What to Do When “Success” Leaves You Feeling Stuck and Unfulfilled?

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 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 it's 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.

0:45 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 Cortes. Welcome back to Working in Purpose program. Great to have you back. They're strating again this week. This show has been brought to you with passion and pride since February twenty twenty five, and I'm happy to share that it is listed on the top ten most inspirational leadership podcast on the web. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we have not met yet, you don't know me. I'm an organizational psychologist and lagotherapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a culture in leadership activated by meaning and purpose. Our mission is to help our clients create a destination workplace where people flocked to join, are intrinsically motivated to perform at their best, can grow into their fuller potential, and are committed to stay in dynamically deliver on the company's mission, which all translates to bottom line results for you. You can learn more about and Now. We can work together at gusto dash now dot com or Alascortes dot com. Getting in today's program we have with us today. Doctor Maya dicit dicit al right, I'll get her name right. She's a personality psychologist specializing in adult development. She is an Associate professor of organizational behavior and hr management, the executive director of the Self Development Laboratory and the academic director of the Rockland Executive Coaching Certificate Program at the Rotman School of Management, University of

2:17 Toronto. She is the author of The Possible Self, a leader's guide to personal development, which we're talking about today. She joined today from Toronto, Canada, Doctor Diejit. Welcome to working on per Purpose, My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Of course I told you before we got on air. I learned so much from your beautiful book, Maya. This is just gorgeous. I mean, it's wonderful to be delighted when I encounter new principles that I have them before. So we're going to dive into this for our listeners of yours, they can learn as well. Right, So, the first thing that I really want to start with celebrating is you say in your book. The central premise of your book is that no matter how long we have been stuck or how hard we have struggled to change, we can get unstuck and we can keep growing. I love that. That's so exciting and empowering. You know, I find that people sometimes consider getting a little stagnant as a part of just the normal aging process. I think, well, I guess this is what adulthood is. It's to be a little tired and very drained, kind of apathetic and you just have to go through your duties. But that's actually not our natural state, and we can enter into it no matter whether at twenty or forty or sixty or eighty or ninety nine.

3:36 You know, I really of course I help develop leaders and cultures, and I do encounter people the same things like, hey, that's just the way I am, that's just in my personality or whatever. And I think, you know, that's what they think. That's their hall pass to just sort of stay as they are and you know, not try to work on changing and growing. So I like that you are definitively directly challenging that. Absolutely. There's tons of research showing that we are a continually growth you know. It's not like your plans and grow to maturity and just stay there. It's we are continually growing all the way until our very last breath. So I really want people to understand that seriously, because I think sometimes people think in live stage is oh, this is my development life stage, and this is the one where I just settle in or I retire. There's only more and more if you really want to fulfill, to get to your purpose, to get to your potential, it is always more growth and not as in this kind of heavy Oh I have to grow, but in this exciting I get to do this. I still get to grow until the very last moment.

4:42 I love it. I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't believe that, of course. Okay, so let's dive in here. So I love your will of self concept, and I appreciate that you come right out and you say that one of the reasons we fail to change is that we often focus our attempts on just our behaviors. So if you could talk a little bit about, you know, why do we tend to f is there? And what's wrong with just focusing on our behaviors? So, you know, I find that that's the message that people get a lot from the environment, even from psychologists here. There's a lot of books out there that says, really, let's focus on behavior and behavior change. And I think the reason why people fix it on behavior is because it's visible, right, So it's your behavior, you see my behavior, no matter your intent or your emotions is the behavior I have to deal with, So then I would fix it on that, so it's visible, it's measurable. I can tell you know if you have decided, let's say you want to exercise, I can tell whether or not you exercise and how many minutes. And that visibility and measurability and focus on it makes us forget that we are not just our behavior, but all the other parts of the self. That we are our emotions, we are our thoughts, we are our motivations or desires, and we're basically the history our body, which carries the history of everything we've learned in our life lifetime that we carry with ourselves. So those are four parts really, and behavior is just one part of it, and I would argue not the crucial part for change. I think if we're a chess board,

6:15 I think of the behavior is a pond because it's so impacted by it. Your behavior is impacted by what you want, it's impacted by your emotions, it's impacted by your thoughts, it's impacted by your history. So in a sense, it's just the end result of the dynamic of all the other forces. And when people just want to change what they're doing is there. Let's say that you decide that you want to wake up in the morning and you want to exercise every morning, and you're just focusing using your real power to change the behavior. But you're doing you're taking one part of the wheel, You're taking one spoke and you're pushing it one way while the rest of the wheel is bearing on you the other way. And no surprised that most of the time the end result is us defeating ourselves self fragmentation. We're basically citing ourselves and then defeating ourselves. It's a it's a really strange fight of self again self that we engage in when we're just trying to change our behavior.

7:15 And that's where we get some of those those things like we are are our own worst enemies, right, that's correct? Yeah, yeah, So okay, so I wanted this other piece. I we just want to read this short little passage and have you commented, And I thought it was so powerful. You say in your book, you say, instead of considering personality traits as our destinations, we can think of them as early in our skills, as temporary plateaus from which we continue to grow. Instead of seeing our undeveloped traits as boxes in which we had better get comfortable. We can leave them and develop parts of ourselves long left dormant. Yes, we have misunderstood personality DP. I have been trained as a personality psychologist, so my PhD is in personal psychology. And the level of misunderstanding we have gotten to is I find very destructive. So first thing is that personality traits are not genetic.

8:11 Our temperament is, which is sort of physiological tendencies, sensitivities, And what they turn into is, well, what is personally some sort of stable way that we are with others for a period of time. And so what happens is, let's say you have, you know, some sort of physiological predisposition. Let's say I don't know you're sensitive to sound, and you are landed in a family, which we don't choose, we're landed in family or thrown into a family of musicians. Now that family would take your sensitivity to sound to be a fantastic thing, and chances are you might develop it, might become musician, become very extroverted. So your personality trait is an inner It is a skill, early skill of dealing with your temperament in a particular environment.

8:56 If you take the same temperamental tendon, see, which is sensitivity to sound, and we throw into a different family, Let's say you pick academics who are writing all the time and they don't want to be disturbed by people making well, then you're going to learn that the best way to be is just to withdraw from you know, from everybody else, right, and so so then you would develop introversion. Or let's say that you are thrown into family where people like to tease you a lot, well, you might develop shyness. And so what I find is that that early trade, what we think of personality trade, that's something we learn how to do in order to flourish, survive, or flourish in our early environment. What I find that box that we box ourselves in and when we say I am and then followed by something, it's like a little box that we stay in it you end up preventing yourself from being able to do all sorts of things. So in my mind, our potential, our purpose and potential are exactly on the opposite end of what we think. It's a set of skills we haven't learned yet.

10:05 So if I'm an introvert, and I know how to be by myself. My potential is knowing how to be with others. If I know how to be with others, I can also know how to be by myself. If I'm assertive, maybe I need to learn how to become agreeable. If I'm very agreeable, I can also learn to become assertive. So we realize basically that this thing of thinking that we are one box is limiting, imprisoning us within these you know, rather commercially successful personality testing boxes that we end up staying inside, and you know, the industries worth something like two point two billion dollars and so, and it turns out not really to predict much, but it tells us who we are supposedly, and we're supposed to stay in our little box. I find that that belief that we end up with and ends up being very destructive because if you don't know that you're not the box, well you never try to get out of it. Right. I love that it's again so empowering. I like to think that, you know, for me, I love the way that I've seen my own development is I consider it like it's been a process of unfolding, and yes, there have been catalysts along the way that have really helped that. But I have delighted in how much I've grown and changed over over my five decades, just delighted by it. So I find it very encouraging. Sorry, my light is going just creol. Got a little bit of an issue going. I think it's tired or maybe giving up the good fight. Anyway, Okay,

11:37 so let's go on and then talk about your wheel of self. I want to talk about each one of the components, and I want to start with motivation, which really speaks to as you say, are once. Can you start there? You know, people often tell me, oh, I'm trying to Let's say, they have a they tend to they like to have a donut in the afternoon, and they're telling you, no, you know, I want to change so I don't have the donut in the afternoon. And I always tell them it's not about not having the donut, it's about not wanting the donut thing. Right, So when people say, well, I'm trying to change my behavior, I'm trying not to yell at my kids. It's not about not yelling, it's about not having the impulse and this our motivational system fundamentally is what decides what is going to come easy and what's going to be developmental. Or if we work against our wants, it becomes what it's going to be hard and what's going to kind of pour out of our cup of will power. It's going to drain us because if we are working all the time against the thing we want, we will get very drained and potentially burnt out as a consequence. So we need to think about, okay, this thing of wanting, how do we change the desire and to be aligned with our development and to know how to read our wants and desires not in this kind of more realistic this is a good thing to want, this is a bad thing to want, which people tend to do. They tend to say, you know, sometimes when people raise children, they tell them,

13:07 listen, here's the menu of what you're supposed to want in life. Speak from your menu of wants. Please, right, you can be these professions, you can have this kind of partner. Here's where you can live. And what it kills is our wants are the only our desires are the only link thread that we have towards our potential. So if we stop being attention, we say, you know, I'm dropping this thread. I'm just going to go what I think work for other people. You lose that central connection to yourself that can guide you towards your development. So wants are very very important to be able to get ourselves moving again. And I really appreciate how you kind of give us a kind of a roadmap here. You talk about how there's four steps step wants to identify your wants, what you actually want, what do you desire? Number two is exploring them. You know, maybe there's some that you've ever looked for a long time or left behind.

14:01 Three is exploring opposing or destructive wants. That's powerful. I want you to speak to that if you would. And four is choosing what you want to focus on. So could you just a little bit of that, exploring those opposing and destructive wants? What do you mean? So you know, I present hypothesis in the book that all wants, everything you desire was at its origin developmental Okay, And people find that unbelievable because they have the experience of wanting things that are bad for them. They want bad food, they want not to exercise, they want to engage in destructive or addictive activities. And what I tell them that destructive or activity is not that the core.

14:46 It's at the periphery of your motivational system. And it came about because something at the very core didn't get fulfilled. So if I've developed it, Let's say that I'm not satisfied at work and I develop a habit of bring a couple of glasses of wine in the evening to forget about it too, then that core it's not the core want. So that destructive potentially is something that I'm doing that is not good for me, is pointing I'm doing it in order to mask to somehow try to get to that core want through a wrong method, And instead I need to explore what is at the core of the thing that I that I'm do. I want to be validated? Do I want to be seen and heard? Do I want to be loved? Do I want to engage creatively in my workplace in a way I haven't up to this point, right? What is that thing? And then note how you know this? How if I don't have that? So unfulfilled want creates new layers of want that become increasingly dissociated from this developmental want at the core.

15:52 So for example, let's say that I want I am addicted to shopping. So let's say at the core, I won't accept and friendship and closeness, but I think that if I get the right kind of purse and the right kind of stuff, people will think I'm cool. That's one layer under and then if I'm cool, they'll think that they want to hang out with me. And if they hang out, then I'm going to be accepted. You see how it's a home set here, something that looks that something that I wanted. The periphery is pointing the fingers and I'm asking, well, look where the finger is pointing at the core, what do you want at the corpus? Because as soon as you fulfill it, that think that the core is always developmental, even when we look at very egregious, you know, addictions. At the core, there's a deser to be loved. At the core, there's a deserve it to be accepted, to be validated, to engage creatively with the world in a meaningful way, all the kinds of things that you speak on your show. And if we don't fulfill that, what we develop is a culture in which we start wanting peripheral things that can't give us the thing that we want. Beautifully explained, Maya beautifully explained. All right. And on that note, let's let our listeners and viewers kind of reflect on maybe some of their wants while we take our a great first break.

17:10 I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We're going the air with doctor Maya Diekitch. She is the author of Sorry I just lost that because my light is coming out here. She is the author of The Possible Self, a leader's guide to person at personal development, which we've been talking about so far. We've covered one part of the wheel here, which is motivation. After the break, we're going to talk about behavior. Stay with us one right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose.

17:52 An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose us 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 Elise, send an email to Alise A Lise at Elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thank you for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I am also dedicated to help them create a world where people can realize their potential in life and at work and are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness and we do business better in the world. I keep researching and writing my own books. So the latest one that I put out came out in Mark twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically in liven your business.

19:06 And I wrote it to help leaders understand the wants and needs of today's workforce and once you continue to actually to address that. And now at the end, there are twenty two best practices to help you create a culture to bring that out. If you are just joining me today, my guest is doctor Maya Dikitsch. She is the author of the Possible Self, a leader's Guide to Personal Development, which we've been talking about so far. So next I want to go on. We opened a bit with the bit on behavior here, but I have to say, there's so many great things in your book, the way that you use language, like this idea of helping us to understand the economy of willpower when it comes to behavior. I have not thought about behavior from the vantage point of willpower, and so not the economy of willpower. So let's talk about behavior as part of the will of self.

19:52 I think what got me thinking about it in terms of economy of willpower is the fact it's the burnout. It's that people when they say I am drained. And let's say, if you're if you're working an office, well, really, what are you doing? You're sitting there all day staring at the screen, and so what exactly is drained? But it's not like we've been digging ditches for half a day. So what is being dripped? So what is being drained is this other thing, which is the willpower. And then the idea is, well, what spends it? How do you put in what is the balance of the willpower? So will power something people use when they do something they don't want to do or prevent themselves from doing something they want to do. And people have this belief that everything takes up willpower, and that's not true. When I do something I want, for example, I like to play tennis. All the tennis physically takes up energy, it pours back into my cup of willpower. So if I have a cup every morning, every time I do something I don't want to do, let'say i'm in a bad traffic I pour a little bit out. But when I do something I want to do, I pour back in. And so what we need to figure out is what pours out of the cup of willpower and pours in. And people tend to think that everything pours out. Anytime you do anything, it pours out, but that's not the case. It only pours out if you're doing something you don't want to do, or you're preventing yourself from doing something you want to do. And so if we start deeply thinking about it, we realize that work doesn't have to be a place where you're only pouring out. It can be a place where you're pouring in. Because

21:26 up to this point, people you know workplaces say oh, burnout, Well, just give people more vacation. And basically they have this concept at work you pour out and go home and pour in there, when really at home, you might have a parent who has Alzheimer, you might have children who require care. So we need to think about workplace not only as a place that pours out, but that also pours in. And most of us need to understand and what is you know, what pours in what pours out, And that depends on your wants, the things that you want poor in, things you don't want poor out. So what is that balance for you in your day, in your month, over the years that it's a kind of question that I wish everybody would ask themselves. I'm smiling and laughing and and joining this because so much of what I'm doing inside organizations is helping them create an environment in which people are better able to reach for for their wants.

22:29 They are or they are energized because they're doing things that they're passionate about, that they that they love, et cetera. And so in so doing they raise the whole vibration of the organization. So that's why I was kind of smiling when you were talking about that it's like, oh, yes, I know, let's do this. Okay, Well, let's go on to emotions. I again, each one of your wheel of self aspects. I just found the way that you describe them to be so compelling. But one of the things that I think I really appreciate too is you know, you say that emotions are a sicking system that tells us where we stand in relation to our wants. Very powerful, you know, I always I always know that you know, emotions are vital data. They give us vital data. But it's situating them against our wants is fascinating. Yeah. It's one of the things I think that people miss about emotions, which is that they are want or goal oriented. That without a goal or want, there is no emotion.

23:23 And I think the reason for it is that sometimes we think that emotions just come upon us like it's a weather. Oh there's a background of sadness or restlessness or something right, but it's not there for no reason. If there is sadness, there has been some sort of a loss, If there has been a sense of restlessness or anxiety, there are some threats in your mind that are that are and so we need to understand that it's a signaling system, and it starts with something that we want, whether consciously unconsciously, and that the emotion's function is to alert you that if it's a negative emotion, it's alert to alert you that you have just are moving slightly away from it, and to let you know how to get back on track. Most emotions as ierrational, and really emotions are very rational and goal oriented. We mistake a couple of seconds of your you know, our pre frontal cortex shutting down and you're very anger and very afraid. That's what we see. Oh, that's what emotion is. No emotion is everything that happens after after you have calmed down and thought, okay, what do I do as a consequence.

24:33 So the way that I like to say is that emotions want something from you figure out what is it that they want. What they want is for you to get closer to your goal, closer to something you want, and they're going to go away as soon as you figure out how to get there. So it's as long as you go through this, you're going to calm down and then go through this problem solving to see how you're going to get back on track. And as soon as you start moving in that direction, emotion is gonna go away. It's a tempt prey process not meant to stay very energetically expensive, so it's really not meant to stick around for long, and so we need to really listen to it and process and process rapidly.

25:15 I think that is just so compelling, Maya, that's just so well explained. Okay, but now I've got to go one step further. I don't know that I've ever seen anybody so beautifully distinguished happiness versus joy, But you do that for us for sure. I think we often conflate these two emotions, and they're really two separate things. So happiness is an outcome oriented emotion that basically says you have mentally set some kind of a goal and you have hit it. So let's say I can I can say, oh, you know what, I want to get to the car wash before I get to work, and if you do it, you say, oh, yeah, I'm happy. And what you look at is a little kind of a peak, you know, you have a little peak of dopamin and saying okay, you hit your goal. However, this goal doesn't at all need to be related to your potential okay. Joy is a signal to your self system that you are in the process of development. So happiness is a signal that you have hit some goal decided. Even if somebody else says, oh, this would be a good goal for you, You'll be and you get there, you'd be, oh, yeah, I'm happy for that. Temporary and goes away very fast. Joy, because it's a process oriented that not outcome oriented, can last a long time and it can also be there combined with other emotions. So and sometimes calling it joy, you know, have us misunderstand its meaning. We can develop inside of a very difficult situation. We can

26:49 grow. Let's say we have a death of a grandparent or death of a parent. Now there's grief, there is loss, there is sadness, and none. I think, well, what kind of joy is there? Well, there's the think of it as deepening of the self in relation to your potential. You're growing through understanding yourself and the life of this loved one in relation to this loss. And this process can happen together. You can have it while encountering very difficult life circumstances. And what you would feel is that these are life circumstances that are coming at me, but I'm growing in relation to that, so that there is that underlying joy that is moving with you.

27:34 That's such a powerful distinction, really really powerful. We'll talk somebout the time about this, but I'm developing this other course that also includes components of joy. So when I read how you distinguish these things, I was like, oh, that so powerful. All right, really go into mind. Okay, So again, just to situate the listeners and viewers, I like how she talks about the mind is our inner working. We have to reflect our own constructs and beliefs that contribute to our inability to get just what we desire the most or what we do what we actually our actual ability to do that. But these the constructs and beliefs I think are really important to hone in here. So if we can, now, let's treat the mind.

28:18 So you know, I call people say, well, why don't you just call them beliefs. The reason for it is because I want people to understand that they're actually constructed. Over to I call them construct because they're basically assumptions you have about the world that you act on and sometimes you don't even know. For example, right now, if I lean back I lean back because I have an assumption that this chair has a back. Right now, I don't have to verbalize it as a belief, I just simply act on it. As you grow up, you end up with, you know, hundreds of thousands of constructs about the world. It's basically your whole information that goes into its lenses through which you try to interpret things gets built. Some of them you can verbalize, you can say, oh, yeah, I believe that this is the case. But most of them stay unverbalized. And the reason why I want people to to think of them as construct is because often we end up with constructs about self or the world that are very destructive for us. Yes, right, so we can have a construct everybody's out to get me. Now, think about how that one way, one lens, one way of looking at the world can impair your your relationships with your colleagues, It can impair your relationships with your family, impair your relationship with the loved ones. You end up being lonely in an isolate So just one belief, one belief, one construct can basically destroy your life potentially. So and they are the place where they are, They're in the unconscious mind and so

29:49 by helping people understand how these constructs sit in the unconscious mind, I help them understand the limitations of trust trying to use their conscious mind mind to think that. People say, well, you have this limiting belief, just change it, think differently. What they don't understand is that you can't just change something through the conscious mind. You need to go into the unconscious and change it. It's a little bit like let's say if you have an employee, we're suffering from imposters syndrome. So they're very very good at their job, but their underlying construct is I'm not good enough, I'm not smart, And you can tell them listen, here's so much evidence that you're smart, and I believe in you, and everybody believes in you. People often give behavioral advice, well why don't you just sit every night and write down all the things that you're so successful, or why don't you practice positive affirmations? And I tell people, you know, your unconscious process is information at eleven million bits per second. Okay, conscious mind does it at fifty bits per second, which means that you know, you can try to give yourself positive affirmations.

30:56 But in any moment of stress, your unconscious mind is going to flood you good thoughts of not being good, so you can be I'm good enough, I'm good enough, I'm good enough. But then you have to go to sleep and the unconscious has So when we need to change something, we need to change change it in the unconscious. So not that we behave as if we have self esteem, or we try to ignore the voice that says you're not good enough. No, we go to the place that created I'm not good enough and we make it go away. M hm. That's so so, so incredibly powerful. Yeah, the mind, there's so much work to be done there. Okay, let's grab our last break. Here.

31:37 Maya lit it on the air with doctor Maya Jikits. She is a personality psychologist specializing in adult development. She is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and hr Management, the executive director of the Self Development Laboratory, and the academic director of the Rothman Executive Coaching Certificate Program at the Roman School of Management, University of Toronto. Talking through her wheel of self concept. Here and last, we were just talking about the mind. After the break, we're going to talk about the body. W 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 Elise 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 Elie Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease A li Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose.

33:16 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. I mentioned in the last break about my book The Rate Realization coming out. What I did for you is I created a three page assessment that you can pull off my website to determine the extent to which your company is operating at today's standards. It's at Gustavdashnehu dot com. If you are just now joining me, My guest is doctor Maya Dikitch. She's the author of The Possible Self, a leader's guide to personal development, which we've been talking about. So we've been talking about the wheel of Self, and now I want to cover body and to situate this listeners of viewers. The way she writes, Maya, the way you write. I just want to read a little bit about how you talk about the body. Here this part you say, from an evolutionary perspective, we could think of our bodies as vessels made of the past, meant to act in the present while looking to the future. That is incredible. I have never, in my whole entire life thought of the body like that. And isn't it so interesting? How much when we think of our bodies we think numbers, We think cholesterol level or or height or weight, and we don't think, really, what were they meant to do? And really they were meant to carry our learnings? And so everything in us really carries the learning. So our bodies where our history is written, and this history informs our actions in the present looking through the future, and it becomes very very The reason the way that the body becomes very dangerous to us is that if you learn something

34:51 and that learning ends up being very rigid and unmodifiable. So let's say you learn something like I can't trust important people in my life. Life that you're going to replay that over again. Because all these constructs that we have been talking about in the mind, the way that they are located really is in the neural pathways that have been created. So your memories, your learnings, your tendencies, it's all inside of the body. On one level, it's dangerous. On another level, it's extraordinary. If your history is in your body, you change things in the body. You don't necessarily change the past, but you change your tendency of how to interact in the future. I find that extraordinarily powerful. I do think, yeah, particularly sense you know, this is something I reflect a lot. Our parents pass on constructs to us that can be sometimes not very functional. Right, So our parents can pass on the construct you know you should really just never extend yourself beyond your family or origin, like that's your unit. Therefore friends are not important, okay, So and that would be passed on to you and now you're living this out. Or they can pass on something dangerous like oh, you know, the way to discipline a child is to physically corporeally punish them. Now, what I find very interesting is that for every person that has changed this

36:24 tendency, what they've created. So when you change one thing in yourself, you suddenly you go from a person who comes from a family that doesn't talk about difficult things, and you become a family that talks about difficult things. Not only have you affected your family, you have affected now all the descendants of all of your children going into the future. So there's something about this moment in time that if you can change something in yourself and pass that new way of being onward, you're changing the future, not just for yourself, but for generations to come. It's a very powerful to my mind, a very powerful thought. I completely agree with that. And then when it comes to you know, transformation only just kind of start this bit with you so you can kind of build on this. But I found this just so incredibly powerful. You say, you're talking, we're talking about the body piece of it here to say, insight may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for transformation. It needs to be joined with an experience that opens the lid to the closed construct and only then can we update it. Getting the wheel of self to move again. So this idea of you know this, the idea of a closed construct sitting somewhere, is that that's in our mind right, the construct, nervous system, nervous system. Okay, gotcha, if you would speak to that this note. This is really exciting to think about, this notion of how you can really get focused on your body as part of the transformative process of the self, for sure. So the construct,

37:55 let's say you have a construct that I'm not good enough, that you you ended up with from Let's say I know in first grade, somebody mocks you for not being able to spell a word or something like that. Okay, So that's a set of neuropathways that are just sitting in you. Psychologically, I would call it a construct, but physically what it is, it's a set of neuropathways. So then the question becomes, given that we can't get rid of the past, you can get rid of the neural pathways, what did you do to produce what? Psychologically? Now people talk about healing, what is healing? And oddly enough, the metaphor of a physical wound is very similar to what psychologically needs to happen. So first you need to find it. So let's say you had a wound on your body for a long time that just faster than you didn't pay attention to it. First, you need to say what hurts where, Then you need to reopen it, Then you need to apply something to it that will be curative, and then you need to And the only difference is that often with physical wounds it's a lot of time, but if it's psychological wounds, it actually can happen very rapidly.

39:04 So when I looked at the literature who find what produces healing, there's fantastic work out there on trauma and all of these things. I found that most of the time that we have interventions, psychotherapeutic interventions, any kind of interventions, they often focus on on one or two of these parts of the self. They'll be like cognitive behavioral therapy, emotion based therapy, or just behavioral intervention, and they are missing one part, and they're missing that body part. And when I went through literature of under what condition does that healing happen, there were basically two things that were common to all empirically successful transformational processes. So it's based on this notion and the thing that we know now in your science, basically, when we're emotionally disregulated, that brain becomes very plastic, which means that when disregulated when in emotionally maybe afraid or just emotional, when we're emotional, that the brain lays down your pathways very fast.

40:16 This is how we can get traumatized very rapidly. Right, very disregulated, the brain says, don't you ever leave the house again, because you might get mugged again. Okay, and then we're stuck with that. So what I realized is when we look at successful whether in therapy or out of therapy, successful transformation of healing, it always included this regulation by the person themselves. So often, let's say in therapy, nothing happens, not because in therapy you get to the point of insight and then you know, so you say, oh, yes, I know why it is that I feel like this, but I still feel like this, right, I know I don't feel good about but I still feel like that. The last step. Usually what happens is that the person this regulates themselves as often as they're thinking about the event, and they apply a new experience. So there's two components.

41:09 This self, this is not somebody else disregulating you, but disregulating yourself by usually by replaying the event. Yes, the new experience you're basically this regulation makes your brain plastic and you add another experience on top of your old one. So I'll give you an example. Let's say that my wound is that I don't feel smart because first grade I got mocked by the teacher. So the technique that I've kind of cobbled together from like what worked, was in writing. You know, I'll write about this experience, and just writing about it is going to disregulate me because it brings up a lot of emotion.

41:51 And so I would say I was in first grade, my teacher came out and asked me to read it, and I'll feel it, and so now I have disregulated, but now I need to bring this new experience. So what I suggest people do is that they mentally have their adult self walk onto the scene, support the younger version of the self as they deal with the what happens after the experience. So I would say, you know, after the experience, I would take my younger self and say, hey, it's okay, doesn't mean you're not smart. You're a very smart kid, even though you're learning that. This is what happens when you learn. I sometimes even have people include like give a little talking to to your teacher and say, you know what, that's kind of inappropriate for a teacher to be marking up. You know. The point is, what are you doing. You're taking this instet of neuropathways inside of your body, and you're not removing what has been, but you're adding what you needed at the time to have the construct healthy and open, which is sometimes I make mistakes and that's okay, doesn't make me stupid. It just means that I'm learning. That's an open construct. We add that on top of the other one. So when that happens very rapidly, what you see within a couple of days, people experience a great relief. And basically what I've done is they've gone into the unconscious and changed something there. Don't come up anymore. There's no voice in the background saying, oh, you know, you're not good enough. They have healed, and I find that possibility of healing and knowing how to do it

43:23 yourself, or if you want, you can do it with somebody else, with a coach, with a therapist, whoever. But what's really empowering is to know that how healing happens, that it's possible to do that. It doesn't take a lifetime to heal the way we say time heals everything. No, it doesn't. You can if you have an unprocessed wound, psychological wound, you can be ninety five and still have a wound from the first grade. Very frequently happens. So this process I find very empowering, and it produces that move that allows the whole wheel of self to suddenly start moving in developmental direction. I feel like I spoke a little bit too much selling the time, you know, I'm just I'm hanging on every word. I am so enthralled with how you have really helped me understand the body aspect and the will of self. I know you've said this, sorry, but again I want to read it again for our listeners and viewers because your language is just so beautiful. And then if you would speak to the future piece of what I'm going to read here, But you're talking about the two functions. The first function, of course, is that we want to be able to move to our wants. We say, unlike plants, you know, we can actually go move our bodies toward our wants. And then you say, the second function of our body is to carry our past, which we've been talking about. But it's so compelling the way that you say this. You say, we often forget that all our learnings, all our skills, and even many of our short and long term goals are nothing more than projected fragments of our past experiences. They are carried by our brain and nervous systems, as well as the muscles, joints, organs, blood cells, immune cells,

44:58 and many other constituents of the body whose actions in the present moment are altered by the memory of the past. We make our future by combining past experiences and learnings with current motivations and potentials. Bodies hold our learnings and employ them forward as we encounter new situations. They are magnificent and subtle learning machines. I have never seen anything like that, Maya, that is so fantastic. They really are. And if we carry something, if we carry a wound that prevents the body from being able to do what it needs to do to carry us to our potential, it's like carrying a sack of stones on your back. This is our baggage, this is our things that we can let go so we can allow the body to do what it's best at, which is start to get us, continue, continue to get us moving towards our potential, our never ending work. Because every time you feel feel that potential, guess what happens. A whole new set of potentialities opens up for you and on you go. We can live very engaged, very deep lives all the way to the very end. You know, people sometimes ask me, but what you know, what if you're ninety nine and you can't get out of bed, what could you possibly learn? And not to end on a morbid note, but you can learn how to say goodbye, you can learn how to end your life. Well, you know, there's so in every

46:28 moment, no matter what do we think our sailminitation, there is potential embedded in that, and that's that's our gift. And if we forget that and every day becomes oh God, do I have to do this? And can I just get to my retirement or do I just get to the end of the day, we really have lost. We really lose, We lose our lives in the process. Completely agree a Maya, and I appreciate also you're also situating a certain way for us to, you know, embrace a certain constructor of belief, and I canmpletely aligned with that, so so powerful. So I have so enjoyed learning from you, reading your book, sharing with my listeners and viewers. I think you know that the show is listened to by people around the world and they either to need because they want to learn something about themselves, how to improve themselves. They want to become more of an inspirational leader, or they want to be able to learn how to create those destination workplaces we've been talking about. What would I leave them with.

47:23 You know, if you're a leader and you're listening to this, you know you have maybe been told focus on your strength. I would ask you find that anchor that is holding you back, find the wound that is preventing you from moving to a completely new level of leadership, like move that wheel in that domain of your life, and you will see how the future just opens up for you beyond what you could have imagined. That's what we want, the future that even in our best possible scenario, we couldn't have imagined. And it's us a little bit of in your work, or sometimes a lot.

48:04 I want to quickly echo that Maya. I have had many conversations on this program. We are all members of the walking wounded, every one of us. That's what life does. So that is beautiful sage advice, Maya. A fantastic way to finish the show. Thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom, your heart, your mind, everything with working on a purpose. Listeners and viewers, my great pleasure. Thank you for having me. Absolutely, Listeners and viewers, you are going to want to find this woman. Check out her work. Learn more about doctor Maya Dikitch, the work that she does as a personality psychologist in her new book, The Possible Self. So one place to start is her personal website. I'm going to say it for you that I'm going to spell it for you. It's her name, Maya Dikitch and the way that you spell that is m a Ja dj Ikic Maya dkitch dot com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch it be recorded podcast. We were on the air with Alex budakh Is, a UC Berkeley faculty member, social entrepreneur, author and speaker who teaches a wildly popular course called Becoming a Change Maker.

49:07 We talked about his book, Becoming a Change Maker, an actionable, inclusive guide to leading positive change at any level, which encourages every one of us to step into our capacity to make meaningful change, regardless of our role, position, or anything else. Next week will be on the air with David Alexander, a commercial photographer whose book captures and celebrates our wonderfully complex connection to each other and all of nature. We'll be talking us through those concepts and those connections. See you there, and 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 them meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's Work on Purpose. M