The Double Win Podcast

22. MASTIN KIPP: Living Less Stressed

Audio

Overview

In this episode of The Double Win Show, Michael and Megan Hyatt Miller sit down with bestselling author and trauma-informed coach, Mastin Kipp, to discuss the profound impact of understanding and regulating the nervous system. Mastin shares insights from his new book, Reclaim Your Nervous System, and explains how unresolved trauma and dysregulation can hinder personal and professional growth.

The conversation explores the practical applications of polyvagal theory, co-regulation, and how leaders can foster psychological safety by mastering their own nervous systems. Mastin covers everything from the body’s hierarchy of responses to stress (green, yellow, and red states), to the effects of trauma on leadership, parenting, and personal well-being. By learning how to identify and manage these states, listeners can unlock a new level of performance and healing.

Memorable Quotes

  1. “We have this idea that ‘If I can change my thoughts, I can change my life,’ which is accurate, but there’s a lot going on below the brain that we also want to understand.”
  2. “The issue is when we have a neuroceptive mismatch, where I’m in the presence of something dangerous, but I’m not being activated to move. Or I’m not in the presence of danger, but my neuroception is telling me that I am.”
  3. “I think of re-regulation as like the bicep curl or the squat. You’re going to get dysregulated automatically. So let’s re-regulate—the re-regulation is the rep.”
  4. “If the leader, or CEO, or C-Suite isn’t creating that culture [of safety], then it will fall apart when there are challenges. Just like we need to have a flexible nervous system, we need to have a flexible cultural nervous system to be able to manage the flexible challenges of business also.”
  5. “Trauma is any experience of threat, disconnection, isolation, or immobilization that results in the long-term or chronic dysregulation of either your endocrine system, your immune system, your emotional body, your brain, your body, your spirit—your health on any level, basically.”
  6. “The problem with successful people and ambitious people is every time we level up, we increase complexity and stress, and those pathways get activated again.”
  7. “Stoicism is great for growth. It’s just not great for healing.”
Key Takeaways

  1. Understanding the Nervous System: The nervous system governs how we experience life. Recognizing when we are in a “fight or flight” state (yellow) or a “shut down” state (red) allows us to make conscious decisions to move back into a “ventral vagal” state (green), where we’re most productive and connected.
  2. The Power of Co-Regulation: Leaders, parents, and partners all play a role in co-regulating others. Learning how to stay calm and collected can positively influence those around you, fostering a more supportive and effective environment.
  3. Trauma’s Role in Leadership: Unresolved trauma can cause leaders to react disproportionately, affecting their teams and overall performance. Recognizing and healing these trauma responses is essential for effective leadership.
  4. Reframing Anxiety and Stress: Instead of seeing anxiety as an isolated mental challenge, Mastin explains how it’s deeply tied to our physical nervous system and can be addressed by body-based approaches like somatic experiencing.
  5. Neuroception and Safety: Our bodies are constantly scanning for safety or danger. Learning to re-regulate when our neuroception is triggered can help us stay present and avoid unnecessary reactions to perceived threats.
  6. Reclaim Your Life: Trauma doesn’t need to define your future. By understanding your nervous system, you can reclaim your happiness and make progress in all areas of life, from work to personal relationships.
Resources

  • Mastin Kipp on Instagram: @mastinkipp
  • Mastin Kipp’s Book: Reclaim Your Nervous System
Watch on YouTube at:  https://youtu.be/hhMXVMNDCIY

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio or video for exact quotes.

Mastin: [00:00:00] When you’re expecting a child to think things through or it’s like, that’s not really an appropriate expectation for them because they don’t have the wiring and then it helps people realize, Oh, and there’s a whole developmental trajectory. We can talk about what happens, what age and stuff like that, because it’s always changing.

There’s different lessons that children are learning over the time, but you don’t really get this thing on board until basically 25. And so that’s an important thing to recognize.

Michael: Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael: And you’re listening to The Double Wind Show.

Megan: And we are so excited about today’s conversation with our friend Mastin Kipp.

This is one we’ve been really looking forward to for a long time.

Michael: We have because this has been something we’ve been learning over the course of the last year about nervous system regulation. I know that’s a mouthful. You may think it has nothing to do with you. I promise it has everything to do with you.

Mastin Kipp is a bestselling author. He’s a speaker. with a focus on trauma informed coaching. And so he’s the author of a new book called, Reclaim Your Nervous [00:01:00] System. And he’s a guy that I met several months ago when I was going through a period of really high anxiety as a result of a misdiagnosis of a heart issue.

And I was kind of in a tailspin and I was being very open on social media about what I was struggling with. And Mastin reached out to me, and then we had several Zoom calls, but he was a lifesaver because he put me in touch with some other authors and some other modalities of therapy that really, really got me help.

And it enabled me to confront some things that frankly have been in my past and kind of been a barrier for me making progress like I wanted to in so many areas of life. At any rate, you’re going to enjoy this conversation. Again, it has everything to do with you and how you achieve and accomplish the things you want to accomplish in work and life.

Here’s Mastin.

Mastin: Mastin, welcome to the show. Good to see you. Hey, you too. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. I can’t wait for what we’re going to talk about.

Michael: You’ve made a huge difference in my life this year, and I’m so [00:02:00] grateful for your generosity and the way that you reached out to me.

When I shared on social media. My journey through anxiety, which continues to this day, but I’m in much better shape than I was back in January. And I said this in the intro, but it was really a result. of a faulty diagnosis I got about my heart that sent me into a tailspin. And it wasn’t the first time I experienced it, but it was the first time that I was motivated to get help.

And you were a big part of that. So thank you.

Mastin: Well, it’s my pleasure. And thank you for being such an incredible student, even though you are such an incredible master also, it’s really inspiring to watch you. Learn about the nervous system and also spread the news, which is a big deal too. So it’s, it’s my honor and also thank you for just who you are and how you show up and your whole family for being open to this too is really amazing.

And shout out to Mary for introducing you to the nervous system concepts in the first place too. She’ll love hearing that.

Megan: Yeah, she will love hearing that. You know, I have been eagerly anticipating this interview, Mastin, because my dad talks about you and [00:03:00] I’m like, I feel like this is our collective new best friend, except I’ve never met him before.

And so I’m really excited. That I get to get to know you in this context. And, you know, when I think about the last year and I think about what’s been the biggest breakthrough for us, you know, like we’re always learning, you’re such a great learner, but you know, as, as a family, like what’s been our biggest breakthrough, I think learning about the nervous system has absolutely been the biggest breakthrough because prior to that.

All of our problem solving around anxiety, for example, or uncomfortable feelings or uncertainty in the world was all mental. I mean, it was all like happening above the collarbone, you know, basically. And I think we were kind of fighting with one hand behind our back. And it’s, it’s really an amazing new toolkit to have this whole idea.

of the nervous system. So thank you for your part in making that a reality for us, because it’s really been [00:04:00] transformational. So. If you’re like, what in the world are they talking about? Don’t worry. We’re going to get to it. Yeah.

Michael: Let’s start with your journey. How did you get to here and how did you get involved in this work?

You’ve got a fascinating story and I’d love for you to start there.

Mastin: I’m going to quote Tucker Max, my friend Tucker. He’s quite a personality. He read the book and helped me get it written. And he was reflecting on my journey. He’s a mess. And you took the hardest road possible to get to where you are.

There are so many easier roads, but you took the hardest road possible. Both your parents had advanced degrees. Your father had a PhD. He was in peer review. And then you basically like said, I’m not doing any of that. I’m going to find my own way. I’m not going to go to college. You’re going to be a college dropout.

You have to learn everything on your own and do experientially to start a business, fail a bunch of times, go through a bunch of stuff yourself to figure out things where you could have just gotten a four year degree and shorten it all. And I said, well, Tucker, if you put it that way, I feel kind of like not that bright, basically he goes, but the difference is you made your own distinctions.

You didn’t learn about other people’s ways first. You made your own distinctions. And that harkens back to some advice I got from a mentor. I would used to be a talent manager in [00:05:00] Hollywood, very different lifestyle. And I exited the music business because it was not fulfilling me the way that I thought it would be.

And I developed a lot of addictions to cocaine and all these other things. That’s the only thing I consider myself sober from. And I got sober from pure will through active grace at around 21, 22 years old, and decided I wanted to feel as good off the drugs as I did on the drugs. Later came to learn I have ADHD, three types, three traumatic brain injuries, and the cocaine was self medicating me.

And helping me get my attentional networks online. I can’t produce a lot of dopamine in my brain. And so I had started having self compassion and as I started learning and growing about how I ended up with so much crisis and addiction. I’m a kid from Kansas had this happen. I learned personal development philosophies.

And I remember like at like 21 years old reading, you know, the seven habits of highly effective people. And I had just gotten fired from a dream job. And he said something like, seek to understand before you’re understood. And I was like, Oh, I wish I would have known [00:06:00] that like six months ago, I probably would have been fired from my dream job, you know, like, where was this information, you know, like, I didn’t know that, you know, so I go down the rabbit hole of spirituality, personal development, and then started sharing it all the way back on Friendster and MySpace.

Now I’m dating myself. And then I just kept going and sharing. I started a blog called the daily love and it was a daily email with like quotes and inspiration and became very successful. Oprah found it, invited me on Super Soul Sunday, and it was just like this like, I got catapulted into this like larger frame of the world.

And then I was like, I should probably build a business around this, you know, like, so I feel like I was like pulled by God or the universe into this path because I was resisting it so much. I wanted to do anything but coaching, but it was the only thing that ever worked out. And then a friend of mine introduced me to Tony Robbins, and then Tony invited me to UPW, his entry level seminar in 2010 or 11 in New York City.

And then I went to date with destiny and I didn’t understand what was going on. It was just like the most incredible [00:07:00] experience. So I wanted to go understand and learn what he was doing, which brought me down this whole rabbit hole. And then fast forward, maybe another year later, 20, 10, 11, someone there, Russell Bishop, who is the founder of insight seminars back in the eighties.

And Russell said, Madison, you obviously want to help people don’t do anything. Go help people make your own distinctions. And then once you’ve made your own distinctions and you have your own frameworks, go study how other people think, because if you go to school or learn, you’re gonna learn how other people think, and you have something inside you that needs to come forward.

That’s unique. And it was very insightful. And I felt like also maybe. A little unsafe. So that’s what I did for maybe five or six years. Just helping people writing the daily love, having, starting a coaching business, starting to do retreats. And we had these profound breakthroughs. And at some point I needed to understand what is happening inside people when I’m working with them.

I need to know the hard science of what’s happening here, because we were talking about trauma without knowing it was trauma. And having all these breakthroughs, and then [00:08:00] that’s what led me down the neuroscience pathway to understand what’s going on in the body, very quickly discovered polyvagal theory and Stephen Porges work, and immediately started sharing about it.

And then I learned about trauma, and I found out about Bessel and the body keeps the score in that whole world, and I started to notice that the trauma field, Sensory motor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, internal family systems, had a lot in common with the coaching field. And then even within the fields of therapy and coaching, there’s all these specializations.

And every time someone would go to a new practitioner, or I would go to a new practitioner, I had to do the recap and talk about all this context over and over and over again. And people had these specialties, but there was no holistic approach to what’s happening inside the body, which drove me further and further and further to find a model for that.

And it was in 2015 or 16, I was at Consumer Health Summit, and I was sitting next to Dr. Jeffrey Bland, who’s the founder and creator of Functional Medicine, so Mark Hyman’s mentor, and I was explaining to him, like, what I’m trying to think about and do. I think I, I was like, I think this is maybe like functional [00:09:00] coaching.

Like you find root causes in medicine. I need to find root causes emotionally and stuff. He’s like, Oh, that sounds good. And we talked about the model and then functional life coaching was born. And I’ve been spending the last eight years trying to figure out what is functional life coaching exactly?

What are the protocols and stuff like that? And, um, that’s basically what I’ve been up to and the shortest period of time I could explain it in.

Michael: Who is typically the kind of person that you help?

Mastin: Usually we’re not the first person’s experience in personal development or healing. They’ve either had a good background in doing some type of therapy.

Or some type of coaching in some kind. So a lot of people who’ve been through like a lot of Tony Robbins programs, for example, or a lot of people who have done maybe some somatic work or healing work, internal family systems that I experiencing, and they get to a certain level, there’s efficacy, but then there’s like a plateau and they don’t know what to do with the plateau because they’re working with like, I don’t know, they need a whole tool belt.

They have like one tool basically. And they come to me because they are [00:10:00] learning that their symptoms are, Secondary causes from what’s happening in their nervous system. And they come to me because I think a lot of people associate maybe coaching with bypassing. Yourself and pushing things aside and therapy with just like lingering in the past and they want to be able to kind of have a more holistic experience of how does the past show up for me, but how can I use it to move forward basically.

So they’re usually like maybe second or third tier therapy people where they have some background in something, but then that thing doesn’t work because we need more flexible solutions than just one thing. Mindset’s great, but it’s not the only tool.

Megan: That’s awesome. Okay. So just to back up for a second, because you, um, you shared a lot in setting up how you got to today, but I think there were some things that you mentioned that we might take for granted as newly minted people in nervous system land, you know, over here, the two of us overnight experts, you’re not an overnight expert, but we are.

And first of all, can you talk about. What the nervous [00:11:00] system is and why we should even care about it. And then second of all, what is polyvagal theory? Cause that sounds like some kind of hocus pocus, but it’s not. Okay.

Mastin: So there’s multiple systems inside our body, right? We have an endocrine system, which is hormones.

We have immune system, which is basically helping fight off pathogens and stuff like that and repair the nervous system. And the nervous system is basically you. And what I mean by that is the nervous system is how you experience life. So there’s all these nerves that go throughout our body. Okay. A part of the nervous system is this one organ called the brain.

We have the brain, then we have the autonomic nervous system, which basically goes down to right below basically the bottom of the spine, and then it branches off into what’s called the peripheral nervous system, which has subsystems within it. And that’s sensory data. So data from the body goes up to the brain and then we send data from the brain down to the body, and it’s bidirectional and it basically helps us have our senses.

So feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling, olfactory, vestibular, ears, and all that type of stuff. All of that is being processed through [00:12:00] our nervous system. We have a hierarchy to how it works. Polyvagal theory, authored by Stephen Porges in the 90s. By the way, Stephen Porges is the researcher who invented HRV as a biometric.

Megan: And HRV is heart rate variability, which you see in your, like, Oura Ring, or you see it on your Apple Watch, or like, all those health things.

Mastin: monitoring systems. Exactly, exactly. And he focused on the vagus nerve. It’s the nerve that’s the 10th cranial nerve. And it basically connects from the brainstem almost all the way down to basically your gut area.

And it connects to all the primary organs. And it’s actually organized in three different levels is what he helped us realize. And why that’s important is because up until polyvagal theory, which just means many vaguses, multiple nerves, we had this idea that we either are in fight or flight. Or we’re in parasympathetic rest and digest, it’s kind of on or off, it’s kind of this idea.

And we have this idea that like if I can change my thoughts, I can change my life, which is accurate, but there’s a lot going on below the [00:13:00] brain that we also want to understand. And so polyvagal theory helps us recognize the nervous system is organized in a hierarchy and it has predictable responses based on the environment and levels of stress that you’re under.

And it helps us understand that depending on how much stress you’re under or not, you may have symptoms showing up. all over the place because the vagus nerve is connected to all the major organs. And so he put together a model about how the nervous system works. And it’s very important because what he gave us is a manual on an operating system for how we work.

Wouldn’t you want to know how you work? I think that seems important. Wouldn’t you want to know how you experience the world? Wouldn’t you want to know how you could know how you would predictably experience the world? Based on certain circumstances. And what’s really interesting is once people learn about some of the core tenants of polyvagal theory, so much shame is removed from people because they realize, ah, this isn’t a [00:14:00] bad thing.

This is, I’m adapting to the stress that I went through and states of the nervous system become traits over time. If you’re in a state long enough, it just becomes the dominant trait, maybe even a personality trait, but we can also. Rewire, which is very exciting. So there’s a way in which the nervous system works based on how much stress you’re under.

There are some core first principles of polyvagal theory, which we’re going to talk about. And when we start to understand those things, the context of life makes a lot more sense. And basically it’s like, Oh, I’m in a car. That’s a steering wheel. That’s what that does. Oh, that’s a gas pedal. That’s a brake.

So I can understand this thing. Imagine trying to drive a car and not knowing the gas or the brake. You probably would not get very far, you know, that’s kind of what it’s like to understand how your nervous system works because it’s how we experience life joy, happiness, trauma, stress, love, hate, all of those emotions and states are experienced through your nervous system.

So, it may be important to understand how it [00:15:00] works a little.

Megan: So, can you explain that hierarchy a little bit? Like, what are the, the components of that system?

Mastin: There’s a couple first principles of polyvagal theory that are relatively intuitive once they’re explained. Because we all have it in our system already.

So, it’s like I’m explaining to you what oxygen is. But, because we all breathe, you know, it’s like, it makes sense, right? Even if you don’t know how oxygenation happens in the body, like, once you understand it, it’s like, oh, that’s what that is. Okay. So, basically. One of the first principles of polylingual theory is called the hierarchy of the nervous system.

And think of it as an inverted stoplight with green on the top, yellow in the middle, and red on the bottom. Green represents your ventral vagal pathways, which is a part of the vagus nerve and brain, where basically from the diaphragm up, you have myelinated As part of the vagus nerve, myelin is a part of the nervous system that helps us with certain reflexes.

Like when we practice something over and over and over again, and then we can do it faster or better. Myelin is a big piece of what helps the nerve fibers connect and talk and stuff like that. So when you’re [00:16:00] practicing something physical, you’re building muscle, but you’re also building myelin pathways.

So that’s the most advanced part of our vagus system. It’s a couple hundred three, two or 300 million years old, which in evolutionary terms would be like. This is the end of the year, 300 million years ago is like the day before Christmas. So it’s very new. This part of the vagus nerve regulates heart rate, breathing, facial expression, tone, hearing, the vestibular system, a sense of balance.

Many things go into What this impacts. And when we’re in a ventral vagal state, we have our prefrontal cortex, which is the best parts of our brain in terms of thinking and creativity. I mean, if you want to be an executive, you need your executive function, which is in your prefrontal cortex. And when that thing is on and we’re in a ventral state, we got collaboration, cooperation, intelligence, creativity, health, growth, restoration.

And that ventral experience is a parasympathetic experience. If we have more stress, if you think about it, right, [00:17:00] maybe you’re cooperating, talking with somebody, trying to figure something out, but then you can’t figure it out. And now there’s like a stressor, maybe there’s like a bill do, or maybe like you’re going to fight or whatever it is.

You drop from green down to yellow, which is the sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight. So that’s like cortisol and the HPA access and stress and all types of stuff. The sympathetic nervous system is primarily going up and down our spine. And that’s an activation. So we got to move right.

We want to get things going right. And then if things get too hard to handle, we drop into what’s called a dorsal vagal response, which is the vagus nerve below the diaphragm, which is non myelinated. So it’s not as intelligent. It’s just kind of on or off. It’s kind of very basic when we’re in a dorsal vagal response with more stress, a stress that wouldn’t be equated to a life threat where I’m about to die or think I am.

That’s when I shut down, dissociate, right? I’m immobilized without safety and all these things and all the sub diaphragmatic organs are like energies diverted and I just kind of [00:18:00] disappear basically. And so depending on how much stress or threat we’re under, we can go from green down to yellow down to red and depending how long we’re in these states, they kind of become dominant.

And by the way, they can be blended. So there can be a blend of yellow and red, or green and yellow, or green and red. So it’s not like you’re just in one or the other. And our, basically the goal is to bring ventral, to bring green, to yellow, or stress, or to red. Because when you’re immobilized in red, but you have ventral online, which would include safety, that’s called spooning.

I’m immobilized, but I’m safe, right? That’s called hugging. That’s called meditation, where I have my eyes closed and I’m still with safety. I can bring ventral or green to red, but red without green. It’s just like depression, dissociation, checked out, going in a very negative place. Yellow without ventral on board is just anxiety and stress.

And it’s in a way, right? Better. I would argue that yellow is probably better than the red for the most part. Cause at least you can get [00:19:00] some stuff done, right? But not very well. It’s probably chaotic and eventually you’ll burn out. And so we want to be able to bring green on board. And if you look at any therapy or coaching approach, basically what we’re trying to do is.

Bring green on board in different ways, whether it’s to move forward or to heal from the past. Our goal is to get into a regulated state and bring green to yellow and to red. That would be the hierarchy as simply as I can say it.

Michael: You know, I think in my own journey, I was completely unaware of these different states. And unfortunately, because I was unaware of them, I was kind of being controlled by them, you know, so I would get into a sympathetic state by her flight and I didn’t know how to get out. And frankly, sometimes I wouldn’t even recognize it.

And so I think that part of my journey towards healing in this area, and I feel like I’m still on the journey has been self awareness, you know, just like last night I was sleeping and [00:20:00] I’d had a kind of an upsetting situation yesterday, but before I wouldn’t have recognized it. But I realized that I was getting a little dysregulated and I was able to employ some tools to kind of calm myself down and move back into that green state.

And so that was enormously helpful. And that’s the value of this for those of you that are listening is that you can develop this kind of facility with your nervous system where it can work for you instead of you just feeling like you’re just kind of being pushed around by these unknown forces and having these feelings.

That’s

Mastin: right. That’s so true. So another piece of how polylegal theory works, one of its first principles, that’s really helpful for high performers to know, is this concept called neuroception. And neuroception is your body’s unconscious detection of threat or safety. And to Megan’s point earlier, it’s like basically a ballistic collarbone.

So your body is constantly scanning for survival. At all times, and it’s literally your body. It’s not your brain and it’s like underneath the neck. It’s [00:21:00] it’s those reflexes. You ever go to the doctor and like they kind of hit your knee and there’s like a reflex that we have reflexes that our brain does not tell our body to do.

It just does it automatically. So neuroception is we’re detecting threat or safety. And what we want is our neuroception or our body’s threat detection machine that’s unconscious to be aligned with what’s happening in the present moment. That would be called a neuroceptive match. So if I’m in a safe environment, and I feel safe, that’s a match.

If I’m in an unsafe environment, and I don’t feel safe, that would be a match. The issue is when we have a neuroceptive mismatch where I’m in the presence of something dangerous, but I’m not being activated to move. Or I’m not in the presence of danger, but my neuroception is telling me that I am. And we see this with like PTSD veterans who come back for more.

They’re in a safe environment, but they still have this overactive and nervous system basically. And so why that’s important is because basically your body is telling you unconsciously if you’re in danger or not, and our goal. Is to [00:22:00] pay attention to what’s happening inside our body automatically and make it conscious, make a, make more self awareness.

So what you’re describing, Michael, is you had this kind of reaction and the reactions are reflexes. They’re learned responses over time that get hardwired in because it doesn’t, It takes a lot of thinking to know what to do versus just having a reflex that’s survival based, that I just do what I have to do to survive, basically.

And so we want to bring our neuroception and our body into the present moment and to recognize, okay, it’s now, right? And to do that, we need two things. We need to know that we have to be out of the presence of danger. But that’s not enough. We also have to have safe connection restored, which is one of the third first principles of political theory is co regulation, which is the mutual sending and receiving of safe signals.

It’s not one way it’s two way. So we’re mutual and safe signals would be like tone of voice and facial expressions and like being together. So if I have safe connection. And I have less threat in my environment. [00:23:00] Well, now I’m creating this situation where I can start to be more regulated over time. And then Deb Dana brought this idea forward, which I didn’t make it explicit.

So it’s, it’s really Deb’s thought, but we’ve been doing it for a long time. Basically what we do is we’re in a regulated state, we become dysregulated. The goal is to reregulate. So we don’t want to feel shame for feeling dysregulated. We wanna get the tools to reregulate. And I think of the Reregulation part as like.

The bicep curl or the squat where you’re like, that’s the rep. So it’s like, you’re going to get dysregulated automatically. It’s going to happen automatically. So let’s re regulate and the re regulation is the rep. And the thing about neuroception and the triggers that can happen is they’re unconscious, so that’s why maybe you’re talking to your special someone and all of a sudden their face changes and then that triggers you.

Why are you making that face? But they don’t even know they’re making that face. Or they have a certain tone, a voice where they say your name in a specific tone. And you’re like, every bad memory comes back. Why are you saying this to me? Ah, right. They don’t even maybe know that their tone changed. Right.

And it’s amazing how, just like [00:24:00] when my mom would be like, William Maston Kip III and like the, the, the holding of that last part, I knew I was in trouble. So tone matters. Facial expression matters, but the compassion comes in because we want to recognize. These are automatic reflexes. They’re not on purpose.

They’re adaptive based on our history. And we want to become to Michael, your point, more self aware of what’s happening and then be able to bring them into our conscious awareness. And then we have choice and the super level up is when we can have shared context with somebody else about that too. So it’s not just by ourselves.

Megan: I think that makes so much sense. And anybody who’s ever been around a toddler or parented a toddler, this concept of regulation and dysregulation is like in 4D, you know, because you see these little kids and they have to put the iPad down or they have to leave grandma’s house or they don’t get to have a cookie before dinner or whatever, something that seems like so obviously, you know, not a good idea.

And they just lose their mind. You know, if you. [00:25:00] Escalate or dysregulate, you know, to use the language of a nervous system. If you dysregulate with your kid and you start yelling back at them, for example, I mean, it goes to hell in a hand basket in a hot minute, like before long, everyone is melting down on the floor, you know, but if you as a parent and I have five kids, Mastin, so I feel like I have a PhD in co regulation with kids.

You know, if you slow your voice down, If you make sure that your voice communicates, I’m safe. If you make sure your facial expressions don’t look angry, if you just slow everything down and kind of You basically become the external modem, so to speak, for that. So they’re able to then regulate. And I have, uh, children, all of whom come from traumatic background.

So this is very well, this is how I learned about trauma, not even knowing this whole nervous system thing is that when you have the ability to regulate as a parent, you can, you can help your kids regulate, but guess what? If you’re a [00:26:00] leader. Or if you have influence over anyone, which is 100 percent all of us, you know, it could be a coworker.

It could be your boss. It could be the people who work for you. When you start to learn about how to regulate your own nervous system, how to move from a place of I’m dysregulated. I just got some kind of bad news. Someone just made me angry. That is like a superpower.

Mastin: That’s right.

Megan: To me, this unlocks a kind of performance, a kind of Well, being in the ability to not feel like just knocked around by life, that nothing else, no, no other strategy, no other tactic will, and that’s why we’re excited to talk to you guys about it.

Mastin: Yeah. I love what you’re saying. And what’s so interesting about what you’re saying too is, you know, what’s the best parenting style. First of all, not a parent. So like the comment on that, but I can comment on neuroscience and biology. Right. So basically a toddler, they don’t have much of a prefrontal cortex, their limbic and brainstem.

And we don’t really start developing that till later in life. In fact, we don’t [00:27:00] really get our prefrontal cortex online until about 25. And what that basically means is that at 25 is when adolescence ends. Which explains, I’m like, Oh, that explains a lot. All the parents

Megan: are like, wow. Okay. Now it makes sense.

Mastin: Right. Because it’s like literally the wiring is not available. Right. So you don’t have the V8 engine. You just have like a little bicycle or something like that. Right. So you don’t have the actual tool development yet. What that implies. Neurobiologically is, as a parent who has a prefrontal cortex, you are the child’s prefrontal cortex, which one of the jobs of the prefrontal cortex is to regulate the rest of the systems, ideally.

So, when a parent gets triggered that like a kid doesn’t think something or whatever, it’s like they’re just running unconscious. It’s just all unconscious reactions because they don’t, they don’t have the capacity to regulate. So, and ideally, the parent’s job is to regulate the children. And be there basically to your point, you said externalize modem, externalize prefrontal cortex, right?

That’s the neuroscience behind it because they don’t really have it. So [00:28:00] when you’re expecting a child to think things through, or it’s like, that’s not really an appropriate expectation for them because they don’t have the wiring and then it helps people realize, Oh, and there’s a whole developmental trajectory.

We can talk about what happens at what age and stuff like that. Cause it’s always changing. There’s different lessons that children are learning over the time, but you don’t really get this thing on board until basically 25. And so. That’s an important thing to recognize as lots of implications around parenting, around many other things, too.

Now, I’m not saying that you don’t have a prefrontal cortex in 3025. I’m just saying it’s not fully developed. Obviously, you have, we have it. But the expectation that a toddler or a child is going to regulate the parent puts an undue burden on the child

Megan: to do something

Mastin: they don’t have the capacity to do.

Right. And so that’s just how we’re wired. That’s just the neuroscience of it. What you said is 100 percent backed up by the neuroscience.

Michael: It seems to me that in the workplace, if you’re in any position of leadership and as a leader, if something happens and you get [00:29:00] dysregulated where you’re in fight or flight and you’re not self aware, that becomes contagious because now you’ve created an environment that’s not safe for anybody.

And so all of a sudden now everybody’s hair’s on fire. And I’ve felt like part of what I’ve learned in this process. Is that as a leader, it’s imperative that I stay calm. Confident even when the worst news happens, because people can’t do their best thinking, which happens in the prefrontal cortex executive function, unless they’re in that ventral vagal state.

The green light. That’s right. And so if I dysregulate them and I pull everybody down to yellow or worse red, then nobody’s gonna be able to do the kind of creative thinking that’s gonna put out the fire or solve the problems. So this is, that’s it. This is a strategic imperative for leaders to learn this.

Yes. And learn how to regulate. Their own nervous systems.

Mastin: Is that right? It’s completely right. And it’s not dissimilar. The term would be relationship asymmetry. Basically there’s one person who’s kind of has more, a more of a power [00:30:00] dynamic in the relationship than somebody else. Right. So in a romantic relationship, we do not want asymmetry.

We want. Equal value, equal worth. Cause if we have asymmetry, one person becomes the parent and one person becomes the child in a romantic relationship, right? In a parental relationship, we want asymmetry that’s developmentally appropriate and in corporate hierarchy, there is a level of asymmetry based on the hierarchy of the owner versus, you know, maybe a C level person versus.

An assistant of some kind. So there’s, there’s also, there’s also asymmetry there when there’s asymmetry, whoever has the power influences the other person in a major way, one way or another. Now, while you can have a whole company full of a grown adult, a prefrontal cortex online, there’s a power dynamic at play here.

And people’s survival is based on their performance and based on maybe pleasing you or, you know, making sure you’re happy or whatever it might be. So to recognize that and to make it, you know, this is a whole idea of psychological safety, right. Um, in corporate space, but I will say one thing we want it to be safe enough.

Cause there is no such thing as perfect safety. [00:31:00] We want it to be like 50. 0001 percent safe, right? Because especially if you’re a startup, there’s not a lot of unsafety that’s happening, so we need to be safe enough. And it is absolutely top down because if the founder of the leader of the CEO, the C suite isn’t creating that culture.

Then it will fall apart when there are challenges. And just like we need to have a flexible nervous system to be able to navigate the challenges of life, you can think about your culture as a nervous system. We need to have a flexible cultural nervous system to be able to manage the flexible challenges of business also.

And that’s only possible if there’s top down leadership and that’s literal in terms of the biology of it, but then also org chart also. Right? Yeah. And in that org chart at the top of the org chart, I really hope that executive has executive function. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, what do you have? You know, so often they don’t.

Megan: Well, I think one of the things that I have learned with my kids and we have gone. Deep into Bessel van der Kolk’s work, which led [00:32:00] us to a woman named Seaborn Fischer, who is a pioneer of neurofeedback. I won’t get into all that, because that is a whole rabbit trail, but I

Mastin: love that rabbit trail, though.

Megan: Yeah, it’s a great rabbit trail. As I’ve learned about that, it’s like trauma stunts the ability of the prefrontal cortex to fully come online, even when developmentally it’s appropriate. It’s not working like it used to, because to your point about neuroception, people are so stuck in fear because of what’s happened to them in the past, that we have immaturity in the brain and all kinds of things that are happening.

And I think that translates to the workplace. You know, um, I don’t know who said that you probably will know who said this, that idea of if it’s hysterical, it’s historical. You know, that kind of concept, oftentimes we will be sitting in a meeting. I mean, I can think about an employee situation that I had a few years ago where, I mean, I just sat there like, what is happening?

Like you said, there was a mismatch between. the [00:33:00] response from a nervous system standpoint and what the stimulus was. It was like so out of whack to what had happened, but this person perceived so much threat in the situation, so much danger, and then because they didn’t have the awareness about trauma, which I know is in play in that situation.

Now, post the situation, I know enough of that story to go, okay, there was some real trauma in play that had not been dealt with because they didn’t have that. They thought that what they were neurocepting was facts. Actually, this was objectively dangerous. They were objectively being attacked by another person, et cetera.

And in fact, I wasn’t the person that they thought was doing the attacking. So I’m kind of like the observer. I’m like, That’s not what’s happening. You know, like I can see this because I’m not activated by the situation and the same way that they were. And so I think that when we’re dealing with people, which, whether you’re dealing with clients or customers or coworkers or employees, or, you know, a [00:34:00] board or whatever, we’re always dealing with people and, you know, you and I were talking about this morning, dad, how.

I think mental illness is so much more prevalent than we have thought because trauma is so prevalent, you know, it’s like, oh, there’s so much trauma that is driving the interactions that we have with each other. And I think when we start to become aware of this and then ultimately are able to get healing and have tools.

Then all of a sudden we can lead more effectively when we get in these situations where people are to use my previous quote that I don’t know how to attribute, you know, hysterical, like their nervous systems are really activated about something in a way that doesn’t match the situation. We can handle it better, but we can also handle our own activation better and with more compassion because we’re not dealing with like a work conflict.

We’re dealing with something that happened way back in the past, or we’re not dealing with the financials that we just got that don’t look good. We’re dealing with. And I think it just gives us capacity for compassion, self understanding, and ultimately healing in a [00:35:00] different way.

Mastin: I think that’s so well said.

I think the first person I heard say that was Dr. Frank Anderson. But he, I don’t know if he was the one who said it originally. One thing that’s interesting too, to your point, is it kind of gets back to the symmetry, asymmetry perspective, right? So, for example, in the workplace, there’s the ability to hold space for and have, create safety for someone’s reaction.

And, That can turn into a role reversal sometimes because we can repeat our childhood conditioning in business, a hundred percent, just like in romantic relationships, we can repeat it. And so there’s this fine line between, I understand that you have a trauma response coming up and it’s based on the past.

It’s happening now, but it’s based on the past response. And at some point, it’s not your job necessarily to do all that work for them. But if you’re in a romantic relationship, there’s a little bit more leniency and leeway, I think. However. It’s still not your job to do it and I don’t believe in unconditional love for romantic partners.

I don’t think based on neuroscience, I believe in unconditional love from parents to children.

Megan: Yeah.

Mastin: And from God to humans, [00:36:00] that’s about it. But from like adult to adult, secure functioning relationships where both parties are trying to regulate, dysregulate and re regulate, it’s like investing, it’s mutual investment.

Because what happens is if you have asymmetry in like an adult relationship of any kind, what happens is whoever is kind of the parent role, the other person in a child role, what is a child supposed to do developmentally? The child is supposed to grow up and leave the parent. And I think I first heard that from Henry Cloud.

So I was like, wow, this is really interesting because I really love caretaking people. But when it comes to like the people I work with, I would like them to come with some work around this already done because my wounding is around. I got that. I’ll take care of that for you. And then I ended up hiring people that I’m taking care of, which is a complete role reversal and repeat of my childhood conditioning.

And so I sort of screened for levels of self awareness also. So I do think there’s a leadership role to be regulated, but also if you rupture to repair and just like with parenting, if you fight in front of the kids, then you should [00:37:00] repair in front of the kids. So they see the repair also, right. It’s super important.

So it’s not that you’re always. Regulated in front of your team. But when there is this regulation to be able to re regulate and go through that process and have them see that and hire people who have some level of awareness. And this is why I believe we actually haven’t seen true exponential companies be born yet, because the majority of the big.

Exponential companies and people like Elon Musk, they’re not creating cultures like this, right? So there’s a rigidity to what they can accomplish, which is a tremendous amount. But when you add in what we’re talking about, I think you want to talk about 10 X. I think this is like a thousand X in productivity.

If you can create a culture like this. Right? Um, and so I think that true exponential companies have yet to truly be born because things like this are not brought into focus yet. And you guys are leading the way in a very important way and bringing that to leadership. And there’s only so much you can do for someone and they have to also pick themselves up at their bootstraps at some point in a performance context.

You know,

Michael: one of the things I want to make sure that we cover, and by the way, I didn’t [00:38:00] mention the name of the book except in the intro, but it’s reclaim your nervous system, a guide to positive change, mental wellness, Bye. And post traumatic growth. You guys need to buy this. I gave it to every member of my mastermind, two masterminds that I lead.

And it was profound master met with one of my groups and they were already primed because they’d read the book. So I’d really encourage you to read it. But one of the things I wanted to talk about. is trauma. And if you had asked me, even just a year and a half ago, did you have any childhood trauma? Well, I knew I grew up in a home where my dad was an alcoholic, but that was kind of his issue.

I didn’t understand the impact on me. So can you kind of define trauma? Because the average person listening to this, Mike, think this is for somebody else.

Megan: Just to add to that, one of the things, you know, when you talked about all the nervous system stuff and you gave Mastin’s book to one of our masterminds, one of the things that we heard from, and this is [00:39:00] predominantly men, not all men, but predominantly men in this group, that question that came up is how do I know if I’ve had trauma or how do I know if I’m anxious?

And it was like a very sincere question from a lot of people. Like I legitimately do not know. If I’ve had trauma or if I struggle with anxiety, like, how would you know?

Mastin: Yeah. So the way that I define trauma, which I’m going to paraphrase is in the book. Basically, it’s any experience of threat, disconnection, isolation, or immobilization that results in the long term or chronic dysregulation of either your endocrine system, your immune system, your emotional body, your brain, your body, your spirit.

your health on any level, basically. So if you have chronic stress, chronic immune issues, chronic autoimmune issues, hard time thinking, like all these different things, metabolic issues, there’s some type of trauma there. And if you look at like, for example, chronic illness and a lot of issues we’re experiencing today, this idea of inflammation is pretty well known today.

Well, inflammation in the body is a trauma response. That’s what it is. [00:40:00] Right? So that’s also a trauma response. So they can be biological, physiological, can be have lots of different areas, endocrine system, hormones, all these things. There’s definitely a medical component to it, but the leaders in functional medicine are getting hip to this work now, which is important because some things they can’t diagnose or explain.

So what’s that about? Right? We can somaticize emotions. Meaning we turn emotion into physical body sensations that we can’t pay attention to. And so, it’s less important to ask yourself if you have trauma and more important to ask yourself are you happy with your life? And then if you’re not happy with your life, where are you not happy with your life?

And then what are the symptoms that you’re not happy with behaviorally or experientially? And that can guide you. Down the rabbit hole to finding things. So it’s not important whether you think you have trauma, it’s important about to think about, do you love your life? Are you happy with the quality of your relationships?

Are you happy with the quality of your financial life? Are you happy with your level of parenting? Are you happy with your health and wellbeing? Are you happy with your habits? And if you’re not in any area, and you can be honest with yourself about that, we want to find where that [00:41:00] thing originated and then do something about it so that We can help you move forward more efficiently.

So this is not about revisiting the past and living there, but it is about understanding history. So it’s not repeated. And we think about that. We know that we don’t study history. We repeat history. So that’s also true personally. And Freud called it a repetition compulsion. We repeat things until they release.

The problem is with successful people and ambitious people is every time we level up, we I complexity and stress. And those pathways kind of get activated again. So it’s kind of this multi level one Jumanji and then now you’re at level 700 Jumanji. Right. So it’s like, there’s a way in which we stop ourselves as relatively predictive once you get to know yourself.

So it’s not necessarily about, do I have trauma? It’s like, am I happy with my life? Do I feel healthy? Am I, am I healthy in my body? And if I’m not, I want to take a holistic approach, understand why, and then what to do about it. Like you would do with functional medicine, but emotionally. And semantically with body symptoms.

So that’s kind of what I would say about trauma and those things. I think [00:42:00] sometimes we can go hunting for something, and that may or may not be useful in the moment. Right? What’s useful right now is, am I happy or not? And if the answer is no, let’s go figure out why so that we can get you back to happiness.

Because here’s the thing, stoicism is great for growth, it’s just not great for healing.

Michael: I was surprised in my own therapy how quickly I began to see results. Yes. Now, I think healing is a lifelong journey, but I saw more progress in like three months of this kind of therapy that dealt with my nervous system than I had seen in the past in years. of cognitive behavioral therapy or other kinds of therapy.

And we didn’t dwell in the past, but to identify that, where this was coming from and to bring different modalities to it, to heal it. Was pretty amazing.

Mastin: I’m not really a CBT fan because the model is actually biologically inaccurate because basically it says situation causes automatic [00:43:00] thoughts, which is true, but what causes automatic thoughts is neuroception, which is body based.

So the, the CBT, it comes from. The sixties is where it originated. And so like, we didn’t have all this stuff and we hear so much in the cognitive world about the situation causes the thought that caught causes the feeling. And I’m like, actually, no, it’s the other way around now. Yes. Your brain can cause you to feel a certain thing.

Um, On purpose, but you need a lot of resources online, a lot of safety to cause yourself to feel something because it takes too much time to think about a feeling. Feelings are reflexive and automatic and are also guide our behavior. So the entire cognitive model, whether it’s the coaching cognitive model or the CBT model is biologically driven.

inaccurate. It’s just what you can notice first. We just didn’t have the science for it. And also, I don’t want to say that changing your mindset isn’t important. It’s radically important to change your mindset. However, there’s a couple prerequisites [00:44:00] that have to be on board to make it. Effective and long lasting to understand how to change your mindset because it happens in the prefrontal changing your mindset, change your thoughts, change your life happens in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

So if I’m in sympathetic or if I’m in dorsal, guess what? No resources are being diverted there. I can’t. Change my thoughts and change my life because that part of my brain is not active or able to have the resources to do so. And so there’s a time and place for reframing and for, you know, distortions of thinking and things like that.

But we want to be able to have that somatic and body based piece online so that our prefrontal cortex can actually do its job. And without that, you’re basically gaslighting yourself. I don’t know how else to say it.

Megan: I think that’s really helpful for people to hear because we’ve all had situations where we tried to reframe our thoughts.

I mean, we have a whole book on mindset, so we’ve written a whole book on this. And I think this body based approach helps to reframe reframing, if you will, in the sense [00:45:00] that like, Oh, I’m not broken if I tried to reframe a certain thought. And it quote, didn’t work. It may be in my body is the access point first.

And I think, you know, it’s helpful, obviously get Mastin’s book, somatic experiencing therapy. You can look that up and find therapists who are trained in that modality of therapy. And it’s great. It’s

Michael: increasingly

Megan: popular. There’s a lot of different things you can do, but I, I mean, I hope that this whole conversation has helped our listeners to go, Oh, There’s a whole toolbox that maybe I haven’t even known existed.

I don’t have access to right now. I want to have access to, and there’s a whole other explanation for why I experience life the way that I do. That isn’t just purely this kind of cause and effect thing. It is cause and effect, but it’s not in the present, you know? Okay, Mastin, we could talk to you for like three days and that would be so much fun.

So let’s [00:46:00] do that sometime. But in the meantime, we have three questions that we ask all of our guests that I would love for you to answer. So the first one is, you know, here on the double one show, we’re all about the double win, winning at work and succeeding at life. We don’t just want people to have this kind of one dimensional success.

So for you, what’s the biggest obstacle in you getting the double win right now?

Mastin: This is going to sound relatively basic. Learning how to rely on people with things that are very important to me is very difficult. It’s still very difficult for me to do. I’m learning. I’m learning how to do that. I’m used to doing it on my own.

And eventually someone will prove to me they can’t. So I’m learning how to not have that be the case. And that’s this thing called ask for help. I’m a recovering lone wolf and I, my nervous system is constantly surprised that other people have capacity to do things for me that are very meaningful. I think I’ll probably have, I don’t want to say the rest of my life, but it’ll definitely be something that I work on consistently is really relying on people with the hard stuff.

Megan: [00:47:00] Yeah. That’s a really good answer. I don’t think anyone’s ever given us that answer before. Yeah. Okay, next question. How do you personally know when you’ve gotten the double win, when you’re winning at work and succeeding at life?

Mastin: I think I just experience a state of excitement without fear. Like it’s just pure excitement over my wall of Tigger framed.

I want to be like in my Tigger state bouncing around and when I’m bouncing around and I’m not worried about other things, that for me is the double win. Because when I’m nurtured, when I get my needs met, which is both financially and in the business and also relationally, Tigger emerges and I just bounce around and I’m so excited.

So for me, that’s definitely the sign.

Michael: Let’s call that the Tigger test.

Megan: Amazing. So like when the stripes appear, you’re good. That’s what we know.

Mastin: In our world, we call it GTE, which stands for Gooey Tigger Energy. Okay.

Megan: So

Mastin: it’s just this like super excited, kind of loving, just, yeah, it’s just like, it’s just like, let’s go.

You know? So yeah, got the GTE going.

Megan: I love that. Okay. [00:48:00] Last question. What is one ritual or routine that helps you do what you do?

Mastin: I’m trying to think about the thing that’s the most simple. This is going to sound also very basic walking. When I get my steps in and when it’s intentional steps, I am so much better.

It used to be 10, 000. I was with my buddy Adam Cobb a couple of days ago and he’s high performance coach. He goes, you know, man, 12, 000 is the new 10, 000. I go, great. Step inflation, step inflation. This is great. Um, but that sounds so basic. And then, uh, advanced thing that I do. is hyperbaric oxygen. I try to be in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at least five or six times a week.

Megan: Oh my gosh. Wow. But

Mastin: that’s not accessible to everybody, right? But the combination of those two things, I feel like enables so many other things to happen in my life.

Michael: Great thing about walking too is it’s so rhythmic that it does have a regulator system. Very well too. Big time. Yeah. I

Mastin: love it so much.

Michael: Well, buddy, thank you so much for sitting down with us for the last hour.

This has been rich and there’s just, [00:49:00] this has just opened a whole new world to me and I’ve been kind of geeky about it, learning about it, but I get asked all the time, you know, when I talk to people, they get kind of excited about it and they say, where do I start? And I always recommend your book.

Megan: Yep.

Michael: So again, the book is Reclaim Your Nervous System.

You guys definitely want to get this and read it cover to cover. Thanks Mastin.

Megan: Thanks Mastin. so much.

Mastin: Love you guys. Thanks so much. Thanks.

Michael: Love you.

Megan: Okay. Well, that was really fun, and it went by so quickly.

Michael: Well, part of it is we’re just geeking out on this stuff anyway.

Megan: I know. If this is a new concept for you, you got a real vocabulary lesson today because there’s a lot of terms that we threw out in there.

The most important thing for people to remember is that, uh, It’s just the upside down stoplight, the red, yellow, green, that there, there isn’t just one color that it’s, we’re kind of like moving up and down that a lot that we’re going to be activated by stressors in our day to day life that are going to unconsciously push us [00:50:00] into one of those different places.

And I think what’s cool is. When you learn some of these tools that Madison was talking about, you can move, you don’t get stuck in the same way. It’s not about not ever going to yellow or red, it’s about not getting stuck there unconsciously. And that has a profound impact on our leadership, our self leadership, but also whatever leadership we have with others in our ability to perform.

Because anytime things are unconscious, you got a problem.

Michael: You know, I think that most people Want happiness. Yeah. That’s their stated goal. If you ask them, what do you really want out of life? It’s to be happy. And happiness comes when you’re making progress and it’s not the destination, but it’s the journey.

It’s we’re making steady progress towards a meaningful goal. The problem is we get stuck in that progress because we have these unseen forces that are happening in our body and in our mind and in our nervous system. That we don’t understand and we’re being controlled almost by [00:51:00] these subterranean forces that are holding us back.

Megan: Yeah. And

Michael: I think the thing that’s gotten me so excited, not that I’ve learned all of this, I’ve learned a lot, but I’ve not learned everything there is to know for sure. But it’s that I’m starting to feel progress in areas which before I didn’t really understand the dynamics and why I couldn’t get progress in those areas.

So this has been like a key that’s opened up a treasure trove.

Megan: Okay, that made me think of your experience with exercise and the trauma connection with that. And I wish I would have remembered this when we were actually on with Mastin, but I think it would be a helpful illustration of where this shows up that you didn’t used to have access to.

Michael: Yeah. So I was really struggling with being consistent in my strength training and some of you know that I had a heart attack. About two years ago, I ended up having quadruple bypass surgery. It was a very traumatic thing, and it was based on basically my genetics. So it wasn’t a lifestyle related thing.

I wasn’t overweight, was eating well, exercising regularly, all that. But [00:52:00] after that surgery, obviously I couldn’t exercise for a while, but then I was struggling to be consistent even after I was healed from the surgery. And it was very frustrating because I teach about habits.

Megan: Right.

Michael: I’ve always considered myself a very self disciplined person.

Megan: Right. And you’re like, I’m a fraud. Everything I teach must not work. Well, it’s how I felt.

Michael: And so I’m reporting to my trainer, and I feel like I’m constantly making excuses. To her for why I can’t be consistent, why I’m blowing off workouts. Well, then I realized, oh, I had my heart attack when I was exercising.

Ding, ding,

Megan: ding. And so,

Michael: and so what happened was that conditioned me at a level of the subconscious or at the nervous system that exercise is dangerous.

Megan: Right. Like that’s what your body felt like. That’s

Michael: right. And so I had this unconscious conflict. in my body, between my body and my mind, that if I was to exercise, it would put me in a serious position of danger.

literally

Megan: life threatening. It could

Michael: be life threatening.

Megan: Yeah.

Michael: So it’s no [00:53:00] wonder I was resisting it.

Megan: Yeah.

Michael: But once I realized that, it was just like an aha moment, and I, I texted my therapist, and I said, does this make sense? And she said, totally.

Megan: Yeah.

Michael: Well, look, I just finished Five weeks of exercise today.

Megan: Yeah,

Michael: and I’ve been I haven’t missed one time

Megan: Yeah,

Michael: and it’s all because I got resolved because I confronted the thing that was holding me back

Megan: Yeah, and I think you that came after a lengthy season of therapy in this somatic experiencing modality that we were talking about when we were on with Mastin But I think this is why it matters because if you have goals that you just cannot seem to accomplish despite the fact that you’re very You Competent at achievement, other areas of your life or some other area of your life.

You’re just really struggling with there may be a trauma or nervous system. regulation kind of undercurrent there that if you can unlock all of a sudden, everything becomes easier. Like brute force is a very primitive strategy. Like, you know, it is a strategy you can use. You can put [00:54:00] that tool in your toolbox, but this is probably if you couldn’t have just tried harder, you did try harder and it wasn’t, and it didn’t work.

And so, I think that’s exciting. I mean, I think it’s just, it’s just like, wow, there’s a whole nother path to break through here.

Michael: I think my other big takeaway from this interview is how important this is for leaders.

Megan: Yes, me too. Because

Michael: if you can’t regulate yourself, you’re going to dysregulate your team, and that’s going to impact their performance.

They’re not going to do their best work. If you’re a parent, if you can’t regulate yourself, you’re going to dysregulate your kids, and they’re not going to give you their best performance. They’re not going to be able to, you know, develop in a healthy way. Yeah. And so, and I don’t mean that to shame us or put us into, to anything other than to just say, This is something that’s worth studying and something that’s worth learning about so we can show up and be our best selves, no matter what the context is.

I

Megan: mean, at minimum, we’ve got to know when we are dysregulated.

Michael: Right.

Megan: Which I think, Many of us who have lived most of our lives kind of above the collarbone aren’t even aware when we’re becoming dysregulated and then are [00:55:00] like, why is everyone acting so weird? It’s like, because you’re acting so weird.

Michael: Well, just think of the, the holidays were, and this has happened in our family.

Megan: Yeah.

Michael: We have a holiday and somebody comes in, they’re dysregulated or they get dysregulated in the holiday. Yeah. And then everything escalates.

Megan: Right.

Michael: Everybody gets dysregulated and there’s just a mess.

Megan: Right.

Michael: Right. Now having this knowledge, it’s a lot easier to go, Oh.

I need to regulate myself because I can co regulate

Megan: or have

Michael: an influence on that other person

Megan: and

Michael: help them calm down.

Megan: And the goal isn’t not to ever get dysregulated.

Michael: No, that’s right.

Megan: The goal is to be flexible so you don’t get stuck there and you have the ability to come back to kind of that place of equilibrium.

Anyway, I, I just thought it was a great conversation and I think that the practical applications are discussed in Mastin’s book and just again, you got to go get this book, Reclaim Your Nervous System. Uh, I think that is going to be key to understanding this at another level and starting to be able to access this toolkit.

It’s pretty powerful.

Michael: Guys, thanks for listening and I want to ask you to do us a favor. [00:56:00] If you’ve gotten value out of this, go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this podcast. Rate the show, give us a five star if you can do that honestly, and give us a quick review. That helps juice the algorithm so that our show rises higher in the rankings and more people can discover it.

And we’re on a mission here at Full Focus to make it nearly impossible for people not to get the double win. And you can be part of that mission and help us create a movement. We’ll see you next week.