I got a team. It's the Bloody You Project. It's bloody Harps, It's bloody tiff and it's bloody doctor Sam. All in the one bloody virtual room. There's a lot of swearing in there, the one virtual room at the same moment in time. Although technically it's not seven o'clock in wa it's five, isn't it? Is it five or four? It's five? Right? So two hour diff? When does it go back to three hour dift? Do you know? When's that?
I just wait for the announcements, but I'm not that prepared.
I'm a little bit like that too.
Hi Tiffany, Hi Kray Anthony, what's going on?
Are you good? Yeah?
I am good.
I'm good.
Banks.
Now, I did not know that you were going to join us, but you stuck your head up like a little fucking meerkat over the virtual wall of the U project and just started waving your little pause going let me into the studio. And I said to doctor Sam, what do you think? She went, Nah? So I overrode her because I'm nice.
Yeah, Sam would never say.
That that is true. There's only one rude person on this podcast, and it's the bloke in the middle. Of the screen, Tiff, what have you done? Have you been productive?
I actually have lots of podcasts today, which.
Is why i'd put a questionable. I'd just finished run in time to get on here. But that's why I wasn't sure if i'd edit this one later, because I might be a bit podcast brain fried, but very productive and even a little little slow plod little run.
Really yeah, really, what do you Because you're a power athlete. Now tell doctor Sam, have you ever seen her in a bloody crop top? You probably haven't. No, I mean this with love. She says that herself spilt like a dude, and.
I'm getting jacked, Doc.
What's brought on the running?
Well? Well, I'm just reading reducing either a little just a short run and or a little hit workout once or twice a week, just because I really value that cardiovascular style of training and it feels good. I just don't want to go back to doing too much of it. On top of the training, I'm doing.
Goodie gum drops and doctor Sam, we spoke briefly last time you hit the gym affair bit you do some weight like, what's your kind of I'm sure it varies, but give or take what's your weekly kind of commitment to exercise.
I love doing three low body days often Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then two upper body days, often Tuesday Thursday. But then I can't stay away on the weekend either, so I just try to shuffle it around. But pretty much, yeah, five weight training days I love, and like you, Chip, I'm trying to just add in a bit more cardio because I feel like I'm really unbalanced in that way.
Kind of neglected my cardio recently, so I've been adding in more walks, trying to get to ten thousand a day steps today.
Were you were you remotely athletic at school? Were you somewhat coordinated? What?
He never I was that student that would be like I will write lines and not just sport. It was actually motherhood that really got my button to gear because I was like, I want to be that mum that can run around the park with my kids, and so I have to there be this person racing exercise. And then I actually just fell in love with weight training. So that worked out really well. And I still feel old when I run around the park with my kids. So I'm getting that.
I think I know, But can I ask how old you are, feel free not to answer that question.
But also, I am thirty five next month.
How young does she look here? I know, babyface, I know, and I'm not even being nice, like I don't know. I don't know anymore. I can't tell. But like I say, fifteen year olds who look to me like twenty two,
but Sam's thirty five and looks twenty five. When you get especially with young with I guess teenage girls and young women when they put on makeup and they're out and about and dressed up with makeup, it's kind of hard to tell, you know, whereas with teenage boys and men it's a little bit easier.
I think, Oh, I feel like these days I can't tell, Like I'm never accurate, you know, like back then fifty year olds then versus now is so different too. So I just I can't kick up look at j Lo like.
She's I think she may have a team that keeps that happening. Plus she's And then I don't want to say anything, I'll get myself in trouble, but yeah, she is, she is. I see. Even when I want to say something compliment you, I go, can I say that? Can I say she's attractive. Is that illegal these days? What is that? Six to twelve months? She's illegal. You're going to jail. I mean you're she's she's attractive, You're going to jail. No, she's she's done. But there's a lot
of people in that, you know, Brad Pitt. I don't want to say this, but Brad Pitt and I are the same age. Look at my head. I look like a fuck some kind of marsupial in a fucking you know, I'm a Brad Pitt still looks like a fucking hot thirty five year old.
Well you just said that they have teams, right, I mean whole team dedicated to them.
Yeah, well, good for them, Good for them. So we're chatting about of course, Dr Sam is one of our regulars.
Now.
I guess we have quite a we probably have ten twelve regulars now. And of course you are doctor Sam Case. You are a psychologist, among other things, specialized primary sorry, you've got a PhD. And you're a therapist, all right, and you specialize in kids and play their therapy. But also you you know, your knowledge is expansive. And I sent you a message this afternoon because I had a message.
By the way, if you have an idea for a topic for a show, just go to the U Project podcast Facebook page, the U Project Podcast Facebook page and go, hey, Harps, what about this? But before you do that, try to make sure that we haven't done it thirteen times already.
But if you've got an idea that's a little bit different or fresh or original and it falls loosely within the kind of the walls of human behavior and psychology and thinking and doing better and personal development and self awareness and management and all that shit, yes, send us. Send it through. Because Johnny Dunn, who is a guy from Queensland, I don't know if I can say his profession, but well he did put it on. He did put it on. Maybe I better not he put it on
the Facebook page. But let's just say he has an important job, works under a lot of pressure, and he may drive a cop car. But other than that, I'm giving you nothing. There's no hints. No, he did say it on the page. Tift done look at me like that. So he wanted us, he wanted us to talk about burnout. And I went, so, I send you a message today and went, is that in your wheelhouse? And you went, well, actually,
Jumbo I can do that, So what what can you? Firstly, what's the difference between burnout and mental fatigue and stress and anxiety or these all intersecting variables that live under the one roof and their first cousins or something.
Well, I feel like it's a really subjective term when you think about it, right, A lot of people you know will have different views about it. I like to think of burnout is you've reached your capacity, Like you feel like you're completely and utterly mentally fatigued. You've lost that compassion perhaps for your job, You've lost a drive, you've lost the motivation, you've become really negative about your role.
You don't see how this will get better. And quite often a lot of people I would say a crispy where they're like on the path towards burn out, and they stay in that crispiness for ages, and then something often kind of pushes them over the edge to that burnout, and often that looks like either you know, having to take leave from their job, stress leave or quitting or
actually not being able to function. So I would say burnout is probably reaching that point right, But right up until then, there's that crispiness it's like, are they bent out? Are they on the road to burn out? I think it's really subjective.
Though, and what are the kind of I might be heading towards that signs and symptoms where maybe I need to take a day off, week off, a month off. Maybe I need another job, maybe I need a different environment. I don't know what's kind of what might be bubbling up that we can be aware of so we don't just keep pushing the accelerator to the floorboard.
I would say that exhaustion both mentally and physically, that loss of motivation and drive for the job, struggling even to get out of bed, or struggling to engage in activities that would bring you joy before, but now you just don't have any desire to do anything outside work
because you're so exhausted. I'd say even in the role, getting really cynical or negative about the role, not seeing any change, like feeling like it's just not rewarding, you know, lost that kind of either passion for the job or just you know, wanting to be there and do the role, like kind of you're physically there, but you've checked out.
Yeah, I reckon to feel free to jump in. I reckon. Like in life, a lot of things have a used by date. You know, bread's got to use by date, milk's got to use by date. But I think also jobs or careers, or environments, or obviously relationships or even training protocols where you know, the way that I trained worked really great for a while, and then it became less efficient and less effective. So I needed to ramp it up or change. I needed some variety or some
progression or some reduction in recovery time. I needed to manipulate the variables to get a different response or in my case, so I started in gyms in nineteen eighty two. I started personal training in eighty six. I set up my first center in nine point ninety. So by the time I sold my gym I started ninety two, it was about thirty two or three years later. And by the time I sold it, I wasn't burnt out, but I was just getting no joy. I didn't you know.
I still love helping people, but I felt like I was I was not only was I not growing, I kind of and maybe I wasn't, but I felt like I was going backwards. Because how many times can you talk about bums and legs and carbs and adjust a bloody bike seat and hand someone a pair of dumbbells and set the bloody treadmill up, and not that they're bad things, but after you do that sixty seven million times, you know, I think you need some kind for me anyway.
I needed a different environment or a different job, or to talk to different people or think about different things, or to be able to keep expanding and learning, because it just for me. It got to the point where I didn't hate it, but I reckon another six months, I would have hated it gone. Even though it's a good job. Yeah, yeah, And it.
Doesn't necessarily be a bad job, right. Every job is, you know, susceptible off this as well. And I think a lot of the helping professions, right, NASA's teachers, people working in a therapist even it doesn't mean that the job's bad or that the workplace is bad, but it's a combination of things, right, that can really add to the loads. So I think we're you said there around change.
I think quite often people are really resistance to change change and that kind of contributes to to them reaching that point.
That's a good point, because people are resistant to change but change sometimes is going to be the solution to the burnout, or at least part of the solution. Right.
Well, change inevitable, and I think often people don't want that, right They just want, like I just want a job and I want to get my head around it, and then that is it, and then things change in their environment and then that would require them to adapt, and I think there's that resistance to do that. And like you said, I think change is necessary. It's inevita part of life. And I think if the more that we can embrace it, even in a playful way of like
what else could I be doing? And what you know, what about this could really shift? And what could I actually tweak to make this a better fit for me? That can be playful, that can be exciting, That can you know when we actually are open to exploring the possibilities. But quite often we don't feel that way.
Right.
We're trying to resist that change. We're trying to push through just work harder. Yeah, we think it's a time management thing rather than an energy management issue as well.
And also it's a how do I respond individually to this situation or this stress or this stimulus or this event or like I was talking this morning at the cafe with a made of mind Deno shout out to Dean. He's a fiery and we're just talking about Yeah, we're talking about, broadly speaking, people's ability to perform under pressure.
So whether or not you're a cop, whether or not you're a policeman or a nurse, or a doctor, or an elite athlete or a soldier or you know, anyone putting themselves into situations that are not comfortable, not certain, not necessarily predictable, maybe not familiar, but being able to just go in there and do what you need to do and to manage the fear of the anxiety, the biology, the psychology, the emotion, all of it. Like some people do great with that, some people melt down with that.
But that's again, it's less about what's going on and more about how the individual navigates or deals with personally what's going on, right, well, how.
They approach it. I think you've made a really good point, Like, look at an athlete right there, for example, gearing up for a race, and so they're training in a certain way and it's super intense and they're looking at their nutrition and then they do the race, they have to obviously highly perform, but then they have this period of rest I'm sure right where their training looks different and their nutrition looks different, and their recovery is their main focus.
So no one actually works at a high level twenty four seven like they're going to go through cycles. But what happens in workplace is people don't go through cycles. They just try and perform at their top the whole time. They don't see the value in resting and recovering and still doing the things that bring us during all of that. Yes, their intense high periods and stuff in those jobs, but it should come with after that intense periods of rest
and recovery. But they don't create space in their lives for that. You know, their weekends are just filled with meeting other people's needs. It's or you know, doing all the social things that they feel like they have to do, the obligations, rather than looking at actually what they need to sustain themselves, to preserve themselves so that they can continue working at that high level.
M and I guess to be able to understand your mind and your body and your emotions and your nervous system and your responses to whatever's going on, you know, to be able to go, oh, my body is telling me I need some time off, Like my nervous system, my blood pressure, my energy, my emotions, whatever are just going and whether or not I need a day or two off, or whether or not I need to go
somewhere else, do something else, whatever the change is. But I think that ability to be able to tap into the wisdom of our own body, that's always like sending these messages and pay attention, you know, like that's a big out of it too, I guess, But we don't tend to do that, no.
Because we haven't really seen that role modeled a lot, either in society or in our families, you know, in terms of like not just being busy and pushing through rest was often maybe you know, you know, it had to be earned, right or where kind of Again, busyness is a sign of like, oh yeah, good, you've got lots on your plate. You know, you're helping out all these people. So I think you're right, we're not in tuned with our own signals in our body because we
haven't really been shown that. You know, how do we know how to trust ourselves? How do we know when we need rest? And how do we know when to push through? Like that's that self trust right that we often talk about.
So TIV in the pH three sixty framework, that addresses quite a bit of this stuff too, doesn't it Like knowing how your body and your brain and your energy kind of works. Can you explain just simply and quickly what Sam's writing it down what pH three sixty is. It's not you're not meant to know what it is. Just give her a snapshot and the listeners of what it is.
It's personalized health, and it brings together a whole range of different biology, medicine, genes, DNA, a whole range of other I guess sciences come together chronobiology, So understanding for people's actual biology, what environments, what chronobiology, what type of work people they need to be around, the type of socializing. So it's just understanding how you interact with your environment and what impact it has on your stress.
That's really cool.
Yeah, we have a guy on tell I'll shut up, I'll get that. Tell doctor Sam about doctor Cam who he is, and a little bit more about things because our listeners might want to go and do the test as well. I reckon Sam would like to do the test.
Doctor Cam's incredible and he's the found one of the founders of the company, and you can go if you just look up free test PhD sixty free test. There's a free test that you can do, or you can do a paid version. Get They've got an app called Shay Personalized Health, so you get a whole personalized app that tells you it's basically it's got AI now, so you've got like a little virtual AI trainer. It tells you what to eat, when to eat, when to train,
how to train, how to move digestion. It tells you exactly what individual foods you need and why, and that changes seasonally as well as overall.
Yeah, wow, it sounds far better when Cam doctor Cam.
No, no, no, no, you're doing a good job. What type are you? What type are you again, tiv.
I'm an activator. There's six main health types, and within those six main health types, there's a three hundred and sixty degree circle of different types that come into it. But the main health type categories will talk about what hormone was most dominant as you're in embryo, So for myself, it was the sex hormones of adrenaline, and testosterone, so that dictates how your body forms and grows at that stage.
So activators will generally be more inclined to be more muscular, lean and muscular, more competitive, more aggressive, more reactive, and less detail focused and early morning people like your crossfitters, your early morning trainers. And then you've got on the other end of the spectrum, you've got a guardian. They are driven by the prolactant as the hormone, so they're very nurturing, like they're a lot of paramedics, a lot of nurses, very nurturing people. They need to have stress
free mornings. And yeah, the whole the timing that you do everything in your day within those hormones, how those hormones flow throughout the day.
Wow, So you found it really useful for you big time and especially.
For Sorry sorry, I was going to say a guardian slide. The labradors of the group.
They so are connectors, actually connectors are they're next to it, and the connector is called the puppy dog. They each have an animal, and the guardian is the bear, and the activator is the cat, and the connector is the puppy dog.
Because they're all about fun. So a connector.
So take myself and a connector, for example, we do a similar style of exercise, but a connector needs to do that in a group with people. They're people, folcus, they have to do everything has to be having fun and connecting with people, whereas an activator is very driven to compete and perform and like punch people in the face and do CrossFit and win.
You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, I don't need anyone and I've got.
This yeah yeah, And it's really fascinating, Like I do it. I do coaching with people, and it's not just physical like I've done corporate coaching with people, where to understand how you work and how potentially other people work, how you communicate with someone who you know is not.
Like you, yeah yeah, and appreciating those differences true, right, and seeing that as strengths, like for them to lend their own body and what would work for them. Yeah.
One of the first things I learned about myself was that idea of letting go.
Of I thought, am I just do I have? Am I obsessed with exercise?
Because I would train in the morning, and if I trained in the morning, I'd finish work and I'd be like.
I feel like training again?
Am I just obsessed? Do I have an eating disorder where I just eat and train? But activators, their primary lifestyle thing is to move, So they want to move in the morning and then they want to move again. The body is built to move. That's the most important lifestyle factor is moving, yea, which is why I want to bring that explosive movement into my days because it's a part of what's hardwired.
Yes, and you know that that would wait for you then, right, the more religind you are.
With that, Yeah, what am I in this framework again? TIV? What am I?
I can't remember?
What you?
Doctor? I don't know, doctor, cam Baby, I don't know. I reckon, I reckon. I'm a hybrid.
I reckon, You're a hybrid? There such thing? Do they have my prints at all of them?
Yes? Yeah, So I'm also very on the cusp of a crusader, which Cam is a crusader. So you can within that, like I said, that's six three hund and sixty degree circle, you can sit right on the cusp. So the look of an activator who's at that end of the spectrum as opposed to the other end of their little wedge of the circle.
You can look very different.
What's a crusader? What tell us about them?
Crusader? They are very data driven, data and analytical and gold driven. And they're often quite.
Tall and lean with big hands, long slender fingers. Yeah, and built for endurance, so they're like great cyclists, great great for endurance type exercise.
So no crusaders here.
Then I am on the cast points for that.
Wow, don't you reckon? Doctor Sam? That like trying to figure out how we work as one of the biggest challenges from a health and wellness like and like with what Tip's talking about, but just knowing if I have six hours sleep, I'm fucked. If I have seven to seven and a half, I'm good. If I eat after nine o'clock, I sheet or seven or eight o'clock I sleep like crap. If I do this, it works. If I do that, it doesn't work. Because we're always getting data, right yep.
It's like life is like one big experiment, and when we're in different situations too, in different seasons of life where you know, getting new data. So I really like that approach to life. It's on the site being a researcher and like you said, you're just looking at that data and you keep using that to inform what you do next next steps.
So are there any from a clinical point of view or a therapeutic point of view when you're talking with dealing with helping people who are in burnout or heading towards burnout? And I know there's no three step plan, but what are the some of the things you would talk about or perhaps want to put in place.
I'd get first, I guess to their core beliefs. Quite that quite often drives a lot of their burnout type behaviors, right where they stop doing the things that bring them joy and they keep pushing through and they think they need to work harder and if only they could just get on top of that to do list. And I think that comes from a lot of those core beliefs, right if, like there's something wrong with me, I need to be able to be more efficient, I need to
work harder. You know, people need me. I can't let them down. I can't fail at this, like I should be able to do this. All of those kind of beliefs come into play and how they see themselves as well.
So I really kind of tap into that, and then I guess really get them to go back to a time where they didn't feel like that what was happening in their life, what was working for them, because quite often they have their own answers right where they go, oh, I was like exercising heaps, and I was doing all those activities that I loved, and I was dancing, and I was spending time in the garden. And I've stopped
doing all of those things. And so they're like a little key indicators right off, like, okay, how do we get some of that back, even when you're fitling like this, right, how do we start to go towards that and make little steps? And then even talking about the basics, right the sleep, the nutrition, I mean, that's all the fundamental stuffs. And we can't think straight when we're on burnout. So that's quite often the problem. It's like, first they need
to take a step back. So usually, especially when they are coming to therapy, quite often that first step is to take a bit of a break right from work, whether it's a few days or weeks, so that they can kind of recalibrate, they can actually think clearly, because when they think clearly, they end up having right those next steps of what they need to do and what they want to do with their career. But when they're in it, they can't. You know, they're in survival mode.
They're super stressed, and when we feel like that will be Yeah, it's really hard to get our perspective, get our bearings.
Is it a good idea? Do you think to want to train yourself to be able to deal with pressure more effectively? Like you know, if you know that you have pretty regular meltdowns in situations where other people perhaps don't write and there's no self loathing in this, just
self awareness. So is it good for me to intentionally and by me, I mean anyone listening put myself in an uncomfortable in an intelligent, strategic way, not a silly, reckless way, but to put myself in discomfort intentionally, or to put myself in a place where I feel under pressure, I feel a little bit of stress, I feel a little bit of tension. Is it good strategically do that? So that? Because it seems to me that's inevitable in life. Right,
hard ship's coming, it's just a matter of when. So do we need to try in ourselves to deal with the hard shit? Yeah?
I quite often think the exercise is one of those ways that we do that. Right, we have to show up and we're pushing ourselves and we're connected with that, and we're choosing to do that, just like I'm sure tif you know you're choosing to live those ways or choosing to push yourselves. So I think that's one element.
But you're right in terms of the problem solving things, I think this is when reflection can be really helpful in being able to look at ways that we can build a life where we are exposing ourselves to these little things like thinking about Okay, career wise, right, they're band to act, hate what they do. Okay, how are we going to start to make steps towards doing something and we like to do What does that look like?
Is that taking on additional study or is it taking on you know, something on the side so that you are getting out of that and yet it takes work and it's that discipline and everything, but it's that small exposure to hard things and it's actually going to make life easier. It's almost like doing the hard things now right, makes it a little bit easier in the long run.
But you're right all about there are different problems and we have to get comfortable with solving them but knowing that they're going to be more right.
It's almost like a gym fit versus life fit, you know, like life is at times hard and unfair and uncomfortable and uncertain and unpleasant, and so let's do some stuff that we maybe don't need to do, but maybe a good idea to lean into every now and then so we can build some of those skills and some of that mindset and some of that resilience, some of that emotional resilience, so when the shit hits the fan, we don't capitulate.
Yeah, I think a lot of things comes into play with that, right, But it's almost like that saying choose your heart. You know, being overweight is hard, but being fit is hard too, Like all these things are difficult, and so when we are choosing our own little battles, it does make it a bit more fun because you're like, this is going to be hard, but I'm choosing to
do this. I'm choosing to retrain so I can move careers, or I'm choosing to say no to people that you know it's going to be bad, and you know people are going to be just point with me, But I know that this is better off than me, so I can get the rest I need. Yeah, so I think it's definitely multifaceted.
With that choose your hard. Thanks you just gave us the title of the show. Thanks for that.
How often, Sam, do you think that people's career bears the brunt of the burnout when maybe it's the rest of their lifestyle that's the cause.
Definitely it bears a brunt because they probably spend most of their time there, right, you know, yeah, forty hours a week or whatever. But you're right, it's what is happening outside that's quite often, You're very right. People are fixated on Okay, this is a workplace, it's my boss, you know, he's been like this, or it's the system,
or it's the policies, and they don't see that. On the weekends, you know, again, they're going to things that they hate doing and they're thinking about, right, keeping everyone else happy, and they're just busy and they're overloaded, and they're cleaning and they're cooking, and they're doing all these chores and they're not doing anything that they're like. So that often is you're right where we should start, because
that's what we have more control over. We don't have control over all the things in our workplace and all the people, but when we feel so powerless in our own lives personally, of course we're going to be picking
apart professionally, right, what's going on? And that's amplified. They'll just put it into perspective your workplace when you get more power in your own life, because then you're really you're more solid with who you are and then you're going to work and that's a role versus it being an identity.
Yeah, what about self awareness? Awareness of how you are and who you are and trying to have a level of perspective and objectivity, which is difficult when we're thinking and talking about ourselves. But self awareness versus self loathing, because it feels like they're very close sometimes, you know, and I think we can mistake one for the.
Other, definitely, because I think what people come to find is when they undertake this self awareness, right and when they're looking you know, they're journaling and they're thinking about all these things, they actually have a really critical way of looking at themselves and so that comes out. So then they equate self awareness with that self loathing because they're like, it must be all my fault, and that's how they approach it versus seeing, actually, I've got this
is my life. I'm responsible in fint of my life, which means I have influence over it. That's a more empowering way to look at it, and then it gets us to take action, right, rather than it's all my fault. Now I need to do something about it. So I think it's how we're approach it. Quite often our default is being really critical and blaming ourselves or blaming someone else, and that's why we shy away from self awareness. And also self awareness inherently doesn't change our life if we're
not going to take action. I can sit here, you know, for ages and talk about all these things, right, if all these patterns that I'm aware of, But if I leave here and not do anything different and not shift anything, then nothing's going to change. Just remains in my head.
And then it becomes exhausting. And that's another thing that actually contributes to burnout, as when we so much in our head and we're thinking about all the things that we could be doing and should be doing, and then taking zero action.
It's so interesting every time not every time, but oftentimes when I post something like a put up thing on I think it was LinkedIn This Morning that said something like, sometimes we don't need to learn something new, which might empower us, but rather to unlearn something old, which has
disempowered us. Right, And then I wrote that there are times when I just wanted to be right, and when I was you know, probably still, you know, and I was operating out of fear or ego or something else, and I just, you know, I was kind of unteachable in some things because I thought I knew right. So when you think that whatever that topic or subject matter is, you know you have one hundred percent knowledge and truth, then everyone who doesn't agree with you in the world
do you automatically think is wrong? Right, Well, that's a big kind of commitment. And anyway, this lady wrote, God bless her. She's like, oh, no, like you're great, You're being too hard on yourself, you know, And I'm like, I actually was just telling the truth. Like it's very like I think we're so used to not wanting to obviously run anyone down, which is nice, although we are pretty fucking good as a species at running people down.
But you know, like when you when you lean in and you're like, I'm sometimes I'm a dumb fuck, and this is what I'm doing. And it's just literally, this is what I'm doing, and it is me being either lazy or cynical, or arrogant or fearful or And then people think that's self loathing. I'm like, no, that's just knowledge, that's just self awareness. I'm not saying I'm a bad human, I can't get better, I'm a piece of shit. I'm not saying saying that. I'm just saying me anyway. I'm
not talking about anyone else but me. Sometimes I do stuff which is just not great. Sometimes I am self righteous, Sometimes I am arrogant. Sometimes I make bad decisions and get bad outcomes. This is all just data. This is just true. This is not me hating on myself. It's a tricky area to really have self awareness, and some of the stuff that you become aware of is pretty negative.
That's where the growth happens. It's uncomfortable, it's not all the good things, right, it's actually sitting with a trumpet of this is the pattern. Wish it wasn't, but it is. Do we do with that?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I think, and I say this a bit and people argue with me. But because I wasn't naturally like, you know, great athlete, all those things, great,
academic great, because I was kind of pretty average. I was really motivated to work harder and try harder and be more because if I didn't try harder and work harder, and because I didn't have the same level of potential or skill or talent you know, or whatever, athleticism or genetics or as most not all, but a lot of people that I went to school with, right, So I just had to learn to go, well, this is going to suck for a while, but that's all right, because
it eventually it won't suck and I'll go from being bad at it maybe to being somewhere between or right and good. But I think it's in that journey of developing, whether it's skill or talent or knowledge or awareness or competence, and getting the results is great, But for me, it's more about who you become when you're doing that thing.
It's a journey, right, And how do you think people responded to that, Joeney? Because I feel like quite often ambitious or ambition in general isn't really appreciated as much. Sometimes it might be like, oh, you know, don't like
you said, don't be too hard on yourself. What's wrong with just what you're doing now when you think about, you know, doing something outside the norm and even new Tiff right going yep, training in the way that you do right, it's against the norm of what maybe most people do, which is like no exercise or not being conscious of those things.
Said a big couple of years. Can you see behind her on the wall there's a poster that could probably hate that's her. Have you heard of Hunters and Collectors, the Australian group No, you've been living under rock, dude. But they're a very they're a very famous group from the eighties, nineties and noughties. There's still do they do anything together? Not much anymore.
They're not together anymore anyway.
The lead singer from that, his name's Mark Seymour, and he wrote a whole album called The Boxer, which was about Tiff, who was his trainer. You probably don't know Tiff as a background in boxing, so ergo that. But yeah, it's been it's been a busy year or two for you with all you like, you've exploded into speaking and your podcasts catching fire and you've been on the bloody front of a best selling Australian album.
How do you feel tip with that ambition? Do you feel like people have been great about Like, what's your take.
On It's funny because I ran into I hung out with someone earlier this week who I hadn't seen for a couple of years, and they commented about the last few years of watching and how I've just overachieved in
all these areas and how amazing it was. And it was just in the way that they said it one of those moments where I was like, oh really, And then you know, I always have to remind myself and it's why I carry on so much, I guess because I'm always in awe sometimes like ah, there's just this little chick from Chassy and like that's me on a billboard, that's me on an album like that happened, and I have to remind myself because.
And feel real like I imagine, Yeah.
I remind myself of in twenty twenty sitting there having Mark on the show for the first time, and I try and imagine what it would have felt like if someone said to me in a few years time, he'll write a song about you and you'll be on the front cover of the album, and that's going to happen. Like I would have punched him in the face and
said you're stupid. Same as like the day that Craig rang me and said, I want to start doing more podcasts and I've noticed your show's doing really well, and you know, do you want to come and do some episodes on my show? And I hung up the phone and went, holy shit, Craig Harper just rang me like I've been hanging out in his bamboo for years, trying to trying to be trying to learn from him and be around his people and trying to and here it is, you know.
And I feel like both those opportunities you could actually predict. You were just taking the steps right in a direction. Yeah, and then that came, But you could have never predicted that, Like you couldn't have been like five years ago. Okay, I'm going to go train someone and they're going to write a song like you can't say exactly exactly. Yeah, I's to such a good person, I think for everyone hearing this, right.
Yeah, but you know what, I love it takes a bit of guts and vulnerability because you can get rejected, Like didn't you say when you're in the ring with Mark once you were training him something like mucking around because you knew he was doing a new album, you better write a song about me. And he said it's already been written.
Well, yeah, I text him. I'd had a couple of training sessions and I sent him. He said, sent me something and I wrote back, I intend to unleash so much, Jim Trauma, you write a song about me on your next album. Ha ha, And he wrote back the boxer in inverted commas, it's already started. And then I still didn't know it was true. And then later that night he started asking me questions about my life and I was like, what are you asking for? And he said lyrics and I was like what, wow?
How good is that? Yeah?
Yeah, money to get listen to this now it's weird.
It's weird. I want to circle back to one thing we're talking about before Sam. Yeah, basically we're talking about the busy badge. How I'm sure overseas listeners do it as well, but in Australia we like, it's like we have this busy badge which is almost like a social credit. It's like that's the way that we get a prove. Oh yeah, how are things? I'm busy? Busy. It's like that's that's how we describe how we are, and the word that we use is busy, So we must think
that that's a good thing to say. What is that about? Why does that? Why is that such good currency?
That's a good question because I feel like it it's like a slip of the tongue, you know, we all just say it, you know, yep, been so busy. I feel like I noticed myself doing that as well. But if you think about what does busy mean, it's like, oh, someone gave me this coat. It's like the mosquito and the bee. They're both busy, but the bee's doing something quite productive. I'm making honey. But then the mosquito is
just like biting people. So you kind of think about what that busy iness filled with, because a lot of the time we're busy with other people's demands and not necessarily sitting with ourselves, and I think it becomes quite a distraction.
Yeah, I reckon, there's there's there's busy good and busy bad, Busy productive, busy, unproductive, busy fun and busy frustrating.
But it's still taking us away from our goal. It could be like I'm catching up this person and I'm, you know, going shopping, and I'm doing all these things. But hang on, didn't I say I have this huge goal that I wanted to achieve this, that I wanted to train, that I wanted to write that book, that I wanted to do that course. So I think it's not necessarily things are inherently bad. It's just like, what
is our main goals here? And is the business taking away from that or actually doing things that are moving us towards living an aligned life right, living at our values?
Do you think we don't follow through? Often we don't follow through on decisions or goals or intentions or resolutions just because it sucks, like the process is not fun, Like why do we make so many Why do we say I'm going to do this and we don't do it? Like, I mean, that's pretty much everyone has done. I would say ninety percent of the time. I'm guessing. But when people say I'm going to do this ninety percent of the time, they don't do it. What is that about?
Because it's hard and they're waiting for a time where it might not be hard. So they're like, I really want to do this thing, that life's a bit busy. Now, I'll wait till the kids are older, I'll wait till after this holiday. Because they think it's going to be easier and that pure of life. But the truth is it's actually going to be hard no matter what time. It is, just like exercise, you know, like it's just
hard either way. And when we realize that, then we don't wait for the perfect conditions because that will never exist, and we just start to make those steps towards that.
Then, when you're building your business, you know, which is quite not mainstream in the psychology therapy treatment space, Yeah,
did you? And I'm guessing there was a stage where you didn't have heaps of confidence because, and I mean this with love, you were just a girl that came that left school early, dropped out and went and cut hair right, and then how the fuck you ended up with a PhD is incredible, But there must have been a bit of pushback or at least some kind of resistance setting up your business because your kind of therapy is something of an outlier in the treatment world.
Oh yeah, constantly. When you think about it, you're doing something against the norm, right, You're creating something that's never been created before, is what it feels like. Right when you're you know, showing up and you're saying things that most people don't want to hear. They want to hear that you know, you're the expert and you're going to
give therapy full stop. They don't want to hear that you've created something different and because and this different thing is actually going to require a lot of deep work, and it's going to require action. It's going to require always hard things. So I think, yeah, there's definitely I guess that what do you say, self doubt? But it's uncomfortable,
it's gross. But I like to lean into that too, because I know that that's it means you're onto something, right when you know that you've been i don't know, trained in a certain way. We've been trained in that traditional way, and then I saw something that was missing, and then I've created something that's missing. I know other people are going to see that too, or other people are,
you know, feeling like how I am. So I think when you create with that in mind, where you're like, I'm making it for people like me, like us, well we want more. It makes it, I think, a lot easier because it's more of like a values driven mission rather than a I must make this per packed.
Really there's you know, there's lots of good and bad about university and study and research in general. There's some really good stuff and some not so good stuff. But what I like about at a PhD level, when you're doing science, you've literally got to find a whole. You've got to find a gap, you've got to find something that's missing and then go. You can't do what's already been done, you know, or even if you do open a door on an area that's been done, you need
to bring something new to the table. And I like that, and I like.
How much that pushed me too, because when I did my qualitative and I found a lot of things that were I probably could catch on too, and you know, make the PhD out of that, and there were kind of safe options there. Oh yeah, they've said this, I could just run with this and you know, focus my
lens on that. But then they said something that was really uncomfortable, and I was like, if I if I say this, I'm going to expose the industry to point out, you know that therapists do have bias as well, and we're not above all this, and despite our training, right, this does impact our work. And I was really scared. It was almost like that good girl kind of conditioning coming through, like I don't want to make anyone feel
bad or uncomfortable. And I remember publishing the study and I was like expecting it to get rejected, and it did, but with revision. So each of my two papers got three revisions and then they accepted it. But when I got my PhD, marked the comments around that, she actually marked it in the top five percent of what she's seen, and she said, I did that because you caught out, like the elephant in the room. You said something that most people don't talk about. And that was I thought,
really good. Because she was in the industry, she could anyther way. She could have shut it down and got all defensive, or she could have seen it for what it is, which is I'm you know, working towards calling this out so we can actually grow through that, we can learn through that. So it was really great. But it shows you that what research can reveal, Right, it's not comfortable stuff, but it's things that we need to hear so we can move forward.
And what people understandably don't understand who haven't been through the process, which is most people, of course, is that you you could have got another reviewer and maybe not even got your PhD. You know, if they just kept rejecting it. I mean you wouldn't you would have got it eventually. But you know what I mean, where you could have got like whoever that lady reviewed your work and quite rightly recognized its uniqueness and its value and
all of that. But if you had another reviewer, and by the way, yeah, so when you when you submit a paper or a thesis, it gets reviewed and then gets the going back and forth process is very normal. In fact, it's pretty much to be expected. You don't care in anything, and they go that's great, well done in no revisions or no whatever. Yeah, because you could have had somebody who was well and truly entrenched in the traditional model who went, what the fuck are you talking about?
Yeah? And that's the thing. It's such a subjective experience when you think about it. Even even with one of the papers, they had two reviewers and the editor and one reviewer was like, this is great. Ready as is yeah, put it in, and the other one was like, no, not at all, like no revisions, it just shouldn't be in this paper. And the editor was like, Okay, these are like polar opposites. I'm going to side with the one that said yes, but here's some revisions. And they
ended up getting accepted. But it just showed you, like literally the polar opposites of what they had said.
That's right, And that's when people think that in academia at a certain level, it's all just science and objective data analysis. It's absolutely not. Because you gave the same work to two people who had different opinions. Yeah, you know, different ideas different Like one thought it was great, one didn't think it should even get considered, and they're looking at the exact same thing. That's how imprecise science can be.
That's what people don't get. People think, Oh, it's like, that's why I'm all the time saying when somebody says the science tells us, just take that with a grain of salt, because that really does not mean much. You know, it depends what we're talking about specifically, but you.
Know, definitely I think people will take it as like gospel and then they listen to that more than these two and their own, Like you said, data from what they're learning about themselves.
So yeah, one hundred percent, Dr Sam. How can people find you, follow you, connect with you, and come and play with you for a huge hourly rate.
So I'm on Instagram, Dr Sam Casey or on my website which is www dot dot samcc dot.
Com, Perfect Tiffany and Cook. Any closing words of wisdom or insight or genius that you feel you just need to dump on us before we say goodbye.
I've got nothing, bro, you.
Don't want to do a big dump before we leave.
No, I'll let you sleep easy.
Thanks all right, would say goodbye here, but Sam, thanks again, appreciate you tip.
Thanks all right, Thanks guys,