Dr. Julia DiGangi - Energy Rising Part 2

Welcome back to part two of energy rising. Today's guest shares eight codes to apply to all our challenges. Her work shows us how to effectively deal with struggles inside the workplace and outside the workplace, because we are the very same people who go to work that come from work. We welcome back the author of this brilliant book. That's doing so, so well. And I'm so happy it is. Energy rising the neuroscience of leading with emotional power julia DiGangi welcome back to the show.

I am so glad to be here for round two. Thank you again for having me. It's great to have you and we promise we're gonna get into the codes today we didn't get there last day we got carried away. We had a great conversation. So I'm happy to have this one go. However, it wants to go too very flexible. I didn't say to the last day, I have a practice of picking out a pin that I wear a lapel pen that I wear for each episode. And it's one of the ways to help me get in the zone.

And I didn't say it to the last day, but I have this one here. And it's a lovely one of a lady. And she has this really long blue hair, not like Marge Simpson, but really long blue hair. That's around there in this kind of shell and i thought it was so perfect for the book because it's this idea of release your own energy and cover yourself with your own energy, love that. I think I'm going to need one of those pins.

send you mine i'll send you this this will be a memento of doing the show together. very nice. Julia, I know you're under time pressure. Julia is highly sought after as a keynote speaker and of course she has her own practice. I have a copy of for grabs of energy rising. And , if you sign up to the innovation show sub stack, you'll be in with a chance to win that.

I want to signpost that there are eight codes. The first five are for you to harness your energy. And the last three codes are for other people, those you lead your team, your customers, your children, your partners, your social media followers, your friends, whoever might be, and we won't have time to go into the great examples that are in each of the chapters, each of the codes. So we're going to cover them at a high level.

In So, let's start with code one and this is expand your emotional power how to transform your emotional pain into your emotional power i really want to really share this one if there's any. Help people release themselves and just enjoy life a little bit more over to you do that to share this brilliant code, So this is really the foundation of not just energy rising, but all of my work as a neuropsychologist. So I could spend. An entire lifetime talking just about this code.

So I'll try to do it succinctly. So I really think about my work in, I use two terms, emotional pain and emotional power. Okay. So when I say emotional pain, I'm talking about any bad feeling. It doesn't have to be your rioting and agony. So it could be, I'm frustrated. I'm irritated. I'm annoyed. I'm anxious. I'm afraid I'm upset. Right? So all there's probably thousands of synonyms. So what we're all kind of doing is trying to avoid these feelings. They don't feel good.

So we're trying to structure our lives in ways that we don't have to feel these feelings. The problem though, is when we chronically avoid things because we think it's going to not make us upset, it's not going to make us scared. It's not going to make us anxious. What happens is our lives really start to constrict. Then we get smaller and we get smaller and we shy away from opportunities and we don't show up in rooms and we don't show up in conversations.

And what I'm telling you about this idea of avoidance of anxiety or avoidance of fear or avoidance of stress, this is the best definition I can give you. I'm fundamentally an anxiety researcher. This is the best definition I can give you for, Anxiety. Anxiety is really sustained by avoidance of the things that we think are going to feel bad. Okay?

So what we're all after is a life that feels emotionally powerful. And by emotionally powerful, I mean all the things we want. If we feel grounded, we feel authentic, we feel connected. In other words, we're really tapped in to our human wholeness. Okay, I think this is why people are using terms all the time these days, like authenticity and belonging. Like we want to be everything that we are.

Well, the only way, the only way, and , if I had one message to give people, I know I have a lot, but this is really the core of it to have the feelings and the experiences and the life that we want is to stop avoiding the feelings we think are going to hurt us. One of the most counterintuitive things I say is that you avoid feelings like fear and anxiety and stress because you think they're going to weaken you.

But when you learn how to intelligently harness these emotional energies that are quite literally inside of your nervous system, they do not weaken you. They become the very catalyst for your power. So I'll give you a few examples. I work with a lot of people who say, you know what, I just want to be more confident. Who doesn't want to be more confident? The only way to get to greater confidence is to have a new relationship with the energy of self doubt.

If I'm not willing to go into that energy of self doubt, I cannot get to greater confidence. When I go into self doubt, it hurts for a little bit. Okay. I work with a lot of people who say I want more influence. have these brilliant ideas, these beautiful ideas. I really want to serve people. I want more influence. The only way to get to more influence is to come into a new relationship with the pain of rejection.

Because if I'm not willing to put myself out there and be misunderstood and, be misconstrued and have people say my ideas are silly, which some of them will, I'm, if I'm going to avoid that pain, there's no way for me to get to greater power, greater influence. And just a final example is I think at the foundation. What every single human being wants on the planet is, is peace. You know, if you say like, what do you really want?

And I've asked this question to thousands and thousands and thousands of people. They're saying, I want more peace. Well, the only way to get to more peace. Is by having a new relationship, a categorically new relationship with what I call the energy of uncertainty. Well, the human brain is allergic to uncertainty.

So when I start to become more accepting and start to surrender more and start to become more peaceful for a little while, that's going to feel very uncomfortable, potentially even painful. But when I do it intelligently and I catalyze and I work with that energy, I transform that energy in my nervous system. I get to greater power. I want to say one final thing about code one, this transforming your pain into your power. The physicists told us that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

It can only be transformed. Well, pain, these sensations of fear and anxiety and stress and irritation and rage are quite literally an energy. I do not mean this metaphorically or metaphysically. The only reason I was able to do my fMRI and EEG research is because the brain is producing these electrochemical reactions. In other words, there's a real energy in the brain that we're able to track with these methods like fMRI and EEG.

So when we put people in a scanner and we scare them or make them sad or do all the things that scientists do, we see real energies occur in the brain. All this is to say is when you're having bad days or you're having bad moments or you're having bad periods in your life, this is an energy. And if we could avoid it, I would tell you to avoid it. Like I want the simplest path too, but that energy can never be destroyed.

We've got to figure out how to intelligently work with the energy in our brain and in our nervous system.

i'm so glad you said that because one of the key lines i picked up from this chapter was the responsibility we have to transform pain is great because if we don't, we'll transmit it to many people who look towards us for leadership maybe to our children or our spouse or partner, we pass it on to them by being distracted unattuned or impatient and worst of all we pass it to ourselves and therefore we, Double our pain or discomfort or whatever it might be

and i thought that was why it was so important and i want to to one other thing here julia in this chapter cause otherwise we'll run out of time again is. So many people that i coach or i just encourage you go you should write a book and their fear of writing a book or putting himself out there or maybe it's addressing as you say in this chapter.

Somebody on your team who's a slacker or somebody on team who's just not doing a great job and addressing that and instead of being frustrated and adding in that to your own pain.

I think those things are crippling and one of the goals of the show is to release people from that grip of that fear or whatever is holding them back and I feel privileged that I don't have that but I really feel a responsibility to help people unleash themselves and enjoy their lives a little better there's a lot in there but maybe you'll give us some insights on that. I mean, I think you're, first of all, I think the work that you do is amazing precisely for this reason.

And exactly what you said. There's so many people with these brilliant, creative, transformative ideas. Who are afraid to be seen, , working in the brain space and even in science, it's a very complex space. So I always say like clarity is the foundation of power. So how can we make things clear and simple, not easy, but just clear and simple. And so I always try to ask like, what's a really good question that people could sit with that could really transform their life.

Here's a question that I think is astoundingly provocative. Am I powerful enough to be misunderstood? Am I powerful enough to be misunderstood? Because if the answer to that question is yes, do you see how it opens the floodgates and allows my creativity to come through? Because as long as I think everybody's got to get it, everybody's got to understand, everybody's got to agree, everybody I will totally be constrained, exactly as you mentioned, by that. What is that?

We have all these words, but what it really is, is an energetic sensation of fear. I'm constrained by that fear. But the second I say, hey, you know what? Not everybody's gonna love this. Not everybody's gonna get it. Not everybody's gonna agree. And you know what? I bet people are even gonna have some good points.

About why they might maybe don't agree with me, but the second I say I can tolerate their misunderstanding, it changes the playing field Absolutely love it it's so relieving when you don't actually care when you stop caring or you find a different why behind your work. i was gonna try and get on to the temperature but there's a lady who's a composite character.

Of so many people i know that you mentioned in this chapter mag and there was one part of her story that i thought was so so important, that she wanted to be a consensus based leader and include everybody and so many of our audience want that as well julia but as you point out sometimes.

The consensus based leadership is just people pleasing and that can cripple people i've done that people pleasing in my early days i stopped later on but again, when you stop that or you look for the source of that in your source code as we go to later on you can release yourself so much, so much. And I, I mean, I think we've all been there where it's like we say, because, because the truth is we genuinely do want to be fit.

Like, one of the points that I make in my work a lot is I say, no one has ever come to me because they've been hit in the face with a two by four. Like the first time you get hit in the face with a two by four, you're like, that was just horrible. Like, don't ever hit me in the face with a slab of wood again. It's unequivocally bad, but the issues that I help people with, and I just got back from St. Louis, I was training global leaders and emotional power. I do a lot of work with entrepreneurs.

I do work with parents. I do work in, in marriages. So I really kind of run the gamut of human relationships is that, you know, I think we've got to. Understand that we, we don't, we don't have to be perfectly understood, but, but what happens to a lot of us is we want to, we want to be fair. We want to be connected. And so it's confusing. It's not always the easiest thing to discern. Well, where does the line between fairness? And people pleasing begin.

And so if we really want to be powerful leaders, we've got to make space to introspect. Okay, Julia, does this really feel like fairness or does this really feel like people pleasing? Does this really feel like kindness or am I really just fawning? Is this really about connection or is this really just about my ego?

And I think what happens to us leaders, whether we're leading in our homes or leading on social media or leading in our businesses is the external world is constantly calling us outward. We got to put out this fire. We got to solve this situation. We got to be in this meeting. But I think we have a responsibility if we really want to be effective leaders and also have good lives like lives that actually feel good to us to really have protected time where we are with our energy.

We are building a relationship with ourself. You know, the foundation of this work that I just did in St. Louis was really about the first five codes. It's like, yes, I understand that you guys are leading global teams. And I understand that your relationships with other people and clients and customers is so important. I totally get it. But the, the, the foundational question of leadership, the foundational question of leadership is who do I say I am?

And if I don't have a thoughtful, clear answer to that, I'm going to be in big trouble because the world will then yank me into what I need to be. there's a Tolstoy quote that i love he said that, everyone wants to change the world but nobody wants to change him or herself and. Oh my god, I got chills. Isn't that the truth? Unbelievable and that's why organizational efforts of transformation fail cause.

You have to change the leadership you have to change how they think how they collaborate etc anyway i'm gonna do it to us again. Well, I, by the way, I'm totally cool with that. We could just keep doing like I, I love talking to you. So don't, don't feel pressure. I'm happy to have the conversation go however you

Okay cool okay well i thought i thought the next code is really important build your power pattern and this is about harnessing the brains pattern detection abilities because innovation we talk about pattern recognition and how a lot of innovation and creativity is also habit formation you're trying to create new habits in your team maybe to even accept failure whatever it might be, what when you talk about in your book you talk about it in a totally different way

i love you to give context to this and then we'll get into how you can harness the brains pattern detection system. absolutely. So I, I always say, depending on my mood, it sort of frustrates me or tickles me that I think we all pay more attention to our cell phones or these days chat GPT than than the intelligent operation of the most exquisite. machine we will ever own, which is our own brain and our own nervous system. Okay, well, then that begs the question.

If I say, okay, well, the brain is a machine like my cell phone's a machine. I know what the function of the cell phone is. The point of the cell phone is to call people or text people or whatever. Okay, so what is the function of the machinery of the brain? The most useful definition I can give you for the machinery of the brain is to think of it as a pattern detection machine. So your brain is literally moving you through your life. Well, not literally yet. Hold on.

But it's effectively going apple, apple, apple, and then fill in the blank. Your brain is going to predict. It's an apple. Now, it didn't have to be an apple. It could have been a banana. It could have been a cup of water, but your brain's going to predict it's going to be an apple. This is wildly adaptive, right? So everything from, I mean, just think about all of the information. It's, it's, you can't even consciously think about it.

The amount of information that your brain is processing every day and your brain knows what to do. A classic example of this is like, we've all probably had that experience where like, We're driving home, we're on a phone call or we're listening to a podcast and we end up in our driveway and we have no idea how we got there. It's just kind of this like mental muscle energy, right? Well, here's the thing.

Okay. And this is, this is also part of code one, but it's, it's a foundational piece is your life. Your life really rises. On the energy of emotion. The meaning that you make in your life is almost entirely emotional. People really miss this piece. There's nothing in your life. I know I'm really hammering this home, but it's such a big piece. There's nothing in your life that has any meaning until you feel about it. So are you a good person? I don't know. How do you feel about it?

Have you been an effective leader? I don't know. How do you feel about it? Do people like you? Should you stay in your marriage? Should you have more kids? Should you write a book? I mean, we could go on and on. It's fundamentally determined by feeling. And also, I just want to, I want to make a really quick point here because I think it's really powerful. This is so true that I've done a Most of my research is on trauma and anxiety.

Okay. So when we take people who've been traumatized and we study them, the trauma itself is not very predictive. This is very surprising to people. The trauma itself is not very predictive of what happens to people post trauma. Okay. So the trauma itself is not very predictive of if I get, for example, PTSD.

And so what you see happen, and, and we researchers have researched this a lot, is people can be exposed to very similar traumas, childhood abuse, childhood sexual abuse, you know, combat trauma. And some people will go on to develop PTSD. And some people will go on to develop another construct we study called post traumatic growth. So it's really the emotional meaning we're making out of something that determines function. So let's go back to this idea of the brain being a pattern detector.

So my brain is really running the patterns that are really constructing my life in a meaningful way are really emotional patterns. So if I go around and again, most of this is unconscious. Until we have conversations like these, or we read energy rising, or we do the exercises, or we get a coach or whatever it is we do and really work to make it conscious. But I'm kind of moving through my life. Like things are okay. Things are okay. Things are okay. Things are okay.

And then I get a new job or a new, I launch a new podcast or I write a new, whatever. And like, it's going to be okay. Chances are very high. It's going to be okay. Or I have a pattern in me where I say, I can't get what I want. I can't get what I want. I can't get what I want. Or you can't trust people. You can't trust people. You can't trust people. And then I, I'm leading a new team or I get into a new relationship.

And lo and behold, yeah, I might get a, I might get an ups, an upswing for the first six months, but the brain's always going to calibrate to the underlying pattern. And then pretty soon I have this feeling of, you just can't trust people. See, see, I see. I, well, what, what's happening is the brain is taking the brain is now, this part, I do mean quite literally, it's taking past data that we call memories and super imposing it over the future.

So the power pattern is this idea of, and I think most of us really are not tapped in to the exquisiteness, the range, the power of the fullness of our energy. So the power pattern is this idea that I am going to calibrate. to a pattern that when I, when I say these things out loud, they like, they give me chills.

They feel like, so I work with a lot, I'll give you a couple of examples and then I'll even give you an example from my own life, I work with a lot of people who are creative and super, super creative, but what I see happen to them a lot is is in this relates to what we were talking about in code one. So you'll see how the codes thread together is they'll have a brilliant idea for a new organization or a new business or a new concept or a new book.

You can imagine creativity shows up everywhere and they'll be really excited about it and then they'll get a little bit of resistance. And maybe for example, they tell their coworkers and their coworkers are like, not that excited or worse yet, they tell their mother and their mother's face is like, or they tell their partner. And in other words, people aren't really getting it. People aren't as excited. People aren't meeting them in that energy.

And then they'll, then the entrepreneur, I'll just use that as an example. We'll start to feel like people just don't get it. And what they're, what they're really saying is what, what, what that emotional coding really is, is it's even deeper. It's like, I can't have what I want. Like people aren't going to kind of agree with me or get me, which is going to block me from really having the life I want to have. So what we have to do is we have to change cause that what's, what's happening.

And I promise this is happening is it's not the pattern is never being created. And that moment of time, the pattern is ancient and hopefully we'll get to code five and talk about early life coding. So, Maybe not today. I know, right? We'll figure it out.

But what I need to then, I need to sort of say like, okay, what pattern is at play here and how do I wanna change not the situation? The situation has like 1% of power in this. How do I change the underlying pattern? So if I can get people to say, my pattern is, I go first. And like really say that with like, like enough power where you almost give yourself chills or I say to myself, I am a pioneer or I say to myself, I am so creative.

I hold the space until other people understand that changes the game. Because if I say I am a pioneer, I go where other people have never even dreamed. You see, then when people don't understand me, I have a pattern that totally knows how to interpret it. I don't go, God, nobody here gets it. If I'm a pioneer who holds dreams that other people haven't even dreamed of yet, this gives me a lot of spaciousness and grounding, because of course they wouldn't understand it yet.

In fact, my role on the planet is to help educate people and help, help them understand what they don't yet understand about My brand of creativity, but do you see how the pattern work is really because it's either going to go What's interesting about the brain is yes, it is it is very capable of super complex functions We put rovers on Mars.

We developed calculus, but In a moment to moment basis, your brain is really conserving resources and trying to distill things down to really simple, almost primitive interpretations. This is bad. This is good. So if I meet somebody's resistance, my brain is going to push it in either one of two directions. It's either going to go, this is bad. This is dangerous. People don't like you. You should quit. Or it's going to say, This is totally normal. I know what's going on here.

I have the authority to lead this, but we've got, we've got to get into the patterns to really make this efficient enough to build momentum and then ultimately to change our lives.

I have one for you and i've never shared this so this is me taking off mask or whatever so i played professional rugby and i played for the two most successful clubs in europe Toulouse and Leinster right and when i was a kid i was. Terrible at sports. I was always last picked last picked in the playground, et cetera. So that's the, that's the pattern that was embedded at source code. If you pretty much close to source code.

And then later on, I managed to break that and I become captain of these teams. Played for my country, played for these two best clubs, but. i went to france when i was like twenty one played for a club started off great really great get into the team this time is gonna be different get in really really highly successful either don't get selected.

Or get injured then get back into the game join a different club do it again pattern again pattern again and it happened time and time again and when i look back on it because the life cycle of sport is so compressed, you can see the pattern more clearly and i would i would do introspection ago.

What was that about was it really i was getting injured or was i seeking an injury in some way to try and, not have to deal with the pain or the potential pain or the predicted pain by my brain of not getting selected so it was easier to just be injured and i've often question that i go, I'd love to find out and maybe i won't find out till i pass on i can see the bigger picture etc fact that you're even raising the question, I think, is really interesting and really insightful.

Like, what do you have a feeling about it? oh yeah well i look back and i look back i've had it i mean from from where i came from, which was not zero would've been like minus twenty i have an incredibly successful career. Played paid well for ten years but the story i have created as you said like post traumatic growth story is actually it's why i do what i do today and i love what i do today i'm very very lucky. What when i look back on that period of my life.

There's just an uneasy feeling in my stomach about it that could i have done better could i have managed the mental part and i write about it my own book that's why i i am so intrigued with learning about this because i want to understand how the brain works i want to understand what is the patterns or was it just, serendipity was it just the way it was supposed to be in order to for me to do what i do today now i've accepted that our story but i still have this uneasy feeling when i look back,

1st of all, thank you so much for sharing that. I thought that was such a powerful story and precisely embodies. what we're talking about and why this work is so powerful and so transformative.

But I think too, it's like, we forget, we forget how extraordinarily powerful we are. You know, this is a little bit of a, of a dovetail, but I think it's worth making. So I, I went. Like I said, I just got back from St. Louis. I was training these global leaders and you know, I'm there, I'm doing a leadership training. And I was like, one of the things I always think about is because the brain is a pattern detector. We, the brain habituates.

There are 57, 000 books on Amazon alone with the word, just the word leadership in its title. And then you think about books like the seven habits of highly effect. Like that doesn't even have leadership in it. So it's like, Leadership, leadership, leadership, leadership. So it's like, we forget that the extraordinary energy that we're really talking about. So what I was like, okay, I'm going to change this up. Forget the word leadership.

I want you to understand what we're really talking about here. What we are talking about here is the creation force. We are talking about the energy of creation. And if I am a leader, a man, managers are wonderful and frankly, totally essential too. I think a lot of times we think like, Oh, everyone, like managers help people do what they already know they need to do. Super essential. But leadership is really about the I am energy. I am the one who builds a movement based on emotional power.

I am the one who builds a movement based on belonging. I am the, so it really is this creation energy. I heard this, this story the other day, and it's really just stuck with me. So Robert Frost was writing about the fine, the founding fathers of the United States. And he said, the founding fathers of the United States didn't believe in democracy. They didn't believe in it. They believed in to democracy.

In other words, they took their energy, their imaginations, their fears, their hopes, their ideas, their creativity, which is literally neurologic energy and breathed it, believed it into being and created a form of government that had not been that the world had never seen until that point.

So I think what happens to a lot of us is we forget that we are wildly powerful meaning makers. So when you, when you go back to that story of your career and that you've had a tremendous amount of success across domains, it's like, what is the meaning you want to make out of that moment? Similarly, when I've been traumatized, No one is debating. Trauma is always horrific. I want to be very clear about this and very careful.

So even people who go on to have post traumatic growth, they will say, I work with people who have lost their, their children. Their children have been kidnapped. I mean, the most horrific things you can ever possibly imagine. And they're not. So, so the idea of trauma is always horrific. That's what trauma definitionally means, but there still is always an opportunity for trauma. to create meaning. Why? Because the brain is a meaning making machine.

And what our meaning is constrained though by what? By patterns. So if I fundamentally have an emotional code that says I can't get what I want, there's never enough for me. How about this one? I work with, and I'm sure you've seen this too, I work with people who have been extraordinarily successful by conventional measures. But if they have a code that says I'm not enough, They could have millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. They could have a good family.

They could have lots of exciting vacations and houses and they still feel what? That it's not enough. Why? Because the emotional code which creates meaning is saying this is not enough. So, so that the imperative to really work if we're leaders and frankly, we're all leading our own life. If we want a good life, we've got to understand how to work intelligently with emotion.

You know, the, the word Abracadabra, the word actually is an Aramaic word and it means I create it as I speak, that's what the word actually means. And I often think about the power of words like spelling, that word actually means like to cast a spell and all the ancient civilizations say. The power of words you have to be very very careful what you say mean, so, okay, we've, we could like talk for an eternity. All right.

But here's the other thing too, is like, you can put people in a scanner and just say words, not like, not a context, not pictures, not a story, just words. And then words that are classically positive and classically negative produce different neurochemical reactions. Have you read hidden messages of water that book about the water but speaking to water the studies that it because people think this is all.

Are you sure my god it's so powerful if you just look at on youtube i'll share a link for audience as well it's essentially this japanese research passed away but he had two sets of water and one set of water, was spoken to and listen to meditative music it was told i love you people it was prayed over the other side of water was abused.

Adjust my words and then they froze the water and they looked at the pattern like that like almost like a nice snowflake pattern and the water that was spoken negatively to the patterns were chaotic. And no coherence and the other patterns were beautiful. They made these beautiful crystalline shapes. Well, the thing that it makes me think about is like, so first of all, like the human body is a total miracle, right?

It's like, how are we, how is consciousness even, I mean, I know that we're all thinking about this in our own way, like how is it even possible that we're all here? But the human brain is 95 percent water. It's like, what? Like how, like I look at a lake or I go to an ocean or I have a shower or whatever. It's like, how does that become the overwhelming majority of human consciousness? It's just like, it's so, uh, just so inspirational. So curious.

You have so many questions, but that's such a powerful example that you gave. going to run out of time, but maybe, maybe we'll just wrap a code two or only to go to, I was like.

Maybe we'll get to four today, maybe, but we'll just do it because you need to add in five minutes, but I'll send you that because they did the same thing with sound so they wasn't just words it was sound and sound does the same to sound it makes it into these patterns, are there all those geometric patterns that you would see in like stained glass windows etc they're actually for that reason they're actually.

These these patterns that happen through the positive patterns essentially i'll send it on. But i was thinking about my pattern that i look back and saw and like going what the heck was that about but one that's more pervasive is one that you address and that's like i join a company. I do well for a while and then it's too stressful my co workers are annoying they won't accept my innovations whatever it might be on the move from job to job to job.

You blame the company and you're the common denominator and that is something that i see a lot with people or else they'll, accept that they'll persist with the job and go through but they're miserable and i'd love you to share, addressing that how would you dress that maybe that be our final final share for today So, yeah, and I, I think the, what we, what you just said about words and like the power of words, I think this is all gonna flow together really beautifully.

So what happens for a lot of us, I always say, um, I can boil all of my work down. And again, I really work, I think one of the most. things that I feel the most grateful for in terms of my own career is just the diversity of people that I work with. So again, CEOs, C suite, global leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, family run businesses, parents, couples, like, and all, I can distill all of that work down to really one question.

And that one question is, How do I get these people around me who matter a lot to me to be different? And what they're really saying is to be more motivated, to be more agreeable, to be more cooperative, to be more engaged, to live, I mean, you could go on and on, right? So how do I get these people around me who matter a lot to me? Because if they didn't matter a lot, like I'm not having this conversation about like somebody that I met at the grocery store, right?

Just because I don't, I don't need that relationship. Well, here's the answer. You can't. You can't make other people have, have a different emotional or behavioral experience. Okay, so what's really happening here? Well, what's happening here is I'm starting to feel. So the, the true, the true question, so people will say, for example, let's use the classic one, the classic one happens in the couple. How do I get my, uh, How do I get my spouse to be different?

Okay, but the, but the real question, or how do I get my child to be different is actually stated. The more honest question is how do I get this person to be different so that I don't have to feel feelings inside of my own body that I don't want to feel? Because if there wasn't that feeling of frustration or rejection or fear or Disappointment. I really wouldn't have a problem with your behavior. So what I have to get leaders to really understand is how we change emotion.

Because it's totally not hopeless. In fact, I think it's a very hopeful story. We just have to understand how nervous systems and brains work. So, we are herd animals. Which means we co regulate to the energy of each other and emotions are an energy and we transact this energy They're almost contagious.

We catch people's emotions the way we catch colds Now you've already had this happen a million times because you've been in a perfectly woke up in a perfectly good mood And then you get on a call with somebody or you see somebody that's got a sour puss on their face and like Your energy just sinks like a lead balloon The alternative is true, right? Where like I walk into a room where people are laughing hysterically. I don't even know what they're laughing about. And I start to laugh.

So there's all these examples from our own life where we catch feelings. Okay. So then the question is.

What I really need to do if I want to change the culture, the emotional climate in my house, on my team, on social media is I, and I, I'm, I say that I am powerful, I have to say, how do I become the emotional standard? How do I set the emotional energy in this dynamic? Cause what we're actually doing, if we look close enough is if when other people are not inspired. What's happening? I start to feel frustrated. I see this all the time in, on teams.

Okay. The leaders are upset because their, their, their teams aren't engaged. How are you doing? Like, honestly, how are you doing? And they're like, we're stressed. We're irritated. We're afraid. I've had people break down, but you know, behind closed doors to me, like I'm so stressed out. Well, the whole thing is it really doesn't matter. The words that you say It matters. The matters, the energy with which you say them, right? So I can go out to somebody and say, Hey, Aiden, I'm really sorry.

I hurt your feelings. But if I'm like, sorry, sorry, like my kids like my kids say to each other yeah, exactly. Exactly. You're like, well, I heard those words, but that did not feel anything like an actual apology, right? So yeah, you might be out there like saying all the right things to your team or to your kids or to your partner, but what is the real emotional energy you're doing it with? And so then the question is like, okay.

First step one is like, okay, I've been focusing too much on you. I still want to, I still want to repair this dynamic. We'll get to that. But let me, okay, I'm frustrated. Okay, what do I want to feel? I want to feel more inspired. Okay, well, how do we get you there? I want to feel more trusting. Like, I think what happens to a lot of leaders is they get very clenched, and they start to overwork and overcommunicate and overthink and overanalyze.

And when you ask them, like, what's going on, it's really because they're scared. Well, what is the antidote to fear? The antidote to fear, and we'll get to this when we finally talk about Code 4, the antidote to fear is really trust. It's actually not more doing and explaining and working and thinking and fun. It's actually trust. So people will say like, so I'll say like, how do you trust yourself and tell me all the ways you, you fail to trust yourself. And it can be really small.

Like, okay, I said I was going to get up this morning at 5 30 and work out and I didn't. Okay, there was a meeting I really wanted to be at, but like, I kind of didn't feel like I belonged, so I didn't show up. There was an idea I had with my co workers, but I kept my mouth shut, because like, I just didn't think that everybody was going to understand. So in all of those moments, I've really given myself reason. Not to trust myself. Now you might think that this is too far afield.

Like, Hey, Julia, I just told you, like my team isn't engaged. And now you're talking to me about ways I don't trust them. This is the way. And if you commit to this way, the change in the relationship happens at an exponentially. But we, we gotta, if I start to become more relaxed in my leadership, if I start to become more inspired because the whole reason I want to say these, this idea to my coworkers, because it's a really cool idea, but now I keep my mouth shut.

Well, in process of keeping my mouth shut, I'm now like, Not moving the company in the direction that I want. I'm not inspired. I'm not engaged. So it's like when I start to allow myself to tap into the fullness of my own energy, I then become the living energetic standard that other people are going to gravitate towards. And I would encourage your listeners to do this. Think for this is a little exercise.

Maybe we can kind of end here is like I want you to think for a moment about a leader who you loved. It could be a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a current boss, a spiritual, I don't care, a spiritual leader, whatever. And I want you to think like what really made me so magnetized to that person and what I can promise. Is that that person was not all up in your business about who you needed to be. They were not trying to micromanage you. They were not sanctimonious.

They were not constantly panicking about small things. They were not super clenched and super triggered. And every time you talk to them, you worried if they were going to be a little bit volatile. What almost happens, , is people start to say many, even though their leaders are very, very different, that when you just start to say the emotional words that describe them, there's a lot of convergence. This person had a lot of integrity to the work. Like they, they really lived the work.

This person was really calm. There was a groundedness to them. This person was really humble. We have the recipe. You want people to follow you? You want more influence? You would literally have the recipe. Just think about leaders in your old life who you wanted to follow. And what you're going to see is there's probably leaders across domains. In other words, it's not someone who is an expert in math. You know, it's not someone who's like an expert in neuroscience.

You can see across fields, across domains, there's things that magnetize you. That's the recipe. How do I be more poised? How do I be more forgiving? How do I be more aligned with, with the mission of the work that I do?

If I start to become those things, and now I'm getting into code six and seven, so we're getting a little, I start to become what I call a magnetic leader. And magnetic leaders are the most unstoppable force on the planet because human beings actually want to be connected to other people. There's a neurobiological drive for connection. They just do not want to be coerced or controlled. There's a neurobiological drive for independence, right? So people reject coercion and control.

If I am really on fire, on energetic fire for my thing, People are not going to be able to get enough of it because I become the living evidence for the thing that other people want the most, which is what? Access to their own power. i'll tell you one thing because i know you need to go. My son, I taught my son this when he was young, so he was only 10 and he was mad into Batman and bats, right? And he said to me, when I explained to him, you get back what you give out.

So it was explaining about energy and the law of the frequency, how you give it a frequency and you get back that frequency, the law of vibration. And he said to me, Oh, just like echolocation with bats. that they give it this frequency and it comes back and it gives them a shape of seeing the world and i was like, stunned looking at him exactly son i'm so

That's from the mouth of babes it was an absolute pleasure again and i'd love to do part three julia will, We should. If this is, yeah, we'll, we'll get through Energy Rising eventually. It really is a phenomenal book. I, it's really been so moving , so thank you for having me to talk about this. I love hearing about your experience. It's been great getting to know i'm julia for people who want to find you where is the best place. I, , hang out on social media these days, like everybody.

So I am at Dr. Julia Digangi on LinkedIn, Dr. Julia Digangi on Instagram. And then I'm just Julia Digangi on Facebook. And then you could also join my newsletter, which is Dr. Julia Digangi on Substack. Brilliant i link to all those things don't forget i have a copy of this brilliant book up for grabs author of energy rising the neuroscience of leading with emotional power julia Digangi, thank you for joining us Thank you so much for having me