Oh, get a team. It's the you project. We've got a new friend to come and play. I'm super bloody excited. But before we talk to him, old Tiff, you know, when I gave Shazzad the briefing, I probably should have mentioned that I swear a bit.
Ye?
Should I tone that down for him? Long it all last though, absolutely? You know it would have been funny if he said, fuck, no, don't do that, Tiff. How are you?
I'm cold? I'm so cold that the motorbike wouldn't start this morning, which is annoying.
Well, zero degrees in Melbourne this morning. Everyone thinks Australia's this big land of fucking sunny beaches and warm weather. And it's zero this morning, which is about I think Shazad, welcome to the show. I think that's about thirty degrees in your language. But zero celsius over here this morning, so it's a cold one. How are you? I am?
Well? Well? San Francisco also has a game called Summers for us, so I can I can relate.
What's the temperature? Make us a little bit jealous? What's the temperature over there today give or take.
Well, we are on fahrenheit, so it's eighty degrees fahrenheit. I'm guessing that's a balmy thirty two degrees or something, but that's a rough gas.
Yeah, listening over there suffering TIF. That's terrible, isn't it?
So?
Hi, welcome to the show. How are you. How's your day been?
Has been fantastic as yours been?
Yeah, it's been good so far. Just some early morning caffeine and Tips. Had a tough one and motorbike wouldn't start water tip with all.
The days, I've got to move it by tomorrow morning because our back car parks getting repaid reserves. If my box sitting there, I'm going to get a big fine.
Well, you've got to get rid of it. So we did discuss how you can get at mobile, so we'll talk about that later. But she's had, rather than me read out a bio, read something off a website or some other kind of forum. Can you give us a snapshot of who you are, your background and the work that you do so my audience can get to know you a little bit.
Yes. My passion there is and i'm here is changing lives, and I have a very specific way of looking at that, which is I believe every single one of us is very actively and profoundly sabotaging ourselves every single day, sabotaging our well being, performance, and relationship. I discovered that I do that years ago. I figured out how to do less of that years ago, and I am passionate about helping others do less self sabotage and being more in
self mastery change their own lives. And that's what I do. I come at it from a more science science background, so a lot of what I'm into is making sure that what we do is first of all easy to do, secondly based on research and science, and third it results in lasting change rather than often we do things that get us excited for a temporary period and then we're
back to old behavior. So I'm very passionate about how do we create sustained transformation rather than the usual you know, temporary blips and how we feel and what we do.
Yeah, that's absolutely paramount, isn't it. Because we're so good at at changing things for a minute, or changing behavior, or changing our operating system for a moment. And you know, when you look at the fundamentals, like for example, just trying to get in shape, whatever that means, you know, lose a few pounds, gain a bit of muscle, improve fitness,
you know, change change something about our physiology. Like gyms can almost rely in fact not almost gyms can rely on the fact that people will make decisions that they won't follow through on. And I don't know what I don't know what the stat is in the States, although I've spoken in the States a bit, But in Australia there's a very act the people who use the gym consistently, which is called active gym membership is very low. It's
somewhere around fifteen percent. And it means She's add that for every hundred current paid up members, most of them don't go why do you reckon we make? Why do we make decisions that we don't ultimately follow through on?
Well, I mean that's the whole point of my research where I look at how our bad old behavior they are habitual and the reason they are habitual as they live in the brain and form of neural pathways that are muscle power and generate those behaviors instantly. Now, when you read a book or attend a lecture or talk to somebody who inspire is you to do something different? I go to the gym that's an inspiration that is not muscle power. It's just an inspiration. So you make
decisions based on those moments of inspiration. Oh my god, this is a life changing thing I'm going to do. And what I talked about is that you can't fight muscle with insight. You need to fight muscle with muscle. So that inspiration until it becomes neuropathways in the brain muscle power, it doesn't mean much. It evaporates. And most of us have these life changing experiences that are based on insights, and we fail to convert those insights into
neuropathways into muscles in the brain. At the end, the muscle power of the old ways keeps winning over.
Yeah, it's that's so true because it's almost like inspiration is the spark that lights the fire, but we need to fire to keep burning, you know. And it's so so I guess part of like intertwined with creating new neural pathways and a new for one of a more academic term, a new behavioral default setting or a new normal, or a new set of habits that work for us that are hardwired into our brain. But what's that? Because we know that we get excited and motivated and inspired,
and we also know that we give up. So what's the that's is it about? Accountability? Is about having a coach or a mentor or a training partner. How that spot between I got excited for three days and then I gave up, and now I've got new neural pathways and this is my new version of normal. What's the bit in the middle.
Yeah, I think the big issue is that we treat the symptoms and not look at the problem. Why we go back to the old behavior at the root cause. So all of our research has been about the root cause problem. What we did with working with more than a million participants by now with it an assessment of how we self sabotage. And what we determine is that there are ten ways we self sabotage. These characters in our head are the ones that have muscle power, that
have the bad patterns of our life. And the reason we don't stick with the new things we want to do is that these characters in our mind are very powerful beings and they win over and so, and they have names like the judge, the controller, the stickler, the victim,
the pleaser, the avoid the restless. So they got muscle power they got, they got habits, and so being inspired, they come back and sabotage the new ways that we want to set in place, because these characters are like being in power and like to take take command from us. And until and unless we deal with this root level what we call saboteurs and our our brain, we'll keep building castles on sand because we don't have a strong enough foundation.
And how do we deal with them? I mean, I know it's I'm sure it's not. I think it's a sure it's multi dimensional. But you know, all of these hard wirde characters in our brain that kind of derail us and sabotage us. Where do we begin?
Well, where we begin is to first of all call them on the lie that they have which the reason that they're in power is that they have fooled us into believing that they are our friends and that we need them. So I work with a lot of CEOs, and every single one of them, you know, tells me, you know what I mean, not all of them have the controllers out or what most of them do. And
they say, without controller, nothing gets done. You know. The stickler says, without the stickler, there will be no quality in the work that I do, and the restlesses. Without the restless, I won't have any fun. So these ways are ways where we tell ourselves we have survived until now. These characters are actually agents of survival that we all have them because in our childhood we learned to do these things in order to get more love, in order to feel more safe, in order to be more independent.
So they are our go to operating system of our five year old version, and they have convinced us that we need them in are to survive, and by the time we are adults, we think we can't live without them. So first and foremost we have to debunk that and tell you, as a matter of fact, you do not need them, and there is a far better way of living.
The Stanford students that have lectured on this they call this work Jedi mind training, and what they say, really the work here is about recognizing that inside your mind there are these dark waters and then there's the energy Jedi. And we got to really call the dart waters for their lives, debunk them, discredit them, and lean into our Energjedi, which we call the sage. So it's the Sage versus Sabbator going on inside of our head, and it starts
with awareness. Awareness is critical. It's just that awareness is twenty percent the starting point, and eighty percent is getting into building muscles.
Such I was about to say, it sounds like high level self awareness, you know. It's like and being able. You know. I think about this a lot like stuff because you and I kind of are in the same space human behavior and thinking and metacognition and theory of mind and understanding how others think and what we think.
But it takes courage, and it takes self control to be able to recognize your own self limiting thinking and self limiting habits and self limiting behaviors, and and the way that you get in your own way, you know, the way that you know. It's like I do a lot of corporate speaking, and I did one the other day and there was two hundred and fifty people and I said, put up your hand if you're an overthinker. Every hand goes up, and then I go, how's that
working for you? And everybody laughs because we all do it, but it doesn't work, you know, And so so then being able to without self loathing, I think this is the key. You know is that that to be able to be self aware without beating yourself up, without being overly self critical.
You know, absolutely, And here's the challenge that of these ten characters sense abators I talked about, the only one that everybody has is the judge Sabator, and the judged Sabator is the one that amplifies the negative in yourself, in our and in circumstances. So it's the one that's constantly finding what's wrong with yourself with others amateur circumstances. And it's the one that sabotages our attempt to change because of exactly what you said, the self loading, because
it discourages us. It just waits for a moment to say, hey, you're not going to make it. Look you're just wired this way. Forget about it. And so all of our attempts at change, first and foremost are discredited by unsabotaged by the Judge Sabatur. So what we do in our work is one of the metaphors. One of the things that we keep using is you know, metaphors related to
physical fitness. So we say, okay, if you if you try to learn a new sports, have you you can have you ever imagined anybody learning a new game and just starting and being good and then better and better
and better and better and better every single day. The answer is no. When you start trying to learn a new game, you have a good day, you take two steps forward and then a step back, to steps forward a step back, and when you take that step back in an attempt to improve, that judge character is going to come beat the crap out of you and say, shame on you, your piece of shit. I told you you cannot improve. Forget about it. You know you're not gonna ever.
This is not going to work, and it discourages you from going on and what we do instead saying that as you take that step back, as you fall again, it is critical to watch this voice coming and beating you up and say no, no, I'm not going to let you do that. I'm going to give myself a big, loving hug. It's the sage part of you, the positive part of you that brings compassion to you. When you're done, alan, let this judge character beat the crap out of you.
So if you truly want to improve in a sustained way, self compassion versus self judgment is a critical fork in the road that you need to keep really watching.
For now, I'm going to let you know how we've obviously we've got a long way Togo, but so should. I wrote a book called Positive Intelligence New York Times bestseller. No less, of course you did Positive Intelligence, so have a look for that. But also if people want to see where they kind of lay in this space, you've got an online quiz that people can do that like five minutes or less. Can you just while we're in this space, can you tell them how to access that?
Please? Yeah, it's just five minute online sabatur assessment. In five minutes you get a bar chart that shows you which of these ways of self sabotage is strongest in you? Is it the avoider, the controller, the victims? What is it? Whatever? Again? There are ten altogether, and you access it through Positive Integions dot com slash assessment Positive Intelligence dot com slash assessment, and it's free and of course strictly confident information just for you.
Out of interest. How much does the environment, the situation, the friendship, groups, the family, the social constructs around us influence how we see ourselves? Like if I'm a really supportive, loving environment and people Am I going to be less likely to have that internal sabotur going off the meta all the time?
Yeah? Great question, and maybe I can answer it by talking about my two kids. I have two beautiful kids who are not twenty one and twenty five years old. They were born from day one. Day were night and day opposites from each other. My son was this very easy going, even keel you know, life is a bullet cherries. Hey, let's take it easy, let's just have fun. That kind of a flexible, adoptable personality. My daughter was born and
it's very sweet and introverted. My daughter was a raging extrovert from day one, and she was a hard charger and she was very goal oriented and very very different in blueprint. Both of these are so I basically say, you know, you're born a rose or you're born a carnation. Rose can never be a carnation. Cornation can never be a rose. You got to really lean into the beauty that you're born to be. So there you're born with
different essences. Now, those ways of being under the same exact environment when they were grown up resulted in them developing different saboteurs. So my son, who had that very sweet temperament and life is a boll cherries. When he was facing challenges and stresses in life, he overused that strength, which became the avoid sabaturs, and instead of tackling challenges, he said, this is unpleasant. Life is supposed to be pleasant. I'm not going to deal with this, and so his
sabatur became the avoid. My daughter, on the other hand, who was very hard charging and all had those strengths. When facebook challenges, she overused those strengths and in the process she developed the controller sabaturs, so controller sabator versus the avoider sabator. So basically, what I believe is that we are born with predisposition for different natural strengths, which
when they're overused, they've become their saboteurs. Because we over use our strengths and insult by overusing them and abusing them, they become the way we sabotage ourselves. And then the degree of difficulty that we have in childhood affects how strong these saboteurs become. But I think, but I believe that the development of sabaturs is a completely normal part of human beings growth. My son and daughter grew up
with the best of haarenting. Of course, as you can imagine, and right in front of my eyes they developed the avoid and the controller sabaturs. It's unavoidable.
And so what was what was your form of self sabotage growing up or even in your even in your early kind of adult years or maybe even now, do you still get in your own way? Yeah? What what's your think?
Absolutely, I believe we all do this every day. It's unavoidable. And the mind, a strong one was the victim sabator. And I was diagnosed with clinical depression when I was about thirty years old. I had no idea that the first three years of my life I had lived in colnicol depression. And the reason that the sabateor was the survival strategy. These sabators are survival strategies. The reason I had that is I was growing up in a in a in poverty, in a in a ghetto with my
with force siblings, a tiny little apartment. My father a terrifying man. He was very angry and scary to me. My mother was running around terrified of him. And I was a very sensitive kid, terrified and not getting much love or attention, and one of my survival strategies was the victim sabatur And what that meant is instead of confronting and having fights and all of that stuff, I
withdrew from it all. I would go to a quiet, a little corner in the room, and I would create this cocoon of depression, of just being, of self pity, and in so doing, the reason it was helpful for my survival it was two reasons. One, I was removing myself from the hostility and the pain to some extent, so I wasn't triggering much by moving myself to that corner.
The second thing is which I later I later realized years later, is that in the absence of getting love, what I had found is that actually self pity is was very suited. So instead of getting love, I learned to give my self pity because that was a very soothing way. And it only took me years and years and years. At some point you realize, you know what
I actually deserve love, I don't deserve self pity. So as an adult, I was playing victim all over the place, and it took me forever to realize that I was still trying to bring my self pity and get pity from others. And at some point I woke up and said, you know what, I actually deserve love, not pity, and that was the end of my playing the victim sabator in such a powerful way. And to your point, is this salator still with me or not? This veritor is
definitely not running me. I no longer am I in depression. It is not my go to thing every time something doesn't go well, and I still find self pity to be incredibly seductive. I don't go there, but I know that it's a seductive thing when something doesn't go well, but I catch it, don't go there. I may go there a few times a year. It's not very common. Yeah, so it's no longer running me, but it's still absolutely
their sabotage never go away. That you can make them much smaller, but they never fully go away.
Wow, thank you so much. I love it when I get someone on who's an expert in something written, a book, spoken all over the world, done all the stuff that you do, and then still go But by the way, I'm still a bit broken. You know, I'm better than I was, but I'm still a work in progress. And I love that because I think, you know, it actually encourages the rest of us, you know, and it's so true. I think we're all a bit brilliant, all a bit flawed,
all a bit amazing, all a bit ridiculous. And it takes courage, I think, especially because I don't know if men do have bigger egos or not, but I feel like we always want to be seen to be the best and the shiniest and the most flawless. And yeah, my curiosity with human behavior, and you knowsogy is really out of all of my own ineptitude and all of my own flaws and bullshit and self doubt and insecurity, and yeah, it is. I feel like it is definitely
a work in progress. I've got to I don't know if you've ever been asked this question, but is there what are the you probably have? What are the benefits or what is the upside to self sabotage? Because there must be something in it for us or we wouldn't do it.
Yeah. What I talk about with the saboteurs is that they are the ones in us that generate all of our negative emotions. Negative emotions like stress, anger, shame, guilt, disappointment, regret all of these things. And the question is aren't these negative emotions helpful? If they weren't, why would we have them? And the answer and in order to answer the question, you know, aren't negative emotions helpful? I ask a religate that question. I asked people, what do you
think about pain? Do you think pain is helpful? Is it helpful? Is it helpful to have pain? And you know the answer is obvious. Of course, it's helpful to have pain. Why because if the stove is left on accidentally and you put your hand on the out stove, it's good to feel pain. If you don't feel pain, you're going to keep your hand on the out stove and burn to the bone. So therefore, pain is very helpful as an ARTH signal. But here's the million dollar question.
How long would you like to feel the pain of your hand on the hot stove before you get the message and before you move a hand? And hopefully we'll all say, oh, that's quickly as possible. Pain is helpful as an alert, but once the alert is delivered, it is then the definition of insanity to keep your hand on the hot stove. And same exact thing with negative emotions, is it good to feel shame, guilt, disappointment, regret, stress or anger or all of these They are absolutely incredibly helpful.
Without them, we will have no conscience. We will do horrible stuff and not feel bad about it. We will you know, make mistakes and not even notice that anything wrong. All of this stuff right, They are incredibly it's incredibly helpful to feel these negative emotions. But for how long? For just one second as a wake up call that says, hey, buddy,
pay attention, something is going wrong here. But once that message is delivered, then staying angry, staying upset, staying stressed, stay disappointed, staying in shame or guilt is absolutely counterproductive because what you need is in order to figure out how to respond to a tough situation, you want to shift to the positive part of your brain. Get in touch with deep empathy and curiosity and creativity and calm,
clear head, that laser for focused action. We need the positive brain to actually deal with challenges in the best way. So in that sense, what we would say is that you know, saboteurs are the one does that keep your hand on the hot stove? Have you continue to suffer and responding to things that are challenging and a big, big transformation we seek its. How quickly do you shift from an initial negative reaction to things so positive? Embrace I've got the challenges.
Do you think that I feel? Like with me? There's been times in my life where I am, for whatever reason, I'm more open to hear what I need to hear, or to be honest with myself, or to I don't know even sometimes I've got this funny story. What's it called? Do you know who Eckhart Toole is? Hold the spirit? Yeah, the spiritual writer. So when I was younger, I mean quite young, maybe twenty five, one of my friends gave
me the Power of Now. I don't know when it came out, but can you just find out when did the Power of Now come out? When was that? Anyway? Please and thank you. I remember I remember reading it when it just came out. A friend of mine gave it to me and said, you've got to read this. This is life changing. It'll blow your head off. It's it's like.
Tiffy sixteen.
No, No I came out, Am I thinking about the wrong book?
Public came out before twenty sixteen, I thought.
Originally published two thousand and two, I think it might have come out on audible.
I think it was like in the nineties. Anyway, it doesn't matter, but I read it and I thought it was junk. I read the first twenty pages Chazzad and I'm like, this is bullshit. It's like spiritual mumbo jumbo, right. And then about five years later, I don't know, five years, six, seven years later, I just saw the book in all of my books and I can't remember why, but I just felt compelled to pick it up and read it again. And the next time I read it, I'm like, how
long has this been around? All this brilliant wisdom and insight, And it was like I was reading a different book for the first time, and it blew me away. Obviously the book was the same, but I was different, and without being too spiritual or weird, it's like, oh, well, now I was ready to have this message. Or two, how'd you go tift? Did you? It doesn't matter?
Seven?
Yeah?
Right, thank you? Perfect? Yeah yeah yeah. But it's it's almost like when the students ready, the teacher will appear, right.
Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes people don't wake up to the need for transformation until the pain becomes unbearable. And I know that that was the case for me. I mean, one of the most pirital moments of my life was after Stanford Business School I had I'd worked in high tech marketing for a while, and then I started a new venture back software company. I was a visionary thinker in technology, and I was able to attract luminaries in Silicon Valley to be my investors, my board members. He
Attackered was our first client. It was a huge hit, and so I attracted all these great people also to work for me, including one of my classmates from Stanford Business School. So here I'm a visionary leader attracting all this good stuff and leading a company. Two years into this product was late, customer was unhappy. I was under a lot of stress, and we were in downtown Palo Alto.
One day, I went out for lunch, got my lunch, came back, came up upstairs with the second floor offices was and my heart sank because what I saw was in the boardroom. Was see that my chairman of the board and the president I had hired and vice presidents, they were sitting in the board Basically it was a palace school. Because what had happened is my president and VPS went to the board and said, sure Zod is being such a horrific controller and micromanager as a leader
that we cannot stand working for him anymore. He is destroying the division of the companies he started. And that was the most painful professional moment of my life. And that day I was demoted from being CEE of the company I had started. And I couldn't walk away because I'd brought in all the investors and all the clients and employees. I couldn't just walk away and abandon them.
So I had to keep going back into the office where I had been the model, working with people that I thought had stabbed me in the back profoundly painful. And then to get to I had to figure out what the heck is going on here? Who am I? Am I this visionary neither or had attracted all this positive stuff to me? Or am I this horrible micromanager or nobody could stand working for? Who am I? The answer, finally, I realized, as I got into getting over my pain discovery,
was I am both. I am that beautiful sage positive visionary who attracted and created all this great stuff and under stress, which is something that fuels or the saboteurs instead of my beautiful sage self. I had become more and more of my saboteurs, and including the controller and the judge, and with all of their negativity. So I am both. And the question is which one am I in the moment based on how much stress am I experiencing and how powerful these characters are relative to each other.
Wow, thank you again, what a great story and also what great insight, and also how it's hard to be objective about ourselves because we are us, right, and we're always looking at everything through the I'm always looking at
the world through the Craig lens. And even though you, I and TIF are all in the same moment now, we're not having the same experience, right, And to be able to not lose your shit when those people do that to you, If I get to academic, let me know to not lose your shit and to be able to reflect on that with humility and self awareness and then come to that kind of awakening. Ain't many people
doing that? That's good for you? And so does this speak to our capacity for equanimity, you know, to be the calm in the else, to be able to be a best self when things aren't going well.
It absolutely does. And the thing that I tell my audience is as I look them in the eye and I say, I have good news and I have bad news for you. The bad news is you are sabotaging yourself far more bootally every single day than you have any clue you are, that these characters inside of you, these saboteurs, are far more devastating than you realize. That's the bad news. The good news is that the sage part of you is far more profound and powerful than you have any clue. And the good news is a
lot better than the bad news. And so what I believe is profound capacity of the human being once they really begin to tab into the power of their sage, we have no clue how magnificent we are.
Do you think it's a good idea? And I guess the answer on this would be well, cry pens, but I'm just going to ask it, and then you can
just riff on the question is it a good idea? Like, for example, Tiff and I know each other well, and so there are times when we kind of started off as mentor mentee, and then she began to work with me, so there are times when she would ask me things about her work or a performance element or something like that where I can have a level of objectivity about her that she can't because she's her right when we're looking to build the best version of us and recognize
these saboteurs and move forward in a more positive direction, do you think it's good to invite people into provide you with feedback purely just because they can see things about us that we can't. Obviously that need to be the right people and all of that.
That's what I have done, Like that's what we have done as a family. So when I started developing this work, the first place I held myself accountable was with my own kids. So I told my kids, I said, look, I have this judge sabatur amongst other sabbateurs, and I want to work on it. And I want you to hold me accountable for my judge. And how do you know my judge is talking if I'm screaming at you, if if I've lost control, I'm screaming at you and
taking advantage of my parental authority. I am in my judge mode. You do not need to follow what I'm asking you to do, because I am in my judge mode. You don't need to follow what I say. However, if I calm down and shift to the positive part of my brain and then the home clear that way, I say, would you please do this, then maybe you should follow
what I'm asking. But and then my daughter, even when she was like seven years old, she always held me accoontole because I'll be screaming, and she say, duddy, who's doing the talking right now? And every time she would
catch me absolutely in being in my judge. And also I told them about my other savators, and in so doing, I was not just holding myself accountable, but also creating an environment in which my kids and my wife got to witness what's possible in this transformation of a human being. Saying I'm not perfect. I have these nasty characters in my head. I want to be better. I want to catch them in the act, and I want to shift
help me do that. And also, and after I would have what I call a sabbator hijacking, I would always go back to them and say, ooh, sorry, the judge was doing the talking. And what my sage would want to say is a very different thing. Here is what my sage right now would want to say so. And that's the way that my son and daughter in particular got to be so inspired by this framework that they
are not practicing it themselves. So my daughter, who's twenty five years old now, I'm living in New York City. Every few months, she says, she texts me this Barchart, and he says, says, Dad, I just started dating this guy. This is his Savator assessment Barchard that yes, what do you think, Let's talk about it. It's just fascinating because it is so helpful for her in helping to understand other human beings unrelated to them better. And it also I was holding myself accountable and modeled it.
I love that. Imagine that first date where you say, before we go to the second date, you're going to have to fill out this online test that my dad created, and depending on the data, and depending on a subsequent discussion about your data with my dad, there may or may not be a second date. That'd be so good. I would love that. Oh my goodness, that'd be an interesting family dynamic. This is what I feel about something,
and I want to know what you feel. I feel like because I'm I've been working for forty three years, right since I was eighteen, So forty three years of work. I'm sixty one, and I feel like less than ever people actually want feedback. I feel like we say we want feedback, but what we really want is praise. What
we really want is endorsement. And so when you know, invited to give it depends on the situation, of course, circumstance, environment, person, but being able to give people real feedback that's coming from a good place, that's as objective as I can be. I think sometimes when we tell people what we truly see, if it isn't what they want to hear, they shut down. So talk to us a little bit about giving feedback in twenty twenty five.
And this goes to the whole idea of how do you get somebody to want to do the work and change themselves. And we can't get people to want to change by confronting them, by pushing them, by you know, wanting them to wake up and change, and we disciplined and all of that stuff, and because what's going on is that when we do those things inadvertently, we are energizing their saboteurs. And as we energize somebody Sabbators that are even more likely that they will want to avoid
changing anything because that Sabators are interested in survival. So the most important thing is we need to energize somebody's stage. Not sabatur have the stage in them, see the possibility for that for who they are. And often what I tell people is that's why when I start by saying I have bad news. But if all I have for you is the bad news, you're not going to want to and you're going to run away. I have really awesome, awesome,
awesome news, which is how extraordinary your stage is. And in that I even tell people, you know, I'm not here to change you. I'm here to hope you remember who you truly are. Because my son and my daughter, when they were born, they were born with extraordinarily beautiful essence beings, and those two essences were completely different from each other. Each person is born as a unique beautiful
essence being, unique as their fingerprints. And one of the most important things I want to help people do is remember who they are in their gorgeous, beautiful essence being and by the way, that essence being never changes. And I play this I play this game with my son likes tickling. My daughter didn't like tickling. But I played this game with my son. I had recognized that one of the biggest problems with people is that they grow
up feeling conductiontionally loved. I am conditionally loved if I do well, if I do the right things, if I I'm good in sports or whatever. So unconditional love is worthless, and so conditions a conditional love is worthless. Unconditional love
is about being loved for your essence. So in order to make sure my son didn't grow up with conditional love and he knew how to love himself, I played this tickling game with him, where I would I taught him to give me all the right answers, so I would stop tickling himself start tickling him and say, so, kem, why I love you so much? And he had learned to say and he would say, I don't know that he idea love me so much. And I would take him some more and say, well, is it because you
are so handsome? And he is very handsome. It looks like my wife and him say no, that it's not because I'm handsome, taking him some more, Is it because you're so good in sports? Know that it's not because of that. Is it because you're so good in math and literature and whatever. No, that is not because of that. Is it because you're so kind of generous? No, that is not so. At the end, I would faint great frustration. I would say, so, why is it, John, why do
I love you so much? And he had learned to say and he would say, that is because I am me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's beautiful.
That is because okay. I would ask him, so what does that mean? And he would say, you know, my true self is the person you held in the hospital. That person has never changed, will never change. I don't have to perform for it. I don't have to do anything for it. I am that person, and so in that I think the most important work here is that the Sabbateurs have created the false identity of us. They have told us a different version of who they say
we are. And as we quiet the voice of these Sabaturs, we begin to see the beautiful, true ess and self that we are, and we fall in love with ourselves and what I One of the ways I talk about our work is I want to help you move from the self brute metality of your saboteurs the unconditional self love of your sage. And that's the good news that that sage is profound, beautiful and has everything that you need in or to be very happy and very successful.
And it starts by being less of our false self. Who are the sabators?
I love it? Hey, tip before we wind up, what's what's at the top of your self sabaturist or your sabatur list? What do you? What do you?
I've already done that, I've already done.
The Oh you've done the test.
Yep, we've done it. Hyperachiever and the restless at my top two?
Really, so what is hyperachiever?
Yeah?
And and restless? Well, we've got the guru here with us. He might as well unpack that with you a little bit. What have you got a question based on that?
Fix me?
I think that's an instruction. You got a question?
Well, I want to go in and read more about it now. I'm really interested.
Well, Tiffany, the hyperachiever that the reason we put the hyper in front of it is being an achiever is really awesome, It's wonderful. And the hyper achiever is the part that has your self love be completely conditioned on your achievement. And the problem with the hyperachiever is that there is never enough achievement for you to feel validated
enough to love yourself. So the hyperachiever, you know, sets this big target and you have to climb this mountain, and you work really hard to clim in mound and get to the top. Then the hyperachiever allows you to celebrate for I don't know, a minute an hour a day if you're lucky, and then it says, well, that's not enough to that was the old achievement. Now you have achieve this for me so you can be worthy
of love and respect. And most hyperachievers, the problem is the hyperchiever takes you to the graves still setting new conditions for you to prove to yourself that you're worthy
of love. And so the big thing we want for the hyper achieve is very much to disconnect your self love from your most recent achievement, so that you can look yourself in the mirror even at the end of the day when you have made a mess of things, and feel deep, unconditional self love for yourself, and then absolutely go after your achievements, but have the achievement, be joyful and enjoy the steps towards the achievement, not just wait for the achievement, and as you are present to
every step. The game you're playing is inherently valuable and useful, not just because of the outcome, because but the game itself is inherently valuable and enjoyable. You will achieve more, not less, because you're more energized, You recover faster from problems and failures, and you actually achieve more, not less. If you're less of a hyperachiever.
That'll be two hundred and fifty dollars. And that's that's like with the tell you why page. All right, let's just quickly let's wind up. Thank you so much for that. Shoz add so Positive Intelligence dot com, Positive intelligence dot com and also the book is Positive Intelligence. Is that your main website, Positive intelligence dot com is that where we steer people.
Yes, and in particular I would love everybody to do the Sabbator assessment, So pasin thurs dot com. Slash assessment is how you do the five minute online Sabator assessment. All the discovery starts there, and then there are these nor science based techniques about how to shift your brain activation. So when you detect yourself in sabator or you can shift to more of the brain activation of the sage so you have access to that. So it's a systematic,
step by step process that you get to learn. First step is to the sabator assessment.
Wow, sounds good that tift.
Did you do?
Did you enjoy that?
Yeah?
What's yourself to hearts?
Oh, get in, get in the queue. Well I have, I embarrassingly haven't done the test. I'll do the test after this, which is not the right order. But I think probably a little bit of self loathing, a bit of a like I never think I'm good enough even when I do well, but not so much high achiever.
I like achieving stuff, but I feel like like when people say nice things to me directly, part of me likes it, part of me doesn't want to hear it because I feel unworthy of what they're saying, you know, So I definitely need some therapy.
Any band aids for that. She's at.
A lot of the high achievers I work with have the impostor syndrome, and there's a voice in their head that says, your your success has come from luck and circumstance. You're a fraud, and any day you'll be exposed for for the impostor that you are. And those are all elements of the judge. And I believe that the judges. We call it the master sabator or the key one, because the judge starts the whole thing. And I found my judge was so devastating as a character. I gave
him a nickname. I called my judge the executioner because he was so dark. And he's basically his staying watchers. Or you're unworthy of any love, of any success, anything that goes well, you don't deserve it. And and by the way, that voice has never gone away. So that judge is in my head every day. Except he used to be a client. I used to trust him. I used to believe that he's just telling the truth. And now it's just a whisper where I say, oh, where
have you been. I haven't heard from you for a while. But what he tells me has not changed at all. And the judge is absolutely the number one sabbator we all want to tackle.
It's all myst like, when something bad happens, it's because of me, and when something bad good happens, it's in spite of me. Do you know what I mean it's like yeah, but that yeah, like you said, that was luck.
We all have that. And the reason the judges the universal savatur is that, for evolutionary reasons, the brain has a tendency to amplify the negative by a factor of three to five versus the positive, because because being paranoid and being stressed and being negative was actually helpful for the survival of ancestors to have avoid all the possible
dangers to their survival. And so I mean, when the tree starts shaking, if your ancestry was anxious and assume the worst, and it's always assumed that the tiger trying to come and eat me alive, and they ran ninety nine other of one hundred times they were wrong. They were unnecessarily paranoid, but the one time that they were right,
it saved their life. Imagine if you had an ancestor that was very optimistic and positive, the tree starts shaking and they would say, you know what, I bet there's a call over coming to give me a very hug. I'm feeling optimistic today. How long do you think that ancestor survived? So we are so the judge being the universal saboteur, is there for a reason, amplifying the negative, discounting the positive, And it is the number one character
that we need to expose. And basically you want to label it when it comes to here you go again, and how isn't a humor? Like I sometimes I judge, where have you been? I haven't heard from you calling in an idiot like a whole hour? Did you know enough? Yeah? So we instill taking them so seriously. We start labeling it instantly like oh there goes a judge again, Oh there goes a judge again, Oh there you are again, where have you been? And then shift our brain activation
to a different place. There the judge is incredibly system.
I think there's I think that like in me, there's this almost duality of I can intellectually know that I did a good job or I'm good enough. I can know that because I've got data or evidence or whatever, right feedback forms from an audience. Right, So I know I did well, but at the same time feel not good enough. So these two things can coexist in the one human where you know something to be true, like I did a good job with this particular thing. I'm
not a dud. I'm not a failure while also feeling concurrently like a failure, which is a really interesting mix.
And really the reason for it is that the saboteurs and the saboteurs tend to live in regions of brain that also where a lot of the thinking mind is and the ruminating mind the other pilot mind the same. And so the harder you think, the less access you have to the feelings you want to have, which is feelings of self love and compassion, which is a whole different part of your brain. And so what we teach
people is shifting brain activation. So if I'm not feeling good about myself right and trying to think my way out of that problem and think so that I feel differently, I need to shift my brain activation. And we do these with ten second exercises that we call the cure apps, and the most popular version that people love is and if we can practice it together, So if you take two fingertips and gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip bridges
on both fingers. Yea, with such attention you can feel the finger to bridges on both fingers. So if you
do ten seconds of that, yeah, we just did. If you had your head under a functional MRI machine, you'd notice that it's ever so quiet, so slightly quite the region of your brain that where these feelings are being upset and stress and shame and shame and guilt and all these things, ever so slightly energize a part of your brain where where you are able to feel empathy and love and compassion and so much of this work is about shifting brain activation and rewiring the brain right
and trying to think our way from one state of being to another state. Thinking is not going to get you there. Yeah, I love shut in percent eighty percent of that. This is about muscle building.
Yeah, well, now that you've been so good, we've got to get you back. So can you come back another day and we do the ten saboteurs? Can we unpack them? Yeah, it'll be glad to Yeah, we'll do that one day. We'll give you. We'll give you a break from me, because everyone needs a break after they've had a bit of me. So Positive Intelligence dot Com. The book is called Positive Intelligence. She's ad it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the You project. Loved
having you. Appreciate your time and wisdom and beautiful nature. Thanks for being part of the experience here. We loved it.
Wonderful Craig, this was a wonderful conversation I enjoyed myself actually, and Deviani it was great to meet you too.
Thank you.