Trusting Your Intuition: A Conversation with Dr. Neha Sangwan on Self-Awareness, Personal Medicine, and Building Human Connection

I am very grateful today to my guest , dr Neha Sangwan and I may have pronounced her name , you said it perfectly Is joining me , and her credentials are like whoa , off the chart . She's the CEO and founder of Intuitive Intelligence . She is an internal medicine physician and international speaker and a corporate communication expert , and she is an author .

She addresses the root cause of stress , miscommunication and interpersonal conflict . She has consulted with organizations such as the American Heart Association , kaiser , american Express and Google . She's been a TEDx speaker .

Her latest book is called Powered by Me from Burned Out to Fully Charged at Work and in Life , and I know we all want to be fully charged every day and we can't always be that way and I just want to share with you that I met Neha , oh , six years ago I don't really know the time , but we were taking an improv workshop , intensive for a weekend , and here

are all of us goofballs . You know , sort of just out there and here is this incredibly gorgeous , talented , smart woman who was able to be a goofball too , but you had so much to share . I remember all of us going , oh my gosh , she's so smart . The things she did were so much better than what we said .

Anyway , welcome to Ignite your Spark and thank you for coming .

where you have to kind of step out and deal with something that you had not expected .

Before we go into your story and your book , I'd like to ask my guest this question at the beginning of each episode how do you ignite your spark ?

It's through surrounding myself with people that , when I look in their eyes and I've forgotten whether I can do something or whether I believe in myself , I look in their eyes and I can just see the reflection of them believing in me .

Thank you , that is just a lovely answer , and I really get that when I'm looking at someone and they are reflecting back at me what I am giving them . We don't take time to do that enough .

That those of us who have a tendency towards that active squirrel brain , it's even worse when you engage in that way and for me , doing a podcast is a great way to be present , to stop and connect , and I love how you said that . All right , thank you for that answer . And I know , are you still a practicing doctor ?

Now what I do is I have my own private practice and now I merge my experience in engineering which is root cause problem solving , internal medicine and executive coaching and I work with leaders , senior leaders , their teams and full company wellness programs , where I combine people's ability to communicate or inability to communicate and how it makes them physically ill .

I use my understanding of business strategy to coach the CEOs and their leadership team and then I take on the entire company as a company wellness program . So the private practice that I do now is more about I know where the intersection of our physical health meets our mental , emotional , social , spiritual health .

So what I mean by that is the simplest way to think about it is , let's say , somebody goes in to see their doctor because they have chest tightness . What a doctor often does is runs an EKJ , takes some blood work maybe , does a stress test or perhaps , depending on their history , does an ultrasound and checks how their heart is beating .

Then the doctor comes out and says something to this person who's struggling with chest tightness , like good news you're doing fine , nothing's wrong . Now the patient is sitting there thinking Okay , I should be happy about this , except what about the chest tightness and so they leave .

And I think that what my dream would be for doctors To say instead would be there's good news and there's bad news . The good news is your heart , the electrical rhythm of your heart on your EKG looks great . Your blood works great . You didn't have a heart attack . Here's in your heart's pumping fine . Here's the bad news .

I Think there's something unresolved on a mental , emotional , social or spiritual level that's showing up in your physical body to try to get your attention . Do you have any idea what that might be ?

Did the whole Barium test to look at my insides oh , you're fine , you're fine like well , no , I'm not fine , you know , but I don't know that mine was mental as much as perhaps some physical response to that virus going around that lingered in my body .

But I Think that so many of the issues of today , whether it's headaches or gut aches , the more people I talk to have gut issues . Of course it's stress related , but the doctors today not including yourself they get us in and out . 15 minutes here , you've got 15 minutes . I'm on Medicare . Now Let me ask all the questions Do you have rugs in your house ?

You do a Medicare doesn't like that . Well , I'm like okay , let's look at me as the person , dr Neha , I mean you look at a person when you tell , well , I would say it's even bigger than that .

It does affect you , but there's there's me , we world , right and . And so anytime you're trying to solve something complicated , you want to understand how it's happening on all three levels . Let me talk to you a little bit about what I would say to your listeners who might be struggling with ailments like you were saying . Yours was your gut .

They say they're stressed or having headaches , they can't sleep at night , right , any of these , any of these issues . So the first thing you have to do is get a clean bill of health . That's your first job , because these can all be symptoms or signals of something bigger . That's medical .

If you get a clean bill of health but you're still not feeling well , what I used to ask my patients was five questions . So in the hospital the night before , I would discharge them . What I learned on my own burnout , stress leave . Was that stress ? The research shows that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illness . So it makes sense .

I mean , my , my intuition tells me it might even be higher than that , but we'll just leave it with the research . So if stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of illness , why are we not starting with what's at the root of your stress ?

Oftentimes , what I would ask my colleagues this , what they would say to me is may have , just like you wouldn't order a diagnostic test that you didn't know what to do with the result , why would you ask a question that you didn't know what to do with the answer ?

And this is a lot of what ended up leading me into coaching , because there's a way in which Curiosity you know , as a doctor I'm prescribing a lot that's , people want me to give them an answer . But the the real dance and magic in our world of personalized medicine . Each person's biology is different and so the dance happens in the exchange .

And so now that I'm an executive coach where I'm listening and I'm curious and I'm asking questions , I understand not just physical from doctoring , but mental , emotional , social , spiritual .

When you put those together you can see the intersection where each of those Professions individually may not understand the connection , and so there was five questions that I used to ask my patients the night before they got discharged To help them get to the root of their stress , and so I call this the awareness prescription .

So , question number one Okay , let's just say someone came in with a heart attack . So why this ? So heart attack ? Why did this part of your body break down ? Right ? So if it's a headache , right . Why this ? Why ? Why your mind ? Why is that ? What's hurting you ? Why now ? Question number two , since you know why . Not three years ago ?

Why not two weeks from now ? What is it ? What's the message your body needed you to get in this moment that it shut down and you're in the hospital with me , so why now ? The question number three is since hindsight's , 2020 , what signals might you have missed that make perfect sense now ?

What signals , what clues , what patterns that may not have made sense right , are crystal clear , and that helps people pick up these clues for next time , so they can pick it up sooner . Question number four what else in your life needs to be healed ?

And question number five if you spoke from the heart , what would you say and so you can use this for a relationship breaking down , you can use this for a dilemma in your family , you can use this for a business decision , you can use this for for whatever you're struggling with and allow your you know you were speaking about igniting your spark , and what's what

? What ignites your spark ? And this is where these types of questions we should trust our intuition and whatever moves through us is the right answer . And so I think there's a bit of you know framing the questions and then there's a lot of trusting our own intuition . So my patients knew , they knew why they were sick , they knew why .

Now they , they just really got to the root of what , what they needed to know .

We didn't spend our time and energy doing this if we didn't want to help people . We know there's something called moral injury , which is essentially like our deep optimism and hope to help humanity gets put into a system that makes it very hard to be able to help people . And so there's , you know , there's many of us that have chosen to do different things .

I , but that takes a lot of courage to do what I did . When you leave a traditional system , it's almost like you have to go out in the jungle and pave a path , because people don't know how to pay you , they don't know how to relate to you . Are you a doctor in a hospital ?

Oh you , you work with private clients and you get them off medications not on them Like wow , I've never heard of that , and so people don't fully understand it , and so it takes time for this to happen . But I have to agree with you . We're in a system that you know is really on the brink of falling apart and needing to be reimagined .

On your website you say the good Indian girl , you know , you sort of followed along , but did your intuition ever say to you , maybe this isn't for me or I know it did eventually after you went through your own burnout , but are you able to access your own intuition as a young girl ?

So it's like insights . But what I'd say , the most important thing that I would tell people is pay attention to children . Children are so in tune with their body . They know , you know , they know when they need a nap , they know when they need a poop , they know when they need to be fed , like , and they respond .

They're so in exchange with the communication in their bodies . We're the ones who think we're getting inconvenience Like now you want to eat , now , like it's two in the morning , like I want to sleep . So we fight that and we almost beat it out of them . We tell them to be polite .

Right now you sit in the meeting , you do the thing , you are in public , don't listen to your body right now . And so when , when kids are young , they are very much in tune with their body and they even allow emotions to just move right through them .

They can be playing with bubbles and laughing , you know , one moment , and then see something else and just move right into anger , upset whatever it is . They don't have all the the invisible barriers that we have constructed to protect ourselves .

And what's interesting is , as we protect ourselves , we also lose our connection to when we're we're trying to , you know , you know safeguard or buffer where we don't want to feel disappointment or we don't want to upset anybody else or we want to be societally correct .

We now have put ourselves in very pretty boxes , but we've also kind of shunned our ability to listen and so , yes , when I was young , I absolutely did listen . I had I was three months old , and so my my parents are immigrants . They came here after having an arranged marriage in India in 1965 .

And they moved to the US , and I am the middle daughter of three , and so my grandmother came because they were both working full time , came to take care of my older sister and myself . Well , while she was here , my grandfather got a job in Africa with the United Nations .

He got stationed there to help their people create a plan for agriculture that could support them . He calls my grandmother and says I need you here I can do the work of the United Nations , but there's a whole social thing that goes on here that you need to take care of .

So she scooped me up I'm three months old , took me with her for two years and I lived happily with them . Once I'm two years old , my mother and my sister come to pick me up , but my sister now is three and a half thinks she's an only child . I'm two years old and for all I know I I'm a UN baby .

I think I'm an only child that's got a life that I'm probably not going to live when I come back to Michigan and I don't understand what's happening . And so I went into a space where I cried for nearly a month straight and finally started to adjust to this new place without my grandparents . Now , culturally , indian families are .

They live in extended communities . They pass kids around all the time If a grandmother's taking care of them or aunts taking care of them or , you know , cousins all live together in multiple generations of families . So my parents didn't think anything of it . They really didn't think about it .

But I will say , when I came back I was so crushed about leaving my grandparents and I really didn't know what I did wrong , that all of this pain was coming on me , and so I became quite the people pleaser and I started paying attention to what I needed to do in my environment to make everybody happy so no one would send me away again . Oh , so sad .

So I became a people pleaser and I figured out very early that academics and athletics were things that would get me accolades and appreciation and love . My father one day I heard him over , overheard him speaking to a friend saying oh , and the second one was a girl too . All I wanted was a son who would be an engineer .

And so I heard it and I thought well , I can't do too much about the son , but I could be an engineer , you know .

And then my mom always spoke about missing her calling to become a surgeon because her parents back in the day culturally thought what kind of a mother and a wife are you going to be if you're always on call and you're always running to the hospital ? So they didn't let her do that . So she went into biochemistry , but she always had that longing .

She even ended up working at a university , in a medical school , in the biochemistry department , and so I always I became much more in tune of my outside surroundings so that I wouldn't get surprised again . And in that effort I tuned out of me oh really , you want me to be an engineer ? Awesome , I'll be a mechanical and biomedical engineer .

I'll do all my summer internships . Now am I good enough ? Right and the same . Then , when I realized medicine and engineering weren't mutually exclusive , I went on to medical school . I mean , I was a speed like a speed , a bullet train , just like ready to run into a brick wall .

Because in the end , when you tune out that much , you lose the early signals to know what's happening . You don't know where you end and somebody else begins and you definitely don't know what you want . And so at 30 , 31 years old , when I'm getting out of school , I'm hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt . I've given up my 20s .

I found myself just feeling depressed down . And I was at a retreat in Australia and it was my first communication and self-awareness retreat that I'd ever gone to . And the facilitator of the retreat handed me a Rose Court stone and said if you spoke from the heart , what would you say ?

And that was when I said oh , my God , I think I've lived my life for everybody else but me , and I'm supposed to be at the pinnacle of my career , but I'm worried that perhaps we're not getting to the root cause of the problem here .

Maybe we're numbing symptoms and we're not healing humans in many regards and maybe I did this for my mom and my dad and maybe the bigger question is who am I and what do I want ? And so you know , I saw great value in traditional medicine in crisis care .

So you get into an accident , you break your leg , you're so happy there's a hospital nearby , you're feeling sick , you need antibiotics , you need something to take care of you in an acute situation . Medicine is phenomenal .

But when we use short-term solutions of you know , in our long-term or chronic illness , when we , you know , just bring blood sugar down with insulin each time , but we keep eating the sugar and the tough diet you know the diet that's tough on our system we just use short-term solutions and we keep calling them , we use them over and over again and call it a

long-term solution and it's not . And so what I'd really say is tuning out of my body got me a lot of accolades and a lot of accomplishment , and you know , my grandparents , the Indian community , my parents , I mean . It's kind of like a party trick you walk in , you're like you're an engineer and a doctor , like no way .

So it's connected me to a lot of people , it's opened a lot of doors , it informs me every day . So I am very grateful that this is the path I took . It was a hard one , but it all started by me tuning out of me and tuning toward .

You know , instead of tuning in , I was tuning outward to see what the world wanted from me , and at some point I'm going to crash into a wall and have to figure out what do I want ?

facility , and my hope is that this is the future of medicine , because , of course I've said this many times I have a lot of holistic practitioners on my podcast , a lot of people who speak to intuition and how vital and important it is to tune in , because who knows better than we do ? No , I mean , yes , you know how to set a broken bone or someone .

I had a hip replacement 21 years ago . Thank goodness for that . But I'm also a big believer in intuitive medicine and holistic doctors who look at the root cause , like you do , which is vital . Now , did you go on after that retreat , your first self-awareness retreat ? Did you then go on to work in the emergency room ? Still ?

I had been trained for this and I was going to go do it . It was all I knew , and so while I was there , though , what had cracked open was huh , is there another way ?

And it took me time to be able to get to the place where I could understand how all these pieces fit together a burnout of self-awareness , of communication , and how our inability to communicate with ourselves and each other makes us physically ill . My patients had a lot to teach me , and so I still had work to do .

So , yeah , I definitely wasn't there , and I certainly didn't have the courage yet to make that big of a leap . It took me about eight more years , and then , in 2008 , after burning out , after running these experiments of asking five questions to get to the root of people's stress and seeing people start coming off a lot of their stress-related medications .

I got the courage and I had had the experience and the confidence to say OK , I'm going to be an entrepreneur , I'm going to go out and do this on my own .

I realized how little the system knew about it and how much judgment people had about people that burned out Like they couldn't hack it . You can't take it . How much of a failure I felt , like that , maybe everyone . How come everyone else was still at work and I wasn't .

How guilty I felt to be on leave and getting 60% of my pay While my arms and legs worked . How come I couldn't work ? So I was confused and it was this experience that I detail in the book .

I mean chapter two is you know the basics of burnout and I basically tell you the five behind the scenes conversations between me and my psychiatrist about how this all unfolded and how I learned about what this is , and ever since then I've been on a journey to heal myself , to figure out how to get this healing into healthcare , how to help patients , clients ,

companies do this , and so the last seven years have been putting it into words , and how do you ? You know , writing a book is a lot harder to me than speaking . If I speak to you but I don't say something quite right , I can just reiterate what I mean , or kind of like , and I can keep going .

But when you write something in a book , it's almost like OK , was that the best version of the way that you could have said it ? Because you get to do it once and they print it and that's how it goes . And so there was something about it that felt more final to me that this .

You need to get this just right so I could see some of my perfectionism you know excellence , perfectionism tendencies coming in there . But the more I do this because it's my second book . The first one was on healthy conflict and and how our inability to communicate with ourselves and each other makes us physically ill . So it's called talk our acts .

But now I'm starting to , as I mature , like allow a few , it's OK if a few mistakes go through , like you do your best and you let go .

And so what I'm learning as I get older is the paradox and the beauty of it , like I used to , like no structure , like just let me do what I want to do in the hospital , don't make me see certain patients by a certain time or whatever . Now I actually understand how structure gives us freedom .

I understand how , if I want excellence , not perfection , all I have to do is try my hardest and then also be able to surrender and allow the learning .

And so now I'm really in the phase of life of appreciating the paradoxes that I had gone to one side of the pendulum on and thought that was like amazing , or control versus surrender , like can you have both ? Can you do what you can control ? And then can you let go of the rest and trust that the universe has your back .

Instead of giving in once we have tried our hardest , we push and push and push until we're burnt out , until we can push no more . And then the universe is like see , yes , should I do it ?

And so when we care as primal to us as food and water is belonging , and when we're navigating what society thinks success looks like and feels like and is , with our own need for rest and routine and what our biology needs , we come into a little bit of conflict there .

And so , figuring out that paradox , right , how do I know how to slow down so I can speed up ? How do I know how to take care of me while I serve in the world ? And so we get out of balance and really burning out is it's a wake up call ? It's a wake up call .

And when I did , powered by Me , I thought I want this to relate to so many generations . I wanted to say power because I want them people to know it's from within . I want my generation that I think in many ways has kind of gotten a little power , hungry and positional power , and CEOs making hundreds of times more than workers , and all of these things .

I think we've lost balance around power Then I , so that's positional power . But then there's power for the next generation . They know devices . They know if you don't power something up , it's not gonna work the next day . So they get so powered by oh me .

So a way to give them accountability , to give them a little bit of oh power it's something you plug in , but sometimes I got to plug me in , and so it's about accountability . It's about I really thought a lot about how I would name this that it could relate across generations and it could speak in metaphor and literally to what I think the world needs now .

Yes , I think you're right .

Everybody gets burned out at one time or another and I am sure that your book gives us all the tips and tricks .

So it basically says wherever you are from on the spectrum , from burned out to fully charged the way you figure it out is whether you have a net gain or a net drain of energy on a physical , mental , emotional , social or spiritual level , and wherever you're having a net drain is where you probably are going to need to adjust your boundaries .

Some are going to be too tight , some might be too porous , whatever it is , but it's basically that your life has changed and you're using some outdated strategies continuing right , and so there's something that needs to be adjusted .

And so it's more of a wake up call than anything else , and I just want people to know that it's just one way that your body , your heart , your mind , your soul are telling you you've outgrown your old version of you and it's time to reimagine what's next .

And now , where can people find you ? I'll put it down in the show notes as well , but why don't you tell us ?

That's why I love listening to podcasts and doing my podcast , because it's not a sound bite . We get to hear a little bit more Sure , and I love it . So , thank you , thank you , thank you . I appreciate it . So you are so welcome and sparkling fellow friends who may be suffering from burnout or may not be .

I hope that you have learned something today from Neha and realized that your own intuitive intelligence is vital to helping you ignite your spark . So shine on . Thanks for tuning in , as always , walk through life .

And everything's going on your way . Oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh . And you wanna make it last forever . Keep it together , cause it keeps getting better . Oh oh , oh . Walk through life and move ahead to your destination . Shine so bright , be the light of a new creation .