Ila and Charles dive into the fascinating world of embodied learning with Dr. Amanda Blake, the award-winning author of "Your Body is Your Brain" and the visionary behind the “Body = Brain” experiential leadership course. In this captivating podcast, we explore a simple, powerful, science-based practice for harnessing the power of body and mind together to develop desired personal qualities.
Learn how to engage both your brain and body in the learning process, whether it's mastering the invaluable competency of trust-building, cultivating trustworthiness within yourself, or any quality you wish to develop. Using a holistic approach, Dr. Blake unveils a transformative process that combines conceptual self-awareness, embodied self-awareness, and relational skills to support human growth and development. Discover how to practice and refine these behaviours, transforming them into natural expressions of who you are.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Ila and Charles dive into the fascinating world of embodied learning with Dr. Amanda Blake, the award-winning author of "Your Body is Your Brain" and the visionary behind the “Body = Brain” experiential leadership course. In this captivating podcast, we explore a simple, powerful, science-based practice for harnessing the power of body and mind together to develop desired personal qualities.
Learn how to engage both your brain and body in the learning process, whether it's mastering the invaluable competency of trust-building, cultivating trustworthiness within yourself, or any quality you wish to develop. Using a holistic approach, Dr. Blake unveils a transformative process that combines conceptual self-awareness, embodied self-awareness, and relational skills to support human growth and development. Discover how to practice and refine these behaviours, transforming them into natural expressions of who you are.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
My name is Charles Feldman and my name is Ela Edgar.
Speaker 3:We're here for trust on purpose, and we already have the giggles, yes. Okay, we already have the giggles, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, we're going to clean this up, ela. All right, we have a guest. We got to be good for our guest. We're here to record another episode of our podcast, trust on Purpose. Today we have a guest whom we've had before and who we have gotten really good feedback about those episodes that she joined us on.
Speaker 2:Amanda Blake For those of you who are not familiar with Amanda, she's an author. She is the author of the award-winning book your Body is your Brain, which I will highly recommend this book as one of my favorites, and she's also created a Body Equals Brain course in the neurobiology of experiential leadership learning. She also teaches the art and science of embodiment and works with leaders worldwide to help them become their best self, which includes enjoying life more, or enjoying more life and making a bigger contribution. At one point she was an internationally competitive athlete. She's skilled at cultivating high performance in herself and others, including the individuals and teams she works with. She is a master somatic leadership coach known for supporting pragmatic and profound transformations for her clients, and she holds a degree in human biology from Stanford University, a doctorate in management from Case Western Reserve University, and she's also a longtime yoga enthusiast, mountaineer and musician.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's amazing. No wonder people have loved the episodes we did with you, mandy. Today, though, we're going to talk about something that Amanda has worked on her kind of process for working with anything in particular, and we're going to apply it to trust today, and so I think where we'd like to start, amanda, is by asking you to tell us a little bit about what this process is and defining the terms that you use, so we all are kind of on the same page with that.
Speaker 1:You bet. Well, let me just say before I dive in how nice it is to be back here with both of you and what fun it was to be giggling with you before we got into the meat of our conversation. So I hope we'll have time and energy for that kind of lightness as we go through. It's just a delight to be back. And we were talking also before the call about how each of us was like. Well, what did we talk about last time? Not sure. So it makes sense to just do what may be a little bit of a review for people who listened to those episodes, but which always bears repeating.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that we understand from the studies of neurobiology is that we have at least two different kinds of self-awareness. And the two kinds that I want to talk about today are conceptual self-awareness and embodied self-awareness, and these are distinct in our experience. They're distinct neurobiologically, they're distinct in terms of what they offer us. So, experientially, conceptual self-awareness occurs for us in facts and information and story, so we can sense our knowledge of our own past and our vision of our own future. And the gift of conceptual self-awareness is that it can take us anywhere in time. We can learn from the past, we can envision the future and the neurobiology of conceptual self-awareness a very broad, high level. Basically, when we're in that mode, the neuromusculature of our face, head and neck, which is involved in communication, is primarily what's activated.
Speaker 1:Embodied self-awareness is quite different. So embodied self-awareness is, rather than thinking about the self, it's experiencing the self, and it's the same kind of knowing we have when I like to use the example of a cat knows when its tail has been stepped on, but that's not a thing it knows in words. It's not a thing it knows in any other way than the experience of its own body. So we have a lot of knowing about our own life that comes from the experience of our own body, and that knowing speaks to us in the language of sensation. So we'll experience temperature or pressure or movement, or a particular posture or facial expression or a gesture. This is how embodied self-awareness occurs for us, and whereas conceptual self-awareness can take us anywhere in time, embodied self-awareness takes us very specifically to this moment in time, right now. We cannot experience sensation any other moment than right now, and so it's a very presencing sort of self-awareness, and both of these aspects of our self-awareness are really, really important. Oh, I should add that embodied self-awareness sort of goes without saying, but I'll say it. It occurs neurobiologically all the way out to our fingers and toes, so our entire nervous system is involved in producing, generating, making sense of our embodied self-awareness.
Speaker 1:And oftentimes, when we're up to something in life and we'll obviously talk here about trust, right? So when we're up to something that we might be kind of going after, something that we want in life, or we find ourselves shrinking away from an important conversation, or we are seeking to become more trusting or more trustworthy, we will often, like our cultural default is to think about how we should do things differently. We very often fail to recognize or don't think about or don't imagine how might I involve my body or engage my body in something like learning to be more trustworthy. So the process that you were referring to, charles, is a process that I use with myself.
Speaker 1:It's a process that I use with my own clients and for people who are trying to embody something, anything, whether it's trustworthiness or confidence, or joyfulness, or determination or follow-through you could fill in the blank with just about any kind of personal quality. This is a process, a very holistic process, that combines conceptual self-awareness, embodied self-awareness and some kind of relational skills that will support your learning, and anyone can use this process. It's very sort of customizable and user-friendly. That's what I'm hoping we can talk about today.
Speaker 2:Sounds fantastic. Sign me up. Awesome. I do have a question, amanda. Yeah, where does emotion fit in that sort of schema that you just outlined? Is it conceptual? Is it embodied? Does it sit somewhere else?
Speaker 1:Yes, yes and yes.
Speaker 2:Oh good.
Speaker 1:There's two ways of looking at that. So when you look at the academic definition of embodied self-awareness, what you see in the research literature, it's defined as present moment, non-judgmental attention to sensation, movement and emotion. And emotion is in there because so that's the yes part of like does it fit with embodied self-awareness? But emotion is right in there because in a really important way, emotion is a bridge between conceptual and embodied self-awareness. So again, if you go back to the research literature, look at how emotion is defined and what we know about it, both neurobiologically and in terms of linguistic and cultural interpretations of emotion, what we see is that emotion is fundamentally a interpretive assessment of physiological cues. So it is both conceptual and embodied self-awareness and it kind of builds a bridge between them.
Speaker 1:So, for example, if you feel nervous or if you feel excited, you may be experiencing like a fast beating heart rate in either of those conditions and it could be that the sensation of that fast beating heart is basically roughly the same in either of those sensations.
Speaker 1:What makes it nervous or excited is the interpretation that we lay on top of that fast beating heart. So in any kind of emotion that you might be experiencing, there is always some physical component and some interpretive, or we could call it a conceptual component, and those things happen very fast, very automatically in the brain. So we won't always feel like we're making a conscious, deliberate choice to experience the emotions that we're experiencing. That's all fine, that's all well and good, but it plays a really key role in kind of bridging these two. I don't even want to call them two parts of us, the conceptual and the embodied, because the truth is they're both embodied and they're both conceptual in different ways. They're sort of a bleed or a blend between them and we are ultimately one unified being, which is kind of the point of this process, which is a very holistic process. How do we leverage all aspects of ourselves to take on, adopt, learn, become, embody something or some new way of being, some new behavior?
Speaker 2:I love it, and so I guess I have a bunch of questions and, eli, you may have to like just reach over through the screen and turn off my microphone so you can have a chance. So one thing that comes to mind for me in this is as we apply this to trustworthiness and also extending trust to others. Being trustworthy we talk about as requiring intention. I want to do that, which is, I think, a conceptual notion, and attention, which is very much, I think, both. It's both where we can conceptualize. I want to pay attention to doing the things that build trust with this other person, but it's also we can get that in our bodies, we can experience it and in fact, there's that.
Speaker 2:I think part of what you were saying earlier is there's that feedback with our bodies, kind of talk to our conceptual part of us and gives us this feedback all the time, a constant data flow of okay, I want to be trustworthy, I want to show up in this way. Am I doing it? Is it working? What's the impact, all of that stuff. That's, I guess, one of the first things that comes up for me. And thinking about how you can apply that, eli, what questions or thoughts do you have?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm percolating and also quite impatient in this moment, because I want to hear what the process is.
Speaker 1:Can we dive in? We can totally dive in. And you know what? I didn't really prep you guys for this, but I'm going to suggest that we dive in in a particular way. Okay, we'll see if this makes sense. So this is an invitation to the two of you, and to anyone listening to dive in. So let me give an overview of where we're headed first, and then we'll break it down into pieces. So, where we're headed, we'll start with conceptual self-awareness, because it's pretty easily accessible or available for most of us. We're used to being there and then we'll go into embodied self-awareness and then we'll talk about how we can, in relationship, create some learning loops. So those are the three things conceptual, embodied self-awareness and creating learning loops.
Speaker 1:So let's start with conceptual self-awareness and let's just take trustworthiness as an example. The first step is to shine a light on what do you really mean? What is trustworthiness? And there are a number of different ways you might go about doing this. So you might, for example, go look up the dictionary definition of trustworthiness, or you might place trustworthiness in the middle between an excess of what we might call trustworthiness or a deficiency. Would there be a word for too much trustworthiness and another word for really not enough. It's easy for me to go to the deficiency. It's like, well, if you're not trustworthy, you're unreliable. But what if you're overly trustworthy? I don't know if there's a word for that.
Speaker 1:So this is kind of a linguistic way of exploring what is it to be trustworthy, and one of the things that you can do is to you know, you can look at the dictionary. You can kind of look at excess and deficiency. You can go look at different wisdom, traditions, books, for example the thin book of trust. You can go look at what is out there about trustworthiness. How has it been described and defined? How have other people talked about it?
Speaker 1:If you have a clergy person that you know and sort of work with in your spiritual life, you might try and get from them a spiritual perspective on trustworthiness. So this is in a sense like really fleshing out the definition in as many different ways as you can so that you have a fuller sense of trustworthiness. So that's the first part of expanding conceptual awareness and self-awareness around trustworthiness. And I want to pause there and hear from the two of you Like we're not really pausing for you to go look up the dictionary definition, but you're also really steeped in this. So what are expanded definitions that come to mind, like, as I'm talking about this, what comes up for you?
Speaker 3:Eilah, you want to take a crack at it. No, you can go ahead. I'm still, I'm listening, percolating, I'm percolating, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess, amanda, it starts for me with trustworthiness, is not? I can't assess that for myself, it's for somebody else to assess. It's for you to assess how worthy I am of your trust at any time in a given moh-led, and it also very much pertains to the future.
Speaker 2:So you make an assessment of my trustworthiness now, but really what you're doing is taking care of the future by saying, yes, I think I can trust Charles in going forward in this way or in these ways in this domain, and so on. So trustworthiness is showing up in a way that other people will make positive assessments about their ability to trust me in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So like if I was going to encapsulate that and I was writing something down for myself. If I'm wanting to myself build trustworthiness, I think I would go okay, trustworthiness is in the eye of the beholder. Trustworthiness is about the future, or promise, or an assessment about the future. Even those two things. For me, because I don't specialize in trust the way that you do that expands my idea a little bit. Elah, I'd love to hear from you if that provokes anything else. That would be like an expanded understanding of trustworthiness. What is it really?
Speaker 3:There's a couple of things brewing in my brain. Number one is I'm actually back at the whole exploration part and looking at different resources and how. What a powerful practice just right there, yeah, and one that I guess what was making me percolate is I was like what would it be like for me to actually do that in my own life, whether it's about trustworthiness or something else, where I give time and that kind of attention to something that matters to me. And if I think about our audience and the clients that we work with, many of them feel they just I don't have time to do that, yeah, but it feels like this delicious ability to sink in versus stay in this shallow knowledge or knowing and what happens when we give ourselves or gift ourselves time to sink in. So that's one place that my brain is spinning a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just want to say when I do this myself, I don't think there's any set time. You could do it for five minutes and you could do it for five hours, really like any given quality. I was working with a client this last fall and she was working with a quality of developing courage. I would say it was weeks of tinkering around and just continuing to poke around and go well, courage over here and courage over there, and what's the translation of courage in this language or that language? So there is something incredibly rich and what I have found I've done this with numerous qualities with myself, with clients there is always something surprising.
Speaker 1:There is always something that you didn't think of. There's something really beautiful, as you say, about gifting yourself the time to discover, as opposed to knowing what it is, to discover something about what it is you're trying to cultivate or develop and to discover something new that's compelling to you. And I would say there's no given start or stopping point in this. You can go as deep as you want, but obviously anything can be taken to extremes. But I think once you've discovered one or two new things that are compelling, that feel like oh, that's hooked me, you could move on to the next step, the second step of the conceptual self-awareness part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is amazing, I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the second step in the conceptual self-awareness realm is to imagine, to get a visual picture or, if you're a musical person, maybe to get a musical score of what it's like to be trustworthy, experience, trustworthiness. So if you could think of a visual picture now, sometimes this could be a hero or heroine, somebody that you know. It could be somebody in the public eye, it could be somebody in your personal life I have sometimes used cartoon characters, like there was a fictional character. So at one point I was going through this process with the quality of joy. Some listeners may have seen the movie Inside Out, which is a Pixar film that has all of these different emotional qualities and joy is one of them, and I got a picture of the character Joy and I just put that up where I could see it on a regular basis and that was a piece of like. Here's a joyful person that I might aspire to be like.
Speaker 1:So it could be a hero or a heroine or a fictional character or a real person, but it might also be an image. So another example actually, when I was working on a quality of trust and trusting as opposed to trust, being trustworthy, like trusting more I found a visual image of somebody floating in a very serene lake, and to me that illustrated something specific about the quality of trust just letting myself be held by the presence of this deep pool. And so each of us will be able to find our own very unique, specific image, and it may be a visual image or, as I say, it may be something musical, or, if you're very gustatory, it might be a taste, right, or a smell, but find something that kind of paints a picture for you of trustworthiness. So, when we're talking about trustworthiness, let's do the same thing. Does this bring to mind anything for either one of you, and if not, I have some tips about how you might go about finding something, but does it bring anything to mind right off the bat?
Speaker 3:I really loved your sharing of the floating on the water. I'm definitely a water person. I know in or near water is where I can feel my entire body, exhale that lovely image of floating. I also really love the crashing, pounding like huge, crashing, pounding waves of the ocean. Something for me is there's a trustworthiness, something that stirs that up. I can think of a couple of songs that come to mind. Of course I can't tell you what they are because I can't remember the title. I love this. This is like another exploration about. There's no right or wrong, but what comes up for us as we explore what might be a representation. Yeah, charles, what comes up for you.
Speaker 2:Boy could be several things. The ocean, to me, in many ways represents trustworthiness. The sun coming up every morning might be behind clouds, but it's there, so it's constant and consistent. There's also a particular Tai Chi stance, just like a fundamental I can't remember the Chinese word, of course but it's a particular stance that's grounded and at the same time, there's some flexibility in it. Energy can flow. Yeah, there's many things that I could come up with that would illustrate to me a quality of trustworthiness.
Speaker 1:That's really beautiful, charles. When I think about that Tai Chi stance, that kind of like bridges us a little bit into the embodied self-awareness piece. So let's bookmark that for a second and say, okay, one, you could get an image of that Tai Chi stance. It could be you in that Tai Chi stance and you have someone take a picture of you, or it could be a Tai Chi master that you admire or a random picture from the web. So one of the ways that we could use this is to collect a few words or phrases or images like trustworthiness is in the eye of the beholder, and combine that with an image of a Tai Chi stance or an image of pounding surf to find one or two images. And frankly, you don't have to have just one. So I tend to have a few and rotate them for myself, because one of the qualities that I haven't quite embodied yet is decisiveness. So I usually have a few things that I'm like how about this, this and this? That'd be good. So you can combine short phrases, a longer paragraph, a summary of your idea with your image and then some physical embodiment. This would be the third step, sort of moving into the embodied self-awareness piece. And for you, charles, that stance might be an example of an embodiment of trustworthiness. This is what it feels like to me from the inside, when I believe myself to be conveying that I am trustworthy here, and so there might be lots of ways that we could explore what it would feel like to be trustworthy.
Speaker 1:So an example would be to remember a specific time when you know for sure that you were trustworthy, and to, as best you can remember what it felt like. Like what were the sensations or how were you holding yourself? Were you leaning more forward or back? Was your chin raised? Or were you maybe more self-contained in a very physical way, where you might have been holding yourself in a certain kind of personal self-embrace, if that makes sense, really considering, oh, in this prior time when I experienced trustworthiness, this is what it felt like, or I don't know.
Speaker 1:This is never something that I've really paid attention to, but let me see now if I were to stand in a way that felt trustworthy, how would I be standing? Or if I were to sit or speak in a way that felt trustworthy, how would I be sitting or how would I speak? Where would my voice come from? From inside of my body? Would it feel more like it was from my mouth or from my chest, or from my abdomen or from my feet? So really exploring some of those physical cues of what it feels like to embody or emanate or be this quality. As I say that again, I'd be curious to hear from each of you what that's evoking right now.
Speaker 3:Our audience can't see us, but I shifted myself. I saw both of you did, yeah, and I think Charles did too right, yes.
Speaker 3:I just sat a little taller. A really important part of being present for me is knowing where my feet are and have them firmly grounded at where I can feel my feet. I know where they are. I often lose my feet, so for me that's a good indication of like go find them. I shifted the openness of my chest to open just a little bit more, not too much, just a little bit more and I noticed that my breath went deeper. And as I say these things out loud, I can also really feel my connection to my back and my spine, which is again something I don't always pay attention to, and these tiny little tweaks in this moment. I would feel, sitting this way, that I am embodying what being trustworthy feels like for me.
Speaker 1:And just to take that one step further and tie it to what we were already doing, if you could combine that with an image, so you make those shifts in your body and you have an image in front of you and maybe a phrase or a couple of words or something just based on what we've talked about so far, always open to further refinement. Where would you go with that, hila?
Speaker 3:There's a particular rock on a particular beach on Vancouver Island. That is the image that's in my head. I'm sitting on the beach, on this rock, and my feet are in the ocean.
Speaker 1:And is there a word or a phrase trustworthiness? Sure, but is there anything else, Like as we talked about expanding the concept? There might not be, because we've only spent a couple minutes doing this.
Speaker 3:The word that pops in is acceptance.
Speaker 1:So that'd be really something interesting to explore. Right To journal about a little bit to kind of go like what's the relationship between trustworthiness and acceptance? Yeah, awesome, yeah, awesome. So that's a really beautiful illustration of okay, we're starting to put together some language, some images, some physical experiences. Charles, do you want to weigh in here a little bit before we go to the next step?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for me, part of what showed up in embodying trustworthiness you said embodiment is right here, right now, and yet part of the sensation was I don't even know how I'm going to describe this but a through line of past, present, future that expanded to include others, other people. I suppose eventually it could include everyone but the people that are important to me, who I want to be trustworthy for, for whom I want to be there, be trustworthy. So there was very much a physical sensation of that, that through line from past to future and then thus and circling or touching out into the lives of those other people.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. That's a really beautiful illustration too of how our embodiment happens, both inside of our own skin, but can also be this is maybe going to sound really weird and woo-woo, but almost like a sensation that we experience outside our own skin. So we experience something different when we are encircled by a group of people, your skin will feel different, your musculature will feel different than when we are standing solo on a beach, and so that might be part of the embodiment too is feeling, imagining, sensing others with you in a metaphorical and a literal sense, and maybe those people that you want to be trustworthy for. Maybe they go somewhere on your map, maybe you have images of them somewhere. So all of this kind of bleeds together and weaves together really really beautifully. But none of it matters until, like the rubber meets the road, and you're doing something in the world, which is the next aspect of the embodied self-awareness. If the first two pieces I call Illuminate and Imagine, the second two embody and enact, and to enact is to actually do something in the world. That is demonstration or proof or an embodied illustration of your trustworthiness. So this can look a lot of ways, but the way to think about this is like what's a small way that I could practice once a day, or multiple times a day, it should at least be once a day putting trustworthiness into action. So I can give you examples from clients that I've worked with.
Speaker 1:On other kinds of qualities, like courage. Well, I'm going to speak up once a day about something that I maybe feel a little uncomfortable or nervous about speaking up. I'm going to open my mouth and be courageous in the way I use my voice. When I personally was working on focus, one of the things that I did was to often unsuccessfully attempt to close all of my browser tabs every day, right? So there's something that's like the rubber meets the road here, and I'm going to put this into practice in a small way, like a musician playing scales, a tennis pro just hitting the ball across the net. We do as athletes, as musicians, as actors we'll rehearse regularly. So how can you rehearse this regularly? In really small ways, everyday ways in your life, so that, in a sense, you're building the muscle memory?
Speaker 1:and you're rehearsing it regularly, with a phrase, an image, a sense of embodiment that you know, in the case of trustworthiness, might be more upright, more open with your feet on the floor, and this is the thing that I'm going to do every day. So I'm curious for either one of you if anything specific comes to mind as a way to practice trustworthiness.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something came to mind right away, which is I have a tennis and I've had this all of my life and I've rated in quite a bit, but I still do it sometimes. I have a bad memory. We've already established that it operates like a broken sieve. But also I have a poor head for specifics, like numbers or whatever. So I often will be tempted to, when somebody asks me for something specific, or it would be good to have to say something that you know has specific data behind it.
Speaker 2:There's a temptation to say something that I think is kind of like that specific number or whatever it is, without really knowing what it is, but saying it in such a way that it sounds like I'm right, because, of course, I also like to be right. Eela doesn't know anything about this, but this is news to her, I'm sure. So my small thing is to, every time I notice because I can notice it now in my body, every time I notice it stop myself from going there, or even before that, maybe just checking is it there or is that feeling there, and then stopping going there and put in there I don't know, I'll have to find out, or whatever is relevant in that case.
Speaker 1:That was what I was going to ask you, and I think that's one of the most important things is what's the positive, trustworthy thing that you're going to do instead? Yes, because it's not as much stopping yourself from doing the untrustworthy thing as choosing. In this moment, I'm going to choose the trustworthy act. This is what the trustworthy thing would sound like, feel like, look like, be like.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I am not very skilled, not very competent, at accurately estimating the amount of time it'll take me to do something. Oh, you and me both. I often underestimate. And then you know, I'm sitting here in my office at 9 o'clock at night or 6 o'clock in the morning because I have a deadline I have to meet and I'm pissed off and frustrated. But I did that to myself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if there was a magic way to just suddenly understand how much time and effort it's going to take to get something done, I would like that skill set. So I know that that gets me into trouble, because sometimes then I am not reliable, I'm not delivering or I'm like I need one more day, or even the felt sense that it leaves for me that I'm not doing what I said I would do and I notice there's a lot of ways. I notice it. I think the positive. What I'd like to choose instead? I'm thinking about your numbers. I'm doing some numbers in my head, so give me a second, because I'm pictures and people, not numbers. I think actually even doubling the time I think that it would take whether it does or doesn't. That feels like it gives me space to do my best work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my wife actually triples the time I tell her that I'm going to help a house project. I say you know, take an hour, and she just says three hours. And it's become for me kind of a badge of pride when I can get it closer to my estimate than her.
Speaker 1:Well, you know I like that, and that actually leads us, charles, in the direction of these learning loops, because we could do this all ourselves in our own private ivory tower and never let anyone in on it. But, you know, might be interesting for you, ela, to go. Hey, charles, I'm going to start doubling the time. I think it's going to take me 10 minutes, going to take me 20, or I think it's going to take me two days. I'm going to tell you it's four, I'm going to tell you when I'm doing that and I want you to give me feedback. So this is a really, really important part of this process for each of us to do our own fairly regular self-evaluation and also to be in a learning loop with someone else. So let me just talk you through that part of the process. It's fairly simple to grasp. The hard part is, as all of these things, putting it into practice. But one of the things that you can do is, once you get set up, with a daily practice that looks like I'm going to have my image in front of me, repeat a phrase, get in the embodied position of trustworthiness or whatever it is, and take the action. Like all of that, you could see how it might take you 20 seconds, right at the max. This is, once you've sorted this out, it's not a thing that needs to take a lot of time, but what really helps is then to go at the end of each day or, if you're a morning person, maybe the beginning of each day.
Speaker 1:Go today or yesterday. Did I do it? Did I close all those browser tabs? Did I extend the time that I gave myself to do something? Did I do the thing? And, if yes, what made me successful? What made it possible? What made it easy?
Speaker 1:If it was easy, you also want to look at what might have gotten in your way, and it's important to understand those, but our tendency is to Myopically focus on what got in the way, what made it hard, all the ways I'm failing and all the inevitable ways that I suck right, and that actually is really bad for learning. It doesn't actually help us learn. So, when you look at the research on Learning and when you look at the research on generating change, what really generates change is studying our success. Counting all your successes, looking for what is supporting success and Jotting yourself a few notes at the end of each day or the beginning of each day is really, really helpful. And then, if you can be in Regular conversation maybe it's every week or two, once a month I wouldn't go less than that, but that might be enough for what you're working on have a friend that you can check in with and go.
Speaker 1:This is what I'm working on, this is how I did this week or this month, and here's what seems to be getting in my way. Do you have any ideas for me? What support can you offer? Can you be a thought partner in this? Help me figure it out. How can I get better at this? And, by the way, what did you notice, right? So if you're working on something that your spouse or your business partner or your friend Sees in action on a regular basis hey, I'm trying to show up on time more often for our dinner dates. Let me know how I'm doing. You give me your feedback too, so that can also be part of that learning loop. So the two parts are your own evaluation and then, in exchange with someone else, those two pieces. When you weave them into your life, that will really accelerate your capacity to embody something new, whether it's Trustworthiness or extending trust, or fill in the blank with courage, or persuasiveness, or decisiveness or joy, and so on.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm, I love this.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things that comes up for me as I'm thinking about this process, as you're talking us through it, is that doing it would create a higher degree of self-trust, trusting myself and my own capacity to build out something, actually identify something that I wanted to get better at, and then build it out and do it, because so often I know for me, okay, I want to be better at that and I have some tools for doing that and I can do a certain amount of that and Like can see, using this process, it would actually give steps that would allow me to be much more rigorous about and therefore builds on self-trust into that process.
Speaker 1:One of the things that's been interesting for me as I've done this for myself.
Speaker 1:I really like that you're saying that, because sometimes I'll take on a quality and I feel like I'm not seeing All the progress that I would hope for and I'm like, yeah, this is getting better, but all those tabs, they're not necessarily closed yet.
Speaker 1:But what's been interesting for me is that as I work with a particular quality and then I may let it go and it'll be in the background for a while, I may be working on something else or nothing at all I will notice a few weeks, months, years down the line oh, check it out. Actually, I'm kind of doing it now Like way more than I was before, and I have had that happen in my own life with numerous qualities that I've taken on. There's something about an ongoing extended process of just choosing some quality trustworthiness in this case and really practicing with it for a while, maybe three months, maybe two to four months kind of thing, just going with it and then eventually you choose a point where you're like I'm ready to let this go, I can put it to bed, that's good enough for now, but it will continue to do its work. In the background is what I have found Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say that, making it small enough so that we don't come out of a process like this with us it here's 87 things I need to do differently. Right, we've made it so small that it can actually be done Daily, at least daily, exactly. And then the consistency of the application. There's a quote I was using it with some facilitation that I was doing recently and it's you seen, both the distance runner and he said I trained for four years to run nine seconds Right, and so what.
Speaker 3:This is Encouraging and I think such an important conversation that we have with clients and an encouragement of the practice is the rubber has to hit the road. We have to do something or nothing's gonna change, and we have to do it regularly, consistently and with purpose and intention and not give up. He said something about like most people go to the gym for a couple months and then they give up because they're not seeing the results they want. Well, right, because it takes longer. Sometimes I'm not gonna see a rapid change or a big shift in something because I've done it for four times. I'm gonna see it because I'm committed, I'm intentional, I have my reflection practice and I keep doing it, even when it's like I'm not seeing anything yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think what I Remember working with this client long ago who we were in a series of practices like this, and she was frustrated that she wasn't seeing Really immediate results. And I was like, well, you love the symphony, right? So we start talking about how, like, what do you think those folks are doing when they're not playing music for you? They have to, over and over and over and over and over again, learn the piece. And for those of us who want to, let's say you want to bring Trustworthiness into a situation, a relationship where that has been missing for some time. That's your performance, that's your symphony, that's your Olympics Train. In the moments where it's low stakes, it doesn't matter, but do it repeatedly and over and over again and in a dedicated way, and then you get to the high stakes moment and it's so much more available to you. That's what it means to embody a quality that you didn't embody previously.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Yeah, the same learning is only a rumor until it's in the muscle. Yeah right, this has been a wonderful conversation. I really love this process and I'm going to work with it first. I'm gonna work with it myself for a few times Before I try and take it to any of my clients. But I think there's a couple things I want to say before we end, and one is that, amanda, you have something new related to your book going on. Do you want to talk about that for just a minute?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, well, two things. One is what you just heard is the next book, but it hasn't yet been published. So you get the preview. You guys get one of the first previews. So keep an eye out for that. That's coming down the line.
Speaker 1:But my existing book, your body is your brain, came out in audiobook fairly recently. So for anyone who hasn't read or listened to your body as your brain, which really describes in Story form I've been told it's very readable and fun and I tried to make it so. The neurobiology behind why all of this works and Understanding that is really helpful to understanding Everything that we've talked about here today. So it's out in audiobook for people who like to listen, like podcast listeners, and I'm really proud of it. My sister-in-law is an award-winning voiceover artist and she read the book. It sounds amazing. It totally kept me engaged and I can tell you I Got really tired of this book going over it like fine-tooth comb. You know, over and over writing, writing, writing. But she really kept me engaged. So it's a great listen and I recommend it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. I've read it and I loved it. The voice that is in my head is just my voice.
Speaker 1:Really good. You have a nice voice too, charles.
Speaker 2:It might be nice to listen to somebody else's good voice. And then there's something else, though, before we finish with that, there's something else that you're doing at the end of the summer.
Speaker 1:Oh, true enough. So let's see, we're in January 2024 recording this. I don't know when it's gonna be released. In August of 2024 I'll be teaching at the Cape Cod Institute for a week towards the end of August and you can find that by going to Cape Cod Institute and searching on my name and any listeners who are interested and sort of part of the audience that that Institute wants to gather, generally practitioners working with clients in Psychological or organizational development or leadership kinds of ways, is invited to attend. It would be lovely to see there.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm going for sure, charles, I think we've invited you and you're gonna make this work too.
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely looking forward to that. Thank you, amanda. This is another brilliant episode here. It's a little longer than most of ours. I think, though, that people can sit through it, and that's the nice thing about a podcast, as you can turn it off. I'm gonna do something else you need to do and then come back to it a little later. I don't think anybody will have any hesitation to come back to it, because there's a lot here.
Speaker 2:Really worthwhile Thank you so much for joining us, talking with us, sharing these ideas and focusing around trust.
Speaker 1:Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for having me back.
Speaker 2:Good night Well and we will again.
Speaker 3:I hope yeah. On behalf of both Charles and myself, we want to say a big thank you to our producer and sound editor, chad Pinner. Hilary Rideout of inside out branding, who does our promotion, our amazing graphics and marketing press, and Our theme music was composed by Jonas Smith. If you have any questions or comments for us about the podcast, if you have a trust-related situation that you'd like us to take up in one of our episodes, we'd love to hear from you at trust, at trust on purpose org, and We'd also like to thank you, our listeners.
Speaker 2:Take care and keep building trust on purpose Until next time.
Speaker 3:Until next time.