(interview blurb)
Anna: It’s like peeling the layers of an onion and our life is such that we have lessons to learn and we learn one lesson and, as we go there, once we’ve learned it, we peel the layers of the onion then we get to the next lesson and then we peel that next layer and then we get to the next lesson. And as long as we’re alive, there’s more and more layers to peel and we think that we’re going to get to this point that, finally, life is going to be peaceful, and perhaps it will be at some point, but it’s really about a choice that human beings make. Do you choose to live a life of comfort and complacency or do you choose to live a life of growth and transformation?
(intro)
Alex: I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Our guest today is an internationally recognized psychiatrist, coach, author, and more recently a movie producer. Her clients include Forbes 500 CEOs, Olympic athletes, A-list actors and actresses, and the chairs of academic departments at top universities. She has helped over 1,500 people in 70 countries achieve greater impact, purpose, and joy in their life and work. She has published over 100 articles and is the author of the bestselling book, Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life. This book was voted as one of the top 23 life-changing books by Forbes and the top book of 2017 by Spirituality & Health magazine. You’ve likely seen her or heard of her as a guest on CNN, Fox News, or other national TV shows and podcasts. There is no stopping this award-winning thought leader. She’s presently making a feature-length documentary while she creates the world’s first spirituality and mental health program at Yale. Please welcome, Dr. Anna Yusim.
(interview)
Alex: Hi, Anna.
Anna: Hi, Alex. How are you?
Alex: I’m great. How about you?
Anna: Doing well. Excited to be here with you today.
Alex: Yeah, I’m very excited for our conversation today. So, as you know, we asked you to choose any beverage that you like. We’re Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee but it doesn’t have to be coffee so I’m actually really excited about what you chose to drink today. So, tell us more about your selection.
Anna: Yeah, I thought we’d do something a little different today. I thought we’d do some kombucha together.
Alex: Love it.
Anna: Exactly, drinking some kombucha which has a lot of gastrointestinal benefits for your gut flora. It’s a fermented food and it also tastes really good and I generally wake up with so much energy that coffee will just put me over the top so I’m not a coffee drinker but I’m definitely a kombucha drinker.
Alex: Love that. I’ve been drinking kombucha for about 20 years. When I started drinking kombucha, there was fear around, like some people had died, I think, with their home kit, I think one person died with a bad batch of kombucha, so it had a bad rap but I’ve been drinking GT kombucha for about 20 years. It’s incredible what’s happened to the kombucha market. I don’t know how long you’ve been drinking it for.
Anna: I’ve probably been drinking it for about 10 years myself and it’s part of the health food movement and really just trying to balance your body in all the different ways and this is really good, particularly for your gut flora. And this is alongside kimchi and other fermented foods that I particularly love, and, of course, probiotics and all the different ways that we can have our bodies balanced so kombucha is just one staple that happens to taste particularly good.
Alex: I agree and it has a little bit of caffeine and the one I’m drinking has a little bit of alcohol. I mean, you need 10 of these to match a beer, it’s like point 0.5%.
Anna: Yes.
Alex: But, yeah…
Anna: But it does have alcohol and that’s an important fact that you can’t forget because if you love this and if you chug it, it will have an effect and I definitely, at the end of my night after two kombuchas, I’m like, I’m such a lightweight. Two kombuchas —
Alex: There was — I remember actually a period of time, maybe seven, eight years ago, where the government started cracking down on kombucha because you didn’t need an ID to buy it because it really has a trace amount of alcohol so now you have like, for example, GT, this is the brand that I usually drink, and I also drink the brand that you’re drinking, it’s really good, I like the ginger lemon one they have. So these ones actually, like now this is like over 21 and it’s less processed than their regular line that you don’t need an ID for and I think that’s maybe like 0.1, 0.2, so now they have like the regular kombucha that has a little alcohol and the one that doesn’t have alcohol, and then you of course have all the hard kombuchas, which is interesting as well.
Anna: There’s a hard kombucha, exactly, and I have a favorite kombucha that I get in rural Connecticut, which is where I live right now, and I was going to have that, but then, last minute, I made this trip to Boston to visit some colleagues and friends and I was like, “How am I gonna get kombucha?” so I had to go on Uber Eats and find a place to deliver me some really, really good last-minute kombucha and it was perfect. It’s a different brand but just as good and I’ve had this brand before as well.
Alex: Yeah, me too. It’s awesome. Cool. Well, I’m really excited for our conversation today because the work that you do is very aligned with my interests. You’re a psychiatrist that looks at your profession from a very holistic perspective. So, you talk about spirituality, you think about — even your description of why kombucha is good, you’re thinking holistically about the body, the mind, spirit so I’m really excited to get started and learn more about the work that you do. Your book is fascinating. So, before we start, take us back to the beginning, like how did you end up doing what you do today? A little bit on your journey.
Anna: Sure, yeah. So, I was born in Russia. I came with my family from Moscow when I was five. I grew up in Chicago. I always loved, in high school and in college, I loved math and I come from a long line of math professors and I was also always very athletic so I was on all the teams, volleyball, softball, basketball, track, but I loved math and I was also on the math team so I was a big nerd. And, going to college, I was planning to be a math professor. That was my passion, always. But then I got to Stanford and realized that the majority of the people or the classes that I took, they were taught by TAs who didn’t speak much English and the frustration of that slowly led to the dwindling of my passion for mathematics. I still love math, but what it led me to do is jump on the pre-med bandwagon, which is what 75 percent of my class at the time was doing and I realized I love medicine. One day, I was in the room of one of my best friends, Antigoni, from Cyprus, and she had this book lying on the couch. It was just lying on her desk. And I picked it up, started reading it. And it was by the psychiatrist, Dr. Irvin Yalom and I just was so enraptured, I loved how deep he went into the minds and the psyches of his patients, how he described their inner struggles, their life, their world, how he helped them to transform, whatever helping them, and I was like, “This is what I wanna be doing. I want to help people in this way. I wanna understand the human psyche with that kind of debt. And, in addition to that, I wanna write about it. I wanna also be an author.” And so Irvin Yalom was my role model and that’s what I have gone on to do, following in his footsteps.
Alex: That’s awesome. I love the combination of the math orientation with the mind. I mean, even from the beginning in your journey, you’re combining these different fields that are very — they’re very different. Different ways of looking at the world and then you combine them both holistically so you’ve probably set the mark for how you were going to look at things throughout your career and the books that you want to write and all that work.
Anna: Absolutely, absolutely, because, at the end of the day, the human psyche and the mind, it’s a very humanistic, creative endeavor to study that and yet, my brain is the math brain so it’s a very logical, rational brain and when I was at Stanford, I studied biology but I also did an honors thesis in philosophy, which is also essentially mathematizing the world or trying to understand human beings and the world around us in a very mathematical, rational, logical way. And so that’s really what I do with my patients, trying to understand these amorphous processes in a much more logical way to give people more control over that which seems uncontrollable.
Alex: I love that. I mean, I love that people with such breadth and depth of interest like ultimately decide that coaching is a good pathway as a vehicle to help people. I mean, it’s so powerful. I definitely align with that. As you’re describing philosophy, I was thinking of Spinoza, like the geometric approach to philosophy. He’s one of my favorite philosophers, but my favorite philosopher is Hegel and he seems to be popping up on every podcast episode that we do.
Anna: What do you like about Hegel?
Alex: It’s the experience of reading Hegel is unlike anything that I’ve ever read, because it’s actually experiential. So, phenomenology of mind or phenomenology of spirit, I think it has different translations and it’s a wild book. It’s a book about — I mean, this guy is like a mystic in the late 1800s, completely Western rational but has an orientation towards like the Eastern approaches, which back then was not a thing. Today, it’s totally a thing but a couple hundred years ago, it wasn’t at all. That book is really a book about how the absolute, that thing that was there before there was anything, recognizes its own oneness and how that process unfolds throughout consciousness, recognizing itself throughout time and space to create time and space and, ultimately, gets to a very historical — or a view of history that’s very powerful and it’s very applicable to look at society so he goes from just the experience of consciousness itself, the phenomenology of existence, to breaking down how basically the flow of evolution happens at different levels. I mean, it’s just — and when you read it, it’s so hard to read. What I do with Hegel is I get into this trance where you just start reading and, after a while, you just get it and you crack through it. If someone asks you to explain it, you might not be able to — it’s almost gibberish but when you’re reading it, there’s something that’s very powerful and deep so that’s why I like Hegel. Have you read it?
Anna: Yes. I think Hegel and a lot of, in general, also existential philosophy, existential psychology has that quality, that it’s very ephemeral, that you pick it up and you’re able to feel it but then it’s very hard to reproduce it in words because, words, of course, our world is made up of words. Words are the currency for exchange between us, between the world, but something is lost, the experience itself is lost because words aren’t all there is and so this is really one of the struggles of human beings is to capture very real experiences in powerful ways with the limitations of words.
Alex: I agree. That’s why I’ve always been drawn to German idealism. It’s like my favorite branch of philosophy. And there’s so much more than words, but we live in a world where the prefrontal cortex really is taking over. We live in a prefrontal cortex world. Everything around us is created by and almost meant to feed the prefrontal cortex. I mean, it’s powerful and, at the same time, it’s nerve-racking that we’re living in a world where we’re so hyper-rational and there’s this need for a little bit more of spiritual connection to the world, to ourselves, and it seems like it’s hard for people to find that connection.
Anna: Definitely, and I feel that that’s what people exactly are searching for or needing or wanting and are trying to recreate. And a lot of people come to me for coaching precisely with that. So I started out as a psychiatrist, I worked for many years as a psychiatrist, over time became then a coach, started working with business leaders, and what most of the executives with whom I work crave, really, it’s not more of the hyper-rationality, they have plenty of that, it’s really the balance and being able to tap into that other part of themselves, just like you said, getting away from the hyper-rationality and really tapping into the more human element of existence that enables us to transcend, to connect to our intuition, to interact with synchronicities in our life, to be able to feel more grounded in our own bodies and to get the signals from the world that we can’t really get in that super logical way. There’s that very powerful, intuitive guidance that we all have that’s just above and beyond sometimes the logical world but yet that we have to balance with logic in order to have a full rich life and to make good decisions.
Alex: I mean, it’s interesting that the rational world really makes it — rationality sometimes I feel has this very drying effect. I mean, obviously, it’s super powerful in creating advanced civilizations but some of the dark side of that is that I think the world becomes a little bit dry and so you have like traditional religion that used to be the thing that people used to connect to the beyond, then you had religion say, “Well, a lot of that, the world doesn’t work like that,” so it supplanted the worldview in terms of how we explain nature and the cosmos but it didn’t necessarily give us tools to connect to something beyond. So I think a lot of what you hear is like maybe some people really still look at that religious orientation, some people are naturalists or very scientifically oriented, then you have this whole new age movement where the tendency a lot sometimes is like to go into shrooms and connect with that because the world’s so dry and then you go into a substance and experience that. But there seems to be very specific strains of how people relate to spirituality. Of course, I don’t want to reduce anything that’s post rational to doing shrooms but like I actually have never done shrooms but it sounds interesting. But my point there is like I think that we don’t have a lot of anchors in modern society to actually — so if religion doesn’t appeal to you as much anymore, it’s almost like you’re on your own to find a spiritual pathway that will fulfill you.
Anna: It’s such an important point that you’re making, Alex, and I think that that’s absolutely right, that, indeed, our capacity for transcendence and our guidance from transcendence really came from religion or spirituality but more and more people are really turning away from that because they don’t like the ritualized structure, people want more freedom, and so the fastest growing community within the religious and spiritual movement is the neither spiritual nor religious, the “nones,” and usually these are people who do feel connected to something greater than themselves but wouldn’t necessarily define themselves in the category of “I’m spiritual, I’m religious,” but they are deeply intuitive, they are creative. They do feel connected, they do breathwork, they meditate, things like that. And then there’s also people who are not religious but consider themselves spiritual and feel guided by the universe and feel very much like in the flow of life and you’re exactly right, then there’s people who really want to transcend and are looking for concrete, real ways to transcend and make a difference in their life and to open up their creative juices and their ideational flow and will turn to psychedelics and that’s a whole movement that’s becoming legalized, it’s already decriminalized in certain states and certain countries around the world and it’s legal in certain places with certain substances. In our country, ketamine is legal. That is a legal psychedelic. Used for pain but it’s also used off label to treat depression and a lot of people have also tried it as a journey experience for a transcendent experience. And I’ve had clients, patients, some of the people who I coach have that experience and it’s powerful. It really is powerful because it enables you to transcend. And the way that some have described it, it’s like they take the rationality and the rationality and all they’re able to come to in terms of their rational analysis of their life, they hold over here, and then they have their ketamine experience and then they’re able to embody that to really take it in. So there’s something very powerful that happens in the psychedelic experience or in the ketamine experience that is different qualitatively than just a coaching session or a therapy session or journaling about the deep parts of yourself. So, it’s really interesting.
Alex: It’s fascinating. Transpersonal psychology has always appealed to me and when we think about like the drug, so a drug can provide you a state experience and it sounds like some drugs really provide a state experience that make it easier for people to then enact some change that becomes more of the stage experience, so we have like you can have a state experience at any level of development but you go through different stages. And a state experience is very powerful, like, let’s say, through ketamine, could potentially infuse your life with like the pathway to advance in terms of developmental kind of levels for human development, which then becomes a stage foundation, which is very interesting.
Anna: Yeah, exactly. What you’re talking about is what’s the mechanism through which these psychedelics work. What’s the mechanism actually through which any growth works? What’s the mechanism through which any transcendent experience can work? And you’re exactly right that through the transcendent experience, whether it comes through psychedelics or through breathwork or through meditation or through our religious experience or through something else entirely or by being so moved by a work of art or a piece of poetry that you transcend, those are also other means, something happens there that’s opened and you’re able to step in and then qualitatively experience a certain portion of your life, whether that be an insight, whether that be an embodied experience, whether that be the release of something traumatic or a free association to something that you’ve been holding back or repressing, all of those things can happen during one of these transcendent experiences, whatever the means. And, often, those things are very transformative, especially if you have together the power of rationality and understanding together with the emotion or the embodied form of the experience. You often need the combination of the two to really move forward in your life. One is helpful but two will create that shift.
Alex: I’ve had people, friends tell me they’ve had these curated experiences with a professional where they do I think combination of like molly and mushrooms and it’s like a guided journey. And, I mean, some of my friends, like someone that lost their dad when they were young had this experience of reconnecting with their father. It’s very interesting and it certainly sounds, in many ways, that there’s different approaches, some people do ayahuasca, but in so many ways, sounds like it’s better than being on antidepressants for all of your life or using different approaches that are legal but they are not necessarily great for your body, the levels of toxicity that we carry with some of the drugs that are consumed, you just go to the doctor, they give you a prescription and then you spend your life basically processing these substances but you might never process the underlying issues that are causing certain, let’s say, for example, depression. So I think the field of using these drugs as alternative medicine has huge potential. Sounds like — so do you have experience in leveraging some of these with coaching?
Anna: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think you’re exactly right. I mean, as also somebody who’s a psychiatrist and having prescribed antidepressants for many people over many, many years, antidepressants in the right situation can be absolutely life changing, and the people who have come to me for antidepressants, it’s not people who are lazy or haven’t done the work or are just like, “I need a crutch,” it’s people who’ve done everything. They’ve done everything. They’ve meditated, they drank their green juices, they’ve exercised, they have gone through retreats, they’ve done therapy, and still they have this level of pain or anxiety that is making some form of life unbearable or very difficult or just not enabling them to function optimally. And so, in that case, antidepressants could be so incredibly powerful in shifting people and creating personality changes in very poignant ways that enable people to take steps forward that even with all of their effort and guidance from professionals, they haven’t been able to do. Now, just like you said, what could happen then is you get to this new level and then you can stay at that level for a very, very long time because you fear going back and so you’re on these meds, it could be for years, and, like you said, there could be other ways. There could be, if you’re able to go into the pain and if you have a way of being able to process the pain with a guide in a healthy, constructive way to be able to release it, such as, I think you were saying MDMA, like molly or — MDMA, which is a heart opener, and that is something that really enables people to process trauma and there’s been studies with war veterans who have used MDMA or ecstasy to be able to process trauma in a very, very profound way that then enables them to move on and they don’t need medications. And, actually, the use of antidepressants is a contraindication for being able to have this experience with ecstasy or MDMA because they both use the serotonin pathways and you can’t do both of them together so it’s like one or the other. Yeah, and so it’s very powerful the fact that a lot of these substances are soon going to be legalized and that includes the MDMA, there’s maps for MDMA therapy, and psilocybin is undergoing its own decriminalization/legalization process. And there are other countries where that’s already the case where there’s decriminalization and where there’s a number of places that people, a lot of my patients and my executive coaching clients have gone to have these experiences and, like you said, there’s also under-the-radar individuals here, guides who provide those sorts of services, which also my patients have experienced that are very, very powerful. And some people are like, “Well, why do you need substances to do that?” If we could do it without substances, everyone would choose to do it without substances, and some people can. Some people’s meditation practices are so powerful, their breathwork practices are so powerful, they’re able to find ways to not need substances, but for so many people, to be able to release from the deepest part of yourself whatever is your core traumatic issue or to get that insight that you need to be able to shift things, it is so deep and sometimes it’s that substance that’s going to open something for you. You also mentioned ayahuasca journeys. I’ve had patients go on all sorts of ayahuasca retreats around the world that have been very healing and very opening. And it’s interesting too because the idea is that there is a substance, whether it be mushrooms or ayahuasca, that actually has a guiding soul and that substance is guiding you and that substance guides you to awaken your inner healer, to awaken a part of you or show you something about yourself that you need in order to move forward in your life. And that could be insight into your shadow side or the dark side of yourself that you often push away or repress and haven’t fully acclimated into your life. Or it could be opening your heart in such a way to enable you to feel a level of love that then makes the things that seem traumatic and unforgivable suddenly forgivable and okay. Or it could be whatever else. It could be some sort of experience that in waking life and without the presence of the psychedelic, it’s just hard to be able to get into that state. You’re shown like the world anew and that’s really what it is. People need new experiences to create new ways of seeing the world and to be able to move forward in their life and there’s many ways to get those new experiences and psychedelic medicine certainly is one of those ways.
Alex: It holds so many promises and coming from someone, I’ve never tried psychedelic. I mean, I had a bad experience with weed right after college and that scared me straight so I think I never going to want to try anything again. With the years, I smoke weed maybe once a year and I don’t think I would have the sensibility for philosophy, like, for example, Hegel made sense to me in a period where I was being crazy. For me, being crazy the way I grew up was I was smoking weed once a week my last semester of college and I thought it was the wildest thing. I grew up in Mexico City in a period where people around me were not doing drugs at all. I think generations before, I think my parents when they grew up in Mexico City, there was a lot of drugs around them then. I think now, what I hear from younger generations in the community I grew up in Mexico is they’re doing it, but I grew up in this very rare period where I was not exposed to any of that. But I think that period where I was smoking a little bit of weed in college, like, really, that led to an understanding of consciousness. Like you say, I like how you frame it like this. You see yourself and your mental processes from a different perspective and that different perspective can be an enabler for growth, that state experience can lead to a stage development, which is super powerful so I’m very encouraged by that. And, of course, I didn’t mean to say that antidepressants are bad but I think they — sometimes I think when you generalize in society, sometimes they’re not used the way they’re intended to to help people get out of a funk and find better ways to cope with things and everyone’s different and, in some cases, maybe long-term antidepressant use is okay, but there’s this promising field that you’re commenting on that it’s super powerful. So, we’ll see what the interplay of that with coaching is as we develop a better understanding of how to use those. In my personal journey, I’m curious about psychedelics but, again, I had that bad experience with weed and I was like — I had a bad trip, I was like, “I never wanna do it again.” I have actually done a lot of meditation too so it is a really powerful tool. It’s amazing what you can accomplish through meditation in terms of piercing through your own experience of yourself, so whether it’s like past trauma or it is really just about being able to control your mind, have more power over these thoughts that seem to be going back and forth and firing, I mean, being able to condense that into this one single point, to be able to do that is very encouraging for an individual so, I mean, meditation is a powerful journey. Do you have a meditation practice?
Anna: Yeah, I do. I do have a meditation practice. I meditate every morning and evening and it varies how long. The least amount is 20 minutes twice a day. Sometimes, if I have the time, I can do an hour twice a day. And I’ve used different meditations over time. Lately, I’ve been using Joe Dispenza’s meditations. I’ve gone to — I don’t know if you’ve heard of Joe Dispenza?
Alex: Yeah, of course.
Anna: Yeah, okay. So I’ve gone to some of his retreats, most recently in Mexico City, and I’m actually going to the follow-up he has in Denver next month. And I really love his meditations but I also love his life philosophy and he is living testament to living this philosophy because he was someone who had a spinal cord injury and he used the power of his own mind to recreate his spine. He was supposed to not recover but he did recover. He pulled himself out and he used the power of focused attention. And I think we were just joking, you and I, how like I hope someone decides to bring kombucha or make kombucha our drink, right? You had that, you put that out into the ether and then the next day —
Alex: I did.
Anna: And you were like, “What drink will you use?” I think I’ll have kombucha, and then I remember, I’m like what led me to think that? I was like coffee is such a boring drink and I don’t drink coffee anyways. What would be like a fun, interesting drink? Oh, yeah, kombucha. So it was like — but it was like you created that, like you put something out into the ether then that like — or you could say it was pure randomness or coincidence, or you can say that it was something about like your energy touching my energy somehow that created that synchronicity because how do we manifest reality? And this is part of Joe Dispenza’s philosophy regarding the power of our thoughts and intention and being able to use our intention, our thoughts together with strong emotion behind it, the emotion of what it would feel like to have the thing that we are seeking to manifest, and if you’re able to hold that thought together with the heightened emotion, then that creates the vibe to draw into your life that which you want to manifest. And that could be anything. That could be a promotion at work, that could be a child, that could be a new love, that could be losing a few pounds, whatever it is that people are trying to do.
Alex: Let’s step into that a little bit more because I think the modern world, I think that the rational emergence of — the perspective of rationality really supplanted a lot of superstitious belief that humanity had in earlier stages of development that were kind of pre-rational, but it’s almost like by saying, yeah, well, when we explain how the solar system works, that casts a spell on, for example, a lot of the ways in which people used to explain things, but it almost feels like it washed away a lot of the magic as well, and the magic in a positive sense. So, my experience of this kind of postmodern world or wherever we are, there’s this hunger for connection and some people that may hear you describe like how we manifested kombucha might just be like, “Well, it’s just a coincidence,” so I think one of the perspectives is —
Anna: And we can’t rule that out.
Alex: Right. So, your experience, how do we balance having — because in your career, you’re a doctor, you’re a scientist, and you also are very driven by these things that we can’t measure so how do you balance those personally and also in your work with your clients?
Anna: Absolutely, and this really is the root of my work and trying to understand this work and, specifically, trying to understand those parts of the human experience that are difficult to quantify and validate scientifically and that we’re trying very hard to validate and quantify scientifically, but just by their very nature, spiritual processes are subjective and ephemeral and transcendent and not necessarily subject to double-blind controlled trials, whereas scientific research and scientific knowledge demands very rigorous repeatable scientific study that you could subject to these trials. And so there’s the rub. So, the science of spirituality, which is my interest area, for many people, is a paradox and doesn’t make sense, but I think that that’s precisely why it’s so compelling.
Alex: I agree.
Anna: What got me interested in this field of studies, actually, in my own work with my clients and patients over time, having a number of experiences that don’t fit well into established scientific models. For instance, I was on a trip to the Ukraine once, of all places, now it’s just so, so sad what’s happening in the world and we can take a moment of silence and send positive prayers for all the people of Ukraine right now. So, I was on a trip to the Ukraine and I woke up in the middle of the night with a start, feeling that something was desperately, desperately wrong. And I’ve never felt anything like that in my life. My patients have described, my clients have described experiences like that and I felt like I was having a midnight panic attack. So, I was like something is really wrong, what’s happening? I checked my email in that moment and a patient of mine who was five time zones and — no, I think eight time zones and 5,000 miles away, had literally one minute prior to my waking up emailed me that he was feeling suicidal. So, by virtue of having woken up at that very moment, I was able to get his email, call him, and literally and metaphorically talk him off the ledge. Now, had I not woken up, would have been fine? Perhaps. Or maybe not, but we don’t know. But the very fact that that happened and the fact that I was able to contact my patient and got this message from him, somehow, even while I was asleep, to me was so meaningful and to my patient was so, so meaningful. And I’ve had a number of these little synchronicities or coincidences happen, enough to get me thinking and start to wonder, so what is going on? How do you explain this? And that’s where the movie that I’m presently making comes in. It’s to really explain these synchronicities from a medical as well as a spiritual perspective. A spiritual perspective often will interpret this as something that is some form of divine orchestration, that I was meant to help my patients, I was able to get his message and that we’re actually much more interconnected than we think. We think that we’re separate and discrete entities but there’s so much more telepathy between us and those sorts of things. That’s the spiritual perspective. And then the scientific perspective was that this was random chance and it just so what happened and whatever it was, what a great thing that it did.
Alex: No, absolutely.
Anna: And so this is where some of the interest comes from and I think it’s such an interesting subject area right now in our world.
Alex: It’s fascinating. I actually was in — one of the most — I’m a very intuitive person and one of the most interesting intuitive experience that I’ve had actually happened in Boston, you’re in Boston today in a hotel, pretty close to where you are, actually, I was walking, maybe that was 2008, it was a while back, and I was walking, I was taking some graduate courses in Cambridge so I’m walking back to my dorm and I get this very weird feeling, like it’s just bizarre, and I just go home and like maybe two hours later, they tell me that, “Did you hear someone got stabbed?” and they got stabbed like a block away right at the time when I had that experience, so it’s like sometimes we’re very in tune. I do feel like the more I’m meditating, the more I’m in tune with that realm so I personally completely on the same page with you. And I think it’s powerful. How do we harness it? How do we explain it? We maybe don’t need iMessage to communicate a long distance, right? It’s like, obviously, it’s not as reliable, telepathy, but it’s such a — I mean, it’s such a beautiful concept, that we are — it’s interesting to me that we’re shocked that that exists. I mean, because think about like the nature of existence, we are in this planet that is like circling around the sun and there’s all these physiological systems, these biological systems, all this diversity in life, yet we are shocked when we think about just, hey, maybe we can communicate without speaking at a distance. When you put it in that context, what’s ridiculous is that we would doubt it, right?
Anna: Yeah, exactly, exactly, that we would doubt, absolutely. And it’s so interesting that like, so telepathy or the ability to communicate across the distance outside the normal channels, like without speaking, it’s something that Sigmund Freud referred to as thought transference and it’s one of the many side phenomena. The others include telekinesis, being able to move things with your mind, being able to heal with your mind, a number of other things that are considered woo-woo but it’s telepathy that Sigmund Freud actually believed there to be a kernel of truth in and Sigmund Freud was the most rational, scientific, neurological, psychiatric person of the time way back then, and yet even someone like that believed there to be a kernel of truth in telepathy or what he called thought transference.
Alex: So I know we both have a shared interest in Ken Wilber. So, Ken Wilber has these concepts, like the Pre/Trans Fallacy. So it’s like this confusion around what’s pre-rational and once post-transrational and he actually provides the example of Jung versus Freud to explain it. So Jung basically ascribed a lot of pre-rational, a lot of like indigenous cultures had like a lot of pre-rational understanding and a lot of what Jung did was sometimes elevate some of those to make them post-rational but they were not always post-rational but that was his orientation. And Ken Wilber explains how Freud did the opposite. So you have these two super famous, contemporaneous world-class psychologists and they have like a different interpretation of this and Freud was made up — anything that was pre-rational for Freud was gibberish. So, for most things, you’re talking about telepathy, maybe not being the case, so that Pre/Trans Fallacy has always been appealing to me in Ken Wilber’s work. So let’s talk a little bit about Ken Wilber. So, what’s your experience with his work?
Anna: I mean, I want to hear your — I have read some of his work, I really enjoyed it, appreciate — exactly, so I want to hear your thoughts. Do share what some of your favorite — and I think he’s a very well thinker, I hear. I think he’s a systems thinker. I think his classifications of human behavior and the human society and how we evolved as human beings is very powerful and he’s obviously someone who’s put so much thought into, I’m thinking about levels of consciousness, which is something that I think about a great deal. So, please tell me your thoughts and, well, we’ll go from there.
Alex: Definitely. I mean, to me, I have — my three favorite thinkers of all time are Hegel, as we talked about, Einstein, just fascinating, and Ken Wilber. I think some people have referred to Ken Wilber as like the Einstein of consciousness. Just when I read this book, it changed my life because I’ve never read anything that I felt could explain how I felt about myself. So when —
Anna: What about it explained how you felt about yourself?
Alex: So I like meta theories but, oftentimes, when you — so meta theory, a theory of everything. Oftentimes, they have so many gaping holes because it’s very hard to have a comprehensive theory of everything. I haven’t been able to find a hole on Ken Wilber’s meta theory, like integral theory, and it’s very comprehensive and it’s also — at the end of the day, it’s not about everything falling into this model, it’s about you have to be integrally informed when you’re doing anything in life so being integrally informed basically means that you’re aware of quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types, which is like, okay, whatever that means, but it really is about understanding human development, the development of the universe, looking at — basically, if you summarize his book is he came up with these quadrants where you have the interior and the exterior and you also have individual and collective so you can plot anything in the universe against that quadrant. So, for example, like — and it’s been a while since I’d read it so I don’t remember which quadrant is which but if you’re having a certain type of thought, there is a correlate in your brain, of the brain structure that’s enabling that thought, and that brain structure also has a correlate of a society that is allowing you to be able to experience that both physiologically and also mentally. One of the most important things that I got from Ken Wilber was we pay very little attention to interior states, so, actually, when I was looking at your work and I was thinking about Ken Wilber, there’s this kind of quote that I think you might actually enjoy, because he’s a systems thinker but he also, a lot of this book is going over how system thinking, sometimes it’s like just looking at the exterior world and he doesn’t pay too much attention to interior experience, which is really the core of what we’re talking about with intuition and all that. I’ll read, it’s a couple paragraphs, I think you’ll find it — it resonated with your work so — and I have like so many highlights. That’s how you know, I have so many books —
Anna: I know you love this book, you love this book.
Alex: People ask me, “Have you read all your books?” and, typically, honestly, I just say like go and check if it’s highlighted. If it’s highlighted, I read it. If it’s not highlighted, I didn’t read it. And we can talk about how this relates to coaching and to our clients as well in a world where there’s so much complexity, so many things going on. Spending some time as coaches thinking about these philosophical implications of the current state of the world, I think it’s so powerful in being able to help clients. “The general systems sciences seek to be empirical or based on sensory evidence, and, thus, they are interested in how cells are taken up into complex organisms and how organisms are parts of ecological environments and so on, all of which you can see and, thus, all of which you can investigate empirically, and all of which is true enough. But they are not interested in, because their empirical methods do not cover, how sensations are taken up into perceptions and perceptions give way to impulses and emotions and emotions break forth into images and images expand to symbols. The empirical system sciences cover all of the outward forms of all that and cover it very well. They simply miss and leave out entirely the inside of all of that,” and I think you’re going to like this paragraph and then we’ll go back to our conversation. “The brain is the outside, the mind is the inside, and as we will see, a similar type of exterior/interior holds for every holon in evolution.” Holon, the world is made up of holes and parts, holes and parts all the way up, all the way down. “And the empirical system sciences or ecological sciences, even though they claim to be holistic, in fact, cover exactly and only one half of the coast of the kosmos.” Kosmos with a K. “And that is especially what is so partial about the web of life theory. They indeed see fields within fields within fields, but they are really only surfaces within surfaces within yet still other surfaces. They only see the exterior half of reality.”
Anna: It’s so powerful, and that’s exactly right and I think that — yeah, I think that work is very, very deep and he sees that and the empirical nature of scientific research, this is exactly what you and I were talking about, that often science demands that which empirical and can be scientifically validated and seen with the eyes and held with the hands and this is in contrast to those aspects of the human experience that are so internal, deeply personal, subjective, not subject to these kinds of experiments essentially, and that really are the way that he described it as perceptions to impulses, impulses to emotions, emotions to representations of the world, to symbols or to archetypes or whatever it is, like that, that hierarchy. It’s a much, much deeper hierarchy, and I’m taking a class right now that I took right before with a psychiatrist colleague of mine, Dr. Jeffrey Guss, and it’s on psychedelics and psychoanalysis and we were talking about precisely this today about how whether it’s a psychoanalytic process or whether it’s a psychedelic process that both of them open people up to different levels of their own internal processes. And, often, these processes are riddled with repression and with doors that have been closed because trauma, certain societal norms, inappropriateness in society to be this way or that way, and through free association and psychoanalysis or through the opening of those doors through a psychedelic process, you have people go deeper and deeper into their own internal processes and, therefore, free themselves, because, often, it’s our own internal processes that are repressed and it’s unconsciously repressed so we’re not even aware of the repression that keeps us bound and keeps a lot of psychic energy bound in the very back of undergoing and undertaking this repression.
Alex: One thing that I, as a psychologist, be careful about and very mindful would be to also understand that the mind is powerful and if it’s repressed, things are repressed, sometimes they’re repressed for a reason —
Anna: Absolutely.
Alex: — it’s almost you have to be very careful when you’re stirring the pot, if we may say it like that.
Anna: Absolutely, yes. You’re exactly right and so repression is the basis for all sorts of other psychoanalytic or psychodynamic defenses, and the defenses are ways of our mind keeping our anxiety at bay. So if the repression were lifted, there’d be so much anxiety that we wouldn’t be able to overtake that, we wouldn’t be able to process it, it would overtake us, and, therefore, we need these repressive mechanisms. For instance, we can have a repressed memory or it could be access to a part of ourselves over which we have great shame and so what ends up happening is we take up a lot of resources in the process of repression but, slowly, over time, through treatment, through life, through insight, through opening our heart, through evolving our consciousness, we’re able to I guess reduce the shame and reduce the need for that repression and really own who you really are, step into our full power, and often do that in the context of a relationship with either a guided professional or someone we love where we feel safe to do so. So you’re exactly right, it can feel very unsafe and scary to open up what has been repressed or to un-repress what has been repressed and that’s why there’s a lot of processes, such as psychoanalysis, which is one of the oldest processes to be able to get into the unconscious mind. It’s a psychoanalytic process where you actually lie on the couch. Sigmund Freud created it and you make the unconscious conscious over time in a safe space with your therapist and thereby give yourself much more freedom over your own life.
Alex: Absolutely. And when you think about development is I think Ken Wilber with a very Hegelian orientation would say that healthy development transcends and includes and unhealthy development transcends and negates, and a lot of what you see in —
Anna: What did you say the first one was? It transcends and…?
Alex: Transcends and includes.
Anna: Includes, yeah, yeah.
Alex: And then like unhealthy development is you transcend but you negate…
Anna: Parts of yourself, exactly. You will disavow parts of yourself like it’s okay to be this way but it’s not okay to be angry or it’s not okay to be dependent or it’s not okay to be sad so that part of myself —
Alex: Well, the negation could be the trauma too so the inability to deal with that —
Anna: Exactly.
Alex: — it’s not healthy development because you have this anchor, basically, that’s pulling you down, but it happens sometimes at all levels as well. So when you look at like —
Anna: Absolutely.
Alex: I don’t know if you’re familiar with spiral dynamics.
Anna: That’s Ken Wilber, yeah.
Alex: Well, spiral dynamics, it’s one of the lines of developments.
Anna: It’s based on his idea.
Alex: That, yeah, a lot of people — because he uses it so much, it’s so powerful and you have the colors so when you look at — that’s looking really at cultural development, that the colors are going from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. So, for example, pluralistic is the level of development that started happening around, let’s say, society at large in the 50s when you get the civil rights movement so this is really about creating equality and you see it everywhere today, but there’s the dark side of even that so when you start to see the culture wars, it’s the extremes coming together. I’d really recommend spiral dynamics for coaches because it is just such a powerful thing to understand like these waves of development in society at large. And then you can see it in your clients in the way they process information, the way they look at the world. It’s fascinating stuff. Let’s talk a little bit about coaching. So, how do you embed — you have this breadth of experience across different fields, you have this intuitive nature that is, I think, such a powerful thing for coaching and I’d love to talk a little more about that as well, but how do you infuse these different approaches with your coaching practice?
Anna: I think, at the end of the day, it’s really about meeting your client where they’re at and being able to understand what they need and then you start there. And it’s really interesting, it’s like, first, you give people what it is that they state that they want. So, this person wants to improve their leadership capacity, they want to increase the revenue of their department, they want to ensure that the people that are their direct reports are able to be more open of them and create more trust among their team, they want to — anything like that. That’s what they’re going to come in with. And this is where we start our work and we do the 360 review of all of my clients and all of their direct reports and their superiors or their colleagues in order to understand who they are and what they need. But, often, with my coaching client, the work goes so much deeper. So, the business aspect of the work becomes the primary lens but, often, whatever is happening at the level of business and with their employees is actually a mirror for what is happening underneath in all aspects of their life. So, in a way, before you give people what they need, per se, you give them what they want so you start off at the level of the business and the key constraints and the key issues that they would like you to focus on and then slowly, over time, you go much, much deeper. And so this is what happens with all of my coaching clients is we begin at the level and then, within six months, we start to go deeper, we start to deal with their marriage, we start to deal with parents, families, traumas, etc. And as we do that, their capacity to perform as an executive only goes up and up and up and up. And because often the things that hold us back, we think that it’s an interpersonal issue and that all you need to do is shift behavior, but, no, often what you need is to understand what at the deeper level has been holding you back. For instance, there’s an executive I was coaching who is wonderful and very loved and, yet, there is a little bit of an issue that I learned in the 360 which is that the people who are his direct reports feel as though sometimes there’s a competition and rather than him holding their hand and supporting all of the direct reports to be the best version of themselves, he keeps them down a little bit without him realizing it, it’s an unconscious thing, and doesn’t provide them the support they need and could sometimes even — and this is someone at a very high level of the company who has a lot of direct reports also at very high levels, but there is that dynamic. And so where does a dynamic like that come from? And it’s interesting as we investigate it over time, this person had a sibling that this person was very much in competition with early on and that sibling dynamic even continues to some degree now and it’s interesting that what was happening with these direct reports, this sibling was a little bit younger, what was happening with these direct reports was actually a very similar element of what happened in the dynamic with the sibling that there’s a little bit of that fear that, God forbid, this person should outcompete me and be better than me and so this unconscious process is being played out with the direct reports. And as soon as we gave a little bit of language to this and some understanding, the behavior shifted and, within a few months, we were getting very, very different reviews, getting very different feedback from the direct reports. So it’s like little things like that. It’s like seeing how something at the level of the work actually is reflected in something from a much more primitive time in someone’s life and reflective of more family dynamics and something deeper.
Alex: Love that. It’s so practical too and it’s one of the things that I really like about coaching is it’s working with people, they’re working in organizations, they’re very high functioning, and how do you help people that already are doing great to do better? And, in some cases — I mean, it’s interesting to look at a lot of issues with startups that you’ve seen with leadership. They’re all preventable, they’re all coachable, like what happened to the Uber CEO and now there’s a show on Showtime that just came out on that, I watched the first two episodes the other day, it’s very interesting. It’s like these subtle cues can really change someone’s demeanor tremendously. Maybe you’re drawing from something in the past, in this case, like a sibling, maybe some trauma, maybe just general growing up and sometimes maybe it’s not something in the past but something maybe more anchored in the present, something that happened maybe with a co-founder two years ago or something like that and then it’s starting to permeate the way someone — it’s such a privileged position for coaches to be in too, to have someone like that trust you, open up to you for you guys to be able to work through what’s happening. And the impact of that is not just in the person, it’s the people around them and, oftentimes, that has global impact because this person is running a company that has tremendous impact. So coaching is just such an awesome, powerful, systemic profession. And I’d love your take too, really look at the matches, not just at the behavior level but look at it more holistically. Yeah, I think that’s where your spiritual intuitive orientation really helps you dig deeper with clients. In a way, that is very anchored because you also anchor that intuition. It doesn’t sound like you just let it go wild, you’re like, “Okay, let’s get some of that non-rational and make it rational and do something very practical with that.”
Anna: Absolutely, that’s exactly right, and that’s the whole thing. Sometimes, every now and then, an intuition will come and then you just will share the intuition and then they’ll be like, “Oh, okay. Is this right? Is this not right?” But, sometimes, the intuition will come and then you will use retrospective rationalization to then explain why it is that you came to that intuition. So it seems as though you came to it rationally but there is a lot of studies showing that we think that we’re purely rational beings, but the truth is, we often come to our decisions about important things in our life through intuition and then use reason and logic retrospectively to explain how we came there.
Alex: Absolutely. I mean, this makes me think about the 40s, 50s, like you have behaviors run rampant and it is so nice to distill all the complexities of existence into something you can observe and to say, “Only what we can observe is real.” Sure, I mean, but no. And I think that’s where we are in society at large. When I see this hunger for spirituality in people, it’s like it’s very hard to get the right pathway because I don’t think we have the right dialogue in society at large. Science has been so effective but there’s one question that scientists rarely ask themselves, like what happens to the scientific philosophy when you can’t answer the question? It’s like everything that’s real physical? And if you ask that question, there’s no scientific way of saying, “Yes, but we operate under the assumption that the answer to that is yes. If you can’t see it, it’s not real.” But, scientifically, you couldn’t really professionally respond to that question like that and be like, “Yes, I’m certain of that.” But why I keep anchoring on science is because the world that we live in today is fueled by science and we’re getting to the point where we have this very advanced AI so I’m actually reading a book, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and I can’t pronounce the other guy’s last name, but now we’re getting to this place where our technology driven by science is getting to the point where we’re becoming gods, where we’re creating these intelligences that are going to either tremendously help us or can also be weaponized so it seems like the level of consciousness that we need as a society and the conversation needs to shift very quickly because our capabilities are accelerating tremendously. We will have human level machine intelligence sometime the century, most experts believe, so it’s an interesting time to be alive, isn’t it?
Anna: It’s amazing, exactly. And you’re exactly right about the amazing advantages that AI offers to human beings and then also the things that we fear about machines at some point, either they learn enough to outlearn us, to be able to overtake the human system, and it’s just really a matter of time as to when that happens and it really depends on —
Alex: Or us weaponizing it, creating AI weapons —
Anna: Absolutely, yeah, exactly.
Alex: It’s a very interesting book. So they’re saying how the US, for example, the government’s official stance is like AI-enabled defense systems, but not like AI defense systems, so it’s like — but if another country decides that they will weaponize AI differently and not have as many safeguards, then you’re competing in a world where you’re putting safeguards that might put you at a disadvantage.
Anna: Absolutely.
Alex: We have to have a conversation at large about what these things mean and it comes back to what the core of being human is.
Anna: Absolutely, right, exactly, and to realize that we currently possess weapons where we have the capacity to end life on earth as we know it, or at least seriously maim the majority of the human population, we have that capacity, and our capacity to not have done that really depends on mutual rationality. But when you have what’s happening in this world, where people are acting more emotionally as opposed to rationally, I mean, of course, everyone’s trying to justify everything with rationality but, clearly, that’s not the case. If there’s even the possibility or remote possibility that someone could be considering using a nuclear weapon, like the fact that that’s even in the air right now, is such a scary possibility and just shows that if we all don’t collectively act from a rational standpoint, that could be the end of humanity. It’s so not a joke and it’s so not something to play with, toy with, or threat in any way with.
Alex: Absolutely. This made me think of Marshall Goldsmith’s book. This is one of the best titles for any book for coaching ever, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. So we got here, we have all this advanced technology, we have all this world’s supply chain that is really a marvelous, incredible thing, but if we don’t change the way we look at ourselves and we interact even with ourselves, peers a little bit deeper into who we, the spiritual nature, and we start making decisions at large based on that, we may not be here for that much longer.
Anna: That’s exactly right and Marshall’s book is so brilliant on so many levels and his title can be interpreted on so many levels, including that one that you just said, that, yes, we have the capacity to end life as we know it, that’s number one. And also, this is…
Alex: Well, I don’t think he would welcome that very much. I’m just using it as interpreting but I don’t think it’s meant to be interpreted that way.
Anna: Exactly, sure, but it’s true, it’s exactly true, but also in our life, it’s like peeling the layers of an onion and our life is such that we have lessons to learn and we learn one lesson and as we go there, once we’ve learned it, we peel the layers of the onion, then we get to the next lesson and then we peel that next layer, and then we get to the next lesson. And as long as we’re alive, there’s more and more layers to peel. And we think that we’re going to get to this point that, finally, life is going to be peaceful, and perhaps it will be at some point, but it’s really about a choice that human beings make. Do you choose to live a life of comfort and complacency? Or do you choose to live a life of growth and transformation? And a lot of people choose the comfort/complacency life and, God bless, that’s completely okay, but that’s a very different life than a life of growth and a life of growth means you are going to constantly be challenged and you’re going to have to constantly be breaking through different, as you call them, stages of your evolution and of your consciousness to elevate who you are and to grow and to become the best version of yourself. It’s a more challenging life but the rewards are much, much greater.
Alex: Let’s talk a little bit about your clients. So you work with a pretty broad base of clients. So you work with some A-list celebs, you work with people in corporations, tell me and our audience, which are mostly coaches, a little bit more about your coaching practice. How do you choose your clients? How do they find you? What’s your typical structure? Do you do like year-long coaching engagements? How often do you meet? I find it that coaches are usually very interested in learning more about that.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely. So, I started, to be clear, my practice as a psychiatrist for many, many years, I started a practice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I titled my practice Upper East Side Psychiatry. That was about 12 years ago and my practice filled up within six months and it’s been full for the last 12 years. And, over time, I got introduced to coaching. I got introduced to coaching after I wrote my book, Fulfilled, and I was doing workshops around the country. One of the people who attended my workshop at Kripalu in the Berkshires was this woman named Julie Rosenberg. She and I really connected. She’s a physician. This was a workshop that was particularly for physicians. And so she came up to me and said, “I have this coaching organization I’m a part, MG100. I wanna nominate you for it. Would you be interested?” And I looked it up I’m like, “Yeah, that sounds really neat.” And that was about five years ago and it was then starting to join MG100 that I got connected to coaching and in addition to my practice as a psychiatrist started to do a lot of coaching. For me, it was a very natural transition because, over time, my practice, which started out — when I started my practice, I took all comers. Anybody and everybody. Took insurance, you could pay, you couldn’t pay, I wanted to fill up my practice, I wanted to have the experience of learning as much as I possibly could, I wanted to help everybody I could possibly help. And then, over time, the practice filled up and, over time, became more and more exclusive, and then started catering to the chairs of academic departments at top universities, it started catering to A-list actors and actresses, it started catering to Olympic athletes, it started catering to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies so that naturally became the practice. And so, to move them into a coaching practice where you’re focusing on some of those executives at very high levels but focusing with a slightly different shift in, and I’ll talk about the shift from being a psychiatrist to being a coach. It was a very natural transition for me and my practice as a psychiatrist was already full and so what just happened over time is I started accepting coaching patients and started accepting less and less therapy patients. And then it was like this, and then, eventually, it went like this. And I still have a psychiatry practice because all the people that I’ve treated for the last 12 years, many of them are still with me, but I now also have a very budding and robust coaching practice through MG100 and otherwise. And, really, how do I get the clients? It’s been because I’ve been in practice for so long and the people who have been my patients, I’ve told them about my practice, some of them have transitioned to then become my coaching clients. They’ve referred their colleagues, their friends, etc., and, really, I think the best referral source is word of mouth. It’s you help people and then people will refer others to you. And that’s just — I used to advertise as a psychiatrist. As a coach, I don’t advertise because the practice has already been full so it’s really been just the people who I have worked with and then, slowly, over time, and then within certain companies, referring more and more people. I especially love to coach physicians being a physician myself so that’s something I really enjoy. And it’s also been very interesting, the differences between being a therapist psychiatrist versus a coach.
Alex: I was going to ask you about that. It’s very interesting. So, what are some of the differences on approaches?
Anna: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s like very similar, you’re helping people be the best version of themselves, but, often, as a psychiatrist, someone will come to you with a very distinct problem and that problem could be anxiety, depression, a breakup, a divorce, whatever that is, and so you help them get out of the depths of their despair and move to an optimal functionality and just get out of pain. Whereas this coaching, sometimes you do have coaching where people are in pain and they bring you in because this person’s having trouble, they need you to help turn things around, that has happened, I’ve had clients like that. Or it could be that people are doing really, really well and they need to get through to the next level and they want to get them somebody who’s going to take their hand and help them get the insight, knowledge, wherewithal to get to the next level. Now —
Alex: What are the boundaries between coaching and therapy and how do they manifest in your practice?
Anna: Yeah, very different boundaries. So, with therapy, the patient pays for the treatment and there’s 100% confidentiality. I could never tell you what any of my patients are because it’s 100% confidential and there is that client privilege, the patient privilege. And that means that my first loyalty is to the patient, which is actually very different from the company. When you are hired by a company to be an executive coach, by virtue of the company paying you, of course, your loyalty is to your patient but it’s also to the company and there isn’t that same level of confidentiality. No, because it’s a different fiduciary structure. Even though that’s actually the case in the reality of things and how things are structured, I haven’t seen many differences in terms of it being bothersome to employees and I haven’t seen it be something that, therefore, employees are less likely to open up to me or less likely to be open about certain aspects because unless the company needs to know something, if an employee, for instance, was suicidal or something like that, I, of course, would help them in any way that I can but it’s not something that I would go to the company and say, “Hey, you need to know this.” I would have the wherewithal to be able to help them — like I’m giving you a very extreme example.
Alex: I understand, and it is a concern though for the industry. As you know, a lot of people are psychologists and do coaching and psychiatrists but a lot of people go through a non-psychology approach to become coaches and I think as an industry, as a profession, it’s good to have some clear delineated boundaries because you can shift between both and it’s more appropriate. I mean, there’s all this licensure, like crossing state lines. I mean, there’s a lot of complexity on the scientist practitioner side of things, let’s say, and way less in the coaching side which is unregulated but, as an industry, we have to be very careful about that, less so, again, with practitioners like you but it is definitely a very hot topic these days because we’re using a lot of coaching for mental wellbeing and a lot of people providing these services are not psychologists or psychiatrists so it’s definitely an evolving conversation.
Anna: Yes. I mean, that’s been a huge thing, because, I mean, with COVID, having a lot of psychiatry clients and patients and then having a lot of coaching clients and patients, the work was actually very, very similar. Everybody was going crazy. Everybody was going crazy with COVID and everyone was anxious, depressed, not knowing what to do, afraid, so whoever I was treating, it was really very similar work that I was doing. And I was working, obviously, as a professional and with my executives but also helping them with mental health stuff too because that’s what they were going through. And it’s just — I think you just are there in whatever capacity and I feel very lucky to have the training as a mental health specialist to be able to really provide that also, especially in this crazy time that we’ve been going through. And you’re exactly right, the coaching industry is unregulated and so to transfer into being a coach from being a psychiatrist for me was a very natural transition because I was already working with those populations and I took a few different certifications from Marshall Goldsmith’s group that I’m a part of, MG100. But someone else can take those certifications and call themselves a coach with no training or experience whatsoever. But at the end of the day, if that does indeed happen, what happens is, the question is, are you providing value to your clients? And if you are, the clients know and they’re going to grow, etc., and you get a call back and then you get other referrals. And if you’re not, you’re not, because people aren’t stupid, of course, so, at the end of the day, it’s really the value that you provide.
Alex: So let’s shift to your movie. So how did you get on a project that was about doing a movie? It seems like very different to everything you’ve done. So tell me a little bit more about the process to get started. How did you come up with the idea? How did it unfold? And then let’s talk about what the movie is about, which you alluded to earlier, and I think it’s fascinating.
Anna: Yeah. So that happened because — it really started with that experience that I mentioned to you with the patient of mine who was suicidal when I was in the Ukraine and then I woke up in the middle of the night, got that message from him, was completely shocked that I got that message in real time and then was able to call him and work through that. So, it was this synchronicity, this seemingly really unusual time-space merging of sorts, that this patient had this really crazy critical thing happening and then I was able to wake up and help him. So that really was the impetus because it made me think, how in the world does this happen? And I’ve had so many other experiences, not as acute and as serious, but other experiences like that. So it was those experiences that made me think let’s investigate this. And how it actually started is right before my book, I was starting to be asked to do a lot of media expert appearances on TV, CNN, Fox News, etc., and a friend of mine who’s a TV producer saw me in one of them and she said, “You know what,” and she’s also very intuitive, she’s like, “I see you doing a movie. I see doing a movie on the subject of,” and she basically said exactly what I was thinking about. And I was like, “Okay, you know what, this is very interesting. I’ve been thinking about doing precisely that.” And she’s like, “I know this person. You need to go see this guy named Jonathan Gray. Go see — he’s an entertainment lawyer, he’s gonna get you started.” So I went to see Jonathan Gray and we had this connection, we started making this movie, we got these people, we started shooting, and then it just picked up and then it ran itself. And it ran itself until we got about 100 hours of footage and then I got a book deal. And with that book deal, we put the movie on hold so I could write my book and then I wrote my book, the book came out, and we need to pick up the movie. So, there’s 100 hours done and now, it’s like the next thing has to happen. So, this is where I’m at right now and looking for the team to finish things off and the remaining funding and I think that within half a year, we’re going to have all that and then we’re going to be able to finish it up within maybe a year or two, it should be done.
Alex: That’s amazing. Congratulations. And you’re so entrepreneurial too, everything you do. Yeah, I mean, I grew up with this math orientation —
Anna: I know, like a math nerd.
Alex: You run a business essentially, you’re like a total scientist, practitioner, entrepreneur, creative, rational. I mean, you bring a lot of different worlds together and I can see how that’d be super helpful for your clients. What do you want people to get from that movie? If I watched that movie, what’s the impact that you’re trying to create?
Anna: Yeah, I would want people to start to — because, I mean, in a way, like my thought is that there are many ways that we can get guidance from the universe. There’s an internal way and that’s through intuition, tapping into the deepest part of yourself. And what is intuition? Well, we know what it is, it’s like colloquial, but it’s that — like I believe intuition is the voice of your soul. It’s that still, quiet voice that can only be heard when the yelling of your rational mind and the yelling of your emotional heart temporarily ceases, that’s still, quiet voice is your intuition. And when you tap into it, it will guide you perfectly. And what is the soul? Soul is also not something that’s talked about in medicine. What is this voice of the soul? What’s the soul anyway? So, in my trying to answer that question, I traveled far and wide to all these countries talking to all these spiritual people and my favorite definition of soul was actually from a shaman in Mexico, Fernando Broca, and he described the soul as comprised of two parts. The first part is that which connects us to everybody and everything. People often say we’re one unified soul and that’s what they mean. And then the other part of the soul is that which encapsulates our uniqueness so our unique set of talents, abilities, and skills and interests and what we bring into the world. So the soul is both, that which connects us with everything and that which is our unique thing. And so the voice of the soul, which will guide you, is your intuition. And that is, when you tap into that, that’s the internal guidance from the universe. The external guidance from the universe is more events like synchronicities or these things that happen that seem irrational but it’s the co-occurrence of two events that are particularly meaningful to you, like what I described, that thing that happened with my patient, that he was suicidal, he wrote me and I woke up at that time and was in — it was a co-occurrence of those events, my patient sending that email, my waking up, being able to call them. People can say that’s totally random. Perhaps, but, to me, the co-occurrence of those events, one didn’t cause the other, but the co-occurrence was so meaningful to me and that’s a synchronicity. So synchronicities, I believe, are the external guidance. Intuition is your internal guidance, how the universe guides you. Synchronicity is the external guidance of how the universe guides you. And taken together, being able to tap into your intuition and live with the synchronicities of life, creates a very interesting, powerful life and a way of just navigating the world. So that’s kind of where I want the movie to go.
Alex: That’s awesome. I think, from my perspective and what the world needs today, it’s a lot of that, and fusing a little bit more of that like non-dual orientation and understanding and trying to — I mean, I like that definition from the shaman in Mexico, because it really puts together like we’re all part of this, like there was a point before there was time itself and everything comes from that so we’re all connected in this adventure of existence, but within it, we all have our own experience. You woke up in Boston today, your hotel, I woke up here in California, and we’re having different experiences and, at the same time, there’s so much commonality in what we experienced that we have our own perspectives and that perspective informs the whole, but the whole, for some reason, wants us to be part of all these separate nests as well. And when you weave all of that together, I mean, there’s a lot of hunger for spiritual understanding in our world today so I love people like you that are just doing the hard work of trying to blend the rational world, doing work that is very grounded. It makes sense, it resonates with people, but it also is reaching to bring some of that hard to define, more ethereal power that the rational orientation so desperately need. So, lots of respect for the work that you’re doing. It’s not necessarily the easiest realm. It’s a little uncertain and it’s trying to put things together in powerful and uncertain ways sometimes, but it’s the work that needs to be done.
Anna: Absolutely. Thank you, Alex. Thank you for understanding that and thank you for your encouraging words.
Alex: Yeah, it has been a pleasure to connect today. So thank you for joining us all the way from Boston on your work trip. Well, I look forward to staying connected and I appreciate your time. I am certain that the people watching, especially the coaches watching, will enjoy this episode and I’m sure they’ll reference a lot of your work. So thank you for your time.
Anna: Thank you so much, Alex. It was a pleasure.