Being Well Podcast – Page 3 – Inspired New Horizons

The Natural Next Steps

When I began my personal growth journey, the buzzword that was catching on was “mindfulness”. Time Magazine touted mindfulness as the new science of health and happiness in 2016. The message was clear — we are time travelers, often letting our minds wander to the past or future. We were being urged to find our balance and be more fully present in the moment.

It became very evident that in addition to time travel, our monkey minds were filled with an inordinate amount of chatter. So, meditation was introduced as the tool to help us stay more present in the moment. The internet was abuzz with “how to” practices and new meditation apps were hitting the market with a fury.

We were being reacquainted with something we take for granted — the power of our breath to regulate us. We were told to pay attention to our breathing and to use it as a grounding tool when we felt distracted or emotionally overwhelmed.

At the time, I recalled how I was taught the Lamaze method of breathing in my early twenties to help me through the labor and delivery process of my first baby. The seed had been planted that a few deep breaths could help keep me stay calm under pressure. Over the course of many decades and a lot of high stress parenting moments, I often told myself – and my kids – to take three calming breaths. I remember my dentist laughing when I shared with him that I used the Lamaze method more often in his office than when I was delivering my babies.

So, I had a lot of “buy-in” and actual experience when it came to the “breathing” component of meditation; but like most, I struggled with the traffic jam of racing, competing thoughts whenever I attempted to “meditate”. I could use my breath to slow my heart rate and calm my body. The next big step was learning how to manage the 60,000 thoughts create so much distraction every day.

That’s where mindfulness played a key role in what was touted in 2016 as the new science of health and happiness. Mindfulness was the buzzword and the trend that shifted our awareness. We began to cultivate greater “self” awareness.

Self-awareness helped us recognize when our minds had wandered off on a trip to the past or the future while we were playing a game with our kids, or enjoying a delicious meal with our family. Meditation practices helped us hone our focus and attention muscles. The goal was never to eradicate our 60,000 thoughts a day; it was to become more discerning about the ones we actively engaged with and to help us stay in the present moment with greater frequency.

The new science behind mindfulness was helping us to understand that time travel to the past often put us in negative ruminative loops and time travel to the future could make us worry and become anxious. We were missing out on gathering up and storing all the positives that were occurring in the present moment. The benefits of being present in the moment was being able to steep ourselves in moments of pure joy, delight and strong feelings of happiness. It was being more keenly attuned to gratitude – both giving and receiving it. It was also the recognition that this present moment may be the very one we had worked so hard to make come true. The science was telling us that our happiness is most salient when we live in the “now.”

Meditation was the term and the tool introduced to us to help us better understand all that our amazing brains are capable of doing when we choose to be consciously engaged in all its features. It became the gateway for learning about neuroplasticity and how neurons that fire together wire together; in other words, how we can create new neural networks throughout most of our lives. Our interest in meditation greased the wheels for us to take a deeper dive into learning how to care for our complex and incredible brains.

It was the Mindfulness trend in 2016 that put us on the path of greater access to the knowledge, tools and resources we have to do a much better job of caring for our brains and improving the quality of our lives as a direct result. Change-makers are coming onto the scene with relatable content, using layman’s terms and helpful metaphors to teach, getting us engaged and excited about all sorts of new approaches to parenting, relationships, education, counseling and therapy.

It is now the fall of 2023 – and the natural next giant step in the science of health and happiness has crystallized into mental health and emotional health. We now know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that if we want to live longer, happier and healthier lives, we need to integrate emotions into our operating system and we need to take brain health and hygiene seriously.

Where we once believed that only those with very disregulated, dysfunctional families were predisposed to mental health issues, we now know better. We also know that being well resourced both physically and emotionally is how we build resilience, courage and flexibility for the inevitable challenges of life. Furthermore, we are just beginning to fully grasp the negative effects of disconnection and loneliness, especially in our teens and elders.

Let’s take a look at some of these change-makers:

PARENTING:

Scroll through your favorite social media platform today for parenting tips and you will most likely discover Dr. Becky Kennedy, a children’s clinical psychologist who made a big pivot from old school parenting and psychology to a vastly improved integrated approach to help children struggling with their big emotions and problematic behaviors. She transformed her practice when she and her colleague launched “Good Inside” in 2020. If you are a parent, grandparent or child caregiver, you will find Dr. Becky’s teachings invaluable; and you will be leveling up your parenting skills in a whole new way.

On her website, Good Inside, Dr. Becky offers insights about herself and her professional practice. It is proof positive that all that we have been learning about childhood development, our brains and bodies, and our emotional health are shifting how we approach age-old problems.

Dr. Becky introduces herself as a clinical psychologist, mom of three and founder of Good Inside. When she first started her career, she practiced a popular “behavior-first” “reward-and-punishment model” of parent coaching. She shares that “after a while, something struck her — “those methods feel awful for kids and parents.” She got to work, taking everything she knew about attachment, mindfulness, emotional regulation and internal family systems theory– and translated those ideas into a new method for working with parents.

“By focusing on the parent behind the parenting, and the child behind the behavior, we help families heal — bringing out the good inside everyone. ” (Excerpted from her Good Inside website)

What Dr. Becky came to realize as she transformed her methods and her professional practice is that we cannot teach what we do not know or skillfully use ourselves. Since none of us were taught about how the brain works or emotional integration and regulation, we were simply using the same parenting practices that keep perpetuating behavioral problems.

This is precisely why we reached a tipping point in our need to change our understanding and approach to mental and emotional health. Generation after generation had just continued down the same path, passing the baton of problems, dysfunction and disregulation to our children, until it reached a collective crisis level that could no longer be ignored. The children of each generation were surrounded by adults who did not know better. Parents, teachers, coaches, mentors, grandparents, siblings and friends — and even well intentioned counselors — were all coming at behavioral problems and addictions with the same outdated, unhealthy approach and model.

As the mental health industry began to recognize that many of the root causes of behavioral issues and addictions could be traced back to childhood, it became evident that the old parenting model and lack of emotional integration into developing brains and bodies were the core sources of our collective human problem.

We should be breathing a collective sigh of relief.

We can move forward from here with greater understanding and deeper empathy for ourselves, our parents and each other. No one is alone in doing the work that will help us live better, healthier and with greater inner resources.

Now you know why Dr. Becky’s following is growing exponentially. She has over 3.1 million followers and that number will surely swell with the recent release of her Ted Talk “The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy”. Today’s enlightened parents are clamoring for the improved skills and tools to raise their kids in emotionally healthy ways.

Dr. Becky is a change-maker for a growing parenting movement.

RE-PARENTING OURSELVES:

A few short years ago, I participated in a Relationship Summit with Terry Real, the highly regarded family therapist and author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It and his newest book, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build A More Loving Relationship. During the Relationship Summit, Terry would often share real life examples from his couples counseling sessions. He made the keen observation that few spouses were willing to make any changes for their partners even when their marriages were on the brink of failure. However, when he asked a troubled partner about their relationship with own their children, everything shifted. As he helped his clients see their offsprings’s experiences through the lens of their own childhood, most parents were broken open. Spouses might not change for each other, but they can be deeply motivated to change for the sake of their children.

As Terry so wisely counsels — we need to care for our inner child and we need to reparent ourselves. This is part of that “healing process” that Dr. Becky promotes as well. It shifts us into raising our kids with the safety, security, acceptance, trust, guidance and respect we wished we had received. This is how we break disregulated generational cycles and shake off societal conditioning that negatively impacts our most cherished relationships. Many of us grew up believing that emotions were either good or bad; that anger was only ok for boys to show; that behavioral problems in a child should be punished. None of this is true.

Marriages are saved and strengthened when we no longer show up with all that childhood baggage and child-sized emotional behavioral patterns. Spouses who go for couples counseling often discover that the root cause of their marital issues came from their childhood experiences of marriage and family.

Here is where Dr. Becky’s work with children, and Terry Real’s work with couples really synch. Both are addressing childhood attachment styles, parental behavioral patterns, emotional triggers, poor coping skills and the long lasting impacts of internal family systems.

Couples who take this work to heart often find a lot of common ground in how they want to be parenting their children in a healthy and unified way. They can also find more common ground in their marriages and help each other in their own “reparenting process”. The places where we are most sensitive, needy and emotionally disregulated become opportunities for deeper connection and not the barriers to a healthy, happy and fulfilling marriage.

The truth is that we can do our inner work at the same time we are teaching it. It is a win-win situation since children give us such rich opportunities for real time, real life practice in dealing with a wide range of ever-changing emotions. Now that we know that our spoken and implied messages to our kids become their inner voice, we can be pre-load their inner voice to be an encouraging best friend, not a harsh judgmental critic. We can “re-parent” ourselves while we are teaching our children using this better parenting model. We can actually “feel” this loving, trusting reparenting occurring in our own bodies, when we are caring for our children as we had wished to be cared for when we were little.

In the recent Huberman Lab podcast series dedicated to mental health, Dr. Paul Conti, explained why we succumb so easily to auto-pilot for habitual, problematic behavioral patterns. When we were kids, we learned what patterns kept us safe and connected. We memorized these patterns for years. Anytime we feel those old familiar feelings, we replay the memorized pattern. It’s our “go to” move when we feel vulnerable. We unconsciously repeat our habitual patterns even though we now have agency to change them. This is the very reason that our emotional triggers from childhood can still have such strong impact even decades later.

With the new parenting model, and the science that helps us understand the “mechanics” of changing our brain’s memorized patterns, we will stop resisting the need to change our outgrown childhood behavioral patterns.

Terry Real is a dynamic change-maker, especially for older adults, who not only are saddled with outgrown childhood behavioral patterns, but are also constrained by old gender stereotypes and societal conditioning.

In this blog post today, I highlighted two “change-makers” who are making waves and making a meaningful difference because they have done their own inner work — and then found a way to take what they learned out into the world to share with others. The ripple effects are transformational for parenting and marriages.

There are multiple “movements” that are gaining traction as a direct result of the newest science of health and happiness because of breakthroughs in mental health and emotional health. In upcoming posts, I will be shining a light on these movements and the dynamic change-makers who are making these movements dynamic, relatable and impactful.

In the meantime, click the links below and get to know Dr. Becky and Terry Real.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Dr. Becky Kennedy was featured in Time Magazine in 2021 at the Millennial Parenting Whisperer
https://time.com/6075434/dr-becky-millennial-parenting/

Check out Dr. Becky’s GOOD INSIDE website — and be sure to sign up for her newletter. https://www.goodinside.com

Follow Dr. Becky on your favorite social media platform, including Instagram and Threads. Her short reels offer a daily dose of parenting reality with humor, relatability and a nugget of helpful advice.

Click this link to watch Dr. Becky’s TED Talk on the single most important parenting strategy https://www.ted.com/talks/becky_kennedy_the_single_most_important_parenting_strategy

Terry Real is a family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy- a revolutionary new approach to couples and individual counseling. Old counseling models kept us stuck in looking only at surface problems and not the root cause of our disharmonies. Click this link to go to Terry’s website and discover the plethora of resources he offers to help you build deeper, more rewarding relationships. https://terryreal.com/relationship-online-courses/

“Nothing is more important in our lives than our relationships. A great relationship boosts your immune system, opens your heart and keeps you vital and creative.” –– Terry Real

A Tipping Point for Our Lifestyle

There was a time when physical fitness wasn’t such a compelling component of our daily lives. Many of us were “weekend workout warriors”. That’s when we would carve out the time to go for a run, take a long bike ride or hike through the local woods. It was in the early 1980’s that a growing awareness of the importance of regular physical exercise intersected with the invention of the Nordic Track and commercial gym memberships expanding to a broader audience. The Nordic Track became a highly popular Christmas gift that held a prominent space in the living room or bedroom for a few glorious weeks. It wasn’t long til there was a lot of humor being shared about the Nordic Track becoming an ingenuous clothing rack by the end of January. While that Nordic Track might not have “fast-tracked” us to include physical fitness into our daily routines, there was in fact an upward trend in the growing awareness of the long term benefits of regular exercise.

Here we are decades later, and most of us have fully integrated some form of physical exercise into our daily routines. We wear fitness trackers to count our steps and measure our heart rate. We speak the lingo with ease – resistance training, VO2 max, zone 2 cardio, grip strength and core balance.

How did we get from weekend workout warriors and Nordic Tracks that morphed into clothes racks to this whole new lifestyle that includes consistent physical fitness? It was that upward trend catching big momentum – for all the right reasons.

And here we are now – at the tipping point of yet another upward trend — proactively attending to our mental and emotional health. It’s going to transform how we integrate tools and practices to support our mental and emotional health into our daily lifestyle. It’s going to dovetail with our commitment to our physical health because they go together like hand in glove.

Just a few short years ago, this would have seemed highly unlikely.

When it came to our mental health, the focus had always been on the pathology. No wonder we had so much stigma associated with mental health. We waited until there was a serious issue and then asked “what’s wrong?” or “who has some diagnosis of a mental health problem?” Treatments were often bandaid solutions to ease anxiety, but not uncover the root cause of the anxiety and fear. Health professionals were treating the symptoms and not the core problems. Because of the stigma associated with mental health, many people tried to power through their emotional and mental health struggles on their own.

We wouldn’t ignore a concerning physical health problem indefinitely. The same is now true for our emotional and mental health. Early intervention, paying attention to the warning signs and getting the support we need is now viewed as normal, healthy and empowering.

We are normalizing what we once kept hidden and that is shifting us to investigate why we react to life as we do. We are beginning to understand how our brains work and what they need to function optimally. We took our brains for granted – and yet they are running our daily lives. With all this groundbreaking knowledge, we now have an invested interest in being proactive about brain health.

We are learning why sleep is key for optimal brain function and health. We are also learning the importance of hydration throughout the day for our brains; and the effects of caffeine, sugar and alcohol on our brains and sleep cycles. We are getting morning sunlight to set our circadian rhythm and dimming our lights an hour before bed.

This upward trend of weaving mental health into our lifestyle is already showing up in our daily lives. Our fitness devices track our sleep cycles and we are now sleeping in darker, cooler bedrooms. Mattresses and comforters are featuring temperature controls to cool our bodies down to proper sleeping temperature and then warm us up just before waking. We take “sleep stack” supplements before bed just as we take probiotics and vitamin supplements in the morning.

There’s nothing like a few new products to really nudge us along on that upward trend; that’s how the momentum builds for our new integrated approach to mental health. Our children will be learning about their brains in this brand new way, all while also implementing healthy brain hygiene. This is how our human evolution advances us – one generation at a time, adapting and adopting what we are learning.

Knowledge is empowerment.

Where we once believed we had no agency over how we were “wired”, we are now learning that the neuroplasticity of our brains allows us to proactively create new neural pathways to help us build — and maintain — positive, meaningful changes in our mental and emotional health.

Just like the previous upward trend that spurred us on to take our physical health seriously and to be proactive in maintaining healthy physical bodies throughout our lifetime, we are now at a tipping point for positive brain health integration.

In a recent Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Paul Conti (Stanford University graduate, psychiatrist and author), pointed out that most of us know an incredible amount of information about our physical body and anatomy. It is also very complex, with many moving parts that integrate rather seamlessly. We can readily self-diagnose when something about our physical body hurts, is not working well, has a bug or virus. Dr. Conti believes that we can also learn about our brains and mental health in the same way.

We can start by taking better care of our brains through sleep, hydration, self-awareness, healthy coping skills and improved emotional regulation. as the foundational building blocks for proactive positive brain health.

Once we have laid this foundation, we will be more receptive to taking the next transformation steps. It is analogous to taking better care of our physical bodies with rest and proper nutrition — and then easing into a diverse, and sometimes challenging fitness regimen. Just like we build muscle strength and endurance in our bodies, we can be building better neural networks and muscle memory for our emotional and mental health.

Mental and emotional health has taken a giant step forward.

Although our brains and emotions drive much of how we show up in life, they were often relegated to the back seat. Think about that — our premier operating system was a back seat driver that we usually ignored.

Now we know more and we know better how to care for children’s developing brains and how to take care of our own adult brains and install valuable upgrades. We are realizing that emotions are a feature not a bug and we need them to help us make decisions about what is most important to us. In fact, emotions are are core ingredient to our overall happiness and fulfillment in life. All those emotions that we stuffed and suppressed were roadmaps for life. Is it any wonder we got so lost and misdirected?

We have been operating on a very outdated autopilot for far too long. We have ignored the lessons and guidance from our back seat drivers. Our unconscious mind is a like a five year old in the driver’s seat, stretching up to see out the windshield while straining to reach the gas pedal.

Over the next few weeks, Andrew Huberman and his guest, Dr. Paul Conti, will be offering a four part podcast series entitled “How to Understand and Assess Your Mental Health.” I have found Dr. Cont’s insights to be revelational and eye-opening.

I will be distilling this four-part series into blog posts over the coming weeks with great enthusiasm. If you are also fascinated by this upward trend that is rapidly gaining a lot of momentum, take some time to listen to the podcast series and check back for future posts about the healthier trajectory of our mental and emotional lifestyle.

Just imagine how incredible it will be to know as much about your amazing brain and mind as you do about your physical body!

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

September 6, 2023 Episode: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health with guest, Dr. Paul Conti https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=100062692001

Here are the show notes for the first episode in this series

https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/guest-series-dr-paul-conti-how-to-understand-assess-your-mental-health-huberman-lab/

Daily Gummy of Wisdom RoundUp

One of the most rewarding experiences I have is recognizing when there are a lot of synchronicities in play amongst a diverse community of people from whom I am learning all kinds of things. And this has been happening often in recent weeks. I hope you will enjoy this Daily Gummy Roundup that highlights what is top of mind for many right now:

This Daily Gummy of Wisdom was shared just yesterday, on September 3rd, 2023. Here is what I offered:

We all experience those moments when difficult emotions make us just want to cry. We should have a good cry –it’s good for us.

Crying helps us to reduce stress, helps to alleviate physical pain by releasing oxytocin, which is our body’s natural pain reliever for both physical and emotional pain. Children cry automatically when they fall and get hurt – and now you know why this is such a normal, natural reaction.

Tara Brach, renowned psychologist and meditation teacher, offers us this acronym – R A I N – to help us appreciate the beneficial impact of being with our emotions. It seems such a fitting metaphor to tap into the health benefits of crying. Let it R A I N.

R – Recognize what is happening

A – Allow the experience to be there, just as it is

I – Investigate with care and interest

N – Nurture with self-compassion; treat yourself as you would a good friend.

A good cry and this tender self compassion practice is as beneficial as a much needed rain shower for a parched plant. Rather than ignore or dismiss difficult emotions, take a few moments to feel the RAIN. Let the tears fall, take time to be with your emotions and experience. Nurture and care for yourself just as would for your child.

Just this morning, one of my favorite business and tech resources, Professor Scott Galloway, shared a Harvard Health review on the psychological benefits of crying — along with his personal insights that young men are even more afraid than older men to be seen crying. For the record, Scott is busy writing his next book on contemporary masculinity. This is a subject very near and dear to Scott’s heart as the father of two teenaged sons. Scott has long been a proponent of helping our young men integrate the full scope of their emotions into their developing bodies and brains, dropping old stereotypes and societal conditioning about men and their emotions, and the importance of having quality male role models especially for elementary and middle school aged boys. It is not at all unusual for Scott Galloway to push the envelope in the right direction, so it was no surprise (and every encouraging) that he would be promoting normalizing crying for men — especially younger men.

We can start this game-changing pivot by responding to our little boys and girls without any gender bias. They are simply small human beings with very few emotional resources and skills, yet — and their brains are not fully developed enough to support what we often expect of them. Let’s normalize crying for our boys with the understanding that their bodies and brains are supporting them in a very natural, normal and psychological healthy way. Let’s encourage men to cry too – and let’s not judge them for expressing deep emotions; let’s have a deep appreciation for their capacity to be that in touch with what matters most to them.

This Daily Gummy of Wisdom was shared on August 31st, 2023:

You can read a lot of books and listen to many inspiring podcasts, but if you don’t put into practice what you are learning, you aren’t really going to be seeing real progress.

Brene Brown once had a great conversation on this very subject with James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, where she talked about buying a Peloton, making space in her basement, shopping for cute workout clothes and new sneakers. Great big intentions — and the hardest part was actually putting on the clothes, walking to the basement and not only getting on the bike, but actually doing a workout. This is a fitting analogy for doing our self-discovery and personal growth work. We can cultivate greater self-awareness and make a list of the habits and behaviors we want to change, but if we aren’t putting in the “reps”, we won’t be building new muscle memory with the better skills. Here’s the thing — we usually know exactly “when” we should be responding differently, but if we just fall back into our normal default patterns, it is the equivalent of staring at the Peloton and wishing we were raising our heart rate and strengthening our quads. Wishful thinking will not make it so.

Self-awareness helps us recognize where we need or want change.

Catching ourselves right before we default to old habits is the next step.

Putting into practice a better response or choice is where the rubber meets the road. The goal is not to be perfect — it is to get better, more often.

The small consistent practices are what bring about sustainable, reliable change. Put in those reps. Just two or three a day are much more beneficial than wishful thinking.

I wrote this Daily Gummy a few weeks ago and cued it up to post on August 31st. Imagine my surprise when listening to the Rich Roll podcast which dropped on August 28th, I heard Rich’s guest, Brad Stulberg talk about how we can spend far too much time peeling off the layers of our onion and never really get around to doing the actual work of healing and growing from what we are learning.

Wow – did that insight really resonate with me. The older we are, the more layers we have in our onion. Do this work earlier in life and there are hopefully fewer layers to peel back. Do it at 40 and live the next fifty years without fossilizing the layers.

But the real take away from this Rich Roll podcast entitled “Rugged Flexibility and the Neuroscience of Expectations” with author and coach, Brad Stulberg, is that at some point, you just need to do the work.

This Daily Gummy was posted on August 30th and was inspired by a book I had just finished reading, Tomorrowmind by Dr. Martin Seligman and Gabrielle Kellerman. Here’s the full Daily Gummy insight:

What if we had the ability to look more closely at each other and see all the individual characteristics we possess — the hopes, the dreams, the habits and personality traits, and the various roles we have in life?

Too often, we view others only by their jobs, their ethnicity or color of their skin, their gender or even the sports team they like. The reality is that we all have multiple identities that we move in and out of each day.

We are children, siblings, aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents. We are spouses, partners in business, co-workers, colleagues, peers, mentors and bosses. We might be caregivers for an aging parent or a declining spouse, volunteers at a charity, members of a book club, fans of the same author or podcaster, members of a pickle ball team or crafting group.

Have you taken the time to write down all the identities that you have? Have you thought about the many hats you wear each day? Taking the time to do this is a skill called “recategorization” and it is the perfect portal to finding common ground with others.

If you need some new ice-breakers fore getting to know people and building friendships, consider asking questions that will help you discover more about the multiple identities we all have. Intentional focus on our individual characteristics diffuses big generalities we often have – and expands the opportunities to get to know each other so much better.

Over the past week or so, I have found myself completely captivated by a number of episodes in Esther Perel’s two podcast series. She hosts “Where Do We Begin” which is focused on personal relationships and “How’s Work?” where she tackles the complex issue of human behaviors and teamwork dynamics in the workplace. In both of these podcast series, it is very common for her to skillfully use “recategorization” to help people find more common ground than they realize they have.

Very often, once partners and colleagues begin to see each other through a shared identity, they soften in their strongly held positions and discover empathy and awareness they simply could not see previously. Esther Perel is a Belgian-American psychotherapist, with a global reputation for her transformational relationship counseling successes. She has a rare surgical precision to get to the root cause of the most delicate and complex relationships issues – and she does so with great empathy, compassion and kind candor.

It has been noteworthy that she often incorporates the reality that we all possess multiple identities and may have great difficulty shifting from one role to another with skillful ease. Esther suggests creating cues to help us refocus our attention to each relationship. Even if you work at home, changing from your pjs to work attire before you sit down at the kitchen table for a Zoom call, will help you and your brain make the distinction that you are a co-worker and teammate now. Changing at the end of the day into casual clothes and taking a walk outdoors can help you make a clear shift from work to home and family.

Esther most definitely leaves a lasting impression as you listen in on her counseling sessions through her two dynamic podcasts. It is very easy to see ourselves in the conversations and relationship issues that she unpacks with her clients. The big take-away from Esther Perel’s work is that there is so much more to all of us than meets the eye — AND – we have more in common that we realize.

I hope you enjoyed this Daily Gummy of Wisdom Roundup — and that you too will start to pay attention to the synchronicities that are showing up across all aspects of our lives. There is most definitely a growing awareness of the importance of our emotional health, the psychological benefits that we derive when we know more about the role of our emotions, and our basic human need for real connection.

If you like what you’re learning and want a daily supplement for your emotional health and self-discovery, sign up to get my Daily Gummy of Wisdom popped into your inbox. Here’s the sign up link: https://inspired-new-horizons.ck.page/3381cf137f

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Check out Scott Galloway on his own podcast, the Prof G Podcast – and on the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher. His most recent book is Adrift – America in 100 charts – a real eye opener. And check out his newsletter No Mercy/No Malice. https://www.profgalloway.com/

Discover the many resources that Rich Roll has to offer by checking out his website https://www.richroll.com and definitely check out his amazing Podcast:

Here’s the episode with Brad Stulberg https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rich-roll-podcast/id582272991?i=1000625912789

If you aren’t familiar with Esther Perel, treat yourself and get to know her and her incredible work. Here’s the link to her website which is chock full of helpful resources: https://www.estherperel.com

Check out her two podcasts (and keep your eyes peeled for her to appear as a guest in other’s — she is really gaining traction and her work is relevant for this moment in time.

Growing Forward

I found a fascinating article the other day that intrigued me so much I spent an entire day making lists and creating graphs, pie charts and collages. Are you wondering what captivated me? It was about the person we will all be in 5 years.

Consider this: The person we will become in 5 years has a lot to do with the decisions we are making as the person we are today (and tomorrow….and so on). What shapes us? The books we read, the foods we eat, the workouts we do, the friends we meet, the sacrifices we make, the habits we build.

Those prompts really got me to thinking about who I am today for those very reasons. I thought about family and friends, and how the last five years have shaped them as well. Even if we would have had a crystal ball then, I doubt very much that any of us could have guessed how much we’ve changed; much of it intentionally and some of it due to things not in our control.

What if we could plot all this change, so we would have a visual for who we were 5 years ago, who we are today, and to project who we might be 5 years into the future. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a chart of our self discovery and personal growth trajectory? I’d call it the “Growing Forward” chart.

It makes sense to step back and take a look at who we were in 2018. Nothing like a rear view mirror to help us see just how far we’ve come.

What books have you read over these past five years? What genres or subjects were you drawn to and what knowledge did you gain? How did you apply it to your life? Reading books, both fiction and non-fiction, deepens our empathy for others and helps us see ourselves in other’s stories. What did you discover about yourself and others through the books you read.

Think about new friendships you have formed and what drew you to these new people. How have they shaped who you are today? Did they introduce you to a new hobby or interest? What have you learned as you listened to their life stories? What did you learn about yourself that was reflected back to you in their experiences? How do these friends make you feel?

Are those habits that were so hard to implement in the beginning now a part of your normal daily routine? How have those improved habits changed your life? What is working so much better now?Are you more conscious of the choices you make that might derail your goals?

Have you discovered any new interests, taken up a new hobby or resumed an old one with a renewed passion? Are you spending less time on social media and more time being present with family and friends? Have you shifted your perspective on self care and recognize that you need to take good care of yourself so that you can be your best for others?

Are you amazed to discover just how much you really have changed over the past 5 years? Since so much of our change happens incrementally and definitely not in a linear way, it is quite surprising to take stock of these transformations, especially in 5 year increments. That’s when the real changes we’ve made become so apparent. That is where we see our “growing forward” trajectory.

I decided to look back on my blog posts from 2018 as part of this reflective exercise and while the topics are still relevant, the research and resources that have advanced our understanding about them have exploded into mainstream conversations. Back then, we still thought of meditation and mindfulness as something done on a cushion. Today many of us are more familiar with how our brains actually work than we ever did before thanks to neuroscience — and the podcasters and authors who break it down into layman’s terms for us and weave its value into our daily lives.

In 2018, there was still a major stigma associated with mental health and no one was talking about emotional health. We may have known there was a growing mental health crisis underfoot but all the pieces of the complex puzzle were not yet coming together. Personal growth was gaining a little more traction and life coaches were in high demand.

We could feel a sense that we were searching for something, but there wasn’t a lot of clarity and we were swimming in a sea of so many tempting distractions. Social media and the news cycles were addictive.

No matter what we were all individually doing that was shaping who we would be in five years, none of us could have predicted the major impact of a global pandemic. This would create changes we did not anticipate and yes, it would also shape who we’d become. The pandemic disrupted our “normal”. We’d been operating in our “normal” for so long that we had become unaware of how we were just going along with the pace and societal influences.

Change happens when our normal routines are disrupted. It is a basic principle for helping us stick to new habits or goals. Disruptions are the catalyst for reflection and redirection. Suddenly, we were all sent home to “think about it”. A collective disruption and a serious re-thinking of what matters most.

It is not at all surprising that the pandemic expedited the integration of modern medicine, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive and emotional health. There was no denying just how interconnected they all were. We started to pay attention to compromised immune systems. We could no longer deny the impacts of high levels of anxiety and extended periods of uncertainty. As humans, we just aren’t built for these long durations of stress and volatility. We need to return to baseline to rebuild our tolerance and resilience. We need breaks, we need quality sleep, we need to feel safe.

As we were washing our groceries, we started to think more consciously about what we were eating. We were learning to bake sourdough and create home-cooked meals.

Isolation and loneliness were amplified which proved just how much we need human connection for our health and well-being. Families needed each other to help with childcare and schooling. Grandparents moved from retirement communities to live closer to their adult children and grandchildren. We began to see the reality that we had missed before. How important safe and healthy childcare is, what needs to change in how we educate our children, What we miss when we cannot be together – to celebrate, to grieve, to scaffold, to comfort, to encourage, to challenge.

The perfect storm became the impetus for breakthroughs.

Our learning curve trajectory was on a rapid ascent. It was integrating with medical and science advancements that would deliver many missing pieces to our human puzzle.

We may not have realized that as we were accepting changes that we had no control over, we were in turn making changes of our own – based on meeting our needs and what mattered most to us. We were micro-dosing change as we found new ways to support ourselves and our families through the pandemic. It was definitely not linear, and we back-tracked more than a few times, but our trajectory has become evident.

It takes a lot of commitment, practice, dedication and perseverance to become an overnight sensation.

We think that rock stars and celebrities, inventors and AI blow onto the scene and create seismic shifts in an instant. But this is not the case. And it certainly has not been the case for medicine and science when it comes to the recent explosion of knowledge, tools and teachers for emotional health. It just feels like an aha moment. It has been a long time coming — and it arrived when we were most ready to soak it up.

As I looked through the past five years of my blog posts, I re-discovered the moments where I was seeing the integration of so many modalities for personal growth and self discovery. As a neuroscience geek, I was so excited. I had long wondered if there wasn’t a better, more enticing way to draw people into doing their own inner work. Why did we have to hit rock bottom or have our world fall apart to begin engaging in self improvement?

To be candid, if not for the pandemic, I may have thought my own personal growth work was done. I had a solid “starter kit” of improved self awareness and better life skills. I was handling myself much better than ever before.

But the real test and the real growth happens when we take our individual work into our relationships. The pandemic delivered a plethora of opportunities to put the new skills and practices to the test. Suddenly, there were a lot more people coming onboard with a keen interest in emotional health and personal growth.

As parents realized how their own childhoods had impacted them in unhealthy ways, they embraced the new parenting models that integrated emotions into the developing brains of their children. Again, there were so many emotions welling up in all of us that it was crystal clear we needed better skills so as not to compound an already complex problem.

We had poked holes in our awareness, seeds had been planted, some had sprouted and there was a growing demand for education, support and counseling. A huge pivot had occurred – the veil around mental health was lifted. Seeking therapy and counseling became normalized, just like hiring a fitness trainer or life coach. The demand for counseling was so high that there simply were not enough professionals to meet it. Just a few years prior, BetterHelp online therapy was only promoted on personal growth and wellness platforms. Today, BetterHelp is a sponsor for business and news podcasts, influencers and fitness gurus.

When neuroscience handed us the missing piece of our human puzzle — emotional health — all the other pieces that had been discarded or misunderstood, fell into place. Are you aware that we had tunnel vision for a very long time – and believed that all our troubles were lodged in psychology? Breakthroughs in neuroscience changed everything – and now we are treating PTSD and childhood trauma in much more beneficial ways, with remarkable lasting results.

The pandemic’s one major positive contribution is the shift from “treating” problems to “preventing” them. After all that we have been through both individually and collectively in the past five years, many people are embracing the truth that we can take better care of ourselves and each other.

The conversations that we are having today and the growing trends in preventative practices to improve our quality of life and our healthy longevity came about because of change. Today we understand that we need to take care of our brains first and foremost. We having a better working knowledge of how our brains operate, what they are capable of and how we can maximize the full capacities.

We are no longer ignoring the warning signs, no longer numbing the pain or putting a bandaid on it, no longer believing that suffering is the way we get to the path of healing. We are enthusiastically proactive.

Here is what I find so exciting about what might transpire for all of us in the next 5 years. As we begin to take better care of our brains and bodies, we will in turn take better care of our children. Our children will grow up with healthy attitudes, resilience and an overflowing toolkit of life and relationship skills. We will be leading by example.

Did you know that when we are overstressed, we are full of cortisol that keeps us in a heightened state of fight, flight or freeze….and when we are with others, they can sense that (especially kids). We end up pushing people away because of all that negative energy.

But when we are calm, emotionally regulated and resilient, we are full of oxytocin (the feel good hormone) and yes, others can sense that too — and guess what — it is like a magnet drawing people to us because it feels good.

As we are making these discoveries for ourselves, we are integrating it into our lives. We start making better choices and in turn those healthier decisions shape who we are becoming. In 5 years, just imagine the books being written right now that we will read in the future. Just imagine the friends you will be making – the ones that make you feel good and inspire you to discover all kinds of new things. Just imagine how your body will feel with 5 years of really good sleep, consistent hydration, regular exercise, healthy eating habits.

If you believe that all these positive, proactive and preventative measures will have a profound impact on your “growing forward” trajectory, you are right.

Take some time to reflect on what you have learned about yourself over the past five years and want you want for yourself and your family in the next five years. There has never been a better time to tap into incredible resources, education and mentors to help you achieve your goals.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Ryan Dusick, founding drummer of Maroon 5, talks with Doug Boost about losing everything, finding recovery and rebuilding his life https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-adversity-advantage-with-doug-bopst/id1496406333?i=1000624725432

Metabolism, Brain Energy & Mental Health with Dr. Chris Palmer. Discover how we are evolving in our treatments for mental health issues that can negatively impact our quality of life.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-forrest-hanson-and-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936?i=1000625115529

Dr. Martin Seligman is often referred to as the father of Positive Psychology. He wrote about post traumatic growth in his book Flourish in 2012.. Now 11 years later, he offers his insights with both psychology and neuroscience to help us prepare to live in a new normal of rapid change

Dr Peter Attia is leading the charge for a long overdue pivot in modern medicine. It is time to become proactive turning our attention to presentation rather than just treatment. Have a longer health span, and better quality of life. Emotional health is the cornerstone.

Authentic Self

It dawned on me recently that the truest test of being our “authentic self” is when we can move through our various roles and interactions without a costume change, an edited script, or adjusting the dial.

Give it some thought. Do you find yourself making personal adjustments to accommodate others, a situation, or to feel like you belong?

We’ve all done this. We know when we are walking into a situation that feels like eggshells and landmines, so we shape-shift a bit to stay in our comfort zone. Or, we sugar coat our truth and hope that we will get the desired result. We might even put up with some bad behavior and decide not to call it out just to keep the peace. We say yes to things that we really don’t want to do. We stay silent when we know in our hearts we should speak up.

One of the compelling reasons it is so hard to disengage from all the costume changes we put ourselves through is because we have multiple identities. And before you freak you, just know that this is really good thing.

Take a moment to think about your own multiple identities. It is a fun exercise and admittedly a little mind blowing. You can be a child, a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a grandparent, an employee, a boss, an entrepreneur, a friend, a gym rat, a yoga student, a writer, a musician, an artist, a volunteer, a birdwatcher, nature enthusiast, a mentor or coach, a member of a pickle ball, golf or bowling team. Are you surprised at all the hats you wear, the interests you have and the variety of people with whom you interact?

It is only natural that we would make some adjustments as we move in and out of our roles throughout the day. We may shift from being a sole decision maker as a parent to a team member at work, a student in a class or a caregiver for an aging parent.

As we are working on our personal growth, we may discover that we are more cognizant of the situations where we do “make adjustments.”

This is a very positive sign that we are gaining traction with the changes we are making – the very changes that get us showing up as our true “authentic self” in every one of our multiple identities.

Think of your authentic self as the “mothership”. You will step into all those other identities grounded in your core identity.

Our core identity is shaped by personal attributes we value. These core values are the touchstones for our words, our actions and behaviors. When we are clear about our values, we cultivate the skills and tools we need to show up more consistently as the person we want to be. We also hold ourselves accountable and make amends when we make mistakes.

A sign that we might be making adjustments that are not in alignment with our authentic self is when we feel discomfort. Think of discomfort as the warning signal that our values and our actions aren’t matching up.

If we are trying to fit in with a group and we go along with something that conflicts with our core values, it’s going to feel uncomfortable. If we have to dial back our natural effervescence, we are going to feel flat. If we bite our tongue instead of speaking up for ourselves or others, we will feel disempowered.

It takes courage to show up authentically in our various roles when we are making changes, but once we get over that initial discomfort, we will discover that we are moving with greater ease and more self confidence. It honestly takes less energy and brain power to tap into consistent behaviors and actions than to be adjusting constantly. In fact, our neural networks will be rewiring to support our better habits and the desired consistency.

Some of the places that may be hardest to step into our authenticity is with our family members. It is pretty commonplace for us to get stuck in old paradigms. Once the baby of the family, always the baby of the family — even if that baby is now 45. Or on the flip side, the eldest child may be the one everyone turns to when health care decisions need to be made for aging parents. Family members can inadvertently keep each other trapped in a long ago past.

Complex family dynamics are often the most challenging places to practice showing up authentically. It may also be the place where some of our most surprising changes take place. Just one family member showing up authentically and shifting the old paradigms can set off a cascade of positive improvements.

The reality is that none of us really stays the same. We are all impacted and changing by our life experiences. Some people will embrace change and work hard to evolve through their trials and tribulations. They will be the ones who will be the cycle breakers, the ones who offer insight and wisdom, the ones that hold space without judgment, the ones that show up as their true selves.

I’ve read books by people who have evolved into their authentic self and they write so eloquently about how freeing it is, how much joy they get out of each day and how much younger they feel. These same sentiments are echoed by the diverse guests of the podcasts I enjoy. Best of all, I see it emerging in my family and friends. It is so evident that they are moving with fluidity and grace through all their roles and experiences.

Authenticity comes from a strong sense of self identity, with clarity about our core values. Those values become the touchstones for decision making, emotional regulation, setting boundaries, being self compassionate, leaning into vulnerability and not getting attached to the outcome. When we can show up consistently with these attributes and skill sets regardless of the role we are in, we will feel a major positive change.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Nedra Glover Tawwab has become the “go to” expert for understanding how boundaries help us take better care of ourselves and our relationships.

These conversations with some of our favorite icons will lift your spirits and motivate you to be your most authentic self. Check out this podcast on your favorite platform.

Dr. Maya Shankar hosts this podcast about real life events that dramatically changed people’s lives. Talk about moving into authenticity due to a major change of plans…these conversations will touch your heart. Check out this August 1st episode with author Dan Pink on the Science of Regret https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-slight-change-of-plans/id1561860622?i=1000623007434

Any Brene Brown book will support your efforts to become your authentic self. Sometimes it is just super comforting to know we are not alone and this one nails it.

White Water Rapids of Life

When I was in my mid-40’s, I used to tell my friends that I was in the white water rapids of life without a paddle when my plate was too full. Life was coming at me fast and furious and I could barely catch my breath, let alone juggle it all.

It seemed, without fail, that after three or four months of pushing through, burning the candle at both ends, making endless sacrifices without discernment, I’d get sick or there would be one monumental family crisis that would grind the fast pace to a halt. At that moment, it would feel like my attempts to “shoot the rapids” left me stranded on the rocks, teetering precariously.

This pattern became so apparent that I’d find myself bracing for it. I could feel the tension mounting every 3 or four months and could feel it in my bones that we were heading for something cataclysmic. Looking back, I can see that bracing for it was also a lifelong pattern of mine. I could feel the ground trembling metaphorically and the only preventative action I took was to steel myself against the inevitable. I would harden up, silently willingly myself to take it — whatever “it” was.

If things were really out of control, I would embellish my story about the white water rapids of life — I would lament to my friends that this time I was in the white water rapids of life without a paddle AND life jackets. Clearly this was the graphic imagery that I used to declare to myself and others that I was in over my head.

This pattern dominated a few years in my mid-40’s – that time when we find ourselves doing some of the hardest life work ever. We are gaining traction in our careers, or deciding we want to change careers in the mid-stream of life. Our parenting has often moved into the more challenging waters of adolescence (maybe that is where I felt I had no life-jackets). Financially we find ourselves looking both backwards and forwards – what’s the balance on the mortgage and how we will fund college educations? No wonder I felt like I was in the white water rapids of life. There was in fact a lot of changes underfoot, all swirling around unseen obstacles as we headed into unchartered water.

When my book club friends and I share stories from that time in our lives, we discover that this is exactly how most of us were feeling during that stage of our lives. We all might describe it a little differently but the patterns bear much similarity.

We’d have these peaks and valleys that could literally be put onto a graph that resembled stock prices or an EKG. The troughs in those graphs were the times where we cried uncle and had no choice but to stop and catch our breath.

Those troughs were the brief respites we were forced to take due to illness, or the acknowledgement that we can’t control a lot that happens in life. They were times where we were so sick, we were mandated to stay in bed for a few days to regain our physical health. Or the times when we had to sit alone in the dark and reflect on what really mattered. Brene Brown aptly named this period of time in our lives as “the great unraveling”.

I recently revisited what Brene wrote in her 2018 blog post about this midlife unraveling and found myself holding my breath as I took in the magnitude and wisdom of her words:

Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulder, pulls you close and whispers in your ear: “I am not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing — these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t spend the rest of your life worrying about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.” — Brene Brown (see link to her blog at the end of this post.)

I often wonder if I had read a wisdom so profound in my mid-40’s how it might have landed on me. I’ll be honest, it’s highly doubtful that it would have resonated in the compelling way that it does today. When I close my eyes and sit with the feelings that emerge from reading it, I can transport myself back to what my own “white waters of life” were so earnestly trying to tell me.

Back then, I did not possess the knowledge and education that now underpins all that Brene imparted. In fact, when she gave us this pivotal message in 2018, we had not yet mainstreamed all that we were learning. Here we are 5 years later and that landscape has changed dramatically. Today it almost feel like a firehose has been turned on — and we are drenched in digestible neuroscience, engaging educational content as well as charismatic, dynamic leaders and teachers and endless resources. We are now fluent in emotional armor, childhood attachment styles and adaptive behavioral patterns. Emotional health has taken its rightful place at the top of the quality of life pyramid.

I couldn’t be happier that so many people of all ages are now absorbing this game-changing knowledge much earlier in their lives. Perhaps the mid-40’s and 50’s will no longer be the great “unraveling” but rather the “great transformation”. Imagine being able to shift gears in the mile markers of our life with vastly improved self-awareness and relationship skills. To be treating adolescence as the apprenticeship it truly is – and preparing our young people to go into the white water rapids of life with all the right tools, skills and burning desire to grow into their natural born gifts.

It is not longer just my wild imagination that envisions this phenomenal pivot, but the reality that we are already farther along on this transformational path than ever before.

There is rarely a day that I have a chat with someone where Dr. Andrew Huberman and his neuroscience podcast, the Huberman Lab are not mentioned. From neighbors to my dentist to seat mates on planes, Andrew Huberman has become a household name. Looking at the arc of his podcast popularity and the emerging topics he now discusses, we can create yet another graph that makes it clear that our trajectory for learning and the breakthroughs that are occurring are soaring.

I recently learned that Andrew Huberman started his highly successful podcast in 2021 because he wanted the general population to have the knowledge and tools they needed to support their physical and cognitive health through the pandemic. He was aware that we were not getting this invaluable information from our leadership and he wanted to educate people about the proactive steps they could be taking that were free, do-able and would have noticeable positive impact.

Think about this — Andrew Huberman saw a need and he stepped up to the plate. He has more than 3.5 million subscribed followers for his podcast launched in the midst of a pandemic. That’s 3.5 million people that have most likely changed their habits – like making consistent sleep a top priority, taking breaks from screens every 45 minutes, getting morning sunlight, changing their relationship with caffeine and alcohol, committing to varied exercise programs and understanding the impacts of their emotional health on their physical and cognitive health.

All of this happened one podcast episode at a time. Knowledge coming at a time of great need and receptivity; a willingness to put in the work and make changes; witnessing the positive effects of those changes and being motivated by all of it to learn more.

Andrew Huberman is throwing his net wide and bringing more diverse guests onto his podcast and for good reason. He is integrating teachings and research from other disciplines because they are all inter-connected to this bigger picture of current evolution. Breakthroughs are occurring fast right now and just like striking a match, they are catching fire quickly with those folks who are hungry to learn more.

The coalescing of personal growth, self development, mental health, emotional health with all the sciences was amplified during the pandemic. It was a collective moment – a tsunami in the white water rapids of our shared experience. It was a great unraveling. Go back now and re-read Brene’s insights for a mid-life unraveling and see if you can spot a similar message for our collective, complicated issues.

As each of us begins to do our own work, taking better care of ourselves and our families, with all that we learn from Andrew Huberman and others just like him, we are contributing to the greater good for everyone. Trust me, people are taking notice. Younger generations are looking at older generations and seeing the effects of ignoring our physical, cognitive and emotional health. Motivated by their desire for longer, healthier, and more satisfying lives, they are charting a new course with the improved knowledge, resources and tools so readily accessible.

Is it any wonder that there is a groundswell of keen interest in all that Andrew Huberman and others like him are enthusiastically sharing with us? Think about what happens when each of those 3.5 million followers shares what they have learned with just one workout buddy, one colleague, or one family member — now that is a powerful ripple effect in the right direction.

We are piecing together how old parenting models that created our armor and ineffective coping strategies also embedded a lot of fixed mindset and limiting belief impediments that hold us back from achieving our full potential and using our natural gifts. As we dig a little deeper on these topics, we are discovering vastly improved ways to educate our children to have a growth mindset, to foster resilience and determination through setbacks, and become critical thinkers.

We are doing this work together and it’s contagious in the best possible way.

Pay attention to the new books being published and the overlapping themes that fit like puzzle pieces. You’ll notice this on the colorful displays in your local bookstore. Check out guests that your favorite podcasters invite for meaningful conversations. Notice how personal stories take up a greater percentage of the discussion now – because that’s how we best integrate all this new information.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess that this blog post was inspired by my current read, TomorrowMind by Gabrielle Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman (who is often affectionately referred to as the father of positive psychology.). I think you’ll find my “connect the dots” story about Martin Seligman delightfully fascinating.

I began my curiosity about psychology about the same time that Dr. Seligman published his book Flourish in 2012. The subtitle of his book was “A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being.” It focused a lot on how positive psychology could help us “preload” so that post traumatic growth might be possible rather than recurring PTSD. At the time I was in a relationship that puzzled me to no end. I could not understand the inability to “bounce back” from even minor setbacks. I was at a loss on how I could help so I was on the hunt for tools and education.

His book and his research set me on a path of self discovery and personal growth that I may have never otherwise considered. And I have never looked back. It’s eleven years later and my friends tease me that I have possibly earned an advanced degree or two. My passion for this learning has grown into my purpose, which is sharing what I am learning with others.

I have observed how often the topics I first read about have gone through a few transformations of their own over the past two decades, with scientific evidence debunking myths, depeening our initial understandings and bringing clarifying proof through neuroscience. For those reasons, I was intrigued to see what Dr. Seligman now had to share – in April 2023 in this brand new book.

I could barely put it down.

Had you been here with me as I began to read this book, you would have heard the resounding laughter that came from me when I read his words that had once been my own — Dr. Seligman uses the metaphor of the white water world of work! He talks about shooting the rapids, and navigating currents, obstacles and change. If he were here, I would hug him. I get the analogy – and I am deeply grateful. I am not at all surprised that we are now embarking on taking the work that we have been doing individually out into the big wide world.

The gear and the skills we need to navigate the white water rapids of life – at home and in the workplace are found in personal growth, self development and attending to our emotional health.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Listen to the July 24th episode of the Huberman Lab podcast with Dr. Maya Shankar on Shaping Your Identity and Goals. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000622115223

This July 17th episode is entitled Enhancing Performance & Learning By Applying a Growth Mindset. Dr. Carol Dewck, author Mindset, is an esteemed colleague of Dr. Huberman. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000621365285

I have listened to Dr. Maya Shankar’s podcast for several years and am always inspired and uplifted by these incredible stories of people who overcame adversities that left them no choice but to reinvent themselves. Check out this episode with Dr, Kristin Neff on Self Compassion https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-slight-change-of-plans/id1561860622?i=1000617332975

Buckle your seatbelt for this very real conversation with Terry Real, Author of US, and Peter Attia. Dr. Attia has been revelational in his message about the importance of our emotional health in his book, Outlive. He turned to Terry Real for the therapy he needed to work on his “Bobbie Knight” inner critic and the behavioral reactions he wanted to change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbI4fm2cNz8

Read — or reread – Brene Brown’s blog post from 2018 on midlife unraveling. It’s aged well.
https://brenebrown.com/articles/2018/05/24/the-midlife-unraveling/

The More We Share, the More We Discover

I have been keenly observing how interactions and conversations have been shifting in profound ways over recent months. It is with great enthusiasm that I am sharing with friends, family and my book club about my experiences while traveling. From Uber drivers to seat mates on planes, hospitality staff, new neighbors and a helpful UPS business owner, more people are sincerely plugged in to self-awareness and personal development. It’s astounding how we’ve shifted from shallow “how’s the weather” conversations to more in-depth and meaningful ones where people are sharing their remarkable personal stories.

I can almost feel the needle and thread stitching together a new tapestry, weaving our own stories and experiences into the bigger picture of others. It feels good to have these rich conversations and to be learning so much.

Some of my most fascinating conversations have been occurring in the self help section of book stores. I’m drawn to book stores — whether it is my local independent one, Quail Ridge in Raleigh NC, or the one my family visited in Scottsdale on vacation, the Poisoned Pen. On a recently layover in Chicago, I hopped off the plane and went straight to Barbara’s Bookstore in the bustling terminal where I ended up having a 45 minute conversation about Outlive and Dr. Peter Attia.

If I had a nickel for every time someone mentioned Andrew Huberman and his podcast, I could fly across the country multiple times.

I confess that I make a beeline to the self help or parenting sections of book stores — eager to see if there is something new to learn and perhaps more enthused to see who is browsing those sections. It’s so uplifting to see young parents, grandparents, mid-lifers, couples and singles all choosing books to help them navigate wherever they are in life. A smile stretches across my face as I take in the transformation that has occurred in the self-help section of bookstores.

Inviting tables of colorful books with intriguing titles pull us in like magnets. To me, these books fit together like pieces of a complex, compelling puzzle. It is not at all surprising that subjects like parenting, mindset, awe, emotions, grief and longing, relationships, atomic habits, boundaries, longevity, purpose and neuroscience are all landing on the same table.

All of these varied subjects are intrinsically connected. We want better relationships — with our kids, our partners, our friends and extended family. We want to know ourselves better. Now we know that the work starts with us, that our emotional health is integral to our overall quality of life and that it needs the same attention as our physical health.

Just a few decades ago, many of these amazing books and resources were segregated; psychology, mental health, diets and exercise, how to guides, hard to understand neuroscience, Buddhist meditation. Then all these various modalities and fields began to intersect — and suddenly authors, researchers and podcasters were quoting each other’s work and having each other as guests. They began to “connect the dots” about our human need for connection. They began to see how all their independent work and findings were actually linked together.

It seems that “overnite” there has been a great convergence of all the individual pieces coming together to form one incredible, dynamic “big picture”.

The best part of our “overnite” awareness is that it is out in the open with all the personal growth and self discovery work that needs to be done. That is so evident in these amazing conversations I have been so fortunate to have with all kinds of people — in the bookstore, on the plane, at the coffee shop, in my writing classes and especially with my friends who are also on the journey.

I recall when I was struggling in my mid-40’s with what Brene Brown called the mid-life unraveling period, I would discreetly make my way to the self help section of Borders, scanning the book titles and the shoppers around me, tucking my book of choice under my arm. I would stand at the counter like a nervous adolescent girl buying tampons with an older teen boy as the checkout clerk. Judgment and shame washing over me. It felt like a public confessional that I did not have my life together.

Hooray for this major shift in acceptance that we all need help!

Today, the inviting and bulging self help section of bookstores often takes center stage. I listen to shoppers enthusiastically sharing with others what they’ve read, what they are working on with spouses, teens or toddlers and even themselves. We have normalized these conversations. Wow.

No one is slinking to the check out counter with their books, workbooks and journals discreetly tucked under their sweaters or shoulders. It’s almost a badge of honor to waltz up to the checkout line proudly displaying copies of Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia, Fierce Self Compassion by Kristin Neff, Lighter by yung pueblo or Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Tawwab. I’ve witnessed some of the most astounding conversations happening in the checkout line between customers as they swap stories, insights and book recommendations.

The seeds of our current emotion revolution and our emotional health have landed everywhere now. The subject comes up in business, leadership and innovation podcasts. It certainly comes up regularly for influencers like Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, James Clear, Ryan Holiday, Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Andrew Huberman. Yes, emotional health and doing our self-discovery work is now a mainstreamed topic of conversation. It is being folded in as the missing piece of our bigger puzzle.

The more we know, the more we grow.

When I first committed to a deep dive into my own personal growth, I was intrigued by Dr. Rick Hanson’s book Hardwiring Happiness, but I did have a hard time wrapping my head around understanding what he meant by “neurons that fire together, wire together.” While I loved the concept of neuroplasticity, I really didn’t have a solid foundation of understanding about the whole brain/body connection.

Today, we have ready access to understandable knowledge of how our brains and bodies operate, the role our nervous system plays and the importance of integrating our inner world of emotions and feelings with our executive functions of our brains. This core knowledge helps us parent better and teach our kids the emotional awareness and regulatory skills that we ourselves were never taught.

What we have before us is a collective effort to help us all live healthier, more satisfied, balanced lives. We are all playing an important role in this integral work when we are invested in our own emotional health and parenting with this upgraded, whole brain model. In her book, Mindset, Dr. Carol Dweck, shares with us that many of us grew up with a societal model of fixed mindset both at home and in school. Is it any wonder that we often then developed limiting beliefs about ourselves and became both the judged and the judgers. Dr. Dweck underscores that we can all work towards developing “growth” mindsets for ourselves and our children, but to recognize that we move toward a growth mindset by taking a journey.

As I travel and interact with others, it is very apparent that quite a few folks have decided to take that journey. We can help each other and in turn help ourselves by continuing to have these more connecting, meaningful conversations. By sharing our stories and experiences, we help others find common ground and encouragement. When we share our favorite resources with others, we help the researchers, authors, mentors and educators reach more people with their incredible work.

There is no denying that our emotional health is the cornerstone of our overall quality of life and meaningful connection with those we love. Unpacking our emotional baggage frees up a lot of space in our hearts and brains to move more fluidly through life, building resilience and enabling us to show up more authentically, more skillfully and much happier.

Let’s do this!

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

PODCASTS and BOOKS

Fantastic Podcast with renowned couples therapist Esther Perel, who supported Dr. Peter Attia through his own personal growth journey https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-should-we-begin-with-esther-perel/id1237931798?i=1000618302924

Everyone is abuzz about Dr. Andrew Huberman – his neuroscience podcasts on relevant topics are chockfull of the knowledge we need about our brains. Check out the most recent episode about growth mindsets and beliefs
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110

Dr. Peter Arria, author of Outlive, is a dynamic resource for understanding why our Emotional Health matters. Listen to this short clip with Esther Perel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6xc-WuROXY

The Being Well Podcast with Dr. Rick Hanson and his son Forrest Hanson is a perennial favorite of mine for years. Check out this recent mailbag episode on criticism, anxiety and dysfunctional family systems https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-forrest-hanson-and-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936?i=1000621375400

A Wholehearted Emotion Revolution

My last blog post was all about the importance of unpacking our family and emotional baggage — and the remarkable opportunity we have to involve four living generations in doing just that. This post is going to start by unpacking how we got here.

It is all about this moment in time where there is a growing, diverse community of people who are committed to personal growth and emotional health. Some are far along on their journey, others are just beginning and there are many smack dab in the middle. No matter where we are in our journey, we are all reaching both forward and backward – asking for more help and guidance AND offering encouragement and resources.

We did not get here by accident or all at once. We got here because of collective yearning and learning.

Over the past two decades social sciences handed off the baton to neuroscience to help us better understand what was really happening in our brains, in our nervous systems and neurobiology, and through epigenetics. Incredible discoveries were made that brought us tremendous breakthroughs in our understanding and treatment of trauma, cognitive and mental health disorders, the connection between stress and physical health and so much more. So many fields merged together to reverse engineer what we got wrong.

Ironically it was about this same time that Brene Brown started her deep diving research into shame and vulnerability. Imagine how serendipitous this was?

Of course, no one wanted to talk about shame and vulnerability – those subjects were taboo and cloaked in secrecy. That should have been our first clue she was really on to something. Brene told a hilarious story of how she could shut down a conversation with a seat mate on a plane in under 30 seconds by revealing she was a researcher – of shame and vulnerability.

Flash forward to today and those very topics open up a two hour stimulating conversation between three strangers on a plane, who share vulnerabilities as readily as Biscoff cookies, and become fast friends by the end of the flight, swapping contact information and favorite personal growth resources. (Read my recent blog post Leapfrog for that story)

That is just one shining example of how far we’ve come….and how long it has actually taken. Two decades, multidisciplines and a growing longing we were all feeling but couldn’t quite put our finger on.

Brene started her shame and vulnerability research in 2001, right before 9-11. As devastating as that massive tragedy was, there was an also a collective unity that emerged from it, at least for a while.

A decade later, in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry published his book, Born for Love, where he warned us about our growing empathy poverty. He was shedding a light in the correlation between an infant’s environment in the first year of life and their ability to emotionally regulate in adulthood. He was sounding the alarm for where we were headed if we did not offer safety, comfort and stability for our children. If you were to go back and read that book today, you would be amazed at the amplified realities of his dire predictions for all of us, and especially for our youth. Back in 2010, we had no clue the negative impacts social media and our political polarization would be having on our mental health and empathy poverty.

Also in 2010, Brene Brown’s infamous Ted Talk on vulnerability went viral. It still stands as one of the most viewed Ted Talks in history. It turns out vulnerability wasn’t such a taboo subject after all. It just took Brene’s courage to put it all out there for us. We may not have recognized that this was a massive “me too” movement as well. It was evident that at a very grassroots level, we were longing for answers to questions no one was asking.

In August of 2010, Brene released her book “Gifts of Imperfection” and invited us to join that grassroots “wholehearted” revolution by finding the courage to tell our truth stories. Mostly she was encouraging us to stop saying (and believing) we were OK when in fact, we were not. She grounded her research in the truth that we were born worthy of love, connection and belonging.

The very same message that Dr. Bruce Perry was also telling us.

Over the coming years, Brene would publish more books including Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart. Dr. Bruce Perry co-authored What Happened to You? with Oprah Winfrey. Dr. Dan Siegel published Whole Brain Child, No Drama Discipline, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain and the Power of Showing Up(with Tina Payne Bryson and most recently he released Interconnected. Dr. Mark Brackett published Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our kids, Ourselves and Our Society Thrive.

Rick Rubin, the renowned music producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, has a compelling way to make us stand up and take notice of what was happening in this grassroots wholehearted revolution. When an idea’s time has come, it will find a way to make itself known.

The seeds of this wholehearted, emotion revolution were scattered far and wide. They began to take hold not only in the research but within us. The self-help section of our favorite bookstores began to swell – from psychology and neuroscience, to the enneagram, to Untamed by Glennon Doyle and Clarity & Connection by yung pueblo (just to name a few).

Brene’s Netflix documentary, Call to Courage was released in April, 2019, where she invited us to choose courage over comfort in a present day culture that had us divided and disconnected. We should have buckled our seatbelts.

Less than a year later, just as Brene launched her two dynamic podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us, the global pandemic was unfolding — and isolating us even more. Perhaps we were listening more intentionally to Brene’s guests and the deeper conversations because they were resonating on many levels.

What we had all been feeling individually for decades, was now also being felt collectively. It was becoming crystal clear that we are not only hard-wired for connection, we are inextricably inter-connected through school, the workplace, grocery store, supply chains etc.

Suddenly the topic of our emotional health was popping up everywhere. What once had only been discussed in the self-help and psychological arenas, was being mainstreamed into business podcasts, education, physical and cognitive medical fields. A magnifying glass was handed to us to see the impacts of emotional health on our children and teenagers; on all of us. Brene Brown confided in her sister series of her podcast that the pandemic puts strains on marriages and parenting we’d never experienced before. We were never meant to withstand long stretches of uncertainty without revealing our vulnerability and need for connection.

The wholehearted revolution that was afoot back win 2010, had been growing slowly. All revolutions take time to build momentum. Surely the global pandemic accelerated the swiftness of of this “wholehearted, emotion revolution.”

Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, was one of Brene’s podcast guests and he shared so honestly what many already knew to be true: “The mental well being of our children and adults is shockingly poor. We have a crisis on our hands and its victims are our children.”

The warnings that Dr. Bruce Perry had offered in his 2010 book, Born for Love, stressed the importance of our community and relational scaffolding for our children. This wisdom could no longer be lost on us.

There has been a giant step forward and a big pivot in the right direction as we step back out into our new normal and begin reinventing ourselves from the inside out. The books and podcasts that are emerging now are speaking directly to the corrective actions we must take.

We must integrate our emotions in our brains and our experiences. We must unpack family and emotional baggage to stop the trauma cycles and give us space for better quality lives and health. We need to scaffold each other, especially our children, and cultivate growth mindsets. We need to shed the armor that we believed protected our vulnerability and discard outgrown behavioral patterns. We can build life skills, resource ourselves better, and rediscover our empathy and common humanity.

Brene Brown published Atlas of the Heart which helps us expand our understanding of 87 emotions and experiences. It is a family reference guide that supports us in helping our children and partners integrate their emotions.

Kristin Neff released Fierce Self Compassion (How Women can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive) which encourages us to treat ourselves as kindly and compassionately as we would a dear friend; and to break free from limiting gender stereotypes that has us all suppressing our emotions in harmful ways.

Dr. Gabor Mate published his phenomenal book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness and a pathway to healing and better emotional health). His insights into how generational trauma get passed down through our family systems point directly to the need for us to unpack family and emotional baggage.

Dr. Peter Attia very recently released his incredible book Outlive, where he drives home the point that our emotional health is the most integral component of our lives. We can be physically health and emotionally unhealthy and we will be miserable. And in turn, we will make our families miserable. He unpacks the reasons why we’ve long heard the phrase “hurting people hurt people.”

Dacher Keltner, a renowned expert in emotional science, just released his book, Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It is the final chapter of his book, aptly entitled Epiphany, that really brings home the lessons that we have been learning over these past two decades. Dacher Keltner reflects on the work of Charles Darwin whose thinking about the evolutionary science of emotion was shaped as he cared for his 10-year old daughter Annie until her death. Dacher offers that we mimic nature as we move through our evolution (and emotional revolution); there is a decaying (shedding the old that no longer serves us), a composting (extracting the lessons and nutrients we need) and then a regrowth (which is where we are now).

We now possess better insights, research, tools and collective commitment than we have ever had before in this emotion revolution. Young people are hungry for mentors and author Arthur Brooks encourages the older generation to rediscover their purpose by stepping into that role. It is an exciting time to be alive — and be an active participant in such a healthy change.

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The Baggage We Should Be Unpacking

It’s no surprise that we all have family and emotional baggage that has never been unpacked – mostly because it feels like opening Pandora’s box. Who would ever want to do that?

What if we were to reframe it as exploring a treasure chest instead? The clues to unanswered questions; the keys to unlock some of our hidden assets; a mystery solved; a weathered, yellowing journal of unknown and revelational history.

We are fearful of what we might discover in our family and emotional baggage. Many of us don’t care to relive the painful memories we stashed in there decades ago. But we are not the same as we were then – we are older, have had more life experiences under our belt and have more nuanced perspectives. Maybe we can unpack the baggage and clear up much needed space for a lighter way of being.

We are not alone when it comes to complex family histories and generational patterns. We are all in the midst of a big unraveling of old societal conditioning, gender stereotyping and poor parenting models. As Maya Angelou espouses “when you know better, you do better.” Thanks to the major breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and emotional science, we now have much better resources and tools available to us for personal growth, self-awareness, relationships and parenting.

In fact, it is these very breakthroughs that provide an entirely different framework for hard conversations and more productive dialogue about the elephant in the room –debilitating family dynamics.

If we wait until parents or grandparents pass away, we miss asking the questions we would like answered. Have you ever sifted through cardboard boxes of old photos and had no idea who the relatives were or the stories that went with each photographic memory? It is just like that with family baggage. So many secrets boxed up and sealed tight. If family members are courageous enough to enter into these challenging conversations with honesty and a desire to learn, it will jettison that cumbersome family baggage.

Just look around at all the complex family dynamics the next time you attend a graduation, wedding, family reunion or holiday gathering. You can readily spot familiar family patterns, passed down from one generation to the next, taking its toll on our younger generations; families dealing with the same adversities, just a different cast of characters.

The baggage may be invisible, but its impacts are as apparent as blue eyes, tall stature, the shape of a mouth or nose and even personality traits.

No generation is immune from common life events including genetic health issues, divorce, co-parenting, behavioral issues, co-dependency, estrangements, blended families, addiction, mental health issues and trauma. Hard things happen in life. We can, and must, stop making them harder than they need to be.

Today, we have the rare opportunity to involve four living generations — grandparents, parents, siblings and grandchildren — to do the work necessary to break generational trauma and address dysfunctional behavioral patterns. It may be the first time ever that we also have evidence and impetus to come together to do this multi-generational unpacking of emotional and behavioral baggage.

A good starting point would be to collectively acknowledge that the old ways of parenting and dealing with emotions are primary root causes of ongoing family dysfunction and our growing emotional health crisis. We got it wrong and now we need to be actively involved in turning the tide on that old paradigm. Just acknowledging this truth can lift the fog of shame, guilt and blame. These conversations are long overdue and we don’t want our grandchildren being burdened by the weight of unhealthy, unproductive family secrets. We can stop spreading harmful patterns and limiting beliefs from one generation to the next.

When we can overlay the new template for parenting and emotional health onto our past experiences, we gain clarity where once there was only murky confusion. There are a lot of stories embedded in our family history that are horribly inaccurate. Imagine discovering this and realizing that we’d been making incorrect assumptions and judging others when we really could have been showing up and offering each other support and emotional scaffolding.

Yes we are afraid to have those hard conversations, mostly because we are feeling very strong negative emotions arise in us each time we even think about it. It would be analogous to refusing to go to the doctor for a suspicious lump. We can no longer afford to let our fear and anxiety prevent us from learning and discovery.

The biggest challenge in having these hard conversations and unpacking family baggage together is the massive entanglement of old, unprocessed emotions, traumas and false narratives about each other. The only way we can do this work is to become very skillful in interpersonal and emotional skills.

If we are going to do a deep dive into the dark, deep waters of our generational family history, we want a seasoned, skillful dive master and tools to help us see clearly, cut those falsehoods that keep us tethered, and avoid getting re-snagged on past trauma. Emotional triggers, limiting beliefs, fixed mindsets and jagged remains of adversities are hard to navigate without compassion, empathy and powerful listening skills.

For the record, we may have attempted to do this in the past, but all we really had to guide us was “hindsight”. While hindsight can shine a light on our regrets and help us own the consequences and outcomes of our choices, it often leaves us at a dead end. Problem identified, but no meaningful path to healing and prevention.

In 2009, Dr. Dan Siegel introduced a new concept for personal growth and self-awareness. He was planting the seed of what would become “other awareness”. But there was no way for us to get to “other awarenesss” without knowing ourselves deeply. Dr. Siegel called his revolutionary personal transformation concept “mindsight”. Mindsight picks up where hindsight stopped. No more dead ends.

Dr. Siegel framed “mindsight” this way: It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner emotional lives with more clarity, integrate our brain and our emotions, and enhance our relationships with others.

Mindsight is how we put our own oxygen mask on first. There is no way that we can be of meaningful value in helping others on their emotional health journey if we ourselves haven’t done our own work. Full stop.

In my previous blog post, “Learning What We Need to Teach”, I shared the steps and the benefits of Dr. Siegel’s concept of mindsight and whole brain parenting. Doing the hard work and committing to a lifetime of personal growth is not for the faint of heart. But as we often say with physical fitness, “no pain, no gain”.

Dr. Siegel encourages us to use this “mindsight” lens to go back and look at our own childhood to discover how our experiences and our caregivers shaped us. Imagine being able to do this – AND have conversations with siblings, parents and grandparents about those experiences that would provide context and nuance, not to mention long overdue accountability and the possibility of repair.

Do you know what your emotional triggers are? Are you aware of the limiting beliefs that were baked into your inner critic when you were a child? Are you still having meltdowns like a two year old when big emotions consume you? Do you expect more emotional regulation and better coping skills from your partner, kids or friends than you can muster in stressful situations?

These are the warning signs of compromised emotional health. If we do not attend to our emotional health, two things will happen — (1) our physical health and quality of life will also be compromised and may even go into serious decline; (2) we will pass down to our children similar unhealthy emotional patterns. Ignoring our emotional health has perpetuated the multigenerational family dysfunction since the dawn of time.

When Dr. Dan Siegel introduced mindsight in 2009, he was an advance scout for what has now broken wide open into the mainstream of our lives. Over the past two decades, multi disciplines have merged and reverse engineered what we need to do in order to address our growing mental health crises.

We need to undo and unlearn all the things we got wrong about parenting, about emotions and about relationships.

It has taken several decades, a ton of research, and more family heartaches and brokenness than we can imagine to bring us to this moment in our collective evolution. We are now able to visibly see and feel why we need to commit to this work when we look at our children and grandchildren. Not only do they deserve better, we are motivated by our hearts to take this work seriously.

In the past, each generation entered adulthood and parenthood with a strong desire to do better than the prior generation. Good intentions, but faulty information and poor diagnostic tools. We labeled kids, rather than naming emotions. We unplugged their first love language (emotions) as soon as they learned to talk and express themselves. We had blindspots and blurred life maps. We unconsciously repeated the same old patterns and reactions from which we recoiled or hid from as kids. We numbed our pain rather than extracting it and healing.

The reverse engineering that neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics, neurobiology, emotional science and social sciences have done is now extending a call to action that cannot be ignored. This call to action is meant for all of us — all 4 generations to become involved. We need to do some serious excavation work on generational baggage.

We each need to make our own emotional health a priority. We need to plug it back into the core foundation of a meaningful, satisfying and rewarding life. We need to upgrade our default systems that were never integrated in childhood. Plug those emotions into our operating systems and get more skillful at regulating them, learning from them and growing because of them. We need to unpack emotional and family baggage that is putting more obstacles in our way than we realize.

We do not have to wait until we are at the master class level to dive into teaching our kids and helping our partners. We can learn together. In fact, our children and grandchildren are the best teachers in the world. If we can step back and ask ourselves, “what did I need when I was their age?” we will instinctively know how to meet the moment. Instead of asking “what’s the matter?” we can pivot and learn by asking them “What matters most?”

This blog post is the first of a new series I’ll be sharing about the life-changing benefits of personal growth and self-awareness not only for our own quality of life, but for all of our relationships. Let’s explore how we got here, what is fresh and new for our emotional health, what we are discovering about the connection between fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, better ways to help kids through divorce and blended families how we can improve the education system from preschool to college and so much more.

There is an “emotion revolution” rising from the ashes of old parenting models, lack of emotional regulation into our human operating system, and the hard lessons learned through a global pandemic. Are you in?

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

**DR. PETER ATTIA is the renowned resource on Longevity — and now he is the front-running** **force for this emotion** revolution. Watch his relatable reels on Instagram, listen to his interviews on YouTube for his book launch. Read his book, Outlive to learn why our emotional health is the most integral component for our quality of life. **Listen to his podcast, the Drive.**

Gummies of Wisdom – Playing LeapFrog

It is truly remarkable how much we can learn about others and ourselves through storytelling. When we share our life stories with each other, we often find unexpected common threads — and we make discoveries that support our own learning and growth.

This is like playing leapfrog — where some part of our story or experience connects with someone else’s and our shared understanding gets ignited and amplified in the most enlightening ways.

We can each unpack the details of our experiences, the lessons learned, resources we found helpful, what our biggest challenges were and how we faced them.

Storytelling can turn strangers into friends in just one conversation or deepen a decades old relationship with revelational new insights. We come to understand that common, similar life events unfold for each of us and yet it is our personal experiences, resources, and interpretations that create the textured, contextualized unique stories of our lives.

The script doesn’t really change that much. What changes are our stories.

I recently sat with two strangers on a flight from Houston to Phoenix; an energetic, engaging young man probably in his late 30’s who is a husband, a father and an entrepreneur; and a soulful, inspiring woman in her 50’s who is an integral part of PacificHelps.org (a non profit organization founded by her husband to provide education and renewable energy to the Pacific Islands) Over the course of that flight, we talked and listened to each other’s stories with a sense of wonder and awe. So many similarities in our stories yet the backdrop, the cast of characters and the obstacles were vividly different. We connected through a working knowledge of the basic life plot — growing up, finding jobs, getting married, having children, marriage difficulties, divorce, remarriage, life threatening illnesses and financial challenges. So much common ground. We laughed, we empathized, we marveled. The human spirit really is undaunting.

The script and the plot doesn’t change much. But each of our stories were uniquely different at the same time. I viewed our stories through the lens of a 71 year old, excited for what the future holds for both of them because of what they have learned from their personal experiences and how they are proactively embracing their continual self discovery and personal growth.

In that young man, I can see my own grown children who are now in the throes of parenthood but so much better prepared and skillful than all the generations before them. At 71, I can look both ways now — I can look back at what we got wrong in old parenting models and I can also look forward to what is possible with vastly improved parenting and emotional skills.

The conversations and insights that the three of us shared about parenting and emotions would have never happened when I was in my late 30’s or early 40’s.

The ease with which we shared things about our own childhoods that shaped us and then later dropped us into our own self-discovery journey was nothing short of incredible. My generation stuffed our skeletons into closets. Today’s younger generation of enlightened parents are doing their personal growth work early to break generational chains of dysfunction and hand-me-down behavioral patterns.

We’ve come a long way since Dr. Spock. These parents are leaning on Brene Brown, neuroscience, whole brain parenting, the enneagram, Drs. Dan Siegel, Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. Yes, I was in seventh heaven – both my seat mates were quite familiar with the same resources that I have discovered in the last decade. They are proactively putting into practice what they are learning — for themselves and for their children.

Moreover, they are incorporating greater relationship skills into their marriages, parenting and co-parenting. There has been a huge paradigm shift from unhealthy, contentious fallouts from divorce that often caused a lot of trauma for children, to an intentional focus on providing children of divorce the relational scaffolding they need and deserve. Joint custody is being anchored in healthy, respectful, cooperative co-parenting.

A few years ago, I had started to connect the dots about the intersecting of so many of my favorite resources for personal growth and self discovery — I blogged about it. Researchers, authors and podcasters began to reference each other in their books, and invited each other as guests on their podcasts. I noticed that the topics of the human need for connection, emotional regulation, parenting and relationship skills were being discussed even on tech, business and news platforms. I could feel that the very subjects I was passionate about were becoming mainstreamed.

And now, here I was, on a plane with two strangers and we were talking, laughing, sharing about all of it as easily as we once might have discussed the latest movie or hottest trend. It was one of those compelling “aha” moments that Dacher Keltner describes in his newest book, Awe. I got goosebumps – often. There were just so many similarities in parts of vastly different stories.

Do you know how it feels when you have a really great customer service experience? When you feel like someone has paid attention, gone the extra mile, and earnestly appreciated your business? Well that is exactly what this conversation felt like to me — it was a standout. The positive impact that personal growth work has on our ability to make meaningful connections was not lost on me.

I thought a lot about LeapFrog when I got off that plane. That remarkable two hour conversation had made lasting impressions on each of us. We each left with new resources to check out and inspiring stories to reflect on.

What struck me most was how much space we had created to really hear and engage with others by learning from our experiences. We were not so mired in our problems (and phones) that we missed this golden opportunity. Rich conversations like this are some of the best educational experiences we can get. We gain new perspectives and insights, are reinforced and encouraged about the path we are on, and we build good connections on common ground.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: