Saving Lives: Unveiling and Addressing the Silent Epidemic of Loneliness

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, Doctor Relise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working in Purpose Program. Thanks for tuning again this week. Great to have you. This show has been on air since February of twenty fifteen and is a pride and joy for me.

1:11 I am your host doctor at least Cortes. If we have not met before and you don't know me, I'm an organizational psychologist and loco therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant destination workplace. There people are intrinsically motivated to perform at their best, can grow into their fuller potential, and are committed to stay and I'm deliver on the company's mission. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal website at Leastcortes dot com. Now, let's get in today's program with us Today. Is Jinyinshin, a mental wellness coach and entrepreneur and president and co founder of Pensive, where they use perspective and reflection to strengthen mental health. His calling in life is to help prevent suicides as a mental health entrepreneur, he is one of many who are trying to help destigmatize mental health. As a coach, he explores where loneliness has disconnected us from the communities we love and provides language to reconnect. Joined today from Denver, Colorado, Ginion, Welcome to Working on Purpose. Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I am thrilled to have you, my friend, and I really applaud and embrace what you're doing with your one precious life working on this. So thank you for that. Thank you for being in service, being obedient to your purpose.

2:31 It's not always easy, right, definitely. Well, let's dive in straight away here to get our listeners and viewers present to what we're so focused on improving. You shared with me that doctor Vivic Murphy, who is the former US Surgeon General, raised the alarm on the loneliest epidemic. What does that mean? What are we talking about here? Oh man, we are diving right in. I'm so excited to do that. Before I do, I just want to take a moment to just honor you, doctor, at least a book that I really enjoy an author I guess by extension. I really enjoy It's good to Great by Jim Collins, right, and he provides excellent commentary on a lot of research on you know, the power that the long like the longevity that companies have when they can align their values with their mission, with their leaders. Right. And you give those people, you know, a platform two for us to get to listen to and examine how are people really doing that and executing that. So while there are excellent comment commentators like Jim Collins or even podcasts out there that listen in or just kind of provide their commentary and how businesses are formed, that you give us a chance to listen to the creators themselves. And so, yeah, thank you for this platform as a listener and a fan, and I'm absolutely honored to get to be here and talk about this topic that I'm so very passionate about.

3:59 Thank you, Jin and that so beautiful, Thank you for those beautiful words. Thank you absolutely so. Yeah, let's talk about loneliness. It's a tough subject, so all of listeners, hold on, we're gonna go for quiet the ride today. But yeah, loneliness, how I like to define it is, it's this feeling you feel when your experience and it's underlying feelings disqualify you from belonging, and the epidemic manifests by disconnecting us from our communities and starving our need for social interaction. I think we'll end up talking about how that's actually coming to, like what outcomes that is manifesting in a minute. But something that I want to highlight is the underlying feelings. As much as we hate to deny that they bother us or they influence us, they're critical because at the end of the day, they are the evidence we have the claim that no one can relate to an experience we've gone through, and by the flip side, how people can relate to us, how we can find a way to find commonality, find a way that we are not alone. So yeah, I'm going to talk about feelings a lot today, but I promise if you stay with me, my goal is just to provide language where you can talk to your peers and your family and your friends about it. So yeah, that's kind of a definition I like to work with.

5:26 Awesome definition, and thank you. Feelings are completely great with me. They're part of my world too, So I'm okay with that. Awesome All right. Well, this is a show called Working on Purpose, and some people when they come on are absolutely governed and delivering and serving from their purpose. And you have a calling to help prevent suicides in this loneliness epidemic time. So of course one of the things, one of the results of loneliness, tragic results, is suicide. Yeah, and I heard you say in one of the talks that I watched on YouTube that it's one of suicide one of the top causes of death for people one to forty four, among a couple others. Yes, what are the others? And then let's let's kind of get into the numbers here. What are we talking about. Yeah, let's let's talk about it because this is the darkest part and then we can start to shed light into it. That's right. Yeah, the top three causes of death, and the CDC they published this between the ages of one and forty four to kind of represent the average half life. And we'll talk about, you know, longevity in a minute, but that between one and forty four, the top three causes of death are first drug overdoses, second suicide, and third car accidents. Right, that's been true since twenty thirteen.

6:45 I believe then. You know, it used to be car accidents, right, something that was something that we were wielding and something that we needed to teach each other and ourselves how to control. But you know, if we don't start doing that, teaching each other how to control our mental health and how to check in on it. Right, these numbers about drug overdoses and suicides, I'm afraid are only going to go up. We expand that now we take the age range off, right, you introduce eight more leading causes of death that I largely qualify as biological decline. Right, it's a heart disease, seizures, liver failure, kidney failure. You'll introduce more biological decline, but those top three are still right there, the only other edition being COVID. So yeah, even when you zoom out and you look at life expectancy in the United States, right, it's in the top four if you zoom out just a little bit. One of the things I did do a little research with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and I saw that they said they were looking at twenty twenty one and they said twelve point three million adults seriously thought about suicide. Three point five million adults made a plan and one point seven million adults attempted suicide, and then it goes on to say that forty one hundred and eighty three people died by suicide in the

8:18 United States in twenty twenty one. And just even just thinking, if even contemplating it, I just wanted just presence, the compassionate and empathy that I want to extend anyone who's felt that way. Yeah, definitely. It's you know, we talk about it in terms of outcomes, and I think that's kind of where I'm trying to shed light onto. This is before the outcomes, Right, there's there's a journey to disconnect, and if you kind of feel like you might be in that space, gosh, I want you to know that there are so many people who have devoted their lives to finding you wherever you are. There are full on institutions. Yeah, there are so many people that have devoted their lives into therapy, into practices because they've been inspired by something that you felt. So even if it's hard for you to believe that you are not alone, yeah, stay stay with us here today, and I hope that I can shed some light into your situation. Wherever you are, and if you're not in that situation. Yeah, I think I really believe we'll be able to help us kind of increase your empathy, how to how to kind of identify this around your communities too well. One of the things that I have really gotten privy to over the years of hosting the show Jinian in my own research, is that very often you know our own story, whether whether it's what we've gone through or what we've found meaningful

9:50 in life, can lead us to our purpose. And you, of course have your own story and connection to loneliness. Let's talk a little bit about you. Yeah, it's like for you to navigate life. Yeah, for sure. The journey to where I have arrived is largely based on lived experience, right. So, I remember in seventh grade it was my I was on this journey of wondering what time was. And if you have any kids who say that, just know that they're kind of going down a dark path. One day I found it. I was laying in bed with my eyes closed, just trying to clear my mind, and I suddenly just had I don't know, I feel like I just was able to identify the absence of time, that being death, all right, And I was so scared by that that what followed was about one year of crying myself to sleep every night, and yeah, just wondering, why does anything that I do matter in this absolute blip of time that I'll have in relation to history. Yeah, That's what I was thinking about in middle school. And I was just thinking at the time, like, there's no way anybody's thinking about this, and I can't tell anyone that. And eventually what pulled me out was this just kind of like resignation to well, there's still a lot of life to live, so you might as well try to, you know, be curious about

11:24 maybe let's start small, what makes life worth living for other people? And sure enough, I have now spent just one on one time with hundreds, truly hundreds of people to where I've just always been asking, like what makes life worth living? Through that, I've learned that we're all on this never ending search for what we want in return for our time, and what makes that hard is well, along this journey, we all have times and we feel lonely and disconnect from our surroundings where it's uncomfortable to just be. When we're uncomfortable being that's that's when we feel alone. Right, that's the difference between loneliness and solitude where you can find great comfort and being by yourself.

12:15 But at that discomfort and being by yourself that such a such a fine line we can slide into. So yeah, I can, I can expand there, but happy to have you to pause there too. Well. I want to just really first acknowledge and celebrate you as someone who is so thoughtful. I don't know of any seventh graders who were wondering about time. I mean, I'm just gobsmacked that that's where your mind and heart and soul were at that time. And I have to say, I'm you know, you're a philosopher, and that voice of yours, my friend, was beautiful. But when you when you say the you know, it encourage you that the absence of time would be death. That is incredibly I don't know, smacking, it's just it really is so So I just really want to acknowledge your journey, your very unique journey. You also talk a little bit, You're welcome also talk a little bit too. It just the pressures of what it was to be raised as a Korean young man, and you know that went along with that too, with maybe just say a little bit about that as well.

13:16 Yeah, for sure. It is certainly part of the I think, Korean American experience, and I haven't gotten to confirm this much except through this blog post. I've had a few people reach out to me, and that is just in the Korean culture, pressure produces diamonds. It's like the one unyielding law. So the only way that I could ever relieve myself from that pressure and defend myself was by being the best. So it was always about, you know, I played a couple of instruments, and I needed to be first chair in everything. I needed to qualify for a masterclass on the piano. I needed to be school president, I needed to be all these things. And yeah, that I think is also why I get so nervous around cameras and audio equipment because for me, growing up, cameras and audio equipment was filming practice, and my mom would film practice so I could review it and it was just, you know, just nitpicking, and that that would get really tough, especially in this time where I'm wondering why does anything that I do matter? Yeah, so, yeah, yeah, that was a pretty rough, pretty rough kind of Yeah, a lot of a lot of different kinds of pressures pressing on you know, what's the point of life at that point? Yeah? Oh, all right, well, let's do this geny, and let's let our let our listeners and viewers let this sink in and maybe consider for themselves sometimes in their lives when things really got incredibly

14:46 overwhelming or they wondered what's it all for? And take our first break. I'm your host, Doctor Lee's Protest. We've been on air with Ginia and Shin. He's the president and co founder of Pensive, where they use perspective and reflection to strengthen mental health. We've been talking about the seriousness and pervasiveness of the loneliness epidemic and some of the ramifications like suicide and other things. After the Rick, we're going to get into this notion of being able to get more present to our feelings, to understand what's under that data that comes with them. Stay with this, will be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance and commitment within the workforce.

15:50 To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise Alise at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I am dedicated to helping create a world where people realize potential at work, are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness. And we do business at Betters the World, which is some of the things that Ginuin had said before. I needed to research and write my own books, So one of my latest came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meeting and purpose can radically enliven your business, and I wrote it to help the readers understand the lay of today's workforce, What do they want and need to be meaningfully engaged and stick around? And then I provide twenty two best practices to you create a culture to to presence that for them. You can learn more about it at my website at a Leastquortes dot com or just go on Amazon for your copy if you are just joining us. My guest is Ginya and Shin. He's a mental health mental wellness coach and an entrepreneur at Pensive, where they use perspective and reflection to strengthen mental health. His calling in life is to help prevent suicides. As a mental health entrepreneur,

17:22 he is one of many who are trying to help destigmatize mental health. As a coach, he explores where onliness has disconnected us from munities we love and provides the language to reconnect. Beautiful, Okay, now let's get back to those those those feelings that you talked about. I too, I too work in the feeling space, and so I appreciate this, and I really really this is one of the reasons I keep hosting the show giniin is that I learned so much from my guests. And I had told you that I had had somebody else on the program before who was using they were tracking mood to try to address mental health and wellbeing, and you indicated that your research is it's more are useful to focus on feelings. So if we could talk about what's the difference and why are is it more effective to focus on feelings?

18:07 Yes, yes, yes, oh man, allow me to begin with that slightly snarky, satirical comment. Okay, let's do it. One day, everybody is going to turn ten years old and you're going to realize that life cannot be categorized into five moods. I'm seeing these five moods like everywhere now. I see them in journaling apps, I see them in the Apple Health Kit, and to try to do so, I think it's just reductive to a point that's self inflicting. A great we experience just nuance in life, and frankly, nuance is where we find the inspiration to take the next act to better ourselves. Like take nostalgia for example. Right for me, that's some aggregate of like a light shade of sadness and a deeper sense of joy and combined it's it's quite fulfilling, and it inspires me to seek out new experiences that might make some sort of feeling concoction that's fulfilling or like you know, close to as fulfilling is whatever I was originally nostalgic about. And there's just no way I could reduce that into a singular a singular mood I think to consistently do so would make me feel like I have to I have to be happy or I'm failing, and that disincentivizes engaging with life with a curiosity that has like you know, long term questions. If I'm always just having to face at the end of the day of today I'm sad or today I'm

19:40 angry, it's just kind of telling myself I've failed to be happy. And that's that that has been confirmed by you know, a lot of the mental health practitioners I work with. They might ask how your mood is in an introductory meeting, But all these therapy clinics I see more and more they have feelings, wheels everywhere, because life is nuanced, and that's how we make meaning out of life is exploring that we want. So, yeah, I do have a little personal vendetta against mood trackers, but I don't it's not as uncommon in the field that I originally thought it was. I really appreciate that explanation, and we align so much to you and so much just quickly of what I've come to see that is part of my work in helping activate meaning and purpose in organizations and the people along the way their own individual transformation journey is. You know, we start off in life being able to access a hole gamut of the human emotional spectrum. We're angry, we're joyous, we're sad, we're frustrated, we're all these things. And you know, as life goes on and we learn, you know, we're not supposed to share all these feelings, and then life stumps on us. And then so by the time I meet somebody in their thirties or forties, they went from this huge emotional spectrum down to about something small like this. So then my job is partly to help them open that's get back up again so they can experience the wild wonder of life and therefore be able to access their sources of inspiration and create something and connect beautifully in a way that they couldn't if they're

21:11 just working from that teeny little slice of emotions. We are so aligned it beautifully said. Yeah, yes, yes, I heard you talk about this recent on a recent episode, and I was just I was just stopping the floor and clapping. Uh so, yeah, good good. I love that. Well, we're we're we're we're going arm in arm here in this world. Yes, absolutely, Well, I really enjoyed reading. I read a couple of your blogs as well in preparation for this conversation, and one of the blogs that you have contains a passage I wanted you to expand on because it really caught my attention. It might be related to what we're just now talking about, but you were saying, as we move through life, between our conditions and our circumstances, we keep looking for significant consequences that contain an AHA moment that complete the puzzle of self actualization. Somewhere in this process, typically at the reflection stage, Aha, we have found the final piece that makes all the pieces make sense. We know we have reached self actualization through some version of I had to go through blank to become someone blank. So I'm interested because I do some kind of an exercise like this too. How and why is this important to mental health and well being? Yeah? That is so loaded and it is. It is very well aligned with what you were just talking about. You had mentioned, you know, conditions and circumstances, right circumstances. They can sometimes force us to retool our conditions. Maybe

22:42 we were once much more expressive and today we are less. Or sometimes they can force us into situations where, you know, our priorities sometimes feel like a forced hand, and that changes the conditions of our hearts as well. If I can use a little bit of an illustration, I like to imagine life like one big house. This is going to maybe hopefully tie together some of the things I was talking about before with all these one on one conversations. But I've been very, very blessed and privileged to get to or in this house. I should say, everybody gets one room. We all get the same size room because we all get twenty four hours in a day.

23:23 And I have been very blessed and privileged to get to be welcomed into many rooms. I have seen the accolades on their mantles, and the achievements on the walls, the pictures, the names that correspond with people's names on the chairs every once in a while, the shames that are tucked away in their vaults, and what I have learned is the things that people are collecting and truly most proud of are those pictures on the walls. But those are the moments they're trying to relive. And rarely do I see a wall full of just happiness. There's trials, there's overcoming, there are low points, because people want to remember what they came from and how far the journey was.

24:08 And that's when I came up with this idea that, oh, I don't think life is about happiness. I think life is about moments of astonishment, to these moments that make us say aha in life. And my evidence for that is because when I ask people about those aha moments, and I say, if you got to know that at a previous point in life, right before all the trials and adversity, would you have liked to have known? And the answer is always no. Sometimes I hear somebody say, I don't want my kids to go through that. But my journey is what's made me who I am today. How it relates to how can we get ahead of that right? How can we apply that to our mental health and our mental well being. The toughest thing that I face when I am just coaching people one on one about mental health is breaking this concept of happiness being the end all, be all goal of your well being. Right, I'd like to live with my own mantra like, don't live life with the luxury of knowing you're going to live tomorrow. But at the same time, you know, have goals that are aligned with who you think you can be. Right, That's that's how you maintain your integrity on the outside at least, and then how that affects the inside the mentals that that will start to foster a curiosity for meaning and purpose being where there is an acceptance for not having all the

25:40 answers. Right, You've got to get to that point of not having all the answers in peace, at that point to where you can actually start to get ahead of your mental health and say, oh, you know, I'm waiting for my AHA moment. That's all this is. And if I can be present in this right now, I think it, I'll only get there sooner. So then that's where I also pulled out this definition of mental health is I think at its simplest form, your mental health is your ability to be present. That's it, Right, And I listen to people talk about mental illness versus mental health or mental health problems and gore chronic mental health problems, and it's all it's all a lot of concentric circles. The way I like to put it is, mental illness are people. People who have mental illnesses are people who are at a chemical disadvantage of being present, and mental health is something we all have to fight with, to battle with to be present. There's so much going on all the time now when we are all looking at screens for what at least six hours a day. Yeah, mental health is absolutely something we need to just work into our regular vocabulary and then have the empathy and sympathy for people who have mental illnesses. So yeah, I kind of spun out there, but yeah, that's I hope I was able to touch on just you know how like happiness and aha moments have their

27:11 own moments or have their own I guess, influence on just being present in the day to day staff. That was beautifully presenced, beautifully Okay, So that takes me where we wanted to go to where I wanted to go next anyway, And that is you really served up for us this notion the importance of being aware of yourself and your feelings and such. So I want to get you to talk a little bit about and you've you know, your own journey and what you're created will help us get I think, get access in a more fresh way. But how can we start to increase our awareness for our conditions and circumstances in a way that can positively impact our our mental health and well beings. So I be interested from the individual standpoint, and then, of course, how can we help others around us? Yeah? Great question, great question. I like that this really grounds as back to like like one hundred level concepts where I feel like I was just kind of in a very theoretical space. I loved it, yummy, but yeah, just in the very practical sense. A word that I think is like being thrown around in a very positive, well intentioned way is mindfulness. And then I think we get a little lost as far as what mindfulness is and how it takes shape. But mindfulness I like to define as practicing being present and then within that, there are two forms of mindfulness, two kind of categories.

28:32 The first one is reductive mindfulness. Reductive mindfulness are things like yoga, meditation, exercise. If you think about all the noise we feel in life, right, it kind of cuts out a lot of the noise and it helps us feel centered again. That's how people often feel after experiencing or practicing reductive mindfulness, and an additive mindfulness is when you're taking whatever is left and you are creating meaning, you're searching the meaning of what's left. This is things like therapy, like reflecting in a small group like Bible studies, men's groups, women's groups, or journaling. And actually a friend of mine who's also a pastor, he put this so well. He said he encourages journaling for people because it's it's the last step where when you get through it, it feels like taking rocks out of a backpack. You feel this immense sense of peace when you do face whatever feelings are left and you're able to find a meaning in them. Yeah, some people are able to do that just kind of reflecting by themselves in a journal or in a sanctuary like a church, and other people they prefer more of an exchange, right, so they'll enter therapy or small groups like I had mentioned. So those are some practical ways that. Yeah, I think that if you have a good combination of reductive

30:03 and additive mindfulness techniques, and you will always be able to just say, hey, I'm not feeling very present. Here's something I can just try out for myself real quick and set myself. That's beautiful. Really like that reductive and additive techniques. Okay, so we were talking about increasing awareness for our own mental health and wellbeing. I don't think we can really not talk about the impact of social media on this frontier. And I was really quite astonished. I didn't know this, but you mentioned to me in one of your exchanges that the top social media companies that just left Congress defending the safety and integrity of their platforms in New York City sued those companies for their negative impact on mental health. So the question, I guess, is, to social media make it harder to practice mindfulness or being aware of oneself? Yes?

30:55 Yes, so, yeah, a handful of companies like tiktoks, Chat, Instagram, Discord, and an x we're just in Congress for a week defending, yeah, the integrity of their applications. But if we just narrow down on making it harder to be present, right, I think it doesn't take a lot to be able to pry that open right on a very cold, just numbers approach. Social media companies make money by generating impressions for their marketers, which means they have to keep our attention and make us engage with content. So they fabricate an experience that gets us to press on our phones and they call it connection. That kind of sucks. I don't know. And if you remember what I said about, like in the beginning about feelings being evidence to support a claim, well, these companies show us that, like, these show us issues we care about, and the feelings they're able to generate then become evidence to support their claim that their health things be connected.

32:00 Right, And it's like this vicious loop of well, I don't really feel any more connected, but you're triggering feelings that I have, so I feel like I want to then re engage, and then suddenly, I don't know, I've never really walked away from social media feeling like, oh, yeah, I feel much more centered now, you know. Yeah, he'scott has brain dumped all the stuff that I'm supposed to feel more connected by. But I feel exhausted and like my brain just went for a spin. Yeah, So I'm rooting for New York frankly, they're they're they're suing all these companies for over one hundred million dollars. I think it's actually one hundred million dollars.

32:45 Eric Adams mayor Eric Adams and his staff to point out, like, hey, you are causing. You are part of the problem, so be part of the solution. So yeah, certainly, yeh wow. All right, Well let's let our listeners viewers think about that. What kind of social media are you consuming? And maybe is that a good thing for you? While we take our last break here, I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We r on the air with Ginya and Shin. He's a president and co founder of Pensive, where they use perspective and reflection to strengthen mental health. We've been talking a good bit about this notion of feelings versus mood and how we can start to get more present to ourselves. After the RIK, we're to learn how Ginian and his team have actually created a way for us to better connect. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Release courts Has is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Alise to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise

34:19 Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise ALISEE at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thankteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. I mentioned in the last break about my latest book coming out last March of twenty twenty three, The Great Vitalization. What I did for you to help you along the way in your journey is to help start to create a destination workplace for yourself. Is I gave on my website a three page assessment that you can use to see the extent to which your current culture practices are meeting the needs of today's workforce. So it's at gustodeshnow dot com. If you are just joining us now. My guest is Ginia and Chin. He's a mental wellness coach and entrepreneur at Pensive, where they use perspective and reflection to strengthen mental health. His calling Your Life is to help prevent suicides, and he has been working diligently with his team to be able to do just that. So we'll learn more about this as we go. Okay, so before we get into more of what you and your team have created, which again I just have so much respect for you've seen something and you're like, Okay, what can we do about it?

35:30 But we'll get to that. I do want to hear your perspective and what does it mean to be in touch? And how is that different from just from being connected. Yeah, that's a really really good question, and I think this is the nuance that I've been exploring a lot lately, because when we were first searching out on like how do we solve this problem, A lot of people could relate to I feel like I'm out of touch with my people, but I also feel like I'm more connected to the world. And it was a massive gap that everyone was looking at and kind of scratching their heads, is how can that be possible. Isn't technology supposed to help fill this gap? And it wasn't until I really thought about like my upbringing that I think I kind of noticed where this emphasis on connection was able to split from being in touch. And you know, I thought about when my parents would you know, take us to grandma's house for example, when I was a kid, I would always want to like resist and I'd always just think it's always boring to go to Grandma's house. We never do anything.

36:40 We just we just kind of hang out and we said. It wasn't until I got much older that I came to appreciate that time to just be No Grandma wanted exactly that she wanted to hear my inner monologue and get to just receive me and ask me questions, reflect with me. And I had noticed that. I think, or how this kind of then, you know, transposes us into connection versus being in touch is you know, connection is really driven by productivity, you know, what is the latest news, what has been done lately? Where being in touch is more the analysis and the time the examination to look at each other and think, well, how has what I've done actually influenced my identity or built my identity or otherwise impacted my identity.

37:36 And I think it's the lack of those conversations on our communities that are making us feel like we are out of touch with our friends and our peers and sometimes even our family members. So yeah, that kind of then forced us to look at how can technology help us to be to be in touch with each other? Yeah, so much in that, And I just really appreciate your thoughtful, contemplative nature. There's just so much and everything that you say has just such a in your rear word nuance to it, and so so much we're getting from this genue. This give me the show, ladies and gentlemen that you're gonna have to listen to a few times to be able to get more and more out of this. All right, So where I want to go next is we did talk about social media before, and you just brought up the idea of technology. Yeah, and I've had a couple of other conversations with guests talking about, you know, how to interrogate content.

38:31 I'd love to hear your perspective on what people can do to be more critical of the content they interact with and consume. Yeah, I should probably clarify that I don't think all content is inherently bad. I think some people might think that I'm making that way, like I love watching TV or movies, you know, And where I'm just more critical of social media is because the constant engagement is draining, Right, I kind of mentioned this before, but yeah, I rarely feel as though I pull away from social media thinking I'm more present in my surroundings. Right, I'm just like scatterbrained, and I know it's not good for my mental health. So this is kind of a pretty big jump into like a I want to say, like a four hundred level concept. And I'm you hear me referencing these numbers because I'm currently working on writing a book. But I think the best way to defend against just the onslaught of information is to know and establish your personal values. So I kind of teach this too kids in their like young twenties, to try to set them up for independence. But values, in their simplest form, they're just themes that summarize what you want in return for your time. And you would be surprised how quickly you could point out your own right if as a listener, if you want to just Google a list of values, I challenge you or I encourage you to just take a look at, like what would your top three be. And the reason why you're going to be able pick them out so quickly, especially as an adult, is because you've spent

40:05 a lot of time with heartache and pride and everything in between, and those those were related around these values and how they impacted your time and how they inspired you. But yeah, when you can know your personal values, I think that's the best way to ensure that you show up in a consistent way and that you know you can then kind of have a filter in the future for how to be critical about the content that you interact with. For sure digitally, but I think it will translate into the real world as well. Yeah, it's funny you bring up values. I have a list of one hundred values that I use when I'm speaking to audiences that I then distribute and flisters viewers. If you want that list, you can reach out to me and get it from me. It's at least at least coore test dot com.

40:54 But yes, many people tell me that they don't know their values, and yet it's so arrest providing clarity. When you define them when you actually isolate them. So I love that. That's beautiful. Okay, So next thing I want to get to then, because one of the things that i'mware of this is both I wanted the conversation to be both about how can we really get more present to ourselves but also to other people, people that we work with, people that we care about. So the next question then is how can we get better at checking in on the mental health of our friends and our peers. I mean, how many times do we hear about somebody having a horrible situation life sometimes even take in their own life and their friends and family and peers did not know they were suffering. MM, thank you for asking this question. I call myself a community builder and I'm always thinking about, you know, how we can help each other out. So I'm glad we get to give them just tactical, tactical things for community members and my number one piece of advice as somebody who is not a clinician, right, I have no extra letters after my name. I'm not a researcher, right. This is all just lived experience, and what brought me so far is frankly, just asking questions, asking questions in a way where I'm not solutioning with people, you can always start with people's mental health by just asking, Hey, what's been making it hard to be present? You have that

42:27 language now, and I please for me. You can even blame me if people are uncomfortable with other questions, say I heard this guy doctor Lees is a podcast and he dared me to do it. But as they start to share, just be curious as they examine how they've been interpreting their surroundings, and that can lead to really grounding conversations. Right, all individuals are capable of making decisions and living with the consequences. But what's really encouraging is when some one will help us talk through preparation or the aftermath, you know, without being told what needs to be done or what I should do right here here. Yeah. Oh that bears repeating listeners and viewers. This question that you can serve up to your family, your friends, your peers, people at work. What's been making it hard for you to be present? What a great question. Okay, now let's go on to what you're doing at pensive now. One of the things that I appreciated about our first conversation is we learned we both had a similar sort of career in management consulting, and that you left yours, as did I. Both of us left that respective field to go found our own thing that was near and dear to our hearts, that allowed us to live our purpose. So let's hear a little bit about what were you doing before you started pensive and why did you take the leap to do pensive? Yeah, I was in management consulting, and after

43:57 a couple of years of trying to figure out how do I separate myself from just being a generalist, I've found it. And it was when I leaned into being a community builder, and you know, I found techniques to help, you know, people at the highest levels of the organization just listen more effectively to people across the organization. And while I was enjoying that very much and it was going very well, unfortunately it wasn't directly serving my calling in a way that I thought I could more effectively. When I look at technology, I look at just incredible potential for community because it's something that's all in our pockets, right phones. We all have computing power as powerful as our laptops in our pockets. I actually have. I just got a new phone.

44:46 It's more powerful, it's got more RAM than my laptop. So you know, we have all this great technology, and to me, that's great potential. And I think where I saw this opportunity was, hey, how do we actually get each other to use these devices in a way where we are serving each other and not just passing information? And that just yeah, thats chewed at me for so long that unfortunately I needed to leave my last company. I understand, my friend, that's what happened to me too. I get it. Well, I'm really intrigued with just the I guess the clarity of how you describe what you do at Pensive. You say, we use perspective and reflection to strengthen mental health, and then you went on, you see, mechanically we use sharing in a feelings wheel techniques we learn from mental health practice to promote belonging and peace of mind. I did download the app, I have not been able to get into it yet because it gives me I got stuck and that was on my side. So that I want you to tell us more about about this notion of this feelings wheel. Yes, the feelings wheel is how we are trying, how we Pensive are trying to courage all of us as a society to take a step with feelings together.

46:06 We're in a place where, you know, people are saying mental health is health, and that's awesome, But when we go a level deeper, just one level deeper, it really does come down to can we look at feelings like information informing our identities. That's the next step we have to take in for us to get there. And for men, I know that the issue is still if I talk about feelings, somebody will consider me weak just in general. Right. Shaquille O'Neal right now is in major headlines because he says he never shares his emotions with anybody, because he says if you tell it, and especially to women. He says, if you tell it to a woman, they will throw that right back and use that against you.

46:49 Right. So this is still extremely prevalent today. And then for women, what makes it very challenging is women know how to articulate their feelings, but women are afraid of being a burden with their negative feelings on their peers, and so even when their peers are trying to offer that space out, they'll shy away from it. And yeah, for fear of being a burden and burdening others. So that's to me where I see this wonderful potential of hey, what if we use a digital space right to be able to inform each other how we are being right? Because the more we neglect this, I don't know why we just keep turning away from this. Looking at feelings like data is the way that we like to put it. And that's that's our goal right now. Our mission is just to help people see feelings as data.

47:38 We're wearing technology to sleep to see when we flinch or sneeze or cough, right, And that's entertaining for the first few weeks, but at some point that's not what's going to help you get in touch with yourself or your peers any deeper in the journey of a stock or words astonishing moments. Right, it's feelings that are the fuel, and I hope that technology can yeah, play a positive, helpful role in that journey. It's fantastic. Now we're almost I did the close of the show here and I want to give you a chance just to share the vision of pensive. So listeners and viewers, from my vantage point, what I teach for my practice is vision is what happens when you're the purpose of your organization is fully realized. So it's a futuristic view. So for you, what's the vision of pensive, oh Man? For me, the vision of pensive is where, you know, I think the ultimate purpose of technology is to find this like symbiotic relationship with humanity. And the signal for me that pensive will have found a symbiotic relationship with humanity is when we talk about value and feelings in a way that authenticates our experiences, the ones that we buy into, the one that we reflect on. Yeah, you know, it's just everyday language where it's like,

49:13 hey, my core values, for example, I probably should have shared this earlier are loyalty, compassion, and courage, And through those three lenses, I really can boil down my entire life experiences of my proudest moments and my toughest ones. But yeah, I think we just have to take one step by practicing being and hopefully technology can help us get towards that beautiful Ginya, and this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for lending your heart and soul and beautiful brain to working on a purpose. And glad to know you as well. Thank you so much for having me. Of course, listeners and viewers, you're going to learn more about this man and what he's doing with his team. So this is a ginin shin we've been on the air with. You can check out what he and his team at Pensive are doing at pe civ. Is how you spell pensive pe nciv dot com.

50:04 You can also then find the app with the same name and check that out. It's free, downloaded and get started, and then join us next week for another delicious serving of inspiring thought, leadership on creating destination workplaces, and other such matters. See you there. Remember, work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four CY. Together we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.