Bouncing Forward: Cultivating Mental And Emotional Resilience With Chris Edwards

Step into the intriguing space where deeply ingrained experiences shape your present capabilities, and unlock the profound power of mental and emotional resilience. We’re joined by Chris Edwards, MS, NCC, LPC, the insightful director and founder of Neurotherapy of Colorado Springs. He unveils eye-opening perspectives on neuroplasticity and the subtle yet powerful influence of childhood patterns on adult capabilities. Discover why the crucial, often-overlooked, art of recovery is paramount. It’s not just about bouncing back from adversity, but truly “bouncing forward” into peak performance across all facets of life, from the sports arena to the boardroom and beyond.

Show Notes:

00:00 – Beyond The Bio: Chris Edwards’ Pivot Journey
03:14 – Wall Street Journal Insights: Neurotherapy In Action
07:25 – Visualizing Success: The Power Of Vision Boards
11:55 – Crafting Your Future: Blueprinting Your Best Self
15:21 – The Pressure Cooker: Mastering Mental & Emotional Performance
21:21 – The Bounce Forward Advantage: The ArtOof Recovery
26:48 – Unlocking Potential: Identifying Performance Roadblocks
33:14 – The Recharge Revolution: Sleep, Hydration, And Tech Recovery
40:16 – The Happiness Check: A Moment Of Self-Reflection
44:23 – Your Personal Resilience Playbook: A Snapshot

—

Get the newest Change Proof Podcast episode delivered directly to you – subscribe here. And, if you’re enjoying the podcast, please give us a 5-star rating on iTunes! For instructions click here.

How do we leverage continuous uncertainty to thrive in this unprecedented new world?
The answer is to build the resilience we need to power us through the challenges we face so that we become “Change Proof.” Prepare to tackle the future with confidence by reading Adam’s latest book Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Bouncing Forward: Cultivating Mental And Emotional Resilience With Chris Edwards

Beyond The Bio: Chris Edwards’ Pivot Journey

Welcome back to another episode of the show. I love the guest that I’ve got coming up for you. His name is Chris Edwards, and he is the director and the founder of Neurotherapy of Colorado Springs. I found out about Chris, his work, and Neurotherapy of Colorado Springs by reading a Wall Street Journal article about an Olympic skater who is having some trouble in the big events.

She is truly amazing and a wonderful person, and an incredible performer. Most skaters around the world could not do a particular move that they could not perform, but she could, except sometimes, when the lights were on, when the competition was at its peak. This particular gentleman and his work in the world have helped her to perform better under pressure, which is something important in her arena, but it’s also important in the arena of business, leadership, and life.

I needed to have this gentleman on the podcast, and you’re going to get to hear what he has to say about neuroplasticity of the brain and about how it is that we create resilience mentally and emotionally. What gets in the way of that? What will keep us from being able to make certain changes in our lives and our business lives that would be optimal for us? Without further ado, I welcome Chris Edwards to the Change Proof Show. Everybody enjoys.

—

Chris, first of all, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on this show, and I’ve been looking forward to this. As you heard, I shared a little bit about how it was that I came to know you and know of you, and a little bit about your background and the work you do in the world. My question to you at the beginning is, what’s one thing that is not a part of your CV, your bio, your history that you would love for people to know about you?

There’s always a bunch. There are a lot of layers. The thing that probably has the most validity is that I have had to borrow your phraseology. I’ve had to pivot quite a bit in my life. I’ve made several career changes and more than several. I have had to work on that whole change-proof mentality a lot. It’s a lot of what I bring to this business. Listening to your stuff and your podcast, I wish you were my neighbor.

Maybe we would have a great time. We have so much in common. I was listening to your Change Proof book and loving it, and a little bummed because I’m like, “He wrote the book I wished I could have written.” It’s good. We think a lot alike. You have good quotes, and you like to use stories to tell to illustrate things, music, and all that stuff. That’s me literally to a T.

Wall Street Journal Insights: Neurotherapy In Action

I knew we were simpatico, but it was a strange thing because I read this Wall Street Journal article. I’m reading this, and I’m hearing about the work that you did with Amber Glenn, this amazing Olympic skater, this incredible athlete herself. I started thinking, “I need to talk to this guy.” Your business is not presently designed and used the way you describe, and you’ve pivoted many times.

Who knows what the future will bring? You decide you want to write that book and take another turn in your career choices, etc. Even though you wouldn’t necessarily be the person who might be looking for an audience to share what you do, I thought, “I’m still going to reach out, and I want to have a conversation with you regardless.” You were so open. Your whole team is so kind and so open to the idea that we would set this up and have a conversation. I said, “We’re for sure kin in a lot of ways.” I’m excited.

Change Proof Podcast | Chris Edwards | Resilience

Resilience: A large component of resilience is flexibility, that cognitive flexibility or ability to be hypervigilant if you need it.

Before we get into the meat of why I wanted to speak to you on the show, I want to learn a little bit more about the pivot story because I don’t think there’s any accident in it. I so appreciate the shout-out for those two books, etc. I’ve pivoted a lot in my life as well. I’m always so happy to meet a fellow pivoter on the path. Would you share one aspect of that, or what you pulled through those experiences?

I can pull you through many quickly, because it’s a story I get asked. I got out of graduate school and was working in a clinic with severely emotionally disturbed kids and their families. I got introduced to using biofeedback with some of these kids, and had a lot of luck. We’re already getting a little outside the box. The pivot comes where my family, my brother, my sister, there’s a lot of music in my family. A lot of musicians are in my family. I grew up as a musician as well.

I didn’t go into it for college, but I had a little weekend warrior band, and that band took off. Here I am as a therapist. I’ve got this other career that is opening up, and I was like, “Maybe I’m going to do music too.” I did a little bit of both. I did a little bit of the therapy. I ended up having to switch gears because it took off. I ended up taking a more flexible research job, let go of that therapy job, and became a full-time touring musician.

Again, at about 35, about ten years of that, I had to pivot yet again. That band imploded, and I decided I was a little too tired and maybe a little too road weary to do it again. Still visiting and there’s still this part of me that loves that therapeutic healer roots and had to do some pretty deep soul searching, sitting in my little house in the country for a couple of years, reinventing myself. Luckily, I had a couple of great mentors who were able to sit and walk me through that process.

They have done it themselves, which is brilliant, and spent two years designing this business at 35 years old. Here I am now, almost 55, and I designed it all on a vision board before I ever moved to Colorado from rural New York. These are some pretty big pivots. Also in there, too, and probably not to go down this road too far, but some emotional pivots along with that. I think all of us do in our lives. We all have those stories.

Visualizing Success: The Power Of Vision Boards

Again, another way that you and I are aligned in so many aspects, one being this concept of the vision board. I saw when I was looking at your website and reading more about you, that some of the things that you do, including, I think one of the offerings, a program, a workshop, where therapy itself is focused around the use of vision boarding, which is something that my wife and I have done for years now. Every year, it’s part of a ritual that we have for starting a new year and living very much on purpose and intentionally.

I think people sometimes hear vision board, and it’s like two camps. Those who lean heavily into it for whatever reason. They embrace the woo-woo. They’re spiritual people, or whatever it is. Those people who somehow think that it is not practical, it’s not logical. Even if they have spiritual or religious inclinations, they think that’s a little too airy-fairy or a little too niche. California Grape Nuts. For the people that are thinking that way, I don’t want you to preach to the choir now, but those other people, what can you say about the applicability, the usefulness of vision boarding?

This is my wheelhouse. That’s my group. The people who are easy to grab are easy to grab. It’s about finding a little more applicability to everybody. When I teach that class, I do the neuroscience and vision board. I usually start with a quote of my own that we tend to resist the things we need the most because they represent the biggest changes we need to make. Our brain is designed to look at big changes with a lot of caution. If we’re waving the cautionary flag from this biological perspective on big change, then we often don’t go there. The interpretation of that red flag is don’t go there. We end up not going there. I start with that, and I let that sink in. I move through a litany of stories and examples and things like this.

Ultimately, it turns out to be this. Your brain runs about 95% on autopilot. Autopilot is born out of a lot of repetition. Repetition always lives in your past. It started in the past. That’s how it got to be where it is. That is what you become. You’ve got this repetition in your past. Look backwards, and you were unwittingly being introduced to patterns, habits, thoughts, emotions, and a way of doing things from a very young age. What you didn’t realize was happening was that you were getting programmed. Look back at that history. How happy are you with things that are in your past?

More often than not, people are going, “There’s a bunch of that that I’m not madly in love with.” Without a doubt, that’s shaping you. It’s turned into a series of habits that are running on autopilot. If you’re doing things blindly, you’re feeling things, and you’ve not made the direct decision to feel that way, it means it’s showing up on autopilot. Most of your life is on autopilot. That’s your brain’s job. You’re only running your day-to-day life, this podcast, and our conversations, our jobs, and all things, it’s 5% of our brain.

It presents the illusion of our life, but 95% of our brain is running on autopilot, which was born in our past. Are you happy with where you’re at? If not, you’re going to have to start deliberately deciding who you want to be, how you want to feel. You’re going to have to decide on the thoughts, the beliefs, and the behaviors of that person, and start engaging them as new habits, building the person that you want to be, versus being the person that was programmed a long time ago when you didn’t even know it was happening.

Crafting Your Future: Blueprinting Your Best Self

I think of it in terms of a blueprint of sorts. When I engage somebody in that healthy conflict around the usefulness of an exercise, like a vision boarding process. My wife and I do this, and we show our kids how to do it, and recommend they do it. Now they’re adults, they’ll do it or not do it. Some of our kids don’t do it, to be perfectly frank about it. I analogize it to the way an architect draws up a plan for a home, let’s say.

Design the person you want to be, then practice their habits until they become autopilot. Share on X

If you went to the site, I know you live in Colorado, if you went to this beautiful, cleared piece of land, and you say, “Here’s where my gorgeous home in the mountains is going to be. Here’s a drawing of what it’s going to look like.” Would anybody say to you, “That drawing is a lie.” They wouldn’t because the drawing is what precedes the building. If you’re intelligent, you don’t deliver the wood and a bunch of other materials and go, “I’ll start constructing something on the site.” I suppose people do that, but I don’t think that’s what we do.

The blueprint is what comes first. To me, vision boarding or that intentional look at what I want my life to be like or be different. What do I want to bring into my life? What do I want to remove even from my experience? It’s like creating a blueprint for something that doesn’t exist yet. Why are those two things different?

That’s where I live with it. I feel like for those people who have that, the anti-woo-woo skepticism, which is fine. I live there too. I always describe myself as an open-minded skeptic. You have to design the person that you want to be, then you have to practice the habits of that person until they become autopilot. Now you’re the person you designed versus the one that got programmed. You’ve got to decide what that looks like. You just have to do it, or it’s always going to defer to autopilot every time.

That’s neuroscience. I was a lawyer for twenty years. I need practical, but I love the way you put that, an open-minded skeptic. I’m going to have to borrow that.

I’m willing to listen to anything, but at some point, you’re going to have to show me something. You’re a quote guy. I don’t know if I have this directly, but I love the Einstein quote of, “Intuition is the sacred gift. Logic is the faithful servant, and we’ve evolved into a society that values the servant over the sacred gift.” Intuitively, doesn’t it make sense to sit down and design this thing?

That’s the way you were going to plan something else, logically speaking, also intuitively, what would make sense. As everybody asks each other all the time, “Does that make sense?” Another verbal tick we’ve adopted. Another habit. “Are you asking me if that makes sense?” There’s a parenthetical in here for those of you who either do that all the time or people around you do that all the time. The next time they ask you if that makes sense, say, “No, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Back that up with some logic. What they love about neuroscience is that it backs up the logic of a vision board. You go, “I get it.” You go, “It turns out it’s important to.”

The Pressure Cooker: Mastering Mental & Emotional Performance

I read the story about Amber Glenn and how she was utilizing your organization’s services to help her get in a better place, mentally and emotionally, to be able to perform. I was also thinking in the last couple of years more about Simone Biles, because she’s such a superstar in the world and a huge personality, celebrity brand, etc. People paid attention to the fact that she took herself out of the Olympics for about a week, the last Olympics or the one before the last one, because of her feeling mentally and not ready to perform, and potentially could not only damage the team, but even damage herself physically, because of the things she is doing.

Could you share something about the mental and emotional side of performance? Often, people will talk about the physical side, but how do people support themselves, and what options do they have if they find that they are mentally and emotionally not performing the way they can, and they don’t understand?

I want to ultimately tie this to resiliency, because that’s the thing that WORKWELL does, being the tip of the spear. How do we develop mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual resiliency so that we can perform in our lives in all aspects, whether it’s the work thing, it’s the sports thing, the music thing, or the creative pursuits in our lives, with writing or whatever it might be. It’s our relationships and our overall well-being.

I think thinking of it like this is probably the best way to go. Let’s use an example. That’s probably the best way to be illustrative. Let’s say you have somebody who goes through some childhood trauma. Let’s pretend we’ve got somebody who’s got one parent or both parents who are alcoholics. We’ve got a chaotic household, and we’ve got an unpredictable environment. Typically, what you’ll get out of that is somebody who’s developing a lot of hypervigilance, because we’re living in a chaotic environment.

That looks like something in the brain. In our office, what that looks like is mid and high beta activity. If somebody goes into a hypervigilant state, we’re going to see this brain go into this hypervigilance. You’ll see it. It’s a thing. It’s a brain wave. What we know through neuroplasticity is that, in my opinion, it doesn’t delineate between bad and good. That is a judgment call. Anything that’s got a lot of repetition.

Resilience: Your brain’s job is to wire those things in that you keep practicing over and over again.

Will you do our audience the favor of quickly defining what neuroplasticity is for those that may not already know?

Neuroplasticity is this idea that the brain can be trained, the brain can change, and anything that’s got enough repetition behind it can be learned. We love this. It makes sense. It’s that intuition that goes, “That feels right.” There’s a lot of logic that supports that. This idea that you could hang out, let’s pretend, in a hypervigilant state for a long time if you live in a household like that. After a while, your brain wires that in for you. This is a good thing because if we don’t have to think about being hypervigilant, and we are hypervigilant, neuroplasticity kicks in, wires that state in for you. You’re a lot better off. Your brain can then go about doing the rest of your life, and be running hypervigilance in the background.

Let’s say we grow up. We grow out of that household, and oftentimes when we’re dealing with households that have alcoholism, you’ll see kids that start to become a little perfectionistic. We’ve got this elevated brainwave state. We’ve got a little bit of learned perfectionism. If nobody gets in there and alerts us to what’s going on, somebody could take that and do some pretty cool things with it. I could run a great business with that. I could plow through law school. I could be a rocking lawyer.

I could go, go, go. Why? It’s because my default wiring is go, go, go. I got this part of my brain that’s always going, and it doesn’t feel good unless it’s got something to land on. A lot of times, what will happen in here is like when we get our like Fortune 500, even our Fortune 50 guys in here, what they’re doing is they’re hitting 45, 50 years old, and they’re going, “I’m not doing so well.” We start to back out of that, and we go, “You’ve been using overdrive for a very long time. Where did that start?” What we can do is because we’re so adaptive and we’re so amazing that way.

Sounds like, by the way, that you watched my TED Talk, and if you didn’t and you’re doing this spontaneously, then I’m having a moment here.

No, actually, I have not yet. I just found out, listening to your podcast, that you had a TED Talk, and I love TED Talks. I have not had the chance.

You’ll get a little freaky moment later or whenever you watch this thing, but keep going.

Here we are, we’ve got this learned thing, and it’s got a glass ceiling to it that we didn’t know existed. We thought we were doing the right thing because we’ve got this default brain state. We’ve got this default, which turns into a default physiology. What we’ve been doing is using adrenals and using fight or flight and using all kinds of things to go, go, go. Of course, our bodies and brains are not meant to run that way. You talk about resilience. I talk about that a lot, too. For me, a large component of resilience is flexibility. That cognitive flexibility, that ability to be hypervigilant if you need it. Later on, when you don’t, chill out and read a book.

Is that similar to or the same as adaptability?

It is. You’re supposed to be able to flex in and out of all of the different brainwave states. If you hang out somewhere too often and too long, after a while, your brain goes, “This must be the new normal. We’re going to go ahead and wire this because it’s here all the time.” That’s your brain’s job. It is to wire those things in that you keep practicing over and over again. It says, “Repetition is king. Good or bad.” That can be a boon at some time in your life when you’re building a business with it, and then a bane later on when you’re tired and worn out.

To go back to your initial question, what we’re doing in here with folks is we can either come at performance enhancement from a top-down or a bottom-up mentality. Some of it is like, “Are there things that you’ve been using for a long time that may have gotten you to where you are, but now they’re starting to get in the way?” That’s a possibility. Are there some things that you haven’t been doing that you could be doing that would be helpful to add in? Oftentimes, it’s both.

What we’re doing in here is we’re doing a good assessment on that, and we’re looking at the central nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, enteric nervous system. We’re making sure that those are in a place of flexibility so that when you’re performing, you’re in a performing space. When you’re in a chill out, you have time to chill out, you are chilling out. You’re not sitting still, crawling out of your skin because your brain is still going 150 miles an hour because you don’t know how to let that go.

When we're showing up to the new thing, not only is the pressure on, but it's unfamiliar. Share on X

The Bounce Forward Advantage: The Art Of Recovery

When we talk about resilience, we don’t define resilience the way a lot of people do, which is to bounce back. It’s this whole idea of bouncing back. If anything, we’d say, “You’re bouncing forward.” The real concept here is about recovery, and in that recovery, we develop greater resilience. I feel like that’s what you’re saying as well.

That’s exactly it. When people come here, sometimes they’re coming in on the surface, going, “I want to improve.” What they don’t know is they’re asking for better recovery, and they don’t know it. They don’t know that that’s why they’re here. In our way of doing what we do in here, and we do a fairly elaborate in-person one-on-one individualized intake and things like that, we start to get to know people and go, “This is what’s going on.”

Having been doing this for as long as I’m doing it and creating my methodology for it, we’re able to get at what your driving forces are. Some of them are going to be great. Some of them may be things that were meant for another purpose that you have adapted to and used to your advantage. Now, those things that you were using to your advantage are becoming a disadvantage.

A lot of it is my own story as well. I think it’s a story of a lot of executives and a lot of people who are high performers and consider themselves that way. That’s their worldview. It’s the way they identify themselves. It’s also difficult for that group of people to acknowledge, admit, reach out, and ask for help that they’re struggling with this. That is the true line of my TED Talk. It took me to have a pretty rough experience to have a pivot moment to go, “I do need this change, or reach out and make an effort to change.” It sounds to me like, at least in your experience, the old dog can learn new tricks. We can change.

I’m wanting to also understand that for a person who’s hypervigilant for whatever reasons that might be the case, or whatever the case that created this state of less function than they want. With an athlete, you know it because their batting average goes down. They fall off the balance beam. They don’t win the race. There are obvious ways for an athlete to determine that something needs to be recalibrated, and they have to ask themselves, “Can I still perform at the level I want to based on age, time, injury, and whatnot?” There’s that moment, then there’s the rest of us.

The 99% of folks that are in their lives working and living and relating to people, etc., and they don’t feel the way they want to feel, or they’re not getting the promotions, or they’re not achieving the things that they believe that they can. I want you to see if we can draw the bridge between those two groups, because I know you work with both the Amber Glenns of the world, the athletes, but you also work with Fortune 50 CEOs and executives. When things aren’t going well for them, it doesn’t often look like, “I lost the race.” It’s like, “My team isn’t performing. My company’s not doing well. I didn’t get a promotion.” There are some signs, but it’s not nearly as clear-cut.

Unlocking Potential: Identifying Performance Roadblocks

That’s right. That’s where it gets a little complicated. I’m sure you’ve run into this because you have developed a methodology for assessing and looking at those things. In doing so, you probably ran into a lot of “What about this? It could be that.” There are so many things that it can be. I do believe it, to a large degree, you can use things like questionnaires, which we do, and the forums, and gather that general information.

I do believe there’s a lot of value to sitting down with somebody or a group and going, “Now that we know this about you, let me ask some questions, because I’m having some thoughts here. I’m seeing this, I’m seeing that.” For somebody like Amber Glenn comes in and goes, “I’m not where I want to be, this is what’s going on.” I go, “First of all, tell me that story, what’s going on?” I’ll start poking around that.

Her story is quickly in the biggest meets for her, the biggest competitions, she was not performing the way she could in practice, even an hour before.

Here’s what’s wild. First, I could say a lot about her. That’s amazing because she’s this cool lady, but she has this claim to fame. She’s one of the few females to do a triple axel. This requires a lot of power, a lot of precision, and she can do it. It’s not an issue. It’s not up for debate. It can be done. Can I do it under all these other circumstances is a whole other question. Why you might not be able to show up to that situation, there are a lot of reasons why that might be. Taking the time to sit down and figure out what those things are.

I think over the years, probably you and I and other people like us have started to come up with a list of the top twenty things that might do that, which makes it difficult for somebody to show up. They don’t know that a lot of those things are running in the background and running interference patterns. Those top twenty listed things that you could or should be doing that you don’t know that you should be doing, or putting a priority on. Because nobody has explained that to you, you’re not doing those things. The funny ones with my executives that always crack me up, but I love it, are how they don’t prioritize sleep.

Water, we’ve got to have that or we die. Food, we’ve got to have that or we die. Sleep, we’ve got to have that, or we die, or sunlight. We know we have these things, so we should be looking at those, and those should be at the top of your list. It kills me when I have these amazing high performers who don’t have that at the top of their list. Speaking of TED Talks, Matt Walker’s Sleep Is Your Superpower TED Talk, which is one of my favorites, gets into this thing. There’s a little bit of ego in there, like, “I’m not one of those people who needs all that sleep. Sleep is for pansies,” or whatever.

Resilience: When you have to shut up and live your life on the bare minimum, those coping mechanisms are going to influence your ability to change, adapt, and pivot.

“You get to sleep when you die.”

That one too. It’s like that, where you go, “How the heck did you get there?” There’s a list of interference, the list of things that have happened or are happening that can cause interference patterns. There’s that top twenty list of things we should probably all be doing that often we’re not.

Like visualizing our success, which I think is one of the strategies you used with Amber Glenn. She could visualize what it’s like to be in the throes of competition, so that she’s practicing being in that state of hyper-focus, or feeling whatever she’s feeling. As you say, the interference patterns, including “My coach from third grade told me I’d never amount to anything. I could never be good enough for my mom or my dad,” whatever the voices are in our heads.

To practice those things when the lights weren’t on. It wasn’t first that when the lights are on, and it’s the most serious that those voices or those interference patterns, to use your term, which is brilliant, that those things are showing up in that moment when you’re going, “I got to do a triple axle right now. Suddenly, I cannot.”

Not only that, too, I think what’s interesting to think about, and you could use Amber’s, like a great way to look at it, is, she’s over here at the Olympic Training Center every day. Skating every day, a couple of times a day. She’s doing the weight training, and she’s doing this. How often is she in front of thousands of people performing? Not that much. Not enough to put that on autopilot. When we’re showing up to the new thing or when the pressure’s on, so to speak, not only is the pressure on, but it’s unfamiliar.

This is where you want as many things in the background to bolster you in that moment on autopilot, as many of the good things as you can. As you said, practicing visualization, having all of these great learned habits on autopilot in the background. All you have to do in that moment is show up and do what you do because it’s all on autopilot, no matter where you are.

Not make hard work of it, oddly enough. Relaxation, loosening, being loose is so important in almost every endeavor, especially creative ones or ones where there’s that intense pressure to perform, that ability to be relaxed, to loosen, to be loose, and not make hard work out of something that essentially can be fun. We don’t do it for any other reason, at least initially, other than the fact that we get something from it. Some fulfillment and some enjoyment from the fun out of it. It’s interesting because we’ve had about 9,000 business case studies that are in the form of an assessment that we developed some years ago.

The Recharge Revolution: Sleep, Hydration, And Tech Recovery

The simple through line of the whole thing, I think you’re going to find this interesting, is that two things. One, there’s a question that asks whether people, the work they do is in alignment with their core values, and routinely that lights up green. Most people that we assess are doing the right work. Believe it or not, they’re in their right zone. The very next question says that there are significant gaps between what they say is important to them and how they allocate their time.

That disconnect between what people are saying is important to them and what they actually do with their time was a thing that I felt when I was a lawyer and a workaholic as well, and I was missing spending time with my kids and my family. Those two things were irreconcilable. I had a conflict that I couldn’t resolve, especially being the prototype for the hypervigilant, like you said, based on childhood and other things. The second thing that we found from all these assessments is that people neglect their recovery. This is the one thing that you said earlier that’s so true that in the four areas, mental, emotional, physical, and on the alignment and spiritual side, the physical piece lights up red all the time.

Organizationally, by teams and individually that people are neglecting their conscious decisions about food, their hydration, their sleep primarily, and how frequently they are tied to their tech right through bedtime. In bed, people have phones in bed with them and other devices in bed, and they’re having trouble. Now people are pretty good at answering these questions when I’m in a keynote and I get to ask people, “How many of you have trouble getting sleep at night?” A lot of hands go up. “How many of you have trouble staying asleep at night?” A lot of hands go up.

I think to some extent, we’ve been sold a bit of a bill of goods from some of the other influencers out there that say somehow you should be able to go and not need sleep, or that somehow or another sleep isn’t a vital tool for your performance in the day. You want to be better with people. You want to be better at leading people and finding solutions to challenges that will always persist. How are you focused on getting your recovery at night, as being one element of recovery?

The irony of that is that if you don’t, there are all these issues. We could sit here for an hour and do your thing and sleep easily. How do you compensate for that the next day?

Tell us more about that. We’ve got a couple of minutes here. Chris, we’re going to have to schedule a part two because I know people are going, “You guys, we need more from Chris.”

The next day, you’re sleep-deprived. You’re going to be running low on dopamine. Blood sugar levels are going to start riding the roller coaster. More than likely, if this is your habit, you will have learned how to tap your adrenals, your fight or flight, your sympathetic nervous system for a little bit of adrenaline, a little bit of norepinephrine, and dopamine. You are now using your body in a way it wasn’t meant to be used, unless you’re running from a bear. We can tap on that, and we can learn to do that, and our brain is going to go, “That worked. You could do that tomorrow. That was cool.”

I have an anxious thought, “I’ll push something to the very last minute. I’ll hit adrenaline, I’ll get dopamine, norepinephrine circulating, and I’ll get it done.” In the meantime, you’ve also got an elevated heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and your digestion is shutting down, cellular mitosis is shutting off. You’re hampering some stuff with this coping mechanism. The next day, when you have to shut up and live your life on the bare minimum, those coping mechanisms are going to influence your ability to change, adapt, and pivot. There are limitations. That can become an ingrained neural habit. We do a lot in here. We use neurofeedback to address the brain wave patterns.

We use biofeedback for addressing the ingrained autonomic nervous system habits. We do look at things like diet and nutrition to address the ingrained enteric nervous system patterns. That lack of sleep turns into a set of coping mechanisms the next day, which starts to take a toll on all of those things. If you do them over and over again, they become your new homeostasis. It becomes your new you. Now your body, your brain, and your physiology, your chemistry, and your energy recalibrate to this outside the norm thing. Now your homeostasis is off-center. This is your new normal. What happens is you could see a therapist or somebody like that.

You go, “I’m anxious and I’m this and that.” They’re throwing techniques at you that temporarily bring you back to center. As soon as you stop using their techniques, it slides you back to your new normal because this is now your new normal. What happens is those coping mechanisms over time that are making up for the deficits in your life and lifestyle, and whatever that is, and all the other things that may have happened, brain injury and poor nutrition, and you name it. You now have an off-center homeostasis and a whole physiology around that.

Of course, we all need to get stuff done. Somehow, you’re getting it all done over here and not well. That starts to take an overall on things. If we can get you back into center, it’s okay to pop out of center once in a while. Amber is going to do it when she goes and performs in front of 10,000 people, and the pressure is on, trust me, we’re pushing an envelope. That’s okay. We don’t want to live up there. What we learned through the research of Robert Sapolsky. He’s got a great book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Do you remember that?

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

I will be reading that.

He’s great. He’s one of my faves. I love this guy. This idea of how we can adapt to stress, the way that human beings adapt to stress, and use that over-activated or autonomic nervous system state and that stress physiology to live our lives in lieu of good habits underneath. This is where it all starts to fall apart. You don’t do the foundations, and the next day, you have to compensate for the fact that you didn’t do those things. You do that over and over again. It’s your new normal. Now you’re in trouble. That’s honestly, I think, where a lot of chronic health issues are coming from, chronic mental health issues are coming from. I think most of the chronic issues are over there. You’re chronically out of alignment anyway.

The Happiness Check: A Moment Of Self-Reflection

As we wrap this part one of our conversation, I have an unfair question for you, which is to ask this. If there is one thing that you would say to the person who is the prototype of what you’re describing, what’s that one thing? I know there’s a lot, and that’s why I say I know it’s an unfair question, but if there’s one throughline piece of advice for somebody listening to this right now, who is saying, “I think he’s talking about me,” what are you saying to that person?

Are you happy with the way things are? Are you happy with not only what you’re doing? That’s what you do. What you do is not who you are. Are you bringing the you, the person you want to be, to the things that you do? Are you loving it? If you’re not, you’re missing it.

I love that message in part because we’re not getting into the solution side of it, because that’s where the question is unfair. We’ve already started to talk and unpack how much is involved in the solution side. I know on our side, what we recommend is something called a recovery map, and I won’t get into that now, but it’s this idea that if you know where you’re missing is by not having recovery rituals, all those things that you’re describing occur over time, and you cannot sustain it. It’s impossible to sustain it beyond a certain point. I think the bigger question is, how do you feel? That’s what my moment of truth was in my life.

I had everything going for me. There was no reason on the outside to stop doing. Friends and family, and others said, “What are you doing?” When I decided to pivot out of being a lawyer, as an example, years later, not right away, I didn’t jump ship. To plan that pivot was seen by some as absurd. When you look healthy, relationships look healthy, kids are healthy, you’ve got money and business and all, why would you change any of that? The bigger question is, how do you feel? When you look in the mirror, what do you see and how do you feel about that? That’s a great point of inflection to start whatever we’re going to say next.

Are you bringing the you, the person you want to be, to the things that you do? Are you loving it? If you're not, you're missing it. Share on X

I wholeheartedly agree because I always tell people when they’re building a vision board, the center of your vision board should be how you want to feel, not what you’re going to do. Start with how you want to feel and build around that. When I built this, I was like, “I want to feel happy and excited every day.” That was it. That was my prime directive, and I built off of that. That’s how I landed here.

It’s brilliant, Chris. I’ve so loved this conversation. I know we’re going to end it now in a second here, but folks, don’t be sad. We’ll get Chris back, I promise. If you’ve got questions for Chris, however, you can go to AdamMarkel.com/podcast, leave questions there, comments, anything like that. If you have a friend, family member, colleague who would benefit from this conversation, please share this episode, share this with those folks.

For me, that moment of truth, both in my TED Talk, is described, but I also read a book called The Road Less Traveled by Dr. Scott Peck. That was a catalytic moment for me to do a lot to go into the dark way we’re describing now, where you can find some truth within yourself to say, “What I do isn’t who I am necessarily.” If there’s a gap, if there’s a delta between who you want to be and how you are showing up in your life, in your world, wherever it is, there’s something to pay attention to. It’s because this is the only life you’re going to get, as far as we know.

Even if it’s not, don’t you want to live this to the best? Don’t you want to hit 99 in your rocking chair, going, “That was cool? I have a good time.”

Too great, brother. We’re going to end it right there, everybody. Ciao for now, and we’ll see you on the next one.

—

Your Personal Resilience Playbook: A Snapshot

I promise that we will schedule a part two to that episode. I hope you loved it. If you didn’t love it, then you’re not, maybe you wouldn’t be interested in part two, but I’m intuiting. My instinct tells me that so many people who have tuned in to our discussion will be benefiting from it. When you sit with it, maybe re-listen to it, even, think about it, it went very deep in a very quick amount of time. I feel simpatico with Chris and his work in the world. We are very much on parallel paths in terms of our purpose and what it is that we want to do, and how we want to impact and have a positive impact in the world.

His methodology also aligns so well with what WORKWELL does, so we’re in conversations with Chris about having him join and become part of our faculty team as well. For now, anyway, I think this is an episode that bears re-listening to and certainly sharing with others, sharing with family, friends, colleagues, anybody that’s that’s in that hyper vigilant state whether they know it or they don’t, but they’re not potentially able to sustain what has gotten them as far as they’ve gotten. It may not be that they can sustain that or get to that next level because of these things that are unconsciously blocking them. Things that are creating exhaustion, a level of depletion mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, even that will not allow them to achieve their highest potential.

I love the conversation that we had. I think it’s so practical. Please share with those. Also, know that if you want to get a snapshot, I think it’s a perfect opportunity, given what Chris was sharing and the thoughts that you may be having, listen to that. That you get a snapshot in this moment of where you are, how you are mentally, how you are emotionally, physically, spiritually, from a resiliency standpoint, from the capacity to be able to move forward, to bounce forward if you will.

All you need to do to get your own resilience assessment and confidential results that are entirely free is simply go to RankMyResilience.com. In three minutes, you will have your own personalized and confidential assessment. It will cost you nothing except three minutes in time, and it will give you tremendous insights into some of the areas that Chris and I were speaking of. I alluded to some of those findings, spoke to some of the through line of those findings, and you would be among those that we aggregate data on to come up with those conclusions.

See if what I said matches up with what you see after having taken the assessment. RankMyResilience.com is yours, and we hope you take advantage of it. Right now, I want to thank you once again for being a member of this community. If you would take another couple of minutes out of your day, if possible, at some point to rank or rate our podcast on the platform that you consume it, whether it’s Spotify or iTunes or in any other way, the five-star rating is the one that we’re looking for. Whatever makes sense for you that’s authentically true is perfect as well. I know that when the algorithm sees that people are doing that, more people get to view it, get to consume it, listen to it, and that’s a part of our mission. We thank you ahead of time for taking the time to do that. Once again, I would say, ciao for now, and thank you.