Welcome and Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You got the the thing you worked for, the number, the title, the relationship, whatever it was you promised yourself would be enough. It felt good for about three days and then the goal was good. And here you are again. I think exhausted wondering if there's something wrong with you. When you identify it, it's a game with gold. You never actually arrive. It's not a crisis, it's according to the final week. We update the verdict and a German accord. Max I and won the German national championship with 17. Felt completely empty three days later and spent the next decade decoding white. His work asks what actually creates lasting fulfillment. Not the next achievement, but what is already here? Welcome! I am so excited for this conversation. We got lost in the pre-chat, and I okay have to record, but thank you so much for answering the call to connect and coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Jody, thank you so much for having me. Just like you, I really enjoyed the pre-chat. I know today is going to be full of beautiful ideas and chats about such a wide variety of topics, and so I'm really happy to dive right in.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yeah, I and I think it was one of the conversations we had, obviously the show is called Messy Midlife

Chasing Success at Seventeen

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Nell Crisis, it's uh according to Connect, and certainly over the years that midlife's age has dropped now globally things that I've got clients younger than that. We were just having a discussion saying that it doesn't necessarily have to turn up to mid life. This is about Archer is called Connect, and so you're definitely turned up to BitLive, just in case people are now watching this and thinking you must have some pay for PSQ, etc., or anything like that. Because yours turned up really, really early, but kind of a blessing. So take us back to that 17-year-old for the ambition and how you got there, what happened, and then that three days afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Absolutely, and you really touched upon it beautifully because I was lucky in a way that I suffered immensely as a child and a teenager. For many years I struggled with anxiety, with depression, with loneliness, and just like every other kid, all I wanted was to be happy. And so back then in my I now call it my youthful ignorance, I made up the story in my mind that said, if only I could become a professional runner, if I could win races and set records, then maybe I could become significant. Maybe other kids and other people around me would love me. Maybe I could finally love myself and find a peace inside that I always wanted. Maybe I could run away from all those fears and doubts inside of me that said, I wasn't good enough. And so at the time I dedicated everything. I sacrificed my friends and school grades and parties and all this stuff that teenagers typically do in order to pursue their dream. And I was very lucky in that sense because when I was 17 I actually achieved that. And I remember crossing the finish line at the German national championships and track and field. And I remember crying tears of joy and tears just running down my face because I really thought this is it. I thought I'd finally made it. And again, the next day I woke up and I had these rose-colored glasses on and I was like, life is finally beautiful. I can finally love myself. And again, and next, and again, the next. And then I woke up three days later and looked around and I looked at my body and I realized that everything had returned to normal. There was no more bliss, there was no more exuberant joy. There was just me again thinking, okay, now can I make it to the Olympics? Can I make it one step further? And so the goalpost had simply moved. And that moment broke me. Because in that moment I recognized that what I had spent years sacrificing everything for was ultimately worthless in terms of how I felt about myself. And so that moment really set me on a lifelong quest to decode happiness. And one of the first things I learned as I was diving into that, that experience that I had, and that probably most of our listeners have had throughout their life, you achieve that dream, or you maybe on a smaller level, you get that thought, or maybe you get into this relationship, or you achieve the promotion at work, whatever it is, and you're happy for a few days, maybe a few weeks, only to kind of feel that happiness fade away again. That experience is actually a very common one. In fact, in psychology, we call this hedonic adaptation. It's a way by which our brains adapt to any kind of stimulus, any kind of external circumstance that we have in our lives for a while. And so once I recognize that, I wondered if that doesn't work, if more success isn't the answer, then what else can I do to finally create the joy and happiness that I've always wanted?

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Well, what strikes me in all of that there is there's an irony in the fact that it was running. And as I was listening to you there, it was literally like you were running from yourself. Like it was I run like if I keep running, I can run away with more of this. And if I go in that direction, maybe I'll run towards something where this doesn't exist. But almost that waking up was like, okay, I can't outrun this.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

And you know, the the funny thing is over the years the distances get larger, right? And so you start with three kilometers on a track, and then you bump it up. Eventually you get to the marathon, and you're like, a marathon is not enough to escape myself, and so you just go longer and longer. But eventually you realize that it's the very act of running away from yourself that creates that disconnection and that's much of the suffering that I was trying to escape from the first place.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

That is classically a legal idea that you get to be running, but with all of those things, like with our jobs, the distance or the promotion gets harder and harder and harder, and we're chasing it because when I get that promotion, then I'll be happier, and then you get that one, and it's empty, and you keep driving. And the same, like if I get that car, if I get that house, if I get all of these things, which you know, you just literally are running away from yourself in all of those things. So that must have been a huge identity shift at that point, and talk a lot when I was with clients about how Richard's saying we externalize so much of our identity and we put it in all of those things. If I run this race and I get that, then I'll be happy and people will like me. And so how then at 17 you have this realization, how on earth did you cope because running it intense and you fit it there, you feel a whole world that your identity is that, and then you wake up and you go, Hey, this is not my identity. How that shit could occur and happen there.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Part of the difficulty, I think, in

Identity and External Validation

SPEAKER_00 7:21

letting go of an identity we built is that it once served us in fulfilling the needs that we had. In other words, in the beginning, the reason why you build an identity around being a runner or being successful at whatever it is, or being beautiful or smart or whatever your specific story is, is because it actually works. Because you get the applause, you get the respect, you get the feedback from the outside world of people telling you, wow, what a great job. And so it's only natural in the beginning to then build that identity around yourself when you get that positive external reinforcement. And so that's what I did in the beginning. It was the first time in my life where I was receiving positive feedback from the outer world, where people were coming up to me, I was in the newspapers and all of that stuff, right? And so in that moment it felt very natural to build this identity of I am the runner. But the trouble is that when you externalize your identity, you're at the mercy of success and failure. A good training day or good race meant I am awesome. But the moment I failed, the moment I get injured or sick or lost a race, naturally I would suffer. And so all of my happiness, my peace of mind, my self-love was essentially dependent upon me performing well in something that I couldn't actually fully control. I could influence it by training hard, but I couldn't actually control who else would show up on race day and which position I would get and whether I would win or lose. And at some point I simply realized that's a losing equation. When you externalize your identity, you make a deal that essentially says that until the world bends itself to my will, until and unless I succeed as much as I want, I refuse to be happy. And I choose instead to live in misery, in anxiety, and constant fear of unworthiness or insignificance or not being good enough. And so it wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime shift only. It was rather a continual, over and over again realization after every race and every failing and every victory that the path I was going on was not sustainable. Like I'd never find truly lasting happiness if I didn't go from this external identity and shift it towards something internal that could actually control.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

I love what they say there as well about that external praise and that reward.

Roots of the Runner

SPEAKER_01 10:00

But I'm intrigued to know where did because it's not your average person's dream of running. So I'm interested to know how did Max end up on that journey in the first place. Well, what was the mode that thought running was gonna be your journey?

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Oftentimes I think it it goes back to the the kind of earliest victories we get. What we're receiving love and respect from, most oftentimes from our parents. And for me, that was from my dad. For me, running, the what got me into running was actually connecting with my dad. He's a fantastic athlete, still an incredibly strong biker and runner to this day. And so much of my kind of early childhood memories were actually going and at first I would bike with him while he was running, and when eventually for the first time or 14 I was finally able to catch up with him while I was running, I was so ecstatic, right? It was really just bonding time with my dad. And then pretty quickly, you know, at the time I was playing football, I was playing tennis, I was doing all these different sports, but quickly pretty quickly I realized that I wasn't a good NVs, but I I really quickly realized I had a certain talent in running. And so that's really when I doubled down, when I sacrificed everything else and just went all out. So it was very quick in that way because from the first race basically that I ever did, like I I had these tiny little victories, right? On some random road races in the south of Germany, right? It was small races, but it was enough to get me hooked. Reaching the podium, winning some races, setting some records. And and bit by bit then just building upon that strength really created this kind of full-on addiction, if you will, towards trying to become a better runner. And so it was really just a natural progression of following something that was naturally the good at, and then also doubling down and really sacrificing everything else to become the best I could be in that field.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

I use this phrase, I always say look, what gets rewarded gets repeated. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a great thing, the reward can be a negative thing, but what gets rewarded gets repeated every time. So just be careful about how you reinforce certain things. I mean, interesting as well that often when we have these big moments of identity shit, one of the hardest things we can face, and at that point, you know, you're still quite young, 17. How did the world around you react when you suddenly pivoted? Because I know when I decided I was gonna quit my job and do all of these things, the people around me were not supportive to start with because this was a huge pivot and identity and they were unnerved by it. So did you experience any of that going from this pathway all of a sudden to actually this is not what I wanted?

SPEAKER_00 12:44

So the thing about my kind of journey in that was it actually

Injury and Body Reconnection

SPEAKER_00 12:48

changed how I viewed running. It didn't change the fact that I did running. And so I actually spent the next ten years still running to the same degree, but without that kind of attachment to the end results, right? And of course that was really a uh a multi-year journey whereby kind of step by step by step I recognized that it wasn't really serving me, that the more I was running, the more I was actually suffering. And it really wasn't until two years ago that I really completely moved off that path. And again, it was kind of one of those failures that actually ended up being a great blessing, which is I was training for an Iron Man and I got injured. And it was the first time in more than a decade for me that I fully stopped training because I just couldn't do anything basically. And so after a few days, I when I was listening to my body, I realized, oh my god, I've never actually felt so good doing nothing. Because for more than a decade I had been overtraining, right? I'd been burning out my body to such a degree that when I listened to my body, all it was doing is was sending painful signals. All it was saying is, oh my god, you did too much. Oh my god, I'm tired, oh my god, this hurts. And I was walking around with this constant anxiety in my chest because I was so tense from all the overtraining. And it wasn't until I just physically stopped because I was forced by an injury, that I recognized there's another way. That I recognized that there is so much bliss and peace available in our body if we just learn to for some of us on extreme athlete side to slow things down, maybe for someone who are lazy, more lazy side, to do a little bit more to really optimize the body. And that's really what led me then down to the path of yoga and really the whole somatic aspect of learning to become in touch again with my body. Because another thing that happens is when you're especially in the endurance world, is that you completely disconnect from the body. When you're fighting for the win in a race, what you're trying to do is you're trying to suppress all the pain that is rising, all the signals your body is rightfully sending you, telling you, hey, if you keep going too long, you might actually die. And so the path of pushing through a hard workout or a race is actually suppressing those feelings, distracting yourself and pushing through what the body actually has set as a very healthy and useful physical boundary. And so for me, actually, then in the end, it was really a process of relearning to get in touch with those sensations again and learn that they're not bad. In fact, they can be really beautiful if you just learn how to regulate your body well.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

I really tried to keep pace because you're coming out with so much stuff that I'm trying to fully point it in my head. So bear with me. What I loved was where hypnotiz on the running. So I say this to clients all the time two things can be right at the same time, it just depends. And I always say there's no such thing as a bad habit, there's just a habit. It becomes bad if you take it one way or the other. So in that way you were saying, exercise can be just equally as destructive if you take it to an extreme. So it hits a balance of being a positive to a negative, and it just depends who you are and where you are. When you put that in the same respect, it's very accepted. No activity, as you brought up there, is equally as bad. So is it sliding scale? Put it on. And I thought what you said there is you know, there's that element where fitness and health actually goes against you if you if you take that too far, and I think it's hard for people to recognise that actually this is now maybe as impactful in terms of being negative and not being active at the other end of the scale, and it's just the consequence is going to be slightly different, and so that really shot out there. The other one was having pivoted running, you didn't have to go to going back to two things being right. But I talk about a lot of the time with people about this very much there's a big difference between a goal and your purpose, and I think we often

Passion Versus Purpose

SPEAKER_01 17:20

confuse them, and so quite often something that should be a goal or is a goal, make it our purpose, but it's not really a purpose, it's actually a goal, and our purpose is something much bigger, it's a north star that sits beyond that, and our goal should take us towards our purpose. Would you say that almost what happened there was about your purpose amongst all of this, and they realized that actually running wasn't your purpose, but it didn't mean it didn't belong.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

And that's such a great thing that you're mentioning here. The way I look at it is this distinction between passion and purpose. Too many times what we do, and this is certainly what I did, right? I turned my passion because I have an incredible passion for running, right? I spent more than a decade doing nothing else than think about and talk about and do running, right? But at some point I had to realize that it was all egocentric. That aside from my grandma and my mom, nobody in this world cares about me running. Nobody cares if I win a race, nobody cares if I do well or not. It's a very egocentric sport that's really all about me, myself, and I. And so there's a vast difference then between your passion and your purpose. If all we did was follow our passions, eating chocolate ice cream might be one of our greatest life contributions, right? I'm passionate about eating ice cream, right? I love my grandma's cake, I love running, but none of these things actually have anything to do with serving other people, with carrying the burden of someone else, with lightening someone else's load, with following a purpose that goes above and beyond me, myself, and I. And so at some point, and this is really the ultimate distinction of why I eventually had to stop running at that level, and it was because I realized that the more I was devoted to running, the more time and energy I was actually taking away from my true life purpose, which is helping people think better so they can live better. And so ironically, for me, it was really sacrificing my passion so that I could fulfill my life's purpose.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

I think that worthy of note, you are still a

Healing Social Anxiety

SPEAKER_01 19:34

record-owning runner, so it didn't stay there in your world, but that transition there from passion to purpose or purpose emerging. Before we move on, me interested though, on the anxiety and the loneliness and those elements that you experienced that you were trying to run away from. You know, that was a long journey and it took several years. But did they start to eat relatively quickly once that just hives it?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Absolutely. So I I remember I I graduated with from the United States, right? I studied in Florida, it was a beautiful university, Florida, Gulf Coast University, had a great time there. But when I graduated, I was 22 at the time, I evaluated my life, right? I moved back to Europe and I really looked at my life and I realized I'd made exactly two friends, right? Four years of beautiful beach life there, and I had made only two friends. And so I thought to myself, wow, if I keep going like this, I'll die pretty lonely. And so I really set myself on a very deliberate journey. Then I was traveling, really started traveling all over the world, and I would deliberately go to new countries and just devote myself to talking to strangers, right? I'd walk down the street and I'd just talk to any stranger I could find, just trying to overcome that fear. And I remember I was in Italy at the time for a while, and I remember my heart beating out of my chest as I was just walking up to some guy my age and asking, Hey, what time is it? It was I was that bad. Hey, can I play football with you? It was like it was that was very simple, very easy for most people's steps, but it really took me out of my comfort zone. And and eventually really led to me just wherever I would go, like I would just naturally talk to anyone. If you walk down the street with a smile, I will talk to you, right? And it's been a tremendous shift for me because it allowed me to build the greatest friendships I could ever imagine just by finding people that radiate joy and happiness and love. And whenever I meet them, anywhere in the world. Actually becoming friends with it. And so this process of quite deliberately facing that anxiety of I don't really know what to say and I feel really like awkward socially. And deliberately overcoming it has been for me one of the greatest shifts in my life.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

I think that's pretty amazing. My husband always says that I'm that person. And my husband's very, very quiet and stuff like that. And he's like, how do you do it? And I'm like, I just like I love people. I get you. And it is like I've had the most amazing conversation. And it just takes that smile and that hello. And I never lose faith to the fact that as a speech, as human beings, we are meant to be connected and in company. And I'm sure it will come up in the second half. I will say two things really. Everybody's goal or everybody's purpose really is to be happy. We like covering things like a house, and I'm like, but that's not really that's not really what you want. Like and I do clients, I say, okay, tell me what will make you happy. Because that is where you set your direction. So you can if the car will make you happy, then by all means have the car. If the house will make you happy, let's really work out if it is that because we're just made to connect as a human being. A smile does it. That doesn't it? And when you go out into the world that you are that person, I always go out of the world. And even if you're small, if you integrate a smile, there'll be someone nearby that smile that you that maybe conversation. It doesn't have much integrated skill gets rewarded. Well yeah, you'll be able to do that in the one day, maybe it will come into some type of guy, but it'll be just a small minority.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

But the great thing is we we now actually have quite a few decades of research showing, in fact, 80 years of research on of Harvard University to show that the single greatest predictor of our long-term happiness is actually the quality and quantity of positive relationships in our lives. And so positive psychology, the entire field is oftentimes summarized simply as people matter. And people matter more than anything else in our lives. And there's also great studies showing that when you walk down the street and you approach strangers just to say hello and make a friend. We feel this, and instinctively many of us feel this, and I used to feel this really this immediate, I don't know what to say, are they gonna like relate me? Are they gonna is it gonna be embarrassing? But actually, research shows that most people are genuinely happy being approached by a stranger. It's like we overestimate the difficulty and the the kind of challenge of that. But actually, if you think about it, when someone approaches you and says, You have a great energy, I would love to connect. Most of us are generally happy about that. And so I found that there's a great difference between being shy and being introverted. I always had this desire for connection, which is really what extroversion is, right? A desire for human connection and conversations that gives you energy, but I was so painfully shy and afraid that I wasn't able to fulfill that need. And it was actually only by transcending that fear, facing it over and over and over again, that I could finally fulfill this need that I have for a great, extroverted, well-connected life.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

It's amazing that I we definitely are at the point to sum up that messy, I would just call it a messy moment, really. The the 17-year-old max has admitted to that, you know, you kind of got to that point which many of the guests that I have all have this typical moment where I think the same thing happened, and all of a sudden purpose that the goals now are written to go to that or start, to go to that purpose. So basically, the purpose of discovering what makes people happy and how to be happy has obviously arrived. And I know this journey afterwards, and I was really excited to talk about the discoveries and how you did that because it sounds very much like that point that healing process that you went on around that anxiety almost today delivered you up to go into the huge words, would that be like a bad point to say that yeah, so okay, I get it. Now I need to repeat that.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Absolutely. There's this beautiful idea, quote, that all philosophy is ultimately autobiography. Right? Every philosophy we create about life, about happiness, about love, about relationships is always kind of filtered through and cultivated through our autobiography, through our life experiences. And so it's actually the the summation of all these different experiences. Succeeding at my dream at 17 and not being happy because of it. Struggling so desperately against isolation and loneliness and anxiety and having to find ways to deal with that, overtraining my body for more than a decade and finally having to learn how to optimize it, how to regulate it, how to create this immense peace and stable energy through breath work and yoga and other techniques. It was really all of this stuff that eventually led to the work that I've been creating creating then over the last few years around psychosomatic intelligence.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

That is definitely a good point there to have a little bit of a break, catch half breath, and then afterwards I know that we're gonna unpack. But listeners, now that science part of it. We don't before where I get called Christopher Yoga, and I always say I'm Christoph Yoga in neuroscience, and so we're gonna do that after the break. Before we get back to the conversation, I want to tell you about the wider messy midlife space. Every episode has its own home at messymidlifepodcast.world where you'll find the full show notes, practical takeaways, guest bios, and links to anything we've talked about today. You'll also find a link to the Messy Midlife community, a supportive space where you can connect with me, connect with others together, and access free tools to help you explore the nine principles of authentic women in your own life. And if you feel ready for more personal support, visit authenticcoaching.me to find out about one-to-one coaching and book a free 45-minute call with me. This show is brought to you completely free. The only thing I ask is that if it's helping you, please subscribe in your chosen podcast app so you never miss an episode. Leave a review like this episode, and most importantly of all, share it with a friend or loved one who might need to hear it. Because midlife might be messy, but it does not have to be a crisis, it can be a calling to connect. Now let's get back to today's show. Welcome back, messy midlifers. And before the

Psychosomatic Intelligence Explained

SPEAKER_01 29:33

break, we heard about that journey, the messy moment that wasn't a midlife, but it was a messy middle teenage moment that projected Max on a really different journey from running away from himself to finding a way to run towards himself and reconnect, and taking passion and purpose and separating them out and making sure that they weren't merged, and this new purpose of discovering what makes people happy and the trajectory he took him on. Just there before the break, mentioned psychosomatic and somatic and psycho are buzzwords that we hear a lot these days around coaching, around therapy, around all of these things. When I was much younger, I trained to be a nurse, and psychosomatic used in medical terms when there was no explanation for somebody's pain. It was almost dismissive, like it would say psychosomatic head pain or psychosomatic stomach pain. And it obviously doesn't mean that. So here are some better explanation of psychosomatic.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

Absolutely. And there's there's many ways to take this depending on where we're going with this, but ultimately, what psychosomatic intelligence is all about is your ability to master both the psychology, meaning the two parts of the brain, which is on the one hand, the conscious mind. That is the part of us that sets a goal and then plans and strategizes how to achieve that. And then, secondly, the subconscious mind, the part below conscious awareness where your beliefs, your identity that says, I am good enough, or I am smart, I am beautiful, I'm wonderful, I'm a great athlete, I'm a great entrepreneur, whatever it is, as well as your habits are housed. And so those are the two parts of the mind. And then on the other hand, we have the somatic aspect, the body, which is really about returning home to the sensations inside. The way I like to think about it is this imagine that you go on the greatest date of your life, and you have such a fun, wonderful, interesting, loving time, and after this incredible date, the man or woman of your dreams finally gets closer to you. And they run their sweet fingerstree hair, and there's their honey, sweet lips finally touch yours in what could and should be a moment of pure ecstasy. All your mind can think about is oh my god, did I brush my teeth? Oh my god, does he really like me? Oh my god, does that mean we're gonna get in a relationship? You take this perfect moment and you absolutely ruin it by living in the head. And so that's the tyranny of living too much in the head and living too little in the body. We overthink and we underfeel in our modern society, and this is especially true for high achievers listening to us. We're so used to thinking and planning and strategizing and roaring and fearing and immediately going out of this moment trying to project it into the future rather than being here for that perfect kiss or for that perfect sunrise or for that beautiful meal with my friends, and actually being here, feeling the sensation of lips touching upon lips, of the sun enlivening and vibrating in my fingertips as it warms my body. True happiness cannot be experienced only by logical thinking. When I eat my favorite ice cream in Italy, I don't go, oh yeah, this is a great flavor. No, I'm like, I feel the explosion in my mouth, right? I feel the taste buds exploding. And that's what creates this feeling of joy and happiness. And so, what the somatic aspect of psychosomatic intelligence is really about is learning, first of all, how to get in touch again with the incredible wisdom of our body. And then, secondly, how do we optimize that? How do I, just like I had to learn when I was running, right? I was getting all this information from my body, but it was all painful sensation because I was overburdening my body. And so, what I had to learn is downregulate it and tap into that peace and that calmness that allowed me to then sit down and actually feel great in my own skin. Psychosomatic intelligence and overall is really about how do we align these three systems. My conscious mind that sets a goal, the subconscious mind that achieves those goals and determines how far I can play it, and thirdly, my nervous system that determines how I feel at every moment of my life.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

Wow. And I think that I just want to say with the nervous

Mind Body Signals and Stress

SPEAKER_01 34:46

system bit there, I mean, there are sometimes very, very physical representations of when something is emotionally off. Would that be correct to say that? Because I think we do experience physical pain or certain things. I think someone the other day, and they actually lost sensation down one side of their body, but no, and it was basically stress and burnout again.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Absolutely. It was Carl Jung that said that intuition is perception via the unconscious, and so there's so much stuff happening inside of us that oftentimes we're simply unaware of. In fact, if we look at the vagus nerve, the largest nerve connecting brain and body, 80% of its information is actually sent from the body to its brain. At any moment in time, there's millions of bits of stimuli coming in through our senses, our eyes, our ears, our taste buds, and our fingertips, our skin that give us information about the outer world as well as our inner world. That's called extra reception for external things, and interreception if I'm looking inside, looking at the depths of my breath and the vibration of my fingertips, for example. Now, if we miss out on that, we lose out on all the information the world is providing us. And so we're essentially nothing more than this pharaoh living in his old and his ancient pyramid inside the head. The human brain never actually touches the day of light. And so everything that we do experience, everything that we call life, is actually coming in through our senses and then interpreted through our brain. And so if that process of filtering and bringing in information is not actually working, then we're missing out on such a great deal of life itself simply because we're not aware of it.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

I talk a lot with my clients about subconscious and how it fires before you even know it, and it's operating from the past memories of its primary aim is to keep you safe. So I would just think that if you're saying that, it's also not getting the correct amount of information. It's having to make a judgment on misinformation almost because your body isn't feeding the right information back.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Absolutely. And in fact, this is one of my, to me, one of the most fascinating things about the human brain is that it cannot reliably distinguish between physical reality in front of our eyes and our vivid imagination. So if you think back to the last horror movie that you watched, why do we get scared, right? When the guy is coming off the axe or when the zombies are chasing that person through the street. You feel the heart beating faster. You feel the goosebumps. You might even, you know, I'm very jumpy when it comes to scary movies, right? So I really do get scared. But why is that? It's because to the brain, it actually feels real. Now, the same principle applies to when you're sitting down for a test, right? And you're gonna take an exam, just a written exam. Why is your heart beating at 160 beats a minute when all you gotta do is fill in some answers? It's because your brain has transported you again into this moment of danger. It's perceiving danger literally, just as if you were being chased by a lion thousands of years ago, and it's activating the exact same nervous system responses, the exact same sense of anxiety and fear of the sympathetic nervous system being hijacked. And this is a major trouble because what this means is you can sit down with your best friends, overlooking the most gorgeous sunset of your life, eating great food, and you can still be miserable if your mind is roaring about the future or regretting the past. Because essentially what you're doing is you're bringing those past or future experiences into the present moment, and thereby hijacking your real life experience.

SPEAKER_01 38:50

I love that you say that I do some work with some organizations around workplace well-being, and I do group coaching in the workplace. One of my phrases is the problem is your brain doesn't know whether it's a saber-tooth tiger or a Tuesday, and so you're you're turning up to work, your emails picking, it's doing all of these things, and I'm like, as far as your brain's concerned, that may as well be a saber-tooth tiger, and so you know, you don't even know doing all of those things. We talk a lot about then how the stomach not covers and physical feelings that we have, and particularly there when I was listening to that personal experience of burnout, you know, that really I had one of those light bulb moments when you were talking before, which is why I asked that question, because I until I burnt out, I didn't realize how physically bad it was. I didn't realize how much I kept pushing, and then it for me I had this question of like, how did I push the data? Um I realized I'd been operating on like two to three hours sleep for six months and you know, driving eight hours a day and and all of these things, and it just allowed me to keep pushing through. And I just think it was insane, you know, it's that bit there of I wasn't listening and I wasn't aware. And it goes back to what you said about your running, you just you know, that's it, but then you're not getting the correct information sent back into your brain. What would you say are the key or the most common sight for anybody in midlife or Gus, anybody having that vote that they really have that bad? Like what would you say is one of the most common symptoms of this on the line between these elements?

SPEAKER_00 40:29

The way I look at this incoherence and inner dissonance is

Dissonance and Coherence

SPEAKER_00 40:33

really imagine an orchestra of a hundred different players, but everyone's off to you. The drums are a little louder than they're supposed to be, the violins are a little faster, the singer is a little bit too quiet, and it's just all a chaotic mess. That is what dissonance and this incoherence and inner frictions usually feel. There's a part of you that wants those goals, right? You set a goal and you want to lose some weight, you want to get in better shape, you want to become more loving, or want to become a more courageous leader. But then there's all of this stuff inside that kind of pulls you back. There might be those doubts that say, I'm not really sure of a cat. I don't really know if I deserve this. For me back in the day when it came to social anxiety, it was my chest. It felt like it was shrinking, it was being compressed. And that's usually what happens when it comes to anxiety or any kind of social experience, right? And so we have this physical tension in our body and a mental overstimulation where the thoughts are just running too quickly in all kinds of directions. You know, there's this myth in our culture, and there's been some great movies like Lucy and Limitless over the last few years that kind of look at what could the human brain look like at its best? If we could invent some magic pill that you can swallow and suddenly your brain works at its best, what would happen? And in those movies, it's portrayed as this idea that we only use 10% of our brain, with the other 90% lying dormant until some neural switch suddenly awakens them. But if we actually look at our happiest moments, it's not like 90% of our brain are just asleep. In fact, throughout the day, virtually every area of your life, sorry, every area of your brain becomes active. And so a happy brain, uh peak performance brain isn't firing more, it's actually firing more efficiently. When we are stuck in anxiety or fear or this inner friction, the brain is firing all out, but it's doing so in 20 different directions, right? You're being pulled left and right and forward and back, and you're constantly fighting these inner impulses, whereas a happy and aligned brain actually slows down. In fact, what happens is the default mode network, the part of the brain that's responsible for what the Buddhists call the monkey mind, this constant chattering and planning and strategizing, that part actually shuts down. And so the brain slows down and becomes calmer. You become more in touch with the sensations of your body, with the sights are in front of you, with the smells in your nose and what you see right in front of your eyes. And as you slow down and you connect with the sensations in your body, all of a sudden everything starts moving on one direction. Instead of constantly fighting yourself, now you're pulling in the same direction. And so that's what psychosomatic coherence is all about aligning these three layers of the conscious goals and the subconscious beliefs, and then your nervous system so that they're no longer in fight, but rather pulling towards the same goals.

SPEAKER_01 43:58

When you say distance, I really That's a word because it is like an argument in the body, so much of an argument with everything being pulled in all these different directions. I feel like sometimes we get trapped in that. And although we don't want our lives to be like that, we can't seem to be outside of that because that is the operating system. So, how do people start to recognize it by this dissonance, this feeling, you know, the goals are one thing, but our physical is going another direction? How do you begin that process of?

SPEAKER_00 44:29

I believe it starts by first of all decoding what's going wrong.

Reprogramming the Subconscious

SPEAKER_00 44:34

Life is essentially the scoreboard of our subconscious. And so wherever you find that, hey, there's an area of my life that really isn't clicking, that's really your subconscious and your nervous system manifesting themselves in their problematic ways. If, for example, I have a trouble falling in love and finding that finding great people around me, whether it's romantically or in terms of friendships, it often is a pattern of thinking I'm unworthy or women are evil or men are evil or whatever you might have been told or might have learned from a past relationship. And it actually isn't until we face that pattern that keeps us stuck that we can change the outer world. And so a great way to start is always looking at where am I not achieving the results that I want, and then starting from there. Now, once I know, hey, there's a pattern in my life that's keeping me stuck. Well, how do I then go and face that? Carl Jung believed that if we make the unconscious conscious, it will stop directing our lives and we will call it faith, right? And so it's really only and when we bring the light of awareness to our patterns that they begin to dissolve. Now, for some of us, that might be enough, right? Sometimes it's enough to just shine that light of awareness on a pattern and constantly keep reminding ourselves of it, and then it will dissolve. Other times it will require more work. And so here we go then from just analyzing the pattern towards reprogramming a new pattern. And so essentially what I want to ask myself is if I created all the success or all the abundance in that area of my life that I want, what would I have to believe? What physical patterns would I have to run in my body? Which emotional states would I have to create? If I want to have loving and beautiful relationships, for example, then there's certain beliefs that I gotta have, which is I am worthy of love, which is I am radiating love to others, and there's certain emotions that I've gotta feel inside my body. Because when I'm stuck in frustration or anxiety or anger, how am I gonna show up? A loving and compassionate and cuddly state of mind, right? And so emotions are really action guides, right? The brain didn't just give us happiness and pain for their own sake, it gave us pleasure and pain in order to guide our behavior. And so what happens is all these negative energy states, frustration, anger, depression, guilt, shame, they tend to create negative, really physical actions in the outer world, right? Anger says go and fight. Fear says go and run away. Shame says go and hide. And so while negative energy states really shut down the mind, they close in the possibilities that we can see, positive energy states open up our mind, they expand the possibilities that we can even come up with. And so I've gonna ask myself, if I want to be in a great and loving relationship or friendship, what kind of emotions do I have to cultivate and vibrate and radiate really outwards every day in that relationship? It might be love, it might be peace, it might be a state of abundance. And well, now I've got something to focus on because here's another crucial aspect to this. Most of us we focus on what we don't want, right? How often do we say, I don't want to be anxious anymore, I don't want to be so frustrated anymore, I don't want to keep making that same mistake again. But what happens is the brain actually focuses on the very thing that you're trying not to think about. In fact, if I may, we're gonna run a quick exercise here for our listeners. So if you're not driving a car or operating at a machinery, just close your eyes for a second. And now please do not, and I repeat, do not imagine a golden crocodile crawling out of the walking into your room, and do not imagine his golden tees trying to snap you. I I was out, I was af I was out of my experience. Absolutely, and that's everybody's experience, by the way. Because the moment you say do not, the brain does not understand. The moment it all it can see is that golden crocodile. And in the same way, if I say I don't want to make that mistake again, the brain actually activates the neurocircuitry of that mistake or of that emotion, and it will make it more likely that I repeat it again. And so, if we now try a second exercise, if this time, please, you do imagine a pink fluffy unicorn, and it's the most beautiful unicorn you can imagine. And this beautiful pink fluffy unicorn, it flies around your house, and now you imagine jumping on top of it, and you're actually flying off into the sky, into the sunset, and you're having the greatest time, you're laughing out loud, you're living life, you're feeling the fresh wind in your face. And now, did you still think about that golden crocodile, right?

SPEAKER_01 49:45

Because the moment No, it just it it so speaks to like so many things. Again, when I'm working with clients, I do something very similar where I say I am, and we create a whole list of I am statements. I three years ago lost 30 kilos. I had type 2 diabetes, and I I don't have diabetes, I put it into remission. I struggled my weight all of my life, but one thing shifted. This time, I got up every day and said, I am someone who honors my body, I am someone who honors my health, I am someone who honors my body, and over a period of time, I did things that honored my health and honored my body, and I then went on to read lots of stuff about this, like identity-based goals, and the easiest way to be anything is to be it in the moment, and so I absolutely love that, Max, because I was like, that is just amazing, right there. And a lot of people do have those goals around health and weight, particularly. And I actually use the example of but if you say I need to lose weight, you've just told your brain not to, because it's a vote against yourself, you're voting against yourself because what you're saying is I'm fat, and actually, your brain hears that as your identity, so it's not gonna let you lose weight because that's voting against like it is just its whole element, and so I think that's really really powerful for people. What you say, what you speak, really is what you become. Very, very careful because you know it will take you there. So, what I want to look at next is how can people start to make that change if you spot the dissonance and start to understand those things? What's the next part of the process to then start the healing or the repair bit? Like, how do you take that next step that starts to really calm everything down?

SPEAKER_00 51:49

This is absolutely crucial. And by the way, what a beautiful identity shift that you just experienced and explained here, right? Because that's oftentimes how it happens. Now, I believe there's ultimately three great ways in which we can really retrain the subconscious. One is what you just explained, which is repetition over time changes the subconscious. If I keep repeating something over and over again, activating the same neurochemistry, activating the same neural circuitry inside my brain, over time those neural circuits get stronger and faster, making it easier for me to walk down the same path. If I keep repeating a thought, if I create really and I reap an identity, if I keep repeating a behavior, I reap a habit. And so repetition is one of the strongest, most reliable pathways we can use. Another one is really rapid moment in time, right? Those kind of breakthrough moments where all of a sudden life changes forever. And this might be the epiphany arising from a car crash, a loss, a disease, a failure, right? Epiphanies are beautiful because there are these once-in-a-lifetime moments that change forever how we approach life. They're powerful, like lightning strikes. But just like lightning strikes, you cannot really plan them. And so epiphanies sometimes come, and if they do, good on you. But most of the times it's not through epiphany that we change. It's either through repetition or, secondly, by deliberately going and putting our brain into a hypnotic state of mind and using that to rewrite the neural hardware of our brain. Now, what does that mean? Well, hypnotic state is ultimately nothing more than a very relaxed, calm state of super learning in which the brain opens up its neuroplasticity, meaning its ability to change itself and adapt itself to the stimuli that we provide it. And so you can do that in a setting with a psychologist, for example. You can also do it to a smaller degree by yourself because every moment, every day, as you go to sleep, and every morning as you wake up, your brain actually transitions first from the conscious to the subconscious at night, and then in the morning from the subconscious mind to the conscious mind. And so it's exactly in those two twilight states of consciousness where you're not asleep, but you're also not quite awake yet, that the brain is most plastic, most open and available for change. And so that's a very powerful moment in which we can introduce issues just like you did, in which we can use visualization practices, meditation to deliberately rewrite the brain much faster. And so, epiphanies, if they come, fantastic, but otherwise, repetition and especially repetition in these hypnotic states are fantastic tools to actually go about then creating a new identity for ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 55:06

I said, Because a bit about my fellow coaches that call me crystals and

Journaling and Brain Filters

SPEAKER_01 55:11

yoga, and I say neuroscience. And I really loved how they were all coming to the surface there, you know, the yoga, that stillness, and I just had a bit of an episteme or a moment as you were talking there about the morning and the evening, the neuroplasticity of the brain, because one of the activities I get everything climbed to do and struggling, I say, is the journal. And I have a very simple journal, and it literally is this bit of I suppose from that bit that I said, my personal journey is it has three gratitude, and it's literally three gratitudes first thing in the morning. What will make today great? And what do I want to achieve? And that's it, it's just those three out of six, but it's not even a journal, it's just three questions about changing your mindset and focusing you first thing in the morning, and then the same again in the evening, it's kind of a reversing of that, but it is that whole bit of it, and so it's what I did and it worked for me, and you just explained beautifully why it works. I was oblivious to that, so I'm now gonna be quoting you to my except saying listen, I I love this so much, Jody.

SPEAKER_00 56:26

And we can even take this further, right? Because if we look at how the brain actually handles information coming in, there's a part at the base of our brain called the reticular activating system. That's the part responsible for filtering out all the information that it deems unnecessary. Because again, if we were consciously aware of all the information coming in through our senses all the time, our brain would metaphorically explode because it's simply too much information to handle. And so our brain has created a filter, and how it filters things into consciousness, how it decides what to bring into conscious awareness and what to leave in the subconscious, it decides based on what it deems important. And so journaling and goal setting are very potent tools exactly because they change the filter of our reticular activating system, they change what our brain thinks is important. Imagine this: you're walking down a street and you really got to use the bathroom. All you can think about in that moment is where's a bathroom, right? Imagine walking down that same street and now you're hungry. All of a sudden you're just looking left and right for restaurants. Imagine walking down that same street, but you're looking for love. Well, all of a sudden, all you can do is look and notice beautiful faces left and right. Right? That's the power of our brain's filter. It will literally, in real time, bring to your conscious awareness the things that it believes are important. Whether that's your fears, and that's where most people live, because all day long they just live in, I don't want this to happen, I don't want that to happen, I hope I don't fail, and I hope I don't embarrass themselves. All of a sudden, all your brain is gonna show you are exactly these experiences. But when you wake up and you do what you just explained, think about gratitude, think about excitement, think about what you love about your life. Your brain is gonna bring all of these experiences into your conscious awareness so you can actually enjoy your life much more and find much more of these experiences in the future.

SPEAKER_01 58:36

Actually, Talkitis, I call it their internal sat now. Because I say that basically what you're doing is you're setting your destination for the day. So if you get up and you go, Oh my god, I've got to go to work, it's miserable, oh, it's cold out, I don't want to do all of these things, then guess what? That's where you're going for the day. And so I say it's as simple as that. And with the gratitude, I say make them small because the smaller you make them, the lower the bar is for the rest of the day. So you make it a bit that you've told your brain to look for big grass tunes for the rest of the day. So I say, make them small, make them simple, and set your satin out first thing in the morning. And the unpacking, like you were saying there, the bit about the evening, and I want to check in on it before, is I often say the clients the purpose of the evening is that your brain has been doing so much work all day. And if you're literally like a desk, it's got an in trader piled up high, and over the night time your subconscious is going to start sorting that because it didn't have time. So the whole point of it is to tell it what was important, to give it an instruction before you start that that filing process, so it gets rid of what it doesn't need and it keeps what's important. Would that be the right way to kind of explain the approach that?

SPEAKER_00 59:57

I think that's ultimately the game that we're playing, is we're literally creating our reality based on our state of consciousness every single day. And so this is why two people can experience the exact same life externally, but have drastically different experiences. Because one has simply trained their filter to notice more of what's good, more of what's right, more of what's beautiful than the other person. The truth is, what's good and what's bad, they're always available, right? Life has all of it. The beauty and the pain. And so our choice is what are we gonna focus on? Am I gonna enhance the pain and make it even stronger? Am I gonna activate the pain that happened to me a year ago and bring it into this moment, or am I gonna choose to focus on a beauty that life also has to offer every moment of every day?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

Um, I absolutely love that, and I feel like I'm gonna be even more empowered now when clients try to tell me they don't want to journal and they don't want to stink. I'm gonna go, there's a podcast episode I'd like you to listen to. I understand the importance of what you're you know, what you're actually doing with that whole process and that neuroplasticity. I know that we are really running out of time. And so is there anything in our discussion that I've missed or that you feel based on what we've discussed, you would like to draw out before we kind of move towards the end?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:32

We've touched on so many beautiful, to me, incredibly uh important

Inner Freedom and Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:01:36

topics. One thing I I would like to kind of mention maybe as a close, simply because that's something that I've been obsessed with really, especially over these last few days and spent a lot of time thinking about, is the idea of inner freedom. There's this incredible quote by the Greek philosopher and writer Nikos Katansakis, and he said, I want nothing, I fear nothing, I am free. And that to me has really become the perfect definition of true inner freedom, of what it means to truly be happy, independent of external things. To want nothing and to fear nothing means to become free. It is a modern take on what the Buddha taught us 2500 years ago, which is that all suffering arises from attachment, from believing that some external thing has to happen for me to feel loved, respected, abundant, full or happy. And I think true freedom arises when we recognize that everything that we seek out there is already within. Like all the drugs and substances and distractions that we use in the external world to get our temporary highs, the neurochemistry that we gain from these things, it's already inside of us. And so our job is simply to activate it from within so that we're no longer dependent on external things, on applause, on status, on success to finally feel worthy and happy. And that's really what I've learned along this beautiful journey.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:18

Never ever heard that quote before, and I know that I would be straight off the episode to look it up because I just think like Max Day is such a brilliant place to bring us to because essentially it is where we started, and it's where we started in the beginning of the show today about this externalization of ourselves and all of the pain that's in it, and the really that freedom is about not doing that and returning back to ourselves and realizing that we have everything we need right within us, but to be brave enough to look inside and to do those things. So that was phenomenal. How is the best way for people to reach out and get in touch with you? I feel like I've been a really bad host because I am part way through. I am part way through the amazing book. I have a huge stack, so I didn't get a chance to do it. So, but Max did say that he always came on the show again. So maybe when I've read the book, I'll have a whole different set of questions for him. And I know I did your PSQ test, which uh told me which scenarios I need to work on. So, where's the best mix for people to A, get the book, contact you, or do a PSQ test?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:37

Absolutely, thank you so much. You've been a gracious and fantastic, interesting host. The best way for people to connect is on my website, maxvigand.com. That's where you get the links to the book, to the PSQ test, to all kinds of resources, and otherwise on social media at MaxVigand.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:53

I will make sure all of that is in the show notes below. I always ask my guests the same final question before I sum up. Um, and I feel a bit mean because I think you just kind of already did it, but I'm gonna ask you the same question anyway. If you could plant a seed in the body of every listener today that would slowly grow over time and bear fruit, what would that seed be?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:21

That seed would be the realization that happiness, true aliveness, is about getting out of the mind and into your body, into the reality of your current experience. And to recognize that meditation doesn't have to be a sitting-down practice. Anything that you do that allows you to focus on the present moment, that allows you to fall more deeply in love with life. Whether that's just like me for me, running, jumping into the cold lake, whether it's being out in nature, being with friends, all of us we have those things that we know bring us right back into the presence, bring us right back into happiness. And the more time we make for those, the more time we just spend living in the here and now rather than a strategizing and planning of the mind, the more joy, the more freedom, the more peace we can find.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:19

Amazing. I from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for this time today. An hour really wasn't loving us to add I hope that there'll be more conversations because that was absolutely phenomenal. For me, I don't know how I'm supposed to sum up such an amazing episode, but I think for me it is that pain about how we're all running, we're all running away from ourselves. That is where that pain comes from, is because we get so distant from ourselves and we talk about being out of a library. It is this bit that we've gone so far away from ourselves that that ache that we feel is almost an age longing for ourselves to come back to ourselves, and really answering that call to connect, whether it you're 70 and a runner, or whether you're 47, 50, 60, 65, is that true root to happiness is in being brave enough to answer that call to connect, to switch passion, purpose, until you're aligned to seek your happiness, as I always say. Always remember you're not broken, simply becoming. Until next episode, I'll see you then. Thank you for spending this time with me on Messy Midlife. If this episode resonated, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who might need to hear it today. You can find the show notes below and more resources at autocoaching.