Srini Pillay

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Dr Shriney Play, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and

invited faculty at Harvard Business School. He graduated with the highest number of awards during his residency training at Harvard, and his latest book is Life Unlocked. Seven Revolutionary lessons to overcome fear. Here's the interview. Hi Shriny, Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, it's a it's a pleasure to have you on. I'm I'm fascinated by a lot of the work that you're doing in the neuroscience field and tying that to both how

we function in our lives and in the business world. Yeah, and it's a it's a huge passion of mine, um the neuroscience itself, but really also because I think it's a it's important for me from a human behavioral perspective.

I think it's the thing I'm most I'm most enjoying about neuroscience right now is that everybody has a brain, and so it doesn't really matter what you're doing, you know, whether it relates to corporations or your own life, for food or fashion of the arts, the brain is relevant. And so I think for me, because I myself have had such a diverse range of interests, it is particularly exciting for me to be able to apply the brain science to a number of different fields. Yet it is

a fascinating, very fascinating topic. I might debate that everybody has a brain. If you look to your right to my co host here, but UM got it, got it insulted from time to time. So so our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery, love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks, and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off and ask you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you're doing. I think I think a lot, So I think from a

from a number of different perspectives. I think I can relate this to my own life and related to the people I work with. Maybe I'll tell you a little bit about the work that I'm doing, because I think we're just about to let the world know what we're actually doing, because the website doesn't really tell people what

we're doing. Uh So, my my background is in brain science, UM and in psychiatry, and what I've done is started a company called Neuro Business Group that's really dedicated to helping people overcome the psychological obstacles using targeted methods and brain science so that they can live happier and more productive lives. And we're using these methods in corporation. So we have Energy Corporate, but we also have a self help division. We have an education division where we're working

with kids and with teachers. We have a lifestyle and Culinary division where we're working with food and fashion, and we have an arts division as well. And we have products and services in these different divisions that relate very much to this parable in terms of what you're feeding people, you know, and what we're feeding ourselves over time. So I'll give you a brief answer first and see which

direction you'd like to move the conversation. I think, okay, you know, in my own life, I think that probably the thing that I've most been inspired by is a sense of possibility. And you know, for a number of different reasons. I think a large part of it was just the lovingness of the family that I grew up with. I really believed in a in a very expensive sense of possibility, and so I fed that wealth a lot um.

And what that means is, when you decide to feed the wolf of possibility, you're also deciding that it's okay if you fail, it's okay if you're wrong, it's okay if you were just being delusional about something. Because I think as soon as you get information along your course, along the path, you can redirect yourself to the destination that you want to get to. So from from the highest level, I think it's really feeding the world possibility that I think was a very positive thing for me.

I think in my work with people, um, you know what, what I've noticed is that my own limitations have also informed some of the work that I've had with people. So for example, I worked in a brain imaging lab at Harvard UM and still affiliated with Harvard, and you know, I learned a lot working there for seventeen years. But I think one of the worlds that I've fed that was negative for me is that I questioned and over

questioned my desire to be an entrepreneur. And as a result, I stayed in that lab for seventeen years rather than leaving earlier. And while I fully appreciate and I've leveraged that disadvantage because I, you know, I aren't a lot in the time and the extra time I spent there,

I don't necessarily think that that was necessary. And so the way that I like to use both of those examples is when I work with people, I really like to help them connect with the ability to feed a sense of possibility and also to not feed the wolf of fear. Um. And so because I used to direct

the anxiety to sort of service, um. You know, a lot of my background experience is really in helping people figure out what to do about this wolf of fear because it's such an intimidating wolf, in part because that wolf is problematic when you see it, meaning when it's conscious,

but it's also problematic when it's unconscious. Yeah, let me let me let's explore that a little bit more, because I that's one of the things I picked up in your work that I thought was really interesting was you talk about obviously, you know, if I see a snake, I feel afraid, and I know I'm afraid, But you talk a lot about and and you can go into the science of it out how we are are amigila, which is a part of our brain that registers fear is registering fear often that we're not even aware of,

and that that takes a toll on us in a lot of ways that we don't know about. So could you could you expand on that should so you know there are a number of different The way we study the phenomenon is we ask people to lie in a brain imaging scanner and then we show while they're lying down, we show them images of fear or threat, and then we look at what happens to the brain when they're looking at that image and what happens when they're not

looking at it. Now, if you show someone an image for thirty to fifty milliseconds, they're going to know that they saw that. And so when they look at that, what we see is that the amygdala, the anxiety center of the brain, lights up. So that teaches us that conscious fear, you know, anything you're afraid of, whether you're afraid that you may not make the mortgage, whether you're afraid that you're not going to be able to live long enough to see your grant, or whether you're a

raid that life's just going to be meaningless and purposelessly. Whatever, these conscious fears are actually activate the avngela. However, if you show someone a picture for ten to thirty milliseconds, that's really not long enough for the brain to register it, so that you know that consciously, and so when you actually think about that, you know when when when you actually show someone a face for ten to thirty milliseconds,

they have no idea that they've seen that face. And usually we quickly follow that with a neutral expression and four hundred and fifty milliseconds and we'll ask people what did you see, and they'll say, I saw a neutral face, so they have no awareness that they've seen the fearful face of the threatening face. However, when we look in

the brain, this actually activates the amantella as well. In fact, the amantella is so sensitive that even in people who are blind, people in whom the seeing center is actually knocked out in the brain these people, if you show them a fearful and threatening face, the amygdala lights up as well. And the reason that happens is that that fear enters the eye, it activates the anxiety center, but

it doesn't get interpreted by the seeing brain. So what these experiments tell us is that even when we're not aware of fear, it still activates the amigdala. And so what a lot of studies have shown is that a lot of us have had early life experiences that we associate with fear. You know, maybe a certain kind of person, a certain kind of location, spiders, I mean, the whole They all kinds of associations that we make. And these associations are like lifelong relationships for a lot of people

because they form really tightly. And as soon as you get anything, any exposure to anything that reminds you of it, you actually activate the amygdala as well. So people obviously the fear is unconscious, so it's not like your to yourself, You're saying, hey, I thing, I've got unconscious fear. You know, that's a problem. What we can do is infer that we have unconscious fear because the amygdala, or the anxiety center of the brain connects to the thinking center of

the brain. So in that center that's where we think, where we make decisions, where we innovate, you know, in that center is that there are connections directly with the amygdala. So when you have unconscious fear, it it activates the amygdala and it starts to disrupt the earthquakes, there sends after shocks to the frontal lobe where you're thinking, and so as a result, you're not able to decide, assess,

to risk, innovate. And so what you generally find is you hit a wall, or you find that you're making the same mistake over and over again, or you find that you just can't figure out you know, what's happening and so, or you find that that you just feel like you're stuck somewhere along the way. So when you when you have these sense nations, one of the things that this research teaches us is rather than trying to think yourself through it, reflect on the possibility that unconscious

fear exists and then try to reverse that. And there a whole lot of ways that we have that we that we help people institute in order to reverse that by directly accessing the amygdala, the frontal lobe through a series of exercises, which I'm happy to tell you about if you're interested. Sure, So let me see if I if I if I can summarize that you're saying that we in our lives, we bump up against situations that are frightening for us. They trigger something in us we're

not consciously aware of it. It triggers the amygdala, and that then is interfering with our overall effectiveness. It's making our our inability to think clearly and make decisions. Uh, is being hindered by that, even though we're not aware of it, and it's triggered in in these situations you describe where we sort of run into the same barriers, there's something in those situations that's triggering that fear. Is that a pretty good summary of what we just talked about. Absolutely, Yeah,

that's exactly it. So I guess let's let's talk a little bit about how do you what's a good way to recognize that you you alluded to it a little bit about when we find ourselves stuck in the same situations. Maybe you could just spend another minute on ways to identify, and then let's go into some of the things people could do to once say, if they think that's what's happening, how do you work on something that you're not even

conscious of is happening. So so, the overarching concept is what I've mentioned, which is that if you find that you're hitting a wall in your life with anything, you just can't make headway with your work. You can't make headway in relationships, you're finding that you're feeling stuck, or you're finding that you're making the same mistake over and over again. You it's really wise to suspect that there's

unconscious fear and trying to change that. So in my own practice, I have a therapy practice and a coaching practice. What I'll find is, you know, if I'm working with CEOs, they'll be unable to hit their quarterly targets um you know, over and over again, even though at a logical level, they feel like they're trying to, they're doing everything they need to do to get there, and so they can

really see where they're going wrong. And at that point we start to bring up this notion of you know, there's something going on under the radar that could be impacting you. You know, when it comes to a in my in my therapy practice, there are a lot of different things, like you know, for example, people will indulge in risky behavior, you know, sexual behavior, substances, things that they don't even necessarily want to do consciously, and they

know the advantages and disadvantages. They can say it out loud, but then all of a sudden between sessions, they come in and they're like, I don't know what I was doing. I was just surfing the net. I was thinking, Hey, I'm just gonna chill out. And the next thing I knew I was involved in the situation. And I was like, oh man, how did I get involved? I hated doing it, I hated getting there. I hated everything about it, and

I felt like I couldn't stop. And so we could just take the approach of well, let's go there and try to have the cognition like you think yourself through it. But if you just say that generically, it's not that helpful. So in terms of how you can help people through the situation, we've developed a paradigm and they're you know, it's a very big issue, but I'll just sort of

mentioned one of the brief things we do. We developed a paradigm that we defined by the mnemonic circuit see I, R, C, A, and each of those letters stands for something, and each is based on a tremendous amount of research that shows that you can actually reinstate the balance in the anxiety center and in the thinking center to help you manage this differently. The first scene stands for chunking. So a lot of times people are overwhelmed by a task that

they have at hand. You know, you know, oh, my god, how am I gonna get my personal life to together, get my work life together, and get all the stuff together. And so when you present your brain with so much information, your brain freaks out. And so part of what we teach people is how to break information up into smaller pieces so that they can actually chunk it and feed the brain in a way that that makes sense. So you don't in that case. You know, it's another metaphor

for feeding in the world. You're not just taking a whole big chunk of something and saying, here, you eat it. You're basically saying, okay, let me cut this up indigestible so you can actually eat that. So the eye stands for ignore, which is ignore mine chatter. And you know all of us talk about feeding wolves. You know, we all have these mental constructs and ideas about who we are and my good and my bad and my guilty. Should have done that? Should I not have done that?

What's the right thing, what's the wrong thing? I mean, at any one point in time, humans have all these ideas floating around in their heads. And so one of the things we've learned through mindfulness is that if you focus simply on the breath rather than listening to that story, the brain just makes up stories all the time, and we tend to believe those stories when those stories are not even real. So the eye basically helps you to bring your focus back to your breath, and as a practice,

that can be really helpful. Yeah, we are. The episode we released just yesterday is a guest Dan Harris, who's ABC News correspondent, and he wrote a book called ten Percent Happier and it talks about meditation. But he originally wanted the title of the book to be the voice in my head as an asshole, which is uh, you know, which in the book is very much right, Like you've gotta disidentify from from those constant that chatter that doesn't

doesn't that is so habitual and doesn't mean anything. Yeah, and you know, it could be anything from sort of like just the worst things you because your brain just comes up with all kinds of things about you, So you know, it can be like really, it can be somebody trying to recover from a hangover and they get up on a Monday morning like, oh man, I'm a horrible person, Like what did I do? And said, well, I don't do anything, but just feel like a really

bad person because your brain is sort of withdrawing. It doesn't like what's going on, and so it starts creating these narratives. So learning how to quiet down those narratives

is a is a really important thing. The third is reality check, which is essentially this too shall pass, and it's about reminding people that when you're in the midst of a catastrophe, you often feel like, oh my God, like everything you know, the sky is going to fall down, so part of and it's obvious when you're not in the catastrophe, of course it's going to pass, but when you're caught up in that storm of fear, it often

feels like it's gonna last forever. And so teaching people to remind themselves that this too shall pass the reality

check can be really helpful. The fourth thing is a control check, and it's really about reminding yourself that that's like the serenity prayer, which is essentially that the stuff you can control the stuff you can't control, and rather than feeling like you've got to control the whole ocean, try to figure out how to serve the waves, because life really is too complex to try to control every

single element of it. And so once you can try to figure out what you're going to be surfing and how you're going to be surfing, it it life actually takes on a very different kind of field to it. And the last is attentional shift. The ace for attentional shift, and what that is is about what you're feeling. Because a lot of people will tend to you know, when you when you were afraid, it actually biases your your frontal lobe or your thinking brain to look for threat.

So you're always looking over your shoulder. You're always trying to figure out what's going to get me next. And the brain has like a flashlight, which is the intentional center, and it's always placing this flashlight on threat or essentially feeding any kind of threat stimulus. So you've got to really train your brain to spend a certain amount of time looking at other stuff. You know, Distraction, just as a pure technique, has been shown to reinstate the balance

in the amygdala and in the front of you. So I think one of the things you teach people is you know, if you really want to be miserable, it's very easy to be miserable, and you just have to look at the news or look at how many people are suffering in the world. There are good logical reasons to be miserable for your entire life. So, you know, one of the things I like to say to people is you have to create some kind of balance that

you feel. And my balance, I don't mean, you know, perfectly instated, but some kind of measure of time where you say, I'm gonna think of good stuff and I'm gonna think of good stuff, not because I'm not gonna force myself to say life's amazing and I'm a positive being and I've got what I sometimes refer to as yoga age, which is like, I'm so angry, but I'm gonna smile and I'm gonna be like that self possessed. It's sort of like, you know, I'm really self at Wow,

it's really great to meet you. And then the undertone is like and I hate you and I hate my life. So you know, when you force yourself to do that kind of thing, it's not that helpful. So it's just about saying, listen, you know, I'm awake for x the number of hours. If I think only of problems, it's just it's just not going to be feeding my brain bad stuff. So why don't I actually think about stuff I like to think about or do that makes me

feel good? And that's what the a's for. So those five things actually have a lot of research backing them up that show that that when you're having this unconscious fear or and you don't know it and what's happening is you're not able to make good decisions and you're stuck in your life, just trying that out can actually really help you. And so that's one of the ways in which we start to tell people to think about it. But there's a lot more about it that we can

talk about. I think you might have just summarized thirty two episodes of our show in uh in a five letter acronym there, because those topics, those themes come up over and over and over as we talk to guests, you know, thinking about where am I, what am I thinking about? UM, what are the actions I'm taking? You know, breaking those actions down, taking action even we don't feel like if those things come up over and over, that's a Really that's a really great, great acronym. So what

do you see? Are you able to see a lessoning and unconscious fear? Have you taken this back through the brain scans and see that these techniques what they're doing to to decrease that that unconscious fear. Yes, there's been a ton of research that's been done to look at this. And what happens is the amygdala basically gets quietened down and then the frontal lobe start having blood redirected towards it so that it can do what it's supposed to do.

So that's sort of two of the major things that happen. The when the mindfulness stuff also turns on what we call the default mode network, which is really something I call the purring center of the brain. It's just usually a couple of different regions that are connected that are always of purring, and when you focus, it turns that stuff off. But when you have this mindfulness, it turns it back on. You become more creative, you find creative solutions.

So I would say that among the different changes, uh, it's really sending blood back to the frontal lobe, decreasing the activation in the amygdala, and then you know, turning this this creativity center back on with the mound, with the mindfulness, so that you can start to find solutions that you want to find. One of the things that you said in your book that I really liked, and I think it's important to these things because we we're certainly a culture that wants five easy tips to never

be a rate again. Right, And and you taught you've got a line that says making a positive effort one time will not suffice to overcome the evolutionary priority the brain gives to fear. So I think you're getting it. A couple of things. They're one is maybe you could talk to us about why the brain prioritizes fear, what you mean by the evolutionary priority, and then then expand on that idea that this isn't a one time thing.

So so essentially the fundamental wiring of the brain is constructed in a way to help us survive, so we have all these survival circuits and and part of the reason it's so hyper sensitive to threat is because from an evolutionary standpoint, when there were while animals rolling around and there was so much more that was unknown and so much more exposure our survival circuits is to help us. But keeping these survival circuits at that level of tension

in today's environment is overkilled. And so a lot of times what happens is is people still have this this kind of wiring in place, but but they're not able to to to do anything about it. And sometimes someone will take something like circle and just do it once and say, yeah, I guess it was kind of helpful and that was that. But you know, the wiring in the brain is pretty sort of well cemented. The bad

news is that it's really hard to change. The good news is that you can, and we're finding increasingly that you can actually rewire the brain. In fact, things like mindfulness, for example, actually change the gray matter and white matter in the brain. So we don't we actually know that that you can change this. But repetition of these positive habits, repetition of feeding the stuff you need to feed, is reelly what is so critical in trying to change behavior.

Having said that, you know, there are there a number of caveats, and maybe I'll mention one at this point because sometimes but are frustrated by this approach because they feel like, you know, I don't even have time to think, you know, the fear just comes out of nowhere and I'm freaking out, and then I'm not going to be like, well, let me try to chunk this up, and then why don't I just try to do a reality check or control check. And we now know that cognitive regulation, which

is basically controlling thought, fails the stress test. So if you have some kind of background, so if you had a fight with a partner or spouse, if you just open your email box and you're freaking out because you could tend like terrible messages, trying to then go into this five step procedure can be really difficult because your

brains already you know, figuratively on fire. So in that case, probably the only taking the want to turn to is the eye, which is the mindfulness piece, because we call that bottom up anxiety, and bottom up anxiety can actually

get worse when you try to control your thinking. So if the anxiety builds up as a result of something, you're not sure, I'm sure if you're gonna get fired if you have, you know, once this builds up, you can use these regulations strategies like circle, But if it comes out of nowhere, then then you want to actually start with something like mindfulness. Nevertheless, you're connected with your question.

You really, regardless of what you do, you want to make it a repetitive practice so that you can rewire your brain through that repetition. So that's that's excellent. Let me go back to what you just said there right before that, which was around the term I've heard used is when you get flooded, when you're when you're flooded, you're no longer capable of good cognitive thought. Your brain is but you know, the logic center is is out

of whack. And so what you're saying is when that happens, going to the mindfulness thing, going to some sort of breathing exercise is the way, because you're not going to be able to talk yourself out of rationally at once you're at that flooded point, right absolutely, And so mindfulness and other kinds of if you're gonna do a cognitive exercise, then probably what you want to do is something like acceptance, which again, you know, I mean some of these words

they kind of make you when a put because they're like, you know, what are you gonna do? Like let's find ourselves like accepting ourselves and so it makes you feel so annoyed because you feel like you have to be some kind of asthetic or spiritual advisor walking around the mountain.

And so it's actually that what I will say to it was a good first step is to actually say, you know what's going on and what are what are my expectations from my human self because a lot of times this ideal that we're constructing our heads really doesn't exist. And so, you know, I really believe in excellence in our life, but I think that perfection is a real problem. It makes you slam on the brakes all the time, and so your whole life becomes one jerky episode after another.

And sometimes you just want to go through the bad traffic and you know you'll you'll figure a way out at the end of that. So part of what I say to people is, if you're not in the mood to, you know, take your attentional flashlight and place it in your breath. And frankly, some people find that just weird. You know. Part of what I would say to them is, well, let's just think about what you think you should be doing. Like, you just got twenty emails that were bad. They're freaking

you out. You know, you're a sensible human being. Like if you looked at that and you were like, wow, I feel so happy that I got like twenty horrible emails, you might even be concerned about a person like that. So, you know, I think that if we can learn a greater degree of self acceptance and we can learn that this, that that the most we can do is to really proceed through life in an active way, know the things

we know, and do the best we can. I think that's a huge first step rather than saying, listen, I gotta be in control of this, and why am I not in control of this? And I think part of the problem is that a lot of public appearances are all about people saying how I conquered this and how I got through that, and and you know, you look at Facebook, not to depress anybody's sort of like, oh yeah, you know, this is me at the party. I was looking so happy. I mean, people like, what's wrong with

my life? But nobody actually has a life like that. And so you know what I say to people is just you know, reframe that, gentle. I think the big thing here is really you know, when when you when I saw the parable and I was thinking about the wealth. You know, part of my own insanity of the brain is that I just like love the brain. And when I look at people, one of the big issues is that they're not kind to the wolf that is the brain.

They're just hard. They're like, listen, I should have done that. Nobody's saying don't be disciplined. Nobody's saying don't want the best. Nobody saying don't try use effort. But you can do that in a kinder way towards yourself. And I find that in my own practice, even a lot of people who have stopped destructive behaviors still hate themselves, and that hatred shows up in the form of something else in

some other way. And so I think the kindness piece being kind to what to yourself and your brain really doesn't matter in the long hole. I agree. I think a lot of times, if if I would never talk to other people sometimes the way that I talked to myself. Um. And I think that there's this idea that if we are hard on ourselves that that will drive better behavior, although almost all the studies seem to show that doesn't really work, that that you know, hammering yourself all the

time does not not produce the needed change. Um. One of the things that you um you talked about that I wanted to go back to there is you mentioned the idea of stop and start and worried about being wrong. And I've heard you say before that we'll do an edit here because I can't find it for a second, but I'll make it sound like you know what you're doing. Yeah, that would be. That's why you're here. Oh here, it

is all right, you um. One of the things that you say that is important in a line, I like you say move before you know it's okay, which I think ties very much to that idea of perfectionism or expecting to always get it right. You've also talked about how much more creative you're able to be and how much more likely you can hit your goals if you're willing to admit or if you're willing to be wrong, and I think those things tie together. You want to

lead us through some more of that. Sure. In fact, the next book that I'm writing this show is all about that. So it's cool that you picked up in that particular sort of subject um. A couple of different things. So one is that we often assume that we get to where we want to get to because we know how to get there, partly because we conveniently forget all the times that we were lost. So a lot of successful people will say, oh, the way you do this is you go to A through A B, C, D

O E and you get to the end. But you know, I'll often say to business people, if I gave you Steve Jobs this entire business plan, like every single concrete step that he took, do you think you could build Apple? And most people would say no, of course not, because there are ineffable things that have not been reported. So a lot of times simple action can be the highest form of intelligence you can give yourself. Sometimes thought is

not enough. So the first thing I would say is, when you're stuck thinking, remember that you can try out something. Start with the low risk, move see what's going on, and then move on. Now, the basis of this is really from something that there's a concept it's called tinkering, which is essentially, you know some of the theories around evolution, So teach us that the body has always you know, the body existed and then the environment had certain signals

and then the body had to adapt to that. So you know, if you're in a high altitude place, your your body has to adapt to figure out how to breathe in that environment. And so the body takes in information and it keeps on changing some it tinkers with it until you can get to the next stage. Now, if you have no action and you're waiting for some nirvana to sort of land on you, then it can

lead to nowhere. But if you take one step forward towards your destination, you are one step forward or you're going towards something where you're gonna learn that you're wrong. Standing still doesn't really get you anywhere. So I think that particular line is really about when you make a move before you know. There are a couple of things

that could be helpful. One is what we call preemptive perception, just sort of everyday intuition, which is that the aim often registers what you need to do before you know

what to do consciously. So if you have some kind of hunch that you need to go somewhere and it's not some majorly dangerous thing, you can actually move towards that, and you can move towards that and and say, well, you know, I wonder where this takes me also a lot of times when we first start moving towards something, we learned something along the way, Like you know, a lot of times I'll come across college students will say I have no idea what to do, Like I just

have no idea. And they're expecting that all along from their first year. They're expecting that when they get to their major and the major in biology, that they're actually gonna want to be a biologist. But they graduate and they're like, you know, I don't really like biology, and I don't really want to be in a lab, and I don't know what to do with this. I kind of want to play guitar. And so it's like, well, you know, what's my biology degree going to do for me?

And then they'll they'll stay in this intellectualized position where they'll be like thinking about the what's my why? What's the connection? Should I leave? Wasn't rather than figuring out the context in which to play guitar and then playing it. And then once you do that, you may actually find

that something comes to you. And so what I will often say to people is that our stuck nous often lies in our intellect, but we are born with the motor cortex, and we are born with the capacity to act, and we have the capacity for intuition, and that life is sometimes most effectively run with constant course correction. And

that requires a number of competencies. You know. It requires self forgiveness, It requires tolerance of mistakes, It requires failing more than you succeed, and it requires really reaching for the big winds so that even if you fail a hundred times, the big wind is where you will end up. I believe a lot in just getting started, in just

doing something in an end. I've seen a lot of people who are waiting until circumstan stances a line in such a way that they maybe can go and do the thing that they want to do, versus finding a way to start doing the thing that they're doing where they are. I mean the classic example of somebody people who say, well, I want to be a writer, and it's well, right, right, then if you just start writing,

then you're a writer. The rest, whether you can do that for your full career, those things tend to figure themselves out. But contemplating being a writer is not is not useful. Writing is useful in that case completely, and you really do come up with alternatives like, you know, a side still play the piano, it's still compose music. But I always feel a little bit sad about the fact that the level of expertise I had feel it's like it's waiting over time. But the Garage Band came

and saved my life. We are well. We One of the fun things we love about this show is that we all the transition music and the intro and the outro music the two of us, Chris and I make, and a lot of it we do on on this iPad here on Garage Band. It's just a blasts. Well,

that's that's really fun. I just created a series audio series and I made the intro and outroom music, and I was like, this is cool that I can actually do this and I have some sense to it, and and I feel connected with what I want to be

connected with. And then you know, I have all kinds of other ideas about, well, if I'm not going to produce that level of music, I can do what I'm doing on Garage Band and then connect with musicians and see, you know, people who have continued that tradition, how I can interact with them because I really like those worlds, So you know, I think you find things that that may not be what you originally conceived of, but that

which can be fulfilling if you dare to make that move. Yeah, I think it also points to the idea of it's not all or nothing. You don't have to either be a professional musician and that's all you do, or you never touch an instrument. Again, there are there are middle grounds and a lot of the things that we do in our lives, and I find a lot of times just engaging in those activities because I enjoy them is

a is a helpful thing. And that I thought I was thinking earlier, and I wanted to I kind of wanted to circle back to when you were talking about the mindfulness piece and and the breath. The other thing I was thinking about is in those stressful situations, particularly if you're not very used to following the breath or doing that, sometimes just anchor in your mind on anything

is a helpful thing. So in those situations, if I'm not really something you can follow my breath, maybe I can just really intensely follow a piece of music that gives my brain something to anchor on. That just came back up in my mind as we were talking about music. I think that's absolutely true. You know. I think that people often will just think they have to focus on what's in front of them, but but focus on unfocused

often need to travel together, they need each other. And so if you take your mind off of something and then follow a piece of music, it's a pretty cool way to get your mind to start wondering, you know. I think one of the there were two things just ideas that I had when you were saying when you

was saying, I was thinking in two things. One was, we often assume, you know, even the self that I'm coming to this interview with, like, you know, there's there's a certain level of authenticity and a certain level of connection that I feel to the questions and intentions that you have. That that's there. But I think for all human beings, the self is often in hiding, you know, It's often sort of hanging out, waiting for you to wait so that it can come out and check out

what's going on. And so the other piece that I want to add to this is that in addition to just doing something, you know, partly because everything and it's opposite is kind of true in the world, that's also important to have a sense of patience with yourself and and recognize that who you are often wants to be met. But the world feels kind of threatening to most people, and so we we put our best face out there.

But but you know, I've I've often found that people are always immensely surprised when they realize the comp lexity of who they are, because they've just hung out in rooms and watched the fireplace or looked out a window, and suddenly you get this feeling of yeah, you know, like some amazingly fulfilling moment. And what feels fulfilling is that the complexity of who you are is there, and that complexity is like all sorts of good stuff, all sorts of bad stuff, in all sorts of everything, but

the fullness of it actually has this permission. And when you have this permission is I think when you can be most effective. You know, a lot of people ask, well, how come I can't be successful enough at at this? And part of it is that because you're leaving half

of yourself out of the equation. Just because you have what you think is this weakness doesn't think you know, it doesn't mean it needs to be left out of here and now we need to invite that part of ourselves to the table and check it out and say, you know, hey, what's going on with this behavior? Like it's clearly not serving me, but I appear to want to be doing this over and over again, rather than banishing it away from your life, to invite it into

your life, you know. I think the other thing that what you said reminded me of was a phenomenon that called repetition compulsion, which is, um, it's a really it's a disturbing phenomenon at a certain level. Because a group of psychologists were hanging around and um, we're actually sort of noticing what they thought was sort of strange behavior, which is that kids in cards would throw out their toys and then start crying. So they were like, already,

that's a weird behavior. Why would you throw out your own toy and then start crying? And then they were like they look at their mothers for help, and their mothers would bring the toys back, and then they'd be like, yeah,

I'm so happy, that's so awesome. And then when their mothers turned around, they would throw the toys out again, and so they'd be like, well, just it's a strange thing that we would be wired to throw our own things away, cry about it, have someone help us give it back to us, and then we throw it out again, like what is this? And so one of the leading theories around the psychologically is that we are wired to

master disappointment rather than to seek fulfillment. And so when we're talking about what to feed in terms of the wolf, we're really talking about if you have the wolf that represents mastering disappointment, you're just gonna have You're gonna become the world's best person at handling things that suck. Whereas if you seek fulfillment, you're really going to try to do something that's actually going to fulfill you rather than make you feel like, Man, I'm so good at being disappointed,

Like I just the master of being disappointed. In fact, I seek it out all the time so that I can experience how good I am at it. And it's amazing how many people get stuck in this, in this

in this mindset of mastering disappointment. And so I just mentioned that because something that you said, and I think the way you said it also reminded me of the fact that so many of us get lost in this non distinction of mastering disappointment versus seeking fulfillment, And I would want to say that that to deliberately seek fulfillment is important and we shouldn't just assume that the brain is going to do that automatically. And that's back to

the idea of embracing possibility. Yeah, absolutely, because because possibility. You know, I often say to people like I'll ask people, well, you know, how how many people want to live an exceptional life, and they'll say everybody will say, of course, I want to live an exceptional life. And you ask them, well, then why aren't you leading an exceptional life? And I'll say, well, you know, it's not that likely. There aren't that many

people who live exceptional lives. And I'll say, well, that's probability, and exception, by definition is low probability. If something is an exception and you want to live an exceptional life, then you're telling me you want to live a life of low probability, which is what you're telling me, which is fine. So your life doesn't have to be highly likely.

In fact, when it's not. When you want to mimic the exceptions rather than the rules is when you can begin to into a world of possibility, and so I think the way out of probability thinking is possibility thinking. And possibility thinking is where your belief forms a blueprint that informs the action center of your brain about where to go. Because it informs the GPS, which is the posterior parietal cortex. The GPS gets a map from your belief and it communicates that map to your actions center

that takes you to your goal. So we often just wait for a conscious instruction like how do I get that? I don't know, And if you say, well, just believe or whole people are like that nonsense, and they're right. Hope alone will not get you somewhere. But belief and possibility does have the ability to generate a map or blueprint for your brain so that you can get to your goal and to enable you to take the action

you need. That's right, Well, we're we're at the end of our time here stream, But this has been a really enjoy able conversation. And uh, definitely, you know, right right down the right down the heart of the plate on things we talked about this show and about feeding the Good Wolf. So thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to seeing your next book when it comes out. Thank you very much. Bye. You can learn more about this podcast and Dr Shriny

pallet at one you feed dot net slash shriny. That's s r I n i