The Curse and Gift of Being “Driven”

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed 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 explicitor implies 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.

0:49 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 Elise Cortez. Welcome back to Working in a Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passionate price since February twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning in this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If wed before and you don't know me, I'm an organizational psychologist, workforce advisor and management consultant, speaker and author. My team and I at gusta Now help companies to enlive, and and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture, inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by meaning and purpose. You can learn about what we do and how we can help you by visiting gustodeshnow dot com. I'm or my personal site at least Cortes dot com. With us today is doctor Doug Breckman. He is a psychologist at I Am Driven.

1:43 He works with highly driven leaders and other highly driven people who often who often add and ADHD spectrum to help them stop their cycle of shame and self sabotage so that they can achieve the success and happiness they were designed for. He's the co author of Driven Understanding and Hard Seeing the Genetic Gifts of Entrepreneurs, Navy Seals and professional athletes and Maybe You, and a new book just coming out called Sheep and Wolves why a small percentage of the neurodivergent population may be responsible for all the problems in the world, and the solution. We'll be talking about the characteristics of this what ten percent of the population that are highly driven and how they can learn to be effective in life through the right structured support systems. These ersure today from Nashville, Tennessee, Doctor Doug A. Hardy, Welcome to Working on Purpose.

2:29 Thank you, Elise. It's really great to know you. You probably changed my life, sir, So thanks a lot for that. I have so much insight reading your book and went, oh my gosh, wow. That's my favorite Amazon review. It says a very uncomfortable autobiography. So it's a yeah, it's kind of a little crey close for home for a lot of people. Yeah, we'll talk more about that offline. But wow, so big, thank you. So it's really amazing to me that you know, you focus on only ten percent of the population, talk about a niche group. So let's talk a little bit about this specific group year ten percent that you're talking about.

3:10 This is the driven population. So how would you describe them and why do you want to work with them? Well, it's it's I am a license psychologist and both iopsyche and clinical psyche, and so it's a clinically speaking it it's called a whole bunch of different things, and so categorization is not really a big fan of that. And so it's a collection of neuro divergent and genetic divergence that really encapsulates and I generously give it ten percent, but it's really probably three or four percent to be you know, kind of swear in the middle. Then you get the fringes. But it's if you got it, you know you got it, and if you know somebody who has it, it's really that were different. And so it was, you know, when I entered psychology and I went into grad school in nineteen ninety one, and it everybody gets into psychology to figure out their own crap. And I was headstrong into really understanding myself. I always knew I was different and tried to fit in and that led to a whole bunch of whole bunch of issues. But in nineteen ninety one, when they released this Time magazine article came out with we found the alcoholism gene, and that was the d r D two dash A one allele gene. Thirty five, thirty six years ago, forty years ago,

4:44 they really didn't understand genetics, and so it was the nature versus nurture controversy still existed, and in the last ten years, particular the last five epigenetically, the argument is that nature versus nurture is gone, and so meaning that our genes interact with the environment and turn on and off, and so we being the drivens, are a collection of very different people, and we are primarily different in the way our brain works. And so the default model network is this operating system the brain. And so we have an operating system that literally is operating three times as fast, connecting four times as many brain parts simultaneously. So it's literally our brains are working differently. All the hardware is the saying, but the software is running a very quick, fast, different program. So literally we see the world in a different way.

5:50 I appreciate how you'd also described this driven population that you talk about here, just so many different things about them that some of this, of course, being that you're chronically disconnected and discontented. I thought that was a really interesting I'm in this category to a certain extent too, I'm looking more on the periphery, not smack down the middle, but I could recognize it a chronic dopamine efficiency that creates persistent discontent. All kinds of interesting things, high sensory and emotional intensity, fast pattern recognition, as as you said, with poor impulse breaking. An interesting sort of collection of how to describe this group. And the easiest way, kind of the simplest way to describe it is really the science behind it. You put us in a functional MRI, and the functional MRI is just way of actually seeing in real time what's activated in the brain. Currently, most people ninety plus ninety five percent of people, when you put them in a functional MRI, they have a nice ball of activity in the left proof frontal lobe. It's the executive function. And what the executive function does for most people, it is a It tunes out information, and so it allows them to selectively tune into information, and interestingly, it puts into a series of sequential events. And so if you think about, you know, the hunter farmer theory, where most people over the last

7:22 five six, seven thousand years adapted to the agricultural revolution, and if you think about what it takes to survive as a farmer's farming, and so they are wired. You put their finger in the ground, they put corn in it, and then they pat it, and then they water it, and then they patiently wait and all of those attributes then you know, lead to their survival. But there's five six percent of us that when you put us in a functional MRI, we don't have all of activity here. Really interestingly, the back of our heads lighted up, which is called the ziphital, and what that does is literally it's where eesight is, and so we use our eyesight to go through the world. Byproduct of that is we have something called hypofrontality and this big collection of symptoms around add or ADHD, two very different things, but the similarity is this frontal lobe that is hypoactive, meaning that it's underactive. In comparison to the people that have this big ball energy, we have little dots of activity all over.

8:31 The farmer sees the world as a series of sequential steps. We see the world as a big ball of potential activity all at the same time. And we have a horrible sense of time. I mean, we are late to every day. We are constantly in this world where we then, with all this activity going on, we can draw lines unique combination of variables that other people can't see. So, you know, we tell our stories or we try to explain our vision for the company, and you know, people look at us like we're crazy because we, you know, are literally seeing connections between eighteen different things, where the normal brain, you know, is only seeing connections between two or three. So you know, it is a truly a different world that we live in.

9:24 But it wasn't made for us. So I'll tell you, you know, candidly. I took your assessment and I came out there's ten attributes that, of course are measured, and I'm eight of them. I'm I'm shown on the assessment is above average, And I thought, okay, that's you know, there's it's probably you know, maybe it's not. Who knows. Maybe I was in a weird mooder when edw with the assessment. But then I read your book, tug I did. Somebody worked with me years ago, and I told her how I like to finish my Saturday afternoon is my time to read my books for the for the podcast, and she goes, oh my gosh, you read books like I eat cookie. So your book, your first book, Driven is three hundred and fifty pages. I easily just sat down and just about it in four hours, and you know, you know, wrote the notes and highlighted what I wanted to have for my notes, and I mean, I just couldn't put it down. I was like, oh my gosh.

10:16 I was like, every other page, I'm like that that's me. That explains me. And I can't tell you how. I don't know. If I'm sobered by it or if I am scared, I don't know, but I just am. I'm amazed the work that you're doing. I appreciate that, and it's for me. And why I wrote Driven is I prior to writing and so I wrote it published in seventeen or eighteen there about seventeen, yeah, seventeen. Prior to that, you know, I was calling it the entrepreneurial mind. I was calling it all these different things. And I happened to actually be working in maybe special warfare, working in the PTSD world, and they're all driven too, and so it was this, you know, and it is we're drawn into this high risk, hyper you know, chaotic world and that's where we thrive. And one of the early authors on this, Tom Hartman, was talking about how you know, in you look at a pool of bacteria, thousand of the same bacteria, there's about three four five percent of that bacteria that's waiting for rapidly changing environments.

11:38 And you know, the ice age hits, they're going to survive. And so that's us. When you know, the meteorite hits or the next ice age, or you know, AI comes onto the scene, when chaos and all of that new activity, we just thrive in it. So it makes sense, you know, we're a bunch of animals. Why we would be so resist in the population. You know why it hasn't this been baited out? Because things change and you know, and so it's a it's a very relieving thing for a lot of people because we structure our sense of self or our identity very differently. That's right, when we go into a normal you know, a farmer's or a typical neurotypical psychologist's office, we can run circles around them and we literally we can finish their sentences and they think we're crazy or sociopathic, or they don't like they don't know what they're looking at. And so large the biggest difference, this left prefrontal is an identity machine. And if you think about you know, ten thousand years ago, there's mostly drivens running around on the planet, you know, after this massive meteorite hit fourteen thousand years ago and we're figuring out survival. But as the agricultural revolution and population grew and most people you know, as I always say, turned into butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, they had this

13:09 nice channel of this is how I survived, This is what I do. You want to take a driven person and make them crazy, is ask them to tell us who you are and what do you mean? Who like that? You know, because we don't have that consistent you know, experience through life with our thoughts. We're thinking all over the place, and you know we tend to and all of us need a sense of self. Most drivens tend to use their emotion as identity. And the genetics behind it, you know, the dopamine receptors number two, which is boredom, the boredom gene. And you know, if you're a farmer, you need to tolerate boredom. You literally are wired to watch stuff grow. Yeah, as I always joked with all my drivens, you know, I'm unemployable. I truly am and most of my guys are our employed, so they have to start their own thing. But what boredom is is very simply, it's a feeling that there's something missing or wrong.

14:08 I understand it well, and. You know that when that gets folded into identity, there's something missing or wrong with me. And these are the addictive genetics and anything that takes you out of that feeling that there's something missing or wrong with me, oh potentially become addicted. It also explains why we're so defensive. You want to drive a driven person crazy. It's accuse them of being you know, something wrong with you, and no opportunity to explain themselves. We lose our minds. It's like, what do you mean? And you don't understand, you don't understand, and that it's coming from this well of feeling like we don't fit in and you know, the dopamine receptor number four a little bit more interesting, and that's the primary difference between a d D, which is you know, an ADHD and the AH is the hyperactivity or impulsivity, which I don't have a lot, and so I really missed the add ADHD diagnosis, but it is the grass is greener Jean or the Foamo gene. If you're a missing out gene as a as a hunter. You know, I feel in I sense that there's more Willie, ma'am.

15:18 It's more opportunity over the next till right. I'm always choosing the siny things in front of me, and it is you know, well, isn't that just add Yes? But it is so much more than that, And if you get into driven, it really explains, you know, why we're different, how we're different. And as I often say, you know, it is a farmer's world. It is not our world. We have to learn it. There's a reason I was telling you im talking about my daughter about your work, and she's always told me how silly I have been over the years. I'm just simply am not able to do a nine to five job. I'm not able to go work for somebody and be stapled into the chair. I mean, I'll work twelve hours, sixteen hours a day, but just don't make me do it, you know, under terms with you know, my daarriers table to the chair, you know, in these hours kind of thing.

16:06 Yeah, we work well, we can work well with others. We do not work for others. Very work, very well. Yeah, it really is bring out the faster, easier, softer, better way to do it. And why are you telling me to do your way when I can? And so the world, you know, the world is. The world can be really tough for us though, because we don't fit in and we often scare the crap out of people that aren't like us. Yes, I understand, guilty is charged. On that note, since we're scaring the crap out of people, let's let let's let them at least have a break while that's happening to them. I'm your host, doctor really score tes run here with doctor Doug Brackman, a psychologist that I am driven.

16:48 He works with highly driven leaders and other highly driven people off an a D d ADHD spectrum to help them stop their cycle of shame and self sabotage so they're can to achieve the success and happiness they were designed for. We've been getting in to what is driven. After the break, we're going to talk about the dark side of driven. We'll 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 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 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 at least send an email to Elise A. L i Se at eliscortes dot com.

18:06 Now back to working on purpose. Fifting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If you are just joining us, my guest is doctor Doug Brockman, the author of Driven Understanding and Harnessing the Genet Gifts Shared by entrepreneurs, Navy Seals, pro athletes, and maybe you, and also a forthcoming book coming out shortly called Sheep and Wolves. Why a small percentage of the neurodivergent population may be responsible for all the problems in the world and the solution. So I do want to situate a little bit about just you know, before we get into the dark side of the driven. If you can speak a little bit to the possibility of being driven, what can we do being driven?

18:52 I do that in my book. I mean Da Vinci and all of your received jobs and Gates and all of the you know, the list of people that have been diagnosed with add or fit into the driven criteria. We are basically the ones that have shaped. And moved the world. We really are. And you know it's and you know in my next work that I'm really it is coming out literally this week, is we are also responsible for a lot of the problems in the world. And so we you know, and I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs over the last thirty years, and you know, the justification rationalization of how we how our minds can justify just about anything, you know, and typically, you know, we are not very We're really not risk averse. We like taking risk and often that's means breaking the rules and so writing the edge of the rules. And we always get accused of being sociopathic, which very simply is you know, the the social norms and the rules don't necessarily apply to me. Drivens we tend to live by this spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law.

20:11 And you know, we don't have that part of the brain that you know, will just follow the rules, and you know, you don't make it very far in life following the rules. And the particular is an entrepreneur creating companies. I mean you have to you have to see around the rules to really what is the bigger objective. But if that objective is to make money on a quarterly basis, we can we can create a pretty horrible system for a lot of people. I think that's coming to a head right now. So it's a you know, driven I think there's a lot of responsibility that hopefully comes with it. If you're hearing this and you're driven, and it's a gift first, but it is a curse.

20:57 Yeah, I appreciate that full perspective. So that's the dark side, yes, but also too it can be very destructive, self destructive, self sabotaging you mentioned in your books. Yeah, and that's what gets people into my office. And it there's car a Young, big fan of young. He was driven, big fan, and what he always said was it six You know, men are either sixteen or forty five when they enter his office. At sixteen, you're out to conquer the world. At forty five, if you've conquered the world, you realize it isn't the world you needed to conquer its yourself, and that you know, sabotage was my doctoral dissertation and I looked at you know, why January sucks at the gym and why is you know, who's really in charge of me? You know, the difference between you know, the neocortex and actually the biology of the body. So I get into that and driven. I won't go and do it here too deep, but it it's it's a very interesting exploration that I believe drivens eventually have to go on because if you don't go into this inner world of the driven, if you stay in the outer world, it's pretty quickly deduced that you know, survival in this world is pretty damn easy. It really is.

22:21 And so once you've reached that point of you know, my outer my outer world looks great, but my inner world, this feeling that I'm not enough, this feeling of imposter syndrome legs driven. You know, that is what we are is, you know, this feeling that I'm not enough, and that needs to be explored if you want to, if you don't want that to steer your world. Yeah, I was really intrigued. You talked about the identity issue in the last segment, but I was really intrigued that that you talk about how you know, you know, ignoring the shadow doesn't make it disappear, and he says it gives it the steering the steering wheel, which is fascinating, and so talking about how pain gets that that isn't felt, gets passed on families, do these cultures do this, et cetera.

23:08 But you also say that we are the ones who carry generational pain until it becomes unbearable. Yeah, and that notion of doing this work is so important. Yeah, that's really getting into the work of My true passion is trauma healing, and that happened my doctoral chairperson, Jim Spira, and we made at Berkeley was a guy named Peter Levine, right levin the world back in the nineties, and it has shaped everything I do. He being driven to ish. But the influence of actually who's in charge of me? Is it? You know, the monkey mind, is that this problem solving the slip in my head always in my base biology, that's that's in the body, you know, very simply this is the brain, this whole thing that we're living in this line. M yeah, and you know, the felt sense that I'm not enough drives us to great success. But when the outer world is, you know, going really well and there's not a lot of chaos, we tend to come up with great ideas to bring chaos back into our world. And the sabotage stories that I have are just phenomenal guys that blow up their worlds, you know, with the next great idea, or they have the typical big exit. You know, they have a seven, eight figure, nine figure exit, and you know, everything is

24:38 great and then all of a sudden, you know, three years later, just like lottery winners, you blow up your world. So I dive deep into that with my guys about you know, how to actually stop the sabotage and cycle, which is trauma healing. Fascinating stuff. You. By the way, now you can't get away from me, Doug, because you're just this is fascinating work. I'm really really, I'm in. I'm in. So let's let's dive into your your new book coming out here, Sheep and Wolves. Let's first start by what an intriguing title title right there, Doug. But let's for our listeners and years who haven't read the book yet, Like I have distinguished sheep and wolves first. Yeah, and you know the just calling most people's sheep and it's you know, I struggled with that forever. You know, it is not meant to be a put down sheeaper compliance.

25:30 Sheep are not a problem to society. Sheep follow the rules, you know, they're not They're not stirring the pot. And you know, the wolves and typically you know, big farm and big food, all of these things that are being discovered now through both the Internet, which is a phenomenal Gutenberg's printing press, on steroids. I think I call it. You know, it's a way of disseminating information that you can't any you can't hide from your past anymore. And that is a you know, with Epstein files and everything else we're facing now, none of that is new. I mean, you know, well, the world's terrible. None of the world's actually never been safer ever, you know ever in the history that we can you know, recorded history. Well, how can you say that safe? Well, you look at our health, you look at the wars, you look at you know, the chances of me, or you are dying in a starvation or you know, God forbid it, you get in an infection. One hundred and fifty years ago, you were dead.

26:39 And so as the world has become this beautiful safe place, the collective is freaking out. And you know, trauma comes up when the world becomes safe. So when the guys come back from Afghanistans, when they freak out, it's not when they're in combat. And all my team guys and all the guys I've worked with that go back, you know, they want to go back into the familiar world of chaos, and we're seeing it. We're literally witnessing it now. It's chaos is coming back into the world and it's just you know, as a collective, I think we're But you try to explain that to someone who has this very dominant left prefrontel that's seeing linear, that doesn't see the big picture. You know, they think you're crazy, they think you're a conspiracy theorist or whatever. But it's like, no, don't you see it? And that's what you know? Second grade, third grade, fourth grade, in my own experience, and why why doesn't the rest of the class see how stupid this is? Like this is you know, they're they're training us to be assembly line workers. This is not going to apply to me. But you know, if if you are in the category of you know, normal, you know, this just looks like, you know, what is happening for drivens?

27:59 You know, for all uh, the ones like me and the ones like us. Don't you see how this and this and this can actually go together. This is like, this is catastrophe happening. And now with AI and the internet, you can see under the covers, you know what what other drivens you know, they're running big food and big farm and using quarterly report you know, quarterly justifications for profits and you've got to do it for the No, you're you're hurting a lot of people and you know, as me compassionate mostly on the trauma healing path person, it's like, what are we going to do? You know?

28:40 So it's it's really the drivens that are you know, both destroying the world, and I think we are the ones that can see it and make some changes. And so it's it's a it's important time for drivens to to get this message out and really start talking about what are we going to do? Mm hmm, Well, I think, you know, just starting to recognize that you are a driven I mean, so that was incredibly Just recognizing for me that I'm somewhere on that spectrum really was It's very It helped me understand my life, my world, my choice is so much better and so that already is equipping me to create some of that necessary structure that we rebel against. So it's that's part of it. So I think your work is really important, just starting with the idea of helping aple to recognize if you're in this camp, if you're one of the if you're a wolf. So let's talk a little bit about about, you know, this idea of burden and gifts. So first we've talked a lot about the burdens.

29:38 I guess you know, we see, we care, we can, we can sense and take in an awful lot. That's part of the burden. Any other burdens you want a service, We're to talk about the gifts. Well, how long do we have? I very young? And then my interpretation of everything, so is it leed or is it gold? That the answer is yes, yeah, the alchemy model. But you know, hypersensitivity, we are we are we are some really big hearted sensitive people. And you know the the r SKI or the you know, reactive abandonment stuff that we get into and this, you know, intense fear of rejection. This this, you know, one of the primary differences between sheep and wolves is really the cheaper herding animal h G r D.

30:25 And you know what happens when a cheetah runs into a heard of gazelle's they scatter. Everybody's on your own, you know, And so you see that and everyone they're all scrambling into their own camps and everybody's splitting up. Where wolves are a pack animal, what happens when a bear attacks one of the wolves and a wolf pack is all of the other wolves coming come. And that's what drivens are really craving is somebody to have my back. Of the hardest groups I've done is when you have six you have seven man you know, Navy seal teams and there's normally eight and ones miss saying man, those groups you know, where they've bless somebody. Just what drives Navy seals is love. And you know what drives a true and I work I get you know, I work with C suites primarily, and you know, when you get the C suite and most are drivens. Working as a true wolf pack, it is a cheat code. But if they're not working as atrual wolf pack, it is a match made in hell. So is it a gift or is it a curse? It is both. But you got to learn to really step out of that experience and you know, operationalize and create external to us what's missing internally and that that is structure and routine and you know we have to create the executive feature out of our heads.

31:52 Yeah, you know, this works. This has always worked best for me when I have you know, people on my team that can kind of help provide that and really like some tell me what to do. I mean, I need you to do these two things by nine o'clock. Okay, I'll do that. It works, It really. Works, and it is it is a it is a farmer's world. It is their world. And you know, we by default are often put into positions of leadership because we see the big picture. And you know, if we can train ourselves to actually let go of control. Most of us are pretty control freaky. It's just faster for me to do it myself. And that's not true. No, But clarification and teaching others how to really communicate with us and how to actually communicate with them in a way that is, you know, you don't need to explain the entire big picture. You just need to explain the little piece that they're responsible for. Task it to them, give them two weeks and then I'll come back. You know, an elon classic Drip and he's a little bit more on others. He's more on the spectrum some but he comes in once a month, you know, to each of his four primary platforms, looks at the big problem, gives it, you know, the solution, and it gets out of the way and lets them work and comes back in three weeks and then and so that capacity to let go of control is something that drivens have to learn that

33:23 doesn't come naturally to us. The meditation and all of the the deeper work comes in and so it's you know, and and religion is something that most of us have to struggle with as drivens because we really do have a strong distaste for hypocrisy. And so yes, they may be saying they're this and that and this, but we see right through them and it's like, yeah, but don't you see what a piece of crap, you really are, No, they don't where you know spirituality is something then you know the I always joke about that, it's not actually a joke, but you know, religion is for people that are scared of going to help. Spirituality for people that have been to hell. Most drivens have been to hell and so self created. And you know that the capacity to actually own your world and take responsibility as a driven for your own world and really embrace the spiritual path is that's where we turn into us potentially superheroes.

34:29 Oh hang on to that thought. I want to die more into that. But let's grab our last break. I'm your host, doctor Realise Cortes, who are on there with doctor Doug Brackman. He's a psychologist that I am driven. He worked with highly driven leaders and other highly driven people of an ADD and ADHD spectrum to help them stop their cycle of shame and self sabotage so they can achieve the success and happiness they were designed for. You've been noticing we've been talking a lot about both the gifts and the burdens of the driven. After the break, we are going to a little bit deeper into this world, talk about the responsibility of the driven and becoming carriers of healing and be right back.

35:18 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning imfused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. 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 al I se at a least Coortes dot com.

36:03 Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Laice Cortes. If you are just now joining us, my guest is dog doctor Doug Brackman, the author of Driven, Understanding and Harnessing the Genetic Gifts shared by entrepreneurs, Navy Seals, pro athletes and maybe you, and also his latest one just coming out now sheep and wolves. Why is small percentage of the neurodiversent population. Maybe we're small for all the problems in the world and the solution. Okay, so that was really intriguing what you just teased us with on the just before the break, This idea of religion versus spirituality. It makes complete sense to me. I've never been drawn to religion.

36:44 I've been exposed to several but never been drawn. None of them make any sense to me in terms of hanging on to that as the thing for me. But spirituality, yes, I think also the idea that we've gone through to hell and that makes a lot of sense to me as well. So very very interesting insights here that you're just dazzling me with. You mentioned also the responsibility of the driven, and I really thought this is important to talk about. You say in your the latest book that if you are driven, you will influence others. It's not a choice. So your intensity, perception, energy all shape the nervous systems around you. So let's talk a bit about the responsibility of the driven. Well, it in my work with all the Navy seals, and we are good people and that that for the most part, And you know, the rationalization, justification. What gets in the way is the trauma, and trauma is uh, you know, well I don't have trauma. Everybody has trauma.

37:45 That's you know semantically, I don't want to get into big trauma capital T versus low T whatever, but it it is what shapes the way we steer our ship. You know, it is this unconscious it's unconscious is not a mysteries right below your nose. It's all recorded in the body. And as you are, you know, you're not responsible for what happened to you, but you're responsible for the healing. You're responsible for you know, what happens. And I've worked with some pretty outrageous people that have you know, making lots of money. You know, back in the wild West of the early Internet, these guys were making money hand over fist, you know, selling all kinds of stuff to Grandma that gramma didn't need, and you know, getting their credit cards and you know they're not really hurting anybody, but they knew what was wrong, you know, and that that that justification, rationalization. And it's because largely, you know, the heart is is a trauma. It's an organ and it's it's a thinking machine. And lots of new research coming out about that gut and the heart. You're both thinking.

39:00 But when you have a frozen heart or dorsally froze heart, you know, you're unaware of your impact on others, so to speak, but you know it on you, You know it, you knowwhere, and that fear of actually going on the inside and really taking responsibility for healing yourself. And I say it in my new book very directly, it is not a choice. If you're driven, you know, it's just a matter of time before you get to a place where you know your world is falling apart and you can blame no one else. And one of the biggest differences between it makes me crazy about most of the world.

39:44 Is this a thing called locus of control. And locus of control is the world happening to me or the world happening for me? And this is it my fault or is it your fault? And hurting animals or you know, farmers tend to actually have external locus of control. They really, you know, like to explain how the weather was bad and this with then and that's why the crops failed. We did everything what we did last year, just the same, and it just just happened. And so we're going to keep doing what we did again and again and again because it works, and that that model for the left pre funnel, that executive function tends to actually validate. You know, they it's not my fault. I get to blame them or blame them and blame them and blame them. But if you're a hunter like me and you're after a rabbit, there's no excuse why that rabbit got away except for me.

40:44 And so drivens tend to have incredibly high locus of control and we actually think everything is our fault, and so we became this. You know, I could have called it the shame based identity, probably wouldn't have sold very many, but it is that, you know, feeling that, yeah, it's all my fault and I'm the biggest pizza crop in the world, and you know, and these are the addictive genetics. So it is the wonderful thing about locals of control is it's malleable, being that it's something that you can adjust appropriately because everything is both external and internal variables and there's a curiosity around that. That's the driven tree.

41:32 It's much more difficult than I don't work with non drivens. I tend to struggle in that world because it's a I have a very dignals time with people that don't take high personal responsibility of. Their life, understand and speaking of that, part of what also drew me about what you're doing too is you have a whole section of becoming carriers of healing in this new book that you're putting out, and you talk about it. You say you don't heal others by teaching them. You heal them by being regulated in your own body, feeling your own pain instead of exporting it, slowing down instead of overriding. So all this is really it's really interesting to me, you know, at a time when you know technology and AI is surfacing so much in terms of who we are as humans, where we're distinct, et cetera.

42:18 So I think this notion of becoming carriers of healing is really compelling and hard work. It really hard work, and it did. Classic example is the founder, you know, the founder's visionaries or whatever you want to call them, the startup guy who you know gets the gets the company going, and you were wired for that world because you're in survival mode. The company might go away, and but once you have a real company and it's running, and you're no longer in survival mode. They kick us out, you know they do, because that we're not we can't run at that speed anymore, and so that you know, fragility of what world we're in.

43:04 But when I get my drivens to, you know, with work with trauma healing, breathwork, meditation and all of the amazing stuff that's happening in the trauma healing world, come out of survival mode. We come into companies and see things that we can create, environments that are absolutely magic to work in. Magic to work in. You've got to do the work first, otherwise otherwise it's you know, as Peter Levine always said, you know, trauma is like tuberculosis. It just wants to spread. You know, hurt people, hurt people, heal people also heal people. So healing is also just as infectious. And you know, the guys that I have worked with for years that are in these companies that they run, you know, people love them because it's a wolf pack. I got it.

44:03 Well, we're coming closer to the end of the end. I've just show and I don't want to leave people without some hope here, some possibility here besides calling you and working with you. You say that the first step in taking charge of your genetics is building the right environment for your personality, giving you the structure that you need. And I really could relate to that point. I could relate to that. So if you could talk a bit more about helping what they help, giving them some reins to be able to take a good, healthy control over their lives. It is immediately what comes to mind is good enough is not a feeling. And for drivens, if you're hearing this, that that is like that kick be profound. Nothing will ever feel good enough to a driven And that's the joke about my doctoral dissertation. It never felt good enough.

44:58 Iris shook my hand, grounding doctor, first guy would ever call me a doctor. My inner experience was in my monkey mind said haha, he bought it. You know, I got the joke is is it was? It was good enough. It's on the wall. It was a check mark, you know. And so learning how to actually not use our emotion to steer the world as the primary thing I got to hear. As you're a driven, then you got to create, you know, an external way of validating what is good enough. You know, finance, romance and health very simply. You know, it's my finances good enough, which means I'm not struggling with my paying my mortgage and my basic needs are met, and you know that's a actual external thing. How you feel about it can then be separate. And health. You know, I never felt like I was healthy enough and wound up doing eleven years of iron Man triathlons the crap out of my body. And it is you know, the magic two seconds when you cross the finish line of an iron Man and then you turn around and look at the time and then all of a sudden, ah good.

46:10 And so that capacity to separate, that is the real message for if you want to start this driven healing process is create reality jets. You know, my exercise is good enough, my health is good enough and can always be better, and my finances are good enough and can be better. You know, I'm not trying to get rid of this internal feeling that you know it's not enough, and I think you know, big food, big farmer need to actually create that as a model. Rather than more is better, it's not more money is not better. Two more questions here, So briefly, how do you help support people? I know, I've looked at your linked profile on your website various ways you can work with people, But for listeners and viewers who don't know, how do you help support people on their journey?

47:01 Yeah, I'm a clinician. I'm one on one is That's where my magic is. Obviously you can't scale that, and I've had multiple attempts to scale, you know, and I call it scale porn. You know that everybody's got a scale. No, you don't. You know, you don't. My group Dynamics and we heal in groups and driven men run men's groups, and I love it. I absolutely love that. One of my favorite things to do is I'm meditation teacher, been teaching meditation for twenty years, and I teach meditation at gunpoint, and working with Randy Kelly, we came up with a way of actually, very simply to understand meditation at gunpoint is I integrated long range shooting. We shoot out to a mile seventeen and eighty yards, but very big guns, and there is no recoil in the present and so if you're anticipating recoil and you're scared, you're not present.

47:59 So learning how who actually disinhibit the body and soften into One of my favorite names for God. There's forty three names for God in the Bible. One of them is presence, divine presence and being able to really harness that gift. Presence and disinhibiting the body is the core beginning place where trama healing is and then you know you can actually touch your potential. And that's the greatest fear of every driven is really really embracing what we can do with this way we're wired. It makes most of my guys cry. And as a driven woman to you, every single time I've done this, I've had brand new shooters, have brand new women who have never shot a gun, outshoot twenty five year baby sealed veteran snipers.

48:51 So I read that in your book. I thought that was amazing. It's yeah, driven women are often joke. If I can get a thousand of you guys together, all healed up, you guys will run the world. I mean, sounds good to me. Please so we' we have gotten to the end. Who already, Doug, It is such an honor and just amazing to get to learn from you, to read your books, to have gone through your assessment and have you on the air and sharing with my listeners around the globe. Thank you so much for coming and working on a purpose. I had a blast. Yet. You're welcome, very welcome. Anytime. It's do it again. Absolutely you can rub which you can't I from me now, All right, listeners and viewers, you are going to want to learn more about doctor Doug Brackman, the work he does with highly Driven and his books Driven and Sheep and Wolves. You can start by visiting his website. It's very simple. It is I am Driven dot com. Last week and you missed the live show, you can always catch it be your recording podcast. We were on air with you Dira Carro, the author of Hardcore Soft Skills, A guy to work with humans. We talked about how and why learning what have been called soft skills makes such a difference in motivating and engaging teams and nobody is some of the several core soft skills sheet teachers.

50:01 See you next week for another nourishing conversation to create destination workplaces where people actually want to come to work and give their best. 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 C. Why 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.