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?
146 Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: Mind Management Explained
We dig into Chapter Two of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess by Dr. Caroline Leaf and explain why mind management is the lever for change. We separate mind from brain, outline a five-step neurocycle, and share practical ways to catch and edit thoughts.
• the urgency behind mind management and lifestyle trends
• difference between mind and brain and why it matters
• thoughts as precursors to actions and results
• how to catch and edit toxic thought patterns
• neuroplasticity and rewiring automatic responses
• five-step neurocycle: gather, reflect, write, recheck, active reach
• the 63-day habit timeline and realistic expectations
• using emotions as guideposts for change
• applying tools across work and life without silos
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Welcome to What's on Your Bookshelf, a life and leadership podcast where we live out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves. With your host, Denise Russo and Sam Powell.
SPEAKER_01:Hi everyone. Welcome back. It's another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our life and leadership podcast where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. The book that we're reading is called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess by Dr. Caroline Leaf. My name is Denise Russo. My friend is Sam Powell. We are now into chapter two, which is really explaining what this book is about. Not necessarily, we're not to the part yet about how you apply it yet, but just to understand what even it is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So this is all in part one of the book, which is about the why and the how, right? Setting that under that foundation of like why we need to make these changes and really how our brain and our minds work. And so this is chapter two, which is what is mind management, which she urgently tells us in chapter one that we need to manage this. So if you listened to last week, which you definitely should, um, it'll scare you into behaving and getting on board. And it gives a whole lot of, and if you read the book, you're even more terrified because it gives you so much information on um a lot of the research and the data around the fact that we are no longer living as long as previous generations. And so much of that has to do with lifestyle choices that we are making. And the population that's affected the most are those who are really in the prime of their life, the 25 through 64, I think was the top range. Like that's when you should be living, and this is when we are seeing ourselves doing the opposite because of things that we actually do have a lot of control over and the mess that we need to clean up. So, chapter two here is all about mind management and why we need it. And it really is built off the foundation of the very scary data and information we talked about last week. And if it doesn't build a fire under you, it's emergency.
SPEAKER_01:I man, I don't know what will. Well, she even says she talks with a lot of people, and I wonder if anybody listening to this can relate. She says, I meet a lot of people who can't concentrate, can't remember, they're burned out, they have strained relationships, they're dealing with many kinds of physical issues. But there's a solution. It's not just about changing your lifestyle. She goes on to say, yes, that's important. Eat good foods and exercise and get good sleep and all that good stuff. But it's one thing about getting information, it's another thing when you are applying what you're getting the information about and really looking at well, what does living a good life for you look like? Because maybe living a good life for you is different than the way I think living a good life looks as well. And so we're sharing these stories that we're both experiencing. That's how we're living these pages out loud. But this book has to be more than you just vicariously listening to us and how we're transforming. We do it because we want to transform, but we want to encourage you and urge you to do the same thing. And so each episode, we mentioned this last week. We're going to attempt to do one to two chapters per episode, which means as long as in a week's time you could read one to two chapters in the book, or go back and just listen to the episodes when you're ready. Then that way you can really drink deeply, like John Wooden's dad said, go deep into this book so that you get the results you're looking for, because the author says change requires action and application. Both of these are driven by our mind. And this chapter is about how to manage our mind.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And the quote at the beginning I love. Um, it's by Santiago Ramon E. Cajal. And it says, Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain. And she says, as I will show you in this book, if our mind isn't managed, everything downstream will be chaos. A mental mess produces a messy life. And I mean, I've met those people, right? Like I know those people. I like had somebody who jumped to my mind immediately where I was like, they're just messy and like they're chaotic, and their life around them is a mess because of the chaos of their mind. And I think that we all get into different states of this all of the time, and is uh just such a very common and very human thing. But you can see the extremes of it. Like we've all met those people, right? And sometimes we are those people for long-term, short term, uh, season of life. It's uh, you know, and and it's that, you know, if we think about that quote, right? It's we can be the sculptor of our own brain and of our own mind if we implement mind management, essentially.
SPEAKER_01:I love that she goes into some detail about what's the difference between your brain and your mind, and that they're not the same thing. And that she says everything we say or do in life, everything is preceded by a thought. We talk about this a lot in the terms of business. Like if you want to look at your results in business, you don't just stop by looking at what you did or didn't do, you go back to what your belief systems were, what your culture was like, and then what you were thinking about. And so if everything we do begins with a thought, then I want to reiterate what we said last week, Sam, which was we are giving no strings attached. There literally no strings attached, absolutely free, free as in it doesn't cost you any money. It just costs you two to three minutes of your time to have an agile brain exercise, which is very science-based, evidence-based, uh, an assessment. It's an assessment that helps you look at your subconscious thinking. Because here's the thing about thinking you only have an awareness at like an iceberg level of your conscious thoughts, but you don't know what everything underneath the water is happening, is at your subconscious level. And agile brain helps us to see at the subconscious level what our thoughts are doing. And the book, the author says, if you could change your thinking, then you can change your mind. In fact, there's a there is a quote that's got to be thousands of years ago because it's from the Bible that says that you can change your life by renewing your mind. You change your thinking and you renew your mind, and that's how you get to a better life tomorrow than you have today, but it takes change and change takes action.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And she says that we all have to learn how to catch and edit our thoughts and reactions before they trigger toxic chain reactions and become ingrained in our neural networks, aka bad habits, right? And like you said, and we talked about that in atomic habits, right? Like the hat, a habit is something that you do automatically. Like we use habits real loosey goosey a lot of times, right? Like, oh, going to the gym is a habit. That's not a habit, that's an action that you take. A habit is I uh every time I walk into the kitchen, I grab, I go for the chocolate drawer because it's this automatic. I don't even think about it, right? It's this subconscious part of it. And so what she's really saying is that we've got to learn how to catch and edit the thoughts. We've got to draw awareness into what's going on because of this thing called neuroplasticity that can give you basically restructuring of your brain. You are able to edit the neuropathways of your brain if you practice it enough, if you rewrite, if you catch and edit thoughts enough, it creates habits, it creates neuropathways, and our brain is super adaptable. And so that's really what she's getting into here is that like your mind is editable if you if you jump in, if you take action, if you take control of your own situation.
SPEAKER_01:She says you can actually become a neuroplastician, and that means that you're your own mind surgeon. And when she goes on to say, Well, what does that mean? She says, I'll explain the difference between the mind and the brain, what a thought is, how we build thoughts with our mind, and how we control our thoughts with our mind, and how we detox our mind and brain using our mind. And so it's this cycle. She goes, the book is about a five-cycle process through all of this, but it's about reaction and response to different things in the world, which she calls the mind in action. Like you have something happen in your life, your mind responds or reacts to it with thoughts at the subconscious and conscious level. And if you can become more aware of how your mind works, then you can be better equipped to react or respond in ways that you have more self-control over.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I think about this all the time. Like, and we we tend to think our brain is set, that our reactions are set. And her whole argument here is that, like you said, like we can become the surgeon of our brain essentially by kind of get hacking the cycle of what we do. Like, I it makes me think of like fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses that we have. Like, you know, people always ask, like, are you a fighter or a flighter? Are you a you know, a freezer or a fawner? And like those are just neuropathways that were probably, you know, recorded in early childhood. I mean, honestly, that's when most of our stuff is formed. We're learning and growing so much then. That's when like the majority of all of our stuff is formed in our early years. And so that that response that you got is like every time something happens and I get triggered, I fight, right? Like that's the immediate response from me. And we think that that's who we are, but it's just how we're currently wired. And you can hack that at the end of the day. But you've got to, like you're saying, like, take control of like get in and understand what's going on. Why is that the reaction? Why is that the thing that you're doing? Because it doesn't have to be if that's hurting your life in some way, right? If you don't like that response that you've got in these situations, like I can, I have some spots in my life where my default response is like freezing, and I'm and I just don't do the things that I want to do. And it's like, that's it's not who I want to be. It's banging up against the identity I want versus the current like wiring of my brain. And that's something that like I'm purposefully working on, but you got to dig down, right? You got to understand that. And she's saying that that is possible, and you can rewrite your brain by using your mind to like right in this example, like draw aware of I freeze when what could be an alternate response? What could I do, right? Like I can rewrite this and retrain my brain so that my brain stops doing that loop, right? It stops, you know, filling that circuit and builds a different one.
SPEAKER_01:What I love about how she starts to describe this, it I'm I see on the disc scale. So I like the facts and I like the research that's behind it. This lady isn't just some fly by night Oprah best-selling author person that who knows if they ever had a job in this industry. She says, My life's mission and why I do what I do is to help people realize how much power they have in themselves to heal their minds, brains, and body. And she spent her entire career trying to understand the mind and develop different ways of using the mind to learn new information, build memory, manage emotions, and mental health. And that this is about resilience. Uh, there's a book that came out last year by a um a colleague, friend of mine uh named Ed Beltran called Fierce Resilience. And it's about how you can combat stress and burnout and the things that make you feel depleted. And when I think of resilience, Sam, have you ever taken a marshmallow, for example, and you can put like push your finger into it and it'll eventually move back to its regular shape? Versus, let's say you have play-doh. And if you take a blob of play-dhow and you push your finger into it, it's never going to bounce back. So, what is it that we can do to become malleable? And she says, your brain has this ability to do it. You just have to learn how to manage your mind, which controls your brain.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And she even takes that a step farther to say, like, awareness without the management skills and techniques can actually adversely affect our mental and physical health. So it's not only like, it isn't just do drive awareness and do whatever. It's you've got to manage it on top of it. You can't just learn something about yourself. You can't just learn that I'm Play-Doh instead of a marshmallow, right? You've got to know, well, then what do I do to keep myself resilient, to keep myself being able to bounce back, to keep myself burning out. And if you don't, if you just drive awareness without the action, right? The consumption without doing something with it, drinking deeply, right? You actually hurt yourself because now you've kind of opened up this world of like, I can see the horrors and feel powerless to do anything with it. Like that's a horrible place to sit. And so you've got to learn the skills that come along with that to do something, to manage your mind, to manage this mind, brain, body connection cycle.
SPEAKER_01:This is such a wonderful book to come after what we did last year. Last year's series was all around we just learned how to be happy. And now what do you do when things go sideways? Because life happens. And she says in this book that listen, to manage your mind doesn't mean you're never going to get upset, angry, unhappy, or irritated. We all take weathering, but we can know how to deal with these emotions and feelings when we experience them in a scientific way that will actually change the brain and increase our resilience. And so she goes through this five-step process of how to how to direct your neuroplasticity. If you're going to be the neuroplastician, that sounds good.
SPEAKER_02:I'm not gonna lie, there are a few words in this book where I'm like, yes, I do not know how I would even remotely say that.
SPEAKER_01:Let's simplify it and say this is first about regulating yourself. And so she makes it fairly simple. It's complex to do, but it's simple the way she describes it. So number one is gather information. So look at what you are reading, listening to, hopefully, our podcast, and watching what you're thinking and how you're feeling. This is about like, have you ever done the exercise, Sam, as a coach, where you have your client look from outside of themselves almost like they're looking at their life like a movie?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's this step outside of your situation and look at it for what it is. You're gathering information. So, step one is really look at the information you have and realize that sometimes Vincent, I have to take an aside and say, Vincent posted something today on his Instagram that was talking about emotional intelligence. And the post was something around how the most emotionally intelligent people don't react or respond to other people, but they become aware of how and why people are the way they are. And so she says in this gathering, like let's say you're really stressed out at work, are you stressed out because of something within your control? Or are you looking at the projection of someone else? Because everybody has their own journey. And we even talked about this. I feel like it was our last episode of the year last year, where we said the downside of listening to our shows and reading these books is that not all your friends and family and followers are doing the same thing. And therefore, they're not maybe elevating their awareness at the same pace that you and we are, because other people have their own turmoil, their other state of mind. And while you're learning over the next weeks together with us about managing your mind, as you're gathering intel, just remember other people are not learning how to manage their mind.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that like when you're in that gathering stage, it's like trying to step out of those biases, trying to step out of that other influence from whatever, and really just trying to understand and embrace the emotions that are going on, right? Like not trying to disassociate from them, but saying, like, yes, I felt angry, yes, I felt stressed out by this. Like, what is that telling me, right? I think it's sitting in a whole, whole, whole lot of curiosity. I think emotional intelligence and curiosity go hand in hand, and you cannot have one without the other because you've got to have enough space to go, huh, why are they doing that? Right? Like, why is this person being? And I agree with Vincent's post, so I'm gonna go check it out. Um, because yeah, that's I think that's exactly right. That really is what emotional intelligence comes down to is that you're able to look at somebody and go, I get why you're doing it. I don't agree. I don't have to respond to it. I don't have to, you know, do whatever, but really gathering, and then once you've gathered information, right? The step two here is reflect. What is it, what is it teaching you? What are you learning out of this? Why are these pieces coming together? Like this is the the puzzle piece, right? This is fitting the pieces together to kind of understand it. And then step three is taking it into like journaling, writing, right? Organizing your thoughts. I cannot stress for people how important writing is. And like, I'm gonna like I maybe this is just because I'm old, but like physically writing, not typing. Like typing's nice and great, and you can definitely do that, but there is something too, and there's some science behind the actual act of writing. But when you're gathering information and then you're reflecting, writing is like the next level of processing, like what we do here, right? Like we listen, I mean, we we read, we talk about it, we go back and we listen, right? You need that full circle part of that. And writing is so, so, so important for you to organize your thoughts, get them out of your head into a physical existence, and then you can look at it in a different way.
SPEAKER_01:One of my favorite places to journal is the passion planner. I've gifted that planner to dozens, if not hundreds, of people. I'm gonna try to remember when we post this episode to post a link to the planner because you can download the entire thing for free. They're so confident in their product. But to your point about the handwriting piece of it, Sam, there is a lot of science that says the tactical nature of handwriting cements things in our mind, and it becomes a practical exercise in you being able to take that gathering of intel, reflecting on what really happened, writing it down and journaling. Well, now I can look from outside of myself and see it on paper. And then you recheck it, you reanalyze it. But the best way to do that, I think, is with a coach. So when you're examining what you wrote down, you want to talk to somebody to get a wider perspective because you're still right now, still self-centered because you're the one that they That gathered the information. You're the one that experienced a reaction from somebody else. You're the one that wrote down this thing you that you experienced from the person. But now when you can talk with someone else, especially if it's with a coach, you might actually be able to find that your thoughts are different at the subconscious level.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. I think talking to other people is what helps you. Coaches are great because they are trained to help you get out of your own head and like pull that out, right? They go through specialized training, or at least the good ones do, go through training to help you have the tools and the skills to be able to do that. But even in like small spaces of talking out loud to a friend, talking to somebody who's trusted. I just talked about this. Um, I run cohorts throughout the year um to help people who are looking for new roles, like next role accelerator, figure out what you need to do. And um, week five is all about your job search strategy, right? How do you actually go out and find jobs and things like that? And um surprise, surprise, it's a lot about connection and networking and things like that. But we talk a lot about like getting into conversation with people, right? And one of the conversation types you should have falls into this recheck category. It falls into the category of uh like validating your path, right? Like I want to talk to somebody who's maybe farther down, who has a different like lens than me, who can help me get out of myself when I've done all this sort of like looking and researching and figuring out what my next path is and what I want to do, and having somebody kind of validate and recheck. And so, like, I think that that shows up all the time, but you're right, like coaches are great for that because they are trained in in this specifically.
SPEAKER_01:The key to all of this, if you are doing this exercise, what we just shared, is that you could do it one time. That's great, but it's not going to cement the habit. Please go listen to our series on atomic habits. I mentioned when we were going to do this book, that one of the things I remembered about Dr. Leaf from the seminar where I heard her speak was she said, most people think it takes 21 days to create a habit, but she says that's not true. If you're going to create, sustain, and become unconscious in what that habit is, that it actually takes a 63-day cycle, not 21 days, and that you cannot improve your lifestyle until you learn how to manage your thinking. So this chapter really is all about the habit of thinking, and that she goes into again more detail about the brain by basically saying that the brain responds to what we think, but it isn't the thinker. And so as you're starting to go through and create these stronger habits in your thinking, then you're learning to manage your mind, especially once we get into the deeper uh section here on the five steps in the neurocycle, because it's going to increase your intelligence, grow your brain, and develop your resilience. So if there were only three things that I would say I took away from this chapter for this this week, is that this isn't about self-help. It's about science and it's about the sustainability of those three things: increasing your intelligence, growing your brain, developing your resilience, and making you be more mindful in the process.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And she talks, and we didn't get into some of the research that she discusses in here, um, but she talks about uh, you know, like clinical trials she's run where people have been able to like really recoup a lot of like brain function through going through her process, through really retraining your mind and that separation of mind and brain and thinking the mind shapes the brain, the brain shapes the, you know, like how the mind kind of default works. And it's this cycle that you really have a whole, whole, whole lot of control over because we like to think things are stagnant. We like to think we're stuck, but we're not. And I think that that's such a powerful, powerful thing. And in that five-step process she was giving us, the very last thing that we is the most important, it's the active reach. It's apply what you have learned in some tangible way. And I think that that's that's what we do all the time. Like to me, I was like, it's highlight, circle, heart, because that's what we're all about here in this podcast of it's not about learning, it's about like, how am I putting this into my life? What am I doing with this? You know, when I'm thinking about that. And so I think for me, as we come up through this week, I'm gonna pay a lot more attention to where did my default brain turn on and affect my mind? And where might I have some leverage and some power that I really need to think about, right? And I think using emotions as the guideposts for that will be probably where I start, right? It's gonna be, well, I feel triggered, you know, anxious, happy, sad, depressed, whatever, right? Well, the gamut of emotions we go through. What drove that, right? And and kind of thinking about it through this little five-step process here, though, you know, she's outlined high-level.
SPEAKER_01:I want to make one last point, Sam, before we go for today, is that we do these podcasts for business people. But business is not separate from your life. And so it very well may be that something that's messing with your mind is not at work. It could be, it could be that whatever's messing you up at work is also messing up what's happening at home because work comes home with you. But it could be that what you're experiencing and you're a business leader, is something that's messed up in your mind with something personal. And so I want to encourage you as well as you're going through this book to look at this that this isn't just about your team at work and it isn't about just your tasks and function in your job title. This is about life. And so next week we're going to dive into why this five-step process, which she calls the neurocycle, is the solution to cleaning up any of the mental mess, because that will help us to understand also about things as deep as mortality or why bad things happen to good people. So next week it doesn't get less deep.
SPEAKER_02:So you gotta hang on through this first part of this book because this again, this is the how and the why, right? This is you know how things are happening, why things are happening, and and what we need to do to tackle it. And I like, I don't know. I I think you're saying like this doesn't get lighter. If anything, this is just should be driving this sense of urgency for you that you've got to clean up your mental mess to live a healthy life, and at the end of the day, to live life at all.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. She's gonna talk about next week about things as deep as biology. There's all kinds of charts and graphs, and it gets pretty scientific next week. So we're gonna do our best to simplify it. But for today, my name is Denise Russo, and on behalf of my friend Sam Powell, this has been another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf, and I'm gonna go to the house.