Podcast appearances and mentions of lisa yes

In this episode, we tackle the often-taboo topic of…money. Specifically, money blocks – those pesky limiting beliefs that can hold us back in business. We share our personal experiences with money narratives that shaped our views on wealth and success. From feeling guilty about charging for work we love, to the fear of being perceived as "slimy" when selling, we get real about how these beliefs can impact our businesses. You'll hear us discuss the importance of recognizing these narratives and how they can affect your mindset and performance. If you've ever felt stuck in your relationship with money or unsure about how to confidently ask for what you deserve, this episode is for you! Join us as we unpack these themes and encourage you to check in on your own money mindset. Let's break those blocks together!  

As entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves in tShohe dual role of both boss and employee, and it can be challenging to navigate that dynamic. In our last episode, Lisa & I talked about being a bad boss to ourselves, so this time we're flipping the script. We start by remembering how, as our own boss, we have the unique opportunity to create our ideal work environment and set our own priorities. So, how do we use that to our advantage? How can we be a good boss to ourselves? Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your approach, this episode is packed with insights to help you set yourself up for success by becoming the best boss you can be!

In today's episode, we dive into the juicy topic of being a "bad boss" to ourselves as entrepreneurs. Isn't it funny how some of the very behaviors that made us decide to stop working for a bad boss, are often some of the same behaviors we do to ourselves. Things like overworking, neglecting self-care, not setting boundaries, working unreasonable hours, and more. Together, we explore how these bad boss behaviors can lead to burnout and resentment, So, if you're ready to stop being a bad boss to yourself and start thriving in your entrepreneurial journey, this episode is packed with insights and encouragement just for you!

In today's episode, we dive deep into a topic that many coaches struggle with: finding clients. If prospecting makes you want to run and hide…don't worry. We've got you! Listen in as we share some strategies that have worked for us, so you can make them work for you. Plus, we sprinkle in some creative ideas on how to make yourself visible and approachable in everyday situations. You know, just because we're fun like that. If you're ready to transform your prospecting game, and maybe even have a little fun along the way, this episode is just for you!

In this episode, Lisa and Brea explore the phenomenon of low ticket offers and how they can be a game-changer for your business. While high ticket items often steal the spotlight, we believe that low ticket offers have their own unique magic that can help you build relationships and grow your business. Plus, we have a special invitation for you! Make sure to listen to the end for an exciting new opportunity to connect with other listeners, ask questions, and get support as you implement what you learn. Let's unlock the potential of low ticket offers together! Work With Us to Decide on Your Low Ticket Offer BREA Roper Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness If you need a Strengths Hype Girl for yourself or your team, connect with Brea at brearoper.com. She's ready to deliver an inspirational keynote, empowering training, or transformational workshop. If you're looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts, reach out today! LISA Cummings Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo To work with Lisa, check out her resources for independent coaches, trainers, and speakers. Get business tools and strategy support with her Tools for Coaches membership.   Takeaways on Using Low Ticket Offers In an Independent Coaching Practice   The power of the no-brainer factor. Low ticket is a strategy for creating offers that your audience can't resist, making it easy for them to say "yes!" ●      Transform Browsers into Buyers: By offering low ticket items, you can convert freebie seekers into paying customers. This shift not only establishes a business relationship but also increases the likelihood of repeat purchases in the future. ●      Creative low ticket ideas: Steal some of Lisa & Brea's favorite low ticket offerings that you can implement in your coaching practice. ●      Leverage Existing Content: Coaches can create low ticket offers from existing materials, such as recorded webinars, activity guides, or coaching templates. This allows you to monetize content you've already developed, making it easier to generate income. ●      Build Trust and Value: Low ticket offers can help establish trust with your audience. When clients see the value in your lower-priced products, they are more likely to invest in higher-ticket items down the line, creating a sustainable business model.   Take Action to Build a Low Ticket Offer Strategy ●      Define Your Low Ticket Offer: Determine what your low ticket offer will be. Remember to make it a “no-brainer” for potential customers. ●      Repackage an Existing Asset: Look through your existing materials (like recorded webinars, handouts, or coaching questions) and package them into a low ticket offer. Aim to create something that provides value and can be easily sold, such as a workbook or an activity guide. ●      Ask For the Sale: After you create a clear offer, it's time to communicate it to your audience. Remember, people who have bought from you before are more likely to buy again. ●      Automate Your Sales: Consider exploring ways to automate the sales of your low ticket offers, such as through email marketing or online sales platforms, to generate income while you focus on other aspects of your business.

Lumpy cash flow. Unpredictable income. Feast or famine.   If you own your own coaching business, you've probably ridden the revenue rollercoaster a time or two. Scary for some, and exciting for others. Either way, this episode is for you! Join us as we explore strategies to smooth out the lumps and create stability in your cash flow, OR learn how to lean into the dips and curves so you can, dare we say, enjoy the bumpy ride!

What do math dreaming, crowdfunding, and Sunday night heart palpitations all have in common? You'll have to tune in to find out!

Selling to corporate clients can be exciting, and sometimes daunting. And everyone wants to know…what's the secret sauce? From the thrill of landing big contracts to the unexpected surprises that come with corporate red tape, we cover it all. You'll hear about the challenges of finding the right decision-makers, the complexities of procurement processes, and the importance of pricing your services appropriately to account for those hidden costs. We also discuss the potential rewards of working with corporate clients, like the opportunity for repeat business and the chance to make a significant impact on a large scale. Plus, we share tips on how to leverage your unique strengths and experiences to connect with corporate teams effectively. So, if you're considering selling to corporate clients or just want to learn more about what it takes, this episode is packed with valuable insights and a few laughs along the way!

Thinking about offering group coaching programs? This episode is for you!   We explore the many benefits it offers – for those being coached and also for coaches themselves. Things like opportunities for support and feedback, profitability and scalability, and developing deep, lasting friendships.   We also share a few different program structures we've tried, and the impact we've seen. If you're curious about how group coaching can benefit your organization, or if you're a coach looking to expand your offerings, tune in to this episode!

Ever wish you knew what all the best business builders had in common? What talents contributed to their success? Well, that's exactly what the BP10 is all about! If you want to build a successful coaching business, you need to tune in!   We kick things off by explaining what BP10 stands for (Builder Profile 10) and how it identifies the top talents that successful business builders possess. We also share about our own top talents and how they influence our approaches to business, especially when it comes to building relationships and profitability. Spoiler alert: we have different strengths, but that's what makes our conversation so rich! We also discuss the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people—your personal "board of directors"—to fill in the gaps where you might not excel.   Whether you're contemplating starting your own business or looking to enhance your existing one, this episode is packed with tips and encouragement to help you leverage your unique strengths for success. So grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let's get building!

This episode explores why having a clear and distinct signature offer is crucial for your coaching practice.   Whether you're an internal coach or running your own independent gig, clarity is key! Having a clear and distinct offering can make all the difference in attracting the right clients and maximizing your impact.   That's why we discuss the importance of aligning your signature offer with both your strengths and your clients' needs. We also share tips on how to choose the right modality and service, and even how to frame your offering around the problems you solve. Plus, we sprinkle in some fun anecdotes and examples from our own experiences, to make it clear – while you can have multiple offerings, a standout signature offer makes you memorable and repeatable.   So, grab a notepad and pen, settle in, and let's get you on the path to creating a signature offer that truly reflects your unique coaching style!

In today's episode, we dive into building your personal brand as a coach. You'll hear about "Connected Kelly," a coach who initially felt pressured to conform to an analytical persona in her big tech job, only to discover that her true strength—Connectedness—was what truly set her apart. You'll learn how she transformed her approach, leading to a more fulfilling and energized coaching practice.   We also explore practical tips for building your personal brand, including how to identify the challenges you can help solve and how to communicate your unique value effectively. Whether you're an independent coach or working internally at a company, it's important to be specific in your messaging to connect with your ideal clients.   So, if you're ready to make sure your coaching brand aligns with your personal brand, this episode is packed with insights and actionable advice to help you shine!

Every coach grapples with today's topic: Should you avoid bias while coaching? We kick things off by acknowledging that the answer isn't as straightforward as it seems. While many might instinctively say "yes," we explore the nuances of bias and how it can actually play a positive role in coaching. Whether you're an independent coach or working within a company or organization, this episode is packed with insights to help you embrace your unique coaching style while still being the best support for your clients. Let's get into it!

Goal setting. Does setting and getting goals light you up and get you groovin? Or maybe you're not a big fan. Either way, this episode focuses on how to set yourself up for success – by using your Strengths, of course! We believe that when you approach goal setting through the lens of your individual talents, it not only makes the process more enjoyable but also opens up a whole new realm of possibilities that you might not have considered before. Tune in for personal anecdotes and insights about how leveraging your strengths can transform your goals from mundane tasks into inspiring challenges. We discuss the importance of having a solid action plan and the value of check-ins to keep you on track. Plus, we emphasize that even if a goal feels outside your natural strengths, you can still use your unique talents to achieve it. So, whether you're looking to set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal or just want to make your bed every day (no judgment here!), this episode is packed with tips and strategies to help you set it and get it!

Did you know that frustration and burnout your talents can be ‘hangry'. In today's episode, we dive into the delightful concept of nurturing your nature! Life can be tough, and we all know that adulting isn't just a walk in the park. So, why not focus on what makes you shine? We discuss the importance of not just using your strengths, but actively nurturing and developing them to unlock their full potential. You'll hear us chat about the nuances of nurturing your talents, the idea of nourishing them like a well-cooked meal, and how to create opportunities for your strengths to thrive. We even share some personal reflections on our own talents and how we are intentional about feeding them. So, if you've ever felt like your talents are a bit hangry or underutilized, this episode is for you! Join us as we encourage you to take a moment to reflect on how you can start nurturing your nature today.

Maybe you're a planner like Lisa, whose calendar resembles a game of ‘time Tetris', more spontaneous like Brea, who's a little more free-flowing, or somewhere in between. No matter how you do it, taking time to prioritize your well-being is essential. In this episode, you'll hear us discuss the importance of setting boundaries and making intentional choices about how you spend your time. We share our personal experiences and strategies, from booking vacations and massages to creating those precious moments of spontaneity that can truly rejuvenate your spirit. We even touch on our VIP day offerings, where you can take a deep dive into your goals and aspirations with us as your guides. So, if you've been feeling the weight of life's demands, this episode is your reminder to take a step back, breathe, and invest in yourself. So, grab your planner (or just your favorite cozy blanket) and get ready to discover how to make time for YOU!

People are always asking us, “Will my CliftonStrengths change?” and “Should I retake the assessment?”   Since these questions are really two sides of the same coin, the short answer to both is the same: probably not. For the longer answer, be sure to listen in as we explore if/when to retake, and how to get the most from your CliftonStrengths results.

We hear it all

We all know how good it is to feel valued at work… but, as a manager, is it worth the time and expense? And how can we ensure that our recognition resonates? In today's episode, we dive into the powerful world of appreciation and recognition! We chat about how everyone loves to be recognized, but not everyone enjoys the spotlight in the same way. You'll hear us share our personal experiences with recognition. We emphasize the importance of understanding individual preferences when it comes to appreciation, because what resonates with one person might not connect with another. We also discuss some practical tips for recognizing your team or peers without breaking the bank. You'll learn that simple, genuine compliments can go a long way, and how being specific about what you appreciate can amplify someone's performance. Plus, we touch on the idea of the "platinum rule"—treating others the way they want to be treated. So, whether you're a manager or just someone looking to spread a little positivity, this episode is packed with insights and actionable ideas to help you create a culture of recognition in your workplace and beyond!  

In today's episode, we dive deep into the concept of flow, that magical state where time disappears and creativity flows effortlessly. We share our personal experiences with flow—what it looks like for us, and the unique ways we prepare for those moments. You'll hear us discuss the importance of creating space in your life, whether that means blocking off time in your schedule or setting the right environment with candles and epic soundtracks. We also explore the difference between being in flow and simply being focused, and how understanding your own strengths can help you find your flow more often. So, if you've ever wondered how to get into that sweet spot of productivity and creativity, this episode is packed with insights and practical tips to help you discover your own flow state. Get ready to embrace the freedom to flow!  

Whether on a trip to Vegas, family reunion, or navigating the mountain's edge, our strengths are there every step of the way. The question is, are they guiding, protecting, and supporting you? Or are they getting in the way, causing conflict and confusion?   In today's episode, we dive into the fascinating world of applying our strengths beyond the workplace. You'll hear us share some hilarious and relatable stories about how recognizing and celebrating each other's strengths can help you move from frustration to fascination, transforming everyday interactions into opportunities for connection and appreciation.   If you're dealing with a frustrating situation using strengths at home, or just want to bring a little more joy into your relationships, this episode is packed with insights and tips to help you embrace your strengths in every aspect of life!

"Where did the time go?" "If only I had more time!" If you're looking for productivity hacks or time management tips – this episode is for you. We've all been there. We believe time is our most valuable resource. Unfortunately, this often leads to overwhelm and guilt when our expectations don't match reality. We don't accomplish as much as we thought we would, our "to do" list keeps growing, and discouragement creeps in. What if there was more to time management than meets the eye? Is time truly our most valuable resource? Listen in as we rethink time management.

“They” say we spend over 30% of our life at work. For some of us over-achieving, work-a-holics burning the candle at both ends, that percentage is likely even higher. If we're spending over a third of our lives working, shouldn't we love what we do? We think so. That's why in this episode we talk about another one of the “5 Clues to Talent”: Satisfaction. Come join us! Work With Us! BREA Roper Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness Talent development shouldn't be “one size fits all”, because each person is uniquely talented! Unfortunately, most leaders struggle to find and fuel the unique talent in yourself and others. If you're ready to find hidden talent and realize untapped potential – let's talk! I'm ready to customize a solution for any need, any budget. Connect with me at brearoper.com! LISA Cummings Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo   To work with Lisa, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.     Takeaways for doing what you love…this week! Identify What You Love What brings you joy and satisfaction in your daily activities is a clue to your innate talent! Maybe it's the opportunity to learn, the sense of accomplishment when completing a task, coming up with creative ideas, collaborating with others…or something else. Whatever it is, understanding what you love to do. and why, can lead to a more fulfilling life – at work and home. Feel better. Do better. When you operate from a place of joy and fulfillment, you feel better yourself, and make more significant contributions to those around you. A win-win! By focusing on doing what you love and leveraging your strengths, you can enhance your overall well-being and positively impact your relationships and work performance. Remember, hard work doesn't have to feel hard. You can actually enjoy what you do. Finding what you don't love to do is not the same as finding what you do enjoy. Sure, making a list of what we didn't like about a task or activity can help us avoid those things in the future. But it won't necessarily lead you to what you do enjoy. And you deserve a life that's more than simply avoiding what you don't like. You deserve to thrive!   Remember, hard work doesn't have to be hard. Align it with your strengths and it actually feels easy.

About This Episode on The Question “How Did You Do That?” Have you ever had someone say, “Wow! How did you do that?” or “You make that look so easy!” and think, ‘What? Like it's hard?' (I see you, Elle Woods!) Or maybe you've recognized how others seem to be able to pick up or breeze through certain tasks with an effortlessness or ease you only dream of. It's all a clue to talent! In this episode, we talk about one of the “5 Clues to Talent”: Rapid Learning. We share personal anecdotes and examples of how recognizing what comes easy to you can lead to a deeper understanding of your strengths. Whether it's performing on stage, hyping people up, or crushing spreadsheets and TPS reports, acknowledging these innate abilities can lead to a deeper understanding of your strengths – and make hard work feel a little more easy-breezy. So, grab your metaphorical "easy button" and join us for this episode on the 2nd “Clue to Talent”: Rapid Learning. We'll answer, “How did you do that so easily” with a lens of strengths.   Work With Us! BREA Roper Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness If you need a Strengths Hype Girl, for yourself or your team, connect with Brea at brearoper.com. She's ready to deliver an inspirational keynote, empowering training, or transformational workshop. If you're looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts, reach out today! LISA Cummings Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo   To work with Lisa, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.   Takeaways on Rapid Learning (AKA How Did You Do That?) Your Talents Are Easy Buttons: One of the key clues to talent is ease - those things that come effortlessly to us but may seem challenging to others. Recognizing and embracing what comes easily to you is fundamental for your success. Leaning into your talents can help you work smarter, not harder. Apply Talent to Challenges: When you're faced with a challenge, ask yourself, “How can I make this easy?” By leveraging your easy buttons, you can excel in your endeavors - even the most challenging ones. Easy Buttons are Not Excuses to be Lazy: Continuous learning and skill development that aligns with your talents i. By taking action to learn skills that complement your strengths, you can make the path to success feel more effortless and enjoyable. Remember, hard work doesn't have to be hard. Align it with your strengths and it actually feels easy.

About This Episode Are you getting ready to take the CliftonStrengths assessment? This episode is for you! Between the two of us (Lisa & Brea), we've facilitated tens of thousands of these bad boys. So, we share the ins and outs of ‘what to know before you go' - CliftonStrengths edition.   In this episode, we answer questions like: “How long will it take?” “Is this a test?” “Will it put me in a box?” “Top 5, Full 34, Managers, and Leaders…oh my! How do I know which one is right for me?” …and plenty more!   As always, you're in for lots of laughs, personal anecdotes, and practical tips. So, what are you waiting for? Let's dive in!     Work With Us!   If you're thinking about introducing your team, department, or organization to the CliftonStrengths assessment, BREA is ready to help you every step of the way. Don't get tripped up in the details. From purchasing codes and distributing codes, to facilitating the assessment, collating reports, and leading a workshop to help you understand what it all means…she'll take care of it all! Visit brearoper.com to schedule a call today!   To work with LISA, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.     Takeaways Embrace your uniqueness. The CliftonStrengths assessment is not a test with right or wrong answers. It's an opportunity to discover what makes you unique and special. By entering the assessment with an open mind and embracing your natural preferences, you can uncover your innate talents and strengths that can help you thrive in both your personal and professional life. Go with your gut. Rather than overthinking or trying to fit into a specific mold, trust your natural reactions and preferences. By tapping into your instinctual responses, you will uncover your greatest areas of potential - your natural talents! Leverage your results for success. After taking the assessment, many individuals are pleasantly surprised by how accurately it reflects their strengths and talents. The CliftonStrengths assessment can provide valuable insights into how you work best and what comes naturally to you. By leveraging these results, you can align your strengths with your goals, whether in the workplace or at home, and unlock your full potential for success.   Take Action ●      Download the checklist for “How To Take the CliftonStrengths Assessment” at brearoper.com. ●      Do it! Take the assessment! Click here to buy a code.   Let's Connect! ●      LISA: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook ●      BREA: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram   AI-Generated Transcript Lisa Hi, I'm Lisa.   Brea And I'm Brea   Lisa And today's topic is taking the CliftonStrengths assessment.   Brea Woo-woo!   Lisa All the things to expect. Brea, do you want to start with just kind of going back and forth, almost lightning round style, where we share with people what to expect when they open this thing up?   Brea Totally. So first of all, it's not a test. This is not something that you can fail. This is not something that is graded, okay? So it's an assessment that is looking at what's good in you and there are no wrong answers. So I think first off, that's where I'd love to start is just enter into it knowing that there are no wrong answers. You can't do it wrong. There's no way to mess it up. Just go in and just be your lovely self.   Lisa Agreed. And if you are a strengths coach, or you are internal inside of corporate, and you're doing this with your team, and you think people might even find the word assessment scary, like, Ooh, there is a right answer. They're assessing my, whether I'm good. I also have had plenty of clients use the term survey, and it goes totally fine. So yes, call it what is going to make sense to the person taking it and not feel like an evaluation of good or bad.   Brea Yes. Love that, Lisa. Just don't use the word test ever. It's bad. Love. Don't do it.   Lisa Yeah. You're going to turn the team off and they're going to be like, I don't want to take a test. Thank you very much. No thanks.   Brea How do you recommend people start approaching this, Lisa?   Lisa Well, one of the most important things, in my opinion, is just to give people an idea of the time it will take so that they can carve out the right amount of time. I think asking people to be sure they have an uninterrupted 45 minutes. I know some people will say 30 minutes or something shorter, but I like to go for 45 because you might have people who take it a little bit slower, and they might read the opening screens a little more slowly. And that way you've covered it, like they block, then they're going to probably block off an hour. And that those are uninterrupted minutes, because you can't pause it. And If you let them tick by, they're going to be counted as neutral. Those answers are going to get thrown out. And Brea, what's going to happen if they get a bunch of neutrals?   Brea Well, if they get a bunch of neutrals, it's, I mean, they don't even show your results. You know, it's kind of nullified and void. So not only do you waste your money and you waste your code, but you've put all that time into it and you didn't even get what you were looking for. So, you know, it's hard because a lot of people like, well, it depends, you know, I don't know if I'm strongly like this or not strongly like this. It depends on the situation as much as you can try to err on one side or the other of that median. And that will help your results so much.   Lisa Yes. And like, if I think of an example, here's what it's like. It's a bunch of questions. Actually, there are 200 questions. So you can imagine, in 45 minutes or less, zipping through 200 questions. They only give you 20 seconds each. And And it's a this or that. It's like, do you like cats or dogs? Now, those are not actual questions. You're not going to be asked things like cats or dogs, but I'm just doing it so that you can see an example of how you might be like, well, yes. And yes, I love both of those. I have to be neutral because I can't pick a cat over a dog. Other people are going to be like, dogs clearly are winners. And then you're going to strongly agree with that. And there are a couple of notches that you can do the strongly agree. The main point that I want to get out there is in this this or that exercise 200 times, you might feel like yes and yes or no and no. And you might feel so strongly that I dislike them both equally. That's what the neutral is for. But it really would need to be absolutely equal. Try to give it a weighting. on one side or the other. And just go with instinct, not what you're supposed to say, not what your role calls for today in the job, not what it's like at home versus at work. Just at your natural preference or instinct, what is the answer? Go, and don't overthink it.   Brea Totally. And I think if you get stuck, a good way to approach it is to think about when you were a kid, how might you have answered the question? Maybe not literally in your childhood, but the idea is it's not looking for skills. or knowledge or things that you've acquired as you've, you know, aged and grown and gone through life. These are natural patterns of thought, feeling and behavior. So when you're stressed, how might you, you know, if you're stressed in some way, you have to make a quick decision. What's your first instinctual, emotional reaction, don't answer as you think you should or as a good person or the right thing to do. How do you want to respond in that moment, in that situation? What feels most natural for you? And that's the right answer. That's the best answer.   Lisa Yeah, and I will add to that in the kind of team or corporate environment, every once in a while, people are like, well, I've done these before. And you know, I did, I did disk with my team back in the day. And if you were an S, then you were not the good group. And so people have had some experiences with something. I don't want to beat up disk because it can be really amazing if done well. But they've taken other assessments and they've had a bad experience. And when they do the workshop, as it unfolds, there becomes a good answer and a bad answer for that corporate culture or for that team. And that's really not ever something I've seen happen with strengths. So the thing is, if you do what Bria just said and you pick what naturally feels good to you. You pick your preference. There's not going to be a good answer or a bad answer. Every result that comes out is going to be something good that the team wants from you. So I love how the results show your success factors. And not good behavior, bad behavior. I have never seen teams demonize a theme or a group of these themes that come out. So I feel like you can rest easy knowing, no matter what your results are, they're going to show your easy buttons for success. they're not going to put you in a good crew or a bad crew. Not to mention, there are 34 potential talent themes that come out on the Strengths Report. So it's not like you can say, Well, No. 1, these 10 are great for our team. These 2 are not. There are just too many of them. So it is totally in your best interest to answer with your instinct.   Brea Totally. And just remember, what is all this for? Well, it's to discover what you naturally do best, how you naturally work or live as your best self. So to hide that because maybe you've learned to play smaller than you are or you've learned that people who have certain behaviors get ahead, you know, or whatever. If you're fitting yourself into those boxes, CliftonStrengths is your opportunity to just break down those walls and break down those barriers and really, really discover and celebrate what makes you unique and special. in a way that allows you to thrive. So one of the common objections that people have are hesitations to taking this assessment is I don't want to be put into a box. This really is as opposite of that as possible. This is breaking those boxes and it's saying you are one of a kind and we want you to be able to show up at work as your best self. So let's figure out what that is and then let's leverage it and use it for your success and for the success of the team.   Lisa Yes, well said. Oh, I think there are a couple more things that I would want to move back toward the beginning. Before they ever start answering the questions, there are two things that I just thought of they might want to know about. As we were talking about, Hey, it's timed, it's 20 seconds, give your instinct, be ready to zip through this uninterrupted time. If you are a person who says, oh my gosh, but all through university, I had an accommodation. I had the timer taken off all of my tests. This is an actual thing for me. You can call Gallup's help desk and get the timer taken off if you have a reason for accommodation. So that is a thing. Just wanted to make mention of that. And it does tell you that when you redeem your code, if you pay attention to the first couple of screens, And then the other thing is there are multiple languages. There are actually dozens of languages you can take the assessment in. So if English isn't your first language and you're more comfortable in another, that is available for you. And it's a question that some people want to know before they get into this thing.   Brea Yes. Great practical tips. That's why you're a pro, Lisa. I love that.   Lisa Thank you. Well, it takes away from instinct, right? Where you're like, wait, I'm translating in my head for the whole 20 seconds.   Brea Yes. And if you are planning to take it in your native language, there's no worry about how that affects the overall group. Your manager or your team leader or whoever will be able to see your results in English or in their primary language. So even if you take it in a different language, they'll be able to see your results in their native language.   Lisa Yeah. And I think depending on the type of assessment you take, so you can choose a top five report, which is the basic standard. You can take a full 34 report or get the full 34 report, I should say. Taking the assessment is the same no matter what. It's which report you've paid to see. So the top five is the standard basic. You can also do versions that are role specific. There's one called CliftonStrengths for Managers. There's one called CliftonStrengths for Leaders. And there's one called CliftonStrengths for Sales. And those are all Top 10 reports. They show a little bit more to you. And then there's a full 34, where you can see the stack rank of all of the 34 talent themes from 1 to 34. No matter what, Gallup knows your stack rank from top to bottom. And And then if you pay to unlock, you can see the greater amount. So I think that's nice to know, because you'll see in your own personal intensity order from top to bottom, it doesn't mean your strengths are at the top and your weaknesses are at the bottom. But it means you'll get your strongest through supporting through lesser. I think that's nice to know, because when you're when they're taking it, I experienced from my corporate clients, sometimes they're like, Well, is it going to show what I'm terrible at? And then I'm going to get exposed at work." No, it's going to show what your top easy buttons are. It's like a showing of your top success factors, which things should you lean on in order to most easily leverage what makes you great. And that's what this list of talents is showing.   Brea Yes. So this is so good, Lisa. I just want to reiterate and maybe clarify a little bit the difference between the assessment and the report. So this is such a great point that you're making. The assessment is the survey that you take, the 200 questions that you answer. There is only one CliftonStrengths assessment. It's put out by Gallup. There are no free versions of this. Anything else is an imitation. Gallup has one assessment. Everybody takes the same assessment. then you have the choice of which report you want. I think the full 34 is the best place to start. That's just my personal opinion because it shows you your full 34 profile, which there are 34 total talents. So like Lisa said, you get to see that full ranking, but you can choose to do just your top five. You can also choose to do a different report that's taking your results and describing it for your role as a manager, or for your role as a leader, or for your role as a salesperson. All the reports, all the results use the same data from the CliftonStrengths Assessment.   Lisa Yes, that is a great distinction. And also mentioning the free imitations and some of those things. That's great to know about. You also made me think about things that they say after taking the assessment. I don't know if you've heard of any kind of trend quips, but I have a couple that I hear people say over and over. And one of them is, I'll show up in a large workshop, and somebody grabs me beforehand, and they're like, Hey, Is this some sort of, like, try-to-catch-me-lying thing? Because it asked me the same question, surely, it was 10 times, and I thought that was so weird. Why does it keep asking me the same question? Am I lying? That's so funny. No, it's not any kind of lie-catching algorithm. Think about the this or that. Do you like dogs and cats example that I gave? But what about if you say, I don't know, I'm kind of neutral. I absolutely adore dogs and cats equally. I cannot decide. You click neutral. But then if it says, what about cats versus snakes? And you're like, oh, I love cats compared to snakes. Well, see, you didn't give cats the vote before, but now you gave cats a high vote. And so that's what it's doing. It's taking it and putting it next to something else. Because how else is it going to make a stack rank if it doesn't give you multiple scenarios with the same thing? You're not in a trap if it keeps asking you the same question. Do you have anything like that you have heard?   Brea I've never heard anybody say it quite like that. It's just making me giggle.   Lisa Yeah, this is good. There's one other one I've heard several times. People are like, how does it come up with those questions? It's funny because some people are like, yeah, it's just really transactional. It gives you just a bunch of preferences. And then other people are like, it's asking me about whether I'm sensitive or I like history movies or something and there they have a little bit of an interpretation memory of what the questions were. But again, it's just asking you questions that get to these themes of talent that reflect how you think or feel or act when you're at your natural best. Most of the questions from workplace standpoint don't surprise people but there are a couple in there where they're like whoa this is like deeper life stuff and I think that gets to the theme of just this is you as a whole person don't try to answer it as the work you and separate it and say well the home me would be like this and the work me would be like that because the truth is You are a person, and you might reveal more of yourself at home or work. But back to Bria's point about just, like, give your instinct answer. That is a key part of what to expect here.   Brea I love that. Yeah, I think what I hear most from people is just, wow, how did that know me so well? You know, like it totally nailed it. So not always, but most of the time people just love their results. Maybe that's just my positivity that remembers those comments more, but most of the time that's, you know, what I hear is like, wow, is this a crystal ball, you know?   Lisa Yes. Well, now I lead through positivity in my Top 5 as well. So maybe we're introducing a bias here. But I will say I, I know that I hear that often. And they'll say, Gosh, based on the questions, I'm so surprised at how it came to this and how it describes me. I've had people say, Whoa, this report, it has said the nicest things about me than anyone has ever said about me. And then I have a lot of people say, Wow, this really nailed me and brought some unique perspective into the way that I work or think that I've, I've never been able to put into words. And then we, of course, can put it into their career brand and team assignments and all kinds of useful things. But it is always a surprise to a good handful of people how those questions translated into the outcomes and the, the talent themes that come out in the report. So I love that you brought that up.   Brea I love that and I want to squeeze one more quick practical thing in. A lot of times people take this at work and then they're like, wow, can my spouse take this? Can my kids take this? Can I use this at home or can I take this to a more personal place? And the answer is yes and absolutely. If you're thinking about kids, Gallup recommends adults take this CliftonStrengths assessment, which is usually like juniors and seniors in high school. and up. So if you have little kids, this is not the assessment for them. Gallup does have another assessment for them, but 18 and up or, you know, a junior who is just maybe a little bit ahead, I think I've used it with some juniors and seniors. Beautiful.   Lisa Yeah. Great mention in that CliftonStrengths for Students. And what's the book? Strengths-Based Parenting that Gallup put out, where there are some codes that you could use with your whole family?   Brea Yeah, it's amazing. I think Strengths-Based Parenting actually includes two codes, one for the parent and one for the child, which is cool.   Lisa Exactly. Beautiful. OK, so if somebody wants to work with you, Bria, on any of the aforementioned CliftonStrengths. How would they go about working with you?   Brea Yeah, so my website is really the best place to connect with me. It's BriaRoper.com. That's B-R-E-A-R-O-P-E-R.com. And you can schedule a quick little chat. We'll meet each other and see if we're a good fit. And if not, no big deal. No pressure. What about you, Lisa?   Lisa Well, LeadThroughStrengths.com is where you can find the website. And in the context of the conversation today, I would point people to the link in the top navigation called Buy Codes. And that way, if you want to buy a code and you haven't yet, now you totally know what to expect and you will be ready to go. You can just grab one on your own and then pick up the phone and find yourself a coach from there. And that's a future episode that we'll cover. What do you do after you get this report? What could you do with coaching and what could you do with it on your own?   Brea Yes, I'm so excited for that conversation.   Lisa Amazing. All right. Well, with that, we are so happy that you're interested in your strengths and love that you now can have a greater view into how your strengths can act like your easy buttons for life.   Brea Awesome. Go live your strengths, people. Go take the assessment if you haven't already. Take it. Discover your strengths because you are awesome.   Lisa You are. Go do it as soon as possible.   Brea Right now, just go right now.   Let's Connect! ●      LISA: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook ●      BREA: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram  

About This Episode So, you're ready to engage with a coach. Awesome! But there are SO many different coaches out there. How in the world do you choose? Lisa and Brea are here to help clear through the confusion and get you on the right path.  This episode is all about how to choose the coach that's right for you, right now. Listen in as Brea & Lisa discuss what to look for in a coach, the different types of coaches available, the importance of finding a good fit, and more. If you're considering working with a coach, this episode will give you some great insights and advice. Check it out! Work With Us! If you need a Strengths Hype girl, for yourself or your team, connect with BREA at brearoper.com. Whether you bring her in to deliver a keynote, training, or workshop… or, you're looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts… Brea's ready to create a custom solution for any need, any budget. To work with LISA, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership. Takeaways Not all coaches are created equal: For as many different reasons you might hire a coach, there are different types of coaches out there. Just like an athlete might have several types of coaches for different needs, understanding the different types of professional coaches will help you pick the one for you. Finding the right ‘fit' is super important: Connecting with a coach is essential for your success. Look for a coach who aligns with your personality and communication style. Inquire about their coaching style and approach. If you're a coach, remember – assessing fit goes both ways. The most successful coaching relationships are ones where there's a mutual fit. The role of a coach: A good coach will act as a mirror, reflecting back what they see and hear. This can help you observe your own brain and identify patterns you may not be able to see on your own. A strengths coach will do this with a unique focus on what's already strong in you. Take Action Reflect on Your Needs: Begin with the end in mind. Think about where you are now, where you want to go, and what you need to get there. What do you want to achieve through coaching? Do you prefer a coach who provides direct advice or one who helps you observe your own thought patterns? What type of coach will best support your goals? Schedule a Discovery Call: Take the first step by scheduling a discovery call with a potential coach to assess fit and understand their coaching style. Let's Connect! LISA Website | LinkedIn | Facebook BREA: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram   Remember, you already have everything you need to succeed! Sometimes, you just need a coach to help you see it.

There are a range of outcomes from a genomic test. The results might provide a diagnosis, there may be a variant of uncertain significance, where a genetic variant is likely the cause of the condition, or there might be no particular gene found that is linked to the phenotype or clinical condition - also known as a "no primary finding" result. In this episode, our guests explore the impact of a "no primary finding" result on families, discussing the common experiences and expectations of parents and patients who undergo that genetic testing, and the role that hope plays in the experiences of children with rare and undiagnosed conditions. Today's host, Lisa Beaton, member of the Participant Panel at Genomics England is joined by Dr Celine Lewis, Principal Research Fellow in Genomics at UCL, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, Jana Gurasashvili, a Genetic Counsellor, and Louise Fish, CEO of Genetic Alliance.   "I think it's also really important to add that hope isn't necessarily lost when you don't get a diagnostic result. And in a sense, what can be really helpful is for genetic counsellors to reframe that hope...sort of giving it a different context."   For more information on the SWAN UK project which supports families with children that have been through genetic testing but have not found a result following that genetic testing, visit the website. Read more about the study by Jana Gurasashvili and Dr Celine Lewis: The disequilibrium of hope: a grounded theory analysis of parents' experiences of receiving a "no primary finding" result from genome sequencing.   You can read the transcript below or down it here: https://files.genomicsengland.co.uk/documents/Podcast-transcripts/Hope-for-those-with-no-primary-findings.docx    Lisa: Hello, welcome to the G Word.  Lisa: I think in the back of my mind, subconsciously, I had hoped that when we eventually got a diagnosis, it would – I don't know, bells and whistles, balloons going off, fireworks, etc. And then the experience of a letter thumping on the doormat, and I recognised the postmark quite quickly, and it was at that moment I suddenly thought, “Oh gosh, I haven't buried all these feelings of hope.” Because I opened that letter with quite trembly hands, and then this diagnosis or lack of diagnosis, you know, nothing had been found, and it was a bit… I don't know if it's been described as like a nail in the coffin experience, because I really hadn't realised I was still clinging to this hope all that time, and then again it was, you know, another, “No, nothing's there. Lisa: My name is Lisa Beaton and I'm a member of the participant panel at Genomics England. On today's episode, I'm joined by Dr Celine Lewis, the principal research fellow in Genomics at UCL, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, Jana Gurasashvili, a genetic counsellor, and Louise Fish, the CEO of Genetic Alliance. Today we'll be discussing the impact on parents with children with rare conditions, who received a no primary findings result after diagnostic whole genome sequencing. If you enjoy today's episode, we'd love your support. Please like, share and rate us on wherever you listen to your podcasts. Can I ask all of us here present to introduce themselves, please? Celine: Hi everyone, I'm Celine, I'm a behavioural scientist in genomics at UCL Institute of Child Health, and I currently hold an NAHR advanced fellowship to look at the implementation of WGS, or whole genome sequencing, in the NHS. Jana: I'm Jana Gurasashvili and I'm a genetic counsellor at Northwest Thames Regional Genetic Service, and prior to that I was at Great Ormond Street, involved with consenting families to the 100,000 Genomes Project, and I also have an ongoing interest in the lived experience of patients and parents of genetic counselling and rare disease. Louise: Hi, I'm Louise Fish, I'm the chief executive of Genetic Alliance UK, and we are an alliance of around 230 charities and support groups that work with patients and families who have particular rare conditions. We also run a really longstanding project called SWAN UK, and SWAN stands for syndromes without a name. And the SWAN UK project supports families with children that have been through genetic testing but have not found a result following that genetic testing. So, it's clear they have a genetic condition, but science hasn't quite advanced far enough yet to tell us what that means and what that will mean for their child, and what that will mean for their family over the coming years. Lisa: And I personally can attest to the wonderful support that SWAN UK can offer because, as the parent of a still undiagnosed child, I have been involved myself with SWAN UK since my daughter was around the age of three to four years old. It's brilliant being a part of my big SWAN UK family. We first realised that there were some – I suppose something wrong with our daughter when she was around two weeks of age, but it wasn't something I could specifically put my finger on. I couldn't at that point have taken her to a doctor and said, “I don't know what's wrong but there's something wrong.” I just knew in my heart of hearts, probably because I have three elder children, that there were issues, and things weren't developing as they should. She cried a lot, she screamed a lot, she never seemed to be comfortable in any position when you held her, when she was asleep, when she was upright. It didn't seem to matter what you did, she was just a rigid, stuck child, for want of a better word. And all my mum senses were screaming, but it completely sounded ridiculous to take her to a doctor saying, “She feels wrong.” And I think that's quite a SWAN UK experience, from chatting to other families with similar situations. The parents just know that there's something not right, but it can be very isolating not to be able to identify kind of where that starts and what it is. In our case, it wasn't until our daughter was nine weeks old that things became much more obvious, that there were developmental concerns physically and medically, and at that point we went from my sort of mutterings that there was something wrong but I wasn't sure what it was, to a sudden hospital admission with quite a shocking turn of events. From something that had started out quite normally, as a routine visit to the baby clinic, to suddenly being seen by a troop of different paediatricians, and doctors coming in and out constantly, asking different questions, and sending us off all over the building for different tests and x-rays and imaging. And being given a partial diagnosis that our daughter had a condition called arthrogryposis, but it was clear that there was much more going on than that, and we would need referring to many more different fields. And that day really our diagnostic odyssey, for want of a better word, began. So actually, in terms of that diagnostic odyssey, many parents of children with rare undiagnosed conditions experience this, and when we agree to have genetic testing, we feel that we are going to get these answers straight away, and that every appointment that you go along to is going to be the one that brings you the answers. But certainly in our experience kind of 15 years on, that's not been the story at all. Celine, can I ask you to explain what the words no primary findings actually mean when a parent receives that regarding their child? Celine: So, there's a range of different possible outcomes from a genomic test. So, the results might provide a diagnosis to that patient and family, or other situations, there might be a variant of uncertain significance, so we don't necessarily know if the gene that we found, a genetic variant is the likely cause of the condition, or we might find no particular gene at all that we think is linked to the child's phenotype or clinical condition. So, that's what we mean really when we're sort of saying no primary finding. Lisa: Louise, would you be kind enough to explain what you think the impact of no primary findings means to families like my own, parents who don't have a genetic likelihood cause, just a gene thrown up to diagnose their child? Louise: Yeah, I think it's a huge challenge for families, and you'll obviously know that from your own experience. People go to have genetic testing hoping it will give them some answers, first and foremost, just to kind of understand, you know, what condition their child has and what the likely impact that's going to be on their child and on the child's life, and on the family's wider life. And I think one of the things that we really ask genetic counsellors and geneticists to do is help people understand before the genetic testing takes place that there may be nothing found from it, so that that kind of expectation is built in. Because people hope that they will get a diagnosis that will give them answers about what the impact of the condition will be on their lives. In a best-case scenario, access to a particular treatment that might be a huge help for their child, but at the very least, access to a range of services and support for their child. So, that kind of diagnosis is often seen by families as the key to unlocking a range of services and support that will help them and their families at what is the beginning of a lifelong journey. And I think when families get no diagnosis, there's a real concern on behalf of families, a, that they don't understand how their child's going to be affected by the condition. What we're really careful to say to families is, “Just ‘cos you don't have a diagnosis with a name, your child is still the same person they were before. They still have exactly the same bundle of needs as they had before, and you will still need to work with the NHS and with wider services to make sure that they can access speech and language therapy, and physiotherapy, and all of the services that they are going to need and you are going to need to help them live their lives to the full.” But I think that moment of not getting a diagnosis is when people feel I think real – the uncertainty continues, and uncertainty, we know, is a really hard thing to live with, and the lack of clarity about which services you'll be able to access. So, I think psychologically it's a massive impact on the family not to have the answers that they were looking for, or the key to the services that they were hoping would be there. Lisa: Thank you, Louise, yeah, I would definitely agree with that. We had a no primary findings result in I think it was 2019. It was a really bittersweet moment because my daughter's list of various different conditions kind of – by this point, named parts of difficulties for her spans over sort of two pages of A4, and yet on the letter back from the genomics service, it just says that, you know, nothing causative has been found. And so part of you is left wondering, well, how can there be all these different conditions or difficulties, and yet there's still nothing there? And I know personally, I had comments when she was much younger, every time a test came back, where people would say things like, “Oh well, that's great news,” and to some extent it was great news that something hadn't been found, but also if that hadn't been found, what was still out there? And that fear of kind of the unknown was extremely difficult. And also paradoxically, there was a sense of some very well meaning people saying things like, “Oh well, if they haven't found anything then there can't be too much wrong.” But yeah, I have a child who is tube fed and on multiple different medications, and cared for basically for 24 hours a day, so that doesn't really fit in with the picture of there not being very much wrong from a personal perspective. And I think it can make you as a parent/carer feel perhaps there's a tendency to downplay that there is an issue and that perhaps, you know, you're making it up, for want of a better word, and that sense of isolation around that can certainly be problematic. Celine, if I can come to you, that diagnostic odyssey, what are the common experiences and expectations of parents and patients who undergo that genetic testing from your perspective? Celine: Well, I think sort of parents go into genetics testing for a whole range of reasons really, and Louise has already alluded to many of these. Ones that I've come across in my own work include wanting to know why their child has a particular health problem, so that that child can access the most suitable treatments or therapies, or even access clinical trials. Even relief from guilt for many parents, a validation that the parents hadn't done anything wrong during their pregnancy to cause the child's condition, and that's hugely important really, to try and get that relief from guilt. Also to know whether future children might be affected by the same condition, and then more social reasons really, for example, making contact with other parents through support groups, or access to social and educational support. And I think there's also a drive from many parents to feel that they're doing everything absolutely possible for their child. I mean, particularly with something like the 100,000 Genomes Project, it was really a sort of first of its kind project, where patients were on a significant scale able to access this new whole genome sequencing technology. So, many of the parents taking part in that project felt like pioneers, and there was really a lot of expectations around whole genome sequencing in delivering a diagnosis for those parents who'd previously not been able to get hold of one. Lisa: Yes, I strongly can resonate with a number of the points you made there, particularly the feelings of guilt. I must have asked myself a thousand times whether, you know, something I did do, something I didn't do, something I thought of, something I hadn't thought of [laughter], all those questions that swirl around, particularly in the small hours of the night when you feel particularly alone. And yes, I can completely relate to that. And also although SWAN UK is primarily for children and parent/carers whose children don't have a diagnosis, actually a number of the parent/carers on there will have children with diagnoses that are so very rare that absolutely, you know, very, very little is known. They might be the only parent – the diagnosis, for want of a better word, they may have received may just be a series of kind of numbers and genetic dot-dashes, forgive my layman's terms there, but it may not actually help them any further along in terms of feeling that they know anything further or the direction of, you know, where that will lead their children, and that can feel very, very isolating, I'm sure, probably just as much for those of us who don't have that diagnosis. Louise: Yeah, just to add to that, I think that's absolutely right, Lisa, and I just want to give a shoutout – at SWAN UK, we tend to support families who don't have a diagnosis at all, or, as you say, a small number of families who do but have been part of the SWAN UK family for so long that we're very happy to keep them because of the support they're finding from other parents. We work really closely with another of our members, Unique, who are a charity that support parents in exactly the situation you've talked about, where people have finally got a diagnosis and it's that kind of relief of having a name, but it's a super long name, and you find out you're one of only three families in the world with that diagnosis. And so although there's a real I think comfort for people, perhaps if you have a five year old and you're meeting a family who have a 13 year old and a family of a 19 year old, then you start to see a little bit about how your child might develop, but there's not enough kids affected that you can be really certain about that. So, it gives you a little bit more information, but not the kind of wealth of information you were hoping for about how your child's going to be impacted by a particular condition, and what the future might hold for you and for them. So, SWAN UK and Unique very much work alongside each other to kind of support families on whichever part of that journey they're on, because there's still a huge amount of uncertainty for families with those super rare conditions, as you say. Lisa: Definitely, and I'm sure you'll be familiar, Louise, yourself if you get time to go on the online communities and seeing the question that pops up quite regularly when somebody has received a diagnosis of, “Can we still remain part of the SWAN UK family?” And they very much use that word, family, because I think they do feel that, although all our children are different, there are children with physical, medical, cognitive, a combination of all the above syndromes, conditions, etc, they feel that kind of embrace of all being in a collective club of rare and unique and undiagnosed, and that's very comforting to the members. Louise: Absolutely, yeah, I think that sense of belonging and being able to reach out to other families that you've been on that journey with for many, many years. You know, many of our families join when their children are like one or two, and they're still with us when, you know, their children are 26, 27 [laughter], and that sense of having that community and that family and that belonging is really, really important to people, I agree. It makes a big difference psychologically to be part of a community you can reach out to and ask the questions that perhaps you can't ask to other people. Lisa: Celine, can I ask you how many patients for the 100,000 Genome Project have had a no primary findings diagnosis back? Celine: Well, back in 2021, there was a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which reported that, in the initial pilot for the 100K, a diagnosis was found for around 25 percent of rare disease participants, and other studies looking at the diagnostic yield of whole genome sequencing have put the number anywhere between 25 percent to 55 percent, depending on the clinical indication. And we know that even already from the 100,000 Genomes Project, this pioneering project has led to more than 6,000 diagnoses being identified, and that number will obviously continue to go up as they explore the data and gather new insights. However, that still obviously leaves a significant number that won't get a result from whole genome sequencing, as many as half of those rare disease patients, and that was really the basis of the study that Jana and I worked on. So, we felt that there had been so much research really looking at the experience of parents who do receive a genetic diagnosis, and that a lot of attention rightfully does focus on the amazing successes of the 100,000 Genomes Project and genomic medicine more broadly, but actually that there is a considerable number of patients and parents and families who don't get a result, and we felt that it was important that we also focus on those parents and patients, and try and understand their experiences. Lisa: Yes, you can feel, if your child, for example, is under multiple different care specialists, that it can be quite hard, when you've just got this list of different names of things that are wrong, that you feel very much still out on the limb and forgotten about. But it's clear that, from your work, you're identifying that and pointing that back to the specialists, the consultants, to remind them that these parents and these children are still finding their ways through. Can I ask you, Jana, the study that was conducted, what would you say the main things from that study told us? Can you describe some of the emotions experienced by the parents, and what challenges that they have faced along that receiving the no primary findings diagnosis? Jana: Yes. So, many participants really felt very strong disappointment and sadness on receiving that no result, and for many, it kind of reflected the feelings they had had when they first realised they had a child and there was no diagnosis for their condition. And as Celine said, this was such a new technology that people had invested a lot of hope in, and so many felt that it had been their last chance of finding a reason for their child's condition, and that they'd come to the end of the road with that no primary finding result. And, well, one person described it as another door shut. And people talked about the actual toll taken, the emotional and physical toll, and one person described feeling low for several weeks following the result. And some talked about the timing of the result. Somebody got it as a letter just before Christmas, and so their whole family holiday that they'd prepared was marred by getting that news just before Christmas. And it often seemed to leave parents feeling isolated and unable to contribute to normal parental roles, such as going to parent groups, etc, because they felt that other mothers particularly - as it's mothers we were speaking to, other mothers, their experience of motherhood was so incredibly different to their own, and they felt a lack of support. And one parent actually talked about wanting to lock everyone in the house just to escape the feeling of judgement and pity from outside the front door. And some parents talked about finding it hard when other people would post on support groups that they had got results from the 100,000 Genomes Project, which was very difficult. And some talked about hope as finding it hard to keep hopeful but needing to keep hopeful. So, they talked of hanging onto a little bit of hope, as though that was quite an intense thing, which I think, Celine, you'll agree, that made us able to kind of identify that hope was really part of a coping mechanism for this whole process of going through this diagnostic odyssey. Celine: Yeah, people sort of talked about not wanting to let go of hope and the importance of hope, and that without hope, there was no sense of wanting to continue this journey of trying to find a diagnosis, and that it was still very important to people. And I think that parents did understand that, even though a no primary findings result now, that doesn't necessarily mean that they won't get a diagnosis at some point in the future. So, there's obviously the opportunity to do future reanalysis of the genome, particularly as we understand more about the function of different genes, and as new genes are added to many of the panels that we're using in whole genome sequencing. So, I don't think not finding a result means that there is no hope in these circumstances, but for many parents, they did talk about hope being too painful, and not wanting to be let down again, and really preferred to focus on the here and the now rather than necessarily focus on the future. Lisa: Yes, I can only speak from my own experience here, but I think I primed myself to actually forget about going on the 100,000 genomes sequencing because, having undergone genetic testing for certain conditions that they were quite convinced my daughter had from around the age of four months through to around the age of three years, I'd gone to so many appointments and thought, “Oh, this'll be the time that I turn up and somebody will tell me this is what is the diagnosis.” And when I then joined the 100,000 Genomes Project in 2015 with my husband and my daughter, the genetic experience, the discussions that we had at the time were very helpful in that it was made quite clear to me that potentially we wouldn't get a finding, and actually that any information that did come forward was perhaps unlikely to be hugely beneficial to our family at that point. So, I was quite clear what potential finding would mean to us. But I think in the back of my mind, subconsciously, I had hoped that, when we eventually got a diagnosis, it would – I don't know, bells, whistles, balloons going up, fireworks, etc. And then the experience of a letter thumping on the doormat, and I recognised the postmark quite quickly, and it was at that moment I suddenly thought, “Oh gosh, I haven't buried all these feelings of hope.” Because I opened that letter with quite trembly hands, and then this diagnosis or lack of diagnosis, you know, nothing had been found, and it was a bit… I don't know if it's been described as like a nail in the coffin experience, because I really hadn't realised I was still clinging to this hope all that time, and then again it was, you know, another, “No, nothing's there.” And I think because of the work I've undertaken with SWAN UK as a volunteer, and being quite involved in wanting to sort of educate myself and learn more, I did understand that, even though we had no primary findings, it didn't mean that the study, everything was closed to us. It didn't mean, you know, that things won't still be looked for. But equally, at the same time, it just meant that we had nothing yet to pin anything on at that point. And I think it's quite hard to pick yourself up and dust yourself off again, to be like, “Okay, we're still here, we're still circling that drain,” as it were. I think actually that takes us on quite nicely really, about what role hope has in the experiences of a child with rare and undiagnosed conditions. And again if I can just say that there's hope and there's realism, and somewhere along the way, if you've been on the journey for quite a long period of time like ourselves, you have to try and find a way of living with that hope and realism all at the same time. So, we're still hopeful that one day we might get some answers, but we're realistic that day to day we need to focus on the difficulties or the experiences that my daughter has, so that we can manage to give her the skills to live her life to the very best of her abilities. Certainly, that's our experience. And also I think if I'd let myself dwell forever on not having a diagnosis or a pathway specifically for that, it would have been quite difficult to carry on, pick ourselves up every day. What would you think about the role of hope there, Louise? What would you say your experience is from chatting to fellow parent/carers? Louise: Yeah, I think you've described it really eloquently and better than I'll be able to do, but when we talk to people, the phrase I always have in my head is kind of hope for tomorrow and help for today are the two things that people are looking for. So, making sure that that hope for tomorrow's still there both in terms of, you know, the NHS being really clear that it will provide support for individuals without a diagnosis, and there may be opportunities for reanalysis in the future as science makes future progress. And, you know, there is progress being made so fast at the moment in genomics and that's really welcome. So, making sure that people who've already had whole genome sequencing but not found anything continue to have access to that potential reanalysis I think is really important. As you've rightly said, Lisa, as well, thinking through in terms of hope for tomorrow, the opportunity to take part in clinical trials and to make that as easy as possible where treatments are being delivered, to have the opportunities to take part in trials for non-condition specific treatments, whether that's for epilepsy, which affects people across a whole range of conditions, or sleeplessness, which affects people across a whole range of genetic conditions. You know, there are both trials that only people who have a particular condition can take part in, and trials that are open more broadly, so making sure those opportunities are available as well, so that people have that kind of hope for the future. But alongside that, I think it's really important for the NHS to be clear with people about what help for today will continue to be available, and so we are working really hard with the NHS to emphasise the fact that when no diagnosis is possible, the NHS still needs to be clear to people about how they will be supported, whether that's through the genetics team or a particular discipline, perhaps the one that is the closest fit for their child's biggest need, whatever that may be, that they can still access more joined up care. So, you know, who is the person in the NHS, if you don't have a diagnosis, who's going to help you secure referrals to speech and language therapy, to physiotherapy, to learning disability nurses, and to the package of care that your child may need. Who is the clinician, if you don't have a clear diagnosis, who's going to be the person with the authority and the confidence to lead the multidisciplinary team, maybe up to 30 healthcare professionals who are going to support your child. You know, who is going to be the lead clinician that's going to pull that multidisciplinary team together and make sure that your child's not being prescribed stuff that's contraindicated, or that's going to help one element of their condition but make another element worse. So, we are really trying to work with the NHS to make sure they're thinking through, where will that support be for the family in terms of their healthcare. And alongside that, you know, many wider services like schools or social care or employers welcome the chance to talk to a geneticist or a genetic counsellor or nurse to understand what adjustments they might need to make for someone who clearly has a genetic condition but doesn't have a clear diagnosis. And so we're trying to kind of make sure the NHS is both focused on the kind of science side and making sure that the hope for future findings is there, but also the help side, and making sure that the right package of care is still available for families who clearly have a genetic condition. Lisa: Actually Louise, yeah, you've really summed it up excellently there, and whilst I am hugely grateful to the NHS and the various services, I can say, hand on my heart, my daughter has a huge number of professionals involved, both from the health side of things and social care side of things, and actually the person that kind of holds all that together is myself. And because we're under multiple different teams, every time a new medication, for example, is prescribed, I need to go back to our lead team, which in this case happens to be neuromuscular, and check that, for example, if gastroenterology have prescribed a medication, that it's not contraindicated from a neuromuscular side of things and so forth. It's all a bit like having sort of interlocking parts of a jigsaw, but perhaps no picture to follow [laughter], and that can be quite an isolating experience. And certainly, having chatted to fellow parent/carers, I know that's their experience as well. And I imagine, Celine and Jana, you found sort of similar experiences when conducting the research. Celine: Yeah, so my PhD actually was focusing on the sort of journey for parents as they go through the diagnostic process, and one of the things that came out really strongly from that body of work was how the parents were really carving their own care pathway, how they had to sort of push and fight to access services, but at the same time were the gatekeepers for their child's health. Having to make sure all the various teams and clinicians were kept up to date with all the different tests that they had and all the results. And, you know, at times, this could be really frustrating for a lot of parents, ‘cos they had to keep repeating their story over and over again, particularly ‘cos they didn't have a diagnosis. So, these parents really were having a very different parental experience to many of their friends and family, because their experience of being a parent to a child with an undiagnosed condition was really sort of as being a patient advocate, and as having to push and fight to access services. Lisa: Yeah, it's quite a unique experience. You are the specialist for your own child in that sense, I think would be the way I'd describe it. And I suppose over the years, I've got so used to sort of trotting out different medical explanations in terms that you can almost sound like you know what you're doing [laughter]. And a few times when I've been at medical appointments, and perhaps we've met a new specialist or consultant, they've said, “Oh, what's your field? What's your area of expertise?” And actually you just think, “No, I'm just a specialist in my own child” [laughter]. But that's quite an empowering feeling actually, so I guess that plays back into the feelings around hope and expectation, even with having an undiagnosed child. Lisa:    When I was recruited to the 100,000 Genome Programme, we didn't actually as a family receive genetic counselling specifically, and I know that this is something that is incredibly important to many families, and how that can support you sort of going forward. We were quite lucky in our experience in that we knew that our daughter was definitely going to be our last child, so we didn't have the thoughts and insecurities around potentially what it might mean for any future children that we had. But certainly as my daughter has got older and she's asking her own questions, and our older children are at a stage in life where they're looking at potentially having families in the future, I know that those things have come up, and we're just still exploring what that will mean in the bigger picture. But can you tell us, Jana, really what can genetic counsellors do to help parents feel less isolated and better to cope with the uncertainty surrounding their child's condition? Jana: Yes, well, I'm sorry to hear you didn't have any genetic counselling prior to going on the 100,000 Genomes Project, because that consent conversation right at the beginning, before the whole genome sequencing, is really important. It's important to know what the range of outcomes may be, so that it may be that you might get a result, you might get a variant of uncertain significance, or you might get no result. And parents in our study did suggest that their sense of isolation when they got a no primary finding result would have been alleviated if they'd known how many were not getting results. So I think in the longer run, it's 40 percent perhaps received a result, so that's 60 percent that didn't receive a result, so those parents were not alone, but they felt very alone. And some suggested if they'd just had a leaflet really explaining that, and explaining that they'd still contributed to research and that that had been, you know, a good outcome in a sense, then they would have felt better about it. So, a lot of work can be done before the testing really, to explore how you might feel on that range of results, and then that way sort of prepare parents for how they're going to feel, and perhaps that helps them to have things in place, to know that it might be a vulnerable time with that letter, although that was particular for the 100,000 Genomes Project, to get the result in a letter in that way, and as you described, after such a long time, that you'd been able to forget that you'd been on the project. But to actually be a little bit prepared that it make take its toll on you might actually help with preparing oneself. It also might be helpful to include ways of promoting ways to enhance health and wellbeing for parents in terms of practical support, such as those things that you're already attempting to access, like the respite services, school support, support groups, and thinking about psychological wellbeing and ways of managing stress, psychological support for parents, and possibly spirituality based resources as well. And focusing maybe on what is known about the child's condition even without a diagnosis, so what's likely to be beneficial, and support parents in actively coping, such as what research they might be able to access, and continued medical support. And also actually having a named person within the genetics service, so they have someone to go to for any follow-up that has a name, and so they don't feel isolated from the genetic service. And signposting to those external resources, such as SWAN UK, can be very important as well, of course. Celine: I think it's also really important to add that hope isn't necessarily lost when you don't get a diagnostic result. And in a sense, what can be really helpful is for genetic counsellors to reframe that hope, if you like. So, one thing that we talk about in our paper is that it might be useful for health professionals to ask a question such as, “In light of the new information that we now have from the whole genome sequencing result, what are you hoping for now?” So in a way, it's sort of reframing that hope, sort of giving it a different context. Lisa: Definitely, and I think one of the things as well is that, because potentially for when parents were first recruited to a study such as the 100,000 Genome specifically in this case, that it might be quite a length of time between that initial recruitment and when the actual result comes out. And of course, in that time, with the advances in genetics, it's sort of somewhat of a Pandora's box really, isn't it, in that we're almost kind of finding the information out quicker than we actually know how to process it and what it potentially means. So actually if there's a genetic counsellor available to speak to those parents, or for those parents to be signposted to somebody who can say, “Well look, since you were recruited, actually this is happening, that's happening,” or, “These research projects are happening,” personally, I can say that is going to be really helpful and handy, and would have been really useful. I just know that for myself anyway and my family, that if there was a leaflet or something that had given me a way of knowing how I could contact somebody in the future, that would be really helpful. What ways do genetic counsellors use in maintaining a delicate balance between not creating false hope but also providing meaningful support to parents? What would you say around that, Jana? Jana: I think as we've already touched on, it's that managing expectations from the outset when the test is offered. So, not generating too much hype or excitement, but setting those expectations, giving that information about the diagnostic yield. Also, informing parents that what people do experience has been described as a rollercoaster of emotions. It's normal. You might also want to explore people, not only what they're hoping for, but also the outcomes that they might be fearing, and giving them a chance to voice those, because they can be very powerful things as well. A diagnosis might not be what you want to hear, so there can be a lot of ambivalence around wanting a diagnosis when it might actually be a life limiting condition, that you didn't really want that certainty. And also helping parents to explore how not receiving a result might feel, so that they've actually rehearsed it a little bit, and where they might go to when they need a bit of extra support. So, they already know, “I go and talk to my friends, that's where I get my support from,” so that they're kind of ready for it, and that might help them with that sense of isolation, but also validating these feelings. So, it's okay, it's okay to have that dip, it's okay to feel, that it's something that many people experience. And creating a safe space for people to feel that, so if they want to talk to a professional or a friend, that those feelings are validated. And in that way, kind of with that pre-counselling really, helping parents to develop their own set of resources, so they've got those to draw on. And as you've mentioned, Lisa, it's like having your own resources also helps generate that feeling of empowerment and control. And as Celine has said, it's really facilitating parents through that passage of reframing what you're hoping for, reframing what the future looks like, if you had one picture of a future. You need to become comfortable with the future you're now looking at. Lisa: Thank you, Jana. Louise, if I can ask you really, we've already touched on the role that SWAN UK can play for parents dealing with undiagnosed rare conditions, but perhaps if you could home in on that and explain in more detail the main focus of SWAN UK, and what that can do for parent/carers. Louise: So, what SWAN UK primarily does is bring together parents who are in a similar situation. So, we have a team of amazing parent representatives, who Lisa is one, who help us shape the support that SWAN UK can provide, and really make sure that it's based on a really strong understanding of what it's like to be a parent of a child with an undiagnosed genetic condition, and an understanding of that kind of expertise that parents who have been on that journey themselves will bring. So, we have a series of Facebook groups. Some of them are for different regions, so people come into contact with other parents in their area who are going through similar circumstances. Some of them are more around age. So, you know, we have Facebook groups for parents who are waiting for a diagnosis or have got a new diagnosis, and then we have a group called SWAN Graduates, which is for children who are older and over 18, so their parents can come together and share their experiences. So, it's really to help parents be able to talk to one another, to share their experiences, to support one another, and often to ask for advice. They're often kind of practical questions about, you know, “My child needs this kind of wheelchair, has anybody been able to source that from somewhere?” “My child's having real difficulties eating at the moment, can anyone give some advice on this particular challenge?” “This thing someone else has faced, how did you approach it? Where did you reach out for support?” So, that peer to peer advice and support is really at the heart of SWAN UK. And then what we try and provide around that is access sometimes to information events, where there's particular issues that are affecting a lot of SWAN families. So, we hope over the coming year to have a series of information events targeted at families with children who don't have a diagnosis, and some of it is just trying to have social events and bring people together again. We've had, for example, an active dads group in Wales, who've been bowling and wanted to go axe throwing, and really they just want to come together with other dads who are in the same situation, and being able to talk to one another and provide emotional support to one another. So, that's kind of the nub of SWAN UK and what we do, and then alongside that, that kind of fits in with Genetic Alliance's wider goal, which is much more around campaigning for improved services. So for example, the Genetic Alliance UK team has worked really closely with commissioners in Wales, who actually commissioned the first SWAN clinic, which is in Cardiff. That was a two year pilot, to see what support could be provided both to help SWAN families get a diagnosis, but far beyond that, to make sure that the care for families who don't have a diagnosis is better joined up. And that we feel has been a real success. Again, there hasn't been a really high diagnostic yield, there have been very few new diagnoses, but the support provided to the families who are in contact with that clinic, in terms of helping them access better joined up care both from the NHS and from services more widely, has been brilliant. And we're currently working with NHS England in the UK, who are exploring an opportunity to commission two SWAN clinics in England. So, that trying to kind of improve services, and then the third aspect of that is just working generally with the new genomic medicine service alliances as they emerge across England, to try and make sure they are thinking through what support they will need to continue providing to families who've gone for whole genome sequencing in future, not through a research project like 100,000 Genomes, but just through routine clinical practice and routine clinical diagnostics, what support will they need to provide for families who go through that process and don't get an answer. And that won't change the support they will need from the NHS. It will just mean that perhaps that clinic needs to play a more active role in helping them access those services. So, all of that kind of campaigning to have better services for family who have an undiagnosed genetic condition continues as well. Lisa: So, I think one of the things really just to finish off today, is of course looking at the future. Considering advancements in technology, would you say that future reanalysis of the 100,000 Genome Project is going to yield additional insights? Celine, can I ask you to comment on that? Celine: Yes, absolutely. As we understand more about the role and function of different genes, and as new genes are added to the panels, we will definitely be able to provide a diagnosis for more parents and more families. But I think we don't yet necessarily know exactly what that reanalysis will look like, and it's not really clear yet how this will work in practice. Lisa: And Louise, would you have anything else to add to that at all really? Louise: No, I think it is just that hope for the future and kind of help for today. I think the NHS needs to be equally clear about, you know, there's some amazing investment by the UK government in genomic research, and that's brilliant and we want that to continue, but equally we want the investment to be taking place into routine clinical services and diagnostic services, so that we can talk to people both about the hope of potentially getting a diagnosis in future, but making sure that the help continues to be available for as long as they don't have a diagnosis, and that help for families who don't have a diagnosis is going to be just as important. And what we try to ask for is both real clarity around what the NHS can provide, and really clear signposting to organisations like SWAN for families that continue to not have a diagnosis. And again, just to give an equal shout out to Unique, who are able to support families who have an ultrarare diagnosis, where perhaps they're the only person in the country with that particular diagnosis, or one of a handful of families around the world. Signposting to that peer to peer support will continue to be a really important part of the process as well, so that families can help one another, learn from one another, and just give each other support that they are kind of sharing that same journey and walking alongside one another on that journey as it continues. Lisa: And bringing this podcast to a close, can I just ask you really, any final thoughts, anything that you would sum up from your experience of researching the no primary findings and where we now are today? Celine: I think the main thing for me is just to sort of make it clear to parents that a diagnosis isn't necessarily a magic wand, even though it is obviously very important to a lot of parents. But that even without a diagnosis, we still have the opportunity to manage patients' symptoms, and often a diagnosis doesn't make a substantial difference, because parents are sometimes left with a lot of uncertainties and a lot of unanswered questions. So I think, and as Louise and Jana have said before, it's really sort of on focusing what we do know, and thinking about what we can offer and what support we can provide to parents and families even without a diagnosis. Lisa: Thank you very much to our guests today, Jana Gurasashvili, Celine Lewis and Louise Fish, for joining me as we discussed the impact of a no primary findings result. If you'd like to hear more like this then please subscribe to the G Word on your favourite podcast app. Thank you for listening. I've been your host, Lisa Beaton. This podcast was edited by Mark Kendrick at Ventoux Digital, and produced by Naimah Callachand.    

The Donor Conception Conversations Podcast is here!  Watch every Monday on YouTube or listen, subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  In this episode of donor conception conversations, our guest, Wendy Kramer, will bust donor conception myths and teach you about connecting with donors and donor siblings (and how it doesn't have to be scary).  She is the founder of the Donor Sibling Registry and has single-handedly moved the needle on disclosure and donor conception openness.   If you are interested in any of the topics discussed in this episode... Subscribe to the YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@thecenterforfamilybuilding You can also find me and lots of great resources at https://familybuilding.net/ Join our community, We would love to have you. https://familybuilding.net/newsletter-sign-up/ Follow me here: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecenterforfamilybuilding/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecenterforfamilybuilding/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/FamilyBuild TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@familybuildingcenter Looking for My Lifebook? https://a.co/d/deSACrM   Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally inaccurate, confusing, and/or amusing transcription errors)   Wendy: All of these parents, all of these contributors make a child who they are. Right. So when you realize that, then inviting in the rest of the contributors that you might not know, it's not threatening. They're not going to take your place. Your kid isn't going to like them better. You know, or I don't know, maybe they will, because kids like lots of people better than their parents, you know?   Wendy: It's not a real fear. So I think the most important thing for parents to know is that this can be something an enriching thing for families, not a fearful thing. There's really nothing to fear. Nobody wants to come in and be a parent to your kids. And half-siblings are enriching you know, the more people to love your kids, the better.   Lisa: Hi, I am Lisa Shuman and welcome to Donor Conception Conversations. This is a one podcast that will provide research based information, professional guidance and personal experiences about donor conception. This is the one place you can go to if you are a recipient or if you are considering being a recipient. If it's about donor conception, we are going to talk about it.   Lisa: I'm your host, Lisa Shuman. I've been practicing as a therapist for three decades. I've won awards for my research, and I've seen thousands and thousands of donors, recipients and donor conceived children in my workshops at clinics and at my program, the Center for Family Building. I've learned so much over the decades, and I want to share that information with you so you can have a better journey and be more informed as a parent.   Lisa: Today is the first episode, so welcome and I couldn't have a better guest. Wendy Kramer For those of you who don't know Wendy, she's the founder of the Donor Sibling Registry, and she has single handedly changed so much of our understanding about donor conception and changed so many lives by helping people connect with their donors and the donor-related siblings.   Lisa: Her business was born from her personal experience and since its inception, she has witnessed the experiences of thousands of others around the world. Wendy, welcome. Can you provide us with a little bit more of an introduction and tell us how the Donor Sibling Registry came to be.   Wendy: Surely. So first, thanks for having me. I'm honored to be guest number one. So let's see, the nutshell version of my story is that I was married in the late 1980s. My ex-husband experienced fertility issues, so we used a donor, an unknown person, back in 1989. And in 1990, my son Ryan was born. About a year later, my ex-husband and I split up.   Wendy: He was completely out of the picture. So basically from that time on, I raised my son as an only parent. There was only one book out at the time about donor conception called Lethal Secrets by Annette Barron. And in the book she talked about the importance of being honest with your child. And I had thought that maybe when my son was four, five, six years old, he might start asking.   Wendy: As it happens, he was about he was two and a half years old, came home from preschool and said, so did my dad die or what? And it was then I went, Oh my God, we're having this conversation. And we laid the very important cornerstone conversation of, you know, the sperm and the egg. And it was about a 40 second conversation.   Wendy: Then he went on to ask the next question about choo choo trains. And so basically that was the beginning and it was the cornerstone conversation that we then could build upon as he got older and had more questions then as it would be. My son was a very curious child and by the time he was six years old he was looking at me saying, I want to know who my biological father is.   Wendy: And at that point, I'm thinking, Oh my God, what have I done? What do I do? Like, of course you're curious, you know, and it just I think I was one of those people, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this. I was so desperate to be a parent, I really didn't think about anything else but getting pregnant.   Wendy: And I think a lot of doctors and clinics and sperm banks are all so focused on the getting pregnant that the other important stuff, the other important information that you should have to make an informed and educated decision. Those things just fall off the track there. So at that point realized my son had a right to be curious and a right to search for and find his close genetic relatives, his biological father and any half siblings he might have.   Wendy: We basically at that point. So that would have been 1996 or so. We had to wait for social media to be invented. And finally, in 2000, Yahoo! Groups came to be and we started a little Yahoo! Group thinking that maybe we could help him find the answers he was looking for. And then maybe in the process help, you know, maybe one or two families find their half siblings or their biological parents, the donors.   Wendy: And that was the beginning of the DSR in 2000 and now 22 years later, we have almost 84,000 members in more than 100 countries and we've helped to connect almost 24,000 of them with half siblings or donors with their biological children. So it was one of those like build it and they will come kind of things like we didn't know there was a need until we put it out there.   Wendy: And obviously there was a great desire and a need. I think, before we came along. People were never told that they had the right to be curious or the right to search for genetic relatives. This whole industry is so shrouded in secrecy and thereby shame, you know, the shame of infertility, the shame of using a donor. And we kind of busted all that open and said, there's nothing to be ashamed of, especially for donor conceived kids.   Wendy: And it's an innate human desire to want to know where you come from, your ancestry, your medical background, and your close genetic relatives.   Lisa: Mm hmm. It's amazing Wendy amazing. So while we're thinking about that, maybe you can help our audience know a little bit about something else that I think is really important as you're sharing this information about having donor relatives that people get really tripped up about, and I think very few people have the accurate information about and that is the lack of a tracking system here in the US.   Wendy: Well, yeah, I think that myth is perpetuated by the reproductive medicine industry, the sperm banks, the egg clinics, the egg agencies who claim to have limits on the number of kids that can be born for anyone donor. So that's really misleading because if you tell people you have limits, that leads one to believe you have accurate records and you know how many kids are out there.   Wendy: And the truth is that no, nobody has accurate records, even in the egg industry where they claim that SART has all records. Not true, because in our egg donor research, our egg donor parent research, we found that more than 40% of egg donor families were never even asked to report their births. So those numbers are not correct. And we certainly know in the sperm donation industry where now we have many groups of half siblings, over 100 on the DSR or some even over 200.   Wendy: Now those groups are growing and growing and growing that there is no accurate record keeping because that costs money. Whenever you ask in this industry, why is it like this or how come they don't do this or why won't this happen? Always the same answer one word money. It costs money to keep accurate records. It would cost money then to limit the number of offspring.   Wendy: They wouldn't make as much money by selling all that sperm. Yeah. The fallacy is when we promise a number of families, we know in our research too, about a quarter of all sperm donors donate to more than one place. So even if in the future they became they had accurate record keeping, which, you know, I'll believe it when I see it.   Wendy: You know, sperm donors go all over, egg donors do to we have serial sperm donors and egg donors that just go from facility to facility. So for donor conceived people, nobody knows how many half siblings you might have. And I tell this to my son and all donor conceived people every single day for the rest of your life holds the possibility of a half sibling coming along.   Lisa: Yes. And what about also we have all these embryos that have been frozen for decades. Right. And last year, I think there was a child born from a 31 year old embryo and last year a 27 year old embryo. So we have hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos and we don't know how many of them were part of a donor sperm donor egg.   Lisa: And we don't know how many of them will be born now or decades from now. And so it's not really possible to have that information either, right.   Wendy: Well, this is what happens when you have a multi-billion dollar industry with no regulation and no oversight. Right. Like what could possibly go wrong? A lot. But it's because there's no regulation and no oversight. Nobody's watching. Nobody cares to look over this industry. And that is in part because the SRM, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, keeps it that way.   Wendy: They're big money, they're powerful. They have lobbyists, and they keep any and all regulation record keeping anything that would move this industry into being more responsible or ethical. They put the kibosh on. They do not want anything to change.   Lisa: Well, let's talk about I mean, you know, in terms of the states, I mean, there are a lot of people who are advocating for these states to say we're going to regulate in our state and the states will say, yes, we're going to enact legislation that will allow us to regulate. But it can't be possible because those states cannot enact regulation.   Lisa: How is the state going to be able to do that if there's no way to track donors?   Wendy: Well, exactly. So I guess in that case, I can't say it could never happen. I'll just say I'll believe it when I see it.   Lisa: Right. And so I think the tough part is that there are so many people who get on this bandwagon of the state, or that state is going to enact legislation to track donors. How can they possibly do that? Right. I mean, I'm sure you see a lot of people donating right through Facebook and social media traveling around the world and donating in other countries.   Lisa: Right. And so how are we going to know? How can one state saying, I'm going to track all the donors who have ever been in this state? I don't I don't know how that's possible.   Wendy: Well, it's not possible with the record keeping that exists right now.   Lisa: Right. There's no state to do that. And it is completely.   Wendy: It's not even possible because they don't have the records. You know, this industry has an amazing amount of floods and fires. Floods and fires like you could not believe where so many records have been lost. So it is so common for people to ask for records, either donor conceived people or the donors themselves or parents and the records are there offsite.   Wendy: They're lost. They were ruined in a flood. They had a fire. So there's all the excuses that people get all the time for not having accurate records. But the bottom line is there are no accurate records. So, you know, that's where we are today. Could they become accurate in the future? Sure. They could become accurate at any time.   Wendy: But the industry refuses to put the money and the time into being more ethical and responsible by having accurate records. They just won't do it. It's not like they're unable. Sure, they're able. They just don't do it right.   Lisa: But I see many civilians who say, well, this state I'd like to use a donor from the state because the state is making efforts to enact legislation that would allow them to track records of donors. And I can't see how any one state could do that. No. Yeah. So it's really good for our listeners to understand that don't go to any particular state thinking that that's going to happen in that state because it's it's not possible.   Lisa: Right.   Wendy: It's state and it's also clinic or sperm bank.   Lisa: Right.   Wendy: So the clinics and the sperm banks are going to tell you everything you want to hear so that they can make a sale. Their job is to sell eggs and sell sperm. So if you go on their websites, you'll read a lot of information. That is not true because it's all marketing materials. It's all about making the sale.   Wendy: You know, we have, you know, celebrity lookalike donors. We limit the number of kids to ten or 20 or whatever. And it's it's just none of it is true. It's just all marketing materials.   Lisa: And they can tell their own donors not to donate a certain more than a certain amount of time. But just because they tell the donors doesn't mean the donors are going to do it. As you said, they can go to multiple agencies. They can donate to their friends, they can donate in other countries. So it's really important for our listeners to understand that because they really need to be able to be clear with their children.   Lisa: Which brings me to my next point, which I think you could speak to our audience about, which is about donor related siblings and how it's so important for people to start to understand is hard as it may be to understand that it doesn't have to be scary to start to search if this is something that they feel ready to do.   Wendy: Yeah, I think let's talk about that. But I think to give proper context here, we have to take a step or two back and go, why are the parents in this situation? Right. So why does this industry still mandate and promote the idea of keeping a human being from their close genetic relatives for 18 years? Nowhere in the world, nowhere in history has any society deemed that it is in the best interests of the people to keep them from their close genetic relatives for 18 years.   Wendy: So why is that accepted practice in the sperm and eggs killing industry? I don't well, actually, I do know, again, it's money, right. Because they're going to put more money.   Lisa: Well, we saw the same thing in adoption for many years. And adoption systems saying, you know, tell your children that your parents died in a fiery car crash and, you know, don't ever tell them. And then, of course, those adult adoptees grew up and said, you know, that's not right. And it's kind of we're kind of following the same story.   Lisa: Well, but.   Wendy: We've learned the reproductive medicine industry learned nothing from the world of adoption because they're still doing it. Decades later, they're still doing it. So they're doing it because obviously it makes more money. But the parents are sold this idea along with the gametes, so that we believe keeping our child from their close genetic relatives for 18 years is somehow in their best interests.   Wendy: Right. And the whole thing the whole premise is crazy. So I think that's where we have to start. Like these parents are where they're at when contemplating connecting with donor siblings. They're there because of an industry that has promoted this whacky idea and sold it and made it mandatory that my child could not know his genetic relatives before he turned 18, which is absolutely insane.   Wendy: There is no research that points to that being in anyone's best interest. Most specifically donor conceived people, and quite a lot of research that says it is in the donor conceived child's best interest to grow up knowing their relatives. Right. We don't keep our children from their cousins or their answer uncles or grandparents until they're 18 or until they ask about them.   Wendy: They're the relatives and we introduce them, you know, when they're kids, because that's the right thing to do. So I guess I have to like just throw this question in there. Why is this okay? Why do people just take this as being accepted practice and in the child's best interest when it's obviously not so? So that said, here we are.   Wendy: We now have thousands, millions of people who have donor conceived children, who have these have siblings, other children who were born from the same egg or sperm donors. Right. So I guess let's take one step back now. At the beginning, when you're buying your sperm or your eggs, there's an opportunity for the vendor, the sperm bank or the egg clinic or the agency to properly counsel and educate you on the importance of a child growing up, knowing their close genetic relatives, knowing about their ancestry, knowing about their medical history.   Wendy: But the industry is failing parents and donors with not properly counseling and educating them on the importance of these connections. Because if people were properly counseled and educated at the front door to that clinic, they would not opt for the 18 years of anonymity. They would do what we have now dozens of egg clinics doing, connect the donors and the parents right from pregnancy or birth.   Wendy: Why not? And yet there are still not. One sperm bank will do that, and the majority of egg clinics in the U.S. still won't do that. And we have to ask why, if it's in everybody's best interest to empower parents and donors to be in control of their own relations chip rate from day one and determine the depth and the breadth.   Wendy: Maybe it's just medical sharing. Maybe it's becoming family to one another. But let the people decide that. Not a middleman saying we know what's best for you and your family and that is to keep you apart for 18 years. To me, absolutely insane. But here we are.   Lisa: Well, let me ask you a question. This is something that I've experienced. And you tell me if you've experienced this. So as you I think, you know, I started one of the only open donor programs at a seen inside of a clinic on the East Coast that I know of. And typically, when I talk to parents or parents to be about the possibility of having an open relationship with their donor, and as you said, there's various levels of openness.   Lisa: So there's all sorts of options. Very often they're afraid that that donor is going to be, all of a sudden, a parent to their child. Right. There's like this anxiety. It's about the infertility and the fears and anxieties. But then when I speak with the donors, very often the donors say the same things to me. They say, well, you know, I really don't want to be a parent to this child.   Lisa: And so it's interesting that both of them, in my experience, I see over and over again, feel like they have to kind of be let off the hook for things.   Wendy: Because this is the myth that perpetuates by the reproductive medicine industry. Parents are told, Oh, you need this eight years of anonymity because that donor is going to want to be a parent to your child. And donors are told, Oh, you want this? 18 years of anonymity. Those parents are going to come looking for you for money and they're going to want you to parent their child.   Wendy: In reality, none of those things are true. Where did those people get those fears from? From the industry. So the industry can't wonder why these people feel this way is because these are the myths that the industry perpetuates. And I know I hear from egg donors all the time who say my clinic told me that, you know, parents are likely to come after me, they're going to disrupt my life and invade my privacy.   Wendy: Parents are told that donors are going to want to come in and be a part of your life and parent your child a myth and a myth. But this is the myth that's perpetuated so that the industry can keep the 18 year separation there. And people can think that's in the best interest for them and their children. But it's all myth.   Lisa: And then in reality, what happens and you tell me what happens in your reality. Once I... I break that myth for them and they decide, okay, we're going to meet the recipients are so happy and the donors all of a sudden where they once would have had, let's say, you know, an egg donor is going to have this medical procedure and she knows she's doing something nice for another family.   Lisa: And now she sees the faces of these people whose lives she is changing. And she says, Oh, my God, I feel like this is such greater meaning for me. This feels so much better for me because I see these people. I really feel that I'm helping them. I really feel like I'm helping them heal these wounds and build their family that feel so much better to be able to connect with them so everybody makes out.   Lisa: It's been great for everyone involved, but they are so hesitant in the beginning and so anxious about it. So what are your experiences of recipients and donors after they first meet? What's their experience of saying, you know, how was my first meeting and how is it different than last year?   Wendy: Well, yeah. Let me take one step back and let's talk about what is that hesitation and that fear? What keeps families from not connecting? Right. And most usually what keeps families from not connecting is some kind of fear. Right. And the fear usually is from the non-biological parent, be it the mom, an egg donor family, the dad in a sperm donor family, or the mom in the LGBTQ family.   Wendy: Right. It's the Non-Bio parent that most too often struggles with making these connections because it can feel very threatening to them. These people are that person has a connection with my child that I don't myself have. And if you're not a really confident person and secure in your parenthood, this can seem like a threat. This person is going to come in and usurp me and be insecure and I can't be right.   Wendy: Again, this is all a myth, too. We're not taking away from a family by connecting. We're just adding to. So children need to be taught that who they are is this wonderful blend of nature and nurture. Right? We are who we are because of the parents that raised us and love us and take care of us and the parents that give us our biology.   Wendy: 50% from the egg, 50% from the sperm. That's what makes us who we are. So to minimize any one of those contributors is not fair to a child. It matters who raises them and loves them. But it also matters who gave the DNA, the egg and the sperm. So you can't minimize or negate the importance of any of those parents.   Wendy: So once. Once you realize that all the parents are important, at the same time, one is not knocking the other one out. One is not taking the place of the other. All of these parents, all of these contributors make a child who they are. Right. So when you realize that, then inviting in the rest of the contributors that you might not know, it's not threatening.   Wendy: They're not going to take your place. Your kid isn't going to like them better, you know, or I don't know, maybe they will, because kids like lots of people better than their parents, you know, it's not a real fear. So I think the most important thing for parents to know is that this can be something an enriching thing for families, not a fearful thing.   Wendy: There's really nothing to fear. Nobody wants to come in and be a parent to your kids. And half siblings are enriching. You know, the more people to love your kids, the better. Right. I mean, that's that was my thinking.   Lisa: Who doesn't want different siblings in the ones they have anyway, right?   Wendy: Absolutely.   Lisa: Brother, little sister.   Wendy: Totally. So, you know, and it's like, is there a guarantee you're going to like them? No. I mean, I always tell people, look around your Thanksgiving table. Do you want to hang out with everybody there? No, probably not. You want to hang out and spend time with the people that you're most like minded with. And this is true for connections for the parents who connect their, you know, minor donor conceived kids, for donors who are connecting with adult donor conceived kids, for parents connecting with other parents for everybody.   Wendy: Is there a guarantee you're going to like each other and want to hang out? Nope. But that doesn't make these people any less your child's genetic relatives. And did they have the right to know these people as they're growing up? Absolutely. Why? Why would you keep them from their half siblings? You know, because we have too many people that come to the DSR as adults.   Wendy: They see that their parents joined the DSR years ago but never allowed them to connect and know they're half siblings. And so you get these adult donor conceived people who are like, okay, wait a minute, I could have grown up knowing my half siblings and you didn't let me. Why? And there is no good answer. Except I was afraid.   Wendy: I had fears, I was insecure, I was feeling threatened. You know what I mean?   Lisa: So now we allay those fears. What is your experience with the recipients when they finally meet them? Don't they feel so much better that you know, it wasn't securing after all?   Wendy: That's the same with disclosure. You know, for parents who haven't told, who are about to tell, they're in a state of fear like none I have ever seen before. They are filled with anxiety and panic about the impending telling the child. The truth. And I see that fear and that anxiety with the impending connecting with my donor or connecting with my biological kids, parents or connecting with half sibling families.   Wendy: There's this anxiety that is there that really doesn't need to be there because that's the worst part, is the before. Once the connection happens, oh my God, people are elated and joyful and relieved to and excited about what the future might hold and, you know, it's all completely positive.   Lisa: Yes, absolutely. And I hope that our audience can kind of take heart that that can happen, that they can feel that it's not so scary after all, that once they connect with these donor conceived siblings or the donors, that it won't be this fear that someone's going to come into your life or do things that you don't want them to do that, you know, just like everybody else, like Wendy is saying, you know, there's some people you're going to like, some people you don't.   Lisa: But it's not their normal people. They're average everyday people just like we are. And it's such a nice thing to be able to gift and to give to your children that connects. It really is beautiful.   Wendy: Absolutely. Well, in these groups, some people are really afraid of the large groups of siblings. Right. Like, okay, I could connect with five or seven or ten. You know, I just logged into the DSR and I see that I have 78 half brothers and sisters. Oh, my God, what do I do? Or my child has 78 half brothers and sisters.   Wendy: Oh, my God. They're overwhelmed. They're afraid. What does this mean? Am I going to have, you know, dozens of people knocking on my front door? And no, everybody's extremely respectful. The people who have already connected usually they have like a welcoming committee, you know, of sorts, like they make soft landing pad for the new half siblings that come along these connections happen.   Wendy: Like you as a parent or a donor conceived person or a donor, you are in control of this feed in the depths of how you make these connections. Right. So there's no right way or wrong way. Some people are like, Well, I'll just communicate via donor sibling registry message or email or Facebook for a little bit. Some people are like, Here's my phone number.   Wendy: Let's meet at Starbucks tomorrow, you know, so there's different levels of feeling comfortable again, no right way or wrong way, but it's just important to make the connection for the minimum of sharing and updating medical information because of if you're saying right now, oh, well, my clinic or my sperm bank does regular medical updates, and then they give anyone who's to use that donor updated medical information.   Wendy: That is 100% incorrect information. Most of the time, the only way to get updated medical information is by connecting the donors with the parents, with the donor conceived people. That's how you're going to get medical information, not from your clinic, not from your sperm bank.   Lisa: 100%. I'm with you. And maybe on our next call, we should start talking about that because that is a really, really important topic for people to understand, particularly because, you know, people say, oh, my daughter is healthy. Well, you know, young, young people usually are healthy. But health changes over time. And if you don't know what's happening with your donor conceived siblings or your donor, how will you know?   Lisa: Right. So those are really important pieces of information. And so I hope you come back on again. Wendy, I really love to have you back.   Wendy: Thank you so much for having me. And I can't wait to tackle these issues one by one and help to better educate people.   Lisa: It's wonderful. You're a gift to our industry, Wendy, and thank you so much for coming. And if you want more information, please to go on the Donor Sibling Registry. Is there any information for people to look for?   Wendy: Come to the Donor Sibling Registry or I'm always available. My email is wendy@donorsiblingregistry.com and I'm available seven days a week. If you need any help, just email me. Call me. I'll be in touch.   Lisa: That's great. Well, thank you. And that's such a gift. And I really appreciate it. And I'm sure everybody who's listening appreciates this. And thank you for joining us. If you want more, please subscribe and review and always you can find us on family building dot net. We'd love to have you as part of our community. Thanks so much.

This week's conversation with Lisa Evans fits under the P of Promotion of the Humane Marketing Mandala. We are talking about telling the stories that matter for your business. As you'll hear in the episode there is a fine line between being vulnerable in telling your story and oversharing. Lisa is the Director of Speaking Savvy and the Lead Trainer of the Soft Skills Academy. She is a Certified Speaking Professional, Certified Virtual Presenter, TEDx Speaker Coach, Host of the Business Chat Podcast, and Radio Show Host. She has been coaching clients to become stand-out presenters and speakers for over 10 years and her area of expertise is helping senior leaders to tell better business stories. Before becoming a coach Lisa spent over two decades as a health professional and began her career as a midwife. One of her clients named her The Story Midwife and it kinda stuck! In this episode, you'll learn about telling the stories that matter for your business as well as...   How to know which stories matter (every story has a reason and a season) Your origin story and ways to tell it Lisa's personal story and how a health setback led her to be an exceptional speaker Encouragement and tips to start with storytelling And much more… Lisa's Resources   Lisa's Website Lisa's Podcast: Business Chat with Lisa Evans Get a complimentary 30-minute coaching call with Lisa Connect with Lisa on: Twitter Facebook Instagram LinkedIn Sarah's Resources Watch this episode on Youtube (FREE) Sarah's One Page Marketing Plan (FREE) Sarah Suggests Newsletter (FREE) The Humane Business Manifesto (FREE) Gentle Confidence Mini-Course Marketing Like We're Human - Sarah's book The Humane Marketing Circle Authentic & Fair Pricing Mini-Course Podcast Show Notes We use Descript to edit our episodes and it's fantastic! Email Sarah at sarah@sarahsantacroce.com Thanks for listening!   After you listen, check out Humane Business Manifesto, an invitation to belong to a movement of people who do business the humane and gentle way and disrupt the current marketing paradigm. You can download it for free at this page. There's no opt-in. Just an instant download. Are you enjoying the podcast?  The Humane Marketing show is listener-supported—I'd love for you to become an active supporter of the show and join the Humane Marketing Circle. You will be invited to a private monthly Q&A call with me and fellow Humane Marketers -  a safe zone to hang out with like-minded conscious entrepreneurs and help each other build our business and grow our impact.  — I'd love for you to join us! Learn more at humane.marketing/circle Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Android to get notified for all my future shows and why not sign up for my weekly(ish) "Sarah Suggests Saturdays", a round-up of best practices, tools I use, books I read, podcasts, and other resources. Raise your hand and join the Humane Business Revolution. Warmly, Sarah Imperfect Transcript of the show We use and love Descript to edit our podcast and provide this free transcript of the episode. And yes, that's an affiliate link. Sarah: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] [00:02:00] [00:03:00] [00:04:00] [00:05:00] [00:06:00] [00:07:00] hi, Lisa, how are you today?  Lisa: Hi, Sarah. I'm delighted to be here.  Sarah: Oh, I'm so happy to have this conversation. It's kind of, is there a second or third? At least I know that I was on your podcast earlier. And so now I get the pleasure to have you online, which is wonderful. And we chose this topic of storytelling, which I know. Close to your heart. And so I wanted to know if you have always considered yourself a good storyteller. Tell us about that.  Lisa: Yeah, well, I've [00:08:00] always considered myself a storyteller. Not necessarily a good storyteller, mainly because of my age, because definitely before the internet, we didn't even have a color TV until dad bought one home for the Montreal Olympics. So that was a long time ago. So I grew up. On stories when I was little. And then that carried on into my, of late teenage years and early twenties when I began my nurse training. So when I became a nurse at a young age, I was 17 and a half. We didn't have counseling, we didn't have psychology services. We had to suck it up and get on with it. So when we had a bad day and we saw a lot of trauma, which you do when you're a nurse who working in acute care, the only outlet we really had in order. Debrief with our colleagues about our day was through stories. So stories also can be used to heal as well. So I guess that I became a natural storyteller and it was then later in life that I joined. [00:09:00] The pieces of the puzzle together and got more interested in helping entrepreneurs and business owners and even large organizations in how to tell several different stories, their own story, their signature story, their leadership story, and the story about their brands and their services and, and products. So I've definitely learned how to tell stories better, but I think we're. We are all storytellers. We all have the, the, the information that we need. We've got a lifetime of, of stories. It's just learning how to get those out and feel comfortable sharing the stories. Wow. Sarah: I'm yeah. I'm so curious uh, about one thing as well, because when I heard you speaking, I was thinking. What about what does reading have to do with storytelling? Right? Because when we're reading, we're not actually well telling a story, but we're definitely absorbing stories. So were you also a, a big reader? Lisa: I was a big reader. And I think that today definitely reading helps you to experience the [00:10:00] characters and the landscapes and the plot and the, and the story in a very sensory way. And of course we need that sensory language, but I think that we need to always be mindful that writing is, is very, very different to, to speaking. And when somebody. Reads from a page or speaks something that they have completely memorized or that it's been written to be read. It doesn't sound right when it's, when it's spoken. So definitely yes. Read to immerse yourself in, in characters and, and sensory sensory language, but never read your story out loud. Sarah: Mm, that, yeah. Okay. That's interesting. So, so it helps to tell better stories, I guess, because we. You know, we kind of, I noticed that when writing my own book it helps to, I'm a, I'm an avid reader. Like I read so many books just like you, I know that you are always posting about the latest books you're reading. Yeah. And, and, and yeah, I think [00:11:00] reading books definitely also then helps you with writing because you just kind of know. You know, the turns of phrases you just kind of yeah. It, it just kind of flows better, I guess, as compared to if you weren't reading at all. But yeah, yeah. With the storytelling that it's not the same. If you read your story,  Lisa: obviously. And you definitely don't need to be a good writer, cuz that can be a barrier for many people. A lot of my stories, I don't even write down, I just use my phone. I hit voice record. I've got an idea for a story. I'll just speak it into a voice memo. I might be walking around or doing something. I get an idea in my head or I'll draw it. I, I like doing little graphics. So if, if you don't consider yourself to be a good writer, Doesn't mean to say you can't share stories. I  Sarah: think that's a good reminder for people because sometimes we do get stuck with the, you do writing, right. And, and another thing people tell me, [00:12:00] tell me about my books is like, it's an easy read. And, and so at the beginning I was like, is that a compliment or like a hidden criticism, but I do kind of write, like I would speak. Right? Yeah. And so I'm not a, you know, a novel writer. Definitely not. And so I think for stories, if we think about, you know, social media, it, these stories need to be told exactly how you would tell them, I guess, in spoken words, would you agree? Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Makes it more authentic. Makes it more real. And I think that's definitely a, a compliment, sir. If somebody says that it's an easy read. that's good. Nobody wants a hard read that they've got to struggle to get their head around. So that's awesome. Well done.  Sarah: thank you. Yeah. Like the inner critic voice kind of like, well, I wanted it to be sophisticated but, but yeah, no, that's not who I am. How do we then [00:13:00] know which stories to tell? Because I think I even notice myself sitting, you know, I use mainly LinkedIn and so I sit there and go, okay, what kind of story can I tell? And you're surrounded by stories all day long, but then when it comes to actually sharing them, your brain kind of blocks you. And you're like, well, which one.  Lisa: Yeah. I, I think the best thing that I like to do, and I encourage others to do is to start a story bank, just like a piggy bank. You're collecting your, your stories. There may only be little, little snippets of information or anecdotes or examples, and you just store them up somewhere. Some people use a note. Book or an index card system or an app like Evernote or, or OneNote. And so you're capturing your, your stories. And then when you want a story down the track to illustrate a particular point, you've got lots of material at hand and, you know, stories have got a, they've got a reason. They've got a season and. The most [00:14:00] important thing about a story is it's gotta be ready to tell it's gotta be ripe. It's gotta be that perfect moment because there may be stories in our lives that for whatever reason, we're not yet ready to share. And I think that we've always got to remember that we are the curators of our own stories and we get to choose which stories to tell and who we are gonna share them with. But the most important thing of all is. The story that we're telling ourselves. So we've gotta get rid of our own negative narratives and those stories that don't help us in order to be able to step up and speak and share whether that's marketing your book or writing your book or believing yourself, or putting out things in business. So we've really got two sorts of stories. We've got our internal stories and our own narratives. And we've got the stories that, that we share. So I think it can be hard just like it can be hard to sit in front of a blank workbook and, and come up with some [00:15:00] writing, same with finding stories. But if you, if you start collecting stories, like have a, have a bank of them, then you'll, you'll never run out. Sarah: Hmm. Yeah, that's a good idea. It could be, could be like a notebook, but it could also be like snippets. You know, if you're more into using online tools, it could be Evernote or whatever Trello  Lisa: board yeah. You using, or even Pinterest or voice notes, you know, voice notes are great because they sync across all your devices. It doesn't matter where you are. You can hit record and just do a 62nd voice note and give it a, a tag. Or a keyword and you'll be able to, to find it again. So that's the important thing, particularly as, as you get older is you, you might see something or hear something, oh, that that'll make a great story and you forget all about it. So not only you wanna quickly capture the essence of that story, but you also also want to take a moment and tune into how that story made you. Mm, because it's, it's that [00:16:00] emotion that, that has that impact. So you ask yourself, you know, if you see something and you, and you think, you know, that's not right, or isn't that wonderful, you know, it's evoked an emotional response in you. So it's important when we capture our story to also put. And I felt joy or I felt gratitude, or I felt frustrated or angry about something that's that's happening. Cuz that will also help you when you are then telling your story. You're reliving that story and that experience to dial into that emotion that you felt at the time. Sarah: Yeah. So good. So many different things I wanna kind of go back to that you just said. So the first thing is obviously the emotion. Yeah. That's where we connect. Right? If we're telling a, a story in, for example, what I sometimes see is, is, you know, stories being told in the third person, like on someone's website, you know, the about page, for example, if it, if I read an about page and instant in the third person, [00:17:00] There is no emotional connection. I don't feel connected to the person. And so I think that would probably be a, be a first, I don't know if you agree at this telling your story, obviously, and your first person.  Lisa: Absolutely. Yeah. Present tense. First person is always better. And, and often when I'm coaching people in their, in their story and we might do the, you know, stop, stop, start when I'm coaching them, they might say something like and then we broke up and I moved to America. I go, hang on, hang on. You broke up. How did you feel? Mm. Yeah, I was devastated. I couldn't stop crying for a week. You know, they were brushing over that emotion. Right. And, and that's the important part. Even if you don't, don't decide to share at all, but you've still gotta think about, okay. How did you feel when you got that call and the breakup happened? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.  Sarah: That's so good. I think you're right. We're we. Wanting to kind of quickly get our story out there. And so we [00:18:00] just kind of share headlines and when you read it, it's like, you know, nothing, nothing happens where on the other hand, you don't have to exaggerate. I as the humane marketer, I'm always careful also about, you know, using pain points in, in, in stories and things like that. So you don't have to exaggerate feelings either and, you know, make people, people feel bad or, or, or worse. But yeah, that's how we connect is with the emotion and with the feelings. The other thing you brought up is this idea I guess kind of a vulnerability, because you said there's a, every story has a reason and a season, and I love that. It's such a good way to remember. You know, what's the reason of the story. And is it the right season, I guess, to tell this story and, and that goes with, you know, timely, current events out there, I guess, but it's also for ourselves. Do I feel like I am [00:19:00] willing to share this story or, or not? So what's your take on vulnerability and probably also kind of this trend of sharing too much information to get something. Yeah,  Lisa: that has become very apparent, you know, the work of the wonderful Brene brown Brene brown has been around for a long time, but her work was popularized through the Netflix series. And I think that your vulnerability became the word. And I think there was a very fine line between vulnerability and overs. We do need to be ready to tell our story. If you are standing in front of a group of people and you cannot get through your story without breaking down and falling apart, probably not the right time to tell your story, you probably haven't done the inner work. You haven't done enough. Growing you haven't done enough healing. Now we can get caught off guard and our emotions can bubble to the surface, but generally you've gotta have done the inner work. And then I [00:20:00] also see I've been in, in audiences where somebody's done the inner work and they feel that their story is ready to share, but they haven't really thought about how their story is potentially going to land and impact. With the audience. We don't want to trigger our audience and leave them walking out, feeling low and feeling, feeling horrid. So we've gotta carefully craft that story that even if we're sharing a story that doesn't have a happy ending and that's life, not every story has to have a, a happy ending, but we are leaving the audience with something to take away that. Inspirational or poignant or has a real meaning and purpose to it. So every story does need to have a, a, a carry out. Yeah. So I think that there's a very fine line with the vulnerability and, and the potentially oversharing, but at the end of the day, it's gotta feel right for you because if you're up. In front of an audience, whether it's in front of a [00:21:00] camera or on stage. And you feel as though you've gotta push yourself to be more vulnerable, you're going to look awkward and uncomfortable. If that's how you feel inside people are going to see that. And then if you are up the front looking awkward and uncomfortable, how does that make your audience feel? They feel awkward and uncomfortable too. Right? So it's really picking. Right time. It's tough.  Sarah: Yeah. And I, I totally agree with you and I, I would go even further and say you know, there there's been marketers, unfortunately also who, who kind of are in this authenticity trend and then use stories with a lot of vulnerability in order to get something, to, you know, sell more of them or sell more of their coaching or sell, you know? And so that's also not. What we want from our or audience, we don't want to use our story in a way that gets something we want to [00:22:00] yes. Connect with our audience, make sure that they resonate with our story, but not in a manipulative way. This, like I've seen this trend where marketers could start telling all these old stories Just because, you know one guy started telling that he was abused when he was seven years old and then all of a sudden it was like one after the other. And, and so you start to actually question the truth of these stories, which is sad because you know, who knows maybe they were all true, but it kind of became this thing where we felt like what's going on here. This is a marketer. Is he doing this? You know, for a reason and for the wrong reason,  Lisa: maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, these days people have got more of a BS meter that they can possibly sense when one of those stories is, is coming and, and people switch off to that these days, I believe.  Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, you're right. The BS meter the [00:23:00] last, last two years for sure has gone, gone up a lot. And so yeah, I I'm just, and I think that's also, I told you before we started recording I'm kind of not a big fan anymore of this idea of the, the hero arc story, you know, where they started to feel like. All the same to me where, you know, there's a struggle, we overcome it. And then there's a huge, happy ending. And now a millionaire. And I don't have any problems anymore to me, even if that's true, that's just not an interesting story to me anymore. And, and yet it's used and recommended in coaching a lot. So what's your take on, on kind of these artificial stories?  Lisa: Yeah, I think that it definitely helps to have a structure to your story and to have a framework, particularly if you are learning to tell stories, it, it does give you some, some guidelines. You don't have to follow the arc from one point [00:24:00] to another. You can start at. At any point, really? I think that definitely a story does need to have an element of tension. A story does need to have some conflict and some change. So every story is evidence of a transformation that's taken place. But the thing is, people think about struggle on conflict as huge people think about transformation. As I became a millionaire, I climbed Everest. I conquered the world. No, it can be a very small transformation. It can be somebody said something. And that made you think about your own behavior or your actions, and you decided to do things differently or you decided to apologize. That's a transformation. So it doesn't have to be huge. You don't have to have a rags to richest story to make a great storyteller there. The best stories are in the simple, the best stories are in the ordinary. If you think about a trip to the supermarket, particularly in the tough times that we're in now, you know, [00:25:00] you never get a whole lot when you're just getting to go out these days, a ride on public transport, an interaction with a stranger, a customer service experience. They're all. Possible stories that you can, that you can tell. And we certainly want to move away from stories that are all about me. Nobody wants to hear an all about me story. Nobody cares about your story until they care how much your story helps them. Right. So we also need to be mindful of, of that. What's the point, what's the purpose of your story? We need to set an intention in all of our speaking, even more so in our storytelling. So I do like the, I do like the arc. I do like some frameworks and, and formulas, and I certainly sort of teach modifications of those, but just think about the small things, because the small things that are more ordinary are more relatable. Sarah: Yeah. I like that a lot. What I also did in, in [00:26:00] the marketing, like we're human book. Instead of telling this hero a story I told the beginning of the hero, a story, and then I said, look, I'm still in the middle of this thing. Right. I'm not there yet. And I feel like it, this really connects with a lot of my readers because they can relate. They're like, Look, she's not the hero. She's just like us in the middle of figuring things out. She has a message to share, but it's not like, oh, you know, she's now made it and has figured it all out. So I feel like instead of always sharing stories where we have figured it all out these smaller stories, like you mentioned before, That really show we're human as well. And we're just in the middle of things, just like everybody else. Those are the stories that really speak to me.  Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. And, and it's often a good story. We'll have somebody else as the [00:27:00] hero. In that story and you as the business owner or the leader or the organization, you are the mentor in, in the story. You're the guide. You're the guru who offers a, a handout and a help to, to somebody else to make their life better. So you can also think about where you wanna position yourself in, in the story and often the best place for you is as the mentor. So you're really shining a light on somebody else's journey. mm-hmm and yeah, there's a little piece about how you helped, but that's very much in, in the background,  Sarah: us introverts. We really like that. Right. We like to shine the lights on, on others.  Lisa: Definitely. Yeah. All about us. Yeah. I love that. Definitely.  Sarah: What about your story then? I, I know it, I kind of read it a bit in the intro, but I would love for you to explain a bit about your story. Lisa: Yes. I began my career as a midwife. I'm from London and I trained as a nurse and became a midwife. And then I specialized, it [00:28:00] became a neonatal intensive care midwife. And I always wanted to be a nurse. I knew that I wanted to be a nurse and that was to be my, my forever career. And it was through my career that I got the opportunity to move. Australia. And I spent almost two decades working as an intensive care midwife. So much joy, helping to bring new life into the world and look after tiny babies on life support. And then one day my life changed drastically when a virus destroyed. Most of my hearing, I was left with a tiny amount of sound on one side only. And because the intensive care environment is very technical, very challenging and demanding. I could no longer do that job. So I literally had to reinvent myself and, and think what an earth am I going to do? And that was tough. I was already 40 wondering, you know, who's gonna have me, what am I gonna do? And also navigating permanent and severe. Hearing loss. I got on a research trial and I got the amazing [00:29:00] gift of a cochlear implant. And that was the beginning of me learning to hear and speak all over again in a very different way. And that was a very long journey. And it was in that journey, rehabilitating using the cochlear implant that I got interested in speaking, and I started to sign up with mentors and coaches and various programs. From around the, the world and went on this speaking journey and reconnected with my, my love of, of storytelling and then decided that I wanted to be a, a speaker coach and a storyteller and a professional speaker, and, and to also teach and, and help and help others. So these days I work with. With leaders, helping leaders to have high, high impact communication skills, presentation skills, speaking of course, business storytelling. And a couple of years ago, one of my clients, when he was introducing me, we'd had a bit of a chat and he asked me, have I always been a speaker? And I told him, I used to be a midwife. And some people are like, whoa. You know, it's a chalk and cheese. [00:30:00] And when he introduced me in front of the crowd, he introduced me as the story midwife and is kind. Up because I do still bring life into the world, but very different. I encourage people to bring their stories into the world. So I still feel as though I've got a wonderful position of privilege, being able to nurture and, and birth those stories. So, you know, sometimes in life we don't get to choose. We get sent on this huge detour and. hopefully the detour ends up to be a scenic route. So there's not a day that goes by when I don't miss being a midwife. But I absolutely love, love what I do now.  Sarah: Mm. What a beautiful story. Yeah. That is just wonderful. And it just, it just strikes me like this, you know, connecting the dots backwards, and now you are. Really into speaking and telling stories and, and having [00:31:00] lost your hearing, it just kind of like strikes me as well. Obviously that was the next step. If you lose something right, then you really want to highlight it and make this your thing now because you gained it back and it's.  Lisa: Yeah, just, yeah. And I hadn't really thought about it at the time. I had no idea I was lost for quite some, some time and right. And in that space of, you know, why me and what am I gonna do? Yeah. I felt sorry for myself for a while, which is that natural or grieving process. But I, I remember I had a, an interview on, on radio and when they wrote up the blur for the interview, They gave the piece, the title in losing her hearing. She discovered her voice. And I thought, I like that. I'm gonna use that. And it's true. And I remember when I went to see the professor in order to get onto the research trial, it was competitive and he only had so many places. He had a lot of people who could have done with being part of the program and.[00:32:00]  We did all the clinical tests and the, and the sort of health related questions. And then he turned to me and he said, you know, I've got more people who could benefit than there are places available. If I choose you to be on the program, how will you share the gift? And I had no idea what he was talking about. I, I really was sort of stumped and I looked at him and I said, oh, I'll, I'll become a better listener. And he said, okay. And I thought, well, that, that would be a good step. We can all do with becoming a better listener. And it was only several years down the track that I thought my role in life, my purpose is now to help others to use their voice because I've discovered. Sarah: Hmm. Yeah. It's beautiful. When you were speaking also, I paid attention when you said, well, I paid attention all the time, but when you said you know, I learned to listen and speak differently. And I think you highlighted that before. So I I'm curious how, how. [00:33:00] How is it different now?  Lisa: Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. The sound that I get from the cochlear implant is artificial and it sounds a completely different to natural, natural sound mm-hmm . And so you not only have. To learn to hear, but you've gotta lay down new neural pathways in order to be able to turn that sound into something that resembles human human speech. And initially when you get the device and you have the sort of the turning on ceremony you can't hear anything at all. It, it, it is completely artificial and it just sounds like noise. And because I've got a small amount of natural sound remaining. My brain has to merge those two signals together. The artificial sound that comes from the device and the natural sound that, that, that I'm hearing. So you are bypassing the natural way of, of hearing. So it is a, it is very much a learned. [00:34:00] Process. And it takes a huge amount of focus and a lot of rehabilitation in, in learning to, and, and maybe it's a lot easier for younger people who, who get a cochlear implant. And I also think that it's potentially easier for people who have never heard. Who were born deaf. I mean, you've gotta have a particular type of hearing loss to be able to get a cochlear implant. It's not suitable for, for everybody, but yeah, it was a considerable, a considerable journey and a lot of frustration. Yeah. And a lot of trial and error with the amazing research team.  Sarah: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Just to tell you from, you know, the outside and, and listeners don't see that, but if you're watching the YouTube video, whenever I speak, I really. See on your face, how you're listening intensely. And obviously now I know your story and I know [00:35:00] why, but it's just so beautiful to have someone listen to you so intensely, you know, it feels like, wow, she's really taking in my information and paying attention to me. So, so I can, yeah, I can see the, the really huge benefit and I'm sure all your clients. Are like, wow. I really feel heard and seen by  Lisa: Lisa. Thank you. That's a compliment. I hope they feel that way too. yes.  Sarah: So we, we are getting to wrap up, but I, I would like you, if you can, to just share some final encouragement and, and maybe tips that you could think of for someone who who's yeah. Struggling with this idea of telling stories.  Lisa: Yeah. So look around you. There is a story in everything, whether it is a trip to the supermarket or remembering your first day at school, or applying for a job, getting turned down for a promotion. Yeah. These are all [00:36:00] potential story opportunities. Write them down, capture them and remember that every story does need to have a point. Or a purpose. So ask yourself, how did I feel? What did I learn? And what's that lesson that I want to share with others. And remember that the most important story is the one that we tell ourselves. So do the inner work, do the inner work to get rid of those unhelpful stories that no longer service that perhaps we've had hanging around for a long, long time. Because if you have got whatever your own story is, you know, you get to choose what the next chapter. It's in your control. Yeah. Get out there and share your story. Start off small. But other people are always fascinated by our stories because humans are hardwired to tell stories. We've always done it. Sarah: Yeah, thank you so much. I, I wanna repeat the point and purpose. That's what I really take away in the reason and season that's a, a good one to an easy [00:37:00] one to remember as well. Like the, every story needs a reason and there needs to be the, you know, the season needs to be right and feel right. To you as well. This has been very beautiful. Thank you so much for this conversation. Lisa, do you tell us I have one more question, but before that do tell us where people can connect with you where they can find out more about your work.  Lisa: Sure. Thank you for inviting me. I love your work. Sarah people can connect with me via my website, speaking savvy.com.au. I'm also on LinkedIn, always happy to have a chat and share a story with anyone online. So I do do a complimentary discovery call and obviously I love hearing stories. So that's how people can best reach out to me. Wonderful.  Sarah: And then my last question is what are you grateful for today or this week,  Lisa: Lisa? Today I'm this is probably gonna sound strange where the [00:38:00] opposite sides of the world. I'm grateful today that it's a little bit cooler. I was actually able to have a good night's sleep. The 1st of March, we are now in autumn. Here in Australia. And so we've got temperatures that are really beautiful and to see the, the flowers and the birds and the breeze. So today I'm grateful for the, the wonderful climate that I live in here in Perth, Western Australia.  Sarah: Wonderful. Yeah, I could, the sun is shining today here too, but I could use some warmer temperatures as well. thank you so much for taking the time. Lisa, it's been an absolute delight. Thank  Lisa: you, Sarah.[00:39:00] [00:40:00] 

SUMMARY:  In this episode, we talk with Lisa Coyne about ACT For mental compulsions.  Lisa Coyne addressed how to use Acceptance and Commitment therapy for overcoming mental compulsions. We cover how to identify your values using a fun little trick! In This Episode: How to use Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to manage mental compulsions How to practice Willingness in regards to reducing mental rituals and mental rumination  A fun little Value Based tool for identifying your values.  How to be curious instead of thinking in a limited way.  Links To Things I Talk About: Stuff thats Loud Stop Avoiding Stuff  https://www.newenglandocd.org/ ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two).   EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 287.  Welcome back, everybody. I am so excited. We are at Episode 6 of this six-part series of how to manage mental compulsions. You guys, we could not end this series with anyone better than Dr. Lisa Coyne. I don't know if you've heard of Lisa Coyne. I bet you, you probably have. She is the most wonderful human being.  I have met Lisa, Dr. Lisa Coyne multiple times online, never in person, and just loved her. And this was my first time of actually getting to spend some really precious time with her. And, oh my gosh, my heart exploded like a million times. And you will hear in this episode, you will hear my heart exploding at some point, I'm sure. I am so honored to finish out the six-part series with Lisa. This series, let me just share with you how joyful it has felt to be able to deliver this as a series, as a back-to-back piece of hope. I'm hoping it has been a piece of hope for you in managing something really, really difficult, which is managing mental compulsions. Now, as we finish this series up, I may or may not want to do a recap. I'm not sure yet. I'm going to just see where my heart falls, but I want to just really first, as we move into this final part of the series, to remind you, take what you need. You've been given literally back-to-back some of the best advice I have ever heard in regards to managing mental compulsions. We've got world-renowned experts on this series. You might have either found it so, so educational and so, so helpful while also feeling sometimes a little bit like, “Oh my goodness, there's so many tools, which one do I use?”  And I really want to emphasize to you, as we finish this out, again, so beautiful. What a beautiful ending. I almost feel like crying. As we finish it out, I really want to remind you, take what you need, take what's helpful, or – well, I should say and – try all of them out. Practice with each of the skills and the concepts and the tools. See what happens when you do. Use them as little experiments. Just keep plugging away with these skills and tools. Because number one, they're all evidence-based. I very carefully picked the experts on this series to make sure that we are bringing you evidence-based, really gold standard treatment. So, that's been a priority. Just practice with them. Don't be hard on yourself as you practice them. Remind yourself, this is a long-term journey. These are skills I still practice. I'm sure everyone who's come on the show, they are still practicing them. And so, I really want to send you off with a sense of hope that you get to play around with these. Be playful with them. Some of them will be we've giggled and we've laughed and we've cried. So, I want you to just be gentle as you proceed and you practice and remind yourself this is a process and a journey.  That being said, I am going to take you right into this next part of the six-part series with Dr. Lisa Coyne. This is where we bring it home and boy, does she bring it home. I feel like she beautifully ties it all up in a ribbon. And I hope it has been so helpful for you. Really, I do. I want this to be a resource that you share with other people who are struggling. I want to be a resource that you return to when you're struggling. I want it to be a place where you feel understood and validated. And so, thank you so much for being a part of this amazing series. That being said, let's get over onto the show, and here is Dr. Lisa Coyne. ------ Kimberley: I literally feel like I'm almost in tears because I know this is going to be the last of the series and I'm so excited. I had just said this is going to bring it home. I'm so excited to have Dr. Lisa Coyne. Welcome. Lisa: Thank you. It's so nice to be here with you, Kim. Hi, everyone. What is a Mental Compulsion? Do you call it a Mental Compulsion or a Mental Ritual?  Kimberley: Yes. So, first of all, the question I've asked everybody, and I really am loving the response is, this is a series on managing mental compulsions, but do you call them mental compulsions, mental rituals, rumination? How do you conceptualize this whole concept? Lisa: I would say, it depends on the person and it depends on what they're doing. I call them any number of things. But I think the most important thing, at least for me in how I think about this, is that we come at it from a very behavioral perspective, where we really understand that-- and this is true for probably all humans, but especially so for OCD. I have a little bit of it myself, where I get caught up in the ruminations. But there's a triggering thought. You might call it a trigger like a recurrent intrusive thought that pops up or antecedent is another word that we think of when we think of behavior analysis. But after that thought comes up, what happens is the person engages in an on-purpose thing, whatever it is that they do in their mind. It could be replacing it with a good thought. It could be an argument with yourself. It could be, “I just need to go over it one more time.” It could be, “I'm going to worry about this so I can solve it in advance.” And that part is the part that we think of as the compulsion. So, it's a thing we're doing on purpose in our minds to somehow give us some relief or safety from that initial thought.  Now the tricky part is this. It doesn't always feel like it's something we're doing on purpose. It might feel so second nature that it too feels automatic. So, part of, I think, the work is really noticing, what does it feel like when you're engaging in this activity? So, for me, if I'm worrying about something, and worry is an example of this kind of doing in your mind, it comes with a sense of urgency or tightness or “I just have to figure it out,” or “What if I--” and it's all about reducing uncertainty really.  So, the trick that I do when I notice it in me is I'll be like, “Okay, I'm noticing that urgency, that tension, that distress. What am I up to in my head? Am I solving something? Is that--” and then I'll step back and notice what I'm up to. So, that's one of my little tricks that I teach my clients. Kimberley: I love this. Would you say your predominant modality is acceptance and commitment therapy? What would you say predominantly you-- I mean, I know you're skilled in so many things, but what would you-- Lisa: I would say, it's funny because, yeah, I guess you would. I mean, I'm pretty skilled in that.  I'm an ACT trainer. Although I did start with CBT and I would say that for OCD, I really stick to ERP. I think of it as the heart of the intervention, but we do it within the context of ACT. ACT for Mental Compulsions  Kimberley: Can you tell me what that would look like? I'm just so interested to understand it from that conceptualization. So, you're talking about this idea. We've talked a lot about like, it's how you respond to your thoughts and how you respond and so forth. And then, of course, you respond with ERP. What does ACT look like in that experience? I'd love to hear right from your mouth. Lisa: Okay. All right. So, I'm going to do my best here to just say it and then we'll see if it sounds more like ACT or it sounds more like ERP. And then you'll see what I mean when I say I do both of them. So, when you think about OCD, when you think about anxiety, or even maybe depression where you're stuck in rumination, somebody is having an experience. We call it a private event like feeling, thought, belief that hurts, whatever it is. And what they're doing is everything that they can to get away from that. So, if it's OCD, there's a scary thought or feeling, and then there's a ritual that you do.  So, to fix that, it's all about learning to turn towards and approach that thing that's hard. And there's different ways you can do that. You can do that in a way where you're dialing it in and you're like, “Yeah, I'm going to do the thing,” but you're doing everything that you can to not feel while you're doing that. And I think that's sometimes where people get stuck doing straight-up exposure and response prevention. It's also hard.  When I was a little kid, I was really scared to go off the high dive. I tell my clients and my team the story sometimes where it was like a three-meter dive. And I was that kid where I would be like, “I'm going to do it. All the other kids are doing it.” And I would climb up, I'd walk to the end of the board, freak out, walk back, climb down. And I did this so many times one day, and there's a long line of other kids waiting to get in the water. And they were pissed. So, I got up and I walked out to the end of the board and I was like, “I can't.” And I turned around to go back. And there was my swim coach at the other side of the board with his arms crossed. I was like, “Oh no.” Kimberley: “This is not the way I planned.” How do you apply Acceptance & Commitment Therapy for OCD and Mental Compulsions?  Lisa: And he is like, “No, you're going.” And I went, which was amazing. And sometimes you do need that push. But the point is that it's really hard to get yourself to do those really hard things sometimes when it matters. So, to me, ACT brings two pieces to the table that are really, really important here. You can divide ACT into two sets of processes. There's your acceptance and mindfulness processes, and then there's your commitment and valuing processes, which are the engine of ACT, how do we get there?  So, for the first part, mindfulness is really paying attention on purpose. And if you want to really learn from an exposure, you have to be in your body, you have to be noticing, you have to be willing to allow all of the thoughts and sensations and whatever shows up to show up. And so, ACT is ideal at shaping that skillset for when you're in the exposure. So, that's how we think of it that way.  And then the valuing and commitment is, how do you get yourself off that diving board? There has to be something much more important, bigger, much bigger than your fear to help motivate you for why to do this hard thing. And I think that the valuing piece and really connecting with the things that we most deeply care about is part of what helps with that too. So, I think those two bookends are really, really important. There's other ways to think about it, but those are the two primary ways that we do ERP, but we do it within an ACT framework. Using Values to manage Mental Compulsions Kimberley: Okay. I love this. So, you're talking about we know what we need to do. We know that rumination isn't helpful. We know that it creates pain. We know that it keeps us stuck. And we also know, let's jump to like, we know we have to drop it ultimately. What might be an example of values or commitments that people make specifically for rumination, the solving? Do you have any examples that might be helpful?  Lisa: Yeah. I'm just thinking of-- there's a bunch of them, but for example, let's take, for example, ROCD, relationship OCD. So, let's say someone's in a relationship with a partner and they're not sure if the right partner is. Are they cheating on me? Are they not? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's this like, “But I have to solve if this is the right person or not. Am I going to be safe?” or whatever the particular worry is. And so, one of the things that you can do is once folks notice, they're trying to solve that. Notice, what's the effect of that on your actual relationship? How is that actually working? So, there's this stepping back where an ACT, we would call that diffusion or taking perspective self-as-context, which is another ACT, acceptance, and mindfulness piece. And first of all, notice that. Second of all, pause. Notice what you're up to. Is the intent here to build a strong relationship, or is the intent to make this uncertainty go away? And then choose. Do I want to work on uncertainty or do I want to work on being a loving partner and seeing what happens? Because there's so much we're not in charge of, including what we're thinking and feeling. But we are in charge of what we choose to do. And so, choosing to be present and see where it goes, and embracing that uncertainty. But the joyfulness of it, I think, is really, really important. So, that would be one example.  Kimberley: I love that example. Actually, as you were saying, I was thinking about an experience of my own. When your own fears come up around relationship, even you're ruminating about a conversation or something, you've got to stop and be like, “Is this getting in the way here of the actual thing?” It's so true. Tell me about this joy piece, because it's not very often you hear the word joy in a conversation about mental compulsions. Tell me about it. Lisa: Well, when you start really noticing how this is working, and if you're willing to step back from it, let it be, and stay where you are in that uncertainty, all sorts of new things show up. Stuff you never could have imagined or never could have dreamed. Your whole life could be just popping up all of these possibilities. In that moment you stop engaging with those compulsions, you could go in a hundred different directions if you're willing to let the uncertainty be there. And I think that that's really important.  I want to tell a story, but I have to change the details in my head just for confidentiality. But I'm thinking of a person who I have worked with, who would be stuck and ruminating about, is this the right thing? I could make decisions and how do I-- for example, how do I do this lecture? My slides need to be perfect and ruminating, ruminating, ruminating about how it works. And one day they decided, “Okay, I'm just going to be present and I'm just going to teach.” And they taught with a partner. And the person themself noticed like, “Wow, I felt so much more connected to my students. This was amazing.” And the partner teaching with them was like, “I've never seen you so on. That was amazing.” They contacted this joy and like, “This is what it could be like.” And it's like this freedom shows up for you. And it's something that we think we know. And OCD loves to know, and it loves to tell you, it knows the whole story about everything. And it's more what you get back when you stop doing the compulsions if you really, really choose that. It's so much more than just, “Oh, I'm okay. I noticed that thought.” it's so much more than that. It's like, yes, and you get to do all this amazing stuff.  Kimberley: Right. I mean, it's funny. I always have my clients in my head. When someone says something, I'm imagining my client going, “But like, but like...” What's the buts that are coming? Lisa: And notice that process. But see, that's it. That's your mind, that's their minds jumping back in being like, “See, there it is again.” Kimberley: Yeah. Lisa: And what if we just don't know? Using Curiosity to Stop Mental Compulsions  Kimberley: And this is what I love about this. I agree with you. There have been so many times when I've dropped myself out of-- I call it being heady and I drop into my body and you get this experience of being like, “Wow.” For me, I can get really simple on like, “Isn't it crazy that water is clear?” I can go to that place. “Water is clear. That is incredible.” You know what I mean? It's there to go to that degree. But then, that's the joy in it for me. It's like, “Wow, somebody literally figured out how to make this pen work.” That still blows my mind.  Lisa: I had a moment. I started horseback riding again for the first time in literally-- I've ridden on and off once a year or something, but really riding. And actually, it was taking classes and stuff for the first time in 30 years. And they put me in this class and I didn't know what level it was. I just thought we were just going to walk around and trot and all that stuff. Plus, she starts setting up jumps. And I was like, “Oh my God, this is old body now. This is not going to bounce the way it might have been.” It's what means all these 15-year-olds in the class. Kimberley: Wow. Lisa: I'm third in line and I'm just on the horse absolutely panicking and ruminating like, “Oh my God, am I going to die? Should I do this? What am I going to do? Should I tell her no? But I want it and I don't know what I'm going to--” and my head was just so loud. And so, the two girls in front of me go. And then I look at the teacher and I go, “Are you sure?” It's literally the first time I've ever done in 30 years. She just went-- she just looked at me. And I noticed that my legs squeezed the horse with all of the stuff rolling around in my head. And I went over the jump and it was, I didn't die. It was really messy and terrifying. Oh my God, it was so exciting and joyful. And I was so proud of myself. That's what you get-- Kimberley: And I've heard that from so many clients too.  Lisa: It's so awesome.  Kimberley: I always say it's like base jumping. It's like you've got to jump. And then once you've jumped, you just got to be there. And that is true. There is so much exhilaration and sphere that comes from that. So, I love that. What about those who base jump or squeeze the horse and they're dropping into discomfort that they haven't even experienced before, like 10 out 10 stuff. Can you walk me through-- is it just the same? Is it the same concept? What would you advise there? Lisa: So, I think it's important to notice that when that happens, people are not just experiencing physical sensations and emotions, but it's also whatever their mind is telling them about it. And I think this is another place where ACT is super helpful to just notice, like your mind is saying, this is 10 out of 10. What does that mean to you? That means like, oh my gosh. And just noticing that and holding it lightly while you're in that 10 out of 10 moment, I think, is really, really helpful.  So, for example, I have a really intense fear of heights where I actually freeze. I can't actually move when I'm on the edge of something. And I had a young client who I've worked with for a while. And as an exposure for her, but also for me as her clinician to model, we decided. She wanted me to go rock climbing with her, which is not something I've ever done, ever, and also fear of heights. So, I kept telling myself, “Fear of heights, this is going to suck. This is going to be terrible. This is going to be terrible.” And there was also another part of me interested and curious.  And so, what I would say when you're in that 10 out of 10 moment, you can always be curious. So, when you're like, “Oh my gosh, I'm really scared,” the moment you're unwilling to feel that is the moment it's going to overwhelm you. And if you can notice it as a thought, “I'm having the thought, I don't think I can handle this. I don't think I'm going to survive this,” and notice it and be curious, let's see what happens. And so, for me, I noticed interestingly, even though I'm terrified of heights, I wasn't actually scared at all. And that was a shocker, because I was full sure it was going to be the worst thing ever.  And so, notice the stories your mind tells you about what an experience is going to be and stay curious. You can always be curious. And that's going to be, I think, your number one tool for finding your way through and how to handle those really big, unexpected, and inevitable surprising moments that happen in life that are really scary for all of us. Kimberley: Right. And when you say curious, I'm not trying to get too nitpicky on terms, but for me, curiosity is, let's experiment. I always think of it like life is a science experiment, like let's see if my hypothesis is true about this rock climbing. Is there a way that you explain curiosity? Lisa: Yeah. Well, that's part of it, but it's also part like what you were describing. Isn't water cool? It's more than, is this true or not true? That's so narrow. You want, “No, really? What does this taste like?” And that's the mindfulness piece. Really notice all of it. There's so much. And when you start doing that, you'll find-- even if you do it outside of exposure, for example, as practice, you start to notice that the present moment is a little bit like Hermione's purse in Harry Potter, where you think it's this one thing, and then when you start to expand your awareness, you notice there's tons of cool stuff. So, in these big, scary moments, what you might see is a sense of purpose or a sense of, “Holy crap, I'm handling this and I didn't think I could. Wow, this is amazing,” or “I'm really terrified. Oh my gosh, my nose itches.” It could be anything at all.  But the bottom line is, our bodies were meant to feel and they were meant to experience all the emotions. And so, there is no amount of emotion or fear or anything that we are not built to handle. Emotions are information. And to stay in the storm when it's such a big storm, when OCD is ramping you up, it teaches the OCD, “Actually, I guess I get to stand down here eventually, I guess I don't need to freak out about this so much. Huh, interesting. I had no idea.” I don't know if that's helpful or not.   Kimberley: No, it's so helpful. It is so helpful because I think if you have practiced curiosity, it makes sense. But for someone who maybe has been in mental compulsions for so long, they haven't really strengthened that curiosity muscle. Mindfulness for Mental Compulsions Lisa: That's so true. So, start small. Don't start in the storm. Start with waking up in the morning and noticing before you open your eyes, what do you hear? How do the covers feel? Do you hear the birds outside your window? Start with that. And start in little moments, just practicing during the day. Start a conversation with someone you care about, and notice what your mind is saying in response to them, what it's like to notice their face. Start small, build it up, and then start practicing with little tiny, other kinds of discomfort. Sometimes we'll tell people like impatience. When you're waiting in line or in hunger or tiredness, any of those, to just bring your full awareness to that and be like, “What is it like inside this moment right now?” And then you can extend that to, “Okay. So, what if we choose to approach this scary thing? What if we choose to just for a few seconds, notice what it feels like in this uncertain space?” And that's how you might begin to bring it to rumination, be curious about what was the triggering thought. And then before you start ruminating or before you start doing mental rituals, just notice the first thought, and then you don't have to answer that question. And there's different ways to handle that, but curiosity is the beginning. And then stopping the compulsion is ultimately, or undoing it or undermining it in some way is going to be the other important piece. Kimberley: I'd love to hear more about commitment. I always loved-- when I have multiple clients, we joke about this all the time. They'll say, “I had these mental compulsions and you would be so proud. I was so proud. I was able to catch it and pull myself back into the present. And yes, it was such a win. And then I had another thought and you'd be so proud of me. I did the same thing. And then I had another thought and...” Lisa: You're like, “Was that the show that you just did right there?” It's sneaky, huh. Kimberley: And so, I'd love to hear what you're-- and maybe bring it from an ACT perspective or however you would. It's like you're chugging away. “I'm doing good. Look at me go.” But OCD can be so persistent. Lisa: It's so tricky.  Kimberley: And so, is that the commitment piece, do you think? What is that? How would you address that?  Lisa: So, if I'm getting your question right, you're asking about, what do we do when OCD hijacks something that you should do and turns it into a ritual? Is that what you're asking?  Kimberley: Yes. Or it just is OCD turns up the volume as like, “No, no, no, no. You are going to have to tend to me or I'm not going to stop,” kind of thing. Lisa: Yes. That is a commitment piece. And it's funny because there's different ways that I think about this, but it's almost like a little child who has a tantrum. If you keep saying yes, every time they make the tantrum bigger, it's going to end up being a pretty big tantrum. And OCD loves nothing more than a good tantrum. Kimberley: So true. Lisa: And so, the thing you have to do is plan for that and go, “Yeah, it's going to get loud. Yeah, it's going to say whatever it needs to say, and it's going to say the worst thing I can think of.” And I have had my clients call this all sorts of different things like first-order thoughts, second-order thoughts, just different variations on the theme where it's going to ramp up to hook you in. And so, really staying very mindful of that and making a promise to yourself.  One of my clients who helped us a lot in teaching but also in writing stuff that's loud, Ethan, I think said it in this really elegant way. He said, make a promise to yourself. That really matters, even if it's small. It doesn't matter how big it is. But one of his first ones was, under no circumstances, am I going to do X the compulsion? And keep that promise to yourself because if you-- anybody who ever woke up and didn't want to get out of the bed in the morning because, “Ah, too tired, it's too early. I don't really want to go to the gym.” If you know you're in that conversation with yourself about, “Well, maybe just one more minute,” you've already lost. And so, this is a good place again for that ACT piece of diffusion. Noticing your mind or your OCD or your anxiety is pulling you into, “Ah, let's just see if we can string you along here.” And so, what needs to happen is just move your feet and put them on the floor. Don't get into that conversation with yourself. And having that commitment piece, that promise to myself with the added value piece, that really matters. And one other thing that's sometimes helpful that I have-- I'll use this myself, but I also teach my clients, remembering this question: If this is a step towards whatever it is that's really important, am I willing to allow myself to feel these things? Am I willing? And remembering that as a cue. We're not here. It's never about this one exposure. It's about, this is a step towards this other life that you are fighting for. And every single step is an investment in that other life where you're getting closer and you're making it more possible, and just remembering that. I think that that's a really important piece. A Values Tool YOU NEED!  Kimberley: Yeah. It actually perfectly answered the question I had, which is, you're making a commitment, but what to? And it is that long-term version of you that you're moving towards or the value that you want to be living by. Would you suggest-- and I've done a little bit of work on the podcast about values. Maybe one day we can have you back on and you can share more about that, but would you suggest people pick one value, three values? How might someone-- of course, we all have these values and sometimes OCD can take things from us, or anxiety can take those things from us. How would you encourage someone to move in that direction? Lisa: Well, actually, do you want to do a fun thing? Kimberley: I do. Lisa: Okay. So, let's do-- Kimberley: I never would say no to that. I would love to. I'm really curious about this fun thing. Lisa: All right. So, do you like coffee or are you a tea person or neither? Kimberley: Let's go tea. I'm an Australian. If I didn't say tea, I would be a terrible Aussie.  Lisa: They'll kick you off. All right. So, Kim, think about in your life a perfect cup of tea, not just a taste, but a moment with someone maybe you cared about or somewhere that was beautiful or after something big or before something big, or just think about what was a really, really amazing important cup of tea that you've had in your life. Kimberley: Oh, it's so easy. Do I tell you out loud?  Lisa: Yeah. If you want to, that'd be great.  Kimberley: I'll paint you guys a picture. So, I live in America, but my parents live in Australia and they have this beautiful house on a huge ranch. I grew up on a farm. And we're sitting at their bay window and you're overlooking green. It's just rolling hills. And my mom is on my left and my dad is on my right. And it's like milky and there's cookies. Well, they call them biscuits. So, yeah. That's my happy place right there. Lisa: And I could see it in your face when you're talking about it. So, where do you-- does that tell you something about what's really important to you?  Kimberley: Yes. Lisa: What does it tell you? Kimberley: Family and pleasure and just savoring goodness, just slowing down. It's not about winning a race, it's just about this savoring. And I think there's a lot-- maybe something there that I think is important is the green, the nature, the calm of that. Lisa: Yeah. So, as you talk about that, what are you noticing feeling? Kimberley: Oh my God, my heart just exploded 12 times. My heart is filled. That was the funnest thing I've ever done in my whole life. Funnest is not a word. Lisa: What if you could build your life around moments like that? Would that be a well of life for you? Kimberley: I think about that nearly every time I make tea, actually. Lisa: That's how you would help your clients, and that's one way to think about values. Kimberley: Wow. That is so cool. I feel like you just did a spell on me or something. Lisa: You just connected with the stuff that's really important. So, when you think about if I had a hard thing to do, what if it was a step towards more of that in your life? Kimberley: Yeah. Lisa: You see?  Kimberley: It's so powerful. I've never thought that. Oh my God, that was gold. And so, that's the example. Everyone would use that, coffee or tea. Lisa: There you go. Just think about it. And it's funny because we came up with this in our team, maybe three months ago. We keep piloting just new little values exercise, but it's so funny how compelling it is. just thinking about-- gosh. Anyway, I could tell you about mine, but you get the point.  Kimberley: And you know what's so funny too and I will say, and this is completely off topic, there's a social media person that I follow on Instagram. And every time she does a live-- and for some reason, it's so funny that you mentioned this, I love what she talks about, but to be honest, I'm not there to watch her talk. The thing that I love the most is that she starts every live with a new tea and she'll pause the water in front of you. It's like a mindfulness exercise for me. To be honest, I find myself watching to see whether she's making tea. Not that this is about tea, but I think there's something very mindful about those things that where we slow down-- and the water example, she's pouring it and she's watching the tea. And for some reason, it's like a little mini-break in the day for me.  Lisa: I totally agree. It's like the whole sky, the cloud, and the tea and the-- Kimberley: Like Thich Nhat Hanh. Lisa: Yes. I can't remember the quote, but exactly.  Kimberley: Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love that example. So good. Well actually, if you don't mind, can you tell us your tea? Because I just would love to see if there's a variation. So, what would yours be? Lisa: It was funny because I think I did coffee the first time I did this, but then recently I just did a workshop in Virginia and I was like, “Oh my gosh, tea.” And what came to mind was, when I took my 17-year-old daughter tracking in the Himalayas to Nepal, because I wanted her. She was graduating from high school and I wanted to show her that you could do anything and she really wanted to go. We both really wanted to go to Ever Space Camp. And every morning after trekking nine, 10, 11 hours a day where you're freezing cold, you're exhausted, everything's hurting, and it's also amazing and beautiful, the guides would knock at our door and there would be two of them. And one of them would have a tray of little metal cups. And then the other one would say, “Tea? Sugar? Would you like sugar?” And they would make you, they would bring you, and this was how you woke up every morning, a steaming cup of tea. Sometimes the rooms were 20 below zero. And you'd get out of bed and you'd be so grateful for that warm cup of tea. And that was the tea I remembered. Kimberley: Right. And then the values you pulled from that would be what? Lisa: That moment, it was about being with my daughter and it was about showing her, modeling courage and modeling willingness and just adventure and this love of being in nature and taking a journey and seeing, “Could we do this? And what would it be like?” And just sharing the experience with her. It's just beautiful. And the tea is right in the center of that. So, it's almost not even about the tea, but it's that moment. It's that time and that experience. So amazing. Kimberley: So amazing. Thank you. I'm deeply grateful. That just filled my heart.  Lisa: I'm so glad. I feel so honored that you have had experience. I love that so much. Kimberley: I did. I always tell my clients or my kids or whoever is at-- when I was a kid, my mom, every afternoon when I came home from school, she'd say, “What's the one thing you learn at school today?” And so still, there's always one thing I learn and I always note it like that's the one thing I learned today and that was it. What an amazing moment.  Lisa: I'm so glad.  Kimberley: Okay. I love this. So, we've talked about mindfulness and we've talked about commitment. We've talked about values and we have talked about the acceptance piece, but if we could have just one more question around the acceptance piece. How does that fit into this model? I'm wondering.  Lisa: It's funny because I always feel like that acceptance piece, the word, it means to so many people, I think, tolerance or coping or let's just make this okay. And it doesn't mean any of those things. And so, I've moved more into thinking of it and describing it as, it's like a willingness. What is under the hood of acceptance and am I willing? Because you cannot like something and not want something and also be willing to allow it. And it's almost like this-- again, it involves curiosity about it. It involves squeeze the horse with all the stuff. Get the feet on the floor, even though you're having an argument that's in your head. And so, sometimes people think about it as a feeling and sometimes it is, but a lot of times, it's willingness with your feet. When you think about moms and infants in the middle of the night, I don't think there was ever a moment when I was like, “Oh yeah, the baby's crying at 4:00 in the morning. I'm so excited to get up.” I'm feeling in my heart, no. It's like you're exhausted and it's like the last thing you want to do and 100% you're willing to do it. You choose. And so, that's the difference. And so, I think people get tangled up, not just thinking of it as tolerance, but also waiting for a feeling of willingness to happen. And that's not it. It's a choice. Kimberley: It's gold. Lisa: Yeah, seriously. I mean, it's the same thing. I learn it every day. Trust me, when I fall out of my gym routine or my running routine and I'm off the willingness, and then I'm like, “Yeah, that's not it.” And I have to come back to it. So, it's something we all struggle with. And I think that's really important to know too, but ultimately, it's a choice, not a feeling. Kimberley: Okay. That was perfect. And I'm so happy. Thank you, number one. This is just beautiful for me and I'm sure the gifts just keep going and flowing from this conversation. So, thank you.  Lisa: Thank you for having me. Kimberley: Tell me where people can hear more about you and know your work? Lisa: Well, we're at the New England Center for OCD and Anxiety in Boston. We have recently opened in New York City and in Ireland. So, if anybody is in Ireland, call us, look us up. Kimberley: Wow. Lisa: Yeah. That's been really fun. And there's a few books we have. There's Stuff That's Loud written by Ben Sedley and myself. There's our newest book called Stop Avoiding Stuff with Matt Boone and Jen Gregg. And that's a fun little book. If anybody's interested in learning about ACT, it's really written-- the chapters are each standalone and they're written so that you could read them in about two minutes, and that was on purpose. We wanted something that was really pocket-sized and really simple with actionable skills that you could use right away. And then I have a new book coming out actually really soon. And no one knows this. Actually, I'm announcing this on your show. And I am writing it with my colleague, Sarah Cassidy-O'Connor in Ireland. We are just doing the art for it now and it's a book on ACT for kids with anxiety and OCD.  Kimberley: When is this out? Lisa: Good question. I want to say within the year, but I don't remember when. Kimberley: That's okay.  Lisa: But look for it and check out our website and check out Stuff That's Loud website. We'll post it there and let folks know. But yeah, we're really excited about it. And it'll be published by a UK publisher. So, it's really cute. So, I think the language will be much more like Australia, UK, Ireland for the US, which is really fun because I have a connection to Ireland too. But anyway, there you go.  Kimberley: It's so exciting. Congratulations. So needed. It's funny because I just had a consultation with one of my staff and we were talking about books for kids. And there are some great ones, but this ACT work, I think as I keep saying, there's skills for life.  Lisa: It really is. Kimberley: So important. How many times I've taught my child, even not related to anxiety, just the ACT skill, it's been so important. Lisa: Yeah. Mine too. I think they're so helpful. They were just really helpful with flexibility in so many different areas. Kimberley: Right. I agree. Okay. This is wonderful. Thank you for being on. Like I said, you brought it home.  Lisa: We'll have our cups of tea now. Kimberley: We will Lisa: So nice to talk to you, Kim.  Kimberley: Thank you. Lisa: Thank you.

Welcome back to Artbeat Radio! Today we hear from Lisa, a musician from our Mobile Arts Program. Lisa has set a goal to learn one new piece of music a month and is excited to share two pieces of music that she has been working on in her music therapy sessions. Lisa has recorded the songs "Let it Be" by The Beatles, and "Spread My Wings" by Troop. In Lisa's rendition of "Let it Be" she has been learning how to voice lead her chords and play in different inversions! In Lisa's rendition of "Spread My Wings", you will hear her playing some more challenging chords, and singing along. For the month of March, Lisa's next goal is to learn the "Pokémon Theme Song" on the piano. Enjoy!  Thanks for listening and tune in next time! For more information about our organization, please visit our website www.ableartswork.org  Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript) *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff* Music, stories, and more! You're listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work. Bella: Hi Lisa! Lisa: Hello, Ms. Christopherson.  Bella: Today you will be playing a couple of pieces. Would you like to share what song you're going to start with?  Lisa: Yes, the song that I will be playing is called let it be song by The Beatles.  Bella: Yeah. And you played this song the last time we recorded an episode for the podcast, but today you will be playing it a little bit differently. Would you like to share how this version of let it be is different from the last time you performed it?  Lisa: Yes. The first place of let it be it was basic. But in the second place of let it be, I made it more challenged in the courts that I play with different than the previous I played before. Bella: Yeah. So, Lisa, you've been working really hard on learning how to voice lead and play the chords differently than the last time you played it. So, whenever you're ready, you can take it away and play your song for us today.  Lisa: Okay. *Lisa begins to play piano and sing for the Beatles song, Let it Be* Lyrics:  When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me Speaking words of wisdom, let it be And in my hour of darkness She is standing right in front of me Speaking words of wisdom, let it be Let it be, let it be Let it be, let it be Whisper words of wisdom, let it be And when the broken-hearted people Living in the world agree There will be an answer, let it be For though they may be parted There is still a chance that they will see There will be an answer, let it be Let it be, let it be Let it be, let it be Yeah, there will be an answer, let it be Let it be, let it be Let it be, let it be Whisper words of wisdom, let it be And when the night is cloudy There is still a light that shines on me Shine on until tomorrow, let it be I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me Speaking words of wisdom, let it be Let it be, let it be Let it be, yeah, let it be Oh, there will be an answer, let it be Let it be, let it be Let it be, yeah, let it be Whisper words of wisdom, let it be Bella: Thank you so much Lisa for sharing Let It Be with us. What song will you be performing next? Lisa: The song I will be performing next, it will be called Spread my wings. Song by Troop. Bella: Awesome. What made you want to learn this song? Lisa: This song is open air and beautiful on the lyrics on how it's like singing about. Bella: Yeah, the message and the lyrics of this song are really nice and a nice thing to kind of draw your attention to while you listen. Is there anything else about this song that you want to share before you perform it? Lisa: Just that answer. Bella: Awesome. Well, thank you so much Lisa. We're excited to hear it. *Lisa begins to play piano and sing for the Troop song, Spread My Wings* Lyrics:  I've imagined faces of many lovers To ease the pain of having no one In my life... And I'm tired of being undercover... It's time to Navigate my feelings tonight... The sky is calm The stars are bright What's better than to be in flight... I'll relax my mind And be at ease... And let this journey Set me free Set me free... And I'll Spread my wings And fly away... (away) To a place... that I long for And my heart will be... the pathway... I'm searching for a love That's ever more...  I've often wondered how'd I managed... Always searching, but not finding a true heart... What does it take to find me a lover... I'm hoping that I don't' have to fly... Too far... Cause the sky is calm The stars are bright... And what's better than To be in flight... I'll relax my mind and be at ease And let this journey set me free Set me free... Spread my wings And fly away... (away) To a place... that I long for And my heart will be... the pathway... I'm searching for a love That's ever more... Bella: Thank you so much, Lisa, for sharing your music today. Both of your songs sounded so good. I think that's about all we have for today's podcast. Is there anything else you'd like to share or maybe tell us what song you'd like to learn next? Lisa: The songs I will like to learn next, it's called Pokémon Theme. For instance: *starts singing* I want to be the very best like no one ever was. To catch them is my real test, to train them is my cause. I travel across the land, searching far and wide. Each Pokémon, to understand the power that's inside. Pokémon, gotta catch ‘em. I choose you. You are my destiny, Pokemon. Oh, you're my best friend in a world we must defend. Pokémon, gotta catch ‘em, our hearts so true. *ends singing* That song. Bella: Cool Lisa! Yeah, that's a great goal. We can definitely learn that song next. Thank you again for sharing all your music today. Lisa: Mhm.*Outro music by Artbeat Radio staff*  We hope you enjoyed this episode of Artbeat Radio. For more information, please go to our website. Ableartswork.org. Thanks for listening and tune in next time! 

What you'll learn in this episode: The history of Sculpture to Wear and how Lisa maintains its legacy Why editorial and media coverage is crucial for getting art jewelry recognized as a fine art What the role of a jewelry gallery is Why Lisa always advises artists to keep good records of their work How the bold brooches of the 80s paved the way for today's art jewelry About Lisa M. Berman Lisa M. Berman is an internationally recognized “Ambassador of Wearable Art.” Based in Southern California, her expertise extends to major manufacturing and retail markets, museums and corporations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia and Europe. Lisa is the owner of the iconic gallery Sculpture to Wear, which was instrumental in launching the studio jewelry movement in the United States. The gallery offers an eclectic array of art, jewelry and unique objects to discerning collectors, media producers and institutions, which have been featured in film, television and publications. Her recently launched Berman Arts Agency offers artist representation, career management, corporate acquisition, sponsorship advisement, museum placement, exhibition curation and education services on the disciplines of fine art, jewelry, design and fashion. Lisa holds degrees in Plastics Manufacturing Technology from California State University Long Beach, Product & Jewelry Design from Otis College of Art & Design and Merchandising/Marketing from Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM). She has served on the Board of Governors for OTIS College of Art & Design; as Public Relations Chair for the Textile and Costume Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and on the Museum Collection Board at FIDM. She volunteers for Free Arts for Abused Children, STEAM projects and Art & Fashion Councils. Additional Resources: Sculpture To Wear Website Sculpture To Wear Instagram Sculpture To Wear Facebook Berman Arts Agency Instagram Photos: Lisa M. Berman wearing Archival 18k gold plate PEBBLES Necklace by Robert Lee Morris, her own sterling silver pendant by K. Lamberti, Issey Miyake coat and holding a signed ARTWEAR Catalog (RLM). Photo by Daniel Oropeza NUE Magazine Holiday 2020  Model Neva Cole, Photo by Daniel Oropeza  ICE Collar by Greg Orloff, 2018, $15,000 Creative Director / styled by: Lisa M. Berman  NUE Magazine Holiday 2020  Feature article "Powerful Woman of Dissent" from the "Feel the Frill" Exhibition honoring RBG curated by L.M. Berman.  Sculpture: LUX MAXIMUS, Winner of ARTPRIZE 2017 by Daniel Oropeza $350,000.  Model Neva Cole wears Emancipation Collar by 2Roses, 2020, $1,500.  Photo by Daniel Oropeza  Creative Director / styled by: Lisa M. Berman  Cover of IONA Magazine  Model wears Beaded Galaxy by 3 Tribes, from our Timeless Measures Exhibition 2006, curated by Lisa M. Berman & Pamela McNeil  1 year collaboration with women from 3 tribes in Africa - elders teaching the younger generation how to bead.  Cuffs (sterling Silver & Copper) by Tana Action  IONA Magazine  Models wears pieces by Jan Mandel: “REVEALED” Collar $50,000 (worn to the EMMY Television Academy's Governors Ball) and “POIGNET” (French meaning Wrist) $25,000 - both with created from Stainless steel mesh, outlined with 18k gold wire, Citrine, 2001. IONA Magazine  Models wears pieces by Jan Mandel: Earrings - 18k gold & aqamarine (NFS), “TRANSITION” Collar, 18k gold, Onyx, Aquamarine $20,000  and “GOLDEN” Cuff, 18k gold, $10,000, made in 2001. Niche Magazine - TOP RETAILER SPIKED, red collar (Collection of Myra Gassman) & Cuffs on left side by Michelle Ritter  “POIGNET” (French meaning Wrist) $25,000 -  both with created from Stainless steel mesh, outlined with 18k gold wire, Citrine. Bouquet Ring, Stainless steel & garnet by Wendy Gwen Hacker $800 Collaboration with Sculpture To  Wear Designer Gina Pankowski & MOEN Facet manufacturer. Utlilitary into Wearable Art Cover of W Magazine  - January Jones wears LATTICE necklace (oxidized Sterling Silver) by Gina Pankowski, $4,000 And Bridge Bracelet sterling silver by Sergey Jivetin, SOLD in Private Collection    The images below are from a PHOTO shoot based in the music video Rico Mejia Photography Fashion Beauty Celebrity Lifestyle Mobile number: 323-370-0555 https://www.behance.net/ricomejia https://twitter.com/RicoMejiaFoto https://www.instagram.com/ricomejiaphoto/ Perpetual Light in Motion - editorial photography by Rico Meija for Costumes bResin and Diamond Bangle by Cara Croninger from 24K Show, 1979, $4,000 Citrus Collar of acrylic, stainless steel & magnetic closure $650, and Bracelet $300 by Adriana Del Duca of Genos Jewelry  Vintage Earrings- acrylic, one of a kind by Frank & Anne Vigneri, 1984, $350 Perpetual Light in Motion - editorial photography by Rico Meija for Costumes by Swinda Reichelt  Resin DROP earrings by Cara Croninger $200 REGINA Collar of acrylic, stainless steel & magnetic closure $800 by Adriana Del Duca of Genos Jewelry for "Feel the Frill" exhibition honoring RBG, curated by L.M. Berman. Bracelet by Genos, NFS in collection of Julie Laughton Perpetual Light in Motion - editorial photography by Rico Meija for Costumes by Swinda Reichelt  BLUE DROP earrings Teri Brudnak $98 HEDGEHOG Collar of acrylic, stainless steel & magnetic closure $850 by Adriana Del Duca of Genos Jewelry for "Feel the Frill" exhibition honoring RBG, curated by L.M. Berman. Clear CUFF by Cara Croninger, NFS collection of L.M. Berman        Cover of Vogue with Cherize Theron     Transcript: Lisa Berman, owner of art jewelry gallery Sculpture to Wear, has been a figure in the art jewelry world for over 20 years, and she has a wealth of insight to share with fellow jewelry lovers. For her second appearance on the Jewelry Journey Podcast, she talked about how she's maintained relationships with hundreds of designers and collectors over the years, what advice she offers the designers she works with, and why art jewelry is coming into its own as a fine art collected by museums. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Today, my guest is Lisa Berman. Although we share the same last name, I'm not related to Lisa; however, over the years she has become a friend and a trusted dealer. Lisa has been a guest on the show before. Today, we'll have a wide-ranging discussion with less of a focus on a particular piece, more talking about her experience in the jewelry and fashion world. Per our practice, the podcast is audio only. We will be posting photos of many of the pieces Lisa mentions today on our website, which is JewelryJourney.com. This is also a two-part podcast, so please keep your eyes open for our second episode which will air later this week. Please make sure you're a member of our jewelry community by subscribing to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. That way you can listen to both episodes hot of the presses, so to speak. With that, I'd like to welcome Lisa to the program.   Sharon: When you say editorial—you talked about editorial versus advertorial—what do you mean?   Lisa: Years ago, we had magazines like W and Vogue and Vanity Fair, and the word advertorial did not exist. You had true editorial, where you were a new designer, you were creating something different, you had a new statement necklace, and they wanted to feature it. By the way, the vernacular “statement jewelry” wasn't in vogue 25 years ago. We talked about it. Now you see something on the cover and people talk about. From a marketing and selling point, it's a statement piece. That's something we were using in studio jewelry decades ago.    Let's see, we were talking about editorial, working with creative directors of publications. You have a timeline that's three months in advance because you didn't have digital. You had film; you had slides; you had all these timelines that were completely different. Then publications changed. They had to find a way to stay afloat, to stay in business, and like any other business they said, “Look, if you buy an ad, we'll promote you in an editorial article.” That's why you have some galleries now charging artists to physically have their work on the walls, which is something we didn't do, of course.   Sharon: That's interesting. Then you have people like me who walk into a gallery—I didn't know a lot—but depending on the gallery, they might pay to have their work on the wall. Having come from public relations, I immediately look at something to see whether they paid for that article or if it was chosen. I think it's important to point out—people might say, “Well, it sounds dated to be talking about all this print stuff,” but that goes immediately online. All the print is immediately online. There may be some things that never make print that are online, but it's important because whatever you see in print is going to be online.    Lisa: Well, I'll tell you why it's important and relevant. It actually goes back to catalogues and museums. I will get to museums in a second. As much as we want to save the planet and save paper and all of that, museums still demand catalogues for their major exhibitions. That's an important part of collecting. An important part of an artist's career is to have that physical catalogue, that tangible item that can be placed on a bookshelf, or talked about, or brought to a dinner party or a lecture series or whatever it may be. That's really important. An editorial and a printed editorial are the same. Obviously, there are more online publications and it's literally just flipping through the images.    For example, we just filmed a music video with Linda Hikel. We used a number of pieces from Sculpture to Wear in the music video. People loved it. They will use it for promotion, but she called me and said, “We want to capitalize on the fact that you brought such extraordinary work to the video. We want to capture those for editorial.” Then she called me and said, “We actually want to take it a step further. We're thinking about a book,” so these are the conversations. Printed materials are not a thing of the past, thankfully; they're an important element of documentation. That's why I tell artists, when I'm on an artist's tour or in their studio or we're having a conversation, “Please, if you're not a good note taker or you're not good about keeping files, literally keep a box on your desk, and anything—a summary or a note or something in regard to that project—keep it in there. This is so important for telling the story for an exhibition in a museum or just a gallery or online show.”   Sharon: Lisa, you mentioned that makers, jewelers, artists don't understand the role of a gallery. They think, “What am I paying you for?” in a sense. Tell us what your response to that is.   Lisa: I no longer have a physical, permanent location, but I do curate exhibitions. I will collaborate with fine art galleries or other locations to host exhibitions within their space. Even if a show is online, you still get the attachment of being in an exhibition that is part of Sculpture to Wear history and legacy. You have the exposure that I bring to that particular artist, whether it be through my website, through the newsletters I send out, through Art Jewelry Forum, through Indelible, which is my new column for older jewels. That's under the umbrella of Artistar Jewels.   Sharon: Artistar Jewels?   Lisa: Artistar Jewels; I'll tell you about that. Also, there's the collector base. A lot of artists think they pick up the phone and it just happens. Well, it does in some instances. It happens because I've cultivated a relationship for five to eight to 10 years. Yes, I can ask for a favor. Yes, I can propose an idea and I will be taken seriously because there's a track record of credibility. That's important for artists to understand. I think a lot of them coming from major schools do understand that. That is something that's part of their curriculum.    Sharon: You mentioned the importance of keeping all your sketches and notes and everything like that because it helps the gallerist tell a story.   Lisa: Right. In my garage, I literally have over two decades of artists' submissions. I know it sounds crazy. I have artists' submissions that were done on slides and then zip drives. I don't even know how I will convert those images, but I was so afraid of throwing away some of the most magnificent images I've ever seen and shown. Then each one of my exhibitions is in chronological order in a binder with the title and if there's any traveling accompanying that exhibition. I think I learned that from my days in the fashion industry, because you had to document, document, document. That has served me well, because if you don't document it, it never happened. So, you've got the documentation of the visuals and the notes and the advertising, and those are really important. Of course, now artists are saving all of that online, but hopefully there's still something tactile to incorporate.   Sharon: It's so important for credibility, whether it's online or not. Ideally, it's legitimizing it. I know for me, when I'm considering a piece of jewelry, if I know the artist has been in this museum or that museum or it's in the writeup, that makes a difference to me. It weighs more in favor of purchasing something, that credibility.   Lisa: Yes, and that's a whole round robin of a conversation. For example, the pieces I placed in LACMA on behalf Lynn Altman—unfortunately, Lynn is deceased. She was one of my favorite and dearest people on the planet. The three pieces that LACMA acquired were actually owned by me first, so it tells me I have a good eye, and it will also tell a collector I have a good eye. I know the process; I know what museums might be interested in. Mostly whatever I thought was interesting or fascinating, that's what I would collect, but it does matter. It plays a role in credibility in the conversation, if I'm going to be working with a client for consulting, either with a one-on-one client, with an artist or with a company or museum. By the way, one of the misnomers with museums and donations is that people think, “Oh, I have these amazing pieces and I want to donate them.” That's a very long process.   Sharon: From what I've heard, it's a challenge.   Lisa: It's a challenge because good museums will only accept pieces they can properly store. Of course, everyone wants them to be on display 100 percent of the time, but you can't do it. That's a conversation as well. You've got museums looking to acquire pieces, but they need funding for it. There's a whole program with their donors and collectors; “How do we buy this?” Then there are pieces they want that are being donated to them, but maybe they're going under renovation. Whatever the story may be, they want to make sure they're going to acquire them and be able to sort them, so that during their downtime another museum doesn't take them. It's really testing out there.   Sharon: When I've heard of collectors who have donated their collections, it sounds like it's been a long process. It's been something that took years before they even decided to do it. They were being wooed, or they would ask the museum, “What should I buy? What would you like to see in the collection?” that sort of thing. It doesn't sound like you just drive up and unload your station wagon.   Lisa: Oh, no.   Sharon: Do people have station wagons anymore?   Lisa: I don't know. They're called SUVs.   Sharon: Yes, SUVs.   Lisa: At least at a reputable location, that is definitely not the case. I think it's a very exciting time because you have people creating these secondary market pieces, people auctioning them, collecting them, and then you have some of the most dynamic makers. What's interesting to me is also the variations of ages from very young, 19 to 20, and then you have some jewelers I've met that were famous. They were architects or sculptors, and they wanted to change direction.    I've also talked to some of them in regards to ageism. They can't apply for certain grants because they're too old for one at 66. There are a lot of new conversations, like how we've had to learn to communicate with this new technology in Zoom. Life throws us curve balls and we go with it, and there are different trends, too. Brooches were so important probably 20 years ago and they still are, but you had it peak with the “Brooching it Diplomatically” book and Madeline Albright. For many years, large-scale collars were important. You have the Susan Lewin book that just came out and the exhibition book about rings. It's exciting. This field is constantly growing, constantly renewing itself, and I'm always inspired by it.    Sharon: I think we had a conversation once where you told me that brooches helped people segue to art jewelry. People could understand those and wear an avant garde brooch before they would wear something in their hair or an earring or something like that.   Lisa: Yes. People won't believe this, but fashion also played a role in that. For example, 25, 30 years ago, you had women entering the workforce—I know I'm going to get backlash on this—but they were wearing these blazers. So, they can't wear a large collar, plus they're downplaying it. They still want to make a nonverbal statement, and the easiest thing is to put a large-scale piece on a lapel. The ideal wall to place a brooch was on a blazer. For example, I'm wearing a Miyake shirt today. You can't put anything heavy through that. These blazers and large-scale shoulders, that was a perfect wall space to wear these pieces. For makers, these are the easiest way for them to literally make sculpture to wear. It was in a format that made sense to them, a smaller-scale sculpture that was on the left shoulder most often, but there are no rules now. Literally everything goes.    I happen to personally enjoy large-scale collars, just because I like to be hands free and my hands are always moving when I'm talking. I don't wear a lot of rings. When I had much shorter hair, I wore giant earrings. Now I don't, but it's all about personal preference. It was also interesting with the gallery. Someone would see a necklace or a piece in a feature editorial in the Los Angeles Times or W or whatever it may be, and they would call and say, “That's the piece I want.” Then, ultimately, they would come to the gallery and try it on, and they thought, “You know what? This just doesn't sit right on me. I want to look at something else,” or we would specifically have the artist there to meet with them and talk with them.   Sharon: You've talked about the fact that relationships are so important. I know what you mean. It's not just a matter of calling up Sally Smith who you've never talked to before and doesn't know you from Adam, versus calling somebody you've worked with or who knows you always bring her great pieces or something interesting. I want people to understand what you do and why they should call you, because you have your fingers in so many different areas.   Lisa: You know what's interesting about your statement, Sharon, is that I do. I am that person who will call anyone. I have the zero-fear factor.   Sharon: That's great.   Lisa: Completely, because the fact is the worst they can say is no. I'm on a phone call and I present the idea. I think it makes sense, otherwise I wouldn't call them or present them with the idea or exhibition or whatever it may be. I literally will pick up the phone, or I have a crazy idea and I will create a way to connect the dots. Most people think, “Oh my gosh! I would have never thought about that.” Often it's thinking about who's in that particular trade industry, how can we possibly get sponsorships, what's a different avenue. Let's think out of the box. We always hear that: let's think out of the box. I like to be creative, and I like communication. I literally will pick up the phone, and I always like to have a conversation.    So many people hide behind this little mouse on their computer or Facebook or Instagram or private messages. I say if we're going to work together or any of this, I have to have a conversation. Let's go on WhatsApp. If you're in a different time zone, a different county—it doesn't matter if they're speaking Latvian and they're mumbling through a translator, you just get their essence. That's really important, especially now with the lack of human interaction. I'm always an advocate for having a conversation because you never know where it's going to lead, that next step, that next unturned stone. You learn so much more when you have the conversation with the person.   Sharon: I always envy you people who have zero fear factor. I don't fall in that category, so I think it's great. Why should people call you today? To curate an exhibition?   Lisa: Thank you. I do a number of things. Obviously, first and foremost, I do represent certain artists' careers on an ongoing basis, whether it's curating exhibitions for their particular body of work. I can also host a show where we would sell work, because that's the fuel that makes the engine go: selling artists' work, curating exhibitions, connecting them to editorial, getting them placement for exposure. I would say 50 percent of what I do is a PR agency. That is the bulk of most of my day. It's writing articles, sending out newsletters, Instagram, Facebook posts, calling institutions or perhaps sponsors who are creating an exhibition, and creating those business alignments to further these ideas. Whenever I'm on Zoom conferences, I'm taking notes. Editorial, promotional, selling—it's like an ad agency as well.   Sharon: And when you say artists, that's bench jewelers, retailers, makers and fine artists.   Lisa: Yes, now I have branched out with the Berman Art Agency. That umbrella encompasses the very few select sculptors and photographers I've worked with throughout the years. For example, Bonnie Schiffman, she's a very well-known, iconic photographer in 16 museums worldwide. She came to me to make a commission piece in a gallery with Claudia Endler. That was an heirloom piece, and she wears it every day. Now we have this relationship where I'm working with her photographs. We've done shows throughout LA. I picked up the phone and created a museum exhibition for her back east. Some of these artists have had a rich career, and then they either hit a lull or they're on hiatus. How do I resurrect this? It's looking at those types of people. Like Marc Cohen—   Sharon: We just had Marc Cohen on the podcast with his box jewelry, which is so unique.   Lisa: I've known Marc for almost 35 years. I'm working with him on his 40 years of archives to make sense of them and understand how to present wearable art box sculptures, which are little, unique maquettes of a stage, like a Broadway stage. He incorporates iconic photography, and each of those tells a story. I'll be wearing one, and from across the room, someone will point at me and say, “That's the box man.” He's done a lot of much larger installations at the Museum of Jerusalem and some other work. So, presenting that work, how do we package that? How do we package it for a museum exhibition, for a gallery exhibition? Of course, we want to do a book.   Then I was working with Teri Brudnak. She was Karen McCreary's partner for Star Trek. We met 35 years ago in a plastics technology class. She and Karen were making work for Star Trek: The Next Generation, the television show. We were the only three women in this class, and people were making fun of us until they would see their pieces on television within the two-week period. They stopped the teasing and said, “O.K., this is something.” For example, the Skirball Museum has a Star Trek exhibition. How do we incorporate the legacy of what Terry and Karen created with their jewelry? It's always about peeking around the curve and finding a placement that makes sense. It is in alignment in an authentic way with their artist's voice and what they've created; not necessarily a stretch, but completely in alignment with their work and their creativity.   Sharon: Lisa, thank you so much. I learned so much today about how an artist has to sell their work. I know that's where so many get caught. Thank you so much for being here today.   Lisa: I appreciate the opportunity to tell your audience about this. It's very important. Thank you, Sharon.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

What you'll learn in this episode: The history of Sculpture to Wear and how Lisa maintains its legacy Why editorial and media coverage is crucial for getting art jewelry recognized as a fine art What the role of a jewelry gallery is Why Lisa always advises artists to keep good records of their work How the bold brooches of the 80s paved the way for today's art jewelry About Lisa M. Berman Lisa M. Berman is an internationally recognized “Ambassador of Wearable Art.” Based in Southern California, her expertise extends to major manufacturing and retail markets, museums and corporations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia and Europe. Lisa is the owner of the iconic gallery Sculpture to Wear, which was instrumental in launching the studio jewelry movement in the United States. The gallery offers an eclectic array of art, jewelry and unique objects to discerning collectors, media producers and institutions, which have been featured in film, television and publications. Her recently launched Berman Arts Agency offers artist representation, career management, corporate acquisition, sponsorship advisement, museum placement, exhibition curation and education services on the disciplines of fine art, jewelry, design and fashion. Lisa holds degrees in Plastics Manufacturing Technology from California State University Long Beach, Product & Jewelry Design from Otis College of Art & Design and Merchandising/Marketing from Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM). She has served on the Board of Governors for OTIS College of Art & Design; as Public Relations Chair for the Textile and Costume Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and on the Museum Collection Board at FIDM. She volunteers for Free Arts for Abused Children, STEAM projects and Art & Fashion Councils. Additional Resources: Sculpture To Wear Website Sculpture To Wear Instagram Sculpture To Wear Facebook Lisa Berman Instagram Photos: Lisa M. Berman wearing Archival 18k gold plate PEBBLES Necklace by Robert Lee Morris, her own sterling silver pendant by K. Lamberti, Issey Miyake coat and holding a signed ARTWEAR Catalog (RLM). Photo by Daniel Oropeza NUE Magazine Holiday 2020  Model Neva Cole, Photo by Daniel Oropeza  ICE Collar by Greg Orloff, 2018, $15,000 Creative Director / styled by: Lisa M. Berman  NUE Magazine Holiday 2020  Feature article "Powerful Woman of Dissent" from the "Feel the Frill" Exhibition honoring RBG curated by L.M. Berman.  Sculpture: LUX MAXIMUS, Winner of ARTPRIZE 2017 by Daniel Oropeza $350,000.  Model Neva Cole wears Emancipation Collar by 2Roses, 2020, $1,500.  Photo by Daniel Oropeza  Creative Director / styled by: Lisa M. Berman  Cover of IONA Magazine  Model wears Beaded Galaxy by 3 Tribes, from our Timeless Measures Exhibition 2006, curated by Lisa M. Berman & Pamela McNeil  1 year collaboration with women from 3 tribes in Africa - elders teaching the younger generation how to bead.  Cuffs (sterling Silver & Copper) by Tana Action  IONA Magazine  Models wears pieces by Jan Mandel: “REVEALED” Collar $50,000 (worn to the EMMY Television Academy's Governors Ball) and “POIGNET” (French meaning Wrist) $25,000 - both with created from Stainless steel mesh, outlined with 18k gold wire, Citrine, 2001. IONA Magazine  Models wears pieces by Jan Mandel: Earrings - 18k gold & aqamarine (NFS), “TRANSITION” Collar, 18k gold, Onyx, Aquamarine $20,000  and “GOLDEN” Cuff, 18k gold, $10,000, made in 2001. Niche Magazine - TOP RETAILER SPIKED, red collar (Collection of Myra Gassman) & Cuffs on left side by Michelle Ritter  “POIGNET” (French meaning Wrist) $25,000 -  both with created from Stainless steel mesh, outlined with 18k gold wire, Citrine. Bouquet Ring, Stainless steel & garnet by Wendy Gwen Hacker $800 Collaboration with Sculpture To  Wear Designer Gina Pankowski & MOEN Facet manufacturer. Utlilitary into Wearable Art Cover of W Magazine  - January Jones wears LATTICE necklace (oxidized Sterling Silver) by Gina Pankowski, $4,000 And Bridge Bracelet sterling silver by Sergey Jivetin, SOLD in Private Collection    The images below are from a PHOTO shoot based in the music video Rico Mejia Photography Fashion Beauty Celebrity Lifestyle Mobile number: 323-370-0555 https://www.behance.net/ricomejia https://twitter.com/RicoMejiaFoto https://www.instagram.com/ricomejiaphoto/ Perpetual Light in Motion - editorial photography by Rico Meija for Costumes bResin and Diamond Bangle by Cara Croninger from 24K Show, 1979, $4,000 Citrus Collar of acrylic, stainless steel & magnetic closure $650, and Bracelet $300 by Adriana Del Duca of Genos Jewelry  Vintage Earrings- acrylic, one of a kind by Frank & Anne Vigneri, 1984, $350 Perpetual Light in Motion - editorial photography by Rico Meija for Costumes by Swinda Reichelt  Resin DROP earrings by Cara Croninger $200 REGINA Collar of acrylic, stainless steel & magnetic closure $800 by Adriana Del Duca of Genos Jewelry for "Feel the Frill" exhibition honoring RBG, curated by L.M. Berman. Bracelet by Genos, NFS in collection of Julie Laughton Perpetual Light in Motion - editorial photography by Rico Meija for Costumes by Swinda Reichelt  BLUE DROP earrings Teri Brudnak $98 HEDGEHOG Collar of acrylic, stainless steel & magnetic closure $850 by Adriana Del Duca of Genos Jewelry for "Feel the Frill" exhibition honoring RBG, curated by L.M. Berman. Clear CUFF by Cara Croninger, NFS collection of L.M. Berman        Cover of Vogue with Cherize Theron     Transcript: Lisa Berman, owner of art jewelry gallery Sculpture to Wear, has been a figure in the art jewelry world for over 20 years, and she has a wealth of insight to share with fellow jewelry lovers. For her second appearance on the Jewelry Journey Podcast, she talked about how she's maintained relationships with hundreds of designers and collectors over the years, what advice she offers the designers she works with, and why art jewelry is coming into its own as a fine art collected by museums. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Today, my guest is Lisa Berman. Although we share the same last name, I'm not related to Lisa; however, over the years she has become a friend and a trusted dealer. Lisa has been a guest on the show before. Today, we'll have a wide-ranging discussion with less of a focus on a particular piece, more talking about her experience in the jewelry and fashion world. Per our practice, the podcast is audio only. We will be posting photos of many of the pieces Lisa mentions today on our website, which is JewelryJourney.com. This is also a two-part podcast, so please keep your eyes open for our second episode which will air later this week. Please make sure you're a member of our jewelry community by subscribing to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. That way you can listen to both episodes hot of the presses, so to speak. With that, I'd like to welcome Lisa to the program. Lisa: Thank you, Sharon. I'm so delighted to be back here again. Sharon: It's great to have you. For those who don't know your background, can you give us a brief overview of your background? Lisa: Of course. I grew up in the fashion industry and had a career in fashion design. I had an accessory business for many, many years, and then I acquired the name of Sculpture to Wear Gallery in 1998. Of course, that was originally launched in 1973 in New York City in the Park Plaza Hotel. I launched my first exhibition at Bergamot Station Art Center, which I'll tell you about in a second, on January 16, 1999. I'm proud to be the second owner of Sculpture to Wear Gallery. Now, location is important. Location, location, location, you've heard a million times in real estate. Bergamot Station Art Center is in Santa Monica, California, Southern California, and it was formerly the home to 25 thriving contemporary galleries and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. It was, I believe, a five-acre complex. Now the Red Line runs through it. Sharon: The Red Line being the Metro. Lisa: Yes, the metro. Anyway, that's where I started my journey. I actually met my former husband, Robert Berman, there as well. It was the heyday. It was like Soho. It was the happening place on the West Side; it was a lot of fun. Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night for 10 years, there were gallery openings. There was constant influx of artists and jewelers and collectors and educators and writers, so it was definitely the place to be. Sharon: What was groundbreaking about—first, it was groundbreaking that Sculpture to Wear was on the West Coast, but what was groundbreaking about the original Sculpture to Wear? Lisa: The owner, Joan Sonnabend, was basically located in Boston, but she had a tiny, little, postage-stamp gallery. Robert Lee Morris told me it was only about 400 square feet. The delineation was that she only showed work by signed artists. For example, you had Alexander Calder making jewelry, and he actually made his jewelry. There were pieces by Picasso; those were in addition to the series and those were made by other craftsmen. Of course, you have people like Robert Lee Morris, whose entire career was launched at the original Sculpture to Wear. The idea was that she was selling one-of-a-kind, sculptural jewelry made by fine artists, not by jewelry artists. That was the idea. Sharon: From what I've heard, nobody else was doing that then. This was unusual. Lisa: It was extremely unusual. The only person that was doing something similar was in Philadelphia. That's our beloved Helen Drutt, who is about to turn 91. She was also very monumental and important in bringing studio jewelry and wearable art to the United States, but she worked with jewelers and makers, mostly in Europe. Sharon: How did you know the Sculpture to Wear license was available? How did you find out about that? Lisa: I was introduced to the idea through Cindy Forbes, who's now Cindy Brown. She ultimately ended up being my gallery manager. We had a conversation, one thing led to another, and that was kind of it. It was available, so I capitalized on that and the domain and the name. When I acquired the name, I felt it was very important that every decision I made was legacy-driven, because it was a very important part of history. This is not something I just launched; they had an important history and legacy on the East Coast. That's why for my business card, I purposely selected the title of “visionary proprietor,” because it kept me on point and on target. At first, I got a little flak from it, but as I explained, that kept me on point to do my best. That was it. Sharon: Flak because people said, “Oh my gosh—”  Lisa: A lot of gumption that I would profess to be this visionary proprietor. Now, everyone on social media is a visionary and all the museum collectors' groups are visionaries. I don't know; I guess I was ahead of the curve. Sharon: You are a visionary. Lisa: This was 23 years ago. There you go.  Sharon: So, you opened at Bergamot Station and then you moved the gallery to Montana Avenue in Santa Monica? Well, they're both in Santa Monica. Lisa: I was in Bergamot Station from 1999 until 2003. In Bergamot Station, I had two separate little locations. In 2003, I moved to a much larger location. That was on Montana Avenue at the cross street of 11th Street. I moved there knowing I was a destination, that I had built a brand with Sculpture to Wear and with the artists through a number of different ideologies and media and exposure. We'll get into that in a second, but I knew I was a destination. I was not going to rely on walk-in traffic on Montana Avenue, like so many of the other stores did. That was really important, that I had built up that mailing list, the collector base. People would be traveling, or friends would be coming in from out of town and our collectors would pick them up at the airport and say, “We have to take you to Sculpture to Wear first.” It was those kinds of relationships we had built there. Sharon: Did people stumble on your gallery in Bergamot Station? How did they find you? Lisa: Bergamot had 25 galleries, so at any given day at any given moment, you had tons of people walking around. It's completely different than it is today; of course during the pandemic, but completely different. There was no problem reaching collectors, and I was the complete anomaly. You have this sculptural jewelry, and it was an education to a new audience. A lot of these people weren't necessarily open to the idea of jewelry not having diamonds or gold. People that had an educated eye in regard to design, like architects, were some of our first clients because they understood the design. It literally was a small-scale sculpture.  I think my passion for that and some of the artists were also incorporated into that conversation. I made a request of any artists that were local to the gallery that they do three things: they had to work in the gallery, they had to come and help set up an exhibition that wasn't theirs, and they had to attend an opening that wasn't theirs. I wanted them to understand the role of a gallery and what we did. At first it was, “Well, why I would give you 50 percent of the retail price?” This was a demonstration for them to learn why. There wasn't any artist who partook in those three requests that came to me and said, “No, this isn't right.” They all were shocked at what we did on a daily basis. Robert Lee Morris, I told him about that, and he was shocked. He said, “You did that?”  Sharon: You mentioned Robert Lee Morris. A lot of people will know who he is, especially New Yorkers or fashionistas, but tell us who he is and why he's important. Lisa: Robert Lee Morris is an icon. He's been designing jewelry for over 50 years. He's the only designer to earn the Coty Award for his jewelry design an unprecedented three times. He was the designer who made the big, bold, gold jewelry in conjunction with Donna Karan's black cashmere new work uniform in the late 80s, early 90s. Digressing to understand why he's important in my world, our world of art jewelry, is that he was one of the most important and prolific designers at the original Sculpture to Wear in New York.  He was self-taught. He was literally found at a tiny, little show in an offbeat path. He was immersed in this incredible work from Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Louise Nevelson—amazing artists who already had these incredible careers, and as it turns out, people loved Robert's work. He outsold all the other artists combined at Sculpture to Wear. Then he launched his own gallery. After Sculpture to Wear closed, he launched Artwear. That launched a number of careers from a lot of famous artists, jewelers, studio jewelers, some of whom are still with us and some are not. That's his legacy; first at Sculpture to Wear, then Artwear. He has these amazing archives, and we'll talk about how editorial and prior images play a role in the secondary market. That might be a good place to talk about that. Sharon: O.K., please. Lisa: What's a phenomenon for me is that when I started and someone would ask if I sold jewelry, I knew the context. They would immediately think of CZ or— Sharon: Engagement rings. Lisa: Engagement rings. I said, “No, that's not at all what I do,” and I would always be wearing a piece. I was always wearing largescale pieces of jewelry. At that time when I first opened my gallery, I had very short hair; I think it was two inches long. People may not have remembered my name, but they would point at me from across the room and say, “Oh, that's the jewelry lady. That's the Sculpture to Wear lady,” and that was just fine.  This type of work, like photography 80 or 60 years ago, was not accepted in the realm of a fine art museum. Now you see photography auctioned at over $1 million, and some of the most incredible collections in the world are simply photography. Art jewelry is now collected in some specific fine art institutions, and that is for a number of reasons. First of all, it's because of exposure from editorial and media, and also because of the stewardship of specific collectors and designers like Helen Drutt, who bequeathed her collection to the Houston Fine Art Museum. I think it was almost a decade ago, and there's an incredible book. It's on my bookshelf. I can see it from here; it's very orange and large. She wanted her collection to be viewed at a fine arts museum versus a craft museum, and that started that conversation.  Lois Boardman on the West Coast donated her collection to LACMA, LA County Museum of Art, I believe five years ago. Also, for example, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian has been collecting this work for a lot longer. For example, Jen Mandel and I were there for her induction into the Smithsonian. That was incredible. We were standing right next to a piece made by Alexander Calder, and that's where her vitrine was placed. It's really about this conversation, and I think it's a conversation of education.  As for the secondary market, we were just attending the Bonhams preview for the Crawford Collection. That's an unprecedented phenomenon, to have a collection of that level, of that stature, being auctioned by Bonhams without diamonds, without gold. There are a few elements and pieces to that, but you're looking at Art Smith pieces, modernists, studio jewelers. This is a very exciting and fertile time to be involved in studio and art jewelry. This is what I've been doing for the last 22, 25 years. We're at a very exciting place and there are a number of forums, especially with Covid and Zoom, with Art Jewelry Forum having open conversations about this, introducing collectors to artists and, of course, your podcast. There are a lot of variations and factors for the secondary market. Sharon: Lisa, because your jewelry and art jewelry in general is still avant garde—although it's coming into its own—do you think collectors or people like you are going to say, “O.K., what's next? What's on the horizon now? That's become old hat.” It hasn't, but do you think people are going to move on? Lisa: Sharon, I hope not. Within the genre of studio jewelry and wearable art, it has progressed and become so sophisticated. There are so many different makers out there, especially with the internet connecting us. When I first started in 1999, we didn't really have the internet; we barely had email, and now that's how everyone communicates. I think that people's creativity, the way people wear pieces and where they wear them—the reality is that we're not going anyplace right now during the pandemic, and I'm looking at different generations and how to include that next generation in collecting. For example, some of my first clients were in their 60s and 70s when they started collecting, and some are no longer with us. So, how do we engage their family members? You're our most recent convert to art jewelry. My gallery was so close to your house, yet you would have had no interest in what we did. I think it's a journey. Can you say someone's going to have a different trend? No.  I also think technology has played an important role not only in studio jewelry and the exposure, but also the techniques. People are using laser cutting, 3D printing. Technology has also been accepted into fine arts institutions and it has blurred the lines of the conversation of craft and fine art. Even five years ago, there was a delineation that was very distinct. There are still institutions that are not interested in immersion, but I think technology has been a friend, not a foe, to studio jewelers and the paths they can cross. Sharon: I do have to tell a story. Lisa and I were laughing because I lived close to where her gallery used to be. I lived not so far in the Valley, 10 miles away. I was never in your gallery, but I remember seeing an ad one day and thinking, “Who is going to wear this stuff?”  Lisa: And now the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Sharon: It was way out. When you say that people who were older started collecting it, that's the sort of people who don't automatically say, “Wow, that's so new and so cool.” Lisa: My collectors—and I'm sure a number of the gallerists across the United States who have been around for decades would say the same—our clientele, they're not interested in trends. If they open a Vogue, they might see a dress they like, but they're not going to buy it because it's on trend or in fashion. All my clientele, they're well-traveled; they're well-heeled; they're generally educated. They're willing to be avant garde. They don't want to wear the same thing everyone else is wearing, so it's a little bit different. The whole conversation now is that there are younger generations. I just met an incredible student at USC at the Bonhams preview. She's running this entire magazine department in her off time while she's full-time at USC. That's to reach a new collector base and new makers, but that's exciting. That's what makes it viable. Sharon: Yes, it keeps on going. Lisa: Right. That was one of the things I wanted to talk about in regards to when I first started in 1999: it was not only the relationships we built with the artists and the collectors, but we also had our version of social media, which was just printed publications. We didn't have social media, so building relationships with well-known stylists, who were either Emmy award winners or high-profile people that worked with celebrities, that was really important. We got to the point where they would literally call me up with the theme, tell me what it was, and I would already pull the pieces and have a box ready for them. We had a shorthand. That was, again, a relationship that would have to be cultivated. It was very exciting, and that's part of building the legacy of why this work is important. For example, Robert Lee Morris is pulling out his archives. Part of the excitement of these presentations is showing some of the editorial, these great magazine covers and shows that these pieces were included in. I have two decades of binders of images. So, that's very exciting, to show the relevance 20 years ago to now.

How do you handle stressful situations? Everyone's built a little different — some people can take their hits on the chin and come out smiling. But not everyone can take those hits. The pandemic has taken its mental toll on so many people. Others might still be struggling with past traumas and dealing with anxiety. Their situation keeps them in a state of constant worry and hypervigilance. That state of mind doesn't only harm their mental and emotional health — it can make them sick and more prone to physical diseases. More than ever, it's time to begin mental healing from past traumas, so we can better cope with our daily stresses.  Dr Don Wood joins us again in this episode to talk about the TIPP program and how it facilitates mental healing. He explains how our minds are affected by traumas and how these can affect our health and performance. If we want to become more relaxed, we need to learn how to go into the alpha brainwave state. Since mental healing is not an immediate process, Dr Don also shares some coping strategies we can use in our daily lives.  If you want to know more about how neuroscience can help you achieve mental healing, then this episode is for you.    Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how trauma can put you in a constant state of survival and affect your performance and daily life.  Understand that it's not your fault. Achieving mental healing will require you to learn how to go into an alpha brainwave state.  Discover healthy habits that will keep you from entering survival mode.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  A new program, BOOSTCAMP, is coming this September at Peak Wellness! Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes:  #183: Sirtuin and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova  #199: How Unresolved Trauma Prevents You from Having a Healthy Life With Dr Don Wood Check out Dr Don Wood's books:  Emotional Concussions: Understanding How Our Nervous System is Affected By Events and Experiences Throughout Our Life You Must Be Out Of Your Mind: We All Need A Reboot   Connect with Dr Don Wood: Inspired Performance Institute I Facebook I LinkedIn     Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? 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If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again. Still, I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. 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Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Episode Highlights [06:05] The Pandemic-Induced Mental Health Crisis The pandemic forced many people into a state of freeze mode, not the typical fight or flight response.  As people get out of freeze mode, there will be a rise in mental health issues.  Teenagers are robbed of the opportunity to develop social and communication skills during this time.  [08:24] How Dr Don Wood Started Studying Traumas Dr Don's wife grew up in a household with an angry father who instilled fear. He used to think that she would be less anxious when they started to live together, but she struggled with mental healing.  She had an inherent belief that misfortune always follows good things. Her traumas and fears also led to a lot of health issues.  She also was hyper-vigilant, which she used as a protective mechanism. However, this prevented her from being relaxed and happy. A person's environment can dictate whether they go into this hyper-vigilant state, but genetics can also play a factor.  [15:42] How Trauma Affects the Brain Trauma is caused by a dysregulation of the subconscious. If your brain is in survival mode, it will access data from the past and create physiological responses to them. These emotions demand action, even when it is no longer possible or necessary. This dysregulation prevents you from living in the present and initiating mental healing.  In this state, people can be triggered constantly, which interferes with their day-to-day life.  [21:07] The Role of the Subconscious Your conscious mind only takes up around 5%, while the subconscious takes up 95%. Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between real and imagined.  In survival mode, people will keep replaying the past and think about different scenarios and decisions.  You're left stuck because the subconscious mind only lives in the now. It does not have a concept of time.  This process is the brain trying to protect you. [25:04] What Happens When You're Always in Survival Mode Being in survival mode will take a physical toll since it's constantly activating the nervous system, increasing cortisol and adrenaline. When you're in this state, your body and mind cannot work on maintenance and recovery. It is more focused on escaping or fixing perceived threats. Over time, this will affect your immune system and make you sick.  To truly achieve mental healing, you need to get to the root cause of your problems.  However, you also have to develop coping strategies to manage your day-to-day activities.  [30:18] Changing Your Brainwave State Traumatic events are usually stored in a beta brainwave state. Changing your response to traumatic events starts with going into an alpha brainwave state.  The beta state is usually from 15 - 30 hertz, while the alpha is lower at 7 - 14 hertz. Anything below that is the delta state, usually when you're in deep meditation or sleep. People who have trouble sleeping are usually in that beta state, which keeps processing information.  It's only in the delta state that your mind and body start the maintenance phase. This phase helps not only with mental healing but also physical recovery.  Learn more about Lisa and Dr Don's personal experiences with these brainwave states in the full episode!  [34:30] Mental Healing and Physical Recovery Starts with the Brain Recovery is about genetics and the environment. In sleep, your mind will always want to deal with the threats first. It can only get to the delta state once it finishes processing these dangers. Your risk for developing sickness and depression rises if your brain can't do maintenance. Living in the beta state will make it difficult to focus.  [41:40] It's Not Your Fault If you have a lot of trauma, you are predisposed to respond in a certain way. It's not your fault.  There's nothing wrong with your mind; you just experienced different things from others.  Dr Don likened this situation to two phones having a different number of applications running.  Predictably, the device that runs more applications will have its battery drained faster.  [44:05] Change How You Respond Working on traumas requires changing the associative and repetitive memory, which repeats responses to threats. You cannot change a pattern and get mental healing immediately—it will take time.  That's the reason why Dr Don's program has a 30-day recovery phase dedicated to changing your response pattern.  Patterns form because the subconscious mind sees them as a beneficial way of coping with traumas.  This function of your subconscious is how addictions form.  [47:04] Why We Can Be Irrational The subconscious lives only in the present. It does not see the future nor the past.  It will want to take actions that will stop the pain, even if the actions are not rational.  At its core, addiction is all about trying to stop the pain or other traumatic experiences.  Survival mode always overrides reason and logic because its priority is to protect you. [50:57] What to Do When You're in Survival State In this survival state, we're prone to movement or shutting down completely.  The brain can stop calling for emotions to protect you, and this is how depression develops.  When in a depressed state, start moving to initiate mental healing. Exercise helps burn through cortisol and adrenaline.  Once your mind realises there's no action required for the perceived threats, the depression will lift.   [53:24] Simple Actions Can Help There's nothing wrong with you.  Don't just treat the symptom; go straight to the issue.  Don't blame genetics or hormonal imbalances for finding it hard to get mental healing. Find out why.  Also, seek things that will balance out your hormones. These can be as simple as walking in nature, taking a break, and self-care.  [56:04] How to Find a Calming Symbol Find a symbol that will help you go back into the alpha brainwave state.  Lisa shares that her symbol is the sunset or sunrise, and this helps her calm down. Meanwhile, Dr Don's are his home and the hawk.  Having a symbol communicates to all parts of your brain that you're safe.  [59:58] The Power of Breathing  Stress may lead to irregular breathing patterns and increase your cortisol levels and blood sugar. Breathing exercises, like box breathing, can also help you calm down because the brain will take higher oxygen levels as a state of safety.  If you're running out of oxygen, your brain will think you're still in danger.  Make sure that you're breathing well. It's also better to do nasal breathing.    7 Powerful Quotes ‘The purpose of an emotion is a call for an action. So the purpose of fear is to run.' ‘People who have a lot of trauma have trouble sleeping. Because not only is their mind processing what it experienced during the day, it's also taking some of those old files saying “Well, okay, let's fix that now. Right. Let's get that.”' ‘I was getting maximum restorative sleep. So an injury that I would have that could heal in two or three days, my teammates would two or three weeks. Because they were living in these, which I didn't know, a lot of my friends were dealing with trauma: physical, emotional, sexual abuse.' ‘There's nothing wrong with anybody's mind. Everybody's mind is fine except you are experiencing something different than I experienced so your mind kept responding to it, and mine didn't have that.' ‘That dysregulation of the nervous system. That's what we want to stop because that is what is going to affect health, enjoyment of life, and everything else.' ‘I talked about addiction as a code. I don't believe it's a disease. Your mind has found a resource to stop pains and your subconscious mind is literal. It doesn't see things as good or bad, or right or wrong.' ‘If there's a survival threat, survival will always override reason and logic because it's designed to protect you.'   About Dr Don Dr Don Wood, PhD, is the CEO of The Inspired Performance Institute. Fueled by his family's experiences, he developed the cutting-edge neuroscience approach, TIPP. The program has produced impressive results and benefited individuals all over the world.  Dr Wood has helped trauma survivors achieve mental healing from the Boston Marathon bombing attack and the Las Vegas shooting. He has also helped highly successful executives and world-class athletes. Marko Cheseto, a double amputee marathon runner, broke the world record after completing TIPP. Meanwhile, Chris Nikic worked with Dr Wood and made world news by becoming the first person with Down Syndrome to finish an Ironman competition. Interested in Dr Don's work? Check out The Inspired Performance Institute. You can also reach him on Facebook and LinkedIn.    Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn steps to mental healing. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Transcript Of Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.  Lisa Tamati: Hi, everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today, I have Dr Don Wood who, you may recognise that name if you listen to the podcast regularly. He was on the show maybe a couple of months ago, and he is the CEO and founder of The Inspired Performance Institute. He's a neuroscience guy, and he knows everything there is to know about dealing with trauma and how to get the mind back on track when you've been through big, horrible life events or some such thing. Now, when we talked last time, he shared with me his methodology, the work that he's done, how he can help people with things like addictions as well and depression, and just dealing with the stresses of life, whether they be small stressors or big stressors.  We got to talking about my situation and the stuff that I've been through in the last few years, which many of you listeners know, has been pretty traumatic. From losing babies, to losing my dad, to mom's journey. So I was very privileged and lucky to have Dr Don Wood actually invite me to do his program with him. We share today my stories, how I went with that, and he explains a little bit more in-depth the neuroscience behind it all and how it all works. So if you're someone who's dealing with stress, anxiety, PTSD, depression, if you want to understand how the brain works and how you can help yourself to deal with these sorts of things, then you must listen to the show. He's an absolutely lovely, wonderful person.  Now, before we get over to the show, I just love you all to do a couple of things for me. If you wouldn't mind doing a rating and review of the show on Apple, iTunes or wherever you listen to this, that would be fantastic. It helps the show get found. We also have a patron program, just a reminder if you want to check that out. Come and join the mission that we're on to bring this wonderful information to reach to people.  Also, we have our BOOSTCAMP program starting on the first of September 2021. If you listen to this later, we will be holding these on a regular basis so make sure you check it out. This is an eight-week live webinar series that my business partner, my best buddy, and longtime coach Neil Wagstaff and I will be running. It's more about upgrading your life and helping you perform better, helping you be your best that you can be, helping you understand your own biology, your own neuroscience, how your brain works, how your biology works. Lots of good information that's going to help you upgrade your life, live longer, be happier, reduce stress, and be able to deal with things when life is stressful. God knows we're all dealing with that. So I'd love you to come and check that out. You can go to peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp.  I also want to remind you to check us out on Instagram. I'm quite active on Instagram. I have a couple of accounts there. We have one for the podcast that we've just started. We need a few more followers please on there. Go to @pushingthelimits for that one on Instagram, and then my main account is @lisatamati, if you want to check that one out. If you are a running fan, check us out on Instagram @runninghotcoaching and we're on Facebook under all of those as well. So @lisatamati, @pushingthelimits, and @runninghotcoaching.  The last thing before we go over to Dr Don Wood, reminder check out, too, our longevity and anti-aging supplement. We've joined forces with Dr Elena Seranova and have NMN which is nicotinamide mononucleotide, and this is really some of that cooler stuff in the anti-aging, and longevity space. If you want to check out the science behind that, we have a couple of podcasts with her. Check those out and also head on over to nmnbio.nz. Right. Over to the show with Dr Don Wood.  Hi, everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today, I have a dear, dear friend again who's back on the show as a repeat offender, Dr Don Wood. Dr Don Wood: I didn't know I was a repeat offender. Oh, I'm in trouble. That's great.  Lisa: Repeat offender on the show. Dr Don, for those who don't know, was on the show. Dr Don is a trauma expert and a neuroscientist, and someone who understands how the brain works, and why we struggle with anxiety, and depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. We did a deep dive last time, didn't we, into the program that you've developed. Since then, everyone, I have been through Dr Don's pro program. He kindly took me through it. Today, I want to unpack a little bit of my experiences on the other side, s the client, so to speak. Talk about what I went through.  Dr Don, so firstly, welcome to the show again. How's it all over in your neck of the woods? Dr Don: Well, it's awesome over here in Florida. COVID is basically non-existent. Oh, yeah. Well, in terms of the way people are treating it, that's for sure. Very few people you see in masks now, everything is pretty much wide open. You can't even get reservations at restaurants. It's unbelievable. The economy is exploding here. There's so much going on. Yeah, I know the rest of the country, a lot of different places are still struggling with whether they're going to put mask mandates back on and all this kind of stuff but Florida seems to be doing very well.  Lisa: Well, I'm very glad to hear that because any bit of good news in this scenario is good because this keeps coming and biting everybody in the bum.  Dr Don: I know. Especially down there. You guys are really experiencing quite severe lockdowns and things, right? Lisa: Yeah and Australia, more so. Australia has gone back into lockdown. I've got cousins in Sydney who are experiencing really hard times in Melbourne and we've stopped the trans-Tasman bubble at the moment. Trans-Tasman was open for business, so to speak, with Australians being able to come to New Zealand without quarantine, but it's been shut down again. So yeah, we're still struggling with it, and the economy is still struggling with it but actually, in our country, we've been very lucky that we've managed to keep it out because they've had such tight controls on the borders. But yes, it's a rocky road for everybody, and it's not over yet, I think. Dr Don: Looks like it's going to continue, and that's creating a lot of stress.  Lisa: Oh, yeah, perfect.  Dr Don: This is what I've said. I think we're coming up to a tsunami of mental health issues because a lot of people have gone into freeze mode as opposed to fight or flight. Some people are in fight or flight. You're hearing about that on airlines: people just losing it, and getting mad, and fighting with flight attendants and passengers, and you see a lot of that. But I think that's obviously not the majority. I think most people are in that mode of just get through this, do what they ask, don't cause any waves, and just get this over with. So that's a freeze mode, and I think when people come out of freeze, you're going to start to see some of these mental health issues.  Lisa: Yes, I totally agree and I'm very concerned about the young people. I think that being hit very hard especially in the places that have the hardest lockdowns. If you're going through puberty, or you're going through teenagehood, or even the younger kids, I think, they're going to be affected massively by this because it's going to be a big before and after sort of situation for them.  Dr Don: And just the social. When we were teenagers, social was everything, I suppose. Learning how to communicate, and talk, and get along with other people, and good and bad. There were always struggles in school with learning how to get along with everybody but that is just sort of squashed. It's going to be fascinating to see when they do a study on the real true results of this pandemic. It's going to be a lot different than many people think.  Lisa: Yes, and I think the longer you ignore stuff, is we're going to see it's not just the people are unfortunately dying and being very sick from the actual COVID, but the actual effects on society are going to be big. That's why talking about the topic that we're talking about today, dealing with anxiety, and dealing with stress, and being able to actually fix the problem instead of just managing the problem, which I know you're big on.  So let's dive in there, and let's recap a little bit. Just briefly go back over your story, how you got to here, and what your method sort of entails in a helicopter perspective. Dr Don: Yeah, basically how I developed this was really because of the life that my wife led first and my daughter. My wife grew up in a very traumatic household with a very angry father that created tremendous fear. So everybody was... Just constant tension in that household. When I met her, I just realised how this was so different than my life. My life was in the complete opposite: very nurturing, loving. So I didn't experience that. I thought when she started moving in and we got married at 19, we were very young, that this would all stop for her. Because now, she's living in my world, my environment, and it didn't.  She just kept continuing to feel this fear that something was going to go wrong and nothing is going to go right. She struggled with enjoying things that were going well. I would say to her, 'We've got three beautiful children. We've got a beautiful home. Everything's going pretty good; nothing's perfect. You have your ups and downs, but it's generally a pretty good life.' She couldn't enjoy that because as a child, whenever things were going okay, it would quickly end and it would end, sometimes violently. So the way she was protecting herself is don't get too excited when things are going well because you'll get this huge drop. So that was what she was doing to protect herself. I just had a lady come in here a couple months ago, who very famous athlete is her husband: millionaires, got fame, fortune, everything you want, but she had a lot of health issues because of trauma from her childhood. When I explained that to her, she said, 'That's me. Your wife is me. I should be enjoying this, and I can't get there. I want to. My husband can't understand it.' But that's really what was going on for her too. Lisa: So it's a protective mechanism, isn't it? To basically not get too relaxed and happy because you've got to be hyper-vigilant, and this is something that I've definitely struggled with my entire life. Not because I had a horrible childhood. I had a wonderful childhood but I was super sensitive. So from a genetic perspective, I'm super sensitive. I have a lot of adrenaline that makes me code for, for want of a better description, I'm very emotionally empathetic but it also makes me swung by emotional stimuli very much. So someone in my environment is unhappy, I am unhappy. I'm often anxious and upset. My mum telling me she took me to Bambi. You know the movie Bambi? From Disneyland? She had to take me out of theatre. I was in distraught.  That's basically me. Because Bambi's mother got killed, right? I couldn't handle that as a four-year-old, and I still can't handle things. Things like the news and stuff, I protect myself from that because I take everything on. It's even a problem and in our business service situations because I want to save the world. I very much take on my clients' issues. I'm still learning to shut gates afterwards, so to speak, when you're done working with someone so that you're not constantly... So there's a genetic component to this as well.  Dr Don: Absolutely. So yours was coming from a genetic side but that's very, very common amongst people who have had a traumatic childhood. They're super sensitive.  Lisa: Yes. Hyper-vigilant.  Dr Don: Hyper-vigilant. That was my wife. She was constantly looking for danger. We'd come out of the storage and go: 'Can you believe how rude that clerk was?' 'What do you mean she was rude? How was she rude?' ‘You see the way she answered that question when I asked that, and then the way she stuffed the clothes in the bag?' And I'm like, 'Wow.' I never saw her like that. She was looking for it because that's how she protected herself because she had to recognise when danger was coming. So it was protection, and I hadn't experienced that so that made no sense to me; it made perfect sense to her.  Lisa: Yeah, and if someone was rude to you, you would be just like, 'Well, that's their problem, not my problem, and I'm not taking it on.' Whereas for someone your wife and for me... I did have a dad who was  a real hard, tough man, like old-school tough. We were very much on tenterhooks so when they came home, whether he was in a good mood today or not in a good mood. He was a wonderful, loving father but there was that tension of wanting to please dad. Mum was very calm and stable, but Dad was sort of more volatile and just up and down. It was wonderful and fun and other times, you'd be gauging all of that before he even walked in the door. That just makes you very much hyper-vigilant to everything as well.  Then, you put on, on top of that, the genetic component. You've got things like your serotonin and your adrenaline. So I've got the problem with the adrenaline and a lack of dopamine. So I don't have dopamine receptors that stops me feeling satisfaction and... Well, not stops me but it limits my feeling of, 'Oh, I've done a good job today. I can relax.' Or of reward. And other people have problems, I don't have this one, but with a serotonin gene, which is they have dysregulation of their serotonin and that calm, and that sense of well-being and mood regulation is also up and down. While it's not a predisposition that you'll definitely going to have troubles because you can learn the tools to manage those neurotransmitters and things like nutrition and gut health and all that aspect. Because it's all a piece of that puzzle, but it's really just interesting, and it makes you much more understanding of people's differences.  Why does one person get completely overwhelmed in a very trivial situation versus someone else who could go into war and come back and they're fine? What is it that makes one person? Then you got the whole actual neuroscience circuitry stuff, which I find fascinating, what you do. Can you explain a little bit what goes on? Say let's just pick a traumatic experience: Someone's gone through some big major trauma. What is actually going on in the brain again? Can we explain this a little bit?  Dr Don: Yeah, this is one of the things that... When I did my research, I realised this is what's causing the dysregulation: is your subconscious your survival brain is fully present in the moment all the time. So everything in that part of our brain is operating in the present. which is what is supposed to be, right? They say that that's the key, that success and happiness is live in the present. Well, your survival brain does that. The problem comes in is that only humans store explicit details about events and experiences. So everything you've seen, heard, smelled, and touched in your lifetime has been recorded and stored in this tremendous memory system. Explicit memory.  Animals have procedural memory or associative memory. We have that memory system too. So we have both. They only have procedural, associative. So they learn through repetition, and they learn to associate you with safety and love, but they don't store the details about it. But we store all the details about these events and experiences. So this is where this glitch is coming in. If you've got the survival brain, which is 95% of everything that's going on, operating in the present, accessing data from something that happened 10 years ago because something looks like, sounds like, smells like it again, it's creating a response to something that's not happening. It's looking at old data and creating a physiological response to it, and the purpose of an emotion is a call for an action. So the purpose of fear is to run, to escape a threat. But there's no threat. It's just information about the threat. That disrupts your nervous system and then that creates a cascade of chemical reactions in your body because your mind thinks there's an action required. Lisa: This is at the crux of the whole system really, isn't it? This is this call for action to fix a problem that is in the past that cannot be fixed in the now. So if we can dive a little bit into my story, and I'm quite open on the show. I'm sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly. When I was working with Dr Don, I've been through a very, very traumatic few years really. Lost my dad, first and foremost, last July, which was the biggest trauma of my life. And it was a very difficult process that we went through before he died as well. And there's a lift, as you can imagine, my brain in a state of every night nightmares, fighting for his life, he's dying over, and over, and over, and over again.  Those memories are intruding into my daily life, whereas in anything and at any time, I could be triggered and be in a bawling state in the middle of the car park or the supermarket. Because something's triggered me that Dad liked to to buy or Dad, whatever the case was, and this was becoming... It's now a year after the event but everything was triggering me constantly. Of course, this is draining the life out of you and interfering with your ability to give focus to your business, to your family, to your friends, every other part of your life. I'd also been through the trauma of bringing Mum back from that mess of aneurysm that everyone knows about. The constant vigilance that is associated with bringing someone back and who is that far gone to where she is now, and the constant fear of her slipping backwards, and me missing something, especially in light of what I'd been through with my father. So I'd missed some things, obviously. That's why he ended up in that position and through his own choices as well.  But this load, and then losing a baby as well in the middle, baby Joseph. There was just a hell of a lot to deal with in the last five years. Then, put on top of it, this genetic combination of a hot mess you got sitting before you and you've got a whole lot of trauma to get through. So when we did the process, and I was very, super excited to do this process because it was so intrusive into my life, and I realised that I was slowly killing myself because I wasn't able to stop that process from taking over my life. I could function. I was highly functional. No one would know in a daily setting, but only because I've got enough tools to keep my shit together. so to speak. But behind closed doors, there's a lot of trauma going on.  So can you sort of, just in a high level, we don't want to go into the details. This is a four-hour program that I went through with Dr Don. What was going on there. and what did you actually help me with?  Dr Don: So when you're describing those things that were happening to you, what was actually happening to your mind is it was not okay with any of that. It wanted it to be different, right? So it was trying to get you into a state of action to stop your father from dying: Do it differently. Because it kept reviewing the data. It was almost looking at game tape from a game and saying 'Oh, had we maybe run the play that way, we would have avoided the tackle here.' So what your mind was saying 'Okay, run that way.' Well, you can't run that way. This is game tape. Right? But your mind doesn't see it as game tape. It sees it as real now, so it's run that way. So it keeps calling you into an action.  And especially with your dad because you were thinking about, 'Why didn't I do this?' Or 'Had I just done this, maybe this would have happened.' What your mind was saying is, 'Okay, let's do it. Let's do that.' What you just thought about. But you can't do that. It doesn't exist. It's information about something that happened but your mind sees it as real. That's why Hollywood have made trillions of dollars because they can convince you something on the screen is actually happening. That's why we cry in a movie or that's why we get scared in a movie. Because your mind, your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between real or imagined. So that's actually happening.  You were just talking about the movie with Bambi, right? When you were little. 'Why is nobody stopping this from happening?' So your mind was not okay with a lot of these things that were happening, and it kept calling you to make a difference. That's what I never understood my wife doing. That before I really researched this, my wife would always be saying, 'Don't you wish this hadn't have happened?' Or 'Don't you wish we hadn't done this?' What I didn't understand at the time, because I used to just get like, 'Okay, whatever.' She'd go, 'Yeah, but wouldn't it have been better?' She wanted to get me into this play with her, this exercise. Lisa: This is going on in her head. Dr Don: Because it's going on in her head, and she's trying to feel better. So she's creating these scenarios that would make her feel like, 'Well, if I had just done that, gosh that would have been nice, thinking about that life.' And her mind seeing that going, 'Oh, that would be nice. Well, let's do that. Yes.' So she was what if-ing her life. And it was something that she did very early as a child because that's how she just experienced something traumatic with her father. In her mind, she'd be going, 'Well, what if I had to just left 10 minutes earlier, and I had have escaped that?' Or 'What if I hadn't done this?' So that's what she was doing. It made no sense to me because I hadn't experienced her life, but that's what she was doing. Her mind was trying to fix something. It's never tried to hurt you. It was never, at any point, trying to make you feel bad. It was trying to protect you. Lisa: Its job is to protect you from danger and it sees everything as you sit in the now so it's happening now. I love that analogy of these... What was it? Two-thirds of the car or something and... Dr Don: So goat and snowflake? Lisa: Goat and snowflake. And they're going off to a meeting and they're late. And what does the goat says to snowflake or the other way around? Dr Don: So snowflake, which is your conscious mind, your logical reasonable part of your mind, there's only 5, says the goat 95%, which is your subconscious mind. Who runs into a traffic jam says, 'Oh, we're going to be late. We should have left 15 minutes earlier.' To which goat replies 'Okay, let's do it. Let's leave 15 minutes earlier because that would solve the problem.'  Lisa: That analogy is stuck in my head because you just cannot... It doesn't know that it's too late and you can't hop into the past because it only lives in the now. This is 95% of how our brain operates. That's why we can do things like, I was walking, I was at a strategy meeting in Auckland with my business partner two days ago. We were walking along the road and he suddenly tripped and fell onto the road, right? My subconscious reacted so fast, I grabbed him right, and punched him in the guts. I didn't mean to do that but my subconscious recognised in a millimeter of a second, millionth of a second, that he was falling and I had to stop him. So this is a good side of the survival network: stopping and falling into the traffic or onto the ground.  But the downside of it is that brain is operating only in the now and it can't... Like with my father, it was going 'Save him. Save him. Save him. Why are you not saving him?' Then that's calling for an action, and then my body is agitated. The cortisol level's up. The adrenaline is up, and I'm trying to do something that's impossible to fix. That can drive you to absolute insanity when that's happening every hour, every day. Dr Don: Then that's taking a physical toll on your body because it's activating your nervous system, which is now, the cortisol levels are going up, adrenaline, right? So when your mind is in that constant state, it does very little on maintenance. It is not worried about fixing anything; it's worried about escaping or fixing the threat, because that's the number one priority.  Lisa: It doesn't know that it's not happening. I ended up with shingles for two months. I've only just gotten over it a few weeks ago. That's a definite sign of my body's, my immune system is down. Why is it down? Why can that virus that's been sitting dormant in my body for 40-something years suddenly decide now to come out? Because it's just becoming too much. I've spent too long in the fight or flight state and then your immune system is down. This is how we end up really ill.  Dr Don: We get sick. I was just actually having lunch today with a young lady and she's got some immune system issues. And I said, 'Think about it like the US Army, US military is the biggest, strongest military in the world. But if you took that military and you spread it out amongst 50 countries around the world fighting battles, and then somebody attacks the United States, I don't care how big and strong that system was, that military system was. It's going to be weakened when it gets an attack at the homefront.' So that's what was happening. So all of a sudden, now that virus that it could fight and keep dormant, it lets it pass by because it's like, 'Well, we can let that go. We'll catch that later. Right now, we got to go on the offensive and attack something else.' Lisa: Yeah, and this is where autoimmune, like your daughter experienced... Dr Don: About the Crohn's? Yep.  Lisa: Yep. She experienced that at 13 or something ridiculous? Dr Don: 14, she got it. Then she also got idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis which is another lung autoimmune disorder where the iron in the blood would just cause the lungs to release the blood. So her lungs just starts filling up with blood. They had no idea what caused it, that's the idiopathic part of it, and they just basically said, ‘There's no cure. She just needs to live close to a hospital because she'll bleed out if she has another attack.' Only 1 in 1.2 million people ever get that. So it's very rare so there's no research being done for it. They just basically say, ‘If you get it, live close to a hospital.' That's the strategy. Lisa: That's the way of fixing it.  Dr Don: And so both of those are autoimmune, and ever since we've gone to the program, she's hasn't had a flare-up of either one of those. Because I think our system is directly now able to address those things.  Lisa: Yeah, and can calm down. I think even people who haven't got post-traumatic stress like I've had or whatever, they've still got the day to day grind of life, and the struggle with finances, and the mortgage to be paid, and the kids to feed, and whatever dramas we're all going through. Like we talked about with COVID and this constant change that society is undergoing, and that's going to get faster and more. So this is something that we all need to be wary of: That we're not in this. I've taught and learned a lot about the coping and managing strategies, the breathing techniques, and meditation, the things, and that's what's kept me, probably, going. Dr Don: Those are great because they're... Again, that's managing it but it's good to have that because you've got to get to the root of it, which is what we were working on. But at the same time, if you don't have any coping, managing skills, life gets very difficult. Lisa: Yeah, and this is in-the-moment, everyday things that I can do to help manage the stress levels, and this is definitely something you want to talk about as well. So with me, we went through this process, and we did... For starters, you had to get my brain into a relaxed state, and it took quite a long time to get my brainwaves into a different place. So what were we doing there? How does that work with the brainwave stuff?  Dr Don: Well, when we have a traumatic event or memory, that has been stored in a very high-resolution state. So in a beta brainwave state because all your senses are heightened: sight, smell, hearing. So it's recording that and storing it in memory in a very intense state. So if I sat down with you and said, 'Okay, let's get this fixed.' And I just started trying to work directly on that memory, you're still going to be in a very high agitated state because we're going to be starting to talk about this memory. So you're going to be in a beta brainwave state trying to recalibrate a beta stored memory. That's going to be very difficult to do.  So what we do is, and that's why I use the four hours because within that first an hour and a half to two hours, we're basically communicating with the subconscious part of the brain by telling stories, symbols with metaphors, goat and snowflake, all the stories, all the metaphors that are built-in because then your brain moves into an alpha state. When it's in alpha, that's where it does restoration. So it's very prepared to start restoring. And then, if you remember, by the time we got to a couple of the traumatic memories, we only work on them for two or three minutes. Because you're in alpha, and so you've got this higher state of beta, and it recalibrates it into the same state that it's in. So if it's in alpha, it can take a beta memory, reprocess it in alpha, takes all the intensity out of it.  Lisa: So these brain waves, these beta states, just to briefly let people know, so this is speed, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's the speed at which the brain waves are coming out. So in beta, like you'd see on ECG or something, it's sort of really fast. I think there's a 40 day... Dr Don: It's 15 to 30 hertz. Lisa: 15 to 30 hertz and then if you're in alpha, it's a lot lower than that? Dr Don: 7 to 14. Lisa: 7 to 14, and then below that is sort of when you're going into the sleep phase, either deep meditative or asleep. Dr Don: You're dreaming. Because what it's doing in dreaming is processing. So you're between 4 and 7 hertz. That's why people who have a lot of trauma have trouble sleeping. Because not only is their mind processing what it experienced during the day, it's also taking some of those old files saying, 'Well, okay, let's fix that now. Right. Let's get that.' That's where your nightmares are coming from. It was trying to get you into a processing to fix that. but it couldn't fix it. So it continues, and then when you go below 4 hertz, you go into delta. Delta is dreamless sleep and that's where the maintenance is getting done.  Lisa: That's the physical maintenance side more than the... Dr Don: Physical maintenance. Yeah, because that's not processing what it experienced anymore. What it's really now doing is saying, 'Okay, what are the issues that need to be dealt with?' So if you're very relaxed and you've had a very... Like me, right? I played hockey, so I had six concussions, 60 stitches, and never missed a hockey game. The only reason now that I understand I could do that is because I'm getting two or three times more Delta sleep than my teammates were. Lisa: Physical recuperative sleep.  Dr Don: Yeah, I was getting maximum restorative sleep. So an injury that I would have that could heal in two or three days, my teammates would two or three weeks. Because they were living in these, which I didn't know, a lot of my friends were dealing with trauma: physical, emotional, sexual abuse. I didn't know that was going on with my friends. Nobody talked about it. I didn't see it in their homes, but they were all dealing with that.  Lisa: So they are not able to get... So look, I've noticed since I've been through the program. My sleep is much better, and sometimes I still occasionally dream about Dad. But the positive dreams, if that makes sense. They're more Dad as he as he was in life and I actually think Dad's come to visit me and say, ‘Hi, give me a hug' rather than the traumatic last days and hours of his life, which was the ones that were coming in before and calling for that action and stopping me from having that restorative sleep.  I just did a podcast with Dr Kirk Parsley who's a sleep expert, ex-Navy SEAL and a sleep expert that's coming out shortly. Or I think by this time, it will be out, and understanding the importance, the super importance of both the delta and... What is the other one? The theta wave of sleep patterns, and what they do, and why you need both, and what parts of night do what, and just realising...Crikey, anybody who is going through trauma isn't experiencing sleep is actually this vicious cycle downwards. Because then, you've got more of the beta brainwave state, and you've got more of the stresses, and you're much less resilient when you can't sleep. You're going to... have health issues, and brain issues, and memory, and everything's going to go down south, basically.  Dr Don: That's why I didn't understand at the time. They just said 'Well, you're just super healthy. You heal really fast.' They had no other explanation for it. Now, I know exactly why. But it had nothing to do with my genetics. It had to do with my environment. Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on here. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way but to do that, we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's patron.lisatamati.com.  We have two patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as 7 dollars a month, New Zealand or 15 dollars a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries, and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com, and thanks very much for joining us.  Dr Don: That's, at the time, we just thought it was all, must have been genetics. But I realised now that it was environment as well. So maybe a genetic component to it as well, but then you take that and put that into this very beautiful, nurturing environment, I'm going to sleep processing in beta what I experienced that day and then my mind basically, at that point, is 'What do we need to work on? Not much. Let's go. Let's start now doing some maintenance.' Because it wants to address the top of item stuff first. What is it needs to be taken care of right now? Right? Those are the threats.  Once it gets the threats processed, then it can then start working on the things that are going to be the more long-term maintenance. So then it'll do that. But if it never gets out of that threat mode, it gets out for very little time. Then, if you're getting 30 minutes of delta sleep at night and I'm getting two hours, it's a no-brainer to figure out why I would heal faster.  Lisa: Absolutely, and this is independent of age and things because you've got all that that comes into it as well. Your whole chemistry changes as you get older and all this. There's other compounding issues as it gets more and more important that you get these pieces of the puzzle right.  Do you think that this is what leads to a lot of disease, cancers, and things like that as well? There's probably not one reason. There's a multitude of reasons, but it's definitely one that we can influence. So it's worth looking at it if you've got trauma in your life. People were saying to me 'Oh my God, you don't look good.' When you start hearing that from your friends, your people coming up to you and going, 'I can feel that you're not right.' People that are sensitive to you and know you very well, and you start hearing that over and over, and you start to think, 'Shit, something's got real. Maybe I need to start looking at this.'  Because it's just taking all your energy your way, isn't it, on so many levels. The restorative side and the ability to function in your life, and your work, and all of that, and that, of course, leads into depressive thoughts and that hyper-vigilant state constantly. That's really tiresome rather than being just chill, relax, enjoying life, and being able to... Like one of the things I love in my life is this podcast because I just get into such a flow state when I'm learning from such brilliant... Dr Don: You're in alpha. Lisa: I am. I am on it because this is, 'Oh. That's how that works.' And I just get into this lovely learning in an alpha state with people because I'm just so excited and curious. This is what I need to be doing more of. And less of the, if you'd see me half an hour ago trying to work out the technology. That's definitely not an alpha state for me. Dr Don: That's where they said Albert Einstein lived. Albert Einstein lived in alpha brainwave state. That's why information just float for him because there was no stress. He could then pull information very easily to float into. But if you're in a high beta brainwave state, there's too much activity. It has trouble focusing on anything because it's multiple threats on multiple fronts. So when we have a traumatic event, that's how it's being recorded. If you remember, what we talked about was there's a 400 of a millionth of a second gap in between your subconscious mind seeing the information and it going to your consciousness. So in 400 millionths of a second, your subconscious mind has already started a response into an action even though your conscious mind is not even aware of it yet.  Lisa: Yeah. Exactly what I did with rescuing my partner with the glass falling off the thing. I hadn't reached that logically. Dr Don: It's funny because that's one of the things that I talked about ,which is sort of, give us all a little bit of grace. Because if you've had a lot of trauma, you're going to respond a certain way. How could you not? If your mind's filtering into all of that, of course you're going to respond with that kind of a response because your mind is prone to go into that action very, very quickly. So we can give ourselves a little bit of grace in understanding that of course, you're going to do that, right? And not beat ourselves up.  Because you know what I talked about with everybody, there's nothing wrong with anybody. There's nothing wrong with anybody's mind. Everybody's mind is fine except you are experiencing something different than I experienced so your mind kept responding to it, and mine didn't have that. So you had multiple... Think about we have a hundred percent of our energy on our phone when we wake up in the morning, right? Fully powered up. You fire the phone up and eight programs open up, right? And mine has one.  Lisa: Yeah. You're just focusing on what you need to. Dr Don: Then noon comes, and you're having to plug your phone back in because you're out of energy.  Lisa: That's a perfect analogy. You're just burning the battery. My all is a hundred windows open in the back of my brain that is just processing all these things and so now, I can start to heal. So having gone through this process with you, like you said, we worked on a number of traumatic experiences, and I went through them in my mind. And then you did certain things, made me follow with my eyes and track here, and my eyes did this, and then, we pulled my attention out in the middle of the story and things. That helped me stay in that alpha state, brainwave state as I probably now understand while I'm still reliving the experience. That's sort of taking the colour out of it so that it's now sort of in a black and white folder. Now, it can still be shared, and it hasn't taken away the sadness of... Dr Don: Because it is sad that these things happen but that's not the response for an action which is that fear or anger, right? That dysregulation of the nervous system. That's what we want to stop, because that is what is going to affect health, enjoyment of life and everything else.  Lisa: Wow, this is so powerful. Yeah, and it's been very, very beneficial for me and helped me deal. For me, it also unfolded. Because after the four hour period with you, I had audiotapes and things that are meditations to do every day for the next 30 days. What were we doing in that phase of the recovery? What were you targeting in those sort of sessions?  Dr Don: So if you remember what we talked about, we have two memory systems. The explicit memory is what we worked on on that four hours. That's detail, events, and experiences. Once we get the mind processing through that, then we have to work on the same memory animals have, which is that associative repetitive memory. So you've built a series of codes on how to respond to threats, and that has come in over repetition and associations. So the audios are designed to start getting you now to build some new neural pathways, some new ways to respond because your mind won't switch a pattern instantly. It can switch a memory instantly, but a pattern is something that got built over a period of time. So it's like a computer. If I'm coding on my computer, I can't take one key to stop that code. I have to write a new code. Yeah, so what we're doing over the 30 days is writing new code. Lisa: Helping me make new routines and new habits around new neural pathways, basically.  Dr Don: You don't have that explicit memory interfering with the pathways. Because now, it's not constantly pulling you out, going back into an action call. It's basically now able to look at this information and these codes that got built and say, 'Okay, what's a better way? So do we have a better way of doing it?' Or 'Show me that code. Write that code.' If that code looks safer, then your mind will adopt that new code. Lisa: This is why, I think for me, there was an initial, there was definitely... Like the nightmares stopped, the intrusive every minute, hour triggering stopped, but the process over the time and the next... And I'm still doing a lot of the things and the meditations. It's reinforcing new habit building. This is where... Like for people dealing with addictions, this is the path for them as well, isn't it?  Dr Don: Yeah. Because I talked about addiction as a code. I don't believe it's a disease. Your mind has found a resource to stop pains, and your subconscious mind is literal. It doesn't see things as good or bad, or right or wrong. It's literal. 'Did that stop the pain? Let's do that.' Because it's trying to protect you. So if you've now repeated it over and over, not only have you stopped the pain, but you've built an association with a substance that is seen as beneficial. Lisa: Because your brain sees it as medicine when you're taking, I don't know, cocaine or something. It sees it as essential to your life even though you, on a logical level, know that, ‘This is destroying me and it's a bad thing for me.' Your subconscious goes, 'No, this is a good thing and I need it right now.' Dr Don: Because it's in the present, when does it want the pain to stop? Now. So it has no ability to see a future or a past. Your subconscious is in the moment. So if you take cocaine, the logical part of your brain goes, 'Oh, this is going to create problems for me. I'm going to become addicted.' Right? Your subconscious goes, ‘Well, the pain stopped. We don't see that as a bad thing.' I always use the analogy: Why did people jump out of the buildings at 911? They weren't jumping to die. They were jumping to live because when would they die? Now, if they jump, would they die? No. They stopped the death. So even jumping, which logically makes no sense, right? But to the subconscious mind, it was going to stop the pain now.  Lisa: Yeah, and even if it was two seconds in the future that they would die, your brain is going...  Dr Don: It doesn't even know what two seconds are.  Lisa: No. It has no time. Isn't it fascinating that we don't have a time memory or understanding in that part of the brain that runs 95% of the ship?  Dr Don: It's like what Albert Einstein said, ‘There's no such thing as time.' So it's like an animal. If an animal could communicate and you say, 'What time is it?' That would make no sense to an animal. 'What do you mean? It's now.' 'What time is it now?' 'Now. Exactly.' Lisa: It's a construct that we've made to... Dr Don: Just to explain a lot of stuff, right? When something happens.  Lisa: Yeah, and this is quite freeing when you think of it. But it does make a heck of a lot of sense. So people are not being destructive when they become drug addicts or addicted to nicotine, or coffee, or chocolate. They're actually trying to stop the pain that they're experiencing in some other place and fix things now. Even though the logical brain... Because the logical brain is such a tiny... Like this is the last part of our evolution, and it's not as fully...  We can do incredible things with it at 5%. We've made the world that we live in, and we're sitting here on Zoom, and we've got incredible powers. But it's all about the imagination, being able to think into the future, into the past, and to make correlations, and to recognise patterns. That's where all our creativity and everything, or not just creativity, but our ability to analyse and put forth stuff into the world is happening. But in actual, we're still like the animals and the rest of it. We're still running at 95%, and that's where we can run into the problems with these two.  Dr Don: Because you got two systems. You got a very advanced system operating within a very primitive system, and it hasn't integrated. It's still integrating, right? So if there's a survival threat, survival will always override reason and logic, because it's designed to protect you. So there's no reason and logic that will come in if there's a survival threat. It's just going to respond the way it knows, does this Google search, 'What do we know about this threat? How do we know to protect ourselves, and we'll go instantly into survival mode.' Again, there's the reason and logic. Why would you jump out of a building, right? If you applied reason and logic, you wouldn't have jumped, right? People will say, 'Well, but they still jumped.' Yes, because reason and logic didn't even come into the process. It was all about survival.  Lisa: Yeah. When the fire is coming in it was either... Dr Don: 'Am I going to die out now or I'm going to move and not die now?'  Lisa: Yeah, and we're also prone to movement when we're in agitation and in an agitated state, aren't we? Basically, all of the blood and the muscles saying, 'Run, fight, do something. Take action.' Dr Don: That's why when people get into depression, it's the absence of those emotions.  Lisa: Yeah, and people feel exhaustion.  Dr Don: Yeah. The mind kept calling for an action using anger, for example, but you can't do the action because it's not happening, so it shuts down to protect you and stops calling for any emotion, and that's depression. So the key to get out of depression is actions. It's to get something happening. So in a lot of people who are depressed, what do I tell them to do? 'Start moving. Start exercising. Get out. Start doing things.' Right?  Lisa: So I run ultras. Dr Don: Exactly. Perfect example, right?  Lisa: Yeah, because I was. I was dealing with a lot of shit in my life at the time when I started doing ultra-marathons. To run was to quiet the pain and to run was to be able to cope and to have that meditative space in order to work through the stuff that was going on in my life. And I know even in my husband's life, when he went through a difficult time, that's when he started running. So running can be a very powerful therapeutic, because there is a movement, and you're actually burning through the cortisol and the adrenaline that's pouring around in your body. Therefore, sitting still and that sort of things was just not an option for me. I had to move. And it explains what, really. It's calling the movement. Like it was a movement because I couldn't fix the other thing.  Dr Don: That's what they'll tell you to do. To get out of depression is to move. What I say is the way to get out of depression is to get your mind to resolve what it's been asking for. Lisa: It's going a little deeper.  Dr Don: Yeah. So it's going down and saying, 'Okay, why has it been getting you angry and now, it shut down from the anger?' Because it's been trying to get you in your situation. 'Don't let Dad die. Don't let this happen.' Right? So because you couldn't do it, it just shuts down. Makes perfect sense but when we get to the resolution that there is no action required, there's no need for the depression anymore. The depression will lift because there's no more call for an action.  Lisa: I can feel that in me, that call. Anytime that anything does still pop up, I sort of acknowledge the feeling and say, 'There is no call for action here. This is in the past. This is a memory.' So I do remind myself that when things do still pop up from time to time now, as opposed to hourly. I go, 'Hey, come back into the now. This is the now. That was the then that's calling for an action. This is why you're doing thing.' Even that understanding

Raw & Real with Dr Lisa  Yes, I get you. You're choosing a class, event, food, travel that has an expansive energy and you can see how it will change your life for the better. But (and for some it's a big BUT), it's too much money. How do you commit to getting something that will stretch you out of what you can pay at this moment? Is it investing in you? Is it creating a future debt? Are you willing to receive $400? And what about receiving $400,000? What makes one hard? And the other easy? Are you ready to get the cages off your life? Check the Cage Talks for more tools and : https://www.drlisacooney.com/cage-talks   Dr. Lisa's Book: Creating After Abuse Purchase here Amazon.com www.drlisacooney.com   *Listen now on the Inspired Choices Network app!  https://linktr.ee/inspiredchoicesnetwork ~ More About Raw & Real with Dr Lisa ~  Dr Lisa Cooney is a Doctor of Psychology and Licensed Therapist with 25 years' experience.  She is a bestselling Author and the creator of the ROAR™ (Radically Orgasmic Alive Reality) methodology to move beyond abuse & trauma. Dr Lisa travels the world facilitating dynamic, fun, life changing classes that share practical tools and accompany people to actualize the lives they have always dreamed of and didn't dare to hope to have.  And she always encourages others to choose different! “Be You!  Beyond Anything! Create Magic!  Live your ROAR™!” Dr. Lisa has empowered thousands of people in breaking free from all forms of abuse to create infinite possibilities for themselves and live a life they truly enjoy. In her work, Dr. Lisa weaves an eclectic collage of cross cultural, multi-faith, collaborative and participatory spiritual approaches leading individuals towards tangible and practical results that change and transform their world.  She is strongly moved to bridging global discrepancies of conflict and violence through tangible forms of conscious, mindful communication and discourse. She looks forward to guiding individuals to become their most authentic self, their highest light self.  Dr. Lisa invites people to remember who they really are and create their life according to that intrinsic knowing in loving and compassionate communion. The author of three books:  Radically Alive Beyond Abuse, Lies of Money, and Creating After Abuse (coming Spring 2021!), Dr. Lisa is an internationally acclaimed facilitator, speaker, and group leader. Come get Raw and Real with Maverick of Consciousness Dr Lisa! www.drlisacooney.com To get more of Raw & Real with Dr Lisa, be sure to visit her podcast page : https://www.inspiredchoicesnetwork.com/podcast/raw-real-with-dr-lisa

In this special episode of the BG Ideas podcast, we present a roundtable discussion about the significance of Kamala Harris's appointment to Vice President, brought to us by the Center for Women and Gender Equity and the Division of Diversity and Belonging. Titled “Being the First but Making Sure You Are Not the Last.” This panel was moderated by CWGE director Dr. Kacee Ferrell Snyder and features three guests: Dr. Melissa Miller, Dr. Kathleen Kollman, and Dr. Lisa Dubose.  Announcer:From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas.Musical Intro:I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.Jolie:Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Big Ideas podcast brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American culture studies, and the director of ICS.Jolie:What follows is a round table discussion hosted by BGSU Center For Women and Gender Equity about the first woman and person of color to serve as the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Titled Being The First, But Making Sure You Are Not The Last, this conversation has been adapted for the Big Ideas podcast.Jolie:This panel was moderated by CWGE Director, Dr. Kacee Ferrell Snyder and features three guests. Dr. Melissa Miller is Professor of Political Science at BGSU and a former ICS faculty fellow. Dr. Kathleen Coleman is a lecturer of English at the Ohio State University and a recent graduate of BGSU's American Culture Studies PhD program.Jolie:Dr. Lisa Dubose serves as the Director of Human Resources for Employee Relations and Professional Development at BGSU, where she also earned her doctorate in leadership studies, and she has taught for the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.Jolie:Due to the ongoing pandemic, this round table was recorded remotely via computer. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees.Jolie:Bowling Green State University is situated in the Great Black Swamp in the lower Great Lakes region. This land is the homeland of the Wyandotte, Kickapoo, Miami, Potawatomie, Ottawa, and multiple other Indigenous tribal nations, present and past, who were forcibly removed to and from the area.Jolie:We recognize these historical and contemporary ties and our efforts toward de-colonizing history. And we honor the Indigenous individuals and communities who have been living and working on this land from time immemorial. Kacee:Hello, thank you all so much for being with us. My name is Kacee Ferrell Snyder. I am the Director of the Center For Women in Gender Equity and the co-Director of the Center For Violence Prevention Education at BGSU. Today, we have some great guests with us to talk about our new Vice President, Kamala Harris, the first woman, and first woman of color into this role of Vice President of the United States.Kacee:In our program today, being the first, but making sure you are not the last, is presented by the Center For Women in Gender Equity and part of the Division of Diversity and Belonging. Our round table participants today are Dr. Melissa Miller, she is an expert on American politics with a specific focus on elections and voting behavior, women inAmerican politics, public opinion in the media. She teaches courses in American government, political parties, voter behavior, women in America, politics, and research methods. In 2016, Dr. Miller was named Master Teacher, which is the highest teaching award on campus.Kacee:Dr. Kathleen Coleman completed a PhD in American culture studies at Bowling Green State University in 2020, so congratulations. She's currently serving as a lecture of English at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on representations of gender in film, television, literature, and other popular culture texts. Dr. Coleman is working on turning her dissertation, If She Were President: Fictional Representations of Female US Presidents in Film, Television, and Literature into a Monograph.Kacee:And Dr. Lisa E. Dubose is a duly certified Human Resources Administrator with nearly three decades of experience in public and private sector industries. She is currently employed as Director of Human Resources for Employee Relations and Professional Development at Bowling Green State University, where she also earned her EDD in leadership studies. She has instructed as an adjunct at two universities, which include teaching for the past two summers an accelerated master's level, strategic human resources course for the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.Kacee:So thank you all so much for being here for our round table discussion. I'm really excited to hear from all of you and hear your perspectives. So we're going to kind of dive right in here if we could. My first question, and I'm going to ask all of you to answer it. And Dr. Coleman, if you could start, share what your initial reaction was when you found out that a woman was nominated for the VP slot, and/or that there was a woman VP elect?Kathleen:Yeah, it was very exciting. I really didn't think that would happen. I was finishing my dissertation on a similar topic, right as the last woman who was still running for President dropped out of the race. I was literally finishing the last few bits of my manuscript that day that she dropped out. So to find out that Kamala had been picked as Joe Biden's VP choice, I was delighted.Kathleen: And then to have them actually win, I was also delighted, but again, I was surprised. All of my research was indicating that things were not necessarily going to go in that direction for this election cycle, because historically, we've had a lot of trouble getting women past a certain point in that process. And even the women have made it all the way to even the top of the ticket as a party nominee, a major party nominee, no woman had yet actually won the electoral college.Kathleen:So it was a sense of both joy and relief. And also, man, I'm going to have to revise a lot of stuff now in my work, but I'm happy to do that. I think it's a great reason to do that. So yeah.Kacee:Thank you, Dr. Miller?Melissa:Yeah. I actually have two responses. The first was when Joe Biden named Kamala Harris to be his VP nominee, which happened in August. I wasn't surprised, and I think that's kind of a cool thing, that in fact, there has been some normalization of women on a presidential ticket running for President. There had been two prior nominees for Vice President on a major party ticket.Melissa:And there had been a weeks long Veepstakes that I'd been following closely. Joe Biden had signaled that he would name a woman all the way back in March during a debate with Bernie Sanders, so I wasn't surprised. It was more like,"Oh, okay, good pick." I immediately went to my political science brain, "Okay. What does she bring to the ticket?" Et cetera, et cetera. Melissa:But then fast forward to the Saturday after the election which was the day that it became clear and was basically announced in the media that the Biden-Harris ticket had won. I was driving with my teenage son and I suddenly got this chill, and I turned to my son and I said, "I don't know if you understand what a big deal this is. We have our first woman VicePresident."Melissa:I started pumping my arm and my teenage son said, "Mom, you need to calm down or we're going to have to pull over." So for me, it was a little bit of a delay, but a real sense of the historic nature and a real turning of the page in women's political history in the United States.Kacee:Thank you, Dr. Dubose?Lisa:Yes. I mirror what my colleagues have stated. The level of excitement that I had was significant. It's significant because now there was representation of someone who lookedlike me, as a woman, as a Black woman, and as a researcher whose study was on the experiences of leadership advancement of African-American women. It told the different story, and just like my colleagues said, the information that I had gleaned over the time period where I was doing my research showed something else because that's what history dictated.Lisa:But this was a time of a shift, of a change during such an uprising of social injustice related issues. And so the excitement had many layers of it, but of course, key is representation is everything. When you have someone of a diverse background that looks different than what we had typically been seeing over the centuries that we have existed in this country, it tells us that there is acceptance.Lisa:So my initial feeling was that of excitement. And then as a person of color who experienced certain types of discrimination, and who has, as a human resources professional, investigated those types of discriminatory behaviors toward people that didn't look like the majority, I also had a little bit of fear, "What is this going to mean for the ticket? Will this ticket be allowed to actually push forward and win? And will there'll be additional threats that may not have been a consideration if a male had been selected for this position?"Lisa:And so I let that fear be overcome by the joy and excitement to say, "You know what?" It's a new day and we have to be a part of this continuation of change through conversations just like this. And so it's important for us to continue to talk about, yes we can, yes we are, yes we will. And then the third element is that I happen to be in the same sorority as Kamala Harris.Lisa:So as a Senator, and now as the Vice President, she is my sorority sister. So I am very happy to be able to state that as well, but it's very meaningful and I believe it's going to assist in helping to change the dynamic and the fabric of how we move forward in our country.Kacee:Thank you all so much. So Harris talks a lot about those who have come before her, and how important they have been to paving the way for her. She's also said that, although she's the first, she will not be the last woman or woman of color in this position.Kacee:Why do you think it's taken so long for a woman to be in one of the highest positions of government? And why do you think we still have not seen a woman in the highest position? So Dr. Dubose, do you mind starting? And then Dr. Miller?Lisa:Absolutely. Well, we all know the research that is surrounding the glass ceiling, and when it comes to women in the workplace and how there's this impenetrable wall or ceiling that exists, that says, "You can see what's out there for you, but we're not going to allow you to break through that ceiling to achieve it."Lisa: So that barrier is something that's real, there're entire commissions that have done research about it. A Federal Glass Ceiling Commission is one of them, and there's significant research on the Department of Labor website that talks about these trends. Now, when it comes to a woman of color, there's an additional element that is of concern, which is called the concrete ceiling.Lisa:So with the glass ceiling, you see it, but you can't attain it, where there are significant barriers. With the concrete ceiling, what it's stating is we don't know about it, we don't hear about it, and the intent is for us not to achieve that. So that's the precursor of all of the types of barriers that have existed, that prohibited women and women of color from advancing.Lisa:So as we move forward down the continuum of what's happened in our government, there were laws that were put into place to try and abate those issues, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of them. And that's Title VII, where it really addresses any kind of marginalization and making sure that there's an entity that is reviewing those kinds of cases that are coming forward, at no cost to those individuals that are feeling as if they're impeded. So we're beyond 50 years with that law, but guess what? We're still facing the same thing.Lisa:So the history of our country has said, "No, you women need to stay in a particular place. You can't have too much ambition. It's okay if you have this level of position, but not the senior level position. It's great for you to be support, maybe beside, but not ahead." And that's not true. We have to catch up with what other countries have done and how they've had women in senior leadership roles, running countries and making a huge difference. We're a super power, so our super powers have to be advanced by understanding that we are able, we are capable, we are knowledgeable, and we are forces to be reckoned with. And if we're at the table, we bring an entirely different discussion, an element that helps us move forward. Lisa:So it has hindered in the past, but every time we make an advancement, it chips away at that ceiling that's glass, and that ceiling that's concrete, and we're going to keep chipping away at it.Melissa:If I can just tag along on everything that Dr. Dubose said, and also add that everything that's true in the workforce, there's been a sort of a companion thread of research among gender scholars in political science and in women's studies, that those very same barriers have been present for women.Melissa:Just to put this in historical context, the first woman to run for President was Victoria Woodhull, who was born in tiny Homer, Ohio. And she ran for President in 1872 as the nominee of the Equal Rights party. She was famously caricatured in a political cartoon by Thomas Nast as literally the devil. But let me just underscore, that's quite a long wait until 2020, the first woman to be elected Vice President. Melissa: The office of President of the United States is the most masculinized elective office, probably in the world. And the traits that people associate with it are strength, decisiveness, authority. These are not stereotypically feminine traits. Stereotypically feminine traits are things like compassion and empathy, and caring, and that's not historically what Americans have been looking for in their President. So there has just been plain outright sexism among voters.Melissa:Now, that of course, has been chipped away at, in the feminism's first wave and the second wave. A lot of progress had been made and women began to enter elective office in greater number, but still that highest glass or concrete ceiling had not been broken. And there are some additional reasons why we have yet to see a woman as President.Melissa:One is that there just are so few women in the pipeline. We think of those stepping stone positions to the office of Vice President, or the office of President. And they are sitting US Senator, sitting Member of Congress, Governor of a key State. And when you think that even as we sit here today, women are just 27% of the US House and 26% of the Senate, and only 18% of Governor's mansions, there just aren't that many women that are there in those stepping stone positions.Melissa:Why is that? Well, so few women run for office and when they do run, they tend to wait until their children are grown up. Whereas a man might run for office for the first time, maybe at the local level, in his 30s. A woman, when she runs for office for that first time, tends to be in her 40s or 50s, which then means she's going to have a much more abbreviated career and won't get up to that maybe US Senate position. Melissa:So that is another key factor. I am just so thrilled, however, that this one glass ceiling has been broken, again, to begin to normalize women at the pinnacle of American politics. And hopefully that will lead to more women being excited, picturing themselves and envisioning being involved politically, and eventually running for office.Kacee:My next question is how does Harris' multiple identities, woman, she identifies as Black, Indian American, she's a daughter of immigrants, those are some of the identities that she holds, how does that play into her role as VP? And Dr. Miller, if you would like to answer that, and if anybody else wants to chime in after, that would be great.Melissa:First, let me say that those multiple identities were a factor in herbeing chosen, and that didn't surprise me at all. And in my view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The number one reason anybody gets chosen as Vice President is because of something they bring to the ticket. So we think back to Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden to be his Vice President. Joe Biden had that lengthy resume in Washington, DC, a lot of foreign policy credentials that the ticket needed, that Barack Obama felt would help him get elected. Melissa:So now we look at Joe Biden's selection of Kamala Harris and the fact that she was a woman, and a woman of color in particular, was a real nod, an acknowledgement that women and people of color were absolutely essential to winning in November. So this pick in that regard was normal. She was picked because he felt that she would help him win.Melissa:In terms of those identities going forward, one thing that we'll be looking for is how visible and how prominent of a Vice President she is. In recent decades, Vice Presidents have been more active and been given more responsibilities by the President of the United States. And so I hope that we will see Kamala Harris play a very visible role as a governing partner, because again, the more visible she is, the more she is a role model, the more that normalizes women at the pinnacle of American politics. Melissa:So I'll be interested in watching for what portfolio she has as Vice President, and whether it might dovetail with some of those multiple identities, but at a minimum, if she's visible, she normalizes women and women of color in American politics. And I think will serve as an inspiration to women to hopefully run for office themselves.Kathleen:Can I add something to that too? That's an amazing answer, but I also want to point out that for any of us who take or teach women's studies courses, that we often instruct undergraduates in the idea of intersectionality when by Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw, and we think of intersectionality sometimes as being, here's how your identity markers interlace to increase oppression basically, that someone, if they're a person of color, if they're a person of a non-masculine gender, that it can be a detriment to their success.Kathleen:But I think that in terms of deciding who he wanted to be his Vice President, that Biden was looking at the fact that intersectionality can, as Dr. Miller said, help with representation and help the Vice President speak to multiple constituencies. So I think that multiple constituencies can take inspiration from the new Vice President's identity markers, and that those are all good things.Lisa:I agree with it and I will build on that even further. I used as a reference point in my research, Dr. Siddle Walker and Sneary, and they built upon research talking about the ethic of justice with Rawls and the ethic of care with Yale again. And added to it, it's not just the male perspective we need to consider, it's not just the female position that we need to consider. We also need to add that diversity element into it.Lisa:And when you ask a person who has been typically marginalized, you understand with a little bit greater depth, instead of thinking, "Well, I believe this is what they need." No, it's an inclusive conversation that allows us to give our voice, lend our experiences, which makes the overall outcome better, and it reaches a broader audience. And I'll give an example. There's a couple of different groups that Vice President Harris has mentioned in her acceptance speech.Lisa:And she talked about her experience within sorority life and what that means to the Divine Nine, which is the historically Black sororities and fraternities. And then also, historically Black colleges and universities. That is a huge factions of hundreds of thousands of individuals who could individually vote, but the level of influence that permeates from that group is significant.Lisa:And so that movement was expanded. So you have the female, you have the person of color, you have the educational background that sometimes had been underrated saying, "They can't accomplish certain things," and it has been demonstrated to be inaccurate. And so with this accurate review of who was selected, who was able to show and share that these experiences of her life brought her to the point of being qualified and capable, it's significant, and it made all the difference in the election. So I agree exactly with what my colleagues stated.Kacee:Thank you. I'm going to jump to a question because I think it relates to some of the things that you're talking about. Amanda Clayton, who's a political scientist at Vanderbilt University said that, "Women can either be seen as leaders or they can be seen as feminine, and two don't go together." And so this classic double bind, how do we get past that? How do women who want to go into politics, or who are in politics handle that?Melissa:Let me just say that for listeners to recall, one of the most prominent memories that many of us will have, and it's easy to Google, you can easily Google this and watch it on YouTube. And it was just shocking, but it really brought to millions of television viewers, the double bind in Technicolor. And that was a 2008 Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, where one of the reporters on the stage pointed out in his question to Hillary Clinton, that New Hampshire voters did, according to the polls, think that she was more qualified to be President, and had the experience necessary for the job more so than her male competitors, and Barack Obama in particular.Melissa:The reporter then went on to say, however, that New Hampshire voters didn't like her as much as they liked Barack Obama. And would she like to respond to that? That was sort of the double bind in a nutshell, that she had the qualities to be President, but it's another way of saying sort of like, "You're not feminine enough." One good bit of news I can report from the world of political science is that recent research on this question is suggesting that the double bind is not as pronounced as it used to be for women on the ballot.Melissa:So there was an interesting study by Deborah Jordan Brooks of Dartmouth, and she did a series of experiments in which she asked voters to read a mocked up news article that she made it look like an actual news article, about a US Senate candidate. And there were different news articles that she used. One was about a candidate who broke down, crying on the campaign trail. One was about a candidate who showed anger on the campaign trail.Melissa:And then at random, the people who participated in this experiment, they only read about one candidate. They either read about a candidate named Karen, or they read about a candidate named Kevin. And that was the only difference in what these voters read about in terms of these candidate descriptions for Us Senate. And guess what? There were no significant differences in how the candidates were rated.Melissa:So she interpreted this as evidence that maybe we're not any more penalizing women for appearing too feminine, and read that as sort of weak, not strong enough, susceptible to crying, nor do they penalize women for being real strong as when they show anger on the campaign trail. So that's one of several studies in recent years that at least in politics, we are no longer penalizing women on the campaign trail when they rub up against that double bind. So I think there has been progress made.Lisa:And I will add to that because I remember watching the four-part biopic of Hillary Clinton. And one of the comments she made is, "I wish I would have been more aggressive, but I was told that I should not come across harsh." And so in that moment, I think she believed that she could have changed the potential outcome if she would have followed her instinct, versus the advisement that people give on what people are thinking, and what people are writing.Lisa:One of the things that we have to become more comfortable with as women and women of color is being our authentic selves, because when we're taking on characteristics that are being pushed on us, it's not going to ring true. And so we should have the same rights to be authentically ourselves, to speak about things that are of value, speak of experiences that we've had from our lenses, that will build more rapport with audiences that look like us or audiences that support difference.Lisa:And so I think it's really important for us to be more conscious of controlling the narrative, and not always responding to the questions that are being asked of us in a way that's a lose-lose situation, but redirecting the question to say, "I appreciate the question you asked, let me tell you this." And speaking the truth of what their capabilities, qualifications are, because you will be penalized if they think you're too feminine, you'll be penalized if they think you're too masculine.Lisa:So just be your authentic self, which says you're qualified to do the work and speak to that, instead of emotions that are continually tried to be placed on us, to have to respond to. So even though the individuals may ask an innocent question, it can be skewed. And so we have to make sure we're prepared for that.Kacee:Thank you. Dr. Coleman, I think your research is so fascinating. And I am wondering if you can share a little bit more about prior to the election, the only examples that Americans had of President or Vice President came from popular culture, as far as women go in that role. So programs like Veep, if any of you have seen that, and Commander-in-Chief.Kacee:So to what extent did movies and television shows help pave the way for Vice President Harris' election, versus hinder the progress that she has made?Kathleen:Well, the examples of female presidency that are in popular culture texts in the 20th century are overwhelmingly negative to varying degrees. There's not a lot of them up until about 2000, and most of my current research has focused on 20th century representations, and those have been incredibly problematic. Those that are actually shown as somewhat positive, have still an air of the ridiculous around them.Kathleen:They're in either cartoons or comedies, or pieces with a little bit of unreality about them. There's a science fiction movie, for example. So having certain genres be represented with a female President, lends it an air of implausibility, whether or not that female President is shown as competent or not.Kathleen:And then as we get into second wave feminism, the representations actually get more negative up until about the late 1990s. In the 1980s, we see several incredibly, I would say direct pieces of backlash against women's pursuit of higher political power. We see comedies that are farces. We see there's a novel where the female President is completely insane, and we see just generally a lot of this masculine angst, where the first gentleman is a little bit more centered than his wife, even though she's presumably the one in more power, and that he is just endlessly full of a lot of complicated feelings around his wife having more political power than he does.Kathleen:So I think that these representations, even if they were designed to put the idea in the minds of the public and the audiences of women could achieve the presidency legally, it's a possibility, that it ended up having the perhaps deleterious consequence that it makes the voters think negatively of the idea, even if that wasn't the creator's intent.Kathleen:Once we see getting into the 21st century, there're more representations, there're a ton of novels. And then as you mentioned, Veep and Commander-in-Chief maybe the most notable examples, but bear in mind, Commander-in-Chief, even though that was actually an overtly positive portrayal of a female President, it only lasted one season. And it was very much designed to be the female West Wing.Kathleen: And you can see a lot of commonalities between those two shows, and yet unlike the West Wing, even though they're arguably of similar quality, Commander-in-Chief did not last nearly as long, and the main difference being this one is showing a female President. The West Wing is showing a male President.Kathleen:Veep, as wonderful as that show is and relatively high quality, she's not a competent leader at all. And similarly, House of Cards, we've got a high quality program, but the female President is arguably duplicitous and has a lot of political machinations, and she's really out for herself. So they have been gaining in number, which I think does help normalize it as an idea. But in terms of whether the character is shown as a positive leader, we really haven't seen that too, too much.Kathleen:I will say, there are several novels from the early 2000s that do show competent female presidential leadership, but unlike television and film, novels don't necessarily hit the zeitgeist as much. You don't necessarily have the wide audience as you do for visual media.Kacee:Thank you. So we've been talking a lot about politics at the national level, but representation obviously is important at every level. And I think you all have talked about that throughout your questions here. Do you all have any thoughts about having a woman and a woman of color at the VP level, is going to affect us at a local level?Lisa:As I stated earlier, representation is everything. And when you see someone looks like you, it is encouragement to say, "I can accomplish this too. Let me look to see what it is that Vice President Harris has that allowed her to achieve this level of success, and how do I need to equip and prepare myself in order to be able to do that at a local level, because she had to start the same way any other politician traditionally starts?"Lisa:And so with that, it's important for us to make sure that we're developing those pipelines that Dr. Miller talked about, and making sure that we have mentors and sponsors that are able to help with that development. And some of the outcomes of the findings from the research that I did, and where I was interviewing highly successful women who are over major organizations, they had achieved levels of experience being an African-American woman, and a lot of it talked about making sure that you're gaining the experience that you need, that you're having networking as a part of who you are and what you do on a regular basis, and not just touch points, but meaningful networking to say, "How is it that I can be successful?"Lisa:Now, the benefit of having social media and technology the way we have it now, while you can have interpersonal relationships and having dynamic conversations, you also have the ability to research and watch footage of others that can help with your development. So if it's something that you're interested in doing, making sure that you're finding someone who can help sow into you information that can help with your growth and development. Lisa:And it doesn't just have to be from a woman. It can be from others who can assist in understanding the process, doesn't mean that you have to follow it exactly, but getting that historical understanding and seeing what you can build and how you can navigate through that process to make the change that you're wanting to make.Lisa:So I think part of it is making sure that you have this fortitude, this courage to strike out and do something that's different, understanding that you may not be a part of the majority number wise, but you can be a part of the change that does happen. And so, as long as we are willing to nurture one another, we all have different skillsets. We all have different types of research, but our backgrounds and what we have to contribute all are factors that can assist someone or many in being able to reach their personal goals. And so I think that's the value of having a variety of lenses at the table experiences knowledge basis because it all works together.Melissa:I will just say that I think it may be some time before we see the effect of having Vice President Harris in that very visible national role, as well as other women. And so to the extent that there are women at the national level in prominent positions, it has this effect of young girls, young women, and all women really, of beginning to visualize themselves.Melissa:So there may be a little bit of a delay, but I'm happy to report that women... I should say girls who are in their pre-teens, their teen years now, watching the inauguration today, watching the next four years, there's going to come a point when they don't remember that the US ever didn't have a Vice President who was a woman, right?Melissa:So sometimes it takes some time, but I think what we can all hope for is that more girls and young women and women in general, women from diverse backgrounds, women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, do enter public office because as we've alluded to throughout today's conversation, women bring a different voice to the table, and it's a voice that needs to be part of the conversation.Melissa:So there may be a little bit of a delay, but at the local level, I'm looking forward to seeing it become that women aren't the anomaly, that they have for so long been on the ballot.Kacee:Thank you. Are there any other final thoughts that you all would like to share?Melissa:I'll just share one quick one, which is, if listeners out there want to accelerate the advancement of women in politics, it's very easy for you to take action. Just ask a woman to run for office, whether that's local office, whether it's City Council, or school board, or mayor, or County Commissioner, women are much more likely to run for office if they're asked to do so.Melissa:Men are much more likely to just take it upon themselves to run and not wait to be asked. It's an important ingredient in getting women on that ballot, is that they get recruited by others. So that's something we can all do, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, or an independent. If we are ever going to get women in those pipeline positions that will lead to a woman elected President someday, we need women in these lower level offices with the years it takes to get to the US Senate or get into a Governor's mansion. So that one day we can have a woman President of the United States.Lisa:And I'll make a quick comment. Businesses are a microcosm of our government, and from my human resources lens, it's important for us to ensure that when we are in positions that allow us to have influence, to use that influence to make sure that we're not just talking about diversity, we're not just talking about belonging or inclusion, and we're not just placing something on our website because it looks fantastic, but mobilizing it to make sure that there are provisions that are made to make these things move forward, to bring equity into the workplace more fully.Lisa:So that means that we have to put the money and the resources to make that happen, and understanding that it's not just a function of one department and division, it has to be the responsibility of everyone that is employed within organization to say, "This is the part that I am accountable to do to make these changes, and the best way to do that is policy development." But beyond that is including it in essential functions where that any individual that is in leadership, that's responsible for hiring, whether it's internally or externally, they are measured about how they're moving forward the goals of the organization. If there's a measure in place, then action will happen. It's easy to take action, you have to just do it.Kathleen:I want to add too that taking action and encouraging real life political movement and women in business, that if you're an artist and you feel like art isn't activism, art absolutely is activism because as Dr. Dubose said multiple times, representation matters. So if we have better representations on women in political power, I think that it will continue to help normalize it to audiences.Kathleen:So if you're an author, content creator, or even just some kind of influencer, you want to amplify the voices of people doing this kind of work well, use your position, use your power, use your voice to do that.Kacee:Thank you. Those calls to action, I think are exactly what I was hoping to hear. It's a great way to wrap this program up. So I want to thank you all again. I know that everyone is incredibly busy and I feel like I got so much out of this conversation personally, so I know that everyone else will as well.Kacee: So again, thank all of you so much for being here. This is an exciting time. It's a challenging time, and I hope that everyone has a fantastic day. And thank you again. Jolie:Thank you for listening to this special episode of Big Ideas, and thank you to Kacee Ferrell Snyder, Melissa Miller, Kathleen Coleman, and Lisa Dubose for the thoughtful conversation. Special thanks to the Center for Women and Gender Equity, and the Division of Diversity and Belonging. Sound editing for this episode was provided by DeAnna MacKeigan and Marco Mendoza.

We live in a fast-paced world, with more everyday demands. And we know that we need good health to keep up. Nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness are often hailed as important pillars. However, there is something even more fundamental for better health—sleep. Sleep ensures we can actually perform. With better sleep, we'll be living better lives. But, how many of us actually prioritise sleep?     Dr Kirk Parsley joins us in this episode to explain how sleep affects our lives. Poor sleep can significantly change our bodies and performance. He also shares that we can achieve good sleep through lifestyle changes. A better life is not about taking more supplements or using gadgets and tools; it's about creating new and better habits.  If you want to know more about the science of sleep and how sleep affects our lives, then this episode is for you.    Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how sleep affects our lives and why it is so fundamental to our health.  Understand that it's more important to change our behaviours and lifestyle rather than depending on supplements.  Discover the ways we can create the right conditions for better sleep.     Resources Get Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy here!  Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!  Listen to my other Pushing the Limits episodes:  Episode with Mark Divine Connect with Dr Kirk: Website I LinkedIn I Instagram I Facebook I Email  You can also get the free downloadable resource on decreasing stress before sleep here.   The Unbeatable Mind Podcast with Mark Divine Dr. Kirk Parsley - How to Supercharge Your Sleep Dr. Kirk Parsley on Sleep And Longevity Melatonin Supplementation with Dr John Lieurance in the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.     Melatonin: The Miracle Molecule by Dr John Lieurance Dr Harch's Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy America's Frontline Doctors How to save the world, in three easy steps. from Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse Podcast   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combats the effects of aging while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Episode Highlights [03:28] How Dr Kirk Started Working on Sleep Dr Kirk used to work for the SEALs. Later on, he enrolled in the military's medical school. After getting his degree, Dr Kirk became the manager of a sports medicine facility for the military. Here, he worked with other medical experts.  Those in the military will usually lie to healthcare providers so they won't get excluded from work, but they tend to be more honest with Dr Kirk because they have worked with him before.  After testing for vitamin deficiencies and adrenal fatigue, Dr Kirk realised that many of his patients were taking Ambien, a sleeping drug.  After learning more about sleep, Dr Kirk realised that every symptom his patients were presenting could be explained by poor sleeping.  [17:31] Sleep's Various Cycles With a sleep drug, you are just unconscious and not sleeping.  Proper sleep needs to go through a repetitive pattern of deep sleep at the beginning of the night and then REM sleep by morning.  The different cycles are important since they affect our bodies in different ways.  Sleep can help boost your immunity and memory! Learn more benefits in the full episode.  [20:12] How Sleep Affects Our Lives If you don't give yourself time to recover, sleep pressure can accumulate and have progressively worse effects.  If you go to bed with high stress hormones, this can worsen your sleep. Poor sleep then leads to higher stress levels, and the cycle gets worse.  People who get poor sleep age faster, not just in appearance but also in their physiology.  Poor sleep can lead to protein structure breakdown, decreased blood supply, aged tissues, and more.  As we age, we also face the problem of not repairing as fast. This is how sleep affects our lives.  [23:56] The Foundation For Better Health We are often taught the basics of health are sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress management.  However, these pillars cannot function without sleep as their foundation, emphasising how sleep affects our lives.  For example, exercise becomes counterproductive when you're sleep deprived because you're not recovering.  Poor sleep can also change your insulin sensitivity and gut biome, which changes your nutrition levels. Because of how sleep affects our lives, it should be our priority. Sleep deprivation is the fastest way to break someone down, this is why it's used as an interrogation technique.    [28:35] How Do We Sleep? We need eight hours of sleep a night. Make your sleeping routine simple. The more complex it is, the more likely you will fail.  First, convince yourself that sleep is important.  We are all born to sleep, and we don't need to learn how.  Before electricity, people used to fall asleep three hours after sunset. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about the neurochemical process of sleep.   [35:36] Creating the Right Conditions for Sleep During sleep, our senses still work, but they don't pay as much attention to external stimuli.  For our ancestors, the sunset will lead to decreased blue light, decreased temperature, decreased stimuli, and increased melatonin.  Better sleep is just creating these conditions in our environment.  If we take melatonin, we should be careful to take only small amounts.  [39:20] Melatonin Supplementation Some have argued that melatonin supplementation does not downregulate our brain receptors, but there are no definitive studies on this yet.  In fact, measuring melatonin is difficult due to its quantity and concentration in each part of the brain.  It's okay to take melatonin supplements but not in physiologic amounts.  [45:15] Can We Reverse Aging? You need to understand your genetics and what ratios will work for you.  While good habits and supplements can improve your overall health, we don't know if it undoubtedly reverses age.  Our bodies are more complex than we think. Shorting yourself two hours of sleep can change over 700 different epigenetic markers.  We can only describe biology. We don't know how to manipulate it most of the time.  Dr Kirk also shares his experience with hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the full episode.  [1:03:36] Paradigm Shifts in the Medical Industry There is a lot of dishonesty in both the media and the medical industry.  Many doctors and medical experts have been silenced on potentially better cures, especially during this pandemic.  Western medicine is effective in treating the sick, but it doesn't keep people from getting severely sick in the first place. A lifestyle change is more important than taking supplements.  [1:12:22] The Importance Of Behaviour Change  People often don't want to work on their behaviour because taking medicine is easier.  We also need to be aware of how the food industry is tapping into our addictive mechanisms to keep us eating more.   Caffeine consumption can also ruin our sleep. More than 200 milligrams can give the opposite effect of staying awake and alert.  Learn exactly how sleep affects our lives, together with caffeine and sugar consumption, when you listen to the full episode. [1:19:40] Widespread Impressions on Sleep and How It Affects Our Lives People have grown to believe that sleep is for the weak and lazy.  This belief also impacts our children, especially since they are still developing.  Losing two hours of sleep can decrease testosterone and growth hormone by 30% and increase inflammation by 30%, among others.   Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system. Kids' brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, experiences a shift during adolescence. [1:26:34] How Sleep Affects Our Lives as Kids Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system. Kids' brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, is formed during adolescence. Furthermore, adolescents also require more sleep because of a shift in their circadian rhythm. Requiring kids to do more with less sleep interferes with their development. [1:31:40] How Sleep Affects Our Lives When We are Sick A new field in medicine called chronobiology is studying how sleep deprivation precedes any psychiatric disease or psychological flare-up. An Ivy League hospital managed to get their patients off medication by regulating their circadian rhythm and chronobiology. [1:34:34] It's More Than Switching Things On and Off Medications can be difficult to get off because they have too many side effects.  For example, most antidepressants are not just working on serotonin. Instead, they affect several neurotransmitters as well.  Physiological doses are artificial and can cause you more trouble.  Learn how sleep medication and affects GABA receptors that slow down the brain when you listen to the full episode. [1:41:17] Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy Dr Kirk discusses how cavemen took around three hours after the sun went down to fall asleep. In the present day, what can people do in those three hours? To fall asleep, stress hormones need to come down due to lifestyle. Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy involves getting the proper ratios of substances. His product comes in the form of tea, stick pouches, and capsules.  [1:46:27] Dr Kirk's Final Advice Change your environment by decreasing blue light and stimulation.  Learn to slow everything down.  Just like how you slow everything down to get a kid to sleep, so should you do the same for an adult.   7 Powerful Quotes ‘You aren't actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep.' ‘Often, if you're sleep-deprived, more is worse for sure. You don't really need to do any exercises. You just stay active until you've recovered, and then you can exercise again.' ‘Insulin sensitivity is decreased by 30%, just by losing two hours of sleep. One night with two hours of sleep. So you go from sleeping eight hours of sleep to six. If you're pre-diabetic, you're waking up diabetic.' ‘Even though I'm known for sleep, the hardest thing for me to coach people to do is to sleep.' ‘The most sleep-deprived years are the most horrible years of the brain development.' ‘Get rid of the blue light. Decrease the stimulation. Lower your body temperature. That's sleep hygiene.' ‘Part of lowering stress is just slowing down your thinking. You can't work on your computer until 9:59 and get in bed in 10 and think you're gonna be asleep.'   About Dr Kirk Dr Kirk Parsley was a former Navy SEAL who went on to earn his medical degree from Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda in 2004. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an Undersea Medical Officer at the Naval Special Warfare Group One. He also served as the Naval Special Warfare's expert on sleep medicine.  Dr Kirk has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006 and consults for multiple corporations and professional athletes. He gives lectures worldwide on wellness, sleep, and hormonal optimisation. He believes that many diseases and disorders are unnecessary complications of poor sleeping habits. We can achieve the highest quality of life possible by changing this habit problem.  Interested in Dr Kirk's work? Check out his website. You can also reach him on LinkedIn, Instagram,  Facebook, and email.       Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn how sleep affects our lives and what we can do about it. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript of the Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Well, hey everyone! And welcome to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have another amazing guest for you. I managed to get some incredible people. I have Dr Kirk Parsley with me. He is an ex-Navy SEAL, and also a medical doctor. A little bit of an overachiever, this one. He spent many years in the SEALs, an incredible man. He also was involved with the first sports medicine rehabilitation centre that was working with the SEALs, an incredible expert on sleep. And that's what we do a deep dive into today. We also talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We also go into areas about the current state of the medical system, one of my favourite topics. And I hope you enjoy this episode. It's really, the most important thing is around sleep.  Sleep is something that all of us, I think, are underestimating its importance. And that this is the biggest lever, not food, not exercise, not meditation, not mindfulness, not anything else. Number one of all leverage points is sleep. So how the heck do you get enough sleep? What is enough sleep, and how to get it is what this episode is about.  Before we head over, I just want to remind you we have Boost Camp coming up. This is our eight-week live online program. There, Neil Wagstaff and I, my business partner and longtime friend and coach are doing. And we're going to, if you want to come and hang out with us live every week and learn everything about upgrading your life, basically, your performance, how to optimise all areas of your life, then we would love you to check the information out, head over to peakwellnessco.nz/boostcamp.  On that point, if you're also interested, come and check out our flagship program, which is our epigenetics program, where we look at your genetics, and how to optimise those specifically, all the areas of your life: your food, your nutrition, your exercise, your mood, and behaviour, your hormones, all these important areas, specifically to your genetics. One-on-one time with us and help us to understand everything about your genetics. It's an incredible platform and amazing AI technology behind us. And we'd love you to check that out.  Go to peakwellnessco.nz/epigenetics. Or reach out to me if you didn't get that. We will also have the links down in the show notes, if you want to just click over to that. Or you can just head over to my website, www.lisatamati.com. And hit the work with us button for our programs listed on there as well. So without further ado, now over to Dr Kirk Parsley.  Well, hi, everybody! And welcome to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have a superstar, who is a good friend of Commander Mark Divine, you may have heard previous weeks on my podcast. We have Dr Kirk Parsley with us today. Welcome to the show.  Dr Kirk Parsley: Thank you. I feel very welcome and happy to be here. I'm still here. I'm happy to be sharing this airspace with you or whatever it is sharing.  Lisa: I'm really super excited. I've heard you a number of times on Mark's show and just thought how hefty you're on because you're such an expert. We're gonna dive into a little bit into your background, but you're an absolute sleep expert. So I'm really keen to help my audience with their sleep, and their sleep patterns, and all of that good stuff. But before we get into that, we were just chatting about genetics and endurance. So, give us a little background. You've been a Navy SEAL. You've been in the military, in the naval military. So give us a bit of background on yourself, personally. Dr Kirk: Yes. So ironically, I actually dropped out of high school. I was a terrible student my whole life, didn't have any interest in school. And after you don't do well for long enough, you just convince yourself that you can't do well. And so you're just, ‘I'm just done. I can't do it'. I was always very physical, very athletic. Just fortunately, genetic lottery, I won, just be an athletic and strong guy. And it came pretty easy to me. But I worked hard at it because I didn't do school work. So when I dropped out of high school, to join the military and do the hardest training in the world. And that was what the SEAL training was supposed to be, as the toughest training in the world like, ‘Well, I'm gonna go do that.' So I went to do that.  This was a way long time ago. This is 1988. So, it was long before anybody knew what SEALs were. They didn't have the notoriety they have now for sure. And when I would come home from the Navy and tell people as I was a Sealer, like, ‘What do you mean, you work for SeaWorld or something? What do you do?' Kinda. So, I went through SEAL training, I would say I made it through SEAL training, I became a SEAL. That was pre-9/11, obviously. So we didn't have the combat that the SEALs of this generation do. So it's not really comparable. We were still mainly working in Southeast Asia doing police work and training other militaries.  I did three deployments. It was really the same thing over, and over, and over again because there was no combat. So you just did the same training, and then you deployed, and then came home, and you did the same training. And of course, I was like, ‘Maybe, I'll go do something else.' And I thought I would be—I was dating a woman who would become my wife. She was getting a master's in physical therapy. And I was reading her textbooks on deployment to make myself a better athlete. And I thought, maybe I could be a physical therapist. And so I started working, I started volunteering in a physical therapy facility in San Diego, called San Diego Sports Medicine Center. And it had every kind of health care provider you could possibly imagine. And this building, it's just this healthcare Mecca. It's the most holistic thing I've ever seen to this day.  I decided pretty quickly, I didn't want to be a physical therapist, but I don't know what else I wanted to do. But I got to follow the podiatrist around, and acupuncturist, and massage therapists, and athletic trainers, and conditioning coaches, and the orthopedist, and the family practice, and the sportsmen. I just got to follow them around and see how everybody worked. And a group of young doctors there, who were probably only five or six years older than me, and they were saying, ‘Well, you should go to medical school.' And I was like, ‘Pump the brakes, kiddo. I didn't even graduate high school. I'm not getting into medical school.' And then the senior doctor overhears the conversation. He comes out of the office. And he says, ‘Kirk, the question isn't, “Can you get in?” The question is, “Would you go if you've got in?”' And I said, ‘Of course, I'd go.' So, well, there you have it. So, he sort of shamed me into it/  I studied hard and got really good grades. And then when it came time to apply for medical school, this was pre-Internet, so you had to go to the bookstore and get your book review and look and see what schools are competitive for. And when I was going through one of those books, I found out that the military had their medical school. The military was a closed chapter in my mind. I'd done that. That's something that I figured I'd always do in my life. But it was never meant to be my whole life. And so I had done that. I was, I figured I was done. But I was already married and had kids. And I was like, ‘Well, the military will pay me to go to medical school. Or I can pay someone else to go to medical school and my wife can work while we're in medical school.'  I made enough to support my family and go to medical school for free. And then to pay off in the military's, they'll train you to do anything. You have to give them years of service and your job. So once you finish your medical training, you have to be a doctor for the military for eight years. And so I figured, ‘I'll get back to the SEAL teams, I'll go pay something back to the community that helped me, was hugely formidable in who I became in my life.' And went back to the SEAL teams, really well-prepped to do sports medicine and orthopedics. And I knew quite a bit about nutrition, and performance, and strength and conditioning. I was pretty sure I had the exact pedigree. When I got there, they had just gotten the money to build a sports medicine facility, which was actually their vision was exactly what I told you that I worked in in college. That's exactly what they wanted to build. I'm like, ‘I got this.' So they put me in charge of building this out. And I was a significant part of us hiring everyone we hired. So we hired our first strength and conditioning coach, our first nutritionist, our first PT, our first everything.  We built our own sports medicine facility. And then orthopedics was coming through every week, and they had to do rounds there. And we'd have pain rounds, pain management rounds come through. We had an acupuncturist coming through. And we hired all these people from the Olympic Training Center, and professional sports teams, and the best colleges. And so, we had all these brilliant people who knew way more than I did about what they do.  Lisa: So you went from there to there.  Dr Kirk: Yeah. And so at that point, I was the dumbest person around, right? Because we had all these experts in every little niche that I knew this much about. We hired experts who knew that much about. And so in the military, when you're the dumbest guy, they put you in charge, right and say, ‘Well, you manage this,' right? And so, I'm managing all these people who know more than I do, however that works. But my office was in this facility that we built.  The SEALs are a lot like professional athletes in that you put them on a bench, so to speak, right? Because they're injured, they need some help. So they can't work. It's the worst thing. Worst thing. So when they see a health care provider, they just lie because they don't want to be— Lisa:  They don't wanna be taken out.  Dr Kirk Parsley: They will take money out of their pocket, and go into the city, and find a doctor to treat them so that the doctor at work doesn't know, so they don't get put on the sideline. But because I was a SEAL, and there were still a lot of SEALs at the SEAL team. It was close enough to my time. There are still a lot of SEALs at the team who I worked with, and I trained with, and deployed with. And so they knew me. And I had a good reputation. And so they trusted me, and they come in my office and they say, ‘Let me tell you what's going on with me.'  They reported this litany of symptoms that didn't have any pattern that I could recognise. And so they were saying that their motivation was low, that they're very moody, that they couldn't concentrate. They're super forgetful. Their energy was low. Their body composition was shifting. They felt slower, and dumber, and colder. None of them were sleeping very well. They're all taking sleep drugs. They had low sex drive. They had a lot of joint pain, a lot of inflammation. And I didn't have the slightest idea. I'm like, ‘And I know it sounds like you're obese and 65. But I'm looking at you and you're not. So I don't know what's going on.'  I just started testing everything I could possibly test. I tested literally 98 blood markers. They were giving 17 vials of blood. Now just shotgun approaches, test everything, and see what's abnormal. And I started seeing some patterns. And they had really low anabolic hormones, so the DBTA, and testosterone, and dihydrotestosterone, pregnenolone. All of that was low. They really have high inflammatory markers. They really had poor insulin sensitivity for how healthy I knew they were, and how well they ate, and how much they exercised. But it's still within the normal range. But it wasn't. Everything was in the normal range. But everything that should be really high was just like barely in the normal range. And everything that should be really low, it's just barely inside of that range. They didn't have a disease. And I was a medical doctor, so I had learned how to treat disease, then they didn't have disease. So I was like, ‘I don't know. What am I going to do?' So that led me to having to train with outside providers. And fortunately, at that time, the SEALs did have the reputation. They'd already done all these amazing things. This was in 2009. So, I think they'd already shot Bin Laden and at that point. So I could call anybody, right? I'd watch somebody's TED Talk, read their book, I'd see them lecture. And I'll just call them and say, ‘I'm a doctor for the West Coast SEAL team. Could I come train with you? Can I consult with you? Can I ask you some questions?' And everybody was generous and said, ‘Absolutely'. So I get to learn a lot really quickly. I take a lot of leave from work and just go sit in these guys' clinics for four or five days. And just pick their brain, go see patients with them, and take notes, and learn. And then I just call them every time I have a question. And I just got to learn really quickly. It's like this team of experts who knew everything about the alternative world.  I was trying to treat people for adrenal fatigue. And I was trying to treat people for vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which are obvious from what was going on. And I couldn't quite figure out what it was. And about 100 patients into it, and probably after 30 guys came in, I could have told everybody, they could just sit down. I'll tell you what you're going to tell me. I could have just just route it off; it's so similar. And about 100 guys into it, embarrassing that it took so long, but I remember this guy telling me that he took Ambien every night. What do you guys call it? Stilnox, I think, right?  I was married to an Aussie, so I know a lot. I mean, I know you're not an Aussie, but I know a little bit about your world, as in your language. And I remember putting a note in the margin, ‘Seems like a lot of guys take an Ambien.' Then I go back through everybody's records, 100% of the guys who had been in my office were taking Ambien. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe that's an issue, right?' So, let me go look at the side effects of Ambien. And it was a fairly new drug. And the pharmaceutical industry, they get to cherry-pick their data. So they were like, ‘Oh, it's the safest drug ever. There's nothing, no problems.' And I'm like, ‘I don't quite believe that.'  Unfortunately, like every other doctor in America, I didn't know anything about sleep. I never had a single class on sleep in medical school, didn't have the foggiest idea what should be happening. I knew what you called a mechanism of action on this drug, which means molecularly what does it do. Well, it binds GABA receptors and has an effect called GABA analog, and benzodiazepines are the same, things like Valium. And so that's about as much as I knew, Well, what is GABA doing? What is GABA supposed to do? And then you can't really understand that without understanding what's actually going on in sleep.  Then, I had to learn about sleep physiology. And what's supposed to happen during sleep? And what are the normal shifts and changes? And what does that do? And if that doesn't happen, what effects do you get? So after studying quite a bit, I figured out the general Occam's razor principle of the thing with the least assumptions is, literally, every single symptom that these men told me about, could be explained by poor sleep.  Now, I didn't think that it would be, right? I wasn't naive, but it could have, then, right? So if this was definitely the most powerful thing, because being a Western doctor I wanted to give them Cortef and raise their cortisol. I wanted to give them testosterone and raise their testosterone. I wanted to get like, I wanted to give them medication to improve their insulin sensitivity. I wanted to just go in there and do it. But I couldn't do that, right? Because you can't give SEALs medication that they're dependent upon. Because then, what if they go out on the field, and they don't have their medication, they can't do their job and it's a waste. So that puts people on the bench, that disqualifies people. So I couldn't do that.  I had to figure out, well, what else can I do? So like I said, sleep seemed like the unifying theory. So let me see about that. And this was right around the time that everybody was catching on to the important vitamin B3. And that was associated with poor sleep. So, I tested all my guys. Every one of them had low vitamin B3. So I'm like, ‘Yeah, I'm going to give them vitamin B3. I'm going to be a hero. Everyone is gonna love me. I'm the best doctor ever.' And it helped a little bit. But it wasn't everything.  Like I said, I had this epiphany with this sleep drug. And once I learned enough about the sleep drug, you aren't actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep. Because sleep has to have, as one of its criteria, you have to have this predictable sleep architecture. You have to be going through these sleep cycles that take you through these different stages. And a particular pattern is repetitive, and it's primarily deep sleep in the beginning of the night, and almost exclusively REM sleep by morning, and you have to do that transition.  If you don't do that, then it's not sleep. It can be partially sleep, if you're just getting poor sleep. But I was having these guys do sleep studies. And they were coming back with 99.9% of their sleep study being stage 2 sleep, which is just the transition. It's what we call a transitional sleep phase. So it's not deep sleep or REM. So they weren't really getting any of the benefits of sleep. And of course, that's an oversimplification. They're obviously getting something, or they'd be dead. But we don't know what they're getting.  That's all we know is that healthy sleep does this, and when you go through these cycles, we know these things happen. Like when you're in deep sleep, we know that's when you're the most anabolic, and you're secreting your anabolic hormones like growth hormone, and testosterone, and DHEA is being ramped up, your immune system's being ramped up. We know this happens. And then we know in REM sleep, what's going on in the brain: the physiological changes, forming more durable neural tracks, that neurological memories, shifting things from working memory into long term memory, pruning off useless information, these little buttons that grow on the side of your nerves that are starting to bud new information. You're like, ‘I don't need that.' You clean up all that. You get rid of weak products and you get the brain working better.  The whole purpose of going to sleep tonight is to prepare myself for tomorrow, right? Whatever I do today, that's what my brain and body are gonna think it needs to do tomorrow. It's gonna use today as a template to try to make me better tomorrow at doing what I did today. And if I don't get enough sleep, if I don't get to restore, I still have to do tomorrow. And how do I do that? Well, I do it the same way you do anything. I'm stressed out. I use Marinol and a bunch of cortisol and DHEA. And I start robbing all my nutrients for my cells. My blood glucose is going up, I'm getting fuel sources that way, epinephrine and norepinephrine stimulate my brain and my tissues to be able to get energy where there's really no energy there. And then I'm going to bed with these really high stress hormones, which are supposed to be low when I sleep, and then I'm trying to sleep with high stress hormones. Then, I get worse sleep. Then, I need more stress hormones tomorrow. And that's what breaks people.  In fact, when you see somebody who doesn't sleep well for even six months, they look so much older. ‘Why does he look old? That doesn't make sense. Is it just because they're tired? Is it tired old?' But if you think about it, you're born into this contract. You're born into this contract; you can't get around. It's just like you're born knowing you're going to die, 100% certain you're going to die. There's also this other contract that certainly is your body ideally worked for about 16 hours, and it needs eight hours to recover. That's the way it works. That's what you're born into. There's small variations there. But obviously, you can't get around that.  If you don't get those 8 hours, you didn't recover from those 16 hours. And so if you think about it logically, obviously, when you're a kid, you need more sleep. So it's not a great example, when you're really young. Kids actually sleep a lot more than eight hours by and large, but you see them actually getting better every day, right? They're growing. They're getting smarter. They're getting more coordinated. You can see that every day. But if you think about, say, like, once you hit 25, and your brain's fully formed, and everything's static. If you could recover 100% every night, and wake up the next morning as good as you were that other morning, you wouldn't age, right? There would be no aging because you would have recovered 100%.  Lisa: It's very important, yep.  Dr Kirk: Everything that you're deficient in, if you're missing 10%, you're going to age that 10%. And if you're missing a little more, you're going to age faster. So when you see people who haven't been sleeping well for a year, they are literally older because they've been recovering less and less every night. So yeah, there's a breakdown in their protein structure. There's decrease in their blood supply, their peripheral vascularisation. Their tissues are aging. There's a buildup of waste products that aren't getting out, and that's toxic. And that's damaging the mitochondria and forming more senescent cells, and all these other things, they're building up. And every marker that we have, even genetic marker, when you look at your children and linked methylation on the genes. Every marker, they look older. And then when you look at them, they look older. That's why.  That's really what aging is. It's really just the absence of being able to recover 100% every night. And as we get older, we just don't repair as fast. And that's, unfortunately, when most people quit sleeping as much. And now that's double whammy there. You're getting twice the aging effects that way. And there's no reason to sleep less when you're old. It's typical, but it's not something you have to do. I've had 84-year-old women who haven't slept more than 4 or 5 hours in 20 years, and I get them to sleep eight hours a night.  Lisa: I've got one over there who's rustling around, walking around behind me. She's 80 years old, nearly. Hey, mum. And she's struggling with sleep in the early morning hours. And therefore, you know her memory and things. So I want to pick your brain on that. Can I just slow you down a little bit because we just covered a ton of ground here. Dr Kirk: You just asked me about myself, and I just couldn't stop. Lisa: No, but you were on an absolute roll. So I didn't want to interrupt you because there was so many things, but my brain's just going like, ‘There's so many questions!'  Dr Kirk: That was just meant to be an overview.  Lisa: That was an overview. Now can we dive deeper into some of the weeds because now I understand why you've become, classically, the sleep expert because obviously that was the biggest leverage. In other words, this is the biggest leverage point that you see. When we think of the SEALs, we think of the SEALs as being these gods of amazingness that can do everything. But what you're saying is like these guys are pushing their limits: endurance, and in fatigue, and all things like that. And so they're going to be the Canaries in the Gold Mines in a way because they're going to be coming up against the limits of everything.  For you to say, as an ultra marathon, so I've come up against the limits in certain ways, like with sleep deprivation. And I sort of understand some of the things now that you were talking about. So you've ended up finding out that this is probably the biggest leverage point in anybody's life, basically, for their health is their sleep. So people, take a bit of a grip on that one. It's not necessarily the food or nutrition, it's the sleep. Would you agree? Dr Kirk: When I first started lecturing, I used to say there were four pillars of health: sleep, nutrition, exercise. And then the fourth pillar is audience dependent. It could be mindfulness, stress medication, it could be community, whatever it is that controls your stress hormones, and your emotions, and your mood, and all that stuff. Then after a while, I shift to there's three pillars sitting on the foundation of sleep. Because if you take the sleep away, none of those are going to work. There's nothing you can do. In fact, if you exercise when you're sleep deprived, it's counterproductive because you're not recovering. And we all know that you don't actually get better when you exercise. You damage yourself when you exercise. Then when you sleep, you recover, and you come back stronger. When you deprive yourself of sleep, you change your entire gut biome, you change your insulin sensitivity. You change everything here. And now your nutritional status doesn't work anymore. And when you don't sleep well, as I said, you increase your stress hormones. So you can do the mindfulness training and all of that stuff, meditate and all that, but you're just going to bring yourself down maybe to where you would have been if you just slept well and didn't do any kind of training.  It's really the foundation for everything. And I say that all the time. It sounds hyperbolic, but I'm 100% convinced it's true. There's nothing that you can do that will, nothing that will break you faster than poor sleep, and poor and insufficient sleep. There's a reason we use it as an interrogation technique.  Lisa: Exactly. Yeah.  Dr Kirk: There's a reason we break people down, intentionally, this way because it depletes all your resources. It interferes with your brain function, your willpower, your problem solving, your speech, your ability to formulate plans, your motivation, your mood. Everything goes almost instantaneously with one night of lack of asleep. Never mind keeping somebody up for three or four days in a row. They're just a mess. They're just in input mode. They just want you to just, ‘Tell me whatever I have to do. I'd do it. Then I'll sleep. Anything I can do to get sleep, I'll do it.' You don't have to rip people's fingernails out of stuff. You just deprive them from sleep.  Conversely, there's nothing that will improve the quality of your life and your performance faster than sleeping. Well, if you're an inadequate sleeper, which most people are. They don't even know they are. Everybody has these 30-day challenges and 60-day challenges. I'm like, ‘I only need seven days.' Again, one week where sleep is your number one priority. And you do everything right, and you get eight hours of sleep, at least eight and a half hours in bed every night, and you're sleeping approximately eight hours a night. And give me that for a week. And then, if you're not convinced this the most powerful thing, go back to wherever you're going. But nobody's ever gone back.  Lisa: A lot of us, I can hear people saying, ‘Yeah, but I go to bed, and I can't sleep. And I wake up at 2 am. And my brain is racing and I've been told to do some meditation. And maybe it's my cortisol.' Let's look now because if we haven't got the message across now that sleep is the number one thing that you should be prioritising about everything that you do, we haven't done very well for the last half an hour.  How do we sleep? What foods do we need to eat before we go to bed or not eat? What supplements can we take? You've got your sleep remedy that we'll get into a little bit. What routine can I do to optimise? What light-dark cycles? All of these things that can be leveraged points for us in optimising our sleep. And how do we test that we're actually in that deep-sleep phase? What are one of the best tools that you've found to work that out? So that was a mouthful, but yeah. Dr Kirk: So the first thing we need to do is get away from that phonetic question right there, which is what everybody's going through in their heads up like, ‘What about this? What about that?' And so my job is to make this really simple. Because simple things we can do, and the more nuanced your plan is around sleep, the more likely it is to fail. And we're doing big, macro movements here. So the very first thing is, what you said, I think we've already covered. The very first thing is to convince yourself that sleep is the most important thing. And to make it your priority for at least one week to get everything going.  Now, when I say your priority, I mean the true meaning of that word. There's only one thing there's nothing else, that's the one, including raising your kids, and your dog, and your exercise routine, and everything else. The most important thing is to sleep. The most important thing for winning. If you aren't quite convinced yet go to PubMed, or go to Google Scholar, or something like this, then put in sleep and anything else you care about: being a parent, mood, dating, sex drive, athleticism, strength, endurance, concentration, memory, I don't care. Whatever it is you care about—strength and this, strength and business, strength and I don't care. Anything you want.  Read to your heart's content. It will convince you that the one good thing about sleep, in the sleep sciences, it's not actually controversial. There's no one out there saying, ‘Oh, you don't really need to sleep.' Everybody agrees. There's nuances and people are different. Everybody agrees you need about eight hours of sleep a night. And just convince yourself that is the most important thing. Once you're there, that's the most important thing.  After that, recognise, ‘Okay. I'm going to make this my number one priority.' Recognise that you're born to sleep. You don't need to learn; you need to unlearn some stuff, right? You're designed to do this. And this should feel good. You should enjoy sleeping. You should usually look forward to going to bed and waking up in the morning, like, ‘Man, I feel so much better. I'm ready to go do my day.' This should be as easy as selling sex but it's not. People resist this forever. I have no idea why. It's great. Why don't you like sleep? I've always liked sleep. So then you just think, ‘Okay, when did sleep go bad for humankind?' Probably in the last seventy years.  Lisa: Yeah, when we got electric light.  Dr Kirk: That's about it, right? It's only been, really since rural electrification, right? Since they got electricity out to everybody. That's really when it started. When you look back in America just 100 years ago, look at people's journals in the winter, they spent like 14 hours a day in bed. That's a certain thing they do. So if you think about it, and just say, ‘I know this is simple. I'm going to let myself fall into it.' And then I'll tell you, there's all the sleep hygiene. You can get on the Internet, and you can find, ‘Oh, do this. Drink a hot cup of tea. Drink milk. Do this. Make your room really cold. Make your room really dark. Make your bed really soft. Make your bed really hard. And get a white noise machine. Get rid of all the EMF.' A million people are going to tell you all sorts of different things to do. And I'll cut through all the BS, and then you can pick and choose. The real answer is all of that stuff works, to some extent. All of that's important to some extent. The way I work with clients is at least 95% of all the successes is from lifestyle. And then all these little gadgets, and your mitigation tools, and supplements, and all this stuff back, that's the other 5. It's 95% behavioural. So you just look back, how did we evolve to sleep? Nobody teaches people how to sleep, right? You're born as a baby; you sleep. So how did we sleep as adults in cultures 100 years ago? Well, when the sun went down, we fell asleep about three hours later, and we woke up around the time the sun came up. It was pretty much that easy.  Okay, so let's reverse engineer that a little bit. I think most people know that blue light is a stimulus for being awake. We don't truly have a sleeping program. If you think of it like software, we don't have any sleeping software. We just have lack of awakening software. So we have things that go on in our brain and body that make us still awake and make us interact with our environment. And then when you take those things away, we're in what we call sleep. The blue light, actually, has nothing to do with the vision. There's nerve cells in the back of your eyes. It senses blue light. That's all they do. And then they fire pathways back to the circadian pathway membrane, essentially. And then the pineal gland secretes melatonin. The melatonin is a hormone, the starter pistol. It initiates all these cascades. And then one of the cascades that it initiates is the production of this peptide called GABA, capital G-A-B-A, gamma-Aminobutyric acid. And what that does is it slows down the neocortex.  When you think of the human brain, the picture of the human brain, we all have that big, wrinkly, massive crescent shape. That's what we call the neocortex. And that is how we interact with the world, right? All of our senses get processed in that, and then all of our movement is processed from that, right? So when we're asleep, all that's really different with our sleep, about in a general sense, right? There's nuances in every neuron and every molecule. And then, in the neural sense, there's a barrier between us and our environment is how it's phrased. What it means is we aren't paying attention to our environment anymore. Our eyes obviously still work, right? You can turn the light and you can wake somebody up. Our ears still work, you can make your noise and wake somebody up. Our sense of touch still works. You can shake somebody. They can roll into something sharp, and their pain receptors will wake them up. Heat will wake them up. Cold will wake them. So we still work. Everything still works. We start processing it. We're not paying attention to it.  What helps us do that is GABA. So GABA involves neurons. A neuron has what's called a resting potential. So there's like an electrical current in here. And when you put in enough electrical current, it goes like this. And that neuron fires. And then, does whatever it does and forms pathways. Well, GABA lowers that. Now, it takes more energy to make that thing fire. And you can overcome this by just putting a lot of energy into the cells. So if you've ever been exhausted, woken up exhausted, didn't get enough sleep for whatever reason. Like, ‘I'm going to go to work. I'm gonna come home. I'm going straight to bed. I'm gonna sleep 12 hours a day.' And then your friends talk you into going out or you get a cup of a drink. You stay up ‘til midnight, ‘I feel fine.' And then you suffer again the next day, right? Because you just overcame that.  You can actually read about this because this still exists, believe it or not, they're still I think 35 or 45 pretty large communities around the globe that have never experienced electricity. And they just lived like hunters and gatherers. They go out. And the men go out and hunt. And the women pick, and nurture their kids, and weave. And just when you think of your caveman doing, they still live like that today. And we study these people. And we did actigraphy. So it's not true sleep, say. It's just movement to know when they're likely to be asleep. And what we find is, the sun goes down. Again, the blue light goes out of their eyes. It fires, the brain starts secreting melatonin that leads to a cascade of 365 billion other chemical changes in the brain, right? But that initiation has to happen. Once that initiation is going, one of the things it does is secrete GABA, increase GABA production in lots of regions of the brain that starts slowing the brain down.  The sun goes down. They don't have electricity, right? The best they have is a fire. So what else happens? Their body temperature goes down. So when the sun goes down and it is dark, we can't see well at night, we can't see very far. So there's way less stimulus, right? They don't have flashing lights. They don't have loud music. So there's not much to stimulate them. So they sit around a fire. Maybe if they're lucky, if not, they just stare around the dark, and they have some quiet, calm conversations, and then they drift off to sleep.  That's all sleep hygiene is. That's it. Those three things: decrease the blue light, decrease the stimulation to your brain, and drop your body temperature. You need a cool place to sleep. One of the things that you can do to speed these things up is to concentrate the right nutrients in your brain. If you are going to take melatonin and just take a very, very, very, very small amount. You just want to initiate. You don't want to put so much melatonin in your brain that your brain doesn't need to make melatonin because then you start running insensitivity to melatonin, and now when you take it away, you don't have, you're essentially melatonin deficient because you've downregulated the receptors, and your brain is not sensitive to melatonin anymore. Lisa: Can I just stop in the first, one second. Dr John Lieurance is his name and he was on the Ben Greenfield podcast, and he's written a book about melatonin. And he argued that melatonin, interesting work, doesn't downregulate when you take melatonin, and doesn't cause that downregulation. All the other hormones do. If we take testosterone, we're going to downregulate our own testosterone, if we take right whatever. He said that they didn't. And he was advocating in his book for actually, super-physiological doses of melatonin. Certainly when you're doing things like jetlag, or whatever you're trying to reset, but also for a raft of other ailments to help with many diseases. Have you heard of his work or? Dr Kirk: I'm familiar with him and his work.  Lisa: Yeah. What's your take on that? Because I was like, ‘I don't know.' Dr Kirk: So, I disagree, obviously.  Lisa: Yeah. That's what I want to know. Dr Kirk: But specifically, so what he's talking about, 90% of his work is about the antioxidant. Lisa: Yes. Is it an antioxidant? Yep.  Dr Kirk: The studies that he's quoting are saying that melatonin doesn't downregulate. We don't know for sure. It's like, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The only way we would know is if we could actually drop a catheter into somebody's brain and sample their fluid in their brain 24 hours a day and study this over months. And so we can't say for sure. We can do animal models. Again, it's hard to quantify because from the time the sun goes down, which is about three hours before you'll fall asleep, to the entire time you slept, until the sun comes up, you're looking at somewhere between 11 and 12 hours. That entire time your brain will only produce five to six micrograms of melatonin.  Lisa: Tiny amount. Dr Kirk: So how do we study, right? It's really hard to study, and you think of it in a mouse model, how much smaller the quantities are we're looking at that point. And the concentration of melatonin in each region of the brain is not the same, it depends on some cells in the brain can actually be stimulated by melatonin. It's somewhere. It's different. And same with GABA. GABA doesn't go to every region of the brain because it can stimulate regions of the brain. But what we do know, so first, I always go with, we don't know anything. We have research that makes us believe certain things are likely to be true based on the best science we have right now. So we don't know anything. And I believe that to be true about everything in science. Just wait a week, it might change. But what we do know is that every other hormone does this.  Lisa: Yes.  Dr Kirk: But if it doesn't do this, it's the only hormone in the body that doesn't. Pretty unlikely. But what we do know with 100% certainty is that it does downregulate melatonin receptors. Lisa: Right. Dr Kirk: It can take away melatonin receptors. If I normally have 10 melatonin receptors, and I go down to just having one, now even if I'm sprayed with melatonin, I only have one. And I have to have this supersaturation for this one receptor to do all this work. And if I go down to normal physiologic levels of melatonin and this one receptor, there's just getting an occasional melatonin coming by, I'm going to be, it's no different. It doesn't matter whether I'm not producing enough, or I don't have enough receptors, it's the same end result. You have to have melatonin binders stuffing pulled into the cell to have it function. Lisa: So can I ask one question there like, so for elderly, who, from what I understand, in my basic research on melatonin, is that their melatonin production goes down with age, and, therefore, they could benefit from melatonin supplementation. Is that a thing or? Dr Kirk: Yeah, I agree. And so what happens is that the pineal gland calcifies just like our arteries. And every vessel, everything in our body calcifies, right. That's sort of aging. Lisa: One of the majors.  Dr Kirk: And so it calcifies, and you do almost certainly secrete less melatonin, right? And again, the only way we would know is to drop a catheter into somebody's brain. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't take melatonin at all. I'm just saying you shouldn't take super physiologic. So his example of when you're speaking about the melatonin work earlier, right? His example is, well, this is a great antioxidant. Now, if I do these super physiologic amounts, there's all these benefits to it. Well, if I give you 10 times the amount of testosterone that your body ordinarily has, you're gonna feel fantastic. If I give you something that secretes a bunch of epinephrine and norepinephrine, like cocaine. And you have this huge rush of norepinephrine; you feel fantastic. And you're super productive, and your brain's really sharp. Does that make that a good idea? I don't think so. I don't deal with anything super physiologic.  Again, I'm the behaviourist, and 95% of all your health is going to come from re-approximating the way you revolt. This body takes hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to this planet. And now we're just like, ‘No, we're smarter. Like I'm a 35-year-old biohacker. I read a bunch of books. I know I can do it better than–” We know nothing about the body. Lisa: Can we all mean for people–we also know that people tend to die. If we wanted to extend our healthspan and their lifespan, but healthspan mainly, can we, with hormone replacement therapy, there's a raging argument: should you be on hormone replacement therapy, should you not? If you're wanting to optimise. Now, there's downsides. And you need to understand your genetics, and you need to understand all of those aspects.  There is benefits for us to taking testosterone or DHEA or all these things in the right physiological doses of, say, a 30-year-old, like, I'm 50 or 52, I want to be at the level that I was, say at 30–35. I understand my genetics, I know where my risk factors are. I can keep an eye on all of that sort of stuff. Can I all meet that so that I live and function longer? Because I think the core question here is how do we optimise? Yes, we've developed like cavemen but then they die at 70–80, as well. Can we extend that with the knowledge that we currently have? Dr Kirk: Well, so I don't ever promise anybody that I can make them live longer. I say, ‘You might live longer from this.' If you think about it, think about it this way: at first, we talk about what sleep does, right? And if we could catch up every night, we wouldn't age. So what are we doing when we're doing things like hormone-replacement therapy? We're doing metabolomics. And we're doing all sorts of supplementation around that, or we're doing artificial things like hyperbaric, and near-far IR sauna, and ice baths, and doing all these steps to stimulate the production of the thing.  Of course, now we have antibiotics, and we have all sorts of treatments to keep people from dying as young from certain diseases. So certainly, we should be able to either, probably add years to your life. But if not, definitely we can add life to your years, right? If you're going to die at 80 either way, one version of this, you could die hiking Mount Kilimanjaro, another one you're dying in a little chair in a nursing home. So I don't know.  The question is, even with the longevity work that people are doing, really smart guys like Sinclair and all these guys are doing all these things, and they're doing all these things with clearing senescent cells, we're doing all these things with peptides. And now I give my patients peptides for certain things. I don't know nearly as much about the longevity stuff as I'd like to. And we and we're reversing aging genetically, right? We're going in there and saying, ‘Actually, over the course of a year, with a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of tries, a lot of modalities, really focusing on your lifestyle and doing everything. Ideally, we can actually, probably, reverse your genetic age a little bit.' Are we actually reversing age? I don't know, we made your telomeres longer. The increased the methylation on your genes, and those are markers for age, does that reverse it? We don't really know, right?  Lisa: We haven't been around long enough to work it out.  Dr Kirk: Right. It's like with omega-3s. If your omega-3s are this, then we know that certain things go this way. Well, but if we supplement your omega-3s, is that the same as you having that nutritionally. Or vitamin B3? Is that the same? We don't know. We're thinking that it probably is. And we're thinking if we're reversing the markers we know for genetic aging that's making you genetically younger. But maybe there's some totally different information in there on aging that we don't know anything about yet. That's possible, too.  I think from what I know about you, you probably agree with me. I think epigenetics is more important than genetics, anyway. You have certain genetics and you change half a dozen things about your day, and your epigenetics are totally different. If you short yourself 2 hours of sleep, you change 735 different epigenetic markers from just 2 hours. All your pro-inflammatory ones are the ones turning on, and all of your anabolic ones are the ones turning off. And again–  Lisa: That's still the biggest leverage point, isn't it?  Dr Kirk: It's still a crazy complex to think that you can decipher what 735 changes in epigenetics mean. We have some ideas of what certain things, how does all that work in synchronicity, but even though we're the smartest animal on this planet, we still have a very feeble mind. Lisa: We're still dumb.  Dr Kirk: When it comes to understanding the complexity of our bodies, we can't understand the complexity of the planet, much less our bodies. And life is just this amazingly complex thing. We don't have systems in our body. We divide the body up in systems as a way to learn it so that we can systematically learn and we can test about the learning, but the body doesn't work in systems. Lisa: I have such an issue with it, too. It's nothing like the way that the medical model breaks us all down. Dr Kirk: The reductionist model doesn't work for life. And if you think about it, most of biology is purely descriptive. All of it is, we've come up with better and better ways to test things and look at things, and then we can describe what's going on. We don't know how to manipulate it most of the time. If we do, it's really clumsy. And it's causing 500 other changes because we wanted to flip this one switch this way. Then what are the downstream effects? We don't know. We'll find out in like 30 years after 100,000 people go through this. It's really clumsy.  I don't know if can I make somebody live longer. I'd never make that claim. But can I make people look, feel, and perform better? Absolutely. I can do it all the time. And me, personally, like you're saying, I just approximate use. Their arguments, there are people out there saying, ‘Well, these hormones will cause this or that.' I'm like, ‘Okay. If high estrogen levels cause breast cancer, why don't young women get breast cancer? Older women, they're the ones who are getting breast cancer, why?' That thing with men and prostate cancer, giving them testosterone is gonna cause prostate. No, it's not. If that were true, then a 20-year-old would have prostate cancer, and a 60-year-old wouldn't, right? It's a lack of this. And I think breast cancer is a lot like prostate cancer. What we know with prosta

We all have something we want to pursue, a goal or an objective we want to reach. We might not always know what it is from the get-go, but as we go on, we can find what we value doing the most. Now, there may be obstacles in our paths, making it feel like our goals are but unachievable and improbable dreams. However, when you are pursuing what you value, nothing can stop you from achieving your destiny.   In this episode, world-renowned human behaviour specialist Dr John Demartini joins us to inspire you to start pursuing what you value. He shares advice and a range of wonderful stories on this topic. Learning about delegation can greatly help you with pursuing what you value. We also talk about the neuroscience of flow states and getting people to understand the quality of your work. If you're mulling over starting your journey to doing what you love, listen to this episode! 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Boost Your NAD+ Levels: Healthy Ageing Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn about delegation and how you can utilise it to make the most out of your job. Discover the two different flow states that come into play when you're doing what you love best. Listen to a variety of enlightening stories that show how pursuing what you value can change your life.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to the Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes: #198: How to Prioritise and Reach Your Goals with Dr John Demartini Connect with Dr Demartini: Website | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube Check out Elon Musk's interview on 60 Minutes. A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!      Episode Highlights [04:21] Achieving the Improbable No matter what obstacles you face, you will get up again if you have a big enough reason. Each of us has a set of priorities. At the very top is our destiny, which is non-negotiable. When you're pursuing what you value, you'll continue regardless of pleasure or pain.  By delegating low-priority things, you can go on pursuing what you value.  [09:20] The Importance of Delegation As long as you're doing your top priority, something that produces the most per hour, it doesn't cost to delegate. Delegation frees up your time so you can pursue something that makes more income. However, when you don't recruit the right person, you end up losing money because you're having to micromanage and getting distracted.  [14:07] Hiring the Right People  Do the basics, such as references and background checks. Dr Demartini specifically asks what applicants would do if they never had to work another day in their life.  If they don't answer something close to the job description, he turns them down.  Don't hire somebody who can't see how the job you're offering can fulfil their highest value. Tune in to the full episode to hear how Dr Demartini helped one of his applicants pursue what they value! [26:06] Job Security vs. Pursuing What You Value Dr Demartini shares a story about how he guided a young man to chase after his dreams. He sees this man eight years later, the owner of eight franchises. Many people stay in their jobs because of security. However, quitting work and pursuing what you value is your choice. Dr Demartini's recalls a time when he accompanied a ditch digger to work. He was so proud of his job, as he brings water—and life—to people. It doesn't matter if the job seems small, as long as you're pursuing what you value.  [44:30] Taking Pride in What You Do When your identity revolves around pursuing what you value, the higher your pride is in your workmanship. You'll excel in whatever you do, as long as you're pursuing what you value.  People who are pursuing what they value go beyond what is expected of them. Whether you start early or late, you can always begin pursuing what you value.  Master planning is a way to get there quickly. [46:26] The Neuroscience of Flow States There are two flow states. The manic flow state is a high that does not last long, as it is driven by the amygdala and dopamine. You get into your real flow state when you are pursuing what you value—something truly inspiring and meaningful.  In the real flow state, you're willing to embrace both pain and pleasure while you are pursuing what you value. Dr Demartini likens the two states to infatuation versus love. Infatuation is short-lived and only sees the positives; love endures even the negatives.  Manic flow is transient; real flow is eternal. [53:33] Finding the Middle and Paying for Quality You shouldn't get over-excited about good things and over-depressed about bad ones. Stay in the middle. Looking at the downsides isn't cynicism. It shows that you have grounded objectives. Dr Demartini's father, who is in the plumbing business, carefully considers all variables before taking on a project. As such, he charges more than competitors. People will be more willing to pay for your work once you explain what sets it apart from others. If you get defensive about your work, you start to sound arrogant. Instead, try to be informative about the value of what you offer. [1:03:32] Staying Stable and Flexible  Dr Demartini is neither excited nor fearful about the future.  He looks at both sides so that he does not become too elated or depressed. Emulating this can help you be stable enough to keep pursuing what you value. Over support leads to juvenile dependency, while challenges encourage independence.  Adapt and do what needs to be done. If you can't delegate it to others, learn to do it yourself.   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode [05:34] ‘Nothing mortal, can interfere with an immortal vision.' [07:00] ‘There's wisdom in not doing low priority things; there's wisdom in not pursuing something that's not truly and deeply meaningful to you.' [23:18] ‘Don't ever hire anybody who can't see how the job description you want can help them fulfil their highest value.' [44:37] ‘The pride in workmanship goes up to the degree that it's congruent with what you value most.' [50:26] ‘Fantasies aren't obtainable, objectives are.' [54:31] ‘If you're overexcited, you're blind to the downside.' [1:06:22] ‘People can be really resourceful if somebody doesn't rescue them.'   About Dr Demartini Dr John Demartini has been a public speaker for nearly 50 years. He is a world-renowned specialist in human behaviour, researcher, author, and educator. He empowers people from all walks of life by sharing his knowledge on self-development and financial wellness. One of his fields of interest is personal development where he has developed a curriculum of programs. One of his seminars, The Breakthrough Experience, uses his revolutionary techniques, the Demartini Method and the Demartini Value Determination Process.  If you want to learn more about Dr Demartini and his work, you may visit his website. You can also see him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you were inspired to start pursuing what you value, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they too can be pushed to go after their passion. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript of the Podcast Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: I want to welcome you back to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have Dr John Demartini. Now you may recognise that latter name. He's been on the show before. And he's definitely one that I want to have him back on again. He is an incredible teacher, and educator, and author of I don't know how many dozens of books. He's been working in the personal development in space for 50 years, I think. Incredible man.  I hope you enjoy part two of this very in-depth conversation about upgrading your life–how to grow your businesses. We talk about also how to reach your full potential. And what sort of things we put in our own way. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Dr John. Also, I would like to let you know we have a Boost Camp coming up. This is a, not a boot camp. It's all about upgrading your life. This is all about being the best version of yourself that you can be, upgrading everything in your life from your health fundamentals to things like sleep, and understanding your brain better your mood and behaviour. Lots and lots of science, and lots of information, and stuff that's going to be actually practical stuff that you can implement in your life to improve how you're performing your health, your vision and purpose in life. And aligning all of these things together.  I hope you'll come and join us. This is an eight-week program that is live with Neil Wagstaff and myself. Neil is my longtime coach and business partner. And he runs all the programs with me that we do with epigenetics, with running hot coaching, and so on. And he is an incredible teacher. I do hope you'll check it out. You can go to peakwellnessco.co.nz, peakwellness, p-e-a-k, peak wellness dot co dot NZ forward-slash boost camp, b-o-o-s-t-c-a-m-p. To find out more, and come and join us, it's going to be a fantastic writer and you're going to learn an awful lot and get to hang out with a whole bunch of people while you're doing it. So check that out.  I also like to remind you too, of our Patron program. We have a Patron program for the podcast to help us keep this on-air, keep us great content, to help us keep the mission going. If you're into doing that, please, for the price of a coffee or a month. Sorry, a coffee a month, you can be involved in this project. And you can also get a whole lot of exclusive member benefits for your troubles. So check all that out at patron.lisatamati.com, p-a-t-r-o-n dot lisa tamati dot com. Right. Now, over to the show with Dr John Demartini.  Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Pushing The Limits. I'm super excited to have an amazing name back again for a second round, Dr John Demartini. Welcome to the show, Dr John. It's fabulous to have you back again.  Dr John: Demartini: Yes, thank you for having me back.  Lisa: It's just–I was so blown away by our conversation last time. And I know you do thousands of these interviews and in the work that you do that you probably can't even remember what you talked about. But it was a real life-changing episode that ended up– we dived into some of your medical work earlier. We went all over the place with your breakthrough experience. I just felt like we didn't quite cover all the bases that I want to tap into your great knowledge.  Having you back again today, and today I thought we'd look at things like I want to dive into things like, ‘How do we achieve the impossible?' I've been doing a lot of work and researching around, what is it that makes incredible people incredible? And that they had the ability to overcome incredible odds and difficulties and obstacles in order to achieve some possible things. And I'm pretty much into a lot of the big thinkers out there. So I wanted to start directly if that's okay. How do we achieve the impossible, Dr John?  Dr John: Well, I don't know. Maybe that's a bit of a metaphor–the impossible is impossible.  Lisa: But yeah, it's a metaphor.  Dr John: Improbable, the improbable.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr John: When the why is big enough the hows take care of thems elves. When you have a big enough reason for doing something, no matter how many obstacles you face, you get up again. And there was an interview. There was an interview by a gentleman I think from 60 minutes with Elon Musk. And they asked him after having three launches explode back to back. ‘You ever think about giving up?' He looked at the guy and he says, ‘I never give up. I'd have to be incapacitated.' Meaning that his mission to go to Mars is too important for any obstacle that might arise to stop it. I would say nothing mortal can interfere with an immortal vision.  Each of us, as you know, have a set of priorities. And the very top, top, top priority is non-negotiable. It's where human sovereignty and divine providence come together, where you feel that it's impossible for you not to fulfil your true destiny. I feel that way with my mission of speaking. I just felt that that was my destiny when I was 17. And I've been doing it 48 plus years now, be soon 49 in a few months. So if you'd have a big enough reason for doing it, you'll see the challenges on the way, not in the way. It's like Edison, a thousand ways to that didn't work for the light bulb to get the light bulb. There was no option about getting a light bulb, he knew he would come up with an answer, he just kept, ‘Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, next. That one doesn't work, next.'  When things are lower on your value, you'll do it if there's pleasure; you'll stop doing it if there's pain. When something's tying your value, you'll do it regardless of pleasure or pain. And you'll see both of them on the way, not in the way. So there's wisdom in not doing low-priority things. There's wisdom in not pursuing something that's not truly and deeply meaningful to you. People who do that build incremental momentum that reaches an unstoppable state, an inertia that's unstoppable. That's the key to extraordinary things. And when it's truly aligned with your value, your identity revolves around it, you feel it's impossible for you not to do it. It's not an option; it's who you are. Lisa: So this involves looking at your values determination, how to sort out what your real– because I think this is where a lot of us come unstuck. We have lots of things we want to do, and we're curious about lots of things and have lots of passions, and it's sorting out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, in order, distilling down that vision so that you're actually hyper-focused and being able to concentrate on the things that you need to concentrate on. I know that's something that I definitely struggle with, when you have so many things that you're interested in. But you're really right when you say like, for me, with my story with my mom, if you remember bringing her back from the mess of aneurysm, there was a non-negotiable. We were doing it, and I was going to get her back or die trying was the attitude that I went inwards. That means sacrificing whatever it took to get to that place. And then we do get there, you know?  Dr John: Well, the thing is not to pursue low-priority things, and to know what those are, and say and delegate everything other than what's important. I don't do anything but research, write, teach. Those are the three things I love doing. But it's all about educating people in human behaviour. So that's the one thing that is non-negotiable that I do. Then I delegate everything else away. That way, you don't have to be distracted and run down. What drains you is doing low priority things. Lisa: Yeah. And this is a lot– yeah, this is a lot that a lot of people, especially startup entrepreneurs, and people that are just getting there, finding your way, are struggling with: the whole delegation thing when they don't have a team around them. What sort of advice do you want to give to people who are at the beginning of their career and don't have a team yet around them to help do all those aspects of it that are draining the hell out of their lives? Dr John: Well, what you do is you ask the question, ‘How is doing this action temporarily until I can find somebody to delegate it to helping me fulfil my mission?' Link it to your brain. Reframe its words. You see it on the way, not in a way, with the knowing that you're going to delegate it. And then, it doesn't cost to delegate. It costs not to. As long as you're doing what's highest in priority that produces the most per hour, it doesn't cost to delegate. Because you're releasing yourself to do the most important thing that produces the most income that produces more than the cost of the delegation, and that they can produce. And yet the person that would love to do that inspired to do that but doesn't have to be motivated to do that. They will spontaneously do it without even thinking about it, you can free yourself up. In 1982, end of 1982, I hired somebody to take care of my financial things: paying payroll, paying bills, bank reconciliations, all that stuff. Because I was sitting there in October of 1982. I was sitting there doing a bank balance, like, ‘What on earth am I doing?' I didn't want to do it. It was distracting, time-consuming. And while I was doing it, I didn't want to think about clients because it was interfering. I needed to get this done, and I'm pushing clients away. I freed that up, and I have not gone back, nor even seen a chequebook. That's 1982. Lisa: Gosh I would love that.  Dr John: I can't even tell you what a chequebook in my company looks like. Lisa: Or accounting or any software.  Dr John: I don't have any of that stuff. I have somebody that does that. That's their job. I– because that's a 20 to $50 an hour job. And why do I value my time? Well, I can make thousands per hour, and tens of thousands per hour. Lisa: But what about the people that can't make the ten thousands of per hour or the thousands per hour, and there's still a net, they're still in taking that leap into getting the first person in the team on board and the second person. I think there's a lot of people in that, jumping from, say, the $100,000 mark to the million-dollar mark of a turnover in a company where it's chaos. I think it's chaos beyond that as well. But it's that getting the initial, taking that risk when you don't have a solid income yet, and yet, you're taking a risk on hiring a business manager or hiring whatever, even assistants. Dr John: If you have a clear job description and you have a clear actions that you can do that can produce more per hour than having to do those things, and you can see, ‘Well, I'm doing five hours a day doing trivial. If I had those five hours, could I go out and close deals?' If you're willing to do that it doesn't cost, ever cost, to hire people.  Lisa: Yeah. So it's a mindset shift, really?  Dr John: Yeah. Because what happens is you think, well, if you're not going to be productive, and they're now, you're just going to pay somebody to do something you were doing, and you're not going to go produce more per hour than it's going to cost. But it frees you up to do something that closes a deal or makes a bigger deal. Makes more income. You're insane not to do it. Now, in my situation, I saw that if I was out doing presentations and taking care of clients, I can make more than tenfold what is going to cost, 20-fold to 100-fold what I was going to pay somebody to do it. It's a no-brainer.  It doesn't cost to hire somebody. Unless you do it ineffectively. You are somebody who doesn't love doing it, you're pushing him uphill, is not inspired by it, and you have the skill by it, and you're micromanaging him and you're having to distract yourself, and you're not doing the thing that produces. That's why it costs money. Not because of delegation, but inadequate delegation. Lisa: So in other words, recruiting the right people to your team is a huge piece of this and getting the right— So what are some of the things that you do when you're analysing somebody to take on into your team? What are some of the processes that you go through from an entrepreneurial standpoint? Dr John: Well, I do all the basics: references and checks and those things. But I just sit them down when I meet them if they get through the screening. I sit down with them. I said, ‘If I was to write a check right now for $10 million and handed it to you, and you never had to work another day in your life. What would you do with your life?' If they're, they don't say what the job is or close to it, I say, ‘Thank you very much.' I walk away.  Lisa: Right? Because they're not. That's not the key thing.  Dr John: That's not their dream. Can I share an interesting story? I don't think I shared this before. Sorry. If I had, just tell me, cut me off. When I was in practice many years ago, I was hiring a manager, and I was scaling up and delegating more and more. We were down to two people's potentials: one was a woman, one was a man. And the man was in for that evening, about five o'clock. I worked till six, usually, but at five, I was telling my patients, five o'clock, this gentleman comes in. He had passed much of the things I thought. But he came into my office. He had a little briefcase, is about 54, looks like a violator jet, this guy. He comes in, sits down on the edge of his chair, and he says, ‘Wow, this is a great opportunity. I've had the opportunity to work with your company would be fantastic. I'm awe-inspired.' I said, ‘Great. Hope you don't mind. But I just got a few questions.' And I had a check. This is back before I got rid of my checks. I got a check that my lady at the front organised. I had the check in front of me. And I said, ‘Your proper name is?' I put his name on the cheque. I wrote 10 million US dollars.  Lisa: It was a real piece?  Dr John: I didn't sign it, but I just put it there. I made sure he saw it. Because any facade he might have, if he saw a check with $10 million on it, his name on it, that's going to distract him. Because the infatuation of that's going to throw any facade that he might try to put on me, ultimately. So I said, ‘If I was to hand you this cheque,' and I showed him the cheque. ‘And I gave you $10 million upfront, and you never had to work another day in your life. What would you do?'  Lisa: What did he say?  Dr John: And he leaned back in his chair like this. He goes, he relaxed a second. He goes, ‘Wow, if I had $10 million. What would I do? I would manufacture furniture. I have a hobby. I love making furniture. I'd make furniture and open up furniture companies.' I said, I got up. I said, ‘Thanks very much.' He stood up and he was like, ‘What?' He said, ‘Well, did I get the job?' I said, ‘No.' ‘Do you mind if I ask why?' I said, ‘Very simple. I'm hiring you for a management position. You said if you had $10 million, you'd love to make furniture. If you're a great manager, how come you haven't managed your life in such a way where you can do what you love?' He just looked at me and he just paused because that's a very good question. ‘And I have nothing I could say, except, you just woke me up.' I said, ‘Thank you,' and I escort him out.  I watched him walk with his head down slowly to his car and sit in his car for a few minutes to just process that. He's like going, ‘Whoa. I thought I'm looking for a job. I'm enthused, I'm really excited, everything else. And I just got slammed with a reality check of what was really important to me. And the real truth was, is I love making furniture.' So he sat in that car, and finally slowly drove off and we ruled him out. We ruled the girl out. So we had to go through another round. Yeah.  Lisa: And so this is part of the process.  Dr John: Three weeks had gone by. And all of a sudden my assistant said. ‘Dr Demartini, there's a gentleman here a few weeks ago that was looking for a job. He's back.' ‘Alright, okay.' He said, she said ‘Should I just sent him back in?' I said, ‘Yeah.' I come down to the same office, same thing, comes in. I'm sitting in the same place, you sit in the same place. But this time, he walks in with a paper bag, a big paper bag, large paper bag with handles on. He said, ‘Dr Demartini,' shook my hand. He said, ‘Dr Demartini. I was here a few weeks ago,' I said, ‘Oh. Yeah, I remember you.' He said, ‘You changed my life.' I said, ‘How so?' He said, ‘When I was enthusiastic looking for the job, I've been looking for a job for three months. I didn't find one. I thought when you said, if I'm such a good manager, how come I haven't managed my own life? And you nailed me. I was a bit depressed after that, and I had a soul searching, and I had a conversation with my wife. Part of the reasons I was taking on jobs is for security instead of doing what I really love to do. And so after that conversation, I told my wife that and I said, “If I was to go out and try to build my own company in furniture manufacturing, would you endure the, whatever we go through to get there?” And she hugged him, and she says, “That's what you've always wanted to do. We'll make ends meet. We'll find a way.”'  He started his company. He started telling people he's there to make furniture and he started making pieces of furniture. He made a bed, and he made a dresser, and he started making furniture and stuff. He also made it available that he could do interior in homes that were being built. He started letting people know in his network. So he's back in my office three weeks later, and he told me that that's the best thing ever happened to his life. He says, ‘I've already got commissioned $5,400 worth of product with the furniture, and that's in three weeks. I'm on track, probably for making $10,000 to my first month now. And that's more than what I was probably going to get paid.'  I said, ‘Congratulations.' And this is what he said to me. He said, ‘You have no idea how much more energy I have, how inspired I am. I don't care about how many hours it is I'm working. I'm staying up, and I'm a different man. I'm loving it. I'm in, I now understand what an entrepreneur is, a bit.' And he said, ‘But this is what I want to do. Because you gave me such a gift. When I came in your office, I noticed the wood. Because you filter with your polar nuclei of your diencephalonic thalamus. You put, you filter reality coin, what you value most. So he noticed the wood in my office.  He said, ‘And I noticed that you had Kleenex boxes sitting on these little rolling carts. It would really be honourable for me if I could actually take those little Kleenex boxes, and melt my Kleenex box systems on your wall that match your wood. All you do is lift them up on a hinge, put the Kleenex box and pull the tissue, put it back down to replace it. And then you have more space on your thing, because I noticed you had less space on there than probably ideal. It really means a lot to me if I can put them in all your rooms.' I said, ‘I would be honoured to have those in there. And I want you to do me a favour. I want you to put your card on the bottom of each one. So I can, for referrals.' He said, ‘I would be glad to do that.' He said, ‘But that would mean a lot. Because you just changed my life.'  He ended up doing what he really loved to do, grew his business. I got complimentary things in all my rooms, which was an added bonus. But it just goes to show that people, when they're doing something that's deeply meaningful, truly inspiring, high in priority, they excel. So don't ever hire anybody who can't see how the job description you want to help them fulfil their highest value. Lisa: Be it personal and be it roles. And not this division of the company. Dr John: The actual actions. So you make sure you have a job description with all the actions and you ask your potential candidate: ‘How specifically is doing this actually going to help you fulfil what's most deeply meaningful to you?' If they can't answer it, don't hire them. If they answer with enthusiasm on all those things, you get them, grab them. If they don't, don't worry because they're going to be microman— you're gonna have to motivate them. Motivation is a symptom, never a solution to humanity. Lisa: And in changing that, I've got a friend Joe Polish. If you know Joe, he's a very famous marketing man and an incredible connector and so on. He talks about, he was talking about entrepreneurship one day, I forget the context of the situation. But he teaches about entrepreneurial things, how to do it. He's hugely successful. Someone said to him once, ‘You've had the same assistant for the last 21 years, for how many years, a lot of years. If she's been hearing you talk about how wonderful it is to be an entrepreneur to do all these things, how come she hasn't gotten that information and runoff and become her own entrepreneur?'  He called the lady over and he said, ‘Why is it that you still with me?' He knew the answer. But she answered, ‘Because I don't want to take on the risk. That's not my job. That's not my passion. My passion is to serve Joe and be the person in the backstage setting all those things up. That is my highest power. That is what I love. That's why I'm still here. I love working with Joe, and I love his mission. And that's what I'm happy doing.' That's the key, is not everybody should be an entrepreneur. Or everybody should be having the same mission. It's that she understands what her passions, what the job is. Dr John: If everybody was an entrepreneur, who would be working for him? Lisa: Yeah. We'd have a hell of a mess. And being an entrepreneur is a long, arduous, often difficult, lonely road full of holes, along the way, potholes. It isn't for everybody, but for people like you and for me, it's, I can go for it. I've got to be running my own ship. And learning from people like you is great for me because then I can see what helps my next steps and what I should be doing. Instead of—  Dr John: Can I share another story?  Lisa: Go for it. Dr John: So, right about the same time when I was hiring that other person, a young gentleman, late 20s, I'm guessing, mid to late 20s, came into my office, and asked if he could have a meeting with me. And he worked with Yellow Pages. There used to be a thing called Yellow Page.  Lisa: Yeah. I'm old enough.  Dr John: They were ads, telephone ads. You put a listing, it's free. But if you put a listing with a little box or a little ad in it, it's a little bit more. You bought the Yellow Page ad. So he was trying to sell Yellow Page ad. So he sat in my office. And he started to do this little spiel. And I had the time. So I took a moment to do it. Because I was curious what the prices were. And at the end of his little spiel, and not even to the end, three quarters through, I stopped him. I said ‘Stop. Just stop.' That was the worst presentation. That was so off. I said, ‘This is not what you want to do in life. What do you really want to do in life?' And he looked at me and he goes, ‘That bad?' And I said, ‘It was bad.' ‘I bet you haven't sold anything.' He says, ‘No, I haven't.' I said, ‘This is not you. What's your heart? Where's your heart? What do you really, really, really, really dream about doing in your career?' He said, ‘I want to be in the restaurant business.' I said, ‘Go to a restaurant today to get a job there, and work your way up until you own your restaurant.' He goes, ‘Well, I needed to hear that. Because I respect you and I needed to hear that from you.' And then I sold him a little audio cassette tape that I'd done, called The Psychology of Attainment. And he bought it, it was only 10 bucks.  He walked out with his $10 thing to listen to because I knew if he listened to it, it would encourage him to keep it going. He left there. Eight years go by, never seen the guy again. Eight years go by. I had moved to a new office. And I was on my way to go have lunch with my CPA. He picked me up. I came downstairs, he picked me up, took me to this little Super Salad restaurant nearby because we both had less than an hour to eat. So it's quick. Get in there and get a salad. You walk in and this Super Salad is a thing where you get a tray, and it's got a whole bunch of foods. And whatever it is they weigh it, and they charge you the acquired weight. So you get salad. You pay less if you get something with it.  As I walked in, and we started going to the line, I saw that young man grown up eight years older in this suit, talking to another man in a suit. And I said, ‘If you don't mind going get me a tray. And I'll catch up. I see someone I must say hi to.' I walk over to this guy. He's talking this man. He's not paying attention to me. I'm standing right next to him. And as he's talking I'm just standing there waiting for him to finish. All of a sudden he finishes, the guy starts to walk off he turns around as if he's going to say, ‘Can I help you?'  Lisa: Yeah, he didn't realise this.  Dr John: And obviously he looks at me and he goes, ‘Oh my god. Wow, wow.' He shook my hand, and ran off and got the other guy to come here, ‘This is the guy I told you about.' And he told him, ‘This is the guy.' And the guy said, ‘Oh, thank you. I'd love to meet you. He's told me all about you, he said you changed his life.' And I said, ‘Well didn't know until today. What impact– Lisa: What are you doing? Yeah. Dr John: But the guy told me, he says, ‘I have eight franchises. I come into my restaurant. That was the manager. I'm checking up on my restaurants and I'll go to the next one. I check them out once a week, I go make my rounds.' He said, ‘That day, I got me a job at Super Salad. I worked myself into a management position for over two years. As I was saving the heck out of my money, which your tape set said to do, I bought into the franchises and I got eight franchises.' Lisa: Jesus! Just from that one tape, that one conversation, see this is the impact– Dr John: I said to him, ‘You just inspired me.' It brought a tear to my eye to know that– because I thought maybe I was a bit tough on you. He said, ‘Sir, you did the most amazing thing to my life that day. Because the truth is, I wanted to be in the restaurant business. And now I am.' Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing The Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that, we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a Patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's p-a-t-r-o-n dot lisatamati dot com. We have two patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us, everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com, and thanks very much for joining us.  Lisa: You've encouraged him basically to have faith in the dream and to– because everybody else, like your family, often your friends, often are, ‘You can't leave that safe job.' I've had this conversation with my husband who's a firefighter. And he says like, ‘I can never leave the fire brigade because it's what I've always done. And that's how I've always, you know, it was my passion,' and so on. And I said, ‘Yes, but you don't have to stay there. That's your choice. Opt for security and– If you want security, if you want to do something, then do it. Life is short.' Dr John: All I know is that if you're not doing something you're inspired by, life can be pretty horrible. I see people. I didn't, I used to get, I lived in New York for a while. And we lived in Trump Tower there, fifty-sixth and fifth, right underneath Donald, so I knew Donald. So I live there for 29 years. And sometimes, you can take taxi. Sometimes, you take, when we're going in the airport, I got a limo. But just going around the city, sometimes I'd have a taxi. I get in the taxi and I– if there was a mess, sometimes I'd pass it by. I go, ‘No, smelly. No, no respect.' But again, in a taxi– if I'm in a hurry, it's hard to get, right? It's 3:30 to 4 o'clock march, I get in whatever I get, because I don't want to wait another 20 minutes. But I get it and I go, ‘How long have you been driving a taxi?' And they'll say a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever it may be. I said, ‘Do you love it?' Some will look in the mirror and go, ‘Pays the bills, man.' And I said, ‘But do you love it?' He goes, ‘Are you kidding, man? If I got a thing in New York, you got to be nuts.' And they have that attitude.  Of course, the car is usually a mess. It's got ripped holes in it. It's got cigarette burns. It's got a little bit of an odour. You know it's not taken cared of; it's not clean. But then you get in another car. And, ‘How long have you driven a taxi?' ‘28 years.' I said, ‘Do you love it?' ‘I love it. I get to meet people like yourself. I meet the most amazing people every day. My father was a taxi driver. My grandfather was a taxi driver in New York. I know every city, every street, I know every part of the city. Here's my card. You want some water?' ‘Sure.' ‘Anything you need to let, give me feedback about my car, please tell me. If there's something not in order, if somebody left something there, if it's dirty, let me know. I'd like to make sure that everybody gets a good experience in my car. If you want to know about the city, you just ask me. Anytime you want to go anywhere in the city, you contact me. And there's my card, I will take you, and I'll make sure you got the best thing, and I'll be on time for you.' He was just engaged. And he loved it. And of course, I got his card. And I called him. And sometimes when I was going around the city, I would use him. He would even come back and pick me up. Lisa: And it shows you that it doesn't matter if you're cleaning toilets or you're a taxi driver or you're at the garbage disposal. Whatever job you're doing, do it well, for starters. That can be your mission in life, is to provide that service. It doesn't have to be taking on the world and flying to Mars like Elon Musk. It's just, do your job; do it well. I don't, I just– I have issue too, with people who just doing the job, getting the paycheck, not doing the job with passion.  You can tell. I walk into my gym and there's a new lady on reception who is just beaming from ear to ear, fully enthusiastic. I see her training; she trains like a maniac. She's just always happy and positive. When somebody comes into that gym now, they get a positive smiley receptionist. ‘Come in' and ‘How was your day?' The contrast to the other person that works at the gym who's surly looking, never smiles. And if you, say ‘Hello, how are you doing?' It's like, ‘Mmm.' And you think, ‘Wow, that is just the difference between someone who's just, “I'm so lucky to be here” and “I'm working.”'  Dr John: They're engaged versus disengaged. Can I share another story?  Lisa: This is great.  Dr John: Right. My father, I started working for my father when I was four. He owned a plumbing business. He wasn't a plumber. He's an engineer, but he had plumbers working for him. And my job was to clean the nipples. And they sound a little sexual, but it's actually, these little pipes and couplings, so it's interesting. But I used to scrape them out with a brush and oil them to make sure they would be preserved because they'll get a little rusty sitting around. Then, my dad would then, every once while, not every day, but most of the time, would give me the opportunity to go out with the plumbers to go on calls to learn plumbing. Everyone, so he would say, ‘Well, you're going to go with Joe today. You're going to go with Bob. You're going to go with Warren. You're going to go with…' And this one day, he said, ‘You're going to go with Jesse.'  I spend part of the day with Jesse. And Jesse was a ditch digger. He was an Afro-American man that was a ditch digger. And I said, ‘You want me to go with Jessie, am I going to dig a ditch?' He said, ‘Yes. I want you to go with Jesse.' I said, ‘Why?' He said, ‘You'll know when you get back.' ‘Okay.' So I go out with Jesse. We drive to this house that is about a 35-year-old house that needs a new water main from the street, the main from the street up to the house. And so he got a T-bar out, and he got a hose, and he got some paper, and he got a sharpshooter, which is a special shovel, and a little round-headed shovel, and a level and a string. This long string thing wrapped up on this piece of wood. And some, and another stick. The stick that had string around it where there are two sticks on either end. You could open them up unravelling. He stayed one at one place, stayed the other place, exactly where the line is going to go. Then he took a T-bar and went down into the ground to make sure there's no roots, no rocks, no anything that might interfere with the laying of a pipe. Then he watered it to make sure that you could go and if you dug it, it was just wet enough that it wouldn't crumble if you turn the sod over. And then he lined paper on one side of it. And then he showed me how to dig the ditch. I would go down to exactly the width of the sharpshooter, which is how deep it had to go. And then we would turn it over onto the paper. And that meant that the grass wasn't even cut, it was just folded over. Right. And we had a perfectly straight ditch. And then he showed me how to create the ditch with this other little thing. And it would go on top of the sides. It wouldn't fall off into the grass. It would just be on top of the paper, and on the inside. Then he took the level and he made sure that the grade was perfectly level from one place to the other because if you have a dip in it, water will sit there and rust and it'll wear out quicker. But if it flows exactly in line, you don't get as many rusting. We put this pipe down, pretty perfectly clear, perfectly graded. We levelled it, made sure it was perfectly level. We installed it to the house, into the main. We then put some of the dirt back over it. Put the sod back on, patted it down, watered it, squished it down, loosened up the grass so you couldn't even tell it had ever been done now. And we had a brand new waterline done. And when you're done, you could not, until you could walk around, you couldn't tell it was done. It was perfect. And then we got in the truck and started to drive off. And I asked, you know, Jesse, his name was. I said, ‘That was neat.' You know, I'm a young kid. And I said, ‘Call me J for John.' He said, ‘J, I have the greatest job on this planet, the greatest job a man could ever, ever, ever ask for.' And I said, ‘What do you mean?' I thought he's a ditch digger. He said, ‘Without water, people die. I bring life to people. My job is the most important job. They can't bathe. They can't drink. They can't make food. They can't do anything without my water pipe. I had the most important job on this planet. And I bring water to people. Without water people die.' And I thought, ‘Whoa.' And I came back and he said to me, ‘My job is to do such an amazing job that they call the office and complain that we never came.'  Lisa: Because they can't see where he's been!  Dr John: It's so immaculate. They don't believe that somebody came and they'll call and cuss out your dad. “Why is it not, why did you not do the main?” And your dad knows. Tell them, “If you don't mind just walk out. They will see that the main is there.”' They're unbelievably astonished that there was no mess and it's perfect. And he didn't tell us about Jesse, and the respect he does when he does water main. He knew that if I would go out there and learn from him, here's a man that does what he loves. Yeah, and he's the ditch digger. And in those days, you didn't make a little bit, you didn't make a lot of money. Lisa: And I love that. And it just reminds me of my dad. He was always cleaning up at the garden. He was a firefighter professionally, but he would be, every spare moment, gardening somebody's garden, cleaning up, landscaping, doing it. And he worked on films as a landscape artist and so on. He was always the one that was cleaning everything up, everything was immaculate by the end of the day. Whereas every, all the other workers were just, ‘Down tools. It's five o'clock, we're off,' sort of thing. Drop it and run. Everything was always a mess.  My dad, he always had everything perfectly done. And was, always came home satisfied because he'd spent, when he wasn't at the fire brigade, he spends his day with his hands in the dirt, out on the sun, physically working in nature, and loving it and doing a proper job of it. So yeah, it just reminded me because he taught us all those things as we were growing up too. And would take us and teach us how to paint and teach us how to, all of these things.  Dr John: The more something is high on your value that you're doing, your identity revolves around your highest value. Whatever is highest on your value, your identity revolves around. As a result of it, the pride in workmanship goes up to the degree that it's congruent with what you value most. Because you're inspired and love doing it. And it's, your identity goes around it. So my identity would rather revolve around teaching. So I'm inspired to do teaching. I can't wait to do it.  Whatever high an individual's values is what they're going to excel at most. And they are wanting to do it not because they have to, but because they love to. People do something they love to, completely do a different job than people that have to. They're creative, innovative. They go out of their way. They don't care if they have to work extra time. They don't care about those things because they're doing what they love. Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. You have some fabulous stories to illustrate the point. So whatever you're doing people, do it properly, and do it with passion, and try to get to where you want to. You might, this just takes time to get to where you want to go. You come out of school, you're not going to end up being near the top of your game. But you have to start somewhere and head towards what your passion is. I wanted to figure— Dr John: If you start out right at the very beginning, master planning, you can get there pretty quick. In 18 months, I went from doing everything, to do the two or three things that I did most effectively. I delegated the rest away. But my income went up tenfold.  Lisa: Wow. Yeah. Because you were actually doing the things that mattered the most. Dr John: Me going out and speaking and me doing the clinical work was the two things that I was, because that's the thing I went to school for. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to do the administrative or I didn't want to do all that other stuff. Hire people to do that. That freed me up. Lisa: Yeah, it's a fantastic message. Now, I wanted to flip directions on you if I could, and I've been doing a lot of study around flow states and optimising. How do we build into ourselves this ability to be operating at our best, which we've been talking a little bit about? What neurotransmitters are at play when we're in a flow state? How do we maintain this over time to remain inspired and not be worn down?  We think about flow state or I don't know how to put this into words, people. By that I mean, it's that state where you're just on fire, where everything's happening really well, you're at your genius place, your talents are being expressed properly, and you're just in it. I would get that when I'm running, or when I was making jewellery and I would, time would disappear, and I'd be just in this otherworldly place, almost sometimes. How do we tap into that? Because that is where we as human beings can be our optimal, be our best. Have you got any ideas around that as far as the neurotransmitters and the neuroscience of flow states? Dr John: Yes. It boils down to the very same thing I was saying a moment ago: not doing low priority things. There's two flow states though, and they get confused. Maybe people have confused a manic elated, utopic, euphoric high, which is a fantasy of all positives, no negatives in the brain that makes you manic. That flow state is a hypocriticality, amygdala-driven, dopamine-driven fantasy high that won't last.  Then there's a real flow state. When you're doing something that's truly inspiring and deeply meaningful, you get tears in your eyes getting to do it. You're not having a hypocriticality, you're having a supercriticality, where the very frontal cortex is actually activated, not the lateral but the medial one, and you're now present. It's the gratitude centre; it's grace. There you're in the flow because you're doing something you really love to do that you feel is your identity. That's where time stops.  Some people confuse a manic episode with that state. But a manic episode crashes. But the real flow state is inspired. That's when you're able to do what you love doing consistently. When Warren Buffett is doing, reading business statements, and financial statements, and deciding what companies to buy, this is what he loves doing. For me, I'm studying human behaviour and anything to do with the brain, and mind, and potential, and awareness. I'm that way. I can lose track of all time and just be doing it for hours. It's not a manic state. That's an inspired state. An inspired state is an intrinsically driven state where you're willing to embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of it.  You love tackling challenges and solving problems, and you'll just research and research or do whatever you're doing, and you just keep doing it because you won't stop. That's not a manic episode. Although manics can look similar, there's a difference. Though a manic state comes from the dopamine, you got a high dopamine, usually high serotonin, you got encapsulants, endorphins. But you also don't have, you're not perceiving the downsides. You're just seeing all upsides. You are blinded by little fantasy about what's going to happen. And that eventually catches you, because that it's not obtainable. Fantasies are not obtainable, objectives are.  Eventually, the other side comes in, and osteocalcins comes in and norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol, the stress responses. Because all of, all of a sudden your fantasy's not being met. But when you think you're going after the fantasy, just think of it this way: when you're infatuated with somebody, you're enamoured. You're in this euphoria. All you see is the upside, and you're blind to the downside. Actually, at this time, you say, ‘I'm in love.' No, you're infatuated. And then when weeks go by, and months go by, you start to find out, ‘Oh, I was fooled. That person I thought was there is not who I thought.' And you find out about this person. And that's short-lived. Yeah.  When you actually know that human beings can have both sides, and you don't have a fantasy of one side, but you embrace both sides, and know that they're a human being with a set of values. If you can communicate and articulate what you want in terms of those values, you now have a fulfilling relationship. It's a long term relationship. It's not volatile. It's not manic depressive. It's just steady. That's the one that's the flow. That's what allows the relationship to grow. The manic thing is transient. The real flow is eternal. Lisa: So it's the difference between being in love, and infatuated, and being in actual true real long-term love. Dr John: Well, infatuation, people confuse with love. If I have an expectation on you to be nice, never mean; kind, never cruel; positive, never negative; peaceful, never wrathful, giving, never taking; generous, never stingy; considerate, never inconsiderate. If I have a fantasy about who you are and I'm high because I think I've found this person, that's ‘Oh, well, it's all one-sided.' It's not sustainable. No one's gonna live that way. But if I have an expectation, if they're a human being with a set of values, I can rely on them to do what's highest on their value, and nothing more. I respect their value, I see how it's serving my value, and I can appreciate what they're committed to, and don't have any expectation except them to do what they do. They won't let me down. And I'll be grateful for them. Lisa: Why didn't you tell her that when I was a 20-year-old finding the wrong people in my life? Relationship-wise, are you going after the wrong types of people? Dr John: If you go after it a little infatuation, you have to pay with a broken crush. You never have a broken heart; you have a broken fantasy. Eventually, it helps you actually learn to go after what's in your heart. Lisa: And value what is really important. Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to have had never met a lot sooner? Dr John: There's no mistake, so much happened, because you wouldn't be doing this project. Lisa: No. Then this is what every piece of crap that's ever come your way in life has got an upside and a downside. Because I hear in one of your lectures talking about this: don't get ever overexcited, and don't get really depressed. It's always in the middle. You put it so eloquently, it was, whenever something good happens to you, don't get too overly excited about it. And whenever something bad happens to you, don't get overly depressed about it. Because there's something in the middle of there. You're not seeing the downsides of that good thing, and you're not seeing the upsides.  I've actually integrated that now into my life. When something good, I used to have this thing, ‘Oh my god, I have this breakthrough. I've had this breakthrough.' And ‘This happened to me.' And then I'll go and talk about it. And, because I'm a very open person and I found actually that's not good in a couple of ways. Because I'm overexcited about it. I've ticked it off in my brain almost as being happened. Dr John: If you're overexcited, you're blind to the downside. Lisa: Yeah. And you think it's already happened. Say you meet someone, new possible job, or it's a possible contract, or something like that. And you got all excited about it. Because you've got you've initiated the process, but in your brain, you've already ticked that box and got the job and you're off.  Dr John: Then you undermine it. And you said it's related about a job opportunity. You usually have it taken away from you. You're mostly unready for it. If you're really ready for the job opportunity, you're going to know what it's going to take workwise to be able to get paid. You'll already get the downside and your objective. And know, ‘Oh, that's gonna be 28 hours of work here.'  Lisa: That's not cynical, that's not cynicism. That's actually not realism.  Dr John: It's grounded objectives. People who keep grounded objectives don't have job opportunities taken away from them. But people who get elated about it, brag about it, talk about it, almost inevitably disappears. Lisa: Wow. Okay. And so you got to be looking at, I've elated— a couple of opportunities come up that are possibly I'm thinking about doing. I'm like, ‘That one's gonna take so much work in this direction. That means going to be the sacrifice for you.' And the old me would have just gone, ‘Yeah. Let's do it, jump in. And I'm like, ‘Am I just getting old or is this actually a better way to be?' Dr John: My dad taught me something as a plumbing industry. He'd have to, they'd say, ‘Okay, we're going to build this house. Here's all the plumbing that's going to be involved in it.' They'd see the plans. He'd have to do an estimate. What would it cost to produce all that, put that together? If he got elated and he didn't do his cost, by the time he finishes, he didn't make any profit. But if he does his due diligence and knows all the responsibilities, what happens if it rains? What happens if there's delays? What happens if the permits are delayed? He puts all the variables in there and checks it all off. He then goes in to the customer and says, ‘This is what it's going to cost.'  He said, sometimes the customer would come to him and say, ‘Well, yeah. But this other one came in at $10,000 cheaper.' My dad would sit there and he would say to him, he said, ‘I want to show you something. I guarantee you, the man that comes in at $10,000 cheaper, is not going to be thinking of all the variables. You're going to end up not having the job that we're going to do. Let me make sure you understand this. You may not hire me, and that's okay. But I want to make sure you're informed you make a wise decision. Because if you don't, you're going to go pay that side to save $10,000, it's going to cost you an extra 10.'  Lisa: Yep. Been there, done that. Dr John: Well, my dad used to go through it, and with a fine-tooth comb, he explained all the different variables. He says, ‘Now, what I want you to do is go back to the person that's giving you those things and ask them all those questions. If they didn't think about it, they're going to either not make money off you and they're not going to want to continue to do the work. Or they're not going to do a great job because they're losing money. Or you're going to end up getting a thing done, then they're never going to want to do follow up and take care of you again as a customer. So here's what it costs. I've been doing this a long time. I know what it costs. I know what the property is. So I'd rather you know the facts, and be a little bit more and make sure it's done properly. Then go and save a few bucks and find out the hard way.' Here's the questions they go check. They came back to my dad.  Lisa: Yep. When they understood that whole thing. And I think this is a good thing in every piece of, every part of life. It's not always the cheapest offering that's the best offering, which you learn the hard way. Dr John: I had somebody come to me not too long ago, maybe four months ago, earlier this year. And said, ‘I go to so and so's seminar for almost half the price of your seminar. Why would I go to your seminar?' And I said, ‘That's like comparing a Rolls Royce to a Volkswagen.' I said, ‘So let me explain what you're going to get here. Let me explain what you're going to get here. Then you can make a decision. If you want that Volkswagen outcome, that's fantastic. If you want a Rolls Royce, I'm on the Rolls Royce. I'm going to give you something about here.' And once you explain it, and make the distinctions, people will pay the difference.  Lisa: Yeah. And that's– in a business, you have to be able to explain to them as well. When I was a jeweller, when I started, I was a goldsmith in a previous life. And we used to make everything by hand and it was all custom jewellery, etcetera, back before China and the mass production and huge factories and economies of scale really blew the industry to pieces. For a long time you were actually in that hanging on to one of those and not transitioning into the mass production side of it because I didn't want to, but not being able to represent the value that actually what you were producing: the customisation, the personalisation, the handmade, and people wouldn't understand that.  You end up chopping your own prices down and down and down to the point where it no longer became a viable business. And that was the state of the industry and so on and so forth. But people could not see the difference between this silver ring and that silver ring. That one's a customised, handmade, personalised piece that took X amount of hours to produce. And this is something they got spit out of a production line at a team and other people are wearing. But people can't see the value difference. Dr John: Yeah, you have to, you're responsible for bringing it to their awareness. If you've been to a sushi restaurant, they have this egg that's in layers. I noticed that to get some nigiri with an egg on it with a little seaweed wrapped around it, it was like $4 per piece. And the other sushi was like $2 at the time. I thought, just an egg. Why would it be that much? And then I thought, and then I watched him prepare one, and how many hours it took to prepare one of those slabs of egg because he had to do it in layers. We had to loony take a pan, take an egg, poured in the egg, cook it just a certain level. And then lay that, scramble it, laid on top layer to time while it's hot, and layer by layer by layer by layer and cut it and everything else to make that thing. And I realised that is an individual egg-layered piece of egg. And I realised after seeing him I go, ‘That's a $10 egg.'  Lisa: This is cheap.  Dr John: I was thinking, ‘How the heck does he do that for four bucks? How did he make any profit out of it?' I never questioned it after th

Raw & Real with Dr Lisa  Yes. Your body. You, the being, the soul, and your body have the potential to be an amazing team. You both have the power, the potency, and the knowledge to allow your life to be as pleasurable and orgasmic as you can only see in your wildest dreams! You also have the amazing potential for healing your body and others. What happens when you are not aware of that potential and you are use these super powers against you is that every situation, person and energy will leave an imprint in you. And your life might become affected by the energy of others. It's time to allow Healer inside of you to SHINE instead of being drowned by others energies. Let's do it! Check out my upcoming events and classes: https://www.drlisacooney.com/events     Dr. Lisa's Book: Lies Of Money Purchase here AccessConsciousness.com www.drlisacooney.com/   *Listen now on the Inspired Choices Network app!  https://linktr.ee/inspiredchoicesnetwork ~ More About Raw & Real with Dr Lisa ~  Dr Lisa Cooney is a Doctor of Psychology and Licensed Therapist with 25 years' experience.  She is a bestselling Author and the creator of the ROAR™ (Radically Orgasmic Alive Reality) methodology to move beyond abuse & trauma. Dr Lisa travels the world facilitating dynamic, fun, life changing classes that share practical tools and accompany people to actualize the lives they have always dreamed of and didn't dare to hope to have.  And she always encourages others to choose different! “Be You!  Beyond Anything! Create Magic!  Live your ROAR™!” Dr. Lisa has empowered thousands of people in breaking free from all forms of abuse to create infinite possibilities for themselves and live a life they truly enjoy. In her work, Dr. Lisa weaves an eclectic collage of cross cultural, multi-faith, collaborative and participatory spiritual approaches leading individuals towards tangible and practical results that change and transform their world.  She is strongly moved to bridging global discrepancies of conflict and violence through tangible forms of conscious, mindful communication and discourse. She looks forward to guiding individuals to become their most authentic self, their highest light self.  Dr. Lisa invites people to remember who they really are and create their life according to that intrinsic knowing in loving and compassionate communion. The author of three books:  Radically Alive Beyond Abuse, Lies of Money, and Creating After Abuse (coming Spring 2021!), Dr. Lisa is an internationally acclaimed facilitator, speaker, and group leader. Come get Raw and Real with Maverick of Consciousness Dr Lisa! www.drlisacooney.com To get more of Raw & Real with Dr Lisa, be sure to visit her podcast page : https://www.inspiredchoicesnetwork.com/podcast/raw-real-with-dr-lisa

We regularly buy our food from markets without a second thought. But to take charge of our health and nutrition, we have to ask: are these foods really good for us?  From produce to sauces, our food can be chock-full of harmful chemicals without us knowing about it. Even if you are a more conscious shopper, the industry labels ingredients to take on deceptively natural-sounding names. Fresh produce can also be laden with pesticides. So, how can we be more discerning about our food?  Celebrity nutritionist Cyndi O'Meara joins us in this episode to discuss how we can watch out for harmful foods. She shares how food production and supply have changed drastically over the years. Her advice? Check the label. She also recommends being a nutrition activist by taking matters into your own hands and doing your own research.  If you want to know more about eating real food for wellness, then this episode is for you!    Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition, and mental performance to your specific genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training and coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com. We can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books, Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, dramatically decreases over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting-edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost NAD+ levels in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity, rigorously tested by an independent, third-party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third-party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop Now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500 mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust: NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting-edge science) combats the effects of ageing and is designed to boost NAD+ levels. The NMN capsules are manufactured in an ISO 9001-certified facility. Boost Your NAD+ Levels: Healthy Ageing Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Understand how food production and supply have changed over the years and why we need to educate ourselves about it.  Learn how certain chemicals are clean labelled to become more natural-sounding ingredients.  Discover how you can improve your health by changing your diet.    Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to the Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! Listen to other Pushing the Limits Episodes: #170: Dr David Minkoff: The Search For The Perfect Protein And Why So Many Of Us Are Deficient  Connect with Cyndi: Facebook I Twitter I LinkedIn    Books by Cyndi:  Changing Habits Changing Lives Lab to Table: Food used to be grown on a farm...now it's made in a lab   Changing Habits: New Zealand and Australia    Take up nutrition courses by Cyndi at The Nutrition Academy  A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!      Episode Highlights [03:29] Cyndi's Background on Nutrition Cyndi first enrolled in anthropology but subsequently shifted to nutrition.  She saw how dietitians viewed nutrition—mechanistically. So, she decided to study human anatomy instead. After university, she started doing nutrition consultations. She advised her clients to shift from the SAD (standard Australian diet) to real foods. Her approach worked wonders for her clients. But forty years later, this type of nutrition shift is no longer enough.  Due to the consumption of ultra-processed foods, many people's food sensitivities require individualised nutrition. [09:40] The Food Industry's Tricks The food industry has become sneakier over the years.  Many packaged and processed foods smell and look like real food even when they are not. For example, vanilla flavouring can be the product of bacteria's consumption of a substrate.  These substrates can be animal-, plant-, or even plastic-based.   Many food additives are a product of synthetic biology. Listen to the full episode to learn more!  [14:29] The Changing Landscape of Our Food Supply The industry now uses genetic modification on microbes, not just on crops.  Genetically modified corn produces toxins that cause bugs' stomachs to explode, which we then consume.  These toxins are harmful to the cells in our gut. In Australia and New Zealand, there is a campaign to radiate fresh produce in groceries.  Cyndi argues that this move would destroy the good soil-based bugs in these foods and sterilise the seeds. [20:06] Becoming a Health and Nutrition Activist Question the origins of your food. You can start by asking local farmers.  Cyndi started the Nutrition Academy to promote local farmers and empower individuals to choose the food they eat. Changing your food choices can be overwhelming. However, small steps are better than none.  You can start with changing your breakfast and learning to prioritise real foods over processed ones.  [26:57] Decoding Ingredients Cyndi advocates checking all your food's ingredients.  For example, quality chocolate should have no emulsifiers, as these kill the bacteria that protect your gut. Many ingredients, such as rosemary extract, sound natural but are either synthetic or heavily processed. In the food industry, this is called clean labelling.  Stop buying packaged foods. Instead, make things from scratch or buy from someone you trust. Learn to read ingredients and make sure that there are no extracts, acids, flavours, colours, and sweeteners.  [37:00] Start to Question and Think A lot of clinical studies nowadays are being funded by industries with a vested interest. Start to question information. Research credible sources for yourself.  There is always a better way—make the effort to learn about it.  Many people think that diseases come with age, but this is only because they've accumulated so many bad habits.  [43:45] Improve and Change Your Lifestyle Your body can heal and do wonders only if you change your habits.  Make sure you manage your stress and do things to lower your stress levels.  With our nutrition, we can affect which of our genes turn on and off. Simple walks or touching soil can increase the good bacteria in your microbiome and boost your serotonin levels.  Don't just stay isolated in front of your screen. Go out into nature to become healthy.  [49:38] Longevity and Wellness  In ancient cultures, people lived up to 100 years. Nowadays, many people are suffering from chronic illnesses or have a disability.  We need both a vitalistic and mechanistic view of health. However, the health system tends to isolate our conditions instead of looking at the patient's lifestyle.  [56:16] Trust and Questioning Advertising has led us to believe that if we're not well, we need to take pills.  We have to shift from a paradigm of trust to one of questioning.  Do your homework and learn more about what you're consuming.   7 Powerful Quotes 'I grow my own food. Because I think we're going to get to a point where people are either going to have to do that or put up with what the food industry is doing.' ‘You're an activist because you are choosing to buy from a farmer in your area.' ‘We didn't want to eat BHA and BHT. We don't want to eat MSG. We got smart. We would look on the label, (sic) it would have that, we'd say no.' ‘It's about reading the ingredients and making sure there's no extracts and acids and flavours and colours and sweeteners.' ‘Our body has the ability to fight. But if we do not feed it the right ingredients, if we do not give it the lifestyle it needs… and if we don't give it sunshine, if we don't give it love and connection, if we don't breathe properly, and sleep, then we are going to be in trouble.' ‘You look at a lot of the clinical studies that have been funded by the industry that's promoting it, and you have to ask yourself, ‘How independent was theirs?' ‘Once you have your philosophy, you don't fall for everything.' About Cyndi Cyndi O'Meara is a nutritionist, best-selling author, international speaker and the founder of Changing Habits, an innovative and impactful whole foods company. Cyndi also built The Nutrition Academy, an online course to teach nutrition based on vitalistic philosophies, anthropology, environment, and lifestyle.  Her passion for nutrition also led to her groundbreaking book, Changing Habits Changing Lives, and her most recent work, Lab to Table. She is also an in-demand keynote speaker, especially after her What's With Wheat? TEDx Talk. Cyndi and her businesses are multi-awarded in Australia.  Interested in Cyndi's work? Check out Changing Habits and The Nutrition Academy.  You can also reach her on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.       Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends, so they can learn how to improve their nutrition. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential, with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Hi, everyone, welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today I have another fantastic guest with you. Cyndi O'Meara from Australia, from the Sunshine Coast, joins me today. Now she is a celebrity nutritionist. She's an author, she's an all around amazing lady. I can't believe that she's actually 61, because she looks like in her 30s. She's just an incredible bundle of energy and an incredible mind of information. So I do hope you enjoy this episode that gets really into the weeds on nutrition, on E numbers, on the chemicals and foods, on toxins, on things that you really really need to know about. So I hope you enjoy this episode.  Before we head over to the show, just want to let you know about our Boost Camp. Now, this is not boot camp, this is Boost Camp. This is an eight week long online webinar series that Neil and I are running from the first of September, and we would love you to come and join us. This program is all about you all about upgrading your life, all about being the best version of yourself that you can be. It's about ageing like a winner. It's about longevity, it's about upregulating your brain and your mind and fine-tuning yourself to being more resilient. It's about health fundamentals. It's about understanding your biology, understanding what types of exercise to do and when and how, understanding your own body types, understanding more about your genetics, this is a really full on program that we'll be delivering live. And you can join us then we would love you to do that.  So what I want you to do is to head over to peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp. Not boot camp, Boost Camp. B-O-O-S-T-C-A-M-P. I'll repeat that: peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp, and join us on this program. If you didn't catch that URL, write to me, I'll send it to you immediately. If you want to upregulate your life, have more resilience, be tougher, mentally stronger, have more focus, have more control over your life, your biology, then do join us where we really, really stoked to have you come on board.  Also, just a reminder, too: we have our Patron program for the podcast now, is open. This is a way for you to support this podcast. We've been going now for five and a half years, and every week I find incredible guests for you to listen to and learn from. This is like having a university in your pocket basically, with the best professors, with the best doctors, with the best scientists, with the most elite athletes, real high performance people. It takes an awful lot of work, I can tell you, and it's been five and a half years and I really need a bit of help to keep this on air. So we would really appreciate your support. You can join us for the price of a cup of coffee a month that really, these micro commitments that people do really help the show stay on the air. So if you like what we're about, if you like our mission, if you want to support this mission on helping people take control of their health, and be more in control of their life, then please head on to patron, P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. Right, now over to this exciting show with Cyndi O'Meara. Hi everyone and welcome to Pushing the Limits. I am super excited to have you with me again this week for another exciting installment of the show. I have lovely Cyndi O'Meara with me, who is sitting on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Welcome to the show.  Cyndi O'Meara: Thank you.  Lisa: Fantastic to have you there. Cyndi is a celebrity nutritionist, author, runs a company called Changing Habits in Australia, which is all about educating people, from what I understand, educating people around nutrition and helping them cut through the mess of the noise that's out there and get them into the right mindset and the right things to be thinking about. So today we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into the world of nutrition. So Cyndi, before we get underway with some topics, can you just give the listeners who don't know you a little bit of background about you and what you do? Cyndi: Sure. So I graduated, well, I started my nutrition education in 1980. But I actually didn't start as a nutritionist. I was doing pre-med at the University of Colorado and one of the subjects that I did was anthropology. I did a year of anthropology and cultural anthropology and I thought, ‘Wow, it was food that was really important in the survival of humans and so that we could have babies and keep going,' and I was really intrigued by it and I thought, well I'll become a nutritionist.  So I came back to Australia and I went to Deakin University and finished my Bachelor of Science majoring in nutrition to go do dietetics and at the end I went, ‘This is nothing like what I was taught in anthropology'. So in anthropology, I was taught hunter-gatherer, agriculturalists, paleo, herders — real food. There was no margarine, there was no low fat, there was no processed or ultra-processed foods. There was none of this, and this is what the dietitians were talking about.  They were looking at more mechanistically nutrition, as opposed to what I was taught with culture and anthropology was to look at it very bio-holistically. So I decided, well, I couldn't become a dietitian. So I went back to university to RMIT. I did two years of human anatomy. That was, I kept cadavers for two years, I did all the -ology: the pathology, embryology, histology, parasitology, everything.  At the end of that, six years at uni, I went, ‘I actually know what the human body needs, it needs real food, it needs what I learned in my first year of university.' I could have stopped going to university, and done what I thought. I started to just do consultations, and I only did real foods. I didn't, I got them off the SAD diet, which is the standard Australian diet. We could call it the SNZD diet — too the standard New Zealand diet. The standard American diet and the standard UK diet — margarine, breakfast cereals, low-fat milk, bread, cheese, those plastic fantastic foods and gotten them onto real food. And the results were remarkable. So that was in the 80s.  We now jump to 2021, 40 years on. What I am seeing is a vastly different population, and vastly different problems that we didn't see in the 80s. Now, it's almost like we need to do very individualized nutrition, because so many people have food sensitivities, food allergies, they have the antecedents of their life. So they may have been exposed to a chemical, they may have eaten ultra-processed foods and so they've wrecked their guts or, whatever is happening in— Lisa: Yep, these products or something like that.  Cyndi: Yeah, I only had to change their diet from the SAD diet to real food diet, and we'd get results. I can't do that anymore. So the thing is it we then have to dive deep to find out what is the root cause of what's happening, and what is the problem? I'm not just talking on an individual basis, here, I'm talking on a global basis. 78% of the US population has a gut issue. 50, I think it's 48 to 50% of their kids have chronic disease, one or more. In Australia, it's 38 to 40 with chronic disease.  Now, when I went to school in the 60s, 2% of the whole population of Australia had a chronic disease. Now we have our kids at 38 and 40%. And New Zealand won't be any different, they will be about the same as Australia. If you get to 60, at the age of 60, which I am, I'm 61 this year—  Lisa: Wow, you look amazing! You've done something right.  Cyndi: Well, this is what I do, I eat real food, and I look the best I can. So at the age of 60, the chances of you having chronic disease, one or more, is 80%. So I'm in the 20% percentile. Because I don't do what the rest of the population do. I am not a statistic because I don't do what they're doing. If you want to be a statistic, you do what everybody else is doing. If you don't want to be a statistic, you do something completely different.  That's what I learned very early on. Don't go with what everybody else is doing. Do something different. I would believe that that's you, Lisa. I have to tell you this, Lisa. We've already had the opposite interview where I interviewed you and what you did with your mum and your book. I went through a bit of a crisis in our family and that kept, what you said kept playing in my ear. Lisa: Really?  Cyndi: What you did. You think you're doing something that should be working and your mum just stayed on that level, and then she shot up? Yeah, that's what was happening with us. So I'm well thank you for your incredible resilience, your persistence, everything you did.  Lisa: Someone to tell, someone to tell. Cyndi: Yeah, and I guess that's what I've always been like, but you, your words were brilliant. Thank you.  Lisa: And we all need people to come along and confirm that we're on the right track sometimes because we are getting bombarded with ‘This isn't possible'. I mean, I've just been working with a young man today. He's had a mess of brain injury and the doctors have told him, ‘You'll never talk, you'll never walk, you'll never do anything again'. He's already eight months into his rehabilitation, he's talking, he's starting to walk, and I'm helping him with different things now, and he will make a full comeback. I have no doubt about it, because he has a family that's behind him, he has a mum who thinks outside the box, and is willing to do whatever it takes, and those are the people that will get the results.  This is why these sort of conversations are so, so crucial to have so that we start to understand, and you have the expertise in the area that I'm sort of, know a little bit about but I'm not a complete expert in nutrition side of it. So I'm really keen to dive in. And if I can help you with your family situation, please do reach out. I'd love to help  Cyndi: We might just have a little conversation at the end of it.  Lisa: Yes, we will. I actually was going to take you through the epigenetics, I've just remembered now, and go through that path with you. But I totally agree with you. What I'm seeing in our population now is, when I was at school in the 70s, it was obesity was a rare thing. You had the odd kid who was overweight. Now you look around, and it's like the opposite is having any kid who's not overweight, and people seem to see that this is normal.  If our kids are already like this, and they're already developing things like prediabetes and diabetes before they even reach puberty, in some cases, this is like a mess of warning alarms. For me what's coming down the road as far as a health crisis and the cost that this is going to be on, you know, and human suffering, but also on the society. We have to start standing up and saying, ‘Hey, what we're doing isn't working guys, and we need to make some changes'.  The real food is definitely we we need to be starting from and the processed foods, what is it that's in processed foods that is causing so much trouble? Because isn't like a spaghetti bolognese sauce that I buy from Domino's or something, why is it not the same as what grandma made when she got tomatoes out of the garden? Let's start there, and the weird sort of stuff, so to speak. Cyndi: So in 1998, I wrote a book called Changing Habits, Changing Lives, and it was about the food industry and what food they were suggesting you had for breakfast, I'd say so breakfast cereal, and then I would explain how they make it, what's put into it, what is fortification? So I'd go through that, and then I'd give an example of what we could have for breakfast. Since that time, I have updated that book five times, because the food industry is not getting better as far as our health goes, but they're getting incredibly tricky, with additives and their chemicals to make you think you're eating food.  So it might smell like food, look like food, taste like food, but it is, no way is it food. Let me give you an example of natural vanilla flavoring. This is just one ingredient. So what they've done is that they've figured out if they genetically modify a bacteria, and they put in the smell of the vanilla bean, so the smell of the vanilla bean gene into that bacteria, put it on recycled plastic, as a substrate as it's eating, it eats it, it will make natural vanilla flavoring.  Lisa: Oh my God. So it's coals. Really? Cyndi: Really.  Lisa: That's a new one on a completely left field. That's just one little wee, soddy flavoring.  Cyndi: One ingredient: citric acid, you think it comes from citrus. They genetically modify a mold, put it on a substrate, the substrate could be animal-based, it could be plant based, it could be plastic-based. They're getting really, they're figuring out that there are bacteria that will eat plastic and produce something. So it produces like citric acid. A lot of our additives now are what we call synthetic biology. So they're genetically modifying microbes in order to make a vitamin, amino acid, or something that's going to go into your supplements or into your food supply or your medicine. Lisa: Wow, that's frightening. That's frightening what you just told me there and I wasn't aware that that, to that degree, the genetic modifying of our food is so because you know, you stay away from genetic modified crops. This is about as far as my knowledge goes in that direction, to be honest. So you're saying that the additives and the preservatives and the stuff that they're using in there is actually, they're doing this genetic stuff? Cyndi: Yeah, so they figured out that microbes, you know, nobody's gonna care about microbes, and don't like animals or rats or anything like that. No one's gonna care about microbes. They figured that if they genetically modify them, they can manipulate them to do anything. In the 1990s, a Japanese company manipulated, I think it was tryptophan. They use the genetic modification of a microbe and produce tryptophan, put it in tablets, sent it out into the market, and I think it was 150 people died and 1,500 people were injured permanently as a result of this tryptophan.  They figured out that the bug produced a toxin to protect itself from the tryptophan or something like that. So it was pulled from the market, they soon quickly figured out what was causing it. But it was all covered up, nobody talked about it. I think in the 90s, that kind of calmed that genetic modification down, not as many people were wanting to do it, but now it's at full surge.  Not everything is being made, of course, by genetic modification. Some things are being made with just making a bunch of chemicals and putting them together. So if I was to give you a strawberry flavoring, strawberry flavoring can have 48 chemicals in it. That strawberry flavoring and if one item is natural in that 48 chemicals, it's natural strawberry flavoring, not artificials. Lisa: You're kidding me. So they're just playing with these names and just putting in something natural in order to make it natural. Cyndi: They are absolute masters at it and people don't realize. I'm just telling you one thing that is happening. So if we take it to the genetic modification of foods such as soy and canola and sugar beet and cottonseed, and things like that. If we go there, these are called either Bt, so Bt-Corn, which is a toxin that the corn produces. So when the bug eats it's a pesticide. When the bug eats it, its stomach explodes. That's still in the corn, when you eat it.  Lisa: Oh my god. Cyndi: What we're finding is that while it won't explode our stomach, what it does is it explodes the, it destroys the gut cells, which is one cell thick. So it starts to erode them, and you start to get gaps in your gut and allow protein, chemicals, and things into your blood, which you don't want. You don't want that.  So then the other ones are Roundup Ready. So Roundup being ain chemical that has glyphosate  it. So Roundup Ready soya, Roundup Ready sugar beet. But now they're starting to realize that roundup is not doing what it should be doing on the pest; or not, it's a pesticide but it's more for grass and weeds and things like that. They're finding that that's not working anymore. Now they're producing 2,4-D ready crops, Dicamba ready crops. So Dicamba came into the spotlight I think was last year or the year before when there was a Dicamba ready crop that was sprayed, and all the spray floated over to a I think it was a peach or pear farmer's lands, and killed all of these trees. He actually sued, I think it was Bayer or Monsanto and I'm pretty sure he's won that case. Lisa: That's a big giant to take on. Cyndi: Exactly. This is what is happening to our food supply. We, the Australian and New Zealand Food Standards. So Food Standards Australia, New Zealand have been requested by Queensland agriculture, for Australia wide; I don't know if they'll do it in New Zealand, but an Australia-wide food irradiation process on all fresh fruits and vegetables sold in the grocery stores.  Now when you do that, what it does, is instead of you just cleaning your lettuce and, and doing a bit of a sterilization on it, which is what they do, whether it's organic or not, they have to sterilize it to get rid of any bacteria. So what they're now doing is they want to radiate it because it just doesn't get rid of the surface bugs, it gets rid of the bugs that are inside the food as well. But we need those soil based bugs, of course, they help us with our microbiome. So they're all of a sudden starting to say, we want to radiate everything. Now not only will they kill every bug in our food, what they will also do is that they will sterilize the seed. You know, when on your compost tea, three tomatoes and your pumpkin and and then you've got this pumpkin growing out of your compost, even a tomato growing out of your compost or cucumber. That won't happen.  Lisa: Oh my god, we're not going to have seed come, and who's going to control the seed like that?  Cyndi: I do my own, I grow my own food. Because I think we're going to get to a point where people are either gonna have to do that or put up with what the food industry is doing.  Lisa: And destroy their health.  Cyndi: Yeah, and it's all ultra processed foods. So the whole vegan movement even, I can read you the ingredients of what is called ‘just egg', and it's a bunch of chemicals. It's an ultra-processed food and it is not saving the planet, in actual fact is the worst thing for the planet. Lisa: Jeez, oh my god, this is, I'm all terrified now. Cyndi: I don't want to terrify you. What I want to do is make you aware of what's happening.  Lisa: Oh, absolutely, yeah.  Cyndi: Go to your local farmer, you go to your local farmers market, you support these small time farmers instead of Woolies or Kohl's or whatever you've got over there. Say, Breyer, I forget what's in New Zealand.  Lisa: New World. Cyndi: All you do is that you change the way you buy your foods, or where you buy your foods from, because then you become an activist by yourself. Don't care about anybody else. You're an activist, because you are choosing to buy from a farmer in your area. And I'm sure you already have some incredible region farmers in your area. Lisa: You think they are, they're not, how do you know that they're not using the same practices and the soils? And so, I mean— Cyndi: You talk to them, they're passionate. Go to the farmers' market, and you say, ‘Do you grow your food'? ‘Yes, I do'. Do you use any chemicals? ‘No'. What kind of farming do you do? ‘I want to actually do something called regenerative farming. Have you ever heard of that? Or I do organic farming or I do biodynamic farming, and this is how I do it'.  They're so passionate, they want to tell you. So what I do is, I grow a lot. But when I'm not growing some foods, I will go to my farmers markets, and I know my farmers now in the farmers markets. I've done the hard work. And I have something called the Nutrition Academy. And it's a bunch of people that come and do a year with me, and they become the people that do the research in their area. People come to them and say, well, which farmer should I go to at this market or that farmers market.  I want to create a groundswell of activists who say, we're not eating genetically modified foods, or anything made with a genetically modified bug, or anything that has something ultra processed in it. We're not prepared to buy from the grocery stores, because they can't guarantee me where this is coming from. So I will find a farmers market and I'll support, there are so many young people that want to be farmers, all we have to do as individual say, I'll buy a box from you, or a community supported agricultural box, I'll buy a box from you every week, whatever you're growing, I'll buy it.  Then to supplement you go to your local, organic shop, your local fruit and veggie shop, ask them the questions. It's about us becoming inquisitive. If that's what you do this, please say you're inquisitive, you went there telling me my mum's gonna be like that for the rest of my life. Surely there's something out there. What is happening, medicine's not working, they're telling me nothing's going to happen. So I'm going to go and enquire with other people. That's what I asked people to do with their food supply, is to enquire. Lisa: It's not obvious! I've looked locally, and I've just found one recently who's delivering certain times, a couple of times a week, and I have to get through, and you're like, ‘Lisa's found somebody now'. But it's always out of the way, and it's extra work, and it's, you're busy and you whatever, and there isn't a lot of farmers' markets in our area. There isn't, and I've been looking into a couple of farms here, and then they find out oh actually they're not organic, organic, even though they, you know, say that, but their seeds aren't in there, you know, there's certain practices. So there's thinks little problems, especially when you live in a rural area, and there's not necessarily a bigger place where these people can congregate. But I'm downloading a little bit more, time to dig deeper. Time, to really get into it.  Cyndi: Yeah, it will be somebody in your area, because this farm is everywhere, that they would love farming, and they would love to be able to sell their produce. But if we take it a step by step, and we do it like this, so let's say you're on the SAD diet, the Standard Australian New Zealand diet, let's just say you're on that. If you go from that SAD diet, and you just go to the fruit and veggie, meats, dairy section of your grocery store. That's a really good start. That's a great start.  Once that's in your life, then you go well, I want a better quality fruit and veg and meat maybe, or dairy. Because that many dairy farms and lamb and everything in New Zealand. So you go well, I want to better quality this, where can I find somebody in my area. So it might be six months after you've gone from the SAD diet to the, at least eating fruits, vegetables, meats, and making your own food that you go, I want better quality.  Then you go and seek out maybe a butcher that's doing the right thing or a fruit stand that's doing the right thing. So don't think you have to jump immediately. That's why I wrote ‘check it out'. Realize that it's like, let's start with breakfast, then let's do salt, then let's do dairy, then let's do grains, then let's do nuts, then let's do seeds. Let's do chocolate, let's do— so it's a 52-week, one thing you change a week. Or if it takes you longer than a week to change them, that's fine, 53 weeks. Imagine when you start, where you will be in one year. Lisa: Absolutely, it's the same with exercise is the same with everything, isn't it. Just taking it, you don't have to jump right in at the big change, just start with one change, awaken it. That just makes so much sense in just putting in a bit more effort to find things and do things and maybe start growing, I started growing my own vegetables without having much success. Cyndi: Greens in New Zealand grow incredibly. So it's about— Lisa: For most people.  Cyndi: Invest in greens, because they're like a weed.  Lisa: Yes, yeah, we've got some of those going. It's just making the time to do that, and to prioritize those, because I think I've definitely been aware of the whole processed food. So you stay away from the obvious things, but you've just taken it to another level as far as the genetically modified stuff. That's completely new to me, so that's really important. But starting where you're at, and improving it every week, and just taking on a little bit, because I'm a big fan of that in everything in life, because everything can be overwhelming.  If you get overwhelmed, then you tend to do nothing. It's better to be walking for five minutes a day than to be doing no minutes a day. It's better to be getting good fruits and veggies, and later on you work on the other pieces, if this makes a whole lot of sense. Is there a program through, that you have as an educational online content type of thing as well? Cyndi: It's in my book. So we renamed Changing Habits, Changing Lives to Lab to Table, because that's what it is, at the moment, it's about—  Lisa: Wow, Lab to Table. So I'll put the links and stuff. Cyndi: Stop being a lab rat and start making better choices for your table. And that's on Audible as well. So people can listen to it and just listen to one chapter and go ‘Right, that's what I'm going to do'. They can jump, they can go anywhere they want. They can start with chocolate, if they really want to. I just say well, where can I buy good quality chocolate that's got no emulsifiers? So an emulsifier is in most chocolate and emulsifiers kill the bacteria that makes the layer that protects you from the outside world, in your gut.  Even that little thing that you do by looking at a chocolate that doesn't have lecithin, it's called soy lecithin or sunflower lecithin, or something that's an emulsifier, even if it doesn't have that, so I teach you how to find a good quality chocolate, if that's where you want to start. Lisa: Chocolate's important, so that's a great place to start. Cyndi: Find the white salt out and getting some good salt that's not refined, hasn't got anticaking agents in it, doesn't have free flowing agent in it. They don't, you don't realize it because nobody reads their salt packet. They don't read the ingredients. So I just tell you, this is what's on it, go to your pantry, have a look. If you don't believe me, go to the pantry, have a look at what they put in. They'll have potassium iodide in there as well because that's the chemical form of iodine but you want natural iodide.  So an actual iodine is seaweed and New Zealand's got heaps of seaweed, you know. What I do is I make a salt with seaweed in it and it's called seaweed salt, and that's on the Changing Habits website and we do have a Changing Habits New Zealand website, so you can purchase it and and get it delivered to you not via Australia but New Zealand so I think it's changinghabits— Lisa: .co.nz? Yeah, usually. Okay, we'll get, I'll get my team to—  Cyndi: But mine is .com.au, and we have one of my graduates who runs that and does all the deliveries and everything from New Zealand. So that was one of my graduates from 12 months' education with me. So these people come out knowing exactly how to help people. It might be a trip to the farmers market. It might be coming into your pantry and going through your pantry. I can go into someone's pantry and I can pull 10 things out. Let's say one is barbecue sauce, another one's tomato sauce, another one's hot chili sauce. In other words, I'll pull out all the sauces, and all the sauces will have tomato as the base. All of the sauces will have a citric or an acidity regulator, so citric acid. All of the sauces will have a flavor or sweetener.  So the flavor is what makes the difference. It's not how you used to make your chili sauces or tomato sauces or barbecue sauces. This is an industry that has a base and then they just put a different flavor in, the sweetener might be a little bit different, the acidity regulator might be a citric acid, or it could be citric acid or it could be something else. And basically, you are looking at eating the same thing, just with a different flavor and a different texture.  Lisa: I would have thought, I didn't know that citric acid, for example, was a bad thing, because I thought that came, because you're not educated in this area specifically. You don't know that some of the things that sounds like potassium iodide, that sounds like a natural thing. And so being able to decode that, and I bet they do that partly differently, too, so that you actually think it's something natural— Cyndi: In the industry, it's called clean labeling. So people like me, got smart. We didn't want to eat BHA and BHT. We don't want to eat MSG. We got smart. We would look on the label, it would have that, we'd say no. So what they've done is they've renamed these. So BHA and BHT is called rosemary extract. Lisa: Really? So you're just, you just have never sure, unless you really spend some time educating yourself. Cyndi: Exactly. I read all the labels. So what they've done, rosemary extract is yes, it started with rosemary. But they pulled out one chemical out of the rosemary bark and rosemary leaf. With that, they do all sorts of processes to it, and it ends up as an antioxidant, a synthetic antioxidant, my way of thinking. But because it's an extract from rosemary, they call it rosemary extract, and you go ‘Oh, it's just rosemary extract'. Yeast extract, you think oh it's yeast extract, but it's MSG. So what they've done is rename, every single natural flavoring is the same as artificial flavoring, they just added one little natural chemical, and well purchase strategies that they put in there.  You might read turmeric, or curcumin, everyone does, or curcumin. 75% of all curcumin is made in the laboratory. It's not extracted from turmeric. The most of the population don't know what's happening. And that's why I go, just stop buying packaged foods. And you do have to make things from scratch, or you have to buy it with somebody that you trust. So it's about reading the ingredients and making sure there's no extracts and acids and flavors and colors and sweeteners. If it said tomato, onion, chili, sugar, salt, I'd be happy. I don't have a problem with sugar. I have a problem with all the other crap.  You're blaming sugar. I don't mean lots of sugar. I'd like to see Rapadura sugar, but they're blaming sugar on what I believe is a vegetable oil problem, and all these additives. Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy pushing the limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patreon membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody. And we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. We have two patron levels to choose from, you can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do, there are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us, everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strings guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries, and much much more. So check out all the details, patron.lisatamati.com, and thanks very much for joining us. Cyndi: One of the things that we do know about this genetic modification that's happening at the moment in the microbes is that there's a disease out there called Morgellons disease, you can look it up. At first the doctors just thought that everybody was a little bit weird and psychotic in a way, that there's sort of mental illness. But what would happen is like, on the, a cut would come here and you'd get a pink and an orange and a yellow and a red fiber that would just come out of your mouth or it might happen here or wherever you gotta cut that would be these fibers, colorful fibers.  So the doctors all said, ‘Oh, you just been rubbing on carpet. You just, you've got Munchausen this disease,' or whatever, whatever that, or you're hypochondriac, you know, but what they're really beginning to realize is that some of these microbes, now these are microbes that make fibers. They're associating these microbes with this disease that has gotten into our microbiome. And as a result, they make them. That's their job. So I kind of figure if I'm going to eat natural vanilla, if that bug that makes natural vanilla flavor, does that mean, like, who's gonna smell like vanilla? You know, like, I just wonder. And I make a joke about it but in actual fact, it's, it's no joke. No, they are like nature. And so I choose not to support them in any way. Lisa: No. And that takes a huge commitment. But that's, that's where we need to be heading towards and like you say, one step at a time. Cyndi: Just one step at a time. And if in a year, you're doing that, or even two years, it's better than for the next 30 years or three decades, you've not changed and you have more Morgellons disease, or you're scared of a virus called COVID. It's actually called SARS-COVID 2. COVID-19 is the disease. Our body has the ability to fight. But if we do not feed it the right ingredients, if we do not give it the lifestyle it needs, such as exercises, you do running and yoga, and if we don't give it sunshine, if we don't give it love and connection, if we don't breathe properly, and sleep, then we are going to be in trouble. And we will become vulnerable to SARS-COVID 2 or whatever else comes along. Don't be scared of an invisible thing. Lisa: Yeah, and this isn't mean, this is, you know, those are all my wheelhouse. And that's what I'm always preaching on every week is one of these health fundamentals that if we, in relation to the slide, as far as you know, if we were just focusing on building our immune system, and eating healthier, and doing more exercise, and things would actually be at least better off, even if we did manage to, you know, unfortunately contract it. And we don't want, listen, this whole journey that I've been on the last five years and listening to, you know, I've had hundreds of doctors, scientists, experts, like yourself, sharing their corner of the world's knowledge.  I have absolutely no faith anymore in the authorities, or to be honest, I have no faith in the standards of medical care, I have no faith. Even though you know, like, clinical evidence, can be manipulated, and pushed in a certain way to make something look like it's good and it's safe. Then you look at a lot of the clinical studies that have been funded by the industry that's promoting it, and you have to ask yourself, how independent was theirs? There's just, there's just holes all over the place. And what I think you and I are, you know, with our different expertise as and trying to do is to get people just to question. Just to not take whatever is being thrown at you propaganda wise or whatever it is to actually question, do the research yourself, start to look at it.  It is confusing and overwhelming at times. But when you take control and when you're faced with the big situations, like I have been in my life, unfortunately few times now, not just with mom's story. I've had to face and work things out. If it was up to the doctors, I would have no uterus. I'm about to go through IVF. I'm 52 years old. They told me four years ago, I will die if I do not have a hysterectomy because I had fibroids. Now why did I have fibroids probably because I was on the pill for 30 years. But that's another story. I refused to have my uterus taken out because I believe there was another way. It took me a year to work it out. But I found a way. I found another doctor who worked out exactly which of the fibroids it was a 10 minute operation that was gone. That was a year of suffering bleeding, anemia, blood transfusions every week, but I refused to have the hysterectomy because I wanted to preserve the chance to have a child. And now I'm 52 and I'm able to go through and I don't have it, I didn't die and I still got my uterus. I've only shared that story.  These are the things we have to question. We just work things out and we're just given a white little pill and it's gonna make things better and go away. And I'm sorry, it's not how biology works. It takes time and it takes effort and it takes grind and it takes research. But if you're willing to do that, you're gonna end up looking, you know, like you do at 61. Not like most people who have autoimmune diseases, who have diabetes, who have heart disease, who have all of the horrible things that happened to us.  If we can prevent some people going down that path, then you know, our job's worth doing. If we can help one person who's listening to this just to open their eyes, and you certainly opened my eyes today. I thought I knew a lot, but I know I don't know enough. I don't know enough. This is why I spend like hours every day studying. Every day is a study day, every day is a learning day, every day is a day where I get to connect with amazing people like you that can share another piece of insight that I'm like, ‘Wow, that's terrifying. But okay, let's do something about it'. Sorry I've gone on my slip ups.  Cyndi: You did brilliantly, because this is what's happening is there will be people like you that are proactive in your health. Then there'll be people who don't want to change. They'll go get their uterus out, they'll take that pill, they'll never eat the right foods. That's okay, we can't help them. But there is a group in the middle that are inquiring and questioning and saying there's got to be a better way. I just don't know where it is, how do I find it. So they're the people that I hope to get to, because people like you are proactive, you're already doing it, you don't need me. But it's the people in the middle that are going ‘I know there's a better way, I know I can do this, but I don't know where to go and I can't find it'.  Then they get this aha. And from that, aha, they change their ways from the SAD diet to a different diet. And once they start to feel better, then they go and they start exercising, or they may exercise first and then decide on their food. Then there's this unbelievable effect that happens. Then they become vocal with their family and friends. That's what we want, is that we need them out there being vocal. It's all right, there will be people that don't want to change, and I don't want to even change them. That's just not my market. It's not my people. But I am here for the people who go, ‘Oh, I want to know more. How do I learn more?'  That's why I guess Changing Habits is really more education. Even though we do programs and protocols, and we've got food, my main thing is to educate you is to get you on a program or protocol, and then go, now that you've done that we feeling better, what are the things that you need to learn in order for you to progress as opposed to degress. If you think that you can come on a program or program with me, and go back to your old ways, and still feel amazing, you're delusional, you cannot go back. You have to keep going. So my thing is, if you're coming on that journey with me, please be prepared to be on this and to make major changes in your life that are sustainable, and for the rest of your life.  It's not the one big thing we do once a year that makes the difference. It's those little things that we do every single day, like the five minutes of walking, the banana instead of the chocolate bar, or better quality chocolate instead of a chocolate bar because they're all shit. Lisa: Yeah. We gotta find some good chocolate.  Cyndi: You've done a terrible job of making chocolate. You've bastardize the whole thing. Lisa: Oh, no. Cyndi: Yes. So this is what I want to achieve and the more people that are awoken, the less will have chronic disease, and the less will be vulnerable to whatever comes along. So we know just by the statistics that have happened in the last 16 months, that the people that are vulnerable to SARS-COVID 2 are those with chronic disease. People like you people like me, we're not even, there's not even a death rate amongst us. It just doesn't happen. But it does with people with chronic disease, and it's not the age group, it's your health. And yet they're putting us into age groups because that statistics what happens at age— Lisa: You get all these diseases, because you've been doing all the stuff for so long and there is genetic components to it and pieces of the puzzle. I partly because I studied genetics, and I know that I actually have a, I'm missing one of the genes for respiratory protection. So I'm actually in a higher risk category, but I can know that and like that I can take my vitamin D's and my magnesium, my things. Whatever's going to help me be healthier and then be armed. I mean, my house is full of biohacking, gadgets, machines, things are back standing behind me. I'm ready for battle. Because I know that I can still go down because I have a genetic predisposition to certain things. However, you know, like I was an asmathic as a kid. Severe asthmatic, in and out of hospital all my childhood.  But because I now have my inflammation in my body under control, I don't have asthma anymore. We didn't know that when I was a child, what was causing it. We cut out dairy but that was about it. My parents didn't know what else, things like gluten that we talked about back then and we lived next door to an orchard that was spraying everything everywhere. So goodness knows, but now I don't have a problem with asthma. Now is that because I've changed my diet, my lifestyle and all that sort of thing? Yeah, probably because I am missing that gene completely. So I have no sort of respiratory protection. So I am more prone to that. There's different aspects that we need to be aware of.  One of the biggest, I think, things that, something that I'm big on is stress management, because stress is definitely going to, and this is something that I've been with personally, because I'm so driven and mission orientated. It's very hard not to have a high level of stress when you're operating. So anything that I can do to lower my stress levels, while still operating at a really high performance level, I'm into. That's the breath work. That's the meditation. That's the getting the sunshine that's having my little breaks, it's having my social time, all of those things that I've had to learn to prioritize along the way as well. Yeah, but again, I'm getting off topic. Oh, I've just lost your— Cyndi: I'm using my shop in the background. You're saying the right thing. We do know, and you've already mentioned, and that's epigenetics. So what is happening above the gene that turns the gene on or off? There's nutrigenomics? Yeah. What is the food that turns a gene on and off? There's also metabologenomics, which is, what are the metabolites are made by your microbiome, which you are 90% genetically microbiome? What are the metabolites that are being made by the microbiome that are turning my genes off? What is the- like in nutrigenomics? I love it, because we know that when we go into a state of ketosis, that we're not only changing the metabolism of the brain and what energy the body uses, but we're actually affecting genes being turned on and off from glutamate together. So these are the things that we are affecting as a result of just manipulating food, that's natural dynamics. Now, when manipulate what's happening in our body, with as far as the microbiome, if you go for a walk in the woods, and you come against some spore based bacteria, so such as bacillus, though you will breathe it in, you will touch it because you touched a tree, or a rock, or you've dug down into the dirt for some reason, or whatever, you will get this and it has the ability to increase your good bacteria in your microbiome. It can decrease the bad bacteria. This is going out into nature, we've shown this.  If you go gardening in a really good soil, you pick up a certain soil based bacteria that actually improves your serotonin and will give you a feeling of calm and helps in mental illness, there's psychobiotics out there that we know that certain ones improve serotonin, some improved dopamine, others GABA others noradrenaline. So we have this thing called metabologenomics now, where it switches it, you're not going down the excitatory path of good mind, but you're going down the calming path of GABA just by manipulating your microbes. And that is nature, breathing as you know, both you and I love our breathwork. Sunshine does it. So we are giving our evolutionary body the ingredients it needs to be the best. When you do not do this and you stay in a city. You never get out into nature, you don't see the sunshine, you've got screen on. You've lost those ingredients that the body has had cues for for 400,000 plus years. We're not an modern body we're still evolutionary. Lisa: Our DNA is old. Cyndi: We'll never survive on the lifestyle that this modern world is giving us. We can still live in a modern world, don't get me wrong. But we have to let the body know that it can have these other ingredients. So hiking, you know like it's one of my favorite things to do is put a backpack on and go hiking for five or six days. Or nobody sees me no WiFi. And if that's not your bag, go out for the day. Go into a park. If you're in Auckland, you know go to what's beautiful for Cornwall Park. Pet the cows and the sheep. Just go breathe that beautiful old trees in. Lisa: This is just so basic, isn't it? You know I lost my dad recently and people know the story a little bit. But he was 81 years old. My dad was unfortunately a smoker and that's what brought him in. I could never stop him smoking and that's what ended up being his demise but he was every day all day in the garden, out in the sunshine working physically hard, and he was 81 years old. Apart from what happened to him, which was an aneurysm of the stomach. So he had arthroscopic sclerosis from smoking, but he was powerful, strong, he was exhausted, at the end of the day, he would sleep fine, he had a natural rhythm to his life: get up, work hard, eat probably too much. And not always the best things, smoke way too much. But he had this natural rhythm and he worked all day. He was in the garden all day, and his hands were always dirty, and his feet always planted on the ground. And I really think that's why he got to 81 despite having smoked for 55 years, which is a disaster, obviously.  He probably would have carried on for another, 20 or 30 years, if he hadn't had that unfortunate thing, because he lived in this natural rhythm. He was strong, powerful and fit, despite all of the stuff that he was doing wrong, but just that natural rhythm. I saw this, and I was like, wow. We are artificially stuck indoors, stuck sitting, stuck in front of screens, we need to make time to go out, have that sunshine, get that vitamin D. This is science now, like a lot of the stuff that ancient traditions were telling us to do. Everyone's that's all woowoo and eerie theory, and there's no proof. Now science is starting to bring this proof out. That's really exciting for me, because then we start to see that these guys were right, there is acupressure pressure points and there is negative and positive ionization.  There is all of these things that people have known for centuries, and, you know, millennia sometimes, and our old DNA just cannot survive if we are only in this artificial environment, not going to do well, we're going to be going backwards in our longevity, when we actually should be going forward. We've gone forward up until now, because we've had incredible surgeries and people know about germs and we've done some brilliant things. But if we can combine that knowledge of nature in our ancient DNA, and anthropology and all of that sort of stuff, and then combine it with the knowledge that we have today, there's the power. Because I truly think that within the next 20 years, we're going to be seeing people living much longer lives, like I don't think that you are going to retire anytime soon, like your average 60 year old would have done 20 years ago, now that's lifting up, right. Then by the time you are ready to retire, it will probably be 150. You know, because that's what's coming at us, the change that's coming is just phenomenal. If we can keep ourselves well enough, in the meantime, to benefit from all this knowledge that's coming down the line. Cyndi: Yeah, and the longevity is important. But the wellness is also important, as you said, because most people been 15 years of their life, and that's the last 15 years of their life, in a chronic condition or with some disability of some sort. So if we can change that, by what we're doing. We've seen ancient cultures. And it has shown that these ancient cultures, as long as they got past the age of five, they could live to 100 110 120, the body is able to do that. It's just that back in those days, the problem was pregnancy right through to the age of five. But once you got past that, the ability to get to 100 was here. We are now past that point. We can get most people past the age of five. Although, in chronic condition. That's what's scary is that they're going to have that chronic condition. And they're going to be beholden to the drug companies and beholden to the medical profession for the rest of their lives. I don't have a problem with the medical profession and the medications that they use, because they are life saving at times. But what's happened is that mechanism, which is you have a heart problem, go to your cardiologist, let's not look at your gut or you're leaving your son or anything like that. Let's just check out your heart. Oh, you've got this take that drug, you know.  So that mechanism has taken over from the vitalism which is ‘Hey, let's check your whole lifestyle out. Let's see what you're doing what you're eating, your son, your connections, everything like that. Let's start changing them before we need to go down the route of mechanism'. Vitalism is prevention. But where mechanism is needed is when, like, let's just say you've been in a car accident, you've broken a leg, get to the hospital, you don't get them asking you about your lifestyle. Fix your leg. So they're both important. It's just that mechanism has taken over from this very natural, holistic vitalistic way of living. If we go back to that, then the need for emergency care is going to get less and less or chronic diseases. We'll have acute problems that we might need another.  This is where I'd love to see the narrative go at the moment and I'm watching your prime minister, as well as my prime minister. They haven't said a thing about this. All they're doing is social distance, lockdowns, masks that don't work, the vaccine, that's the narrative. What happened, what, 15 months ago, just imagine this, that both our prime ministers said, right, we're shutting down McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, all foods that have got crap in it, we're stopping the genetic modification of any food coming into our country, because you're lucky you don't grow genetically modified foods.  Stop all of that, we're going to give you the time to go out and exercise and to give you money to go out and do this and get sunshine and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If they've done that, can you imagine the state of health in New Zealand and Australia at the moment? It would be incredible.  Lisa. That would not be appropriate. You will be pissing off a lot of big companies. And this is what you know, people need to understand, like we tend to think, and like, you know, don't get me wrong, I have a lot of fantastic doctors and things and scientists and things that I work with, who I love, and we need doctors and so on. But the narrative is that they have all of the answers and that they are the only people that have the answers. That isn't necessarily the truth. There are big powers at play. I'm going to sound like a conspiracy theorist when I say that, and that's a word that people use in order to label you and discredit you.  But let's look at what is actually going on. Like in this case with the vaccine, I don't wa

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Craig also shares how powerful our minds are and how we can use them to manage our pain.    If you want to know how to develop a growth mindset for a fuller life, then this episode is for you!   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? 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The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? 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Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how to develop a growth mindset to keep yourself young and healthy, regardless of your chronological age. Understand why you need to manage your energy and plan fun and laughter into your life. Discover the ways you can change your mindset around pain.    Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! Listen to other Pushing the Limits Episodes: #60: Ian Walker - Paraplegic Handbiker - Ultra Distance Athlete #183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #188: Awareness and Achieve High Performance with Craig Harper  #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova Connect with Craig: Website | Instagram | Linkedin Interested to learn more from Craig? You can check out his books and his podcast, The You Project. T: The Story of Testosterone by Carole Hooven  Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin M.D. Lifespan - Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To  by David A. Sinclair PhD Neuroscience professor Andrew Huberman's Instagram  Dr Rhonda Patrick's website A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!   Episode Highlights [06:50] A Growth Mindset Keeps Us Young and Healthy It's helpful to take advantage of the availability of high-level research and medical journals online. If you're prepared to do the hard work, you can learn anything.  Learning and exposing ourselves to new things are crucial parts of staying young and healthy.  Age is a self-created story.  With a growth mindset, you can change how your body and mind works so that you feel younger than your real age.  [12:23] Develop a Growth Mindset It's vital to surround yourself with people with the same mindset — people who drag you up, not down.  You can also get a similar experience by exposing yourself to good ideas and stories. Be aware of what you're feeding your mind, on top of what you're feeding your body.  School is not a marker of your intelligence. Your academic failures do not matter.  With a growth mindset, you can keep growing and learning.  [17:40] Let Go and Be Happy People tend to have career and exercise plans, but not a fun plan.  We can't be serious all the time — we also need time to have fun and laugh.  Laughter can impact and improve the immune system. Laughing can change the biochemistry of your brain. Plan for the future, but also learn to live in the now. Having a growth mindset is important, but so is finding joy and enjoyment.  [23:31] Look After Your Energy Having fun and resting can impact your energy and emotional system.  These habits can help you work faster than when you're just working all the time.  Remember, volume and quality of work are different.  [30:24] Work-Life Balance Many people believe that they need to balance work and life. However, when you find your passion, it's just life.  Even doing 20 hours of work for a job you hate is worse than 40 hours of doing something you love. There's no one answer for everyone. Everything is a lot more flexible than before. Find what works for you.  [35:56] Change the Way You Think It's unavoidable that we think a certain way because of our upbringing.  Start to become aware of your lack of awareness and your programming.  Learn why you think of things the way you do. Is it because of other people?  Be influenced by other people, but test their ideas through trial and error. Let curiosity fuel your growth mindset.  Listen to the full podcast to learn how Craig learned how to run his gym without a business background!  [44:18] Sharing Academic Knowledge Academics face many restrictions due to the nature and context of their work.  He encourages the academic community to communicate information to everyone, not just to fellow researchers.  He plans to publish a book about his PhD research to share what he knows with the public. Science is constantly changing. We need to keep up with the latest knowledge.   [50:55] Change Your Relationship with Pain There is no simple fix to chronic pain.  The most you can do is change your relationship and perception of pain.  Our minds are powerful enough to create real pain even without any physical injury. Listen to Craig and Lisa's stories about how our minds affect our pain in the full episode!   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘My mind is the CEO of my life. So I need to make sure that as much as I can, that I'm managing my mind, and my mental energy optimally.' ‘If you're listening to this, and you didn't succeed in the school system, that means absolutely nothing when you're an adult.' ‘We're literally doing our biology good by laughing.' ‘Living is a present tense verb, you can't living in the future, and you can't live in the future.' ‘Often, more is not better. Sometimes more is worse.  So there's a difference between volume of work and output and quality of work.' ‘It's all about those people just taking one step at a time to move forward... That growth mindset that I think is just absolutely crucial.'   About Craig Craig Harper is one of Australia's leading educators, speakers, and writers in health and self-development. He has been an integral part of the Australian health and fitness industry since 1982. In 1990, he established a successful Harper's Personal Training, which evolved into one of the most successful businesses of its kind.  He currently hosts a successful Podcast called 'The You Project'. He is also completing a neuropsychology PhD, studying the spectrum of human thinking and behaviour. Craig speaks on various radio stations around Australia weekly. He currently fills an on-air role as a presenter on a lifestyle show called 'Get a Life', airing on Foxtel.  Want to know more about Craig and his work? Check out his website, or follow him on Instagram and Linkedin!   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn how to develop a growth mindset. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits with Lisa Tamati. This week I have Craig Harper. He is really well known in Australia. He's a broadcaster, a fitness professional, a PhD scholar, an expert on metacognition, and self-awareness. And we get talking on all those good topics today and also neuro-psycho-immunology, very big word. Really interesting stuff; and we get talking about laughter, we get talking about pain management. We sort of go all over the show in this episode, which I sometimes do on this show. I hope you enjoy this very insightful and deep conversation with Craig Harper.  Before we head over to the show, I just want to let you know that Neil and I at Running Hot Coaching have launched a new program called Boost Camp. Now, this will be starting on the first of September and we're taking registrations now. This is a live eight-week program, where you'll basically boost your life. That's why it's called Boost Camp. not boot camp, Boost Camp. This is all about upgrading your body, learning how to help your body function at its base, learning how your mindset works, and increasing your performance, your health, your well-being and how to energise your mind and your body. In this Boost Camp, we're going to give you the answers you need in a simple, easy-to-follow process using holistic diagnostic tools and looking at the complete picture.  So you're going to go on a personalised health and fitness journey that will have a really life-changing effect on your family and your community. We're going to be talking about things like routine and resilience, mental resilience, which is a big thing that I love to talk about, and how important is in this time of change, in this time of COVID, where everything's upside down, and how we should be all building time and resources around building our resilience and energising our mind and body. We're going to give you a lot of health fundamentals. Because the fundamentals are something simple and easy to do, it means that you probably aren't doing some of the basics right, and we want to help you get there.  We're going to give you the answers you need in a simple, sort of easy, process. So we are now in a position to be able to control and manage all of these stressors and these things that are coming at us all the time, and we want to help you do that in the most optimal manner. So check out what boost camp is all about. Go to www.peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp. I'll say that again, peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp, boost with a B-O-O-S-T, boost camp. We hope to see you over there! Right, now over to the show with Craig Harper. Well, hi everyone and welcome to Pushing the Limits! Today, I have someone who is a special treat for you who has been on the show before. He's an absolute legend, and I love him to bits. Craig half and welcome to the show mate, how are you doing?  Craig Harper: Hi Lisa! I'm awesome but you're not.  Lisa: No I'm a bit of a miss, people. I've got shingles, a horrible, horrible virus that I advise nobody to get. Craig: What it— do we know what that's made? What causes it, or is it idiopathic as they say? Lisa: Yeah, no, it is from the chickenpox virus. Although, I've never, ever had that virus. So I'm like heck how, you know, it's related to the cold sore virus and all of that, which I definitely have had often. So it sits on the spinal cord, these little viruses, dormant and then one day when your immune systems are down, it decides to attack and replicate and go hard out. So yeah, that'll be the down for the count now for two and a half weeks. In a lot of pain, but— Craig: What is it like nerve pain or what kind of pain is it?  Lisa: Yes, it's nerve pain. So this one's actually, it hits different nerves in different people, depending on where it decides to pop out. My mum had the femoral nerve, which is one that goes right down from the backbone, quite high up on the backbone, down across the back and then down through the hip flexor and down the leg. I've got all these horrible looking sores, I look like a burn victim all the way down my leg and across my back. And it comes out through the muscles of your like, through the nerves and nerve endings and causes these blisters on top of the skin but it's the nerve pain that's really horrible because there's no comfortable position. There's no easy way to lie or sit and of course, when you're lying at night, it's worse. It's worse at nighttime than in the day. So I learned a lot about shingles. And as usual, we're using these obstacles to be a learning curve. Craig: Why on earth are you doing a bloody podcast? You should be relaxing. Lisa: You're important, you see. I had, you know, I had this appointment with you, and I honour my appointments, and I— Craig: Definitely not important. What's the typical treatment for shingles? Lisa: Well, actually, I wish I'd known this two weeks ago, I didn't know this, but I just had a Zoom call with Dave Asprey, you know, of Bulletproof fame, who is one of my heroes, and he's coming on the show, people, shortly. So that's really exciting. He told me to take something called BHT, butylated hydroxytoluene, which is a synthetic antioxidant. They actually use them in food additives, they said that kills that virus. So I'm like, ‘Right, get me some of that.' But unfortunately, I was already, it's— I only got it just yesterday, because I had to wait for the post. So I'm sort of hoping for a miracle in the next 24 hours.  Also, intravenous vitamin C, I've had three of those on lysine, which also helps. One of the funny things, before we get to the actual topic of the day, is I was taking something called L-Citrulline which helps with nitric oxide production and feeds into the arginine pathway. Apparently, while that's a good thing for most people, the arginine, if you have too much arginine in the body, it can lead to replication of this particular virus, which is really random and I only found that out after the fact. But you know, as a biohacker, who experiments sometimes you get it wrong.  Craig: Sometimes you turn left when you should have turned right.  Lisa: Yes. So that, you know, certainly took a lot of digging in PubMed to find that connection. But I think that's maybe what actually set it off. That combined with a pretty stressful life of like— Craig: It's interesting that you mentioned PubMed because like a lot of people now, you know how people warn people off going Dr Google, you know, whatever, right. But the funny thing is, you can forget Dr Google, I mean, Google's okay. But you can access medical journals, high level— I mean, all of the research journals that I access for my PhD are online. You can literally pretty much access any information you want. We're not talking about anecdotal evidence, and we're not talking about theories and ideas and random kind of junk. We're talking about the highest level research, you literally can find at home now. So if you know how to research and you know what you're looking for, and you can be bothered reading arduous academic papers, you can pretty much learn anything, to any level, if you're prepared to do the work and you know how— and you can be a little bit of a detective, a scientific detective.  Lisa: That is exactly, you know, what I keep saying, and I'm glad you said that because you are a PhD scholar and you are doing this. So you know what you're talking about, and this is exactly what I've done in the last five years, is do deep research and all this sort of stuff. People think that you have to go to university in order to have this education, and that used to be the case. It is no longer the case. We don't have to be actually in medical school to get access to medical texts anymore, which used to be the way. And so we now have the power in our hands to take, to some degree, control over what we're learning and where we're going with this.  It doesn't mean that it's easy. You will know, sifting through PubMed, and all these scholarly Google articles and things in clinical studies is pretty damn confusing sometimes and arduous. But once you get used to that form of learning, you start to be able to sift through relatively fast, and you can really educate yourself. I think having that growth mindset, I mean, you and I never came from an academic background. But thanks to you, I'm actually going to see Prof Schofield next week. Prof Schofield and looking at a PhD, because, I really need to add that to my load. But— Craig: You know, the thing is, I think in general, and I don't know where you're gonna go today, but I think in general, like what one of the things that keeps us young is learning and exposing ourselves, our mind and our emotions and for that matter, our body to new things, whether that's new experiences or new ideas, or new information, or new environments, or new people. This is what floats my boat and it keeps me hungry and it keeps me healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually, creatively, sociologically. It keeps me healthy. Not only does it keep me in a good place, I'm actually at 57, still getting better. You know, and people might wonder about that sometimes.  Of course, there's an inevitability to chronological aging. Clearly, most people at 80 are not going to be anything like they were at 40. Not that I'm 80. But there's— we know now that there's the unavoidable consistency of time as a construct, as an objective construct. But then there's the way that we behave around and relate to time. Biological aging is not chronological aging. In the middle of the inevitability of time ticking over is, which is an objective thing, there's the subject of human in the middle of it, who can do what he or she wants. So, in other words, a 57-year-old bloke doesn't need to look or feel or function or think like a 57-year-old bloke, right?  When we understand that, in many ways, especially as an experience, age is a self-created story for many people. I mean, you've met, I've met and our listeners have met 45-year-olds that seem 70 and 70-year-olds— and we're not talking about acting young, that's not what we're talking about. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about pretending you're not old or acting young. I'm actually talking about changing the way that your body and your mind and your brain and your emotional system works, literally. So that you are literally in terms of function, similar to somebody or a ‘typical' person who's 20 or 25 years younger than you. We didn't even know that this used to be possible, but not only is it possible, if you do certain things, it's very likely that that's the outcome you'll create. Lisa: Yeah, and if you think about our grandparents, and when I think about my Nana at 45 or 50, they were old. When I think about now I'm 52, you're 57, we're going forward, we're actually reaching the peak of our intellectual, well, hopefully not the peak, we're still going up. Physically, we got a few wrinkles and a few grey hairs coming. But even on that front, there is so much what's happening in the longevity space that my take on it is, if I can keep my shit together for the next 10 years, stuff's gonna come online that's gonna help me keep it on for another 20, 30, 40 years.  For me now it's trying to hold my body together as best I can so that when the technology does come, that we are able to meet— and we're accessing some of the stuff now, I mean, I'm taking some of the latest and greatest bloody supplements and biohacking stuff, and actively working towards that, and having this, I think it's a growth mindset. I had Dr Demartini on the show last week, who I love. I think he's an incredible man. His mindset, I mean, he's what nearly, I think he's nearly 70. It looks like he's 40. He's amazing. And his mind is so sharp and so fast it'll leave you and I in the dust. He's processing books every day, like, you know, more than a book a day and thinking his mind through and he's distilling it and he's remembering, and he's retaining it, and he's giving it to the world. This is sort of— you know, he's nothing exceptional. He had learning disabilities, for goodness sake, he had a speech impediment, he couldn't read until he was an adult. In other words, he made that happen. You and I, you know, we both did you know, where you went to university, at least when you're younger, I sort of mucked around on a bicycle for a few years. Travelling the world to see it. But this is the beauty of the time that we live in, and we have access to all this. So that growth mindset, I think keeps you younger, both physically and mentally. Craig: And this is why I reckon it's really important that we hang around with people who drag us up, not down. And that could be you know, this listening to your podcast, of course, like I feel like when I listen to a podcast with somebody like you that shares good ideas and good information and good energy and is a good person, like if I'm walking around, I've literally got my headphones here because I just walked back from the cafe, listening to Joe Rogan's latest podcast with this lady from Harvard talking about testosterone, you'd find it really interesting, wrote a book called T.  When I'm listening to good conversations with good people, I am, one, I'm fascinated and interested, but I'm stimulating myself and my mind in a good way. I'm dragging myself up by exposing myself to good ideas and good thinking, and good stories. Or it might even be just something that's funny, it might— I'm just exposing myself to a couple of dickheads talking about funny shit, right? And I'd spend an hour laughing, which is also therapeutic.  You know, and I think there's that, I think we forget that we're always feeding our mind and our brain something. It's just having more awareness of what am I actually plugging into that amazing thing? Not only just what am I putting in my body, which, of course, is paramount. But what am I putting in, you know, that thing that sits between my ears that literally drives my life? That's my HQ, that's my, my mind is the CEO of my life. So I need to make sure that as much as I can, that I'm managing my mind and my mental energy                                                                                  optimally. Lisa: Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people if they didn't do well in the school system, think that, 'Oh, well, I'm not academic therefore I can't learn or continue to learn.' I really encourage people, if you're listening to this, and you didn't succeed in the school system, that means absolutely nothing when you're an adult. The school system has got many flaws, and it didn't cater to everybody. So I just want people to understand that.  You know, just like with Dr Demartini, he taught himself 30 words a day, that's where he started: vocabulary. He taught himself to read and then taught— Albert Einstein was another one, you know, he struggled in school for crying out loud. So school isn't necessarily the marker of whether you're an intelligent human being or not. It's one system and one way of learning that is okay for the average and the masses. But definitely, it leaves a lot of people thinking that they're dumb when they're not dumb.  It's all about those people just taking one step at a time to move forward and becoming, you know, that growth mindset that I think is just absolutely crucial. You talked there about laughter and I wanted to go into that a little bit today too, because I heard you talking on Tiffany, our friend Tiffany's podcast, and you were talking about how important laughter is for the body, for our minds, for our— and if we laugh a lot, we're less likely to fall victim to the whole adult way of being, which is sometimes pretty cynical and miserable. When you think, what is it? Kids laugh something like 70 times a day and adults laugh I think, six times a day or some statistic. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? Craig: Well, I used to sit down with you know, I don't do much one-on-one coaching anymore, just because I do other stuff. I would sit with people and go, ‘Alright, tell me about your exercise plan and blah, blah, blah. Tell me about your career plan, blah, blah, blah. Tell me about your financial plan, blah, blah, blah.' Tell me about, you know, whatever. And they have systems and programs and plans for everything.  I would say to them, 'Do you like fun?' And they're like, they look at me like I was a weirdo. 'What do you mean?' I go, 'Well, what do you mean, what do I mean? Like, do you like having fun?' And they're like, very seriously, like, 'Well, of course, everyone likes having fun.' I go, 'Great. What's your fun plan?' And they go, 'What?' I go, 'What's your fun— like, is laughing and having fun important to you?' 'Yeah, yeah.' 'Okay, what's your fun plan?'  They literally, like this idea of just integrating things into my life, which are for no reason other than to laugh and to have fun. Not to be productive and efficient and to tick more boxes and create more income and elevate output and tick fucking boxes and hit KPIs and you know, just to be silly, just to laugh like a dickhead, just to hang out with your mates or your girlfriends, or whatever it is. Just to talk shit, just to, not everything needs to be fucking deep and meaningful and world-changing. Not everything. In fact, it can't, you know?  Our brain and our body and our emotional system and our nervous system and— it can't work like that we can't be elevated all the time. And so, literally when we are laughing, we're changing the biochemistry of our brain. You know, literally when we are having fun, we're impacting our immune system in a real way through that thing I've probably spoken to you about, psychoneuroimmunology, right? We're literally doing our biology good by laughing and there's got to be, for me, there's got to be, because, like you probably, I have a lot of deep and meaningful conversations with people about hard shit. Like, I'm pretty much a specialist at hard conversations. It's what I do. But, you know, and, and I work a lot, and I study a lot. Then there needs to be a valve. You can't be all of that all of the time because you're human, you're not a cyborg, you're not a robot. And this hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, work harder, sleep less, you can, you know, you can sleep when you're dead, it's all bullshit. Because, also, yeah, I want to learn and grow and evolve, and I want to develop new skills. But you know what, I want to also, in the moment, laugh at silly shit. I want to be happy and I want to hang out with people I love and I want to be mentally and emotionally and spiritually nourished.  Like, it's not just about acquiring knowledge and accumulating shit that you're probably not going to use. It's also about the human experience now. This almost sounds contradictory. But because of course, we want a future plan and we want goals and all of those, but we're never going to live in the present because when we get there, it's not the present. It's just another installment of now. So when next Wednesday comes, it's not the future, it's now again, because life is never-ending now, right?  It's like you only like, live— living is a present tense verb. You can't living in the future, and you can't live in the future. You cannot. Yes, I know, this gets a little bit, what's the word existential, but the truth is that, yeah, we need to— well, we don't, we can do whatever we want. But I believe we need to be stimulated so we're learning and growing, and we're doing good stuff for our brain and good stuff for our body. But also that we are giving ourselves a metaphoric hug, and going, 'It's all right to lie on your bed and watch Netflix, as long as it's not 20 hours a day, five days a week,' you know. It's okay to just laugh at silly stuff. It's okay, that there's no purpose to doing this thing other than just joy and enjoyment, you know.  I think that people like you and me who are, maybe we would put ourselves in the kind of driven category, right? You and I are no good at this. Like, at times, having fun and just going, ‘I'm going to do fuck all today.' Because the moment that we do sometimes we start to feel guilty and we start to be like, 'Fuck, I'm not being productive. I've got to be productive.' That, in itself, is a problem for high performance. Like, fuck your high performance, and fuck your productivity today. Be unproductive, be inefficient, and just fucking enjoy it, you know, not— because in a minute, we're going to be dead. We're going to go, 'But fuck, I was productive. But I had no fun, I never laughed, because I was too busy being important.' Fuck all that. Lisa: I think both of us have probably come a long way around finding that out. I mean, I used to love reading fiction novels, and then I went, ‘Oh, I can't be reading fiction novels. I've got so many science books that I have to read.' Here I am, dealing with insomnia at two o'clock in the morning reading texts on nitric oxide, you know. It is this argument that goes on, still in my head if there was an hour where you weren't learning something, you know, I can't. Because I know that if I go for a big drive or something, and I have to travel somewhere, or going for a long run or something, I've probably digested a book on that road trip or three, or 10 podcasts or something and I've actually oh, I get to the end and I'm like, ‘Well, I achieved something.' I've got my little dopamine hits all the way through.  Now I've sort of come to also understand that you need this time out and you need to just have fun. I'm married to this absolute lunatic of a guy called Haisely O'Leary, who I just love, because all day every day, he is just being an idiot. In the best sense of the word. I come out and I'm grumpy and you know, had a hard day and I'm tired, I'm stressed, and I come out and he's doing a little dance, doing some stupid meme or saying some ridiculous thing to me. I'm just like, you know, I crack up at it. That's the best person to have to be around because they keep being—and I'm like, ‘Come on, stop being stupid, you should be doing this and you shouldn't be doing that.' Then I hear myself, and I'm like, ‘No, he's got it right.' Craig: Well, I think he does, in some ways, you know. It's not about all, it's not about one or the other, it's about— and it's recognising that if I look after my energy, and my emotional system, and all of that, I'll get more done in 8 hours than 12 hours when I'm not looking after myself. So more is not better, necessarily. In fact, often, more is not better; sometimes, more is worse. So there's a difference between volume of work and output and quality of work. Also, you know, quality of experience.  I wrote a little thing yesterday, just talking on social media about the fact that I, like all of the things that I do, even study, although it's demanding, but I enjoy it. My job, you know, like, right now you and I do podcasts. I do seven podcasts a week, apart from the ones like this, where I'm being interviewed by someone else, or spoken to by somebody else. My life is somewhat chaotic, but I don't really, in terms of having a ‘job'. Well, one, I don't have a job. I haven't had a job since I was 26. Two, I don't really feel a sense of work, like most people do.  Like the other night, I did a gig. I don't know if you, if I posted a little thing about this on Insta, and I was doing a talk for Hewlett Packard in Spain. Now, how cool is the world? Right? So I'm talking here, right here in my house, you can see, obviously, your listeners can't. But this is not video, is it? Just us? I wish I knew that earlier. Sorry, everyone, I would have brushed my hair. But anyway, you should see my hair by the way. I look like bloody Doc from Back to the Future. Anyway, but I'm sitting in here, I'm sitting in the studio, and I'm about to talk to a few hundred people in Spain, right, which is where, that's where they're all— that's where I was dealing with the people who are organising me to speak.  Just before I'm about to go live at 5:30, the lady who had organised me was texting me. So it's on Zoom. There's already a guy on the screen speaking and then lots of little squares of other humans. I said to her, ‘How many?' and said, ‘You know, like a few 100.' I said, ‘Cool.' I go, ‘Everyone's in Spain,' and she goes, ‘No, no, we're in Spain, but the audience is around the world.' And I go, ‘Really? How many countries?' She goes, ‘38.' I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, I'm wearing a black t-shirt. I'm wearing my camo shorts. I've got bare feet. I'm talking to hundreds of humans from this big organisation in 38 countries, and I'm talking about the stuff that I am passionate about, right? I don't have to do any prep, because it's my default setting. I'm just talking. I had to talk for an hour and a half about high performance. Well, giddy up, that's like an hour and a half of breathing. You know?  I just had such fun, and I had this moment, Lisa, halfway through, I don't know, but about halfway through, where I'm like, I remember growing up in a paradigm where pretty much when I was a kid everyone went and got a job and you went, you became a cop or you sold clothes, or you're a bricky or sparky or you're some kind of tradie. A few of my super smart friends went to university. That was way over my head, I'm like, ‘Fuck university.' But there was literally about 50 jobs in the world. You know, it's like there was only 50 jobs, and everyone or nearly everyone fitted into one of those 50. There was a few other ones but for the most part, nearly everyone fitted into about 50 jobs. I'm sitting there going— I won't say what but I'm earning pretty good money. I'm sitting in bare feet in my house talking to humans around the world about this stuff that I want to tell everyone about anyway.  I do it for free on my podcast and your podcast and I do it anyway. I have this great time, it's a really good experience. Then I finish at 7 pm. Then I walk 15 feet into the kitchen and put the kettle on and check my messages.  Lisa: No commuting, no travelling, no flying. Craig: I'm like, ‘How is this a job?' I'm like, ‘How is this real?' ‘This is a scam. I'm scamming everybody.' Like, how great is 2021? I know there's a lot of shit going on and I'm not trying to be insensitive, and it's smashed my business too. All of my live events for 2020 got kicked in the dick in two weeks, right? I got financially annihilated, but you just go, ‘Oh well, improvise, adapt, overcome and figure shit out.' But, I think when you can have it and a lot of people and it's a very well-worn kind of idea. But when you're, what you love, and what you're curious about, and how you make a few bucks, when that can all collide, then life is a different thing. Then there's not work and life, there's just life.  You know, and so when we talk about this idea of work-life balance, you know, it's like the old days that talk about that a lot. And it's like, almost like there was some seesaw, some metaphoric seesaw with work on one side and life on the other. And when you get balance like that— because what happens, think about this, if we're just basing it on numbers, like all 40 hours of work versus however many hours of non-work or however many hours of recreation and recovery. But if you're doing even 20 hours of a job that you hate, that's going to fuck you up. That's gonna, that's gonna mess with you physically, mentally, and emotionally. That's going to be toxic; that's going to be damaging; that's going to be soul-destroying, versus something else like me studying 40 hours a week, working 40, 50 hours a week doing 90 in total, depending on the week and loving it, and loving it. And going, ‘I feel better than I've ever felt in my life.'  I still train every day, and I still, I live 600-800 metres from the beach, I still walk to the beach every day, you know. And I still hang out with my friends. You know, it's like, it doesn't have to be this cookie-cutter approach. The beauty I think of life, with your food, with your lifestyle, with your career, with your relationships with the way that you learn, like the way that you do business, everything now is so much more flexible, and optional than any time ever before that we can literally create our own blueprint for living. Lisa: Yeah. And then it's not always easy. And sometimes it takes time to get momentum and stuff. Being, both you and I have both said before we're unemployable. Like, I'm definitely not someone you want to employ, because I'm just always going to run my own ship. I've always been like that, and that's the entrepreneurial personality. So not everyone is set up for that personality-wise. So you know, we're a certain type of people that likes to run in a certain type of way. And we need lots of other people when doing the other paths.  There is this ability now to start to change the way you think about things. And this is really important for people who are unhappy in where they're at right now. To think, ‘Hang on a minute. I've been I don't know, policeman, teacher, whatever you've been, I don't want to be there anymore. Is there another me out there? Is there a different future that I can hit?' The answer is yes, if you're prepared to put in the work, and the time, and the effort, the looking at understanding and learning, the change, being adaptable, the risk-taking, all of those aspects of it. Yes, but there is ways now that you can do that where they weren't 30 years ago, when I came out of school I couldn't be, I was going to be an accountant. Can you imagine anything worse than that?  Craig: Hi, hi. Shout out to all our account listeners, we love you and we need you. Lisa: I wasn't that— Academically that's I was good at it. But geez, I hated it. And I did it because of parental pushing direction. Thank goodness, I sort of wake up to that. And you know, after three years. I had Mark Commander Mark Devine on the show. He's a Navy SEAL, man. You have to have him on the show. I'll hook you up. He's just a buck. He became an accountant before he became a Navy SEAL and now he's got the best of both worlds really, you know, but like you couldn't get more non-accountant than Mark Devine. We all go into the things when we leave school that we think we're meant to be doing. And they're not necessarily— and I think you know, the most interesting 50 year-olds still don't know what the hell they want to be when they grow up. Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on www.patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. We have two Patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us. You know, I'm still in that camp. Craig: You raise a really interesting point too, and that is programming and conditioning. And, you know, because we all grow up being programmed, one way or consciously or not, we grow— if you grow up around people, you're being programmed. So that's not a bad thing. That's an unavoidable human thing. So, situation, circumstance, environment, school, family, friends, media, social media, all of that stuff shapes the way that we see the world and shapes the way that we see ourselves.  When you grow up in a paradigm that says, ‘Okay, Lisa, when you finish school, you have to go to university, or you have to get a job, or you have to join the family business, or you have to work on our farm,' or whatever it is, you grow up in that. You're taught and told and trained. And so you don't question that, you know. And for me, I grew up in the 70s, I finished in the 80s. I finished school in 1981. And I grew up in the country, and most people go to trade or most people worked in logging or on a farm or— and I would say about five in 100 of the kids that I did— by the way, doing year 12 was a pretty big deal in that time. ‘Geez, are you a brainiac?' Definitely wasn't a brainiac. But year 12 is a big thing now. Now, even if you have an undergrad degree that it's almost nothing really enough. It's like, you kind of got to go get honours, or masters or maybe even a PhD down the track. And that landscape has really changed. So it's just changing again to— you know, and I think to become aware— like this is for me, I love it; this is my shit; this is what I love— is starting to become aware of our lack of awareness. And starting to become aware of my own programming and go, ‘Oh, I actually think this. Why not? Because this is how I naturally think about, because this is how I've been trained to think about work. I've been trained to or programmed to think this way about money, or relationships, or marriage, or eating meat, or being a Catholic or being an atheist or voting liberal law,' or whatever it is, right.  Not that any of those things are good or bad, but it's not about how I eat or how I vote or how I worship. It's about how I think. And is this my thinking? Or is this just a reflection of their thinking, right? So when we open the door on metacognition now we start to become aware of our own stories, and where they come from. And this is where I think we really start to take control of our own life, and our own present, and our own future that doesn't exist, by the way, but it will, but it won't be the present.  Then, we start to write our own story with our own voice, not our parents' voice, not our friends', not our peers' voice, you know. And we're always going to be influenced by other people. Of course. Just like people are influenced by you and your podcast, and your stories, and your thinking, and your lessons for them. They're influenced. But I always say to people, ‘Don't believe me because you like me. Listen to me, if you like me and consider what I say. If what I say sounds reasonable for you, maybe a good idea to test drive, take that idea for a test drive, and see if that works for you, because it might not.' Right?  I think, I really encourage people to learn for themselves and to listen to their own internal wisdom that's always talking. So listen to smart people. I don't know if Lisa and I are in that category, Lisa is, listen to her. But at the same time, do your own, learning through exploration and trial and error, and personal kind of curiosity and drive.  For me, I opened my first gym at 26; first personal training centre in Australia, there weren't any. I'd never done a business course, I've never done an admin course, I knew nothing about marketing. I knew nothing about employees. I knew nothing. But I learned more in one year than I would say, most people would learn in five years at university studying business, because I was in the middle of it, and I was going to sink or swim. So in one year, I started a business and I acquired overwhelming knowledge and skill because I had to, because of the situation. But that was all learning through doing.  The way that you've learned, you know you said earlier that, like, a lot of people think that they're not academic; therefore, they're not smart. Some of the smartest people I've ever met, and I don't— and this not being patronising, but like, mind-blowingly brilliant, how they think, live outside of academia. One of the reasons some people are so brilliant outside of academia is because they're not forced into an echo chamber of thought. They're living outside the academic paradigm, where we're not trying to restrict how you think or write or speak. There are no rules out here. So there's no intellectual inhibition.  Lisa: Yeah, I love that. Craig: When you do a PhD, like me, and I can separate the two, thankfully. But there's a way of communicating and writing in PhD land, which is incredibly restrictive because of the scientific process, which is fine, I get that. But it's having an awareness of— this is what I'm often talking to my supervisors about is, yes, I'm studying this thing, which is deep, deep neuropsychology, and everything, the way that you do your research, get your data or interpret your data. The whole process of creating new science, which is what you're doing as a PhD, creating, bringing something new into the world. That's one thing. But you write your journal articles, which is my PhD process, you get them, hopefully, you get them published in academic resources and magazines. But then, I don't want that to be it. I'm going to write a book when I finish about all of my research totally in layman's terms so that people can use the knowledge, so that people can— because that's the value.  For me handing in some papers and going, ‘Oh, Craig Harper is an academically published author.' That's cool, but it's not— and I'm so respectful of people who have had hundreds of things published, but that doesn't blow my socks off. I'm not really— like that's a real, you really hang your hat on that in academia. Oh, how many things he or she had published, publications, which is cool. They're all smarter than me. But I'm not. I'm like, yeah, that that's cool. But I want to connect with the masses, not the few. Also, by the way, people who read academic papers, they raise it— they're reading it generally, just like I am right now, for a specific reason which relates to their own research. There ain't too many people like you. You're one of the rare ones who just thumb through fucking academic journals to make your life better. Lisa: Yeah. And it's just some real goals. So you've got the wisdom of having lived outside of academia and being a pracademic, as Paul Taylor says, and then actually seeing the pre— and this is a discussion that I had when I was talking to someone about doing a PhD and they say, ‘But then you're going to become a part of the establishment, and you're going to be forced into this box.' And I said, ‘No, not necessarily because it's— I can see where you're coming from. But you can take that, because you have that maturity and that life experience and you can fit yourself into the box that you have to fit into in order to get those things done. That research done, but you don't have to stay there.'  That's what you know, one of my things has been, I don't want to spend however many years doing a PhD, and then that's not out on the world. To me that that needs to be taken out of the academic journals, wherever you go to publish, and then put out into a book or something that where it's actually shared, like you say, with the masses, because otherwise, it just collects dust like your MA does, or your whatever, you know, that sits on your bookshelf, and how you got hey, your exam your piece of paper, but you didn't actually do anything with it.  Of course, lots of people do their thing, they're going like they're in research, and they're furthering research and so on. But I— my approach, I think yours is too, is to be able to communicate that information that you've learned, and then share it with everyone, so that they can actually benefit from it, and not just the people that are in academia. The other thing I see after interviewing hundreds of doctors and scientists and people is that they are, actually, the more specialised they are, the more inhibited they are by what they can and can't say.  While they need to be doing that because they need to protect what they are doing in their studies and what they're allowed to and what they're not allowed to do and say, it also is very inhibiting, and they don't get the chance to actually express what they would actually like to say. That's a bit of a shame, really, because you don't get to hear the real truth in the qualifying everything flat stick. Craig: I reckon you're exactly right. But they don't need to be that. And the reason that a lot of academics are like that is because they get their identity and sense of self-worth from being an academic. They're way more worried about three of their peers hearing something that might not be 100% accurate, and then being reprimanded or, rather than just going— look, I always say to my academic, super academic friends, when I talk with them, not everything that comes out of your mouth needs to be research-based. You can have an idea and an opinion. In fact, I want to hear your ideas and opinions. Lisa: You're very educated. Craig: You know, that's the— and as for the idea of you becoming an academic, No, you go, you do your thing you study, you learn the protocol, the operating system, and you do that you go through that process, but you're still you. Right, and there's— you and I both know, there are lots of academics who have overcome that self-created barrier like Andrew Huberman.  Lisa: Yeah, who we love. Craig: Who we love, who, for people listening, he's @hubermanlab on Insta, and there's quite a few academics now, like the one that I spoke on before, on Joe Rogan. She's a Harvard professor, she's a genius, and she's just having a— it's a three-hour conversation with Rogan, about really interesting stuff.  There's been a bit of a shift, and there is a bit of a shift because people are now, the smart academics, I think, are now starting to understand that used the right way, that podcasts and social media more broadly, are unbelievably awesome tools to share your thoughts and ideas and messages. By the way, we know you're a human. If you get something wrong, every now and then, or whatever, it doesn't matter. Lisa: Well, we'll all get, I mean, you watch on social media, Dr Rhonda Patrick, another one that I follow? Do you follow her? Fantastic lady, you know, and you watch some of their feeds on social media, and they get slammed every day by people who pretending to be bloody more academic than her. That just makes me laugh, really. I'm just like, wow, they have to put up with all of that. The bigger your name and the more credibility you have as a scientist, the more you have to lose in a way.  You know, even David Sinclair another you know, brilliant scientists who loves his work. And I love the fact that he shared us with, you know, all his, all his research in real-time, basically, you know, bringing it out in the book Lifespan, which you have to read, in getting that out there in the masses, rather than squirrelling it away for another 20 years before it becomes part of our culture, and part of our clinical usage. We ain't got time for that. We have to, we're getting old now. I want to know what I need to do to stop that now. Thanks to him, you know, I've got some directions to show them. Whether he's 100% there, and he's got all the answers? No. But he's sharing where we're at from the progress. Science by its very nature is never finished. We never have the final answer. Because if someone thinks they do, then they're wrong, because they're not, we are constantly iterating and changing, and that's the whole basis of science. Craig: Well just think about the food pyramid. That was science for a few decades. Lisa: Lots of people still believe that shit. That's the scary thing because now that's filtering still down into the popular culture, that that's what you should be doing, eating your workbooks and God knows what. This is the scary thing, that it takes so long to drip down to people who aren't on that cutting edge and staying up with the latest stuff, because they're basically regurgitating what there was 20 years ago and not what is now.  Now Craig, I know you've got to jump off in a second. But I wanted to just ask one more question, if I may, we're completely different. But I want to go there today because I'm going through this bloody shingles thing. Your mate Johny that you train, and who you've spoken about on the last podcast, who had a horrific accident and amazingly survived, and you've helped him, and he's helped you and you've helped him learn life lessons and recover, but he's in constant chronic pain.  I'm in constant chronic pain now, that's two and a half weeks. For frick's sake, man, I've got a new appreciation of the damage that that does to society. I just said to my husband today, I've been on certain drugs, you know, antivirals, and in pain medication. I can feel my neurotransmitters are out of whack. I can feel that I'm becoming depressed. I have a lot of tools in my toolbox to deal with this stuff, and I am freely sharing this because what I want you to understand is when you, when you're dealing with somebody who is going through chronic pain, who has been on medications and antibiotics, and God knows whatever else, understanding the stuff that they're going through, because I now have a bit of a new appreciation for what this much of an appreciation for someone like Johnny's been through. What's your take on how pain and all this affects the neurotransmitters in the drugs? Craig: Do you know what? Lisa: You got two minutes, mate. Craig: I'm actually gonna give you I'm gonna hook you up with a friend of mine. His name is Dr Cal Friedman. He is super smart, and he specialises in pain management, but he has a very different approach, right? He's a medical doctor, but look, in answer to, I talked to Johnny about the pain a bit, and we have, we use a scale, obviously 10 is 10. 0 is 0. There's never a 0. Every now and then it's a 1 or 2, but he's never pain-free. Because he has massive nerve damage. And sometimes, sometimes he just sits down in the gym, and he'll just, I'll get him to do a set of something, and he'll sit down and I just see this, his whole face just grimaces. He goes, ‘Just give me a sec.' His fist is balled up. He goes, sweat, sweat. I go, ‘What's going on, mate?' He goes, ‘It feels like my leg, my whole leg is on fire.'  Lisa: Yeah. I can so relate to that right now.  Craig: Literally aren't, like, burning, like excruciating. I don't think there's any, I mean, obviously, if there was we'd all be doing it. There is no quick fix. There is no simple answer. But what he has done quite successfully is changed his relationship with pain. There is definitely, 100% definitely, a cognitive element to, of course, the brain is, because the brain is part of the central nervous system. Of course, the brain is involved. But there's another element to it beyond that, right.  I'm going to tell you a quick story that might fuck up a little bit of Dr Cal, if you get him on. He has done a couple of presentations for me at my camps. He's been on my show a little bit. But he told this story about this guy at a construction site that was working and he had a workplace accident. And he, a builder shot a three-inch nails through his boots, through his foot. Right? So the nail went through his foot, through the top of the leather, and out the sole, and he was in agony, right? He fell down, whatever and he's just rolling around in agony and his mates, they didn't want to take anything off because it was through the boot, through his foot.  They waited for the ambos to get there, and they gave him the green whistle. So you know that whatever that is, the morphine didn't do anything, he was still in agony. He was in agony. Anyway, they get him into the back of the ambulance and they cut the boot off. And the nail has gone between his big toe and second toe and didn't even touch his foot.  Lisa: Oh, wow. In other words, psychologically—  Craig: There was no injury. But the guy was literally in excruciating pain, he was wailing. And they gave him treatment, it didn't help. He was still in pain. So what that tells us— Lisa: There is an element of—  Craig: What that tells us is our body can, our mind can create real, not perceived, but real pain in your body. And again, and this is where I think we're going in the future where we start to understand, if you can create extreme pain in your body where there is no biological reason, there is no actual injury, there's no physical injury, but you believe there's an injury, now you're in agony.  I think about, and there's a really good book called Mind Over Medicine by a lady called Lissa Rankin, which we might have spoken about. L-I-S-S-A, Lissa Rankin, Mind Over Medicine. What I love about her is, she's a medical doctor, and she gives case after case after case of healing happening with the mind, where people think placebos and no-cebos, people getting sick, where they think they're getting something that will make them sick, but it's nothing, they actually make themselves sick. And conversely, people getting well, when they're not actually being given a drug. They're being given nothing, but they think it's something. Even this, and this is fascinating, this operation, pseudo-operation I did with people where—  Lisa: Yeah, I read that one. I read that study. Craig: Amazing. Craig: Oh, yeah, it's look, pain is something that even the people who are experts in it, they don't fully understand. Lisa: Well, I just like, if I can interrupt you there real briefly, because I've been studying what the hell nerve pain, and I'm like, my head, my sores are starting to heal up right. So in my head, I'm like ‘Whoa, I should be having this pain, I'm getting more pain from the burning sensation in my legs and my nerves because it's nerve pain.' So I read somewhere that cryotherapy was good. So in the middle of the night, when I'm in really bad pain, instead of lying there and just losing my shit, and have I now have been getting up every night and having two or three cold ice-cold showers a night, which probably not great for my cortisol bloody profile, but it's, I'm just targeting that leg. That interrupts the pain sensation for a few minutes.  What I'm trying to do as I go, I'm trying to go like, can I—am I getting pain because my brain is now used to having pain? Is it sending those messages, even though there's no need, the sores are healing?  Craig: That is possible. Lisa: Am I breaking? And I can break the pain for about 10 minutes, and then it will come back in again. But I'm continuing on with it, that idea that I can interrupt that pain flow. Then of course, during the breathe in, the meditation, the stuff and sometimes you just lose your shit and you lose it, and then you just start crying, ‘Mummy, bring me some chicken soup' type moments. But it's really interesting. I mean, I just like to look at all these shit that we go from and then say, ‘Well, how can I dissect this and make this a learning curve?' Because obviously, there's something wrong, but I just, I feel for people that are going through years of this. Craig: It's, yeah, I'm the same I feel. Sometimes I work with people, where I work with and as do you, I work with a lot of people who have real problems. I don't have any problems. I mean, they have real problems. And I'm, despite my appearance, I'm quite, I'm very compassionate. It's hard for me because I, it upsets me to see people in pain. I feel simultaneously sad and guilty. How do I deserve this? But it just is what it is. But people like John and a lot of the people that I've worked with and you've worked with, you know, people like that inspire me.  I mean, they're— I don't find typical heroes inspirational. They don't really inspire me like the people we normally hold up as, I mean, well done. I think they're great, but they don't inspire me. People who inspire me or people who really, how the fuck are you even here? How do you turn up? He turns up. He's actually in hospital right now because he's got a problem that's being fixed. But, and he's in and out of hospital all of the time. And then he turns up, he hugs me and he goes, ‘How are you?' I go, ‘I'm good.' He goes, ‘Now look at me.' So I look at him. And he goes, ‘How are you really?' And I go, ‘I'm good.' This is the guy who—  Lisa: Who's dealing with so much. I've got a friend, Ian Walker8, who I've had on the show, too, so he got hit by a truck when he was out cycling, I think it was years and years ago. He ended up a paraplegic. And then he recovered, he didn't recover, he's still in a wheelchair, but he was out racing his wheelchair, he did wheelchair racing, and he's part of our club and stuff. And then he got hit by another truck, now he's a quadriplegic.  This guy, just, he is relentless in his attitude, like he is, and I've seen him dragging himself like with his hands because he's got access now to his hands again. After working for the last couple of years, and he kind of, on a walker frame thing, dragging himself two steps and taking a little video of him, dragging his feet, not the feet out, working, they're just being dragged. But the relentless attitude of the guy, I'm just like, ‘You're a fricking hero. You're amazing. Why aren't you on everybody magazine cover? Why aren't you like, super famous?' Those people that really flip my boat. Craig: Yeah. And I

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Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Discover how to become metabolically flexible and fat-adapted. Find out the truth about the keto diet and its effect on your metabolic health. Learn how chronic stress can lead to severe brain damage.    Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-aging and longevity with NMN Bio.  Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes: #183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova Connect with Prof Grant: Website | Facebook What The Fat? Book PreKure: A place where you'll learn about health & wellness From Prof Grant's blog: Who cares about what humans have eaten in the past? How to reverse the diabetes epidemic in 3 years. Fast This Way by Dave Asprey Patrick McKeown and James Nestor  ‎Huberman Lab Podcast by Dr Andrew Huberman    Episode Highlights [03:34] Prof Grant's Background Grant liked science and sports from his early childhood. He wanted to study physical education in university, but his family told him to take up engineering. He eventually ended up studying physiology and psychology.  Grant then got into triathlons while he started his academic and research career.  He focuses on fitness, nutrition, sleep, and well being. He has written books on fasting and diets for reversing sicknesses and enhancing performance.  [10:41] Metabolic Flexibility Can Be Trained A long time ago, humans used fat as a primary fuel source when resting and moving around.  In contrast, the modern, average person doesn't burn fat, especially when at rest. Grant thinks that people can reverse this and train to be metabolically flexible.  People who have metabolic inflexibility tend to have a low supply of readily available energy.  Grant prescribed a diet and workout training programme to a client. This person eventually became fat-adapted and broke a record in the triathlon he joined.  [17:54] The Truth About the Keto Diet The initial process of getting into the keto diet is strict, but after around three weeks, however, it becomes sustainable. Unless you have therapeutic reasons to do so, you don't need to stick to the keto diet all the time.  Some people believe that the keto diet isn't good because our genetic ancestors had short lifespans. Grant and Lisa argue that the cavemen's lifespans were shorter because of other reasons. [24:18] The Addictiveness of Food Lisa thinks that the quality of our food is horrific: a lot of processed food is unhealthy and addictive. Grant also observed this through his research.  Sugar, in particular, is often overused in our food.  Sugar addiction can be especially harmful because our bodies are not predisposed to coping with it.  The food industry has many tactics to make unhealthy, addicting food sound healthy.  Listen to the whole episode to hear Grant's research and battling the food industry's tactics. [34:57] The Metabolic and Mental Health Crisis Mental health problems are becoming more and more prevalent amongst New Zealand youth.  Because of the faulty healthcare system, the youth often turn to medicine for their mental health problems.  We have a metabolic crisis involving obesity, diabetes and the brain. Our metabolic balance can be interrupted by antidepressants. Instead of taking medicine, Lisa thinks the youth should be taught how to manage their health better. [43:41] About Glutamate and Stress Our brains produce glutamate when we are stressed. There is an inhibitory system called GABA that inhibits the effects of glutamate. When you are chronically stressed, this amino acid keeps getting pumped out and can overwhelm your brain. Too much glutamate in our system can kill our brain cells and damage the brain.  You can combat glutamate toxicity through various methods. Learn how when you listen to the full episode! [58:02] Making Science Understandable for Everyone Lisa mentions the works of Patrick McKeown and James Nestor.  Grant applauds their approach of translating science into something understandable while not dumbing it down.  Lisa thinks that most health systems treat most people as idiots and don't explain the science behind health well. [1:03:26] Grant's Parting Advice It's difficult to reach a state of good health and homeostasis in our current world. However, it's not impossible. Grant advocates for everyone to use their voice to overwhelm the industries that promote unhealthy living.   7 Powerful Quotes From This Episode ‘The thing is, with addictions, of course, is that people go because everyone is not addicted to it, doesn't mean it's not a thing.'   ‘Sugar is definitely one of those things that is one of the hardest addictions I think, not that I've been addicted to anything else but it's a bloody hard addiction to get rid of and stay on top of.'   ‘We're fighting a war here, and we've got kids that are already diabetic and before they're even teenagers, and this is a coming huge disaster for the healthcare system.'   ‘We've got a metabolic crisis with obesity and diabetes, but guess what? The most important metabolic organ is your brain.'   'Now I understand the need for health fundamentals like sleep, hygiene, and movement, and exercise, and sunshine, and the right diet, because diet is a huge piece of the puzzle because your gut and your brain are connected.'   ‘We weren't designed for long-term stress. We're designed for acute fight or flight.'   ‘Let's treat people as if they have got a brain in the head. Just because they don't know the jargon. You can explain the jargon.'   About Prof Grant Prof Grant Schofield is a Professor of Public Health at Auckland University of Technology and the director of the university's Human Potential Centre (HPC). His research and teaching interests include wellbeing and chronic disease prevention. Prof Schofield is committed to unlocking people's peak performance through consulting. His motto: 'be the best you can be'. Grant has been interested in human health and performance ever since he started his career. He first took up psychology, went into sport and exercise psychology, then into public health. Prof Schofield has a diverse background and has an interest in biology, medicine, public health, and productivity management. He covers various health topics in his blog and book. If you want to connect with Prof Grant, you can follow him on Facebook.     Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn how to optimise their health. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.  Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week I have another wonderful professor with me who is going to share some insights and the latest research and I'm really, really excited for this interview. I have Professor Grant Schofield, who is the Professor of Public Health at Auckland University of Technology. He's also the director of the University's Human Potential Center, located at Millennium Campus up in Auckland. His interests lie with dealing with chronic disease and well being and prevention around degenerative diseases, obesity, metabolic disorders. He's a very, very interesting man, he's written a number of books along with his team. I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation. We're pretty frank and upfront about our beliefs, and they're very much aligned so I really enjoyed this talk with Professor Grant Schofield.  Before we head over to the show, just a reminder to check out our patron program, www.patron.lisatamati.com, and I'd also love you to check out our flagship epigenetics program. Our epigenetics is all about understanding your own genes, and how to optimize them for your best health. So looking at areas from your food, to your exercise to the what times of the day to do things, your chronobiology, that's called looking at your mood and behavior, your what parts of the brain you use most dominantly, and this is a very powerful program that has changed really, hundreds of lives. We've now used it for a number of years in the corporate space, as well as in the athletic space, as well as with people dealing with different health issues. So if you want to find out more, go to lisatamati.com and hit the work with us button and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program.  We've also got out Running Hot Coaching. Don't forget that, www.runninghotcoaching.com is the website to go for our online run training system. It's all personalized, customized to you to your next big goal, you get video analysis, a consult with me all in the basic package and plan for your next event, including everything from your strength to your mobility workouts, as well as your run sessions and advice around eating and mindset. So check that out at runninghotcoaching.com. Right, over to Professor Grant Schofield at the Millennium Center in Auckland.  Well, hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today, I have a superstar. I have a guest that I'm really, really excited about speaking to because this is a very learned gentleman and an elite athlete and someone who I greatly admire. I have Professor Grant Schofield to guest. Welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you, Grant!  Prof Grant Schofield: Hey, Lisa. Yeah, thanks for having me. And, yeah, I've been following you from a distance for years. And you know, just enjoying your achievements love, and it's so great to have you on the show. Lisa: And likewise in reverse. So thank you very much. It's a real honor. So today we, I reckon we just gonna dive into some of the stuff that you've been researching and what's on your mind at the moment, because you've got so many areas that I could go down, you know, looking at high fat diets and obesity and diabetes and prevention. Then we can look at the weight paper that you've just recently released, which I've, I just studied and went, ‘Wow, that was all about glutamate and toxicity and all that'. Well, that's new, that was all new to me. So which direction and firstly, give us a bit of an introduction to you in your background and your sporting career and all of that sort of stuff. Grant: Yeah. So, like, I'd always, something that always interests me in my life is things that I was sort of good at, and I was only good at it because I like doing them was, not so much school, but science and biology. I just liked it. I just like learning about that stuff. I was right from the very start of school and this is just something that continued to happen. I also like doing sports. I was just like one of those kids who is into the sports and I was okay. It was like, every New Zealand kid plays rugby. I wasn't that great, but I played it, you know, I've got on the 15 rugby and all this sort of stuff and that sort of thing. And the school I said also had rowing as a sport, which Yeah, and they did a performance level. So it was to win the national championships. And they so, the crews I was in, trained hard. And there was high-performance aspects, as long as they were in hindsight of nutrition and psychology and training and the broad range of things that good teenage athletes get involved with.  Then of course, they don't finish as when you finish the school, and I sort of found myself, thought I'll go to uni. My dad was an engineer and he thought I should go to, I wanted to go to do physical education. That was the main thing I was interested in, and my family sort of pulled me out of it and told me I should have gone to engineering. I lasted a week in there. It obviously wasn't for me. But I ended up in a degree studying physiology and psychology, just a science degree because that's what I found interesting. And then I went from, not really been that interested all of sudden getting these A-pluses. I didn't think I was brainy. But it was just, you know, I was just used to go to lectures, and not really take notes, and just listen and ask questions, and it was really interesting. But because I wasn't that mature, there was never a point in my life early on where I was like, Grant Schofield is now capable of getting a decent job where someone's going to employ him, and he's going to make some difference to the world. That wasn't a thing, right?  Lisa: Yeah.  Grant: So I couldn't finish this one degree and go and get a job because I wasn't capable of doing any work. I didn't think I could at the time. But that's the reality in hindsight, right? So. Of course, this is the early 90s. And this sport of triathlon was coming on the scene where I live in New Zealand, there was these great personalities like Erin Baker, another woman, Erin Christie, another one, Rick Wells, and, just to a young person, and then I ended up, you know, going out training with quite large, and a lot of these people, and I just got into the sport. The thing is about endurance, especially longer, it's as you know, what, you need to be sort of mentally tough, the pain's a lot softer than something like rowing or, or, you know, measuring 3,000 meters running or, you know, 400-800 meter swimming, these are sports with a piano actually does fall hard on you. And so that sort of softer pain of the— Lisa: Softer, longer.  Grant: Longer. Lisa: There's all the pains that come with it, yeah.  Grant:  But it's more of a, it's more of a thinking person sport, right, because you get to work through that. Whereas, you know, in a 400-meter is something that you don't get to work through anything. It's just falling on you, the cut score is coming in. And so I really love that stuff. And so I just did more and more of I just want to do nothing but that. The mindset of the endurance ethic that just wants to do more and more and more. Luckily, I sort of carried on with my studies and then started my academic career. And then I became a psychologist, I'm actually quite useless at psychology because, mainly because I want to give people the answer. And of course, you know, good psychological counseling is about asking open-ended questions, reflective listening, and waiting for the client to come up with a solution, which is absolutely hopeless. As my wife would tell you—  Lisa: You're an action orientated guy, like no, there is the solution here.  Grant: Yeah. This is why this is the problem for us. It's this sort that out. By then, by the early 2000s, when it really just dawned on us that our kids didn't look like we did when we were kids.  Lisa: Yeah.  Grant: You can look. I actually was reflecting on the other day, I looked at my photo of Twizel Primary School, Year One in 1974. And, yeah, by modern standards, people will be wondering if those kids are properly fed, why the teachers are so lean. And you compare that with a modern day Year One primary school class, or later, and it's a different world we lived in.  So that was the early 2000s, that world had unfolded, right? So didn't, wasn't the same.  Lisa: It's scary. Grant: And as fit as I used to be, they weren't the same shape they used to be and we wondered why. And so that was really the field that welcomed me, which was that topic of nutrition. Lisa: Wow. So that's where you got into, yeah. Grant: Yeah, yeah, just didn't mean to. And then, you know, all of a sudden, I guess my research career's followed my curiosity around the world. So when you're, when you've got young kids, you're interested in young kids. When you've got teenagers, youngsters, young teenagers, When I was racing, elite, high performance, triathlons, we're interested in that. And thankfully, being an academic, it allows you to, especially in my field, allows you the freedom to roam around those and understand those different things. So I've sort of had a, maybe it's a short concentration span, but effectively just a curiosity to keep rolling my research career and practice. Lisa: It's really good that you can do that with an academic career sort of go go like this and still stay— Grant: You can't go off into sort of, you know, rocket propulsion or something, but, you know, yeah, as long as I stick it to the main things, which are being sort of fitness, nutrition, sleep, well being, then those sort of four things combined, have really been my wheelhouse. But in different, the settings, and the context seems to often change. And then you just, you'll do some work and you'll discover what you think an answer is, or not an answer is, it's a dead end or it's actually got places to go, then you're sort of done with it, and you're on to the next sort of variation of something.  So that's sort of been my life. So the latter stuff is really, we've done a lot of work on low-carb and keto diets, fasting, written quite a few books on that.  Lisa: Yeah, What the Fat? and— Grant: And yeah, yeah, and so that's been really interesting for me, you know, for, for reversing things like diabetes at one end of the spectrum, sort of net, sort of metabolic dysregulation, through to the other end of a high performance.  I'm an athlete, so I coach still, you know, being able to triple their ability to burn free fatty acids at a given intensity and really have a pretty much inexhaustible fuel supply. Before that, they would, you know, really run out of glycogen and struggle through the enjoyment and performance of an event. So— Lisa: Let's start with that one, just if I may interrupt you there, because it's, you know, something that's fascinated me. When I was, you know, active career, I'd never become fat-adapted as an athlete. Your take is that, should endurance athletes be always fat-adapted? Or is it a genetic thing some people are good at, and some people are less so? What is your take on it now, like, given the knowledge that you have and the experience? Grant: So I think that the normal human condition, if you wander up to a Paleolithic human before we started farming grains and wheat and stuff, that sort of hunter gatherers that they would have enjoyed this metabolic flexibility to use fat as a primary fuel source when are resting and moving around low intensities, and then as they got higher and higher intensity, then they would have supplemented that fat burning with extra energy produced from burning glucose in the body. But that doesn't exist. So commonly, and so we're just in the normal human state that lets you burn fat in some circumstances, and carbs and fat in other circumstance.  But if you went down to the local Westfield shopping mall and went to the food hall, and you you bought all those people up to my lab and put them on our metabolic card and measured there, because you can measure both breath by breath gas analysis and understand whether they've been in primarily fat or carbohydrate or whatever mix of. So we do that sort of graded exercise tissue stop at risk, just breathing into the tube. The machine's analyzing fat and carb burning, and as you increase your intensity, like running speed or power on the bike, then you just see this greater change.  Now, your average person off the street in the food hall doesn't burn fat, even at rest. So they're metabolically inflexible. Yep. And then the question is, can you train that? And can you train that even on high performance athletes? I think the answer is yes, and I'll give you a good example. There's a young fellow I trained, Matt Kurt and what I mean, saying this. I've trained him for a few years now. So he came from a CrossFit background. He was a fit young man. Yeah, he would be eating mostly carbs, actually. Lisa: Yeah, we were all told back in the day.  Grant: Yeah, totally. So he wanted me to help him prepare for an Ironman triathlon. And so I started training him and say, on an April one year so over in New Zealand winter, didn't really mention diet, because we couldn't seem to get to that but we sort of got on the on the idea that he had to go bike riding, and what running would look like, and it was learning the sports. And by December, he did his first triathlon, which was a 70.3, sort of half Ironman, with a view to going through the Ironman in New Zealand three months later and beginning of March, and he did pretty well actually, like it came fourth overall in the amateurs, so he is talented young man, and he's a swimmer. He could hit a bike, he could run a bit. But I knew he was a cub and I was like, I need to put you in my lab and we need to measure your fuel burning on that.  So in early December, we got them in there and his peak fat oxidation was about half a gram, a minute, at about 165 watts in the box. So it's not very good power, output is not going to be very fast. And he's only getting because a gram of fat has about nine calories, he's spending half of one of those a minute over 60 minutes. He's got about 400 to 500 calories an hour available from fat, and you know, he's going to be racing at 1200 calories an hour.  Lisa: Yeah.  Grant: So over several hours, yeah. He's simply is going to run into all sorts of trouble, because he's got this deficit of 800 calories an hour, he needs to find from glucose. He's got probably 2000 calories that he's got in his muscles and liver. He can consume another couple of 100 by eating gels and stuff, or bananas or something. So he's woefully short. And so it means he can just make a half, I mean, over four hours. We probably have eight or nine hours, he's going to grovel home. He's going to be a really bad mess. And that's what you see. It's always frustrated me. I got things like Ironman Triathlon, they sort of, 8-15 hour events, or 17 hour events for people.  And I think the saddest thing for me is, first of all this, two thirds of the fittest still mimics the general population, which is overweight.  Lisa: Yeah.  Grant: And virtually all of them run out of glucose or glycogen and their body, sometimes during the bike or shortly into the run. And so the whole marathon experience for them is a very unpleasant affair. They don't like doing it, they finally make it, it's been a real drain on, and they've had so much support from their friends and family over that preparation period, and it was all avoidable. So with Matt, within a mile, we're like, what this is going to happen with you, Matt. So we're stuck on a strict keto diet for three weeks, his training over that period was fairly low intensity, we didn't really go for any intensity up until after the new year period. And then just sit them on to Iron Man training, and that includes his long run and his long bike which he did weekly, and I've been doing them fasted. Yeah, so with just water. People find that a little bit extreme but his intensity is really low. We'd go out and do you know, like a six hour bike in the end that with no food, and he'd be fine.  Lisa: And that's the thing, you're adapted.  Grant: You get adapted. And so going back into the lab just before Iron Man, and he'd improved his maximum fat oxidation from half a gram a minute at 165 watts or something, to 1.1 grams a minute at 260 watts.  Lisa: Wow.  Grant: So now he's able to supply 800 calories an hour from fat, and he can do it at 260 watts, which is actually a reasonably competitive pair out, but he's going to get along at you know, 39, 40 calories an hour.  Lisa: Wow.  Grant: And yeah, and so in his first, second ever triathlon, in his first Iron Man, he does, he finishes, I don't know, the top 10 and 9 hours 22. So good effort.  Lisa: That's amazing. Grant: Yeah, we come back the next year, now with a bit more training on his belt, and he can he manages 8 hours 50. Wow. And this year, he comes back and he wins the entire age group race by half an hour, breaks the course record by seven minutes and does 8:27. And I got him back in the lab straight after that. And what we saw as further fed adaptation over that two-year period, so now he is able to burn 1.8 grams a minute of fat at 310 watts, and that's an astonishing power output. So 310 watts, yeah, you're doing 42 Ks an hour, on a decent course. And that's, he rode 4 hours 29 480 Ks, it's an astonishing time, especially for a guy who's working full time as a teacher. Lisa: That's insane. Grant: So that's what we mean by being metabolically flexible, and, and becoming a real fat-burning machine. Lisa: But what about the arguments about you know, I mean, keto diet is a very difficult diet for people to, if we're talking about the general population now, and it's quite a hard diet to stick to, long term. What about adherence to things? Do you have to be strictly keto? Do you have to be really low on your carbs in order to get the ketones and be in ketosis and to get this fat adaptation? Is there any middle ground? Can you— Grant: Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a great question. I mean, the series of questions you got there, Lisa, are just crucial. And the answer is, initially getting into that. as I'm, for that three, it's very strict. And so that's three weeks. After that, it's very much cyclical. So we generate nutritional ketosis and fat burning by fasted long workouts. And on other cases during the week, we're adding carbohydrates quite a bit. So it's definitely not a strict ketogenic diet at all. And we'll have off periods where he's just eating whatever. In fact, I have trouble trying to get him off the ketone to be a bit more loose, frankly. But that's, that's an athlete, not a normal human, in that sense. This is why I introduced the idea of fasting and intermittent fasting and I'm quite keen on that. And for me, what the fast what I tried to sort of mimic what I felt was an easy, sustainable, cyclical way for me to eat that generated fat burning. Lisa: And pursued it with autophagy? We're all talking about intermittent fasting and I do it like an intermittent fasting, a short-ish intermittent fasting. Is that going to this, I'm not gonna get into ketosis doing an intermittent fasting. Grant: So I just, I would do this sort of pattern of Sunday, try and be reasonably good on the low carb, just eat whatever I wanted. But try and be okay with it. Monday, do some restricted eating windows. So you know, might be, a longest window. Someone who's experienced like me, I could just have one meal that day, and the Tuesday I just did the same thing. So you know, and when I hit a meal I made sure it was super filling, super nutritious, I was calling that super meals. So that's my, that's my Monday and Tuesday, my hard parts of the week, right I worked hard and I concentrated hard on my freshly generated nutritional ketosis. By Monday lunchtime, despite the weekend, Saturday being quite poor, I was back in full ketosis.  I made a bit of an effort, I managed to sort of hang on to some stuff with no real particular restriction but trying to keep the carbs down for Wednesday, Thursday. By the end of Friday, everything had sort of gone pretty loose. And Saturday it was, could be, sometimes off the route is completely out of nutritional ketosis and plenty of carbs, even the odd bit of alcohol, which I'm not encouraging, by the way, but that just seems to happen sometimes.  Lisa: Yeah. And we've got to live, too, Grant: Yeah, yeah. So I'd be completely out of ketosis and in no shape for that at all. But by Monday morning, I'll be back in again. So I just get this period.  Lisa: So you can do that. It's been my question today is like, do I, if I go to keto, you know, go the keto diet. Do you have to do it as a religion? This is me. And then you get people like Dave Asprey and and if you read his book, Fast This Way, and that, he talks about cyclic keto, and how that's even better than just being straight keto, because keto itself can have some negative benefits. Dr Grant: Yeah, I completely agree. And so unless you're wanting to be on keto, for some sort of therapeutic resume, I said, you know, glioblastoma, brain cancer or brain injury like a TBI, I think so. Interesting thing, some other cancers, or you're in chemotherapy, then I don't see any reason to be in that state all the time. But the point is having a bit of bollock machinery to be able to be and easily get in and out. My hypothesis is the Paleolithic one, which is really that humans are metabolically flexible, it's the normal human condition and to see modern humans that have really lost their orchestration of the metabolism to, to burn fat as a primary fuel sources as a sort of denying your own humanity type situation without being too dramatic about it, really. Lisa: But yeah, if we, I was reading one of your blogs, and you hit another, Dr Lisa Te Morenga, I think it was, saying, oh, but you know, like, if we look at from an evolutionary perspective, the caveman because this is an argument that I've had with people too, oh, but the cavemen didn't live very long, so therefore, it's not a good diet. To say that that's, but that's not a bit that helped us survive till now. You know, like we— Grant: I think that's a complete straw man of an argument, by the way.  Lisa: Yeah, I think so too. Grant: I mean, I think, you know, I mean, first of all, while the average lifespan, is fairly low for people, it's just for other reasons!  Lisa: It's for other reasons.  Grant: So if you didn't have those reasons, your actual survival was pretty good. And actually, the important thing to remember is that Paleolithic humans didn't have chronic disease. So they didn't have this, these, what is it a New Zealand at the moment, 12 years of disability in their life before they died, which, so subtract 12 off your lifespan, to get your health span, to health span, span with the same thing. And also question about that. Lisa: We don't have infant mortality, like they did. And we didn't have lions chasing us, and we've got all these other things that make us live longer. But now we have to take even more care of our metabolic state, in order that we don't have these long term. And I mean, I've been living with the consequences of mom's metabolic disorders, leading to an aneurysm, for the past five years, and trying to undo the damage. You know, what I'm talking about is like, in that decline that we see with so many people for over decades, sometimes, and it's just a horrific way to go out for starters. Grant: You know, I don't think anyone, if you ask them when they're in good health, about how they want the rest of their life to track, says they want to be in poor health with a low health span. I don't think that's a topic that people raise as being a good thing.  Lisa: No.  Grant: It's my experience. When I ask even people who aren't doing many healthy behaviors of what they want, then they'll say health, family, friends and happiness, whatever that means. But they, yeah, Lisa: yeah. And I think this is the discussion that we need to be having, so that we find out what the optimum diet is. People I know, I've struggled with my diet over the years. One of the reasons I started running was because I wanted to eat more, because I love food. And then, then I suddenly, at some point, I realized, this hypothesis of calories in calories out is absolute bullshit. This isn't working and that really came to you know, people who hear my podcasts and hear me say when I ran through New Zealand, and I just suddenly woke up. I was running 500 kilometers a week. Yeah, and I was getting fatter because I was in a complete state of chaos. You know, my hormones were up, my water retention, all of that sort of—  Grant: High amount of inflammation, probably.  Lisa: Huge amounts of inflammation. And I ended up flaccid, losing muscle mass and getting fatter and having a slower metabolic rate. I could have sat on the couch and eaten chips and gotten better, you know, in shape?  Grant: Yeah.  Lisa: So that's when a light bulb went for me, and then it also had other reasons like genetically I'm not really made for the long distance stuff, I'm more the high intensity, shorter, sharper, is more suited to me. So I was doing that wrong as well, because some people, it's better to be doing the long. But I think having these discussions where we really dig in, and you've done the research, you know, what, from an evolutionary perspective, what we need to be eating. The state of our food now is horrific. Then you, you add into all that the whole addictive nature of all the stuff and the additives, or preservatives, the MSGs for all of the sugars that are added to our phones, and people are up against it. Like, you know, you can't even— Grant: Yeah, I agree. Those two topics that might be worth going into those, I've got two— Lisa: Yes, please. Grant: —sort of bases, working in both those areas, the first you mentioned, like you go out, the state of our food supply. So what we've been doing recently is we've been going to primary schools around the place. And we've been taking photos of all the year sixes' lunchboxes. And whatever you think, particularly on what we call that social gradient, that sort of tipping of rich versus poor at the bottom end of that, whatever you think the food supply's like, I don't care what you think about how bad it is. It's worse than you think.  Lisa: Yeah.  Grant: I actually cried, I actually physically cried. Lisa: That's what our kids are getting to eat every day.  Grant: Yeah, and how that's not a priority. Just remember that the biggest cost to our healthcare system for our kids is having to anesthetize them to extract teeth because they're rotten at age five, and we can't walk around too much if they're not anesthetized. So yeah, I mean, what society treats its most vulnerable like that? Just one little rant: in kids healthcare, we have to go and do fundraising and buy raffle tickets to pay for the hospitals for kids. And we don't do that with adults. That sort of fundraising for that is despicable. It's not a government that cares. Lisa: Not to mention the whole bloody ambulance service. Grant: Yeah, there's all of that, wouldn't I fund that? There's all of that stuff as well. So that's just a mess of how, frankly, Ad the second thing is I've got another student who's just really got into this, the addiction side of food. And as a former psychologist, she goes through and look at the, some, you know, use this Diagnostic and Statistical Manual DSM, DSM-5 is the latest version, which is a way of characterizing disorders.  And you look at the substance misuse disorder, which is really around addictions. And you know, if you change the word alcohol or methamphetamine or tobacco for sugar, yeah, then, you know, the sorts of things you know, sometimes feel withdrawal sometimes. I eat more than I should change unprofessional behavior and makes things worse in my life. You go across all 11 criteria, and you go, Yeah, it's pretty plausible. That's a real thing. Yeah. And the thing is, with addictions, of course, is that people go because everyone is not addicted to it, doesn't mean it's not a thing. So there's this, there's a lot of alcohol drunk where people don't turn into alcoholics It doesn't mean there's not such a thing as alcoholics. And there's, you know, for many people, it becomes a substance they can't control using and I feel the same things about sugar in your ultra processed food in general really. Lisa: Yeah. And the sugar I mean, the I mean like people like you I know you've done a lot of work with a Pacific Island population and Maori and so on, we have a predisposition to you know, not being able to cope with the sugars and more cardiovascular disease and more metabolic disorders. So even more Prater the stuff because we've already and haven't had I don't know hundreds of years of of having it to a certain degree in I mean, I've struggled no sugar is definitely one of those things that is one of the hardest addictions I think, not that I've been addicted to anything else but it's a bloody hard addiction to to get rid of and stay on top of. Grant: Something like smoking or alcohol like the absence of is part of it is hard but just slightly easier because it's contained whereas sugar's so ubiquitous in the food supply, you can't stop it. It's very hard, you know, all of a sudden you put some chili sauce on your something and you're damn near 75% sugar, you know, like? Lisa: You don't even realize it unless you start baking them and making everything from scratch.- And then you know, not to mention all the MSGs and the additives, preservatives, emulsifiers that are you know, destroying our guts and causing us to want more. I mean, there's a real reason why you can't eat one chip. If you eat one chip, you've eaten the packet, Grant: Well, that's certainly my experience. But strangely, and I had an argument with a dietitian the other day about this, there's a total open quote and short of eating. And it's like her hypothesis was, well, the whole reason we I was like, Look, there's no point having salted chips in my house, because they'll last five minutes, I'll eat the whole lot. Yes. Oh, no, no, no, the way you should overcome that is just have dozens of packets on there and just eat yourself silly and then you'll get over it. That's just bullshit in my experience  Lisa: Pretty much done that, and that didn't work. That doesn't work. I've heard that theory too. I think that's absolute rubbish, and not something that I'd recommend for starters, because you're gonna start on an either like, that's like, you know, a little bit good, then we must have just have some more.  Yeah.  Lisa: That's ridiculous. Really, they still think that. You know there's a whole movement?  You're kidding? Okay. But how do we help people? Because people are unaware of the addictive nature of their food and we're so like, I don't have a big garden full of organic veggies. I never time, all the knowledge and I used to having my dad used to do my garden and then it was good. But now I don't. Most of us don't have access to good quality foods. What the hell do we do? We go into a supermarket and it's just so easy to pick up a pre-made sauce, you know, tomato sauce, or Bolognese sauce instead of, you know, buying a bloody lot of tomatoes and making it. But yeah, but we've fallen into this trap. And now we're addicted all of us. Because the big food industry wants you to eat more of its crap. Grant: Yeah, they've conspired both on research and practice. And then just in all practical ways. In fact, I wrote a paper with a couple of superstars actually a guy, Aseem Malhotra, who's a cardiologist, in London, and Rob Lustig, who's pretty famous, a pediatric endocrinologist from San Francisco about the the tricks that the food industry has pulled, which are pretty much the exact same ones as Big Tobacco have over the years, you know, creating bogus interest groups, false advocacy, sponsoring athletes, list goes on. Lisa: I'm a part of that machinery, unfortunately, you know, when I was a young athlete being sponsored by Coca Cola— Grant: I didn't, I was told, I was told not to come back to, I'm in New Zealand. I spoke there one time, a couple of years ago, because I had to guard the sponsors product, which was Nutrigrain, Kellogg's Nutrigrain, which is four and a half staff health rating food, that's, you know, a third sugar. It's just a disgrace. Yeah, that was not welcome again. Lisa: When you see famous sports teams, I won't name any, but they're nutritionists on the telly telling you to eat stuff that really is not what you want your kids eating. And you're like, ‘Wow, that's wrong on so many levels', you know? Grant: I'll tell you a story about that. I don't know if I should tell this story. Years ago, I gave this talk on a sort of update on physical activity and health for the first-time executives of Coca Cola over this Waipuna Lodge in Auckland. I'd finished my talk, I was just at the back. And the head and corners in and go on. The next guy that got was a corporate guy from the US about how they're going to discredit various nutrition people and active tactics. I went around, and I sort of sat there and listened to it. And I was like, ‘Oh', and then about halfway through, I was like, ‘Shit, I'll make sure I get out of here alive'. Yeah, but there was like an active discussion about, about the tactics to deal with scientists who were dissonant to the view, to the worldview, which I thought was a really interesting, Lisa: This is a reality. And this is what's happening not only in the food industry, it's also happening in the pharmaceutical industry. It's also happening in many industries that we in the public are not, and when you've got people like you that are brave enough to stand up and say stuff, you get attacked. I'm quite surprised that my podcast hasn't been taken off here yet. But anyway. Grant: Yeah, that's right. And yeah, it will heavily wind but people will be, there's forces in play there. You don't want to get too conspiratorial because it sometimes requires a degree of organization that doesn't, that we're capable of, but yeah, I think in the food industry case and pharmaceutical industry, the evidence has been there for a long time. Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And I think, my approach to it now is like, we are possible, light a candle toward the good information rather than fighting and banging your head against the, you know, because otherwise you can end up in a very bad place. But okay, so we know that there's all these addictive forces, if you like, at play. And so because you just look around town, you know, in the obesity and they are boys they're looking like girls and, you know, the hormone regulation is just obviously affected and fertility rates are going down. We're fighting a war here, and we've got kids that are already diabetic and before they're even teenagers, and this is a coming huge disaster for the healthcare system when you're in public health. Grant: Yeah, yeah. The present one that I've become much more interested in because it's, I think it's become more obvious today for a bunch of reasons. I'll tell you a few stories as mental health, particularly Youth Mental Health. I've been an academic for a few decades. And, you know, a decade ago or two decades ago, okay, students will get seconds, some would have some mild mental health problems, but it wasn't really a thing that you would see very much. Now at the moment, all the time I get students, students like it's dropping out of the degree now because of their mental health.  They've got anxiety. And these are really smart, intelligent, switched-on people with, these are the top of the socioeconomic ladder, we don't know how much worse it is at the bottom. I didn't even get there in the first place. That youth suicide rate in New Zealand, it keeps getting talked about as the tip of an iceberg for a major problem. One of the women that I work with, mid-20s, beautiful, intelligent woman. Yeah, we're talking about SSRIs, antidepressants, because I've been on those I could have knocked me over I said, are, you know, is it a common thing for your friend group and that sort of thing? She goes, I pretty much everyone I know is on them. Yeah, yeah. And, and so we've got this—  Lisa: It's a good sequence, isn't it?  Grant: Because the brains are metabolic. We've got a metabolic crisis with obesity and diabetes, but guess what? The most important metabolic organ is your brain. Somehow, again, here we are, asleep at the wheel, we've got this, you've got this treatment gap. So even if we could treat them with anything effective, which is doubtful. From our current system, yeah, they can only treat half the half of the 910,000 people in the country of 5 million. Because 910,000 is the number of serious mental health problems. Wow. Half of them don't get any treatment whatsoever, because there is no treatment. You bring the mental health crisis line, which we've had to do. And they will say, are they killing themselves right now? And that's just like, no, that's like—  Lisa: ‘Okay, we've got time.'  Grant: Yeah, then okay, we're not doing it, I think. And we'll go to your doctor. If you go to your doctor, you know that there's a nine month wait to see a psychologist?. It's just unacceptable. Lisa: And what's the answer? The course, the easy answer for the doctor is to give them a SSRI. Grant: Which doesn't work very well. No. neuroplasticity, if they're a young person, causes them harm.  Lisa: Closes down hormones. And does it different.  Grant: Yeah, 100%.  Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on www.patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. We have two Patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us. Grant: So to me, the unacknowledged metabolic crisis here we can see obesity. We can measure diabetes. Yeah, and those are problems. But you know, to me the most perverse one, especially having, you know, teenage kids myself and that sort of thing is this youth mental health thing. It's despicable. Like my dad, yeah, good for him. He had metastatic prostate cancer and was sorted with this keto diet, but the amount of access to expensive treatment, he was able to get in his 80s. Compared to a young woman in her early 20s, who has a serious mental health problem that's going to affect her, and even around for the rest of their lives, who can get none. It's perverse, who spends their money on health that way? Yeah, like, I want my dad to get his treatment and get better and everything, which he has, but, what sort of society prioritizes that over these young people? Lisa: Yeah, and what can we do? Like why, there is a lot of I mean, I talk research a lot, and I know that your research is also pointing in this direction, that there's a lot of health fundamentals that we can get right, that can actually help people without costing anything even, without having to be a pharmacological intervention. How about we try to teach people how to manage themselves? And I mean, I've had, I was on antidepressants for over 20 years, and I could not get off them, because they are addictive. It took me three years to get off them, and thank God I did. I, in my early 20s, had relationship crises, was put on them, just stayed on them because I didn't know any better.  What are, what implications that's had for me, and then trying to get off them. And of course, your body starts to downregulate your own if you're not producing your own. I've got off them now, and I'm fine, and so on, and I'm helping other family members off them. But that was the first port of call. Now I understand the need for health fundamentals like sleep, hygiene, and movement, and exercise, and sunshine, and the right diet, because diet is a huge piece of the puzzle, because your gut and your brain are connected. And there's a lot of, like you say, a fix. When you have a bad diet, and you have bad nutrition, you're going to have more mental instability, if you want to put it that way, you're going to have more problems, than if you're on a good, really robust, solid, good diet. That's going to affect your mental health. And what are our kids, they're not giving any of that information, or any programs around it. Grant: Yeah, and you interfere with one aspect of metabolic homeostasis with an antidepressant, and you're surprised that it doesn't work very well, and there's unintended consequences. What we're trying to do is, and humans, I think, all want to be in the state, we're trying to return ourselves to a sort of metabolic homeostasis where things are balanced and well-regulated. For the most of the body, that's the primary target, there is a sugar in your blood and the insulin in your blood, because if those aren't right, then you're an inflammatory environment and pro-growth and no chance to, you know, being that autophagy of tightening things up. So that's the big metabolic picture. But in the brain, I've just started to stitch together a much more, I think coherent view of what's going on.  Because the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain is important. I just think with the low fat revolution, we pick fat, not carbohydrates. We pick the wrong one of the three. Yeah, well, this is alright, we pick serotonin as the neurotransmitter to manage, we need to get it back to where it started more quickly. That's what reuptake inhibitors do. And actually, sorry?  Lisa: You've written a paper recently on glutamate and its role in all this. Can you explain about it?  Grant: I have, six months ago, I had heard of glutamate because I, trying to, from psychology, and frankly, I'd forgotten what it did. Until one of my smart students reminded me that glutamate is the most important and most prevalent excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain. It's about 90% of your neurotransmitters, it runs in tandem with an inhibitory system called GABA. And so these two things operate together. The inhibition fine tunes the excitation. And not only that, the glutamate gets recycled onto glutamine and then back into GABA and they rely on one another to be in a sort of, you know, good, healthy relationship, right?  And so what happens is, when there's over-excitation, which chronic stress does, then glutamate because it's excitatory neurotransmitters, just keeps getting pumped out. Pumped out, pumped out, and it hits its receptor in the other side of the synapse, between neurons. That receptor, it's called the NMDA receptor, it's downregulated. So it stops seeing the glutamate as much as it could be, which causes even more glutamate to be produced. And then this glutamate starts to seep out of that cleft and to just general space. And the trouble with it—  Lisa: It's toxic.  Grant: It's toxic, and this is called glutamate excitotoxicity. So this is not a theory, this is a thing. And it starts to kill brain cells, and the trouble with it, first of all it atrophies neurons, which is never good, and they're not there anymore when they die. But those dying neurons themselves spill out glutamate, into more glutamate into the space, and you get this downward spiral of—  Lisa: Neurodegeneration.  Grant: Neurodegeneration, exactly right. And so the most interesting thing in my mind about this, and this is why I'm so excited about it is because, and you'll see this. So the most obvious is a concussion or mild TBI, traumatic brain injury, is that what causes your initial brain cell death is just an insult, right? You bang your head, right? So you get that glutamate excitotoxicity. The initial effects of the concussion is mild, but the long-term effects of the concussion because of the glutamate excitotoxicity are severe. That's why concussions get worse and worse and worse for time after they've happened. Lisa: Okay, thanks that somebody's saying that! Because people go to the hospitals with a concussion and they go, no, there's, you've had a mild concussion, go home and rest. And that's it. It's like we there's so much we can do— Grant: 100% there's so much we can do. And I think we already do it when it gets really severe, right? So if you're in hospital with ischemia, lack of oxygen in the brain from a heart attack, or sometimes in some hospitals, that neonatal hypoxia, so newborns become deprived of oxygen. One way that they deal with that is they induce hypothermia, because cold exposure, especially in those areas, helps reduce glutamate. And they provide intravenous magnesium because magnesium antagonises as a receptor and allows glutamate to get back to its homeostatic levels more quick, and it's highly effective. And the animal studies are very, very convincing. And it's near a clinical practice for things like spinal cord injury.  And then you start to think about other ways that the brain gets damaged. So Alzheimer's and dementia is an interesting one. So for other reasons, including high glucose, we start to lose brain cells. But as soon as you start to do a little bit excitotoxicity, then exacerbates the problem massively. A mild or severe stress, which results in post traumatic stress disorder, is another way of damaging the brain initially through chronic, elevated glutamate but it rolls onto itself. And this is solved, then it's not a problem.  Lisa: This is why stress and trauma—  Grant: And chronic stress, you're just stressed out, your fight or flight response is up more than it should. And it goes on a long time. The two to three minutes that it's designed to be up for is actually days, months, years, same thing. And so you've got these different pathways, getting brain damage. Lisa: Brain damage is happening as well.   Grant: When you take, if you if you scan people with major depressive disorder, you autopsy people who've committed suicide, then you see severe atrophy and things like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, important areas. And it's caused by chromatic toxicity. But the reason why that's interesting is that there's a lot you can do about it. And so we mentioned cold water therapy, just getting in cold water, especially you can breathe slowly and deeply through your nose, which downregulates the nervous system, as medical therapy for depression, right? Yeah. So and potentially I think for TBI and concussion and Alzheimer's and that sort of thing, because it helps with that.  But so is aerobic exercise for the same reason. So is a whole range of nutrient supplements, particularly magnesium, particularly you have to take them in the form of magnesium citrate or magnesium l-threonate. And the clinical trials of magnesium citrate and depression is a more effective medication than an antidepressant. And there is no real side effects. So magnesium, zinc, omega-3 fish oils, B complex vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, all anti-inflammatory, antioxidant type. Lisa: And all stuff that I'm on every day, and my mum's on with her brain injury on, all the time.  Grant: That's right, because and they are downregulating glutamate transmission and achieving a glutamate GABA balance in a better way, as does presence of ketones in your blood occasionally, as does any sort of diet that's anti-inflammatory, and any diet that's inflammatory, exacerbates the problem. So— Lisa: So for things like brain injuries, like someone like mom who was in a coma and they were putting a ba- basically a glucose strip into the, you know, into feeding tubes. That's just like causing more damage than if we'd had ketones present if we'd had— Grant: 100%, because you're, there's also a fuel cri- an accompanying fuel crisis on the brain where it can't— Lisa: Uptake the glucose. Grant: —uptake the glucose in the normal fashion, but you can use ketones. So you've got the glutamate part going on, and you've got the glucose fuel crisis. So you know— Lisa: And isn't the same with Alzheimer's, and they, it's a, when you get insulin resistance, you also get the glucose not being able to be uptaken in the brain, and therefore the brain starving for glucose. Prog Grant: Yeah. So ketogenic diet for that group is actually a pretty therapeutic diet, that would be the one situation that would be, you know, granted, for keto is hard. I mean, obviously, it's a hard population group to work with them on that, but that doesn't make it not therapeutic. That's another whole— Lisa: No, and that's what I put, you know, like with mum's brain injury, once I started to realize that from the research I was doing. I was doing I had her on as good as possible, keto diet for that first couple of years. Not so much now, because she's got autonomy so it's harder regulate. But she does do intermittent fasting, and she has got all the supplements, and she has got a very, low-carb diet, as much as I can get it to do it, when she's not sneaking things around my back. But this is just so crucial for all of these degenerative diseases, and I'm really excited about this glutamate thing, because it's only just come on my radar through your research, and I think that this is perhaps gonna go to the next level. Are you continuing the research on this?  Grant: Yeah, and I'm really interested in, I haven't been that interested in micronutrients through my career. I sort of felt while you're eating whole foods, you know, that should be the template. And I still think that, but I increasingly started to think, especially my colleague, Julia Ruckledge, who's a professor of psychology at University of Canterbury, in her work with micronutrients. She uses fairly high doses, but how effective those have been in her clinical trials with various aspects of mental health. And just as I see also random other outcomes like they just happened to be doing a clinical trial when the Christchurch earthquake happened, and they're only halfway through it. So the randomization wasn't quite complete.  They noticed at the end of the trial that the people in the micronutrient supplementation group, about 19% of those ended up with some sort of post traumatic stress from the Christchurch earthquake. Lisa:  Yep.  Grant: Those without, who are in the placebo group, 69% have post traumatic stress. And this is consistent with other research around, you know, the stress of natural disasters, natural disasters, and that sort of thing. And all sorts of things go wrong in the brain. And it's just, there's a mess of effects. If you could get this from a pharmaceutical, the pharmaceutical company would be all over it. But, you know, inexpensive micronutrients. So, you're interested in those really. Lisa: So that improves your resilience. Basically, you've got the right vitamins and minerals and things in your body to do the work that's needed to be required. Have you ever heard about the research of ketamine and post traumatic stress? When that ketamine is able to stop the formation of the memories, the traumatic-ness if that's a word?  Grant: Yeah, so, so yes, yeah.  Lisa: Because it's part of that there'll be part of that glutamate thing, wouldn't it? Grant: Ketamine is, antagonizes the NDMA receptor, as the same mechanism magnesium roles a play, plays a role on. And so ketamine is a little bit more of a difficult substance to think about it because it's an analgesic and it's sort of that pre-anesthetic and acidic and it really spaces people out. But you're right across PTSD, single treatments have been shown to be highly effective. Single treatments with major depressive or otherwise intractable have shown to be temporarily effective. The most interesting one, for me, I was just talking to an ethicist the other day about this. He was talking about ketamine with chronic pain sufferers, and about half of the people they treat with ketamine with chronic pain, they have an instant and complete alleviation of the chronic pain. And they give them ketamine at a subclinical dose for five straight days. I don't know the ins and outs of that.  Lisa: Because it stops the pathways from— Grant: I don't know what, I'm think

You've heard it before: go hard, go long. But do we need to go hard all the time? Many people think that harder is better. However, overtraining and overexertion can reduce your gains and also be detrimental to your long-term health. Let go of this mindset and take on a healthier view of your body. Legendary long-distance running athlete Lorraine Moller joins us in this episode to talk about how training and racing should not be about winning at the expense of your own body. It's all about your personal journey of learning more about yourself and growing from it. With the Lydiard approach, Lorraine shares how her career was mostly injury-free. Her body's performance is stellar, proving the merits of her training! 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If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. 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Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how the Lydiard approach to training is a safer and healthier way. Discover the ways we can achieve peak performance and how to remove the obstacles towards it. Understand the ways your body adapts and why it's essential to listen to it.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-aging and longevity with NMN Bio.  On the Wings of Mercury by Lorraine Moller Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes:  Episode 27 - Gary Moller - Functional Nutrition Consultant, Elite Age-Level Mountain Biker   Episode 189 - Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova Episode 183 - Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova Episode 194 - Inside the Mind of New Zealand Olympic Runner Rod Dixon   Connect with Lorraine: Lydiard Foundation | Email   Episode Highlights [05:19] Lorraine's Background Lorraine grew up naturally active and part of nature. She was engaged in the community and local athletics.  At some point, Lorraine became more interested in her school running events and just kept going.  During the 60s and 70s, being a professional athlete wasn't a career choice. It was commonly discouraged and seen as for men.  When Lorraine's talent was discovered, she was brought to a neighbouring town to train. She competed against women a lot older than her. By 16, Lorraine was representing New Zealand. Listen to the full episode to learn about Lorraine's running journey!   [14:37] The Lydiard Approach to Training  The Lydiard approach to training is primarily based on endurance training.  Building your aerobic capacity is the core of the Lydiard approach.  In a way, Lydiard is the father of periodisation. He found what worked and incorporated it into training.  Lorraine shares that you need to understand the principles first then apply your own perspective in training.  [19:52] What's the Overall Picture? Some people get lost when looking at the details. You need to know the overall picture first.  When you don't understand the overall picture, you may overshoot the mark and get burnt out.  We have a culture that thinks more is better.  But training can give you more than the capacity to win.  It's really about the inner journey taking place and what you're learning along the way.  [24:25] Take It as a Personal Journey As you're growing, you are influenced by external factors like other people's expectations.  But you'll also reach a point where you start dismantling these expectations to uncover your true self.  Running was a choice Lorraine made for herself. Through this, she developed a deep connection with her father.  When Lorraine didn't do that well, she kept things in perspective.  She always came back to being in love with the journey of the race.  [28:51] From Track Athletics to Long-Distance Running In Lorraine's experience, long-distance running doesn't make you slower.  You'll need to do the work to run faster, but long-distance running lets you sustain your fastest possible pace.  The body responds to whatever stimuli it receives, which is why a holistic approach is vital for achieving the best results.  The Lydiard training, for example, has different phases for training that consider more than just your endurance.  Don't neglect the foundational elements of mobility, coordination, and strength. [39:51] Let Your Body Adapt  The Lydiard training first started with helping people with cardiac problems fit enough to finish a marathon.  The approach is considerably different from the ones professional athletes consider. But, the Lydiard training is safer long-term.  People can adapt to different situations. You can direct your body into what you want to be.  Pay attention to your body, especially when it gives danger signals. Learn to back off and give yourself recovery time.  Burnout and overtraining usually come from a lack of confidence and trust in your own body.  [46:46] What Keeps Us from Peak Performance Hard work is redundant. Things don't have to be hard — just do the work! Lorraine feels a state of flow and happiness in races. The flow state is peak performance manifesting as coordination of body, heart, mind, and spirit.  People often don't reach this state of flow because of tension and excess energy.  If you don't give yourself time to rest when your body needs it, it will become detrimental to your health over time.  You need to identify the fine line between putting your body under strain to get stronger versus pushing it until you break. [56:22] Don't Let Age Stop You People need challenges and goals no matter their age.  Invite new experiences and learnings into your life.  Don't let age stop you from living your best life.  As we get older, we also accumulate more wisdom.  Society needs to acknowledge the value of elders more from that perspective.  [1:08:11] The Strength and Beauty of Our Bodies   You don't need to be perfect; you just need to inch your way forward on your own time.  There is a way back even if you've beaten your body with overtraining.  Your body is strong enough to regenerate itself.    7 Powerful Quotes from this Episode ‘What I did with the Lydiard system was look at what were the principles, not looking at the hard and fast rules. Because as soon as you start looking at rules you have limited yourself, and it doesn't work that way. It's an experiment of one. Your journey as an athlete is completely unique.' ‘I think the journey of the athlete is a wonderful way to get to know yourself and to be able to tap that in the knowledge and to learn.' ‘That's the beauty I think of the Lydiard training is that It is holistic. It puts all the energy systems and every type of training response in its rightful place. So that you can be at your peak on the day that it counts.' ‘And that's why you go on principles. So you look at what you're trying to achieve, and then how best to achieve it based on the level of that person.' ‘You want a cooperative relationship with your own body and it will give you the information that it has and which is better than if you're trying to perform to these external measures.' ‘We approach a lot of the things that we wish to do, or the things we wish to create in our lives from a state of fear… And then we can't get into this natural flow. ' ‘I think that as we get older, our world should be getting bigger, not smaller. You know, and, and I do think that a lot of what we attribute to old age is just bad habit.'    About Lorraine  Lorraine Moller is the only woman to have run all of the 20th century Olympic marathons for women. She is a 4-time Olympian, Olympic bronze medalist, world track and field finalist, multiple Commonwealth Games track medalist, and winner of 16 major international marathons, including the Boston Marathon.  Lorraine's career started as an exceptional 14-year-old middle-distance runner, coached by John Davies. This continued into a 28-year stellar career as an undefeated master runner. Her wide range of accomplishments earned her title as ‘New Zealand's greatest women's distance runner'. Lorraine credits her mostly injury-free career and high-performance longevity to the Lydiard training approach combined with her unique ‘inside-out process' philosophy towards competition.  Since retiring in 1996, Lorraine has helped establish charity running events in Cambodia, Mongolia and East Timor, served as vice-president of Hearts of Gold and NGO in Japan and co-founded the Lydiard Foundation, which educates coaches and athletes on endurance training. Lorraine also wrote her autobiography, On the Wings of Mercury, which became #2 on the New Zealand Best Seller List.  “Sports is a powerful spiritual path. When one seeks their most excellent self, they invite the noblest of human qualities into their lives.” Interested in Lorraine's work? Check out the Lydiard Foundation.    Reach out to Lorraine through lorraine@lydiardfoundation.org.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn why it's vital to listen to their bodies. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Hello everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits this week. Today, I have another athlete to guest, for a change. It's not a doctor or scientist, it's an athlete. This is an incredible athlete. One of my role models from childhood, Lorraine Moller. Lorraine, if you don't know her, she's an absolute legend. She's a four-time Olympian. She won the Boston Marathon, that's a serious marathon, that one. She has won the Osaka marathon four times. She was in the first four marathons for women in the Olympics, which is an incredible thing. She also was a middle distance runner before doing marathon.  She's also the sister of my good friend, Gary Moller, who I've had on the show previously. Lorraine, she has her insights on what it is to be an elite athlete. Lorraine is still training athletes today as part of the Lydiard Foundation. After Lydiard she came through that school, of Arthur Lydiard's training style. It was really interesting to talk to her and sort of go head to head on ideas around coaching. She is available there for help if anyone wants to find out more.  Yeah, really interesting conversation with a very, on-to-it lady. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I certainly did. It's really nice when you get to meet your heroes from yesteryear, so to speak, or when you were a kid, and they're just as cool as you thought they would be. Before we go over to the show, make sure you check out our patron program. If you haven't joined already on the podcast family, we would love you to be a part of our VIP family. There are a lot of member benefits when you do, if you wouldn't mind helping us out. Keeping this great content coming to ear, we've been doing it for five and a half years now. It's a globally top 200 ranked podcast now on health, fitness and medicine.  We need your help to stay there, we need your help to keep bringing this content out. It's a huge labor of love. I've been doing it for five and a half years, and guys, I can really do with a bit of a hand. So for the price of a cup of coffee a month, it's really a very small contribution. If you would like to become a member, please go over to patron.lisatamati.com.  I'd like to also remind you to head on over to our website, www.lisatamati.com. Check out our image genetics program. This is all about understanding your genetics and how to optimize them, and this is our flagship program, the one that we've been doing for a number of years, we've taken literally hundreds of people through this program. It's been a huge success for people changing their lives and helping them optimize so they're no longer doing the whole trial and error thing or the one size fits all. Medicine and fitness and all of these areas, nutrition should all be personalized now according to your genetics, and that's what you should expect from your health professionals. This is a very powerful program that can help you sort of optimize that so go and check that out at www.lisatamati.com and hit the ‘Work With Us' button.  We also have our NMN, our longevity supplement, an anti-ageing supplement that I'm recently started bringing into the country and from New Zealand or Australia. I've teamed up with molecular biologist Dr. Elena Seranova. This is an independently-certified, scientist backed and developed product. This is a longevity supplement that is aimed at upregulating the sirtuin genes, which are longevity genes in the body and science, it's too complicated to name here. But I would love you to check out those two episodes that I've done with Dr. Elena Seranova. Also, head on over to nmnbio.nz. That's N-M-N-bio.nz, if you'd like more information and more on the science behind it, or reach out to me and I can send you a whole lot of information around it. I've been on it now for over seven months and my mom's been on it too for that period of time. I've had huge changes. Actually my whole family has, and we've all had different things that it's really helped us with. It's working on a number of levels, so make sure you check that out. Right over to the show now with Lorraine Moller.  Hi, everybody, and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. Today, I have an amazing woman to guest, certainly one of my role models, Lorraine Moller, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you here with me.  Lorraine Moller: Thank you, Lisa. Fantastic to be here with you. Lisa: I'm excited for this conversation already. Before we got recording, we already dealt with some deep topics so who knows where this conversation is going to go, but I think it will go pretty deep. You are a legend in the world of running. You have so many, four times Olympian you've won the Boston Marathon, you've won the Osaka marathon three times, you're an author, you're still involved with running. Lorraine, can you just give us a little bit of your background for starters? When did you realize that you were this amazing, incredible athlete? What was your childhood like? Should we go back that far?  Lorraine: Usually, not in my childhood, although, you know, we were brought up in a time where we were naturally active and very just a part of nature and engaged in the community and local athletics and swimming and you know, all those things. Walked their feet and just went to the beach on the weekends and got sunburned. All those sorts of things. So it was a very lovely, free, close-to-nature sort of upbringing in my little town of Putāruru, right in the middle of the North Island, and where everybody knew everybody and it was just pretty easy-living, and our needs were pretty simple.  Those were the times when we had the quarter-acre section, with the garden out the back and like okay, go get a cabbage for tea. So you'd go cut one and bring it in. So it was, yeah, I suppose it sounds idyllic, but in certain terms that was. It was just a fabulous basis for growing up healthy. I had my trials as a kid. I was in the hospital a few times, and just that separation, and just the emotional eggs have been taken away from my family for long periods of time. It's very lonely.  I think that was, I think, you know, we have things that happen to us, and they sort of set you up. They set your story up, and then it's like, okay, go see what you make of it. So I had, I think, running for me was a real freedom. Something that just, I don't think it was something that I really decided to do. I just think it's something that took me. Lisa: It happened to you. Lorraine: One of the key events was, when I went to high school, and we graduated from the little kiddies athletics, doing 50 yards, 100 yards, you know, yeah, I met all that was. We graduated to being able to do the full 40 yards. In my first full 40 yard race at the local club, I could beat the girls who beat me in the sprint. It took me a little bit longer, but I've got your number, you know. So I was really excited by that.  So I started to get really keen and show up during the school events, and I won just about everything in the school events.  Lisa: Just naturally talented at the event, sort of.  Lorraine: Yeah, but you know, at that time, and that would be in the 60s, there was, it wasn't like the girl thing to do. It was nothing in your vocabulary. The four-bill athlete or woman-athlete, professional athlete, even, that just didn't exist back then. That was not a career choice,  being an athlete. It was even discouraged, somewhat. It was considered as a man's sport. If you did too much of it, you would become manly and— Lisa: Your uterus might fall out, as Catherine told me once. Lorraine: That's universal, you know. People tell you that all across the world I think, that yeah, that was just a popular meme. You had to wear clean underwear in case you got run over and taken to the hospital, they find out you've got dirty underwear on. Those things sort of just become popular culture, but nobody really thinks about how true they are or whether they really apply. We just accept them.  I accepted that as a girl, we didn't have longer events, that we didn't have official events. The cross country was unofficial, usually. So we would have a men's race. Then they would have a little short bill's race, but, you know, that's just the way that it was, I didn't think I was disadvantaged in any way. You just get on with what's available and go like it, and I loved it. Lisa: How did you develop, because even back in the 60s and 70s, there wasn't any official thing that you could go to. How did you actually get—I mean your later career was phenomenal. How did you actually bridge that? Was it a time change too that in the 70s, things started to open up, and or how did that sort of unfold? Lorraine: People were really kind and the club system was very nurturing. So as soon as they realized I had some talent, they took me in hand. I was taken to a neighboring town of Tokoroa, which was sort of like a big town, and introduced to John Davies, who was the bronze medalist from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. They wanted me to have a proper coach. I was introduced into the Lydiard training theory, from about the age of 14, and for races, et cetera. My event was the 80 yards. I really loved it, and so laps of the track.  I also did cross country. But those events I competed in, there were no junior woman. So I was competing against women who were probably 18 years my senior. I did go to my first national championships and the senior women's at the age of 14. Yeah, and I made the final. I came last in the final. We're like a mate. We're pretty darn good. You know?  Lisa: Yeah. You were 14?  Lorraine: Yeah, sort of, like hanging on, I can remember coming around the straight. I had two people behind me, and I could just see them going, ‘I'm not letting this kid beat me.' Yeah, threw me off, but you know. I was going—representing New Zealand from the time I was 16. That provided opportunity, and that was so damn exciting. Just to be going overseas, and wearing the silver uniform, and getting on a plane and going somewhere, and it was just the most amazing time, and I absolutely loved it. I was put into a competition at a time when I was young enough not to have any respect.  Lisa: You had no idea what was coming at you yet.  Lorraine: So I sort of figured I could run with the best of them. Yeah, so that was sort of part of my make-up or my set up. Which really, you know, it just went from there, until finally, I sort of took off on my own and went to the US and just sort of, seeking greener pastures. That makes a big wide world and yeah.  Lisa: Oh, wow. So tell me a little bit, like Arthur Lydiard. What was he like? Tell us a little bit, you know, so I've heard you say on articles or something, there's a bit of a misrepresentation of how he trained. What was his actual philosophy as an athlete that was actually in under him for a while? What was he like, and what sort of training regime did you have, and how did that develop you? Lorraine: Yeah, I think I was really, really fortunate to grow up in New Zealand, and his system was pretty much adopted by the New Zealand running culture, and I think still has—is part of the culture, yeah. It's based on endurance training. So that's the first thing that John Davies did, was give me a training program. He used to write it, handwrite it on a— and send it to me by mail. So I would get a letter with my training program written down. It would be so exciting.  I ran with my dad. So my dad didn't want me going out there by myself, or we ran on the bush a lot. We got lost a lot, but wouldn't have me there by myself. Although I'm sure if I'd navigated, we wouldn't have got lost, but anyway. Yeah, I mean, we just—and we had a great time. It was really fun for me to get to know my dad. I don't think I would have developed that closeness without having that running. It was just fantastic. So we just ended up doing longer and longer runs. It was just building up mileage, just getting some aerobic base, which is really the crux of the Lydiard training, is that you build your aerobic capacity, and that's the main engine. Lisa: Yeah. Because a lot of them, you know, like I had Rod Dixon on last week, on the show. He's also trained under that. Of course, a lot of the great runners that have come out of New Zealand, and there's been many, have trained on that system. Then, you know, was it a real high mileage system? Like, was it—is there anything that you do different now? Because I know, you're still involved with Arthur Lydiard? The groups that you're taking through now, is there any change in the approach that you've had? Because you know, a lot of the listeners out there are runners that are listening to this. So is there anything that you've learned along the way that you do differently now? Lorraine: No, no, the Lydiard system was sound. I mean, the only thing was, as an athlete, I'd come off a season and then I'd go, ‘I'm gonna just train harder than I've ever trained before,' and then I jump in and overdo it and sort of mess it up. That's what we do, we overtrain. So the Lydiard system itself, I think if you just take the way that he put it together, and the, he was the grandfather of periodization, we didn't call it periodization. The exercise physiologist came along a lot later and then just started to put the jargon onto it, and all there is.  Arthur was very practical. So it's just what worked, it was about 60 years in the making. So you will find Lydiard, that he evolved it with just trial and error. Then, as more people started to do research, he started to incorporate other things. But he was really like, just what works, and what he put together worked really well. What I did with the Lydiard system was look at what were the principles, not looking at the hard and fast rules here, because as soon as you start looking at rules, you have limited yourself, and it doesn't work that way. It's an experiment of one, and your journey as an athlete is completely unique. You occupy your own place, and space and time that nobody else can occupy. If you can respect that, and get away from any sort of cookie-cutter staff. Lisa: I love that personalization approach. That's what I'm heavily into now. It's not like we have access to genetic testing and things like that now, where we can actually tailor things to people's genetics even. But back then that wasn't the case. But to make it your own, so here's the framework, and then you make it yours. That fits with you and your style of being, in your style of life, and in everything that fits to you, rather than just forcing yourself into the confines of just, this is black and white. I think that that's pretty insightful, especially back then. Yeah. Lorraine: Yeah. So what I'm teaching now, and I teach courses through the Lydiard Foundation, two coaches, on how to apply the Lydiard training. The big thing, I think, is to look at things and the overall picture because the, you might say the devils in the details, but the details can completely tell, like the devil, the wrong story So it's very easy for people to, and most common, I think, to overshoot the mark. To put in too much. Then if you put in too much energy into the task at hand, you will get the opposite of what you intended.  Lisa: Yeah, overtraining and burnout.  Lorraine: Also we live in this culture where we think more is better. He said also, we pander to outsourcing our information, and so not tapping into this incredible vehicle that we have that can synthesize and put the information together that is specifically tailor-made to you. That is there. It's innate within all of us. We're just not tapping it. I think the journey of the athlete is a wonderful way to get to know yourself and to be able to tap that in the knowledge and to learn.  So the focus, and this happened to me, during my own running, there was, initially you're motivated by the—just winning or getting a faster time and all those kinds of things. Then you think, well, what is it really payback? It's pretty silly, you know, you're all just running around the house and in circles. Somebody goes, ‘Oh, I'm really great, because I finished in front of you.' You get all worked up. Does that really matter, in the big scheme of things?  Well, in certain terms, it doesn't. The exercise is, and I just gave a talk to our advanced classes on the hero's journey. The hero's journey is that the focus is then on the inner journey that's taking place. Yeah, and is a path for us to get to know ourselves. Socrates said, ‘Know thyself.' It's really sound advice, because, I mean, what else are you going to do to see, you know, you go through life, and then suddenly you get to the other end? Lisa: You don't know what the hell it was about. I mean, this is, this is exactly in line with what I like to talk about, which is like, you know, that we, we learn so much when we do these, you know, athletic endeavors, and I don't care whether you're good, or you're really not talented, and you don't have any ability. It's all about yours—your personal journey. That's why any athlete who's just starting out and doing the first kilometer, you know, is on a journey, to get to know their own body, their own mind, what they're capable of, and we find it, you know, and it's, I hate comparing, you know, like, the actual winning of races and stuff is amazing, but how many of us are actually going to have a career like yours, where you're actually at the top of the podium?  For 99% of the people, it's about what they learn along the way, the health benefits that they gather from the training, the strength—mentally. All of these aspects are just even more important, I think, than the, getting the gold medal put around your neck, or the silver or the bronze. It is much more about a personal journey for most people. I mean, you as an elite athlete, at the top of the pyramid, so to speak, did you find that as well? Has it had a bigger implication on your entire life and your life philosophies than just winning? Part of it? Lorraine: Oh, yeah. In the end, though, the inner journey became more important to me than the outer journey. In a way, I think with life, you have your experiences and you're influenced by your parents and your upbringing and your ancestors and all the rest. So we have all these influences that make up who we think we are I think then—and then we go into our older adult life, and we proceed accordingly with this concept of self, which then I think starts to happen. You start to dismantle that concept themselves, and you start gradually stripping it away, so that, hopefully, when you're ready to go out the other end, you have connected with the essence of who you truly are. Not just all these roles and the expectations and put on yourself, you know. Lisa: Was it for you,was there a lot of expectation, you know, like, I had a lot of expectation in my early years from my dad, who I loved dearly, and wanted to impress and wanted to please and so I had a lot of expectation all the way through. So a lot of the things that I did weren't necessarily what I wanted to be doing. They were things that I felt compelled to do, or expected to do. Was that a part of your journey with running? Or was that more, you just had this passion and actual, like Rod just loved running. You know? What was it like for you? Was it a cut and dried thing that this was a passion of yours, or was it more of an expectation that you would—because you were so good?  Lorraine: Yeah. No, it was mine. I mean, it was completely driven by me, instigated and driven by me. My family was really supportive. My dad got on board with it. So my dad got into running because I was a teenager that got into running. He figured he was like the canary in the coal mine. If there was—if I was doing too much or overdoing it, you know, and he did the same as me. Well, then he would clog up before I would. That was very nice of him. He did, you know he actually died while he was out running. That was the way he wanted to exit. So he did. Lisa: Well, yeah, it's never a good thing to go. But if you're going to go, I suppose doing something and being healthy until the last moment is the way that most of us would like to exit this world. Lorraine: My parents were, oh, they were obviously proud. I mean, you get out there, and especially when you're in an Olympics, or Commonwealth Games, or something that's really big for your country, you do feel the expectation of your country and how you do and you know it really matters. It's quite personal. Sometimes when I didn't do that, well, and you get refreshed.  Lisa: That's harsh.  Lorraine: Yeah. Yeah, it is. You just, you know—I don't know, you get over it with pursued— you realize that you have to keep things in perspective. I think one thing I could always come back to and just be in love with the journey of the race and yeah. That it didn't go away.  Lisa: That passion stayed right throughout you. So let's talk now a little bit about the actual—some of the highlights of your career because this is like for most of us, we're never gonna get to do these sorts of things at this level. What was it like to go to the Olympics? What's it like to compete in the first marathons that women were allowed to do in the Olympics? What was that like for you? Lorraine: Well, the first marathons, my foray into marathons was another thing. That was sort of serendipity in a way. It just sort of came to me, and maybe there was a certain, I don't know, maybe openness, the new experience, I think that yeah, that just led me into different sorts of places. But what happened in—when I left school, and I was already a nationally recognized runner as a high school kid, and what to do? I didn't know what to do, so I decided to go to phys ed school because it was the closest thing that I could think of that's for a woman.  Lisa: It is, exactly. That's all we had back then. Lorraine: Yeah, yeah, you just, that's what sporty girls do, become a phys ed teacher. Gary was, my brother, was already at the phys ed school underneath. So it seemed really easy to hit off down to the need. I thought that was really great because it was really a long way from home. Yeah, you know, and I just loved being a student. I just thought that was so fantastic.  So the first day I was there at the phys ed school I got, I was standing on the steps of the phys ed school, and I was sort of looking to my left and looking to my right, and I didn't know where anything was or which way to go for my run. This group of guys came running past. They were a bunch of lunchtime runners, and some of them are very good runners. One of them looked up and saw me standing there in my running shoes and shorts and said, ‘Hey, chick, you gotta come and run with the boys today.'  Okay, there's an invitation I can't refuse. Down the steps, I glommed on to the back of this group, I could barely keep up. But we did this run. The next day, I was there again, and the next day, and so I became the girl that ran with this group of guys.  Lisa: Crazy girl.  Lorraine: Yeah, and they sort of took me under their wing. So I did all the rounds with them. Sunday was like the Needham version of the white tacori run, was the white Eddie's. It's just, just, you run out somewhere over a mountain and down the other side and you've gotten 20 miles, you know. So I started doing those every Sunday with the guys. As a 800-meter runner, you know, I was building this incredible base, and I just got stronger and stronger. Lisa: Did it make you slower doing the long stuff, for the actual short track races? Lorraine: I'm glad you asked. Yeah. No, that's not true, that. Yeah. Endurance running does not make you slow. No, it does not. Though, you do need to do the faster work to bring on your speed. But the endurance will enable you, eventually, to be able to sustain your fastest possible pace. That's the basis of endurance. So nearly all events over two minutes would derive their energy mostly from aerobic means, right? So the greater aerobic capacity you have, the greater capacity you have for any event over two minutes. Lisa: But what about, I've never been fast, that's why we're long. So I don't have a comparison really, of having lost speed because I never had any to begin with. But doing the super long stuff, you know, the ultra marathon distances, I got dreadfully slow when it comes to the shorter distances over time. I always put that down to my muscle, fast twitch fibers mainly tuned into slow twitch fibers.  Now, actually, like, in the last five years, where I stopped doing the ultra marathons, and I've been concentrating more on shorter, sharper, I'm still not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm a heck of a lot faster than I used to be over the short distance. So even in your 50s, you can start to go back the other way. But it's interesting to hear you say that, no, you don't find that. Because that's—yeah, interesting. Lorraine: With some caveats in matters that, if you—your body will respond to what you give it. In terms of training, stimulus response, so what training is, you are giving the body a specific stimulus to get a specific response from the body. It will do that really well. So the thing about the Lydiard pyramid is that you build the endurance, but you don't do that ad infinitum. Right? So then you go on and then you go through the faster phases and you develop the muscles on faster twitch and the different ones, right through to your peak events.  So, we have quite a few ultra runners who come and do our coaching courses. They get in and they get really excited about doing the phases and getting the full development. That's the beauty I think of the Lydiard training, is that it is holistic. It puts all the energy systems and every type of training response in its rightful place, so that you can be at your peak on the day that counts. What I find with a lot of ultra people is that they've just lost their flexibility and range of motion because they haven't practiced it.  Lisa: That's definitely a big part of our training and how we coach—a lot of strength and a lot of mobility, in proprioception, work and coordination and drills and things that traditionally, when I, because when I started back in the dark ages to when we had no idea, and I certainly had no coaching back in the day, I just ran and ran long, because I wasn't very fast, so just run longer than everybody else and I was good at that.  But now I understand and what you know, that whole mobility piece of the puzzle is absolutely crucial, and the drills and the form and the strength training or all the foundational elements, to be able to run the mileage, you know, it's like a pyramid for us, how we how we build it. So yeah, I totally agree, and I think most ultra runners neglect that part. That's where they come unstuck to some degree. You get very slow and stiff. There's reasons for that. But you managed to finish the distance, but the quality sometimes goes down with the length of time you're out there. Lorraine: Also, if you're out there for a heck of a long time, you don't want to spend much time in the air. You don't need a lot of upwards motion, or that long, beautiful stride, et cetera. You develop a bit of a shuffle, it's just being efficient at the distance that you're doing, yes. Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing The Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join the program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on here. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing The Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com.  We have two patron levels to choose from: you can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com, and thanks very much for joining us. Lisa: Yeah, that's really fascinating. It is like, I did, like I said at the beginning, everything wrong that you could possibly do wrong, I think in my early career. It was just like, go long, go hard, though, you know, but no strikes, no mobility, no drills. I didn't know what running form was. I just ran. Incredible that you can still achieve great distances and that way, but it's certainly not healthy. It was very high mileage in those early days, and that has its own toll.  Now we try to train people efficiently because most of the people that we training are also, you know, got careers and kids and jobs and stressors. So we find that you can't train them like you would a 20-year-old professional athlete when they're a 45-year-old mum with three children and a full-on career. Then you're going to break them if you have that high mileage model. So it's much more about time efficiency and getting the best results that they can get with the level of stress that they're already under.  So yes, it's just really interesting to compare notes on all this, especially as you've come from the elite level, in a lot of the things that I find with people who are not in that elite group, don't respond the same way that elite runners would, like when you were doing your top level stuff, the amount of mileage and manner of training that you would have been able to cope with is not what your average person can cope with, because you would have been focused on that solely. Lorraine: I think if you look historically at Lydiard training, he started coaching the first joggers group in the early 60s. So the story is that he was invited, after his Olympic successes, to the Tamaki Yacht Club to talk to the businessman there about training, etc. He was asking them about their own levels of fitness. A whole bunch of them said, ‘Well, we can't do any, our doctors told us to take it easy, because we've had cardiac arrest'. And Arthur's like, you know typical, Arthur, you know, ‘That's absolute rubbish. If you guys want to start jogging with me, I will teach you how to run a marathon.'  He had quite a group, of which quite a few of them were cardiac patients, and had this running group. He got them to run a marathon in about nine months. You're talking more than a couch potato? Yeah.  Lisa: Exactly. He approached that differently than he would with his elite athlete, obviously?  Lorraine: He had to, because if they couldn't start out on 100 miles a week and he realized that you can't expect middle-aged men getting run out to do that kind of mileage because they spend so much more time on their feet, that they're actually doing a lot more work than an elite runner, yeah. So then he changed the distance to duration.  Lisa: Yes, that's what we do too mostly, duration, because then that's more of it. Because otherwise if you run your good marathons at incredibly fast times, but the person who is at the other end of the marathon is taking six hours, they're going to be athletes for twice as long or longer. That doesn't equate from an equivalent point of view. That's—yeah, so that's exactly what we do. Yeah. Lorraine: Physiologically, it's about the same based on duration. Not based on distance. If you spend two hours out there, and you're just jogging along, and that's as fast as you can go, you will have about the same effect as somebody who runs at the same effort but is heck of a lot faster. The system is adaptable to all levels of runner. That's why you go on principles. You look at what you're trying to achieve, and then how best to achieve it based on the level of their person, but, you know, the—we're all, physiologically, we all basically work the same.  We all have—we metabolize fats and glycogen and have the same energy systems and they are invoked at the same perceived effort or level of effort and can be developed. We all have this system of adaptation. We all are losing cells and regenerating them all the time. That is basically so, if you're becoming a new person, like they say, maybe 95% of our bodies are replaced every year, just cells dying and new ones coming on. Or in seven years you get a completely new you. So it doesn't really matter, the point is that, can you direct who you are going to be in the view. Yeah, you can. Athletes know that. Lisa: Yeah. That's what our reputation is all about and why we do it, that's why we train so that we get that reputation. In heavier like—what do you do with people, because we get a lot of athletes who are just head through the wall, type A personalities who want to go harder than what their bodies, and I'm putting myself in this category, to harder than what their bodies can actually cope with, they're burning themselves out, breaking themselves and not actually reaping the reward that they should be for the amount of effort that's going in to their training. How do you try to get them to back off a bit? Lorraine: Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the key things that I teach is that we start right from the beginning, learning to pay attention to our bodies, and getting this rapport with ourselves and learning that you want to a cooperative relationship with your own body and it will give you the information that that it has, and which is better than if you're trying to perform to these external measures, which, there's so many of them because we can measure every frickin' thing that we do, and post it some way of where other people can look at, and they couldn't care less, because they're too busy putting their's up and wanting other people to pay attention to it.  So this constant pandering to make ourselves into somebody that we think that's something on the outside that's going to approve of us. So people who overdo it have a lack of confidence, and a lack of trust in their own body and their own physiology. Because my goodness, your body does an incredible job to keep us alive, and to keep us going and to perform the tasks that we give to it so we can achieve the dreams that we have. Then that will bust itself, for you.  But we do have sort of certain sort of measures, then that will also put into place when you're going to to kill yourself. But those that are well, I'm not doing this because yeah, our minds are incredible also. But most of them use our minds like a slave driver.  Lisa: Yes. I certainly did.  Lorraine: Yeah. You have to learn the hard way sometimes. But we have, being able to recognize, and to know where those danger signals are, and to be able to catch them and back off. Those, I started out my courses, were talking about the fallacy of hard work. Hard work is not where it said, everybody thinks, ‘Oh, God, you must be a really hard worker.' Well, you know, I can knock a knuckle down, but you know, why put in more energy than the task requires? So hard is redundant. Just do the work. Don't make it hard. Because then now, as soon as you say hard, people start to stress, they tense up, you know, okay, Lisa: It plops your brain and it becomes a negative, that you associate with, pain with your exercise and things and that it creates a negative loop. Lorraine: It's horrible. When I won big races, it was actually you get in the state of flow, and it feels wonderful. Lisa: Wow. So when you're actually at the top of your game, and winning these international events and things, you felt like—so it didn't feel as if you were killing yourself to get across the line on those days.  Lorraine: I always get pretty tired of the marathon.  Lisa: Yeah the in and out it. But you felt like you're prepared for this, but not overprepared for this, not burnt out and sorry about it. You actually enjoyed that, you enjoyed those top races that you really did well in? Did that feel like a flow state? Lorraine: The system that I teach, it's a performance system, right? It's good, so that you get the best you possibly can on the day that counts. So that's getting yourself into a peak performance state from wherever you're at. Right? Everybody can do that. That feels amazing. I'm sure you felt it, that you just get there and everything's clicking right. You've got it.  So it is a coordination of body, heart, mind and spirit. It's just, they all come together and you reach that state of flow. Actually, for most of us, we don't get there because we are working too hard. We have too much tension. That getting into a peak state is actually an act of surrender. Yeah. So, when you hit it a few times, you go, ‘Man, this feels so good. I'm gonna try and figure out how I got there again'. As I said, when I was young, I'd just go on the on the train harder than ever before, and you know, and then it seems to sort of go away from you and then you get injured or something or you don't perform as well, because you're in the syndrome of hard work, you're overcooking it, you've got excess energy. That energy has to go somewhere, and all it does is that just messes things up. So that precision of giving the stimulus that is needed for the effect. The thing is that the effect of it takes place during the recovery period, not when you're actually doing the task. So, you know— Lisa: That's an important point. If you had a bad night's sleep, you're being under the pump all week with work, you've got kids who have slept in, everything's going to cast it, and then you go and smash yourself, because it's on your list today to do a really long, hard run. You're not going to get the adaptation, you'd have been better to go hang on, well, ‘Life, come at me this week, I'm gonna actually take it a little bit easier.' Having that confidence to do that, and back off, because I think a lot of people are like, ‘Yeah, but I have to go harder'. They congratulate themselves when they slave drive themselves, and they push them through the bad event.  While that might make you mentally tougher, and there's some advantages of that approach for a while, it isn't going to get the adaptation that you're going to want, because actually, it's in the recovery, it's in the sleep, it's in the downtime that you're actually going to get that benefit. If you're not able to adapt, and then all that training was for nothing, or worse, it can be even detrimental to your immune system and to your health, your mental health. That's a hard sell, tough-minded athletes who think that they have to enter. I certainly struggled with us, and still do so on occasion, we, but I have to go harder, and I'm not, you know, doing enough, because I'm not getting the results, therefore, you know, a little is good, more must be better. That approach doesn't work. Lorraine: Yeah, look, it's a lack of trust. I think a lot of us are brought up to sort of think in the negative all the time, and to talk about what we don't want to have happen. We approach a lot of the things that we wish to do, or the things we wish to create in our lives from a state of fear. That's a real shame, because that immediately puts us on the backfoot. Then we can't get into this natural flow. Look, the world has set up for us to be creative beings, and for us to have, be able to manifest our dreams and make works that are worthwhile and contribute it, so when we leave this life, we have lived something better, we have used our own talents and things are more enhanced, because of our being here.  I think most people have a very huge drive, I think all human beings do, to be of value in this life in some way. I think, you know, we started out talking about this, that we have these systems in our systems, they're not human, you know, they're just systems that are put in place that eventually become self-serving, and they don't serve us.  So they will perpetuate fear, etc., because it just gets us putting our energy into the system, rather than putting it into ourselves and our own dreams. I think that what we need to realize is that it is set up in our favor. I'll give you just one really good example of that. When we train, and we give the body a training stimulus, so to meet that training task, that run or whatever we do, that workout, you have used this fuels in your body and you've broken apart all these bonds to provide energy to enable you to do the task, and then you stop doing it.  As soon as you stop doing it, the body gets busy. It starts to reconstitute those energy bonds and etc. So all these adaptations are taking place. That brings us back to normal again. But it doesn't just bring us back to normal. It gives us more, it makes us stronger, more storage space, you know, stronger muscle fibers, better oxygenation. It actually adapts itself to better accommodate what we're asking it to do. Yeah. So nature has given you a bonus. I mean, if you can't see that everything is set up in your favor just by that little thing alone, it's like, ‘Wow.' Lisa: Yeah, biology is just incredible. These are hormetic stressors. So when we put our body under strain, we come back stronger. When we put ourselves under too much strain, we actually break it down. So that's the fine line that we have to, for us, for each of us individually, find where those points are. That will shift as we get stronger, and you'll be able to take on more training.  But we have to honor the process, that honor the the hormetic stress, recovery, stress recovery, and then build on that so that we can then, you know, eventually you can be running at the best, if it's a training thing, but this is in every area of life, that we're more stressed, we're more resilient. Resilience, the word. We're more able to take on a load, this is just the beautiful thing of all these hormetic stressors and if we don't push ourselves at all, well then, we're going to definitely, the body is going to go well, this is a piece of cake, I can just keep being where I'm at, and then actually start to decline.  What I'd be really interested in your take with older people. One of my passions in life is to empower older people to not give up on on their lives because society sees your past that, and that you've got a use-by date,  you've passed, you know, all of these sorts of attitudes that are just insidious in our culture that, in the Maori culture, it's a little bit better, where we actually respect their elders, and we value their wisdom, but in general culture, it's pretty bad.  We also have this thing—when I retire, then I'll recover and I'll relax. For me, that's the beginning of a downward spiral. So in the rehabilitation journey that I've been on with my mum for the last five years, you know, I set her tasks every day that she has to achieve. She has goals that we're aiming for. Of course, we have phases of recovery, and so on. But she's always on a mission of some sort or another, and she's 79 years old, and we're going forward. I will treat her like that until there is no hope, you know, to the end of her days, because I believe that humans need challenge.  They don't need comfort. They don't need to be, you know, mollycoddled and stuck on the couch to watch telly all day, because you're older now. No. I'd like to see people having their challenge, whatever their challenge is, and it could be like, mum has offered art classes now and just loving the creative. She's got time to do something different and that's a goal that is helping her brain stay on point. What's your take on the way society sees people when they get older? How do you approach that from your personal standpoint? Lorraine: Well, from my own personal standpoint, they're getting older. Yeah, I'm with you 100%, Lisa. I think we need to continually be adding new stimuli, and you know, they can be stress, you know, stimuli stress, it's all just, you're asking the body to do new things. So then you're just inviting new experience into your life. I think that as we get older, our world should be getting bigger, not smaller. I do think that a lot of what we attribute to old age, it's just bad habit.  Lisa: It's accumulating it for many years and makes it the typical aging things. I mean, we are all going to die at some point, but my goal is to live an extremely long life that is healthy until the end, that's my goal. None of us know what's going to come at us from left field. I've experienced an awful lot, I know that some things can still, but that's the goal. That's the approach that I take. So I'm doing everything in my life and in my family's life, to make that as best as possible.  To have constant challenge and have constant goals that you're aiming for and new things that you're learning. It keeps you in this growth mindset for starters, and it keeps your body not knowing what's coming, so it's still having to adapt and go forward, rather than going backwards. As we get older, we get wiser, well, hopefully we do, most of us do, we've got more experience, we're more able to cope with, you know, all the, the emotional things that we probably weren't able to cope with when we were 20, we've got all these experiences.  It's just fantastic if we can look to our older generations as the one who provide wisdom for the ones that are coming behind, and they're seen as a valuable resource in our society, because and not as being your past that because you're over 50, or you're over 60, or you're over 70, or whatever, you know, this demarcation line is that people have and they put on themselves, you know, partly because society does this. Lorraine: Yeah and it's a horrible thing for you to be made redundant and society in terms of your value to it. That is largely, I think, exacerbated by what runs the show is generally money. So people are not seeing older people as being contributing into. Yet we need to start valuing other things besides that. I think we are at the moment, just with the times and what it's for, the time of shifting, and there's an invitation here to make sure that we reconnect with our humanness, and start to prioritise what things we value as human beings, because we're in danger of losing a lot of them. We look at our older people, and we also look at our children. Now children have a life expectancy less than that of their parents. Lisa: Yes, horrific. Lorraine: It's the wrong direction, and you can't cut off your old people and your young people are not benefiting from the wisdom that is available, and that wisdom is something that you can't put a price on. We need to get back to, away from this sort of outside focus and measuring everything in those sorts of terms, and start to value our human relationships and our depth of experience and our connection to the divine spark which we all have within us. To value that journey and support each other on that journey. We're all in it alone, and we're all in it together. Lisa: That's beautifully put. I think we are in an age of change, and I hope things will gather some more momentum. We've got lots of problems in the world but we've also got lots of opportunities now to change things. In the areas that I'm working in, I'm seeing huge changes taking place within just the last few years and that's encouraging. Then there is lots of negativity, but I like to focus on the positivity.  But I think, yeah, let's start valuing our elder, older population, and they have a lot to bring to the party. What we want to do is help people stay healthier, longer. That requires a bit of a mindset shift. When I take my mom to the gym, she's training her butt off there at 79 years old, and people know where she's come from, like being in a wheelchair for a few years, and not being able to do anything. Now she's doing all this, you know, crazy stuff, well, you know, compared to where she was there. That's a role model. She's a role model for so many older people who now have actually joined the gym, and, you know, we're doing stuff because they go, ‘Well, if Isabel can do it, I can do it.' That's, to me, the greatest, beautiful thing that's come out of that tragic journey that we've been on. It's empowering now, other people to not give up just because they're older. To have that attitude of, ‘I'm going to fight my way back.' Then it's a team event. I'm mum's coach, mentor and driver. She's the one who's willing to put in the hard yards and to do whatever I asked her to do to the best of her ability, and that's a winning combination. I'd like to see more people have that, if they've been on rehabilitation journeys. Even for younger people, that they've got someone in the corner that's willing to help them fight because when you're in a big health battle, you need people fighting with you and alongside you. Lorraine: Yeah. When you're down and you don't have the energy, that's what families are for. That's what families are for. To help you when you need to help and how you can all be putting in and bringing it together. I just think this divorcing ourselves from old people and just giving them a bunch of pills, then putting them in front of the telly, what a waste, what an incredible waste of resources.  Lisa: Yep, and loneliness and despair, and all of those things, and the value of that person's life history is just disappearing, when it could be being impassioned, if they, if we can keep their minds active, and their bodies as strong as possible for as long as possible, they have a great value. It's not like, from a societal standpoint, it's often thought, well, once you retire, you're no longer adding value to society, it's measured in monetary value, and you're costing more in the health systems. Hopefully, you don't live too long. That's just an approach to me that is just horrific. The way that society treats its young, and it's old and it's vulnerable, as is the mark of a civilization, I think that is, you know, is that is what we should be measured by, not how strong— Lorraine: Yeah, and I think the example of your mum, is that, all we have to do is take care of what's in front of us and do the best that we can. That is being an example to other people, it just starts to, so she's going to the gym and other people see her and they go out, and they have a whole different mindset about the possibilities and what happens and, and that's all it takes. Lisa: You like the work that you're doing, that's imparting your knowledge. You could be sitting back on a beach somewhere and just enjoying life. Instead, you're still teaching, you're sharing, you're imparting that valuable knowledge that you have to other people, and that is gold. It's so important. Gary, your lovely brother, who I absolutely adore and admire, thinks he's crazy and awesome at the same time. Still world-leading mountain biker at his age, and he certainly helped me on my journey when I was broken and burnt out and came to him, a few years ago going, ‘But Gary, I'm broken, can you help me?' He put pieces of the puzzle back together again, and helped, gave me actually a role model, because he'd done the same thi

When your loved one has a serious illness, the world feels a bit darker. But you shouldn't lose hope. In this episode, I talk to Cushla Young, my lifelong friend and the co-author of Relentless. This book recounts my mother's road to recovery despite seemingly insurmountable odds. Cushla and I talk about the challenges my family and I face to cope with my mum's sudden illness. You'll also hear a little from my mum and her experiences through this ordeal. Our circumstances didn't stop me from being relentless. My goal was for my mum to recover, despite the experts saying otherwise. I wanted to extend my mother's lifespan and give her the best quality of life I can. Throughout my mother's treatment and rehabilitation, I had to step up and take control. I managed to compartmentalise things before they got out of hand.  If you want to learn about my relentless effort to defy the odds, this episode is for you. You will gain insights into how I challenged myself to keep my family together in a time of crisis.    Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that is capable of boosting the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements that are of highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combat the effects of aging, while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Discover my relentless journey of helping my mother recover from aneurysm. Learn important lessons about the value of health and extending your loved ones' lifespan. Gain insights from how I maintained my composure and became the backbone of my family in these difficult times.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  Relentless: How a mother and daughter defied the odds Listen to other Pushing the Limits Episodes: #71: Cushla Young- Seizing the Day in Paradise #183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova   Episode Highlights [04:43] Cushla's Interview with Lisa's Mum, Isobel As an educator, Isobel shares that she felt terrible when the doctors told her about what she can't do after the aneurysm. Getting a driver's license boosted Isobel's confidence. Isobel advises people who are going through a rough time to hang in there and continue to fight. To maintain her health, Isobel is currently going to the gym, taking yoga, undergoing hyperbaric treatment and attending art classes. She feels amazing about herself. [14:04] How an Aneurysm Affected Isobel and the Family After the aneurysm, Isobel went from an active individual to someone who couldn't function. Lisa shares some medical mishaps on the day her mum was rushed to the hospital. These mishaps caused delays in Isobel's surgery. It took 18 hours for Isobel to be taken into surgery because she had to be airlifted to another hospital. The fear of death coming to her mum was a big wake up call for Lisa. [20:03] Lisa's Relentless Fight for Her Mum's Life In the initial phases, Lisa was in shock and was extremely terrified. After processing the situation, she was in a ‘mission mode'. Lisa's father came up to her, saying that they needed to plan the funeral despite Isobel still being alive. When people are in crisis, you need to take control and give them jobs, so they don't panic. Over the next few weeks, Lisa was relentless in organising her family and the logistics surrounding her mum's medical needs. [26:14] Sustaining Herself Throughout This Journey Lisa shares her experience crossing the Libyan desert with an abusive boyfriend. During that extreme situation, she learned to compartmentalise. She will fall apart, but not right now when there's something that needs to be done. Lisa and her family had to stay with Isobel in the hospital around the clock for she could go any moment. Lisa also had to learn a lot about aneurysms, medicine and rehabilitation.  Amidst all this, Lisa's dad experienced heart problems, so he had to go home. [32:17] The Importance of Self-Care Lisa knows the value of exercise and having fresh air from time to time.  She made sure to take at least half an hour to an hour for herself. When you're in stressful situations, you tend to put self-care aside. However, it's vital to have systems in place to manage the stress so that you're prepared to continue fighting. [35:02] Lisa's Family Lisa's brothers were very supportive throughout the whole process. Lisa's family trusted her and what she told them to do. Her father also stepped up to help. He was relentless in caring for and supporting his wife's recovery. [38:25] Coming Home from Wellington after the Surgery Lisa was happy that her mother was stable. But she is also worried during the flight because any dropping of pressure could cause Isobel's death. Lisa sneaked into the hospital to have a friend check her mother for sleep apnea. And the results confirmed her suspicions. She had to convince the medical staff to provide her mother with a C-pap machine. Her mother could breathe properly with the machine. [44:43] Moving Lisa's Ageing Mother Lisa shared how they came up against people who insisted on having her mother placed in a facility. A social worker was against them having a caregiver. Lisa shares that she had to fight for the resources she wanted for her mother. [46:08] Caring for Isobel at Home Lisa and her family were willing and able to care for Isobel in the comforts of their home. A social worker told her that they wouldn't be able to care for her mother adequately. But Lisa remained relentless in the face of all these judgements. She and her family wouldn't go down without a fight. [50:57] The Importance of Mindset Professionals show you statistics based on their knowledge and experience. Don't discount their expertise, but don't lose hope. How you approach things is critical. You have the power to control your health and well-being. Lisa brings her mum to the gym daily for this reason. Lisa wants Isobel surrounded by athletes pushing their limits. If you want to stay alive, you need to work hard to keep fit and healthy. [1:00:28] Living and Lasting Longer Living a relentless life means taking lots of small steps and letting them accumulate.  By being relentless, you'll find more fulfilment and last longer.  Lisa shares that she wants to push degeneration out for as long as possible. There's a lot of research now that helps you live longer and better. Don't feel guilty for investing in your health.  If you want to learn more about how Lisa takes care of her body and her family, tune in to the full episode. 7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘She was really the rock of my world. And then that turned upside down very much overnight. And you go from being this adult kid to complete role reversal where you're now having to do everything for your mum.' ‘We need to set up systems and processes and understand our own bodies and how our bodies work so that we can manage the stress levels.' ‘What I want people to understand is you have to fight for the resources that you want for your loved one.' ‘I'm only ever going to listen to the ones that tell me I can do, not the ones that I tell me I can't do. They may be right. I'm not saying they're not right, but I'm gonna throw the book at this. I'm gonna do whatever it takes.' ‘They're (professionals) making educated guesses, based on the statistics of the past whatever and their experiences. And I get that. And we can't give people false hope. But we've also can't take away all hope.'   ‘The older you get, the more effort you have to put into [working hard] if you want to stay alive... If you still want to be alive and enjoy life, then you have to fight for it.' ‘If you have some self-care and take those small steps, whatever that may look like for you at the time of your life, then you are living a life that is relentless.'   About Cushla Cushla Young is a life-long friend of Lisa. They met in a running retreat they both participated in 7 to 8 years ago. She is also the co-author of Lisa's book, Relentless: How a mother and daughter defied the odds. Cushla is a teacher at the St. John Bosco School, New Plymouth. She is also a Trustee and Educational Coordinator at the Taranaki Gifted Community Trust. Having an interest in gifted education, Cushla provides intellectual and creative ways to support students with advanced and complex learning skills. The other things Cushla is passionate about are digital technology, literacy and pedagogy. Cushla currently lives in New Zealand with her family. If you want to reach out to Cushla, you can find her on Twitter.    Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can find comfort and hope in fighting for their loved ones' lives. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Hey everyone. And before we get on the way with the show today, I just want to remind you to check out all our great programs that we have. We have our www.runninghotcoaching.com, where you can find out all about our online run training system, we get video analysis, your customised personalised plan made specifically for you, and ongoing support and help and education around everything running. So check that out at runninghotcoaching.com.  We also have our flagship epigenetics program, which is all about optimising your genetics and making the best out of them and how to do that. Understanding what your genes are all about and how to get the right food, the right exercise, the right timings for everything. Understanding every aspect of your life, your place, your career, your social environment, all of these things, your predispositions and much more. So check that out. Go to lisatamati.com and hit the work with us button and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program right there. Also a reminder to check out the longevity and anti-ageing supplement that I am now importing into New Zealand and Australia in conjunction with Dr Elena Seranova, a molecular biologist who is behind this product. Now this is all about the sirtuin genes basically, which are all your longevity genes. Now NMN is a precursor to something called NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And this is an absolutely essential compound for every in every single molecule— every single cell, I should say, of your body. It's very important in regards to ATP production, and in regards to metabolic health, in regards to autophagy, in regards to sirtuin genes and upregulating those. Make sure you check out the episodes that I did with Dr. Elena Seranova and head on over to www.nmnbio.nz if you want to find more about the science of that, and why I am super excited about this product, this longevity and anti ageing product, NMN.  Right. Now, today I have something very, very different. I've turned the tables on myself and I have a very dear friend interviewing me about our book that we wrote together. Cushla Young, she's a, got a master's in English and she is the person who helped me rescue my book when I had a hell of a mess, basically. So I hope you're gonna enjoy this interview. This is all about my mum's story. It's about mindset. It's about going up against all the odds, it's about going against the establishment. So it's a lot of things we cover in this interview. So you're also going to hear from my very special mummy. She's going to come to work and tell us a little bit before she heads off on her coffee date. So now over to the show with Cushla Young and Isobel.  Well hi, everybody. Welcome to Pushing the Limits. Today I am doing something very unusual. And so hi everybody in YouTube land who's listening to this as well. I want to introduce my best friend, Cushla Young. Cushla, welcome to the show.  Cushla Young: Thank you. Lisa: For starters. Now I'll give you guys a bit of background. Cushla and I have been friends for now, a decade or so. Cushla is the lady that helped me write this book. Without her it would not exist. It wouldn't have come out before Cushla came along. The book is Relentless: How A Mother and Daughter Defied the Odds. It's my latest book, and Cushla is the magic behind that book. What we're going to be doing today is talking about what the book is about, which is the story of bringing my mum back from a mess of aneurysm, major brain damage at the age of 74, when it was against all the odds, when the medical professionals were telling me the brain damage is so bad that she's never going to recover.  Being an athlete I went, ‘No that's not happening, and we'll find a way.' This is going to be all about that story. Now I'm going to hand over the reins to Krishna to actually interview me, but I've actually got a very, very special guest sitting here next to me, who is the actual star of the show. And so Cushla is going to, she's going to take off for a coffee date. So I'll have to let her come to work first. So I'm going to pass you over to my very special mummy. There she is, Isobel. And she's gonna talk to Cushla for a second so I'll just pass over the headphones. Cushla: Hand over the reins. Lisa: You're on, Isobel.  Isobel: Okay. Cushla: Hi Isobel, morning.  Isobel: Good morning, Cushla. How are you?  Cushla: Taking off for a coffee date soon, are you? Isobel: Yes.  Cushla: So you are a guest of honor for a few minutes on this podcast. This is, I'm going to be a little bit different because I get to interview your daughter rather than her interview others today. Isobel: That's good. Cushla: So, but we'll start with you. So you have been on one heck of a journey over the last few years. Isobel: I sure have.  Cushla: So how can we start with how you're feeling now?  Isobel: I'm feeling good.  Cushla: You're looking great.  Isobel: I can go for a coffee and I can go walking on my own. And I can do almost anything.  Cushla: When Isobel left my house after a lovely glass of wine the other day, you didn't have one, but Lisa did. You drove, didn't you? You drove her home? Isobel: I did. Yes. I can drive now. That's good. Especially if Lisa's having a wine. Cushla: You get to be a mum.  Isobel: I do, I get, revert back to being mum. Yeah.  Cushla: Yeah, and that must have given you a lot of independence that you have lost for quite a few years.  Isobel: Yes. It's awesome. You don't realise how isolated people are. They haven't got— We all have a way of getting around here. It's isolating. Yeah.  Cushla: And can you tell us a bit about what you have been getting up to? I understand you've been doing some art classes with your sister. How's that going?  Isobel: Not as well as I would like to but it's, we're doing all right, you know?  Cushla: Yeah.  Isobel: I'd like the results to be a bit more spectacular. But—  Cushla: It must be nice to be creative.  Isobel: Oh it is. It's good, it does me good.  Cushla: Now, do you have much of a memory of the hospital time?  Isobel: No. Cushla: No. What's your first memory that you can recall?  Isobel: Probably where we went to a meeting with all the big guns— Lisa: At the hospital.  Isobel: At the hospital, and they wrote me off, really. Cushla: Did they? They underestimated you as well.  Isobel: I can remember saying— Lisa: I was feeling good. I was feeling good. Isobel: I was, I was feeling fine before this. Now. I'm feeling terrible. I have been demoted, I've been, lost my independence. Just because they were talking like they were, they shouldn't have done that.  Lisa: They took away all your confidence. And— Isobel: Yeah, they just. Cushla: And so your background is similar to mine. You're an educator.  Isobel: Yeah.  Cushla: Have been for decades and decades. You must understand how demotivating it is when somebody tells you what you can't do rather than what you can do. Isobel: Yeah, that's it exactly.  Cushla: So when did it change for you after that meeting? What were some of the first things that happened that gave you a bit more confidence? Lisa: Driving?  Isobel: Getting on a driver's license probably was a major breakthrough. Lisa took me down to the dam by the port and just— Lisa: It's been months. Isobel: Happier— Cushla: Round and round you. Isobel: You will, ‘now you drive.' I was totally gobsmacked. Cushla: But you did it.  Isobel: I did it.  Cushla: And I understand the doctor was utterly shocked—  Isobel: He was.  Cushla: —when you went in to get your medical for your license.  Isobel: Totally blown away. Cushla: Yeah.  Isobel: That was a blow away.  Cushla: It had probably been a while since the doctor had responded that way.  Isobel: Yeah, I think so. He was a nice doctor. So that was good. Cushla: So could you give some advice to someone who might be going through something pretty tough at the moment. What would you say to them?  Isobel: Just hang in there and— Lisa: Fight. Isobel: Fight hard. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to grit your teeth and just carry on, really. Yeah. Cushla: You're one tough lady, aren't you?  Isobel: I must be.  Cushla: Definitely.  Isobel: So that's what we did.  Cushla: Can you describe some of the routines of things that you do at the moment that keep you in such good health? Isobel: I go to the gym most days.  Lisa: Do weight training, cardio. Isobel: I do weights, I do cardio, I do walking on the treadmill, yoga. Cushla: And you still do your hyperbaric as well?  Isobel: Yes, every day at the moment. Cushla: Everyday? Wonderful. Still eat the smoothies that Lisa makes you in the mornings? Isobel: They're pretty terrible.  Cushla: But they're good for you, right?  Isobel: But they are good for me. Broccoli is not exciting, and it's sickening. Cushla: What we've noticed is, about over even the last six months, is how fit and agile and glowing that you are. That's amazing.  Isobel: It is amazing. It's amazing that you said that. I don't always feel it.  Cushla: Right.  Isobel: It's hard to know where you're at, so.  Cushla: Yeah, I think sometimes what you see is yourself reflected in others' eyes, and that's a really good indication of how far you've come.  Isobel: Yeah, and I have come a long way.  Cushla: Really. Isobel: Yeah, a really long way. Lisa: A bloody long way. All right, now you can go get coffee. Isobel: I'll pass you back to Lisa— Lisa: —and get yourself a coffee date. Cushla: Enjoy! Isobel: I will. Lisa: Thanks, Mummy.  Isobel: Okay.  Lisa: She's an absolute legend. Thanks, you have a nice coffee. We're now actually going to get into her backstory. Because, I would have done it the other way around and had her at the end of the show. But she needed to get to a coffee date. So she's just rolling. Yeah, we're rolling with the punches.  But Cushla, this— can you, I'm gonna pass the reins over to you fully. Because you know the story, you lived it with me, you helped me from the get-go pretty much. So over to you. Oh now I'm an interviewee. Cushla: Got you. We're flipping the tables, aren't we? Lisa: Yeah, we sure are. Cushla: To be interviewed for once, which is fabulous. So this has been a long journey for you and your mum and your family, and you're right. I was, I had known you for a few years before this happened. I think from my perspective, the thing that was so shocking about what originally, with the aneurysm, with your mum, was just how quick things changed overnight. I think we see Isobel now and— how old is mum?  Lisa: She's 79.  Cushla: 79. So we're going back quite a few years, and I used to often pop into the shop and see your mum, and just pop in and say hello. And she is now but she also was been a very intelligent, clear spoken woman that used to do acro-aerobics all the time, she was very fit and healthy, very independent, working still pretty much full-time. Lisa: Yeah, she was. Cushla: For somebody watching, to see overnight that she went from that, from a completely functioning full-time working adult, to just being, nothing was there. Overnight, the aneurysm took her from being completely functional to nothing. I think the shock in that first visit and I saw her quite a few weeks after the aneurysm, and you're back up to New Plymouth. You'd been in Wellington. The shock of seeing her lying there, she had aged a decade overnight.  Lisa: Yeah.  Cushla: It's hard. Hard to see. I think the shock of that must've ripped through your family quite viciously. You notice that change overnight. Lisa: It was huge. Yeah, to have growing up with mum being always the one supporting me. And the one that was there for me in all the phases of my crazy, upside down life that I've had, you know, with all my adventures supporting me with all lower— dramas and relationship breakups and divorces and business growing.  Cushla: Rooting for you at most of your races. Lisa: Oh, yes. Yeah. She'd seen, been there, done that with me, I can tell you that she had a hard life with me. She had a good life, she had exciting times with me. She was really the rock of my world. And then that turned upside down very much overnight. And, you know, you go from being this adult kid to a complete role reversal, where you're now you know, having to do everything for your mum, you are advocating, you're fighting, you grow up really quickly, even as a fully-grown adult. Obviously, I still am very much, when you've got a parent, you're still like a kid in a way to them. That is that was a biggest shocker for me I think was to be, no, now you are the one that's caring for your mum, and you are going to have to pull out all the stops to help her and it's you know, no longer about you being the selfish egotistical athlete, and there's nothing wrong with it, if you're an athlete, you have to be if you want to reach, know, do the stuff that I did. But that was a shocker. And then not, like the— we had medical research mishaps from the very get-go when mum had this aneurysm that happened early in the morning. And an ambulance driver came into the house, you know, they got her into the ambulance up to the hospital, he knew already that she was having a neurological event. And he told the doctor so much, and he just ignored it. He ignored it.  He said, ‘No, she's having a migraine, I think. So we'll just leave it for a few hours and observe her and give her some painkillers.' Well, you know, ‘Thanks very much for that.' The first six hours not knowing, and she was dying, basically. She was dying. And I knew she was in deep trouble. And I didn't know what to do. Because at that point in my life, I had no idea of anything like this. So I was never, you know, in a situation like this, I didn't know what was wrong with her. But I knew we were in trouble. And that was a very big wake up call. I actually got our mutual friend, Megan Stewart, who's a paramedic here and the head of the ambulance here. And she came up to the hospital at that time. She sort of rattled some bloody cages very quickly. And because she knew immediately what was happening, stroke or aneurysm or something neurological, migraines. She went and told this doctor what for. He then relented, and we got a CT scan. And that's when we saw the blood right throughout the brain. So that was a very big wake up call for me in a number of ways. Obviously, the shock of it happening to your mum, the fear of her dying, she's being very, very, very close to death at this point. And then realising that, you know, the medical system had not worked for us. And I'm not— you know, we're all human, and we all make mistakes and stuff. But that was a pretty big one. That was a pretty big one. Cushla: I think, in those situations, we want to trust the people that are— the medical professionals that are around us. For the most part in ED, they're an amazing group of people. But I think also there is a lot to be said for your mum. You knew what a migraine looked like, you should have before. And it's a matter of trusting yourself, isn't it, enough to then think, this isn't to your question what you're saying, and then fight as hard as you can for a different outcome. Because my understanding about aneurysm is there's a golden hour, or it's really important to be treated.  Lisa: Exactly.  Cushla: A short time.  Lisa: Surgery, that's the golden hour, they talk about getting you into surgery within the hour. It took 18 hours. 18 hours, because not only do we have the medical mishap and we also had the fact that we had to get to our Main Hospital down in Wellington, neurological. Living in a regional area, unfortunately, that's just the way it is. But we had to wait another 12 hours for the air ambulance to actually get to us, and when you're over 65, you're sort of bumped down the hierarchy, especially if you— if they don't think you're a good, you got good odds. So, you know, we— there were, at that time we had a baby that needed help, and that was more urgent than mum. They have to make those calls. I understand. I don't like it; I understand it. It's your loved one and you don't really give up. Cushla: Not at the time because you're also going through the shock of what's happening and trying to process that. In that moment, can you describe, I suppose I want to focus a little bit on what was happening to you and your body. Because I think the thing about this really, this story is that it's not just about a mum surviving an aneurysm, but it's also about you and your family and how you've managed to pull yourself back together as well.  So not just Isobel but yourself. I know that a lot of us, all of us will face a moment in our lives where we have to handle a bit of trauma.  Lisa: Yep.  Lisa: What was going on in your body and how did you cope so that you had the ability to fight for your mum? What are you doing in your mind? Lisa: So in the initial phases, Cushla, you know, you are in shock, you're out, you're terrified. But very, very quickly, oh, especially after the mishap, once I realised what had just happened and the ball's up that that was, and that it was likely going to cost your life. I just went into what I call mission mode. Like, ‘Okay, right, I am not going— I'm going to research the hell out of this. I'm going to learn everything I can. I'm going to be hypervigilant. I'm going to watch everything they do. I'm going to question everything they do. I'm going to get my family organised.' Because I had get them down to Wellington. My father was, of course, falling to pieces because it's the love of his life. He's been, you know, married to her for 55 years. He came up to me already in the ED and said, ‘We better start planning the funeral.' Because they were, you know, saying to us, she's like, unlikely to survive. And I'm like, ‘Dad, we're not even considering that. She's alive, she's still breathing, and we're gonna fight with everything we have. Here's a list of jobs to do: I want you to go ring so and so, organise this, get the boys down, my brothers down to Wellington, blah, blah, blah.' When people are in a crisis, you need to take control and give them jobs to do so that they, their, you know, their amygdala, that their permanent part of the brain doesn't go into complete full-blown panic, and which doesn't always work. And I'll relay a story a little bit later, where I did go into full blown panic. It's all very well and good to say this. But at that point in time, I was like, ‘Dad', I shook him, I grabbed him, I held him and I said, ‘No, you've got this and this job to do, we're going to do it, and follow me, dad. Follow me.' And that was basically how it was then for the next few years. Yeah. My brothers as well, they were very much, ‘What do we do?' I had no idea at the time, but I pretended like I did. Fake it till you make it. What we're doing this is how we're going to operate over the next few weeks. So it was being down on Wellington together, organising the family to be down there, all the logistics that go along with that, and your jobs and your, you know, partners and all the rest of it. And then a 24-hour watch over Mum, and being hypervigilant, explaining to the boys everything that I was learning medically, because I was like, studying forever, I was just going, going, heart out, trying to understand and get up to speed on something that I was completely not aware of prior to this, learning what an aneurysm does, what vasospasms are, what I've been looking for, what they— signs.  We were only in the neurological unit, we weren't in the ICU, which, looking back when I arrived, what the hell. When she got down to Wellington, they get straight into surgery, they started draining her blood off the brain. She started to— start to have that pressure released. But then we had to decide the next, in the next couple of days, though it had stopped bleeding at that point, but it was about to go out in time again, it could go at any moment. How do we clamp it? What do we do? Would we cut into her brain and put a physical clamp over the area? And it was a mess of aneurysm. Like we're talking a 16 millimeter huge aneurysm. We went up through the femoral artery, and we weighed up the pros and cons and you make that call. She's got a 50% chance of dying this way, she's got a 30% chance of dying that way, pretty much. So we'll take the lesser evil, but she was going to have to have two operations and in that way you know. So that was gonna be really touch and go, really touch and go. I remember them wheeling her off for that operation. I think it was on day two, through the doors, and you just don't know if it's the last time you're going to see them alive, and the whole just trying to hold your shit together. Cushla: I know that you're very good at compartmentalising parts of the— of something when it happens. What I remember you talking about when we were writing the book, was how you were able to put the jobs that needed to be done in that box. The research you were doing in this box, your family in that box, and probably, and I know this because we had phone calls and I was in touch with you at the time, your emotions and your shock and your trauma in this box. It was a matter of kind of keeping you know, all those juggling balls in the air at one time. But also, and importantly allowing you to have that emotional spot as well. And I know that you were very good at compartmentalising and giving yourself time to do that, but not letting it overtake you, letting you drop all the other balls at the time when you were dealing with the emotional side of it. I think that's really important because I know— so when Lisa and I first met, I was a bit of a Lisa Tamati fangirl, before we became friends, and I got to know you really well.  Lisa: And then realised, oh no. Cushla: Yeah. I mean, we just saw you as Wonder Woman. You know, there's tough, tough, you know, athlete. Then I got to know you, as a human being, of course, a woman, there's a vulnerable side to you. But what I think is really important at that time, an immediate trauma time, as you gave yourself time to release a bit of that stress and that trauma by leaning on your husband Haisley, by your phone calls to me. But also, like, I know that you went for some runs, went to get gym, threshed it out, you probably screamed at the ocean at one point. Do you know? That's also important, isn't it? It's not just— Lisa: If you want to sustain— we knew this was going to be a long, long, long battle. While we hoped it was going to be a long battle, a short option was not a good one. This is something that I've learned doing ultra marathons: is to— in particular in the Libyan desert crossing, where you have to read the book for the whole story. But I did an expedition across the Libyan desert with three other guys, one of them being this abusive boyfriend that I was with at the time. There was a very extreme situation that we were in, we needed two liters of water a day, etcetera. And I'm having this big domestic fight with the boyfriend right in the middle of the Libyan desert. Cushla: In the most extreme environment on the planet. Lisa: In the most extreme environment, walking 45 kilometers a day with 35-kilo backpacks and only two litres of water a day in a military bad zone, not a good time to breakup with a boyfriend of five years. And in that moment, when he left me and disappeared over the sand dunes, that was a turning point for me, and I fell apart initially. And I was like, ‘Oh, God,' started  crying in the rails. I can't afford to lose any more tears here. I've got to pull my shit together, because I cannot let the energy dissipate that at the rate of I want to actually survive. It was getting down to that sort of level of you know, you're going to survive this or not. And so I learned in that moment, really a very hard lesson in compartmentalising things in your brain. So like, ‘I'm going to fall apart, but not right now. I'm going to put that off right now because I have to focus on this, and getting through the desert and surviving.' That's been actually a really good lesson. It's never a pleasant one to actually have to instigate where you have to actually compartmentalise.  Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody. And we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on www.patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. We have two Patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us. Lisa: But in this in this situation where you're dealing with— you're having to study like really hard. And we have access now to the greatest minds on the world that come in, all those information about out there that you can study. So I was studying all the drugs that they had on, all the procedures they were doing, what is the normal plan, and what happens when you have an aneurysm, what are of the some of the dangers, or of the things that I should be looking out for, what are the signs in your body. You know, all of these types of things in the initial phase and then later on at it went into rehabilitation research and study. And so that was one aspect of it. And then we had a 24-hour clock system, much to the disgust of the people at the hospital because they didn't want us there 24 hours. They don't like that. There was no way I was leaving my mother when she could die at any minute alone. No way.  So I had massive battles with the hospital, for them to be able to allow us in. And then having to fight for that. So you're fighting on all these fronts, you're already fighting with— your mum's in deep, deep trouble, and then you're fighting against these systems. And they may have some good reasons for those systems. But there was no way I was leaving my mother alone when she could die any second. A family member had to be with her at all times. And I was very, very strict on that. We had some big blow-ups at the hospital. We got through really in the end. And we tried to be as unobtrusive as possible when we did what we were. And we picked up things that they missed, because she was on a neurological ward, they only come around a couple of hours into obviously, patients. But going back to the whole compartmentalising things. I know how to manage my body really well, and how to pace myself really well from doing ultra marathons and stuff, and expeditions. And so I knew that we were going to be in the for the long haul, I knew sleep deprivation was going to be a problem, I knew that the family dynamics were going to be a problem, that there was going to be fighting because of the stress there was it we were under, and we were all living in one motel unit. And that mum was in deep crap, we had my father to look after who was just, you know. Cushla: And he was down with you in the initial stage.  Lisa: He was here, he was; and he's very much, was a homebody. He didn't like to be out of his garden and sheep. So he was very, very stressed on that front, and of course his wife in such dire straits. He was, but he— so we managed to, had him to manage home because he started having heart problems. And so I had to eventually actually send my dad back home and actually lied to my dad that, ‘She's okay now, we've got her, Dad. She's all good.' Because I think that we're gonna lose him. I was making those sorts of decisions and just running the ship. Like you said, I know the importance of, for me, especially exercise and fresh air for my mental well-being, that if I was going to sustain it, I had to have at least half an hour to an hour every day out from this whole thing, where I just go and do a workout.  Again, all the fear, the cortisol, the adrenaline that's running through my body flat stuck and try to manage it, and making sure that she was looked after, and that time. You know, you feel guilty and everything for leaving the hospital all. But you had to do that after a few days. You know, just a couple of days, I didn't, but after that. It was— it's setting all these things in place. And we need to do that in our daily lives. We need to set up systems and processes and understand our own bodies and how our bodies work so that we can manage the stress levels and we can manage the movement that we need, the sunshine, and needs for sleep and recovery and all those aspects. And of course, in a situation like that, sleep deprivation was a massive, and there's not much you can do about that, you have to function at that level for as long as you have to.  Cushla: And I think a lot of people that are in stressful situations, whether or not it be something like what happened with your mum, or even at work or just in daily life, big stressful moments. A lot of people put the self-care to the side. And they just think, ‘Well, I'm not that— I don't have time for that,' or, ‘I shouldn't have time for that.' That's when the guilt that kicks in, and yet, it probably is one of the most important things to prioritise in terms of your day and compartmentalising your day through to handle stressful situations because it allows you to have the focus and the energy that you need and get back into the the stressful—  Lisa: Into the fight you're in. Yeah, absolutely. You need to be able to have that energy put back in. It might only be 10 minutes out in the bloody— you know, like when we, here's another situation which we'll probably get onto later with my dad. In his situation, in the hospital for 16 days, fighting for his life. It was sometimes 10 minutes in the waiting room doing press ups. That was all I could get before I went back into the battle zone if you like.   Cushla: Just to release that.  Lisa: Just to manage the cortisol. Reach, I call it discharge and recharge, and then reset. Come back into the moment. But yeah, it was a heck of a lot of lessons to be learned and then leading in a crisis situation. My brothers were amazing. They were very supportive, and they were, followed everything that I asked them to do, basically. Because I'm the study-er of the family, I'm the one that is into research and science and studies. They trusted me to do that thing. And they were like, ‘Well, you tell us what to do, we'll do it.' And that's really great. Because you've got your roles. That is, in having somebody lead the charge, so to speak, even though you don't know what you're doing, where you're going, and there's certainly no rehabilitation over the next years, because this process took years, having that person that's got that responsibility, got that, ‘This is what we're doing. This is how we're doing it, I just need you guys to do this bit and the other thing.' And my whole entire family were willing to do that. They were— my dad was just, jumping ahead in time, my dad was just amazing, how he stepped up to the mark. When he had a wife that had done everything for him pretty much. Cushla: He was, back when she came back to New Plymouth, he was cooking, and— Lisa: He was doing all the things.  Cushla: He was doing all the things, yeah.  Lisa: It was a shocker for him, but he stepped up to the mark to the best of his ability. He was the most wonderful, caring husband. He didn't give a— he didn't care that she— when she came back home for the first time, and we actually got her out of the hospital after three months. Now, I'm jumping ahead in time. But he didn't care that she had no function, basically. She was in a vegetative state who had a heartbeat. She was alive, and we were fighting. That was all he needed to know. He had his wife at home, she was alive, she's stabilised, we were fighting together, and we were on a mission. Every day he had his jobs to do and the things to do. He was just relentless in his love for her, stepping up.  Cushla: So going back to the moment where— so she's in Wellington, and you need to read the book to find out what went on in Wellington. The moment that she was transferred back to New Plymouth was a bittersweet moment, wasn't it? You were able to come home and be with Haisley and be back at home with the family and friends around that were helping. But you knew that the care that you would receive back in New Plymouth wasn't at the level that it would be in Wellington, basically just because Wellington is way more resourced. And fair enough, you can have a very small region. Taranaki here, you know, we're a little provincial spot in New Zealand. So we knew that we wouldn't get the care that you got in the big city. So talk us through how it was like to come home— Lisa: It was terrifying. I was happy for all those reasons, but at the same time, and I was happy that she's apparently stabilised. But she was in ICU for the good part of the two of the three weeks that she was in Wellington when she was in and out of coma. Once she'd gotten out of the coma, then they had to get the stent out of her heart, and she kept dropping. What happens when you take the stent out is that pressure can start rising in the brain again, and three times as they tried to take the stent out, the pressure went up. On the third time, they said, ‘Well, if it doesn't work, this time, I'm going to have to operate and put in a permanent one.' And the third time, it worked. But it only worked for the next 24 hours, and then they were like, ‘Right, she's not— her pressure's not going up. She's keeping consciousness, she's not falling back into the coma. She's good to go.' And I had researched, I knew that that was not the case, that she couldn't have— that pressure could go up over the next 70 days at any point, and if that pressure went up, it would happen very quickly, and she wouldn't— she could die.  So I knew that even though they weren't telling me that, she could still die in the next 70 days. If that happened in Wellington and the pressure started to go up, they were— they might be able to recognise that, they might be to go in and do something. They wouldn't be able to in New Plymouth. I was hypervigilant on trying to understand how I could notice if something in her consciousness was going down, right. All I could do was to understand some of the symptomatic things that she did which might exhibit if her pressure is starting to go up, because you wouldn't be able to communicate it to me, you wouldn't be able to see it, you would slowly lose more and more of a brain till it was gone basically. So that was a huge fear bringing her home, and of course putting her in an airplane with a pressure change. Yeah, I didn't know what it would do. In fact, it was nothing, but there wasn't a problem, really. But you know it this time you just— Cushla: You don't know.  Lisa: Yeah, so for the next 70 days, I'm like, hypervigilant. If I noticed something down on, I'll be like, ‘I think she's doing this and doing that.' Then they took her off the oxygen at the same time, and that was a big problem. They didn't see it as a problem that she was, ‘Her oxygen states are alright.' What they were forgetting was that she was sleeping 18, 20 hours a day. So when she was asleep, she wasn't breathing properly, and I believe she had sleep apnea. So I said to them, ‘I want a sleep apnea assessment.' They said, ‘No, she doesn't need that, why should she need that? Her oxygen stats are okay when she's awake, so why would she?' I knew about sleep apnea. So I got a friend of ours, he's actually a sleep apnea consultant, Jez Morris. I said, ‘Come into the hospital illegally, would you do that?' He said, ‘Yeah, I'll do that.' Well outside of rules actually, so not illegally, but you know.  We sneaked into the hospital at nighttime, put on these machines onto her, did an assessment overnight, because it had to be an overnight thing. We got the results, and when it came back, severe sleep apnea. Now, this is absolutely key. Like her oxygen levels were down at 70% SPO2. she was Cheyne-Stokes breathing, which is not a good thing. Probably going to be on your way out in the next couple of months. Her oxygen was so low that she was knocking off any brain cells that she has, the infections that are in her body were just going apeshit. So bacteria was exploding, and they're already known. That was actually the one of the signs that I picked up because I had done a lot of racing at altitude, and I was seeing a lot of the signs in her that I had at altitude when I had altitude sickness and things like that.  That was at first wind, because I had to convince the bloody staff that we needed to have the CPAP machine on here, and they weren't trained in CPAP machine, so they didn't want to do that. I'm telling what she needs, she's got this and you know, him being a sleep physiologist was able to convince them that okay, this is a good thing for her now. He said he'd been banging his head against the brick wall for decades, trying to get for stroke patients an assessment that is part of the process. Because very often, this happens that that part of the brain is damaged in the stroke or the aneurysm, and even in things like concussions, that you can have a change in your breathing situation. And that part of the brain that monitors that is not working properly. So it should be staying apart and perfect, and that's what I believe, and that's what he believes. So anyway, we got the CPAP machine. Initially started to have little bits of improvement, but we're already two months, three months, two and a half months or something into her time in the hospital and we're running out of time. But she's stable, nothing we can do with her, basically. She's pretty bad, and we've given paid lip service to some physio and some speech therapy and stuff, and now it's time to get you out of the system. Cushla: And I think at that point, I think they, if you saw Isobel at that moment in the hospital, you would see an old woman who was probably on her way out. You didn't see the vibrant person that we saw before the aneurysm, that was so independent, and so highly functioning. For the hospital, I think they just saw an older woman— Lisa: Another older woman.  Cushla: —another older woman, and a family that wasn't willing to accept the fact that they had an ageing mother. So there's that little bit of not understanding who she was before, and how abrupt this change was. We knew that if we could just get her back, even if it was a little bit back, then you could take her home and start working on rehab. Can you talk about how quickly they just wanted to move her into a home? Lisa: Oh yeah. And this is what happens very often when you're over 65 is the answer is get them out of our budget into someone else's budget. That means putting them into a hospital-level care facility. If you've got anything, that's the normal route that you go, and they will try and convince you of that route, at least in our situation. I can't speak for everybody obviously. We came up against a brick wall of this, especially the social worker who shall remain nameless, who just was totally against us being able to have the caregiver that I wanted, the caregiver for in the morning for an hour, and one in the evening for an hour, which is part of, they do provide the service and so on. But it costs more money, and you stay in the budget. That's the key point.  We were fighting over these resources. What I want people to understand is you have to fight for the resources that you want for your loved one. And we have limited resources, it's a fact of life. If you want to get some of those resources, and you think your loved one is worthwhile, worth it, because they've spent their entire lives paying taxes, being good citizens and have a right to have some of this, then you better be prepared for a fight because that's what you're in for. And we did have the fight. Cushla: And it was interesting that, because as a family, you were willing to bring her home and you're willing to do a lot of the care yourself. You didn't want to be taking up a resource in a care facility. You were prepared to do that yourselves, as a family, at home. So in a sense, there's a lot of money to be saved. Because I know how much you have given up and how much it costs the family to care for her at home. But that is what you wanted, and your family wanted was to just, to have her home. I remember in the book, you spoke about wanting Isobel to hear familiar sights, smells, sounds around her to aid her in her rehab. And that in having those, you felt that she was going to make more connections, neurological connections, because she was in her own home, with her own people around her, with her own sights and sounds and smells around her. Can you talk a little bit about how positive you felt that was? Lisa: Yeah, that's a huge piece of the puzzle. I had a friend's mum who actually worked in stroke rehabilitation. She really encouraged me to do that and said how important this was, and it just made total sense to me. I knew that when you're in the care of any facility, no matter how good they are, they can never provide the love and the attention that you can. Because they've got other people and you're just another patient and in— they provide a magnificent service and so on when this is absolutely necessary. But in this case, we had the willingness and the ability to do this. They said to me, the social worker said to me, ‘There is no way in hell you are going to cope with her. She's 24/7 around the clock care, two people at all times, there is no way you're going to cope with her.' I actually came and threw my books on his table one night, across the table at him. And I said, ‘Read these. This is who I am and my family are, and we are not giving up without a fight. We may go down fighting, but we're going to go down fighting, we're not going to go down and take the easy route out. It is not in our nature.'  It's a fundamental difference between a family that's a fighting family and a family that isn't. It's very much influenced by the people in power in these situations, the medical professionals, the people that are associated with all of it. And you have no confidence to stand up against all these professionals, usually. They're the ones that have been to medical school, they're the ones that have been to whatever, social work. Whatever the case may be, and you have a tendency to think, ‘Well, they know better than me.' But one thing they don't know is you. And they don't know how strong you are. They don't know the resources that you have. They don't know your mentality. And they don't know, really, they're all guessing as to what will actually happen based on their experiences. But that's what becomes partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. So when they say to you that there is no hope. No, that's their opinion that there's no hope.  I had time and time again, people telling me, ‘There is no hope, there is no hope, she's 74, her brain damage is so massive, it cannot be that she would ever.' I was like, ‘We'll see.' I'm only ever going to listen to the ones that tell me I can do, not the ones that I tell me I can't do. They may be right. I'm not saying they're not right, but I'm gonna throw the book at this. I'm gonna do whatever it takes. And it's all about attitude and effort and grinding it out then I'll take that one any day, I'll take that option. I'm a fighter. I'm a worker. And my family is too, and we're not going to go down without a fight. I've seen lots of— I saw lots of other families going through the same process, because this thing's happening every day in every hospital around the world, right? It is very much, ‘Well, statistically, this person's not a good bet. Therefore we'll just go through the standard of care, we'll be the— do the humane thing, we'll do all this— tick all the boxes or do it all right.' But the anomaly cases, the cases like mum's, why is nobody coming to say to me, why do I get— no, I'm out there telling everybody that story. That's why I've written the book is to empower other people in these types of situations, even different ones. But why is nobody asking me, ‘Well, what did you do?'  Cushla: What did you do to get there? Lisa: They've been— I'll let you know, when they mum here today, talking and walking and going off for coffee and driving up to see her friends, you would have no idea that she ever had anything.  Cushla: No.  Lisa: She's just completely normal again. But I was told that was an impossibility. How many people are told, you have a terminal illness, you are going to die of this thing? When you plant this sort of stuff, they're making educated guesses based on the statistics of the past whatever and their experiences, and I get that. We can't give people false hope, but we've also can't take away all hope. Cushla: No. That's a really powerful message, I think. I was talking to a friend of mine who is battling with cancer at the moment. She has the most amazing mindset, her mindset. So she's— you know, she was told she had three months to live, that was, I think, six months ago. Her mindset— and she's just been through some chemo and the tumors have shrunk. Her mindset, basically, is that cancer is not welcome back. It's just not. I'm going off to live my life. If I die of it, well, okay, I die of it. But in the meantime, I'm living my life, and I'm— it's not welcome back. She is charging in life and sure, she has her rough days. I really love how you said, it's— there's a responsibility for them not to give false hope, but at the same time not to take away. similar situation with my father, he has myeloma, so cancer of the blood. I think at the time, the doctors said, ‘After this treatment, you have between five and fifteen.' He immediately said, ‘I'll take the 15, thanks.' Because it puts them at that, at the point that it would have taken them to 85, and he was quite happy with it, because at the time he was 69. I love that. And we're six years down now. And I think mindset is huge—  Lisa: Oh, yeah.  Cushla: —in the way that you approach things. Because, sure, we might, I might die by being run over by a bus today. But if you don't live life thinking that things are going to get better, that you have the power to do, to have control over your health and your well-being, the way that you deal with these traumas, if you don't have that mindset—  Lisa: You're definitely not going to—  Cushla: — you're definitely not, you're going to roll up in a corner. As my friend with cancer said when she went to hospital, she's like, ‘Oh, I'm surrounded by all these sick people.' Which I loved. Because she didn't see herself in that. Lisa: That's one of the reasons I take mum to the gym every day.  Cushla: Exactly.  Lisa: I don't take her, I didn't take her, we did go to the physio program at the hospital. Don't get me started on that. But it was dreadful, it was shocking. The story's in the book, if you want to read that one, that is a real battle. But they— I like her to be surrounded by athletes going for it. Because that rubs off on her. She's not a patient, she's an athlete. She's training for her Olympics. That is the attitude we take every single day. And I make no concessions that she is 79 years old, and, ‘Oh, isn't it time for her to relax?' No, it isn't time for her to relax. It's time for her to work harder. It's time to go harder and the older you get, the more effort you have to put into, if you want to stay alive. That is the key.  When you stop wanting to be alive, then yes, sit on the couch and do nothing. Because it's what that will lead to. If you still want to be alive and enjoy life, then you have to fight for it. This goes whether you're bloody 10 years old, or 95 years old, or 105 years old. If you give into the easy way, if you go, ‘I don't feel like training today.' I don't feel like training most days. But most days I train. Because it keeps me healthy, fit, and I'm being prevented. That's what I'm all about now is being in the prevention space, and then helping people who are in dire need navigate the waters of into connecting people to the right doctors in the right studies and the right information and the right books and all of that sort of jazz. Cushla: When I was in the depths of my training for a marathon, I remember that exact conversation with a friend. She said, ‘I can't—' You kno at the end of the day, I go for a run. And she's like, ‘You've just worked a full day.' And I'm like, ‘Yeah, And I'm tired. But I'm going to go do it because you never regret it when you finish it.' At the end of that 10k, you've never thought, ‘I really shouldn't have gone for that run.' You don't. You come back thinking, ‘That was awesome.' Sure you're tired, but you were tired before you went out for the run. So you actually end up more energised.  Lisa: You mean that will energise your cortisol in—  Cushla: My muscles might be tired, but you're energised.  Lisa: And you're getting stronger. Cushla: Yeah, I think that's a really good message, that you don't regret it once you get out. It's always just those first, first few five minutes, or I always say the first 4k of any round was always more difficult than the rest. Lisa: 20 minutes is all it is.  Cushla: Yeah, it is. It's always shit.  Lisa: So same for me. And if I warm up properly, then it's only shit. If I'm in a hurry, and I run out the door, and I don't, then it's gonna be more shit, warm up quickly.  Cushla: The more experience you have with training, or with whatever it is that you're doing for self-care, understanding that the first little bit is always tough. And the more that you experience it, the more you know to expect it, then you know that you're going to get the buzz at the end and you start looking forward to that. Lisa: Yeah, yeah, I had that conversation with my brother yesterday, because I've been telling him, he's very funny. He does a lot. He's amazing, boaties, he does weight training. He's a surfer, and he surfs sometimes six hours a day, but he doesn't do cardio. And, you know, I monitor his blood, and his health and his everything. ‘You've got to do some cardio, we've got some issues here, we need some cardio please.' And he's like, ‘I hate cardio, I don't want to do  cardio.' And then we'll do five minutes, and he's like, ‘I don't want any—'  and I said, ‘It's about pushing through that barrier. It's the same as if you tell me, why aren't you going surfing anymore? And I'm like, “Oh, because it's so hard, and I don't want to get hit by the waves and get smashed around.' And he's like, ‘what are you talking about? It's awesome.”' As long as you go through that barrier. Pushed enough, long enough to get through that, and I'm having to go through that.  It's always that initial adaptation phase, that time when you're not fitting, you're not good at the surfing or the running, or the whenever, when it's shit. Let's be honest. But if you hang in there long enough, if you stay with the tension long enough, th

Have you ever wondered what it must feel like to be a world record holder? It may seem like their experiences are so different from yours, but you'll be surprised with how alike they are to you. They may share the same hobbies or be in the same industry as you before they made their record. Or they may have faced the same struggles you're currently confronting. No matter where they come from, great people are still people, just like you. Today, ex-Special Forces soldier, security specialist, and record-breaking adventurer Dean Stott joins us. He shares his experiences, from his military background to his Pan-American Highway cycling adventure. His is an inspiring story of pushing the limits and redefining the meaning of ‘adventurer'. Just like everyone journeying through life, he has also faced challenges on the way to the finish line. After listening to the episode, you may gain the motivation to try something you've never done before. 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If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. 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Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:  Find inspiration as Dean shows us the meaning of adventurer. Realise your similarities in experiences with a world record holder. Gain insight into how long-distance cycling is both a physical and mental feat.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-aging and longevity with NMN Bio.  Listen to other Pushing the Limits Episodes: #183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #192: Mental Resilience and Endurance: A Journey Across the Ocean with Laura Penhaul Connect with Dean: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter   Relentless by Dean Stott   The Black Country Buddhas Podcast Episode #55: Dean Stott- Human Performance, World Records And The Unrelenting Pursuit Of Excellence!  13 Hours (2016)  Heads Together UK Windy TV    Episode Highlights  [04:53] Dean's Background Dean's father was a tracksuit soldier or the football manager and coach in the army.  Dean was an active child growing up.   While he was never forced to go into the military, he ended up joining anyway. [09:00] The Fruits of Dean's Military Training Dean's time in the military helped him put on some muscle and gain height and weight. He didn't feel pressure to choose a department because he wasn't aware of how difficult each option would be. Dean ended up in the SBS (Special Boat Service) as he was more comfortable with water. He learned that rehearsing over and over helps you prepare for different scenarios.  Dean's training also prepared him to expect things to never go according to plan. He was taught how to react and plan for the best outcomes. [16:57] Dean's Turning Point Unfortunately, Dean had an accident while on an aircraft jump during pre-deployment training. Luckily, he landed successfully. However, he tore numerous supporting muscles, particularly in his knee. He couldn't even run 100 meters due to these injuries. Dean left the military. After retiring, he experienced an identity crisis. Dean's wife, Alana, was also pregnant. So, he was under a large amount of mental pressure. Alana helped him during this challenging period.  [22:35] Experience in the Security Industry With his training from the Special Forces, Dean went on to the security industry. He carried out projects for the British and Canadian embassies. Dean bought weapons and communication tools to sell to his clients. Additionally, he also made and sold evacuation plans to oil and gas companies. Ad-hoc security projects were a better option for Dean as he didn't want to join organisations. He helped in the aftermath of the Benghazi assassination of the then American ambassador. With his safe houses and contacts, he was able to transport people from Benghazi to Tripoli.  Despite the numerous tribal and ideality differences between these two places, Dean helped people safely reach their destinations. He did this by communicating respectfully and humbly with the locals. [31:33] The Effect of Fear The media largely contributes to the world's perception of high-risk places.  Dean is fully aware of the threats present in his job. But he learns to appreciate and look at another perspective.  Despite terrorist threats and danger, these high-risk cities have hospitable people and lovely surroundings.  [37:03] Looking for the Meaning of ‘Adventurer' Dean became fixated on working to gain money. Then, he realised he was losing physical and mental wellness. Before turning 40, Dean experienced a midlife crisis. He wanted to leave a legacy. And so he chose to break a world record on cycling.  Dean chose to cycle from South Argentina to North Alaska via the Pan-American Highway, the longest road in the world. To beat the record of 117 days, Dean's goal needed to cover the distance in 110. So, he trained to cycle in different weather conditions and altitudes. Dean cycled for Heads Up, the mental health campaign of Prince Harry, Prince William, and Kate. He set a target of  ₤1,000,000. [48:11] Preparation Phase As Dean was doing his research for cycling, he also spoke to previous record holders. He asked them questions that he learned from his experiences in Special Forces debriefings.  Dean learned that the previous record holders experienced issues in South and Central America, the second half of the challenge. [49:27] Dean's Journey Across South and Central America  Dean decided to start in the south first to get all the issues out of the way. His adventure began in Southern Argentina. He became physically and mentally stronger after four weeks on the road. Most of the time, Dean would also go beyond his daily-set kilometres and hours.  He divided his milestones into countries, cities, and days. He also divided his days among four stages. With smaller and more manageable milestones, Dean didn't feel overwhelmed. He instead felt like he was training, nothing more. Dean looked forward to small rewards after each milestone. These motivated him to move and be better the next day. [55:47] Dean's Trip Across North America By this time, Dean learned that he was invited to Prince Harry's wedding. This meant he had to finish the challenge in 102 days.  So, he cycled at night.  Dean also saw a post of a recent world breaker, saying he'll break a record within 100 days.  Dean's family was also at the end to greet him; this thought motivated him. So, Dean cycled for 22 hours every day, even at -18 degrees, to beat the record.  [1:01:50] The Cycling World Record Dean's adventure lasted for 99 days. He spent ninety-four days cycling and five days on logistics.  He averaged 147 miles a day with a speed of 16.8 miles per hour. Dean also lost 12 kilos. Most importantly, he raised $1.2 million, or  ₤900,000, through corporate donors and sponsors.  He was even able to attend the royal wedding.  [1:03:19] Events Following Dean's Adventure  Dean experienced two highs in a week and felt a depression phase after. Dean did a Q&A with Prince Harry shortly after returning to talk about the amount they raised. It's weird for your family to go on with their everyday lives while you're still riding the highs of your success.  Dean feels lucky because his family is involved in his activities. So, they can be with him throughout his journey.  Anyone can do a world record when they have the luxury to just focus on their craft and immediate goals. Mortgages, physical health, and family responsibilities may get in the way of those goals. [1:08:44] What Lies Ahead for Dean His next goal is to kayak from Rwanda to Egypt, which is a 4,280 mile-long feat. This time, he will raise awareness on issues such as human trafficking, modern slavery, and pollution.  This new feat will also promote African people and their beautiful and natural environment. Kayaking is more skill-involved since he'll be encountering wild animals and overcoming water currents and waterfalls. Listen to the episodes about the specifics of Dan's preparations. [1:14:54] Final Thoughts and Advice Don't compare yourselves to other people, especially on social media.  Anticipation is worse than participation. Start with small steps and progress from there.    7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘If someone disagrees, “I didn't think you're gonna do it”. The best way to prove them wrong is actually physically doing it.' ‘You can't control the uncontrollables, you know, as long as you have a plan. One thing I saw, really take from the military is that meticulous planning and detail that goes into it.' ‘What I really took from the military is that unrelenting pursuit of excellence, trying to be the best you can be.' ‘The world's very quick to tarnish certain societies with one brush because of what they've seen on TV.' ‘Before you get, sort yourself out, you know, we'll sit down, and we'll ask three questions: “What worked? What didn't work? And if you're going to do it again, what would you do differently?”' ‘And then it was just, look at the next two hours. Look at the next stage. I didn't look at the afternoon, didn't look at the next day. And before you've done it, you've done a day, you've done a week, you've done a world record.' ‘Don't worry about what other people are doing. Just focus on yourself. You know, I always say anticipation is worse than participation.'   About Dean Dean Stott is a former member of the British Special Forces, where he travelled to dangerous places for 16 years. After an accident, he was forced to find other ways to use his time and skills. With his experiences in the Special Forces, Dean is now a world-leading security consultant and avid adventurer. Indeed, Dean redefines the meaning of adventurer in everything that he does. He has set the world record, cycling the entire 14,000 km Pan-American Highway in less than 100 days. Apart from these successes, Dean is also a motivational speaker who helps others overcome fear and adapt to change. His positive mindset and wide range of skills also enable him to work with brands and charities. He also incorporates advocacies into his adventures, with his most recent world record supporting mental health. Check out his website if you want to know more about Dean and his next adventure. You can also reach him through other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can understand the meaning of being an ‘adventurer' and go on their own adventures. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Welcome back everybody. Lisa Tamati here, your host. Fabulous to have you with me again for another crazy episode of Pushing the Limits. Before we get underway with today's guests who I know you're going to find very, very exciting and interesting, just a reminder, to check out our epigenetics program, our flagship program that we do. One of our main programs besides our online run training system, where we look at your genes and how to optimise your life, your nutrition, your food, your exercise, all aspects of your life, including your social, your career, what parts of your mind you use the most, your dominant hormones, all this information is now able to be accessed and we can identify the lifestyle changes and the interventions that we can make to optimise your life. So if you want to hit know a little bit more about that program, head on over to lisatamati.com, hit the work with us button and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program, go and check that out.  I also like to remind you about my new supplement, NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide. A bloody long name I know, but it's about longevity and anti-ageing. There is a ton of science that has gone into the research into NMN and as a precursor for NAD, which is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. I've had a couple of podcast episodes with Dr. Elena Seranova. I'd love you to go and check those out. She is the founder of the company and I'm importing it now into New Zealand, Australia and down the center of the world. So if you want to check out that anti-ageing and longevity supplement, I spent months trying to get it so make sure if you're down in the world and you want top quality, independently certified, scientists-backed supplement that really does what it says on the label, then check it out. Go to www.nmnbio.nz, nmnbio.nz, and find out all about it.  Right. Today's guest is oh he's a bit of a legend. Dean Stott is his name. He's a ex-Special Forces soldier, he was in the special boat service, British Army's where he came from originally. And he spent 16 years going into the most dangerous places on the planet and doing his job as a frogman. That's his nickname on his website. Even, as The Frogman. He is the author of a book called Relentless. Go figure, we've both got books called Relentless. I think we knew that we were going to get along. He's a motivational speaker. He's also a world record holder. Most recently he cycled the entire Pan-American highway. What are we talking- what is it, 14,000 miles or something ridiculous. And he did it in under 100 days. He's an absolute legend. And he had to get it done in time to get to Harry and Megan's winning. So he was desperate to get it done under 100 days. It's a really interesting story. This is a guy who's lived life on the edge in every which way you can possibly imagine. So I'm really looking forward to sharing his insights and his story with you now. Right, over to the show with Dean Stott.  Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Your host Lisa Tamati here, sitting in New Zealand and ready for a fantastic interview today. I have a bit of a hard ask with me. I think it's a bit hard to describe this man, what he's done. I have Dean Stott with me. Dean, welcome to the show. It's fantastic to hear you. Yeah, you're sitting in Orange County? Dean Stott: I say, yeah moved to move to Orange County in California six months ago, actually in the middle of the pandemic. Just took advantage of the world pause, and just changed scenery. Lisa: Just change the scenery. Right, Dean we're gonna have a really interesting conversation because when I discovered you actually through another friend's podcast, My Home Vitality, shout out to Sean and everyone over there. And I realised that we had the same title of our books, was your one right?  Dean: Yeah.  Lisa: My one's been smaller. I thought, you, ‘This guy's probably right up my alley'. So you are known as the frogman, you've been in this Special Forces, Special Boat Services. You have also become an expeditionary athlete and adventurer and, in many years. But I want to go back a little bit, and it's starting to, were you always this determined and crazy and head through the wall type of person? And tell us a little bit about your background for starters. Dean: Yeah, so I don't know whether I was on reflection, you look back and think maybe I was slightly, you know, you touched when I was in the military, my father was in the military. And I grew up surrounded by that, in that environment, but was never forced upon me to continue any sort of tradition and things like that. My father was the army football manager and coach. So he was very sports-oriented, what we would call a tracksuit soldier. He very much that, you know, his career was based on his sport and abilities. So there was that competitive drive anyway, that I had from my father. My parents split up when I was a young age. And when I was about eight years old, I moved away with my mother for a couple of years. My father then got custody of me and my sisters, we went back to live with my dad, so I only had the single parent, and we just went everywhere with him. And it was all with the military and all these sporting events. I wasn't, you know, the children of today, with technology, you know, when we were younger, as you will know, we know you weren't allowed in the house unless it was absolutely raining.  So we had some natural physical robustness. And by, I joined the military, I approached my father and told him my intentions of joining the military, when I was 17. And he, he told me, I'd last two minutes. I don't know whether that was reverse psychology for me to push harder and prove him wrong. And, but I was about 65 kilos, and five-foot-seven, so I wasn't, you know, the figure, the man that I am today. And, but when I did join the military, I then went through training and things. And I didn't have aspirations of being Special Forces or commandos or anything like that. And I didn't, I wasn't really aware about the structure of the military anyway, because it was just sport. That's all I've seen where my dad, I hadn't seen the bigger picture. So then when I pass basic training. It's only 10 weeks long, you know, you then get a little bit of confidence in your abilities. And then you started in a short period of time, by the age of 20, or 21 actually, I was a para-commando diver and a PTA, done every arduous force within the military. But I'd grown so quick over those two or three years, and I will be about 85 kilos, now. I'm five-foot-eleven. So I was getting confident in my own abilities. And I was also growing into the individual that I was today. And I mean, once you pass a certain threshold, or pass a course, you then sort of look at, ‘Well, what's next?' You know, I wasn't the best on the courses, but I just gave it my 100%. And then you sort of, your career then starts channelling in one direction, you then those before you or your peers, the mentors are all going Special Forces. And then it's like, the next question is, ‘Why not? Let's have a crack.' Lisa: Yeah, that it takes a special type of person to be able to, like, I grew up in a family with lots of stories, like my dad was only in the military for a short time, but he was a firefighter. And so, you know, my husband's a firefighter, my dad's a firefighter, my brother's a firefighter, we're a firefighter family. And when I was a girl, when I was a little girl, we couldn't, I couldn't grow up to be a firefighter. It wasn't, it wasn't you know, unfortunately. Thank God, you can now. And, you know, if my dad had had his way, I would have been a firefighter, I would have been an SAS soldier, I would have been like, because he was a hard ass And he wanted all of that for me. And, you know, unfortunately, society sort of stopped some of the things. So I ended up doing it in other ways that I could do it. But wasn't there a lot of pressure? Did you feel like you had to live, you know, your dad saying that to you? Was it sad and just a thing? Or did that really bite with you that, ‘Hey, I'm going to prove you wrong,' you know what I'm going for?  Dean: Yeah, I think for me, it was. And we'll talk about other stories in my career, and it seems to be a common theme. I know, I fought. There's no point in arguing my father, you know, and or anyone, if someone disagrees, ‘I don't think you're gonna do it'. The best way to prove them wrong is actually basically doing it. Yeah. And then you don't even need to say anything. You just need to just leave that pause. And so I think for him, I don't know. I think it was a throwaway comment, you know, the fact I still talk about it now. And you know, a lot of people say to me, would you say that to your son? So of course, you know, I mean, I and, but for me it was that drive. Now, my father we talked about, you know, he really, he was sport oriented, actually when I joined Military I got sent to Germany to play football as well, because they knew I was Dave Stott's son.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dean: And see, after a year of being there, I said, ‘No, I don't want to follow the same footsteps as my father, I want to carve my own path.' And that's when I then went, commando, para and things. So I was going a different path from my father, he wasn't a para commando and things like that. So for me, it was like, this was new territory to me. I wasn't really put under pressure from him. I know a lot of guys who I served with, you know, from a young age, from young boys, all they ever wanted to be was a Royal Marine, or a para, they wanted to be SAS and things. I didn't, I wasn't, there was something that I didn't– Lisa: You weren't conditioned. Dean: Look, I wasn't even aware of it. That was why. So when I approached these courses, I didn't put myself under that self-induced pressure with some of these guys– guys and girls do. And I think that helped in a way. I sort of approached it in a, you know, it is what. It is not being naive, it's not what was involved walk in the park. But, you know, I was aware how difficult it was. But it wasn't the be-all or end-all. You know, some guys who did it, don't achieve the grades or, or the standards, and then they're broken. That's all their life. And I think it's actually too much pressure on themselves. So sort of going into these situations, you just need to be a bit open-minded. Lisa: And what was the training like to go into the Special Forces and to know what you do? What is it like to go through– because we see the stuff on the telly, and you know, everybody knows about how hard ass all that type of training is. And what do you need? What did you get out of it? What was the experience like for you to do those extreme sort of courses? Dean: Well for me, it's very much a grown-up course. You know, the way that then, you've got this stuff on TV, where you have the perception it's hard-ass and everyone's swearing and shouting here. And it is night and day from that, you know. I understand with TV, there's a fine line between authenticity and entertainment. Actually, if you film selections, it's actually quite boring. You know, these guys just get told where they got to go. And they just do it. So, and that's what I liked about the course is that the fact that you're– you all grow– you're all treated as grown-ups. There was no shouting, and they just told you what to do. They didn't need to shout, the selection was that hard in itself, that they didn't need to put that additional pressure on you. So I did what I can. And in fact, they gave you some sort of independence. To think on your own. I was fortunate to be an instructor on the commando course and also the senior dive instructor. So I've seen it from an instructor's perspective. And on those sort of courses, you do give the students some motivation and inspiration as well.  But on this one, you don't get anything. Yes, you get the reverse when you go to the jungle, and they tell you about how you're not doing well. And you know, just give up now and save six months of your life and things out. But again, I got that reverse psychology as a young boy telling me I couldn't do it. So yeah. And for me, I didn't go– you're– I was from, I came from the army. So I, the normal traditional route was especially SAS. I went SBS. I was one of the first army guys to do that. And that was because I'd spent eight years with three commando brigades, Brigade Iraqi force and I was a senior dive instructor. So water, I was more comfortable in water. So the special boat service was that natural transition for me. So they say when you go on selection, be the gray man, you know, just don't don't stand out and bring attention to yourself and things. I'll be the gray man for about two minutes. Because they will react, they'll scream my name out. And that's why I was going this way and not the traditional, right? Lisa: Because you came from the wrong place. Dean: Yeah, although I didn't put myself under my own self-induced pressure. I had that sort of hovering above my head. But again, once you– if you're confident in your abilities, and there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance at that age. I was a 28 year old sergeant. And I spent seven years in Brigade Iraqi. I've seen those who've gone before me and I knew that I was just as good as then. And you sort of know that they're going to play these mind games and when they come, as long as you identify when they come in and just deflect it.  Lisa: Yeah. Has it really helped you in everything that you've done since like, what are some of the key learnings that you take away from doing such arduous, tough, scary stuff? Dean: Um, I think, you know, you can't control the uncontrollables you know, as long as you have a plan. One thing I saw, really take from the military is that meticulous planning and detail that goes into it. And the fact that we rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse. You know, we do that over and over and over again. You know, I've been guest speaking alongside some, like, some of the England rugby players. They talk about the World Cup, now that how they repeat an exercise, until they get 1% better. You know, we'll rehearse, rehearse all these different scenarios. And, but ours is a bit of a different situation. You know, if we get it wrong or pause or hesitate, you know, we don't lose five points in a row, we lose lives. Guys, people will get killed.  So yeah, so there's that which what I really took from the military is that unrelenting pursuit of excellence, trying to be the best you can be. But also, as well as the planning, and that we talked about that, we'll probably talk about it later when we talk about the bike ride, is the fact that not– nothing always goes to plan. Plan is the best plan in the world, you know, and things never go to plan. And don't worry about that. And that's what I liked about the Special Forces is there were a lot of, ‘Well, if you don't go as planned, you just react to the situation that's in front of you.' And a good friend of mine told me a quote, ‘You can't be experienced without experiences'. And that's what I got from the military. The military, a lot of these big corporates around will, would love to try and replicate the scenarios or, or conditions that these people have been in, but you just can't. And that's the great thing about the military. They put you in some high octane environments, in difficult positions, difficult environments, and having to make difficult decisions. But you learn from that, you know, my decision, when was the wrong decision? You know, when you have to make? Yeah, you just reflect back on what worked and what didn't work. Lisa: Wow. So you were in the military for, I think it was 16 years, was it, or something?  Dean: Yes, yes. Yeah.  Lisa: And so it was a big chunk of your life. And then and then what happened? Tell us about the accident. Dean: Yeah. So I joined, I joined a special forces in the height of the war on terror. So I was the pinnacle of my career, everything was going really well. I was doing what these children nowaday plays Call of Duty. That was my lifestyle, day in day out. And we're just about to get pre-deployment training to go back out to Afghanistan again, and we're out training in Oman. And I was doing what's called a HAHO jumps, it's a high altitude, high opening jump. So unlike freefall, where you're free aligned, you're actually still connected to the aircraft. You exit the aircraft at 15,000 feet. And you do that, because that's the limits of oxygen. Any higher and you need oxygen. You open the aircraft and the parachute will open– pull open straight away. And when you travel up to 50 kilometers, or 30 minutes in the air to the target area. So I've done–  no– we've done hundreds of these jumps before, I think it's about the third or fourth jump in a day.  And I just exit the aircraft as I normally did, no different from any time before. But this time, when I look, there was something wrong and my leg was actually caught in the line above my head. So I was trying to clear my leg in time before the parachute opened and potentially rip my leg off. But I couldn't clear it in time. The parachute opened, pulled my leg up over my head and the right. Thankfully made my foot released. And otherwise wouldn't be here having this conversation. But straight away I knew there was a problem. The pain was so severe that I was vomiting and because of how thin the air was, I was drifting in and out of consciousness. But no one else in the team knew there was a situation so I wasn't going to come over to net and tell them that I had a sore leg. So I managed to stay with the team, assess where the other parachutes were coming in against the wind.  And my first challenge was to land it because if I didn't land it correctly, you know, on one leg, you know potentially, you could damage your good leg. So, but I did. It was a great, great landing, landed one-legged. And fortunately, the damage sustained on the exit show in my career. As I tore my ACL, my MCL, my lateral meniscus, my hamstring, my calf and my quadriceps, so all these supporting muscles–  Lisa: Just got ripped. Dean: Yeah, just got ripped. But you know, in the ideal world you would go straight back to UK and you start physio, you just start working on it. But it was the same time as the Icelandic volcano which grounded all aircraft. I was there for about nearly five weeks just thrown in a hotel with painkillers.  Lisa: Are you kidding. So that was it.  Dean: Yeah, yeah, I sort of missed that, and then got back to UK. I remember I made it back to UK, got sent home for six weeks and leaves. We're now talking about 11, 12 week period from the injury. Then they lost my MRI scans. It was just a spiral of failure in the medical system there. And so yeah, so I left. But all I've ever known, it's 16 years. Military, even as a young child growing up. So I didn't have, I didn't look beyond the military. For me, I was a lifer. That was me. Lisa: Wow. So how did that, apart from the gun to the physical injury, but how did that affect you mentally? Like you suddenly– you're at the top of your game, you've been training for this forever, you're doing your job. And then all of a sudden, you're out of the game. And you're completely sidelined. What happened to you mentally from that side? Dean: My wife will tell you a different– Lisa: You didn't get divorce. So that's good. Dean: But the one of the things I scored an identity crisis. Well, it is whether you believe in the military, whether you're a professional sports person, or whether you're just someone who works in an organisation or a team, but I've been– I've gone from working in a tight-knit unit, having a role and having a purpose, knowing what I was doing for the next two years, to like, ‘Where do I now fit in society? What was my role and purpose?' But I got to where I got to, because of my physical robustness. That had now been taken away from me as well. I couldn't even run 100 meters without my leg being in pain. So I had that going on in the background. Also, to add to the pressure, my wife was eight months pregnant. So also wondering whether there is going to be any work there. How am I going to support my family? And thankfully, for me, my wife is very entrepreneurial. You know, you hear horror stories of men and women when they leave the military, about that transition can be quite turbulent. Mine was quite smooth. You know, the military, like your mother and father, you know, they clothe you, they feed you, they pay you on time. You don't even know what, who provides the water or what to eat. You've just got a job to do.  But when we leave, we're not aware of who we need to speak to in the council's or the state. There. So my wife was a bank manager for three sons and their banks in Aberdeen. So the stuff that I would normally be worried about, she was, ‘Yeah, I've got all that.' And she sent my first security company on a Blackberry watching TV, you know, done the right paperwork. So when, so whatever I was going through a hard time having to talk personally, you know, thankfully, wasn't that bad, because my wife had sort of–  Lisa: Yeah, she's awesome.  Dean: But yeah, I just had, you know, talking to the security industry, the pressure of trying to, if there's any work. And I was very fortunate. Within 48 hours I was asked if I can go out to Libya, which I know you're familiar with, to help set up the different project restart the British Embassy during the Arab Spring. And so that's what I did. So wow, look at me, I had work straight away. And I was out in Benghazi, helping sell that project. Lisa: Can you tell us a little bit about that story? Because that sounds like a bit of a movie. Dean: You know– familiar I did– when I left, I wanted to find a niche within the security industry. I didn't want to go to Afghanistan and Iraq and do the hostile action, because I've sort of done that, you know, I've done that bit. And you know, I was very lucky to survive. So why would you take another risk? And I looked at the security industry, and actually, a lot of my friends from the special boat service. They were,  they had their maritimes companies who are dealing with the Pirates of the east coast of Africa. So I didn't want to be competing with them either. My wife's from Aberdeen, so I moved back to Scotland with her. It's the only gas capital of Europe. So where is all this trouble? So I was looking into more in the corporate clothes protection sort of industry, that's where my head was focused.  But when I got to Libya, I soon identified that Libyans didn't want another Libyan, another Afghan or Iraq once Gaddafi had fallen, they wanted to take control. But also these larger security companies, the big five, now sort of like dominate the industry. They were charging crisis management in evacuation plans, when actually we just scraped the surface, there was nothing in place. So I flew home, my wife gave birth to our daughter, Molly. And I said, ‘Look, I have a plan. Do you mind if I take our savings out of the bank?' And that's what I did. And I went back into Libya, there was a huge proliferation of weapons at this point. It's actually ammunition was difficult to get hold of, weapons are not a problem.  So I bought 30 weapons off the black market, and I buried them between Tunis and Egypt and buried them with communications equipment money, and just designed my own evacuation plan, spent a month in the desert. These in design. And I mean, I sold them to a couple of the oil and gas companies on a retainer and just just sat on them. Then the security industry. You know, for me, I didn't want to work for an organisation and be on rotation and things like that. I took a gamble and it was very ad hoc. So each time I got a phone call was a different job. So you know, for example, we did London Olympics. And then next thing you're taking the UAE royal family superyacht from Barcelona to Maldives, and you're training the Kurdish Special Forces in Erbil.  Lisa: Wow! Fascinating! Dean: It's very diverse. When you tell people in the security industry, I mean, they think you're a doorman from the local nightclub. Lisa: Surely not. Dean: I'd like to help people as well. And I'm for me, but what it what it was good for me was– is I was seeing– some of these countries that I've been to anyway with the military, but seeing all the cultures and seeing how things, not from a military perspective, because it was almost a little bit blinkered, there, you know. Lisa: Yes. Like you say, your head, your role. Dean: You know, it's understanding more the politics, the demographics and things like that. So I just come back from the London Olympics. I was in Benghazi. And in the evening, the American ambassador got killed. And they made it into a film called 13 Hours. Lisa: Yes, that's what I thought, it sounds very familiar, I'm sure. Dean: I know, I always say, ‘Right place, right time' or ‘Wrong place, wrong time'. And I was there in Benghazi. And I was asked by a German oil company if I could get some of their German engineers from Benghazi to Tripoli. So I had safe houses in the desert. And that's what I did over the three days. I took them back out. And then two years later, I was in Brazil, covering the World Cup. Lisa: You're just like… You just got them out through a hole and you do that like going to the supermarket. Dean: There's no real, no threat to them, no direct threat to them. the only issue I had with that one, you know, we could have– I had drivers from Benghazi, who took us out initially. The problem in Libya, you have 167 tribes. And this is where there's real issues. Because, I mean, you have, you know, those in the East in Benghazi, don't like those in the West in Tripoli. You know, the politics are in Tripoli, the oils are in the East. And so it's understanding that as well. And that's why, so we did it over three days, and the reason we did that is, I was actually, I had the drivers from Benghazi in the safe house. And now that will, ‘You know, Mr. Dean, we can go on because Tripoli is only, you know, it's not far, 300 kilometers'. But they didn't realise I had drivers coming in from Tripoli. Lisa: And you didn't want them to–. Dean: And I didn't want the drivers to compromise us when we go in. So I woke up that morning that we were setting off and the drivers that arrived from Tripoli, the drivers and Benghazi in there. They all had their guns out.  Lisa: Oh, my God.  Dean: I say I mean, I mean, they're worried they weren't gonna get paid. I said, ‘No, you're paid. I just can't take you to Tripoli.' And so it's just understanding that sort, rather than just driving as fast as you could to Tripoli and potentially running into issues along the way. And so yes, that was a success. And two years later, I was in Brazil covering the World Cup. And we now had the Tripoli war, which is a civil war between the militias and the government. And I think that's just ended now. And I got a phone call from the Canadian Embassy saying that they'd been stuck in Tripoli. And so they had 18 military within an area close protection team with them, but they weren't allowed to leave the city. So they'd never seen the coastal road out and didn't really have eyes on. So in the days leading up to that, the British Embassy got shot at every checkpoint between Tripoli and the Tunis border. So I went out with my fixer, and just spoke to the tribal elders in those regions at war and everywhere else. And it was actually just showing them courtesy and respect. Just let us know who we are, when we will come in, we were no threat. And again, it's that understanding the politics and the demographics, which was a success to that. And yeah, we got 18 military in four different maps safely back to back to Tunis. Lisa: Wow. Dean: But you know, I've never like they said in Hollywood, I never needed to dig up any of the weapons. They're still there. It's more of an intelligence-led security thing. But I came home from that trip and my normal procedure would be to wash my kit, repack my bag and everything else, and then get ready for the next phone call. Yeah, one of my shirts was covered in blood. But I've been doing first aid and RTA. And I said to my wife, ‘Can we get the blood out of the shirt?' And she said ‘Yes, but I'm more concerned why there's blood in there'. Totally what I just got yourself is like a throwaway comment. Yeah, you see, this was the second time in my life, I realised the pin dropped. There was something more mentally, I was just five years now from the military and I was trying to match the adrenaline rush that I had been, without coming to terms with the fact that I'd left and I didn't have that support network. If something had gone wrong, my friends were gonna come in and parachute for me. And so something had to change. And my daughter was young, and my wife now is, you know, she had a very successful property development business. And she said, ‘Look, this was actually all about communication'. She thought I wanted to go away. And I thought she needed me to go away. Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Because you've been used to that sort of setup for so long. Dean: Yeah. And I've just been disconnected from society. I just thought that was the norm. You know, I was going to Somalia on my own. Yeah. Just doing– Lisa: Were you not like, like most people listen to this, I mean, it's such a foreign world for the average person who's never been exposed to any of this. And I've never been anything military. I've been in some tricky situations, and self-caused, gone into shit places which I wasn't really for or shouldn't have been in. But for most people, this is a terrifying thought to even go to some of these places, let alone to do the job that you do. Did you never have a fear of like, do you not have the normal fear responses that most people have? Dean: I think I do. I think the problem that we have in today's society is TV, is media. You know, it's very, you know, dramatised about these places. These places they go. I use Somalia as an example. I'll go there on my own and have a walk from the airport to the hotel, I won't– because that's where the business is. That's where I think things are happening. And then I've been, you know, yes, there's bad places and things go on. But it's no different from any city, you know. Yes, there's a bit of a terrorist threat and things. But I've been sent on a mission, south of Mogadishu, and in some of the most beautiful waters. I see parts of the country that people don't see. Now, I'm not naive to think there is no threat at all. You know, the success of a lot of my projects is having the right fixers and local influence. The world's very quick to tarnish certain societies with one brush because of what they've seen on TV. For me, they're the most hospitable people. You know, the Canadian Embassy, the KCA Deutag and a few others, they wouldn't have been successful if it wasn't for the locals. Lisa: The local people. Yeah.  Dean: And I think that's where somebody's security companies or individuals who think they can just come in with weapons and guys like me, very arrogant, they think they're going to do, to get away with it. And, and it's just showing respect, and humility. And that's my approach to it. So I am obviously conscious there is there is a friend, you know, I have friends who–  Lisa: And you can handle yourself there as well.  Dean: –things that, but yeah, I think that as long as–  Lisa: Yeah, I know what you'd be like when you go to some of these places, you have these preconceived ideas. And some of the places I've been to, like Niger. I went to Niger and you know, Niger, I don't even know how to say it properly, Niger. Never got that right. That was one place where I landed there. And we were doing a 333k race through there. And I didn't like go, ‘Holy shit, this place is pretty damn scary'. And you know, you're running across the desert on your own, and there was a lot of military, sort of oil problems. Chinese doing exploration in the desert against the wishes of the tribal people. So there was lots of military convoys coming through with all the arms and things. And you're a little girl running across the frickin' desert on your own. It's pretty, pretty hairy moments here where you think you can just disappear, you know. But generally speaking, most of the places that you go to where you think are gonna be terrifying, aren't that terrifying. And the people are pretty amazing, too. And you've got to be aware of yourself and, you know. Dean: Yeah. Having the responsibility, you know, those sort of places as well if they're running an event like that, and, you know, these countries want, you know, it's all about tourism and try and promote and put the country in a good light, you know, they'll do this. Yeah. Lisa: This one was a bit out there, though. Like this was a French Foreign Legion guy who was running it. He didn't give a shit about anything except making money, right? We went into it naively. These particular ones thinking it was gonna be like the marathon on Saturdays or something. You know what I mean? And it wasn't. It was like 17 runners, nothing was organised. It was like, we ran out of water, we ran out of food, we, you know, I ended up getting food poisoning on top of it all. So that was a really– that's when I realised that most of the races are really super well run, but then there are the cowboys out there. And, you know, we were in their very hands really, you know, and we were lucky to get out the other side on that one. But so how do you like, for your wife? What's it like having your husband off doing God knows what, and having to keep the, you know, the business going, and the life going, and that fear of you being away?  Dean: Yeah. And I'm very fortunate. I've got a, my wife is part of the business anyway, the scoop is anyway, so she would always be doing intelligence bits anyway. So having her being part of that helps. Yeah. Well, rather, you just go in, and she's not knowing what's going on. Yeah. I mean, a part of that. And when we talk about the bike ride, you know, she was the campaign director that so–  Lisa: Sounds amazing.  Dean: –but gets involved in everything. Because then it's very easy to explain why you're doing something or why you're going away because, yeah, the full picture. But no, very, very fortunate to have an understanding– and she, you know, Alana's got a book coming out soon as she talks about why she fell in love with me, because I showed a world that she hadn't seen before. I mean, I was very, we had very similar mindsets, and like, achieve whatever goals you want. So for her to then say, ‘I couldn't do something,' or you know, would go against, you know, what she believes in, and why we got into it. So obviously, now I'm a bit older and we've got kids and obviously I need to be a bit you know, she needs a little bit more. Yeah. Lisa: She sounds like an amazing lady. I'll have to get her on. Dean: Yeah, yeah, she is. She's got a cracking story herself. Lisa: Yeah, she sounds like it. So I want to transition now into going into life after this chapter of your life, if you like, in becoming this professional adventurer. Because in what you're doing now, what you've got coming up, and the whole world record that you have. Tell us about that. Dean: Yeah, so we actually stem from coming back from that Canadian Embassy job. You know, something had to change. In chapter 16 in the book, it's called ‘Dead or Divorce', so that's the stage we're talking about. Obviously, it's been five years since my leaving the military. I've sort of neglected my own sort of physical and mental well-being. I've been so fixated on work and bringing in money, and I take like a TRX with me around, just throw it in the suitcase. And I haven't done any sort of cardiovascular stuff. My injured leg like now was two kilos lighter than my good leg, which is an awful wastage.  So I just that's when for Alana said, “Come do property development.' And that's what I did. I hung up my security boots and just bought a pushbike of farmers, and just cycled to and from the office. There's only about eight miles there and eight miles back. You know, nothing big but straightaway being physically active again, you know, I felt like there was a big, big weight off my shoulders, and that's what I did. I cycled to and from the office. But you can imagine my story, you know, sat in these architects and planners meet.  So it's about a month for my 40th birthday. So I was getting a midlife crisis around. What have I done with my life? I'm going to have a legacy and things. So I said, well, ‘I've always fancied doing a world record.' And Alana said, ‘Well, what in?' And I said, ‘Well, cycling is good, because it's not impacted– well, you need to consider my knee injury.' And something that wasn't the knee injury wasn't going to compromise it.  So I said, ‘Well, what about cycling?' And you know, being in Scotland, I was thinking maybe Aberdeen to Glasgow or something. And my wife then found the world's longest road, which runs in southern Argentina to northern Alaska. So for the listeners, it's probably equivalent to say it's the equivalent of cycling from London to Sydney. Yeah, 30,000 miles.  Lisa: And then another.  Dean: Yeah. Because of the curvature of the earth. So having only cycled 20 miles, this is what I did: I applied for the world record in it. We had looked at Cairo to Cape Town. But I–  majority of my security work was in Africa. So I'd be in those days anyway. So for me, I wanted to, as part of the challenge, I wanted to see places that I am–  someplace that I hadn't been to before and also because of where you started, and when you're finishing, you're going through all different temperatures and climates and things like that. And so Guinness came back. And the world record when I apply for it was 125 days. Six weeks later when it came back, and said you were successful with the application. And we've been beaten by eight days, the new world record was 117 days.  So that was my target. And my wife and I do a lot charity work. We have been doing since I met her really and, you know, do a lot of stuff with the military. You know, it's part of a special boat service, ambassador for Scotland. Legion, which is the oldest military charity in the UK. But I'm gonna name drop now massively. So Prince Harry and I are good friends, and we've known each other.  Lisa:  Is he though? Dean: Yeah. And as you've seen. And I've been friends about 14 years, met each other on a community training course. And, you know, he'd come to some of my events; I've been to some of his events. You know, I– in Mozambique, Tanzania had an intelligence fusion sale, which would identify smuggling routes for the ivory, you know, which I could then relay back to him. So he's doing a lot of stuff in the background. So I rang him up, and I said, ‘Look, I'm gonna cycle, the world's longest road, you know, what campaigns should we do it for?' And this is back in 2016. So him and his brother and Kate, were just about to launch a mental health campaign called Heads Together in 2017. And he said, would I do it for that campaign? And I said, ‘Yes, of course'. So I now have the challenge of the campaign. And in the end, I set a target of a million pounds.  Lisa: Wow, that's a big-ass target! Dean: For me it had to be the enormity of the challenge to reflect how much you're trying to raise. You know, you couldn't– you know, you can't go– can't say I'm going to raise a million pounds and run the London Marathon because it just doesn't add up. The size of the challenge and the size of the ask here, you know, was balanced. And also to add to that I'd never cycled before as well, which is even more of a– Lisa: Mental.  Dean: Yes, yeah. So I did a train for a year, you can imagine what it is like trying to get sponsorship at the beginning. Lisa: What the hell! Dean: I will perform, break a record, and we'll record and raise a million pounds in mental health and a lot of them thought had mental health problems themselves. Lisa: But you had a track record of what you've done? I mean, I would have taken you seriously, as far as the– Dean:  A lot of people say to me, ‘How do you get sponsorship?' You know, I got– and it was just, it was the right messaging at the right time. You know, the Heads Together campaign is launched in the UK, and it's very much the topic of conversation. So a lot of these big corporates wanted to get behind.  Lisa: Wonderful. Yep, yeah.  Dean: So it was the right message at the right time. And, yeah, I got a great sponsor. And, you know, that was only about two months before setting off. You know, I funded it, funded 50,000 of my own money up until that. I had to believe in it Lisa: And put something on the line?  Dean: Yep. Yeah. So. So that's what I did. Yeah, I mean, I set off on the first of February 2018, the– when I was doing all the early stages when I was doing the planning, and I'd never cycled with I just took a military set of orders, put it on there and just crossed out ammunition. And then as I started learning about saving, I then introduced that into the plan. But there's things that, you know, there are things that are out of my control, like natural disasters, coups, third party influence. So the world record was 117 days, but I was aiming for 110. And it wasn't– I was going to beat it by a week.  Lisa: You're in that buffer. Dean: Yeah that buffer. The buffer, the fudge they call it. Encounter that is eating into the fudge and not your challenge. So that's why, where I set off aiming for 110 days. You know, I was very fortunate to, being in the military and worked in the desert, the Arctic, and the jungle, and things that I've never done on the bike. I had to then simulate those situations. So the Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest non popular desert in the world. It's 47 degrees. What I decided to do so, I went out to Dubai and did two weeks heat training in Dubai. The altitude in Ecuador, of cycling. You know, the biggest climbs in Tour de France ranges in 21, 23 kilometers, minus 67 kilometers and sea level to four and a half thousand meters. So I had to train altitude. So I know that on the day of the event, you know, you do 8 to 10 hours on the bike.  Lisa: Altitude. Yeah.  Dean: So, yeah, I did that. And there's a famous bike ride in the UK called Land's End to John O'Groats. Lisa: Yes, I know that one.  Dean: Yeah, so I did that twice. I never mean to sound arrogant, but for me, it was a training ride and actually it's training ride because the challenge was 15 Land's End to John O'Groats back to back. So if I couldn't do one, how was I going to do 15? Lisa: Yes. It's funny how your perception changes, the bigger your current goal that you're going for, the other stuff becomes small, but what I've learned too is that it goes the other way as well. When you stop doing the big stuff, your horizon comes back in pretty quickly. And then you know, it can be gone the other way. Dean: You can never replicate what you're going to do with some of the ultra marathons, you won't go run the exact distance.  Lisa: No, no, you're running near it.  Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. 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Dean: Yeah, what I got from doing those Land's End to John O'Groats, you know, I did about nine days, is the fact that the first four or five days are always whether you're at your peak, or wherever you're below peak is always going to be hard and then by the end of the first week, your body then knows what you're asking of it. Lisa: I found that like too, when I did– because I ran through New Zealand, and I did you know, 2250ks in 42 days, which I was aiming for 33 days, but I had again, I didn't add in the fudge, did I? And I got slower and slower and more injuries and so on. So it took me a bit longer than I was planning. But at the two-week point was when I was at that absolute, like I don't know how to take the next step point, you know. And somehow I had to drop the kilometers a little bit, but then I was able to– my body actually got better from that point on. And I would never have believed if I hadn't lived through it. I thought I was like, absolutely, I don't know the how I'm going to take the next step to then actually the end of the 42 days being like, ‘I could carry on now'. You know, it was quite a phenomenal thing to go through. And I've heard other expeditions that athletes go through the same sort of thing that it bottoms out at the worst point. I've got a couple of mates who ran across the Sahara, and I mean, right, right across the Sahara, 7,000 kilometers. And they said the same thing that they you know, two weeks, and they were thought, you know, ‘We're about to die here. We're not gonna make it.' And then it's sort of you know, and you have the ups and downs. But if you can push through that mentally, that point you seem to come through it. Dean: Yeah, you do. I think, you know, for me, I set off from sort of going back slightly when I was doing my research, I, you know, was reading books and magazines learning about cycling. You know, it evolved so much since I was a young boy in a BMX, and I wasn't getting the information I really wanted. So I spoke to the previous record holders, and they're very open, which was great, really, they're very receptive. but they– you know, one of the things we do in the military, especially in the special forces is, it's like a hot debrief. So when, as soon as you've done a job or operation, you come. Before you get, sort yourself out, you know, we'll sit down, and we'll ask three questions: ‘What worked? What didn't work? And if you're going to do it again, what would you do differently?' So I just asked that question to the previous record holders, and all their issues were in South and Central America: bureaucracy, the borders, languages, first to the base. So they all started in North America, and it was the second half of the challenge which had the issues, right. So I turned on its head, start in the south and get those issues out the way early. So one thing I was quite proud of–  just because everyone did it that way didn't mean it was the right way.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dean: But yeah, but I set off from Southern Argentina in the first week, you know, relentless winds, it was like 40 mile an hour, approximate speed. I've never known anything like it. But once that had–  I had targets each day, you know what I had to hit each day and I was hitting those targets. I think by the end of the first week, I was 39 miles behind target, but my target is still a week ahead of the world record, right? Yeah, yeah. The weather sort of changed for the better and now the winds have abated. I got through Peru, I got tailwind all the way through Peru. That's 2500 kilometers of tailwind. We did you know, I crashed the bike in Chile, I got food poisoning in Peru, you know, coming out with issues and, you know, got to Ecuador, got the big climb-ins. But before they're gone on the challenge, I've never done more than 150 miles on the road, on the road. I've done 10 hours on a turbo trainer, but never done more than 150 miles. By the week four when I was in Peru, anything less than 150 miles wasn't enough for me. I was physically and mentally stronger as I went. I started at 90 kilos. I was too big.  Lisa: Yeah, but I but you needed it.  Dean: Yeah, but I knew from my time in the military that special forces selection six months long, you don't start day 1 100%. You carry that timber and weight, and then that will shed and you'll get fit. And that's what I did. And you know, when I finished I weighed 78 kilos. Almost 12 kilos. And you know you have to– it's almost like a polar expedition, you're losing weight from the start. So you just need to try and try and keep it on. But I got to Cartagena on day 48 on March 21. That took 10 days off the previous world record for South America. But that wasn't the world record. And a lot of people called me said, ‘Oh,' they said, ‘The pressure's off.' I said, ‘That's not world record. Call it Brucie bonus. That was a Brucie bonus or a marker to aim for rather than looking at the full challenge. As you know, you don't look at the– Right down into– Lisa: You get overwhelmed pretty quick. Dean: What do you do on the flight? So I