What's on Your Bookshelf?
“What’s On Your Bookshelf” is a personal and professional growth podcast exploring the intersections of passion, potential, and purpose - featuring multi-certified coach and leadership development consultant Denise R. Russo alongside Sam Powell, Zach Elliott, Tom Schweizer, Dennis LaRue, and Michelle King.
What's on Your Bookshelf?
SP2 Special Edition Agile Brain: Self, Safety, And The Road To Potential
We explore how psychological safety enables authenticity, and how authenticity unlocks potential. JD Pincus connects fear, narcissism, imposter syndrome, and conspiracy thinking to a broader model of self, social, material, and spiritual domains, leading to transcendence.
• Safety as the basis for authentic expression
• Apprenticeship and voice development before mastery
• Redefining self-actualization as attitude, not fame
• The four domains reframed with an integrated self
• Evidence-based case for spiritual well-being
• Student mental health pressures and system strain
• Fear as information and the SM case study
• Fight, flight, anger and self-control under stress
• Authenticity versus narcissism and emotional stunting
• Imposter syndrome as a brake or motivator
• Stress, prevention energy and conspiracy belief
• Transcendence beyond self and resolving opposites
• Coaching questions to assess talents and next steps
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Welcome to a special edition of What's on Your Bookshelf with your host, Denise Russo. Hello, everyone. Welcome back. It's another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. My name is Denise Russo. This is a special edition series. I'm so excited to be back again with my friend, Dr. JD Pincus. And JD is the author of The Emotionally Agile Brain, which is about mastering the 12 emotional needs that drive us. Last time we were together, we did an overview or an intro of how this wonderful book is laid out and about the company, the Agile Brain. And today, now, JD, we're gonna get right into the first of five parts of the book and of what you have written here that's called The Motives of the Self. And so, first of all, thanks for being here with me.
SPEAKER_01:Always uh thrilled to be here with you today.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. Well, JD, self-ish late, I suppose, I am very honored that you take the time to be able to share this great body of work with us and all of the great work that's being done at Agile Brain. And so just a reminder to the listeners this book is so extraordinarily comprehensive. We mentioned last time that the bibliography itself is pages and pages long where you can take even deeper dives into the content. And then in Agile Brain, there's also opportunities for people to become certified as coaches and debriefers of the Agile Brain assessment. So there's more information that you can access directly on the website. So before we jump into this part one on self, JD, is there anything else that I've neglected to share that we might want to drive the listeners to for Agile Brain?
SPEAKER_01:I think you hit the major points. Um we we do a monthly forum, it's the first Wednesday of each month. So for people who are just kind of getting into it and and sort of curious about it, that's a great way to kind of join us. It's free, obviously. And you it we have a lot of coaches from around the world who join. And basically, just you know, we we do some presenting, we do some interviews. Uh Denise has graciously been interviewed on it. Uh, and and uh it's just a great sort of introduction uh to see what this is all about.
SPEAKER_00:So just add that. Awesome, thank you. So we're gonna start at this 20,000-foot view of this part one, which is all about the self. And so when we think about the self in this chapter in the book, JD, you've separated into three main areas safety, authenticity, and potential. Can you help our listeners understand this about emotions and the power of self-actualization?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. So the reason that they are arranged the way they are, as sort of, you know, foundational, experiential, um, and aspirational, is that there's sort of three levels of development. It begins with the need for safety, psychological safety. Uh, the concept there is pretty straightforward. Uh, you know, you need to feel psychologically safe. That is, you know, you you will not be threatened or somehow, you know, humiliated or or attacked if you uh, you know, to express who you truly are. Um, if you feel psychologically safe, you can express who you truly are as a person. Uh, once you get to that point and you're really being who you are authentically, uh, that's really your first opportunity to become who you can be, your sort of best self, your highest self, your sort of fullest articulation of yourself. It's kind of like if you were a writer uh and you were trying to sound like someone else. I'm like trying to write in the style of Stephen King or or my professor or my boss or someone else. Uh, I will never achieve self-actualization as a writer. You have to speak in your own voice. Uh, and the sooner you get started on that in life, the better it is, uh, because you'll be then be able to get there in your voice and be able to sort of master it and and uh you know explore what's possible. So without authenticity, there's no self-actualization we call potential in the book. Um and without uh safety, there's no authenticity. You can't really be yourself. So that's why we we put them that way, as sort of a ladder.
SPEAKER_00:When we talked last week, we had some really interesting history about you prior to you becoming a doctor. And so just recently, there's been the passing of an icon in the music business, Ozzy Osborne. And I saw your post recently on LinkedIn about that and your affinity for Black Sabbath and some of that type of music. And so I'm curious when you think about this chapter on self and you're talking about being your authentic true self, but maybe as a starting out as a musician, were you emulating or having uh something in regards to looking at the authenticity of how could you be your own self, but but looking at people you looked up to, whether it's somebody at work that you look up to, somebody in the uh entertainment business or celebrity business or government business that you look up to? And then how do you take that and drive your potential?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's a really important question uh because uh it if you just kind of naively listen to what we were saying, and and you think uh, you know, I I need to be my authentic self right now, and I need to speak in my own voice and self-actualize right now, but I'm just starting out, that doesn't work. You need everyone needs to kind of go through that apprenticeship. You know, you you you have to learn how the thing is done. Uh so you know, I was a musician, but I was not, you know, technically very skilled. I was I was you know I was pretty good. I was okay. Um, I remember the guy we opened for said I was the best guitarist he had encountered since uh Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys, which is a high honor. But uh the truth is uh Dwelling Cheetah himself is not the greatest musician, uh, but the uh uh you need to kind of be humble when you start out. You need to learn your your you know professors, the great writers, like the the you know, your boss's style. You have to learn those things. Uh and then you through practice, then you become comfortable and conversant in in multiple styles. And that's really your your style doesn't just come out of thin air. It's really uh it's built on the experience you have with multiple styles. You sort of draw the things together from those that that kind of create your style. So uh yeah, I don't think this is not something that I advise people, you know, become self-actualized today. You know, say that to a 20-year-old. That just it doesn't make any sense. Uh Maslow, when he talked about self-actualization, you know, every example he has, basically, people had to get to maturity and adulthood before they really could be self-actualized. So it's a goal. It's it and most people will never get there, frankly. Uh Maslow thought 3% would get there. I think it's we can do better than that. Uh but the the concept is you need to kind of go through that apprenticeship and practice and practice and practice, and eventually you'll get there.
SPEAKER_00:So, as you start to learn more about yourself then, what do you think about the idea that if you have this dream, you know, maybe in your younger years you wanted to be a musician? I also wanted to be a musician or I wanted to produce, I wanted to produce the halftime show of the Super Bowl. Never, it never came to be. But uh doesn't mean it meant never will, it just hasn't maybe yet. But I'm curious when you're thinking about as you're learning about that and your authentic self and the potential maybe you have for something like that. What happens when that dream shifts or changes? And is that okay when you were talking in the book a little bit about relentless risk taking and and at what time and at what point is it okay that your dreams maybe don't become self-actualized?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think you know, also the definition of what self-actualization is or could be can also shift, you know, when it comes into contact with uh, you know, the harsh realities of life, uh, that sometimes you need to sort of, you know, it's not really settling, but you need to sort of get comfortable with with sort of where you are. Uh and and I think that's part of it. It's like, you know, when Maslow talks about self-actualization, it's not like everybody there is the most incredibly successful version. Uh, it's really more of an attitude. It's it's really about being comfortable with who you are, knowing who you are, being sort of, you know, unafraid to really be yourself and to speak in your own voice and to, you know, uh really not doubt yourself. It's kind of it's almost like the opposite of imposter syndrome, right? It's like uh imposter syndrome is all about not really being confident in who you are, thinking that you're sort of playing a part, you're playing a role, and it's not really genuine. You know, I feel like self-actualization is the polar opposite of that. It's when you're sort of completely comfortable with who you are, you know who you are, and you are speaking in your own voice. Uh and and Maslow talks about the sort of you know, an almost arrogance of uh you know uh of mindset or uh or expertise in self-actualized in self-actualized people, that they it's it's kind of like there's no question in their minds, you know, that they they are who they are. So they're not gonna hesitate to to you know speak or act. Uh so that that can imply some risk, but it doesn't have to. You know, you can still you know just live a normal life and have that attitude. And certainly, you know, I feel like I know people who, you know, they're not household names, you know, but they live in that way, like they absolutely know who they are. I consider them to be self-actualized.
SPEAKER_00:Gotcha. Well, it sounds like what you're describing is the most holistic, well-rounded, healthy way of being. And if that's what we're all striving for, you talked about in this first part of the chapter about the four domains of well-being. Can you share with the listeners a little bit about why it's those four with physical, mental, financial, and social?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. And I feel like um the reason that there are multiple definitions. If you Google, you know, definition of well-being, you'll find, you know, multiple definitions out there. These are the four that are the most common. So it's physical, it's uh mental, financial, and social. Um, you know, they they do kind of map on to our four domains, but not perfectly. So the easiest one is social. So social, we have social, they have social, right? Uh uh financial is a weird one because uh it implies a Western capitalist mindset, right? That you own your own things, you have your own money, you have a job that pays you. Uh, there are many cultures around the world, especially historically, that did not have that. There was about a communal ownership of things, you know, tribal ownership of things. Uh, and and you didn't that that concept of financial would have been completely foreign to them. But in every society, you know, wealth is not completely evenly distributed. Some people, you know, through status or whatever, end up with more or better stuff. Um, so to the extent that we're we're talking about stuff, it's it's material. So it's the it's the analog of the material domain, right? It's it's it's objects, uh, you know, uh tools, uh, it's it's resources, you know, that sort of thing. Um, so financial to me is material. Social, social, financial is material. Physical and mental is a weird one to me also, because it it's sort of trying to reify this concept that there's a mind-body dualism, right? That there's your mental self and then there's your physical self. We know from tons of research that you cannot really separate those things. Uh, how you're feeling is in a larger part driven by how you're doing physically. You know, our emotions are a kind of continuous readout of how we're feeling and how we're doing how, you know, are we feeling good? Are we feeling tired? Are we feeling sick? Are we feeling hungry? Like those are continuous uh readouts that go into our mind and determine our thoughts and they shape our thoughts, right? So I don't really believe in those as separate categories. So to me, I collapse those two as the domain of the self. So it's your physical being, your your mental being, you know, integrated into the self. That leaves one more that's missing. And I think it's intentionally missing from all of these models. Uh, it's intentionally missing from, like, for instance, the CDC's definition, uh, and that's the spiritual. They don't talk about the spiritual, they just sort of pretend it doesn't exist. And I find that particularly maybe shocking because of just the enormous volume of research that's shown that people who are more spiritually evolved and people who have a more active spiritual life are actually in better physical and mental health than people who aren't. And it's not like it's a one-off, it's not like it's a fluke. You know, it's been repeated over and over and over again. Uh, and I feel like it's it's basically reflecting a kind of academic historical discomfort with acknowledging that because of fears of we're talking about religion or whatever. We're not. We're talking about something that's much bigger than that. And when I define the spiritual domain, I define it as anything you can't see. You know, it's it's concepts, ideals, principles, ethics, values. It's it's it's you know, higher purpose. It it doesn't, it's not as limited as as religion. So um I just found it interesting, too, that the the groups out there that have no trouble talking about spirituality as one of the pillars of well-being are the people who put their lives at risk. So, you know, Edwards Air Force Base has a site where they talk about, they begin with spiritual well-being. You know, people who are basically willing to sacrifice their lives for their country, uh, community, et cetera, um, didn't have any qualms about that. Uh putting that right up front, that that sort of you know, duty to country and duty to your you know, fellow man uh was number one, uh, even though those are things you can't see, right? So uh yeah, just uh interesting. So I think I listed those out just simply because they're the most commonly cited ones, but I have a critique of them, which is I think they really should be our four domains.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. I love how you articulated the piece between the physical and the mental, because we know lots of research shows that if you have stress, it can manifest in disease and even ultimately death. And so I also like how you describe the spiritual part as you know, I'm a person of faith, I know you're a person of faith. And I think there are several hundred citations in the Bible, and it doesn't mean that if you're listening, that you are a person of faith, or a person that is of the same faith as me, or a JD, maybe you just have a spiritual sense about whatever that higher power is in your life. But we know from the Bible there are hundreds of references that say, do not be anxious, do not be afraid. And these messages come from messengers. I guess that's why they're called messages in saying that sentence. But these messengers came with that message that this is the way for you to have balance and stability and clarity of thought, clarity in your emotional state, I suppose. And you go into the next part of this talking about how important it is to have psychological safety. And I don't want to say the name of the school unless you're okay with it, but you were having a discussion, we talked about it off mic, where uh a colleague or an associate of yours was talking about how high psychological safety, stress, and burnout is for college-age students at epidemic maybe rates.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's exactly right. And uh, you know, it's funny, it's like that's actually, you know, we weren't sure exactly where this um model of ours and our technique was gonna take us. And the market basically spoke and told us that it was student well-being because there's a crisis going on. And there's people who are responsible for taking care of those students. Uh, it's not a uh idle concern, it's not a it's not as gonna sideline. Like they have to make sure their students are safe. Uh, it's not just important for you know the ethical reasons, uh, it's also important financially for them. Like you cannot have uh people, you know, uh attempting suicide or or worse, uh, you know, at your school and expect the same volume of applications to come. People find out about these things. They they get reputations. You know, MIT for years, of course, they've got no trouble getting applications, but they they were known as a place that was sort of you know uh depressive and and anxiety-producing. Uh uh and so you no mid-sized college, you know, uh wants to have that reputation. So they there's a real problem. They need to do something about it. So they're you know, this particular case, the uh the guy uh told me that they had doubled their commitment to uh financially to student well-being, and that wasn't enough. They're actually shifting people to telehealth because they simply don't have the resources, even though they've doubled the staff, doubled the size of the you know, square footage associated with it, uh, doubled the funding, uh, and it's still not enough. So uh student well-being is a very high priority. You know, we we've made this available to coaches, therapists, um, you know, uh people in the medical profession, uh in into you know, HR and organizational development, but the the real traction we're getting is with student well-being because there's such a crying need for it right now.
SPEAKER_00:So if we think about this from the terms of if you don't feel safe and you don't have that sense of balance in your well-being, that that potentially leads into fear, perhaps. And those things, I wonder if sometimes fear is not real. Like there's a song out by Zach Williams, who's a singer, and it's called Fear is a Fear is a Liar. And is it true of this thing that you're afraid of? And there's like a book, I think I can't remember what the beginning of the book is. I think it's a start, but it's a John A. Cuff book, and this and the subtitle is Punch Fear in the Face. And then there's another book that we're doing right now on uh What's on Your Bookshelf on our regular series that's called On After Yourself, is basically Untangling the Mess in Your Mind. Uh that book is uh written by Gary John Bishop, who's kind of a noble spirit, doesn't bite his tongue on the way he talks. There's another great book. Of course, this is this is a podcast called What's on Your Bookshelf, so of course we have books. There's another book that was written by Dr. Caroline Leaf, who is a psychologist, and it's about um it's about your mental mess. And it's about also looking at those things that are fears, or are the truth are there is there truth in those fears? And so when you talk about this in the book, you mentioned an example of potentially is it possible to live with no fear?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it is, it is. It's a very interesting case that I call out. It was one from Antonio Damasio's uh writing. Uh, this person that they give her the uh acronym SM. Uh she had Urbak Witha disease, which basically calcifies different parts of your brain. Uh so it's a pretty tragic thing, and it basically knocks them out uh of uh functioning. In her case, it happened to take aim at the two amygdala, you know, which are sort of uh mid-brain structures, which really are essential to feeling fear. You cannot feel fear without them. So what happened was she actually, these things began to calcify, and she discovered that she was no longer afraid of anything. And that sounds like a great thing, right? You're just completely fearless. Um, it turns out, and there's another book, maybe for your bookshelf, a bit called the uh The Gift of Fear, which talks about the importance of fear as a piece of information which tells you, you know, who to trust and who not to trust, which situations you should be avoiding. It's that sort of you know, sense you get, the sort of you know, a tingling in your spine of like, I need to cross the street now. There's something going on ahead of me that's not safe. Uh, you know, I think there's somebody who's following me. I think you know, this person who's trying to call out to me, like they're they're up to no good. Uh, she didn't have any of that. So this unfortunate person has been beaten up multiple times, she's been robbed, uh, had knives and guns pulled on her because she will walk through a park at night without a second thought, fearlessly. And someone will call out to her and she will, without that gift of fear, will just walk right over to them, and then that person, you know, will rob her or that kind of thing. And then she doesn't learn from it. And there's a lot of experiments that have been done in in um rodents that basically show this. They'll basically do this kind of ablation um before fear conditioning, and they find that they're not able to learn fear. You know, even when something, you know, this thing is going to shock you, they they can't learn it. They'll never make that association. Then they find if they do the the uh the procedure after they learn fear conditioning, they still can't respond to it because there you need to feel that fear. It's not just a matter of learning uh and making that association between fear and a particular environment or situation. You have to be able to call up that fear right now, in the moment, for it to have any effect. So the memory of fear isn't enough. Uh, so I think you know, that's a really good example of how you know our emotions are there to help us survive, you know, and and even though some of them can be inconvenient, like fear. And we would think anybody with a phobia would love to get rid of it completely. But the truth is, phobias aren't random. You know, people don't have phobias of laptops and books, they have phobias around snakes, spiders, cliffs. Uh, you know, they they they aren't randomly distributed. Uh, and the reason we have those phobias is because of evolutionary survival. That's it's uh those things kept us alive. So uh again, uh the there's a lot to be thankful for uh from fear as as a kind of a thing, a gift that we get.
SPEAKER_00:If we think about JD, the concept of fight or flight, for example, what's the natural state? Is fear built in the flight piece of it? And does that mean that we're not naturally wired to be fighters?
SPEAKER_01:Actually, so fight and flight are intimately linked. So we don't uh fight unless we feel fear generally. Uh, you know, it isn't like it's a separate process. So uh there's a classic uh animal study that they do called the pain attack reaction, where you put one animal next to another animal and then you like deliver a shock or something to one of the animals, and what they do invariably is just attack the other one. Like they've been they've been hurt, you know, they've been something's happened to them that they don't like, and they leap out and aggress instantly against the other. That there's no logical reason why they should do that. But certainly think about you know, in humans, when when people are you know tired and hungry, they get hangry, right? They they they then they begin to lash out, road rage, you know, uh domestic abuse, whatever it is, you know, it's very easy to kind of lower people's ability to control themselves um by having some burden on them, like when you're in pain, when you're overtired, when you're hungry and thirsty and need to find a bathroom, whatever it is, you you're vulnerable then to sort of lashing out. Uh and everyone has experienced that, you know, with with uh, you know, friends, family members, you know, the general public. Uh and and so I think you know, fear and anger aren't not different things. They're sort of just different stages, you know. Like so, so you know, someone gets insulted and then they they become aggressive. They had to originally feel slighted, you know, like there was something like they they they they were kind of pushed back, you know, they were there was a kind of a fear moment, you know, someone put them down that then elicited this sort of aggressive response. But you can't really get aggression uh without that first, you know, taking a hit, basically.
SPEAKER_00:This is a really good segue into the authenticity part of this section because I've heard the saying before the hurt people hurt people. And you mentioned that in this rodent study, for example. I'm curious if we're not gonna have enough time to go into deep detail on this section, but I really encourage you, as listeners, to get the book and read deeper. And the one place I do want to take uh some focus on, JD, for uh reasons because I've experienced this myself with us with certain people is this the authenticity versus narcissism. You mentioned about just now what happens when people have some experience that maybe they use as a protection in their life, maybe it's something from their past or their their childhood that maybe then manifests itself into not being your authentic self, or you have a mask, or you hurt people because of something like narcissism.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, exactly. So the the concept that's used a lot now is the sort of dark triad of um, you know, uh like grandiose narcissism or any kind of narcissism, and uh uh psychopathic tendencies, uh sort of really only caring about yourself and no one else. Um and uh um what's the third layer of the uh the triangle? It's um uh it's escaping me. But uh it in any case, it or I think it's dogmatism. But the uh the concept is that if you feel bad about yourself, you can just sort of withdraw, you know, um, and there's people who do that. Uh or you can sort of come up with a coping mechanism to sort of try to make yourself feel better about it and to try to you know impress other people uh that you are a confident person and and you shouldn't be messed with uh by being very super aggressive. So, and we certainly see a lot of this out in the world. Uh you know, people who, you know, it's never enough, you know, uh whether they're a billionaire or or in some other field, uh they they there's no way of satisfying what's really missing inside them. So they it there always there always needs to be more. And there's you know the grandiose narcissist will be somebody who you know can you know own buildings and planes and put their name on things and and everything else, uh, and and will never be satisfied with it. There's the vulnerable narcissist, which is really uh someone with very weak self-esteem, who who you know um wants to you know get through life by by you know making people afraid of upsetting them, you know, because they're gonna overreact. Uh so I I think you know narcissism has a big uh connection to authenticity. If you are really confident in who you are, you know who you are, you're not trying to fill some void through material things or or flashy and you know, uh flash in the pan kinds of uh exhibits, um, you're much more likely to be a happy, healthy person, you're much more likely to self-actualize. Uh, if you're kind of stuck in that narcissistic space, uh, it's because you're constantly trying to prove something to yourself, you know, i and others. Uh, but it's inauthentic. It can't be authentic because it's not based on anything real.
SPEAKER_00:So if we talk about if you're somebody who has NPD or knows somebody with a narcissistic personality disorder, maybe you have been diagnosed or haven't, or you know somebody who has or hasn't, is this something, JD, that is tied to the chemicals, I guess, in your brain? Is how is that tied to the emotions that are are parts of agile brain? Because it seems to me that if the person has this sort of disorder and doesn't not know that they're not being cruel to someone, but they just don't care, kind of like the lady who couldn't feel fear, do these people not feel empathy or love in the truest sense of what that might mean in a reciprocal uh relationship with someone?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think in most cases they have the the equipment, you know, they they have the signal that's being processed in their brain, but through you know repeated experience over and over again, kind of creating those grooves, those sort of super highways in their brain, it gets sort of corrupted so that it doesn't it doesn't feel good to them to you know connect with other people to become vulnerable. They can't let themselves go there. They because they are so you know sort of consumed by the need to kind of project a particular image, project strength and invulnerability that they can never experience those emotions fully. Uh it basically becomes this sort of circular loop where you know the love that they should feel for. For other people is somehow channeled back into sort of um self-puffery, you know, and and narcissism, like, you know, I must be the best, I am the best, you know, everyone knows I'm the best. Uh and and that it it really does sort of stunt them emotionally. So I think the signals are all there. It's just, you know, through lots and lots of really bad experiences and and training and you know, upbringing, uh, those wires kind of get crossed. Uh and you never end up, you know, those signals that should lead to empathy, vulnerability, sharing, caring, they just can't be expressed.
SPEAKER_00:It seems like the opposite side of that is where you go next in talking about imposter syndrome. So if the narcissist is somebody that thinks they're so amazing and wants everybody to think they're amazing, and yet maybe they don't really think they're amazing, is this the same or different when we're talking about if the narcissist wants you to believe they're amazing, but they maybe subconsciously or innately know they're not amazing? With imposter syndrome, isn't this where you know you're not, you you believe you're not amazing as opposed to you believe you are?
SPEAKER_01:Right. I I feel like, you know, so what it's all about is it's kind of like if uh narcissism uh is is all about kind of um it's almost like almost psychotic state where you're like you can't accept reality because of this core belief you have that you're the best. And and um it reminds me of the study that was done on they call it the dark side of self-esteem. You know, this big self-esteem movement uh in the United States, you know, during like the Barney years, you know, you are special, you're everyone is special. What they found was in this study that the people with the absolute highest self-esteem were people who were on very long-term prison sentences, who were gang members. So they the absolute highest self-esteem. Uh, you know, they and and what they had, I wouldn't call normal self-esteem. I would call it narcissism, right? It's it's sort of a a psychopathic narcissism where you believe that you are entitled to more and better stuff than everyone else just simply because you are you. Um I feel like like imposter syndrome is like the watered down version of that. You know, it's like the the more, it's the less psychotic version. It's the one where I feel a little bit badly about myself. I'm not really convinced of who I am, uh, my authenticity, but I I don't believe that entitles me to things. But I have to kind of get through life and I've got to, you know, give this presentation and I've got to do this, you know, thing, and and and you know, I've got to have these experiences, but I don't really feel like I deserve it. Like I feel like I'm not quite ready for it. I feel like I'm sort of pretending. I I feel like that's that's the uh the sort of watered down, you know, not crazy version, and it's incredibly widespread. So it's really not even in, it's not in the DSM, you know, it's not a clinical diagnosis because I think something like the majority of people, you know, suffer from it. Uh and and that is, you know, it's become almost sort of uh a cultural thing, you know, that uh, you know, people don't aren't shy about saying they have imposter syndrome. Uh, you know, in a way, it's a kind of a humility, you know, it's saying, I I know that I'm not the best at this. Uh, and and it should then motivate you to want to learn more, to practice more, to do those things. Uh at its worst, it's basically preventing you from making forward progress because you doubt yourself so much.
SPEAKER_00:I heard the saying before in some leadership summary that said, uh, to know yourself, you have to grow yourself. And so as you're growing in business and you get maybe that next job jump into a new role or a new title or a larger team or something like that, it shouldn't be expected that you already have it all figured out. You were given the opportunity to go into that role in order to grow and to show that you can add value. And so if if you go from narcissism, you go to this idea of imposter syndrome, but now you pivot into what happens to people that get caught up in believing things that are just not true, having these coping strategies. We talked about this goes into the third part of this section, which is the conspiracy theorists.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Yes. And this is a favorite topic of mine because uh when we did this research, you know, there were just a lot of conspiracy theories out there, and we thought it would be fun to sort of you know measure how how common it is that people would believe a whole host of things like, you know, um COVID isn't real, uh the COVID test is actually implanting a small device, you know, so the government can track you, um, uh and a whole, you know, the the uh moon landing was faked, you know, like the whole, a whole down the line. The earth is flat, you know, you you got the whole the whole panoply. Um what became incredibly interesting was when we looked at the agile brand data against those items, and there was a really unmistakable pattern that people who had huge spikes in terms of prevention energy, sort of, I want to get rid of this bad feeling on the negative side of potential, sort of limitation. I'm feeling limited, I'm feeling like I can't get ahead, I can't grow, I can't, you know, move forward. Those were the people who believed in conspiracy theories overwhelmingly. And it makes sense, it's basically an indicator of stress. It's saying, I am not doing well, you know, and and uh for some people that leads them not to say, so what can I do to change my circumstances? What can I do to better myself? What can I do to start over? Instead, they look for somebody else to blame. And this is not news to anybody, you know, scapegoating has been around for a very long time. Uh, but it it hands you a very convenient excuse for why you're feeling miserable. So if you know we if everyone is lying to me and the system is stacked against me and everyone is out to get me, and there's other people who say that that's the truth, there's a much more likely, there's a greater likelihood I'm gonna believe that if I feel really bad about myself, and I feel like I there's no way I'm getting ahead. Uh so we have this cartoon in uh in the chapter on potential of um, you know, these two movie theaters side by side. One is uh showing a movie called A Reassuring Lie, and the other one showing a movie called A Convenient Truth, and there's nobody going to see a convenient uh an inconvenient truth. Uh, and uh there's a huge line of people waiting to buy tickets for a reassuring lie. Uh, and and uh it was a great cartoon because it really does make that point that people do seek out confirmatory information, and that's unfortunately what's happening in our you know, in the politics of our age, is that people are kind of retreating into what's comfortable, will not challenge them at all, will not expose them to any ideas that they find uncomfortable, and it just creates echo chambers.
SPEAKER_00:So I'm glad you brought that up because it does seem like that's what keeps government in business, or at least the people that are elected officials, because they count on one side believing one thing, another side believing the other thing, and never tell shall the two meet in the middle. And uh and you talk about how if you have this idea that you want to follow the reassuring lie versus the inconvenient truth, and it'd be based on anxiety and stress and maybe even lacking these coping skills. You mentioned earlier that the fifth domain not mentioned is on the spiritual side, and in the end of this chapter, you do talk about the markers of actualization in the spiritual domain. How does that play in like what you described earlier? You mentioned about how if you are somebody in that has a stronger tendency that way, that you have uh maybe more groundedness. How does this piece in this chapter on potential make the most sense to end this chapter this way?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so um it's interesting. Uh that the this was Maslow's sort of last contribution, was uh just before he died. And unfortunately, when they show his pyramid of uh motivations, they kind of cap it at self-actualization. He believed there was a higher level called transcendence, which is the name of our chapter for purpose in the spiritual domain, because he saw that people who got to that very high level of self-actualization were much more likely to actually transcend the self. So self-actualization is sort of a stage of development where I'm gonna become my best version of myself. I'm gonna become all that I can be, right? But there is, once you've achieved that, there is a higher level, which is to go actually beyond the self and say, okay, I'm great and all, and I've mastered what I want to do, but it's not about me. It's actually about a higher purpose. It's about everyone, it's about you know every every living thing, about our planet, about our universe. And once you make that switch, you're no longer in the sort of uh self-domain. You've now transcended over to the spiritual domain. So that tendency to kind of you know be able to sort of view things cosmically, view things, you know, uh objectively and outside of time and outside of relationships that are particular to you, uh, you know, he saw that as that sort of highest level of self-actualization, which I would argue is actually you're leaving self-actualization at that point and you're actually going somewhere else. Um and you know, one of the characteristics around that is he said sort of there were sort of resolution of opposites, you know, that that you know, um things that that uh you know really confound a lot of people here about, you know, should it be this thing or should it be that thing? You know, uh these choices, particularly in politics, that they tended not to see them as opposites. They tend to see them as just sort of different framings of the same problem and and had different, really interesting, you know, other dimensions coming in that can resolve those kinds of conflicts. Uh so it is, it's truly a higher kind of thinking, uh, which you know sadly is not uh as widespread as it might be. Um, but it really is where solutions come from. It's it's you know, it's it's sort of saying, you know, forget the old jargon, the old politics, the old you know, arguments, uh, and the old debates. Uh let's actually try to solve this problem in a way that's sustainable. You know, uh so uh I think that's the sort of highest hope for the sort of potential, you know, part of our model is to get to the point where you've become so confident in yourself and so masterful at what you do that you actually can forget about yourself and go to this next square.
SPEAKER_00:I imagine to get outside of yourself, you have to be outside of yourself. So that implies being open-minded versus closed-minded. We talked a little bit about Carol Dweck and her work of growth mindset, even at the end of the chapter. We're gonna get outside of ourselves next week since we're out of time for today and talk about the motives of the material world. Looking forward to having that discussion. When you get the book, friends, there at the end of this chapter, there's some really great coaching questions or maybe reflection questions, journaling questions, but just questions that will help you think deeper about where we are, even in just this early part of the book. So there you'll find questions that say, Do you feel that you're utilizing your talents and abilities to the fullest? And my question as a coach to my clients would be like, if you don't say yes, well then what's missing for you? And let's try to get you one step ahead. There's a whole list here. I think there's at least 10 or a dozen questions, and you'll see that this book, again, is deeper than just the uh 400 pages that are in it. There are ways for you to grow in it. Our podcast is about living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves, going deeper. John Wooden, his father, uh taught him uh several principles in life, and one of them was to dive deeply into great books. And so that's what we're attempting to do here in the spirit of living out his legacy as well. JD, as always, it's such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for teaching us even beyond the pages that you have supplied us with here. Before we go for today, is there anything else that you would like to share with the listeners?
SPEAKER_01:Uh I think we covered a lot of ground. Um, I I think you know it might away on the uh domain of the self is that an important thing to realize about the self is that the self domain is actually a function of your interactions with all the other domains. So it the self is uh its own thing, but the self also tends to be fed by what you do in the material domain, right? Uh what you strive for in the material domain, what you do in the social domain, your relationships with other people, you know, how you're viewed, uh, that sort of thing, and what your relationship is with higher principles. You know, do you do you walk around with a set of values that you're aware of that that guide your life? All those things go into sort of who you are. So that those things can bring you a sense of psychological safety. Those things go to kind of form your authentic self and the definition of who you are, and ultimately they help you grow to become the sort of fullest version of yourself. So uh they are separate, but not separate. Uh there's a lot of crosstalk in our model.
SPEAKER_00:Understood, understood. Well, this has been very enlightening and wonderful. Thank you for listening, friends. If you're finding value in this, not only get this book, but please share these episodes with others that can get value from it as well. My name is Denise Russo, and on behalf of my friend Dr. J.D. Pincus, the author of The Emotionally Agile Brain, Mastering the Twelve Emotional Needs That Drive Us, this has been another episode of What's on Evolution.