#1894 More Q & A - Harps

I hope you're going okay. Be it a good day, a bad day at peak, or a trough, I hope you're doing all right. So after that bloody meandering introduction or hello, I was doing a I was going to do like a little series, like a little group. What's the collective now for podcasts? A herd, a swathe, a flock. I was going to do a flock of podcasts which

will based on questions from you, the list listeners. And so I chucked up a little thing or two on I put one in the Facebook group and one of my main Facebook page, and I've got somewhere around sixty or seventy questions answered, a few of them I did my first episode and then, like four year old in a lolly shop, I got distracted. Nonetheless, I'm back. So, like I said, there's lots of questions, and what I've

done is or what I'm going to do. I'm working through them one at a time, obviously, and I'm trying to talk about topics or questions or ideas that are broadly relevant. Some of them are in a little bit specific to a very small percentage of the population, and as a listening experience for the entire population or a big audience, a big cross section of humanity. I've, for better or worse, I've made the decision to try and make this as broadly elevant and engaging and helpful to

as many people as possible. I may or may not execute that. We'll see anyway. So question one today is from Aaron Scully. Eron says. Eron says she didn't even say get a harps. Come on. Aeron. Eron says, maybe talk about the subconscious mind and the importance of retraining it. That's such a good idea. You can read. This is from Aaron. You can read every self help book and fail because the beliefs in your subconscious mind are running

the show. That is largely true. Our subconscious mind is operating obviously below and behind the old subconscious kind of realm that we tend to inhabit a lot. Eron says, true lasting change requires reprogramming deeply ingrained beliefs and patterns that reside in the subconscious. The question is how to do that? That is a good question. Remember, everything I'm sharing today is just me thinking out loud. None of this is a personal personal prescription or recommendation or program

per se. It's just me thinking out loud. And so then the idea with these I think is I share my thoughts and ideas, and I guess feelings or research on whatever the topic is, and then you figure out what you may or may not do with that. You may do nothing, you may do something. You might go you know what, I'll roll the dice, I'll try that. I'll see what happens. I'll do that for a week

or two, or you might go fuck it. Fuck, I'm going to jump in AI and I'm going to do a little bit more investigation and research into that idea or that construct or that strategy, and then I might operationalize it in my own life, But that is all up to you. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm just a conduit to ideas and thoughts and information. But managing your life and making the decisions is obviously up to you. Does that sound like a

big disclaimer? As it was coming out of my mouth, I was thinking, my lawyers would be so happy if I have lawyers. Grown ups have lawyers. I don't. All right, So let's talk about I'm really fascinated with the subconscious mind.

That I'm fascinated with the way that our subconscious mind shapes and forms, and the role that it plays, the influence known or unknown that it has in our choices, our actions, our behaviors, our reactions, our relationships, our words, our conversations, our career, the way that we manage good things and bad things, the way that we navigate or perhaps create stress and anxiety, all of those things. But I guess, I guess what we know about the subconscious

is that it basically is shaped. And I guess what's the word it learns? It gets programmed through rep Titian not logic. So if you expose your subconscious to the same stimulus or the same message or the same behavior often enough, then that thing will start to embedras you in your subconscious as truth, absolute truth, even if it may not be the absolute truth, but if you hear

it enough and think it enough. So an example that I've spoken about many times on this show is the you know, growing up in a particular environment of a thought a thought cult, where we all, you know, believe the same things. We all Mum and dad believe X, and why so we believe X? And why Mum and dad eat this way? So we eat this way, And Mum and Dad believe in this God or that god or this ideology or philosophy or theology, and so that's

what we do. And then so I grew up in a religious environment, and through repetition and through familiarization and programming, I eventually had my subconscious mind program to believe certain things, despite the fact that I never really I never really

chose those things. That hardwiring, those ingrained beliefs, those ingrained patterns and habits and ways of thinking, that embedded ideology, that embedded version of the truth, that happened, that happened as a byproduct of just being exposed to certain people and certain ideas and certain thinking over a long period

of time. Now you think about that, So what is maybe the antidote to that, Well, the antidote to that, or part of the antidote to that, is to think about, Okay, is it possible that that thing that I believe, or that idea or that belief or that value or that whatever it is, that story that I grew up in the middle of that is hardwired into my subconscious and this is happening in the conscious, this is happening in the prefrontal cortex. Is it possible that this is not

true or that part of it is not true? And so maybe what we do is if we want to open a new door in regarding say unwiring or reprogramming some of that repetition and that programming, we start to expose ourselves ourselves to new ideas, to a different information, to a different theology or a different training methodology, or

a different political angle or whatever the thing is. But it can't generally, or it doesn't generally happen quickly that we reprogram our subconscious and for me personally, coming out of an echo chamber of theology, an echo chamber of belief, growing up in something that I didn't even realize or recognize it took me a long time to reprogram my subconscious or to it the very least be able to

challenge those hardwide subconscious beliefs and ideas. And so I think part of part of it is recognizing that these things didn't become embedded in my subconscious because I wanted them to be there, or I chose them, or I thought critically about them, and then over time they became my normal cognitive, emotional, psychological, theological operating system. No, that didn't happen. What happened was that shit just got programmed into me without me even trying, without me even knowing.

So part of the antidote to that is being willing to. By the way, if we can't even admit or consider the fact that a thing that we've believed or thought or been intertwined with as part of our identity for a very long time, if we can't even consider that that could be completely wrong or a little bit wrong or somewhat flawed, then it's very difficult to unprogrammed that subconscious programming, if you know what I mean. The other way that this kind of subconscious programming happens is I

guess environment. You know, all of the and this kind of reflects what I was talking about a minute ago. But there I was really just talking about the stuff that's just programmed into me, the thoughts and ideas, but the environment that I'm in and the other stimuli that I'm exposed to, different people, different cultures, stories, media, social media, work, environment,

social environment, relationships. All of these things shape, influence, and form in part our subconscious operating system as well, which is why sometimes we'll see kids who are raised in chaotic homes develop subconscious patterns of anxiety, mistrust, and overfunctioning,

even if their conscious mind knows better later on. If you work in an environment where you feel or you live in an environment where you feel threatened or intimidated or perhaps at risk, even down the track, when you're in an environment, situation, circumstance, house, job, whatever, where you are not at and you intellectually know that you're not at risk, undoing that subconscious programming just takes It just

takes time. It takes time, and while there there there are no quick fixes to this stuff for me, And again these are just my thoughts. I believe that reprogramming our subconscious is about consistently, methodically intentionally exposing ourselves to new ideas, new people, perhaps new even new cultures, different operating systems, different information, trying different things, doing different things, being in different places, and once we recognize, once we

recognize what it is that we need to change. Like, for example, my relationship with food was very unhealthy for a very long time. I've spoken about it, and I had a subconscious and sometimes conscious obsession with making myself feel good through food. I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs. I didn't do a lot of things that people do to get that dopamine hit, that quick fix that ends to gratification. And so I was always pushing the food button as my gateway to dopamine.

And there was just a lot of subconscious habits, thinking rituals that I never chose around food, but nonetheless they ended up becoming part of my day to day reality. And so I think that for many people, for me, anyway,

trying to unprogram something, initially it takes one. We've got to recognize that that is an unconscious program that's not doing us any good, that that's an unconscious mindset or kind of operating system that happens automatically, unthinkingly, that is on some level a form of self sabotage or self destruction. And so then it's recognizing, well, what is better? What is a better operating system? What is a better way

to do this? And then how do I over time embed that so that and this is the key, so that becomes my new normal, my new normal. How do how do I embed that in my subconscious And so you know, it's like when people say to me, how do you stay so disciplined, so focused, so committed? You know, how do you have so much willpower and fucking strength and all of these things to train every day? And the truth is I don't have all that stuff. I don't, but what I sometimes I do. But that's not why

I train every day. Why I train every day, why I work out every day, why I walk my kind of ten kilometers a day, give or take, and go to the gym and lift shit, is because I've created a new normal. I've created a normal operating system that reflects who I want to be and how I want to be. I've created a normal operating system that aligns with my goals and my values and my standards around

health and wellness and human behavior and human optimization. And because I've created that operating system which took discipline and structure and organization and accountability in the beginning, but done long enough, right, done long enough, it eventually becomes our new normal. In other words, it becomes our new subconscious programming. And now we don't need to, in inverted commas, try hard. We don't need to white knuckle it. We don't need to find the will power and the strength and the

courage because over time I've created a new normal. And I guess the question is, you know how long does that take? And my experience, there's no number, there's no set number. It's different. It depends on what's the thing I'm trying to change. How much control does it have of my mind and my actions and choices and behaviors and outcomes. Is it a fucking nine out of ten debilitating all controlling thing or is it a one or two out of ten? And I do it, but it's

not destroying my life. But I recognize that I need to change it. So I think some things we can reprogram and rewife one a better term quite quickly. Other things are going to take a while. But on a really practical level, and I'm taken fuck and way too long to answer this. One question on a practical level is recognize the thing that you want to change, the thing that you want to make your new normal. So, what's the current normal or the current subconscious programming or

unconscious programming that's not working? What do you want to replace it with? Right? What is a better version? What is a better mindset? What is a better protocol? What is a better habit? Right? And then create Once we recognize, for example, I want to I want to create a habit of exercise, or I want to create a habit of for me more specifically stretching, or I want to create a habit of one hour of study a day.

I want to create a habit of Oh what do I want to create a habit of working in the garden thirty minutes, three times a week, whatever it is. I mean, you know, it doesn't matter, It only matters to you. But recognize the thing that you want to be hardwired. Want to be hardwired into your normal operating system, to be just part of who you are and how you are, not what you're doing when you're in the zone,

or focused or pumped. And this is the thing about recognizing what our subconscious programming is and how it derails us and limits us, and then rewiring and reprogramming over time, because what we really want to do in this space. I don't know if this is helpful or not anyway,

you know when you second guess yourself. Anyway, what you want to do, is, I think, or what we want to do is we want to own a time, create, like I said, a default setting, a new normal operating system, a new programming in that subconscious that is a healthy version of normal. So this is me on autopilot. This is my subconscious programming which happens to be aligned with my values and goals and who and how I want

to be. And it's not destructive. It's not ruining my life, it's not giving me anxiety, it's not making me feel guilty. It's actually producing good results. And initially the way that we do that is we get clear about that. Then we create some rules about that structure process accountability, and we just dig in and we do it. We roll up our sleeves, and we do it when we don't want in inverted commas. We do it when it's not comfortable, it's not fun, it's not quick, it's not easy, it's

not all those things I always talk about. But if we can initially, and yes, initially there you are going to need discipline, self control, focus, commitment, all of that initially. But when we do it for long enough, when we can get through the resistance, when we can get through the emotional and psychological and physiological resistance of wanting to give up because it's hard, when we can come out the other side of that, we can build some habits

that are fucking life changing in a great way. That was way too long. I apologize. Next question is from Tanya. Go o U d I E. I'm going to go is it? I don't know, I don't you know. You know when you know, you're going to fuck it up? So and then people are going to roll their eyes and go is if it's pronounced like that. So I'm just going to go. Tanya, You're welcome. Kenya says, why do I always overthink everything? Emoji hand up to the face,

blonde lady emoji. I'm guessing tenure. So this will be much quicker than the last one. Thank god. There's a range of reasons we overthink things. But generally in my experiences, it comes down to fear that we know that we need to do something, or we think that we probably need to do something, but we don't do it, or

we don't want it. We kind of want to do it, but in the moment we don't want to do it because we think we could get embarrassed, or it could be hard, or there's some kind of perceived emotional, psychological, physiological, or physical risk. We don't want people to judge us, we don't want to be kicked out of the group,

and so on and so on. So overthinking in my experience personally with me, I overthink things people, I overthink things or I have overthought things in the past because I was worried about what people would think or do or say. So there's that insect security thing that's part of it. And I guess also the self protection thing where we we want to protect ourselves, look after ourselves.

So that you know why we while we love the idea of vulnerability, being vulnerable being the real you, and we love the idea of building resilience, but the thing is, we can only be vulnerable and we can only build resilience at the coal face of all of this emotional and psychological stuff which fucking terrifies us. And so overthinking doesn't make you weak or bad or flawed tenure. Overthinking

makes you very human. A way to perhaps overcome that, or at least begin to overcome that is by breaking it down and going and trying to figure out the source of the fear or the source of that apprehension or the source of the avoidance. Why am I avoiding this? Why do I need to do this? Why am I not doing it? What is that about? Is it a fear? It might not be, it might be something else. For me and for many people I've worked with, it's a fear of something. Identify the fear. I spoke about this

the other day. A thing that I've asked myself lots of times over the years with this stuff is what's the worst that can happen? And this is a common kind of strategy used in different forms of psychotherapy, is to ask yourself, what's the worst that can happen? And if I can deal with the worst, then I'm going to jump in. I'm going to jump in if I want to do it that much, if it's important enough to me all right, next one, Kevin Murphy. Good keV.

I'm going to say your whole name, because I'm pretty sure I'm not fucking up Kevin or Murphy. Kevin Murphy said, you mentioned you don't like dumbell bench press. Why do you use pin mites in your workouts at all? Or only free weights? I did not say that, kid. What I said was and if I did, I may have. But if I did, then I fucked up because what I don't what I don't love is barbell bench press. So let me just clarify that. And I may have misspoken or you may have misheard me. It doesn't matter

either way. Let me tell you exactly where I'm at with that. So I can't bench press anymore properly. I have to bench press very light, if at all, because I've got fuck shoulders. So personally I don't love it. I love, you know, the idea of like my training partner Marquis Son Lucky, who's like fucking twenty five and bulletproof benching nearly four hundred pounds. I love watching that, and I love, you know, seeing young, big, strong fucking

blokes lifting things and young strong women lifting things. I love all of that shit. But at the same time, because I'm old and I've seen a lot of injuries. I mean a lot of injuries. I've had a lot of injuries. I've torn both rotato cuffs, I've ruptured my right peck, I've torn all the muscles, and you know, disk issues and being you know, injected with bloody cortizon

a million times, and all of those things. So I'm older and more wary, and also I have a better understanding of injuries and recovery, and you know, I essentially do a cost benefit analysis some things. I go, what's the potential benefit, what's the potential cost risk and reward, all of that kind of shit. I actually like. I like dumb bells better because you get a better range of movement than with a barbell. So I'm not anti barbell.

The only thing I don't like. The reason I don't love barbell bench press purely just from a as a movement, I love it, But as a potential health risk for shoulders, I don't love it because what happens when you do that, when you do that bench press movement, if you're sitting up, even in a chair now, and you put your hands out in front of you, straight out in front of you. Everyone, If you're going to do that with me, join along,

Join in. And then you bring your hands down to your chest and your elbows go back past your ribs in a bench press movement. When you do that, your shoulder blades or scapuli they come together, they retract towards

the spines, so they don't just sit there. They move in towards the spine, and then when you push the weight, they go back out away from the spine, so they move in on the downward or the eccentric phase of the bench press, and then they move away from the spine back into their normal position on the concentric or the pushing part of the bench press. Right. That's all cool,

But here's the problem. Here's the problem. We are lying on a bench which doesn't allow your shoulder blades to track that way properly because the bench is somewhere between quite hard and pretty hard. And what happens is, even though you bring your elbows down and your hands down towards your chest and that heavy weight down towards your chest, your shoulder blades quite often get jammed, so they can't

move along that plane. Towards the spine smoothly and then back away from the spine smoothly because they get jammed up in the bench. Now, this is people don't talk about this much, but it's actually not great for your

shoulders at all. It's kind of shit. What is much better, what is much better from a shoulder health point of view, is using a fitball or whatever you want to call them, exercise ball, because you are lying on something which is much softer, so it allows for more shoulder mobility and movement.

And also because of the shape of the ball being convex, that is, it's round, and if you are lying in the right kind of position, it actually almost fully allows or allows that shoulder movement to be fully functional and operational. There might be a little bit of inhibition, but not too much. So those are my thoughts. By the way, I use free weights, cav I use dumbells, bar bells, I use pinloaded equipment, I use cable crossovers, I use kettle bells, I use all of that shit. Anything heavy.

But it's just working around injuries. And even you know, young dudes that are in the bench, in the bench in the gym lifting heavy heavyweights, there is zero chance that a twenty year old today who's training hard and heavy and keeps training hard and heavy, there's zero chance that he or she will not have injuries. So whether or not we will ever get injured training is not a question. The question is how often, how much, how bad?

And even people who train perfectly no such thing. But even people who train really fucking well, they're going to get engined. They're going to get engined. You know, there are anyway, for a range of reasons, but I hope that at least addresses that question. Low gainer, Is it a joke? No, it's not a joke. I thought it meant like gainer, you know how a person in a gym is a hard gainer or an easy But it's not that it's g A Y N O R. Low So apologies low cool name. Though Lowe's question is crea

team yes or no? For women? Fifty seven year old menopausal woman. Thanks, This is timely so again this is just me sharing what's come across my desk, so to speak. Metaphorically speaking. So, I've read more about creatine in the last few months, in the last three months than I have in the last three decades. I reckon. So the research seems to say that creatine is great for recovery,

for building some muscle, for some tissue repair. But more recently, and most of you know what I'm going to say, but for those of you who don't, more recently the research is telling us that apart from the physiological benefits of helping you train better and recover better and maybe build a bit of muscle, that creatine is an amazing cognitive enhancer, that it has some real what the biohackers called nootropic no trop I see nootropic or kind of

cognitive performance benefit. So the recommended dose, and again I'm not recommending anything, I'm just saying what the recommendations are somewhere between three and five grams. That's like a teaspoon ish per day for guys and girls, I think typically around five. The problem I have with that is, you know, different people respond differently to the same stimulus. So if ten people have five grams of CREA ten a day, you know one person weighs forty seven kilos, one person

wis one hundred and twenty. Well, I don't know that that's going to have I don't know how that's going to impact the person with nearly two and a half times the body weight of the other one, or two and a half times less or whatever it is, right, So I think that these are variables and factors that are somewhat unknown, but definitely so anecdotally experientially. For me, I take about I'm going to say, I take about fifteen grams a day of creatam and I do not

take many things at all. I take two or three subponments. That's it. And as you know, I've spoken many times about how important it is to keep your brain working, to keep your mind working, and to do the work to train your brain to learn, to research, to study,

to solve problems, to consciously and intentionally do things. Where you are stressing in a good way, you are putting some pressure and stress on your brain to work, to train, to solve problems, to figure shit out, to be creative, because just like the rest of your body, your brain needs to be trained for it to stay somewhere close to operationally optimal. So the answer low is yeah. In my opinion, that's all. It is not personal advice. I think creatine for many people can be men and women.

And I did read something yesterday or the other day, not yesterday, the other day in the last week. That said, it's actually has more benefits for women than men, So that's a good thing. So noel Ce Blundell or Blundell will go with Blundell right, impost syndrome? What drives it? How to control it? Impost syndrome is I think anyone who's ambitious or in people not so ambitious, but anyone who wants to achieve something, change something, be something, do something.

I think most of us have a degree of imposter syndrome, you know, self doubt, not good enough itis. And I think what drives it, like a lot of things, is fear. And while I like the how how do I control it? Question, I think a better question, at the risk of being Jeeki Nole, A better question is how do I not let it control me? Not how do I control it? How do I not let it hijack my brain? How do I not let imposter syndrome hijack my nervous system,

hijack my mind, hijack my choices and my behaviors. How do I not let impost syndrome hijack my potential, my power, and my possibilities And I think the only way well for me anyway. So this is speaking personally because imposter syndrome and me analogous peas in a pod. I admit it is me at times, at least so for me coexisting with it, Like the moment that I went, oh, I don't feel good enough. Oh, I feel like fraud.

I feel like an impostor. But nonetheless, and generally that's emotional, like I feel this, but it's not often we go I am a fraud. We say I feel like, Oh, fuck, I feel like a fraud. I feel like an impostor. Notice, we always have that emotional kind of attachment. I feel, I feel, I feel, and I think that doesn't go away for many people, most people perhaps, and I don't know that you know, we're ever gonna live a life

free of that for most of us. But I think I think being able to over time recognize it for what it is, so I can simultaneously think I'm a fraud while knowing that I'm not. I know, it depends what we're talking about. If I was talking to telling people that I've just won or I won three Olympic gold metals, well fuck, I'm a fraud and I know it. But if I feel like when you know, I'll give you an example. This is real life, real world. I can't give you all the details, but I can give

you eighty percent of it. So I'm recalling this Sunday. Last week, I had three or four conversations with companies and potential employees I guess of me. In other words, people who wanted to employ me or use my skills to talk at their conference. And in nearly every conversation where we've got to talk about Okay, so what's that going to cost? Craig, Even though I've been doing this for a long time, and even though I have a track record that says, Craig, You're not terrible at this.

So I have the knowledge. Now this is not an idea or an opinion or an emotion, but I actually have evidence and data and knowledge. I have historical evidence that says, Craig, you've spoken I don't know how many, but more than a thousand times, maybe two or three thousand times to different organizations, companies, teams, in lots of

different environments, in different countries around the world. You've been paid somewhere between a bit and a lot, and you've been doing it for a long time, So you're not shit. So that's my evidence you're not shit, because here's all the data. At the same time, I can feel shit, like I can know that I'm good enough while simultaneously

not feeling good enough. And so when I see it, when I recognize the feeling or the emotion or that the that the idea I guess that I'm not good enough, I recognize it for what it is, which is just a fear based kind of thing that's you know, temporarily invading my awareness or my space or my psychology or physiology. I see it for what it is. I don't try

to control it. I just almost say like, I see you, thanks for dropping in, thanks for keeping me grounded, and I these days I almost have a like a friendship with it. It's like I for me anyway, a bit of self doubt, a bit of an pasta syndrome keeps me from having a fat head. And so over time, I think Noel. For a lot of people, the volume

goes down. The impact reduces that capacity that at once had to almost emotionally, mentally and physiologically cripple me or stop me from doing something that's long gone in the context of my day to day work. Anyway, Having said that, there are other scenarios, there are other scenarios and environments where my imposter syndrome is alive. And well, you know, when I started my PhD, and even up until today,

and I'm probably three or four months from finishing. But when I'm in that space, when I'm at university, when I'm talking with a bunch of academics, when I'm standing in front of three or four professors doing one of my milestone so an academic review of which I had to do for over the course of my PhD, When I'm in that space, I feel overwhelmingly like an impostor, like a fraud. But even then I know that I'm not. I just recognize that in this environment, they're better than me,

they're smarter than me, they know more than me. That doesn't mean I'm bad, that doesn't mean I'm a fraud, that doesn't mean I'm an impostor. It means I'm human. But even in that environment, I'm okay with it because even though it can almost hijack my emotional system, it's still not going to control what I do and what I don't do. Alrighty so that'll do for the moment. Sorry. Some of those were brief, some are very long. You know, I'll do my best. Hopefully got some value from that.

I'll do another one in the next day or two. That is my current plan. Anyway, Take care kids, enjoy your day.