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Helpless then breeds hopelessness and stuckness. And then what happens when she's stuck? She cuts off. But guess what happens? It trickles into her relationships and she avoids confrontation and she avoids depth in her relationships and she avoids intimacy and vulnerability.
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I'm really excited about today's episode. Now I know, I know, I say that a lot. But for this one, I'm extra excited. Today we speak to Dr. Michael Maidenberg. I'll tell you more about her in a bit but for now you just have to know that she's a published therapist and she really knows her stuff. When you get trained as a coach, they go through great lengths to draw a clear line between therapy and coaching. Now mostly they do this to manage any liability that may be involved, but in my experience there are some clear distinctions between the two practices. Therapy often goes to the past to try to understand and maybe heal the root cause of the problem while coaching goes to the future.
It basically says, okay, I get it, that happened, but you now have the power to move forward and create a new future. Make a choice. What's fascinating about Dr. Maidenberg is that she walks the line between both. She has a great deal of clinical training, she's a doctor for God sakes, but she speaks with the spunkiness of a coach. This led to some really interesting conversations about mindset, mindfulness, and the human tendency for emotional avoidance.
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So Dr. Michelle Maidenberg. All right. Dr. Michelle Maidenberg. So Michelle, I'm actually really excited to talk to you. And I normally don't read people's resumes before in the show, but I feel inclined to do so with you. wow. I'm honored. So you're a PhD. Yeah. Master of Public Health, licensed social worker. Yeah. You have a private practice in Harrison. Yeah.
You're the co-founder of Through My Eyes, which sounds lovely and I definitely want to hear more about it. It's a nonprofit that offers clinically guided videotaping to chronically mentally ill, excuse me, medically ill individuals who want to leave a video legacy for their children and loved ones. So I definitely want to hear how that came about. Adjunct faculty at NYU.
You are on the board of the Boys and Girls Club in Mount Vernon. You're on the board of the Westchester Trauma Network. You are a member of the American Red Cross Crisis Team. You are a published author, right? Your first book was Free Your Child from Overeating, 53 Mind, Body Strategies for Lifelong Health. Your second book, which we're gonna get into, Ace Your Life.
Unleash your best self and live the life you want. And you have a TED Talk, Think Preventing Emotional Avoidance, which I definitely want to get into. So my first question for you is, how did you come about getting so passionate about mental health? Gosh, I think I was born that way, out of the womb. I'm not even kidding. Not to mention my whole life's, I guess, predicament, I'm going to call it. I just I had a pretty challenging childhood, I have to say. And I think
I think it, when you go through a challenging childhood, you either, you go in one direction or the other, you either decide I want a different kind of life and I want to cease the patterns that I've seen throughout my life that hasn't served people around me well, right? Or you end up repeating patterns of behavior. I think you kind of go one way or another. For me, and I really think about this and I'm astounded and I think it's just, you're just born that way, but.
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I just remember always being independent and resilient. Even from when I was a tiny girl, like I remember sitting in my bed at night and hugging my teddy bear and thinking in my mind, this too shall pass. And one day I will have a life of my own that I could cultivate. Like I remember saying that to myself when I was tiny. It's just, I also remember thinking.
Like and looking at my family life and things around me and recognizing what was okay and what wasn't. Like knowing the difference between the two. And having a core set of values. And I think the reason for that is I did visit other kids' homes and I was exposed to things so I saw the difference. I was able to see the difference. And the other thing which I think has really kind of saved me is I always gravitated for some reason.
towards older women mentoring me and throughout my life, if I think about it. And actually I dedicate in my new book to my women warriors and included in those women warriors are the women who mentored me throughout my life. So again, from when I was little, I always had like my grandmother or my dissertation advisor or like a woman who I used to visit who was elderly. I always had an older woman who found for whatever reason, who loved me, who really loved me, who took note of me, who attuned to me, who cared about me.
So I knew that I was lovable. I knew that I was worthy. And I wanted to understand that better. Like what made me lovable? What made me worthy? And I wanted to cultivate that more and have like a really successful, thriving life. Like that was just so important to me from when I was young. I can't say why. I really feel like I was born that way. I really believe that. It was part of my character and my temperament.
Interesting. Yeah, I do feel that some of us do get that calling, right? You just say for whatever reason, this is this is what my purpose is from from the very beginning. So one of the things that I was doing my research getting preparing for this, there were a lot of things that excited me that I want to talk to you about. But one of the things that really struck me was you are a therapist that speaks as a coach. I don't know if you know that.
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And it's very clear that there is a lot of influences that you pull from in your work. Obviously, you have the scientific background that comes with your clinical training, but there's also some spiritual aspects. There's a lot of mindfulness, meditation, affirmations, mindset work. And it struck me because I don't normally know therapists to speak that way and to kind of pull from all of that. So I'm curious as to
What were your influences and how did this tapestry come together? I love that question. It's so thoughtful. Yeah, I love that question. So thank you. Really. I appreciate it. I actually, when you were speaking, I felt it in my body. I literally did. Because I felt gratitude and appreciation that you took note of me and such. And it felt so caring. So I...
I want to say I appreciate that. Thank you. You're welcome. I try to do my homework. But it's more than homework. I think it's such thoughtfulness. So I don't want you to take that for granted. Thank you. I appreciate that. I really do. So I do. I think I do happen to have a lot of patients who come to me who has seen other therapists in the past. And I do think that my style is somewhat unique in that way and authentic.
One thing that my clients, my patients always say to me, which I appreciate, and when they say this to me, it's such a gift. I cannot even tell you. They say that I'm authentic, that they find me very authentic. And that is the biggest gift, that when somebody expresses that to me, because that's all I strive to be, honestly, from the bottom of my heart. Like it comes from a real heartfelt place. So I think, yeah, I do have a lot of, like you said, academic.
and treatment -based knowledge, and I always strive for more. I'm actually doing a certification right now. I'm doing actually kind of a treatment and certification at the same time. I am a lifelong learner. Let's put it that way. There's never an end to the vastness of knowledge that I could accumulate, and I love it. Like if I was independently wealthy, I always say this, I would sit in a classroom for the rest of my life. I love, I love like,
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When people are so moved and motivated by knowledge, it just literally, it's like such a passion for me. So, and when I'm in a classroom teaching too, I love when students are like thinking and constructing and processing and contemplating, like it moves me so much. So that's just who I am as a person, but it is, it is a really conglomerate of value -based work, which is my training and ACT work and CBT. I also do EMDR, which is a very trauma -based work.
And it's also a mind -body practice as well, because we're using bilateral stimulation, which is that machine right there behind me. That's with the eye treatment, right? The eye stimulation. Yeah. Eye movement desensitization reprocessing, which is bilateral. We're using our senses. So we have auditory and visual and all this, which helps to move, because we have sometimes things that are large in our actual brain, especially when there's trauma or stuckness.
And we don't know why that happens. So we could have a physiological or emotional response to something that happened from the past. Right? So like somebody once used this example, which I thought was so fascinating. We could have like these joyful moments in a relationship, right? And so many really poignant, like intense ones. But if you try to think about them, they're kind of fleeting. You don't remember them. And then if I asked you to connect to the feelings related to them, you wouldn't be able to.
You would remember that it felt good, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to viscerally and physiologically feel the feelings. But if I asked you to think about something really, really painful and traumatic, you could do that. Now that doesn't make sense. Like, why is that? And that is why it is so important when we do experience joy and when we do experience being present and connecting to our joy, that we take the moments.
to really connect to the feelings on the gut level because that doesn't happen instantaneously. It only happens with negativity. Why? Because our brains are wired to protect us from danger and discomfort. And sometimes it does a job like no other, right? It will remind us of that even when we don't want to be reminded of it because it takes its job really seriously and it's part of our nervous system. It's part of our physiology.
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So I can't say enough, like we really have to be in the present moment and take those times. So again, just from my training, who I am as a person and the work that I do, I'm always extrapolating from different kind of treatments, from different philosophies, from different theories. Like I said, I'm like a sponge. Like I can't get enough. I laugh because people say to me, this is one thing, people are saying to me, how do you have so much content?
They're amazed by the amount of content that I have. I've written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles. I've just, like, this is what my brain does. Literally, I'm sitting and I'm talking to a client and they're raising something with me and I'm like, my gosh, I have to write about that. There was an example the other couple of weeks ago I wrote on. What was it? Well, even just this last one that I wrote on is how to boost relationships. I kept on speaking to patients and clients and friends and all of these things kept on coming up.
about how it's so difficult and how challenging it is to be self introspective and how you can't cultivate a connected positive relationship without being self introspective. You know what? I need to write about this because people need to realize the barriers of why what keeps us from being introspective and then how it then negatively affects our relationships. So every time I'm talking to somebody, every time I'm watching, I'm observing something every time
It's everything stimulus to me, literally. But there's something that's like coming alive is there is an openness to always being in discovery, which I think is also, I'm gonna say, a superpower of yours because very often as humans, we're more interested in like what we know.
And in holding on to that reality and the comfort of what we know versus like just being in the inquiry of it and the discovery of it and the process of like, I'm not a fixed thing. I'm always evolving and growing. So it's really beautiful how that is also just manifesting in the work that you do as well. Yeah. So the word that encapsulates what you just said is the word curiosity. Yeah.
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It's more than an openness because openness is only kind of structurally a part of it. But curiosity is what breeds us, right, to look for the more. And it really speaks for relationships, too, right? Because when I'm interacting with somebody and I have, let's say I get triggered or I have, let's say, a judgment or a perception about what they're saying or why they're behaving a certain way or whatever the case is, which again, what happens are
mind kind of influences and kind of gets in there and says, right, it gets all paranoid and judgmental, right, because it's trying to protect us again. And I could say, I could kind of take a step back and I could be curious and say, hmm, I wonder why that person responded to me that way. What is that about? And instead of saying, why did you respond to me? I can't believe you said that. What's wrong with you? Which is what we do, right? I could say, wow, like I'm so curious why.
You responded that way. I really want to understand you better. Could you explain that to me? Very different. Very different. Yeah. And you're setting up my next topic that I want to get into. And so I often talk this idea of like just developing a mindfulness. And I often I often speak about how having some kind of mindfulness practice is just no longer optional. Like every human being.
needs to have that because we're never in the history of humanity have we been to stimulated. We are constantly having information notifications just trying to get our attention. So on some level, like our attention and our nervous system is just fried from all this over stimulation. And it's very easy to get in reactionary patterns in survival patterns when you are when you're living in this constant stimulation and
I work a lot with entrepreneurs and one of the first things that I've put in now, before we get into the business practice, before we get into the business strategy, it's a mindfulness practice. Like I have them do morning rituals. I have them start to practice some of these strategies because if I can't get you out of reaction, it's gonna be really hard to build, to create.
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So let's get into like mindfulness and why don't we take a step back and just create, let's create the distinction for people when we're talking about that. And what does it mean to be mindful and to have a mindfulness practice? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think it's a big misunderstanding for many, many people. So I love that you're asking for the distinction. Yeah, because there is a difference. There is a difference. So people have this idea that meditation,
that mindfulness is meditation practice, and that's not accurate at all. Meditation is a type of mindfulness practice, and there are thousands of different types of meditative practices. So I want to make that clear. And there's thousands of different types of mindfulness practices. But essentially, I always go by Jon Kabat -Zinn's kind of definition of mindfulness, because I think it's such a beautiful one. But it's really intentionally being in the present moment, non -judgmentally.
And I always say there's like a thinking mind and an observing mind. Okay. Now we're hardly in our observing minds. We're constantly in our thinking minds. So it's, it's actually bringing ourselves back, right? To our grounded, authentic, playful self, I'm going to say. And we need space between the thinking and the doing. Because like you said, we're on such autopilot that there, there isn't, or it seems people don't realize that space.
So when somebody acts or reacts or has reactivity and you say to them, why did you do that? They'll say, I don't know, I wasn't even thinking about it, I just did it. So like, let's say eating, overeating, binge eating, whatever, right? Like, I didn't want that piece of cake, why did I have that piece of cake? Like, there was no space, I just, I saw it, I wanted it, I put it in my mouth and then I feel right, shameful about it. And I slow them down and I say to them, really?
You don't have any thoughts. No thoughts are going through your mind at all before you put that cake in your mouth. Are you sure about that? Let's slow down. And they'll say, well, yeah, I kind of thought to myself, do I really need that? Maybe I'll work out more tomorrow. Like, et cetera, et cetera. And then before you know it, they had like 10 different things going through their minds before they decided to put it in their mouth. But they didn't even realize it.
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because it's so automatic and spontaneous that they don't take the time to process those thoughts and they just ignore them literally. And that's we habituate to ignore our thinking. Why? Because the feelings that go along with it are uncomfortable. And that's where the circumventing emotional avoidance, right? We avoid the thoughts and the feelings that are uncomfortable.
because we rather just not deal with it. It doesn't feel good in our body. It doesn't feel good in our mind. And we kind of push away from it. So mindfulness is really about being in the present moment. And because of the way our minds are wired, we tend to be in the past, which leads to a lot of regret and sadness and frustration, or we tend to be in the future, which leads to a lot of worry, chronic worry about uncertainty, about what will be, right? We don't really appreciate what is
right here, right now. And there's mindfulness ways you could do that. And it could be as simple as feeling your feet strongly planted on the ground. So I always like to use the body because the mind body is really, again, very poignant. Our breath. We always have our breath, right? It's portable. We also could use even our body. So I use something called the butterfly, which is just slightly tapping, right? Using tapping and closing your eyes always helps.
because you're able to then focus right on the touch, on the feeling it's evoking as you're doing this. Paying attention keenly to what you're doing. I don't care if you're like writing, brushing your teeth, taking a shower and feeling the water cascading down your body. We could be doing mindfulness all day long and I'm not kidding. And the course I teach at NYU is a 15 week course on integrating mindfulness into your clinical practice.
Now people will say, how do you teach this stuff for 15 weeks? There's a lot to teach. And you know what they say to me? yeah. They always say to me, they're like, my God, every practitioner should take this course. Anybody who works with people should be taking this course. And I'm like, yeah. Yeah. So it helps us in all different kinds of ways. One of, so my take on it and it's like there's the machine you.
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and the automatic that comes with it, the reactionary stuff. And then there's like the conscious, I don't know if it's the conscious you, but it's the you observing the machine. And that's what I think the practice of mindfulness is for me, is that you can pull back and observe the stuff that's happening, the stuff that you're doing, how you're responding for things, and observe it and interact with it in that way, and then develop an inquiry.
of how with yourself about how you're, why are you doing what you're doing? Something that has helped me greatly with this. Go ahead, you wanted to say something. I was just gonna say the words, just to put words around that, it's present moment awareness. It's present moment awareness, which breeds curiosity. I love that. One of the, so a practice that I've been leaning into, and I was, again, I was really surprised to see you.
lean in so heavily into meditation and you you you put out a lot of meditations on your Instagram and on your YouTube channel and it's clearly a big part of your toolbag and and how you support your people and your client and I personally have always struggled with meditation. It's something that I have always aspired to do.
because I always understood it as valuable. And it's something that I've kept doing over the years, even though I didn't do it right, or even though I struggled with it. For those of you that are listening, I did air quotes, right? Doing it right. So there's the interesting thing about meditation is that I've always struggled with it. And even if I did it poorly, air quotes, I still got value from it, right? I still got value from just...
honoring myself for five, 10 minutes, just relaxing and breathing and trying to be with myself. But my mind was always racing all over the place and I could never like, my ADHD would just be bouncing off the walls. And for the longest time, I was trying to, I thought meditation was the absence of that. That I thought the goal in the meditation was that I had no thought whatsoever for 10 minutes, right? And so,
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Very recently, I've been - Good luck. Good luck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And very recently, I've had a breakthrough in awareness about that. And it's been so powerful to figure out that it wasn't about that, but it was about being aware when you did go off, right? Like, and coming back. And that when you come back -
that's not you doing it wrong, that's actually you doing it very right in that practice. And there's an amazing resource for anybody who can relate to what I'm saying. In the Calm app, Jeff Walker has this 30 day course called Mindfulness for Beginners. And it's been a game changer for my meditation practice. Like it's such a game changer. So.
How did meditation become such a part of your process? And well, I don't know if you want to respond to anything I said, but then I also want to get into how did it become such an important part of the work that you do? So again, I was always just very curious about it because I'm always very, very curious about our biology and physiology and how our brain is structured. So I learned a lot about neurocognition. I'm fascinated by it. Yeah.
Because I think people are so self -blaming and self -critical. And what you're speaking to about like, I hear people talk about this all the time when they're talking about meditation, what's wrong with me? Why can't I rest my brain? Why can't I stop my thinking? Or they have anxious thoughts or mean -spirited thoughts or whatever thoughts they have. And it's not the thoughts themselves. It's the judgments and perceptions they have about their thoughts. And I always say that
Yeah, I say right there. And I'll say to them, think however you think. No holds barred. Everything's welcome. Literally everything is welcome here. And I see people literally it looks like they put they took like luggage off their shoulders when I say that. Because they're like, I thought I was a mean person because I had that mean thought I'm like, No, that actually makes you human. Welcome to my world. Thank you.
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And I say to them, I have mean thoughts. I have some sadistic thoughts. Whoa. And when those thoughts come up for me, I giggle. I literally do. I stop and I'm like, whoa, those are some like serious, salty, like aggressive, sadistic thoughts. Like, wow. And I marvel at my humanness rather than criticize it. I'm like.
Boy, am I a passionate person and it spills over into my rage too. Cool. We can't be passionate in one area and decide like, no, my anger is going to be a little temperament. It's going to be tempered because like that's okay. Like when I'm joyful, but it's not okay when I'm angry. No, it doesn't quite work that way. Sorry. It's going to be like come out, spill over in all different places. Right. And I could say to myself, like, there's my passion. That's what reminds me what's important to me. Right.
That's what connects me to myself. And I need those reminders. Those are important reminders. I need those. So for me, it's, again, it's been trying out different things, experimenting. I have to say that I prefer certain meditations myself. So I've been doing transcendental meditation for a very long time. And what was helpful for me about transcendental meditation was exactly that sentiment that you just said is like,
It's okay to think it's okay to not be in the present moment with your thoughts. But as soon as you recognize it, you just kind of bring it back in, right? And you say your mantra or you say your sound and you just kind of bring it back in. But here's the thing, which is fascinating. So with, for example, transcendental meditation, it's a 20 minute meditation twice a day. Can you explain what that is? Yeah. So again, it's a type of meditation.
two times a day for 20 minutes. Again, you take like a little mini, I would say tutorial and you are actually, they select for you either a mantra or a sound, which you basically go in your grave with that, right? It's a big secret. So whenever - I've heard about this. Yeah, so whenever your mind, right? Whenever your mind kind of slips away into thoughts, whenever you recognize it, you just come back to your like mantra or your sound.
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Now, what's so fascinating about it, like I said, with the 20 minute meditation, you're not supposed to kind of awaken by anything that's gonna jolt your nervous system, like by a sound or an alarm or whatever the case is, you allow your body to naturally just respond to a weakness. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, and we know just there's so much research on mindfulness. The great thing about mindfulness is we don't have to think about its benefits. We actually,
see it visually on MRIs. We see the structural changes in the gray matter of our brain and the gray matter gets affected as we age, right? So it affects our focusing, our attention and so many, our health, so many different things, but we actually see the structural change. It changes the structure of your brain. I mean, what else changes the structure of your brain?
I mean, it's fascinating. If you think about it, it's absolutely fascinating. So what has happened over the course of time, and this is fascinating to me, now when I meditate, my brain literally knows when 20 minutes is up, within five minutes. And I naturally, yes, I naturally awaken and it craves, it craves the quiet. Like it literally craves. Like I find myself not feeling good.
If I'm not, I exercise, I'm an avid exerciser. And also if I don't do my meditative practice, I don't feel good. I don't feel good in my body. The other thing that it does, which is also fascinating, so sometimes I usually meditate in the morning and you know how it is in the morning. You're planning, you're thinking, you have, you're consumed with all these thoughts. And like to think that your mind's gonna rest is like, gosh, it's a novel idea, but like, how's this gonna actually happen? When I sit,
And I say to myself, like, I feel my mind is on rapid fire. It's like having this thought and this plan and this, and within literally seconds, boom, it knows what to do. It literally goes deep, so deep that I have to question whether I'm sleeping, meditating. I don't even know what's going on. That's fascinating. Yeah. And I really want to stress for people, first of all, I wanted to correct something I said. I said, Jeff Walker is Jeff Warren.
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So I do what I'm trying to say is for anyone really looking to do this, stick with it. Be patient with yourself. Be really kind with yourself. It takes a little while in my experience anyway. Some of you might just go right in. In my experience, it took a little while, but it was so worth the payoff. And now I'm at a point where if I don't do it, I feel it. That's what I'm saying.
If I don't do it, I feel it. And it's literally the first thing I do in the morning. I go through my morning practices. I meditate, I do some chanting, I do some journaling, and I keep my phone in another room so I don't grab it because the moment I touch it, it's like the first thing that I go down the rabbit hole, especially because of the ADHD part of my brain that will just start.
of going down the Instagram rabbit hole for a while. I love this conversation so much. So I wanna move on because we're running out of time, but there's a couple of things I wanna talk to you. So first of all, I love, love, love, love, love your TED Talk. It was so good. And for those of you that wanna go check it out, it's called Circumventing Emotional Avoidance. And when I first heard emotional avoidance, I was like, what does that mean, right?
But the thing that really fascinated me about it is that in many ways, I feel like we're living in a very avoidant moment in our society. I feel like it's become part of our culture to avoid uncomfortable conversations, uncomfortable moments. Instead of having conversations, we're canceling each other. We're putting up boundaries. We are villainizing, judging the heck out of each other, right?
And there's like this phenomenon that's happening that I think is really making it hard for us to meet in the middle and connect and we're becoming very polarizing. And I think this really leans into what some of what you were talking about. So why don't you break down that concept of of circumventing emotional avoidance for people? Yeah, it's literally the way we're wired. It's not our fault as human beings. Yeah. Like I said, our brain is wired to protect us.
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from discomfort and danger. But you have to think about all the cues around us that, again, our brain gets confused. And sometimes it's overprotective. That's part of the problem. Right? It can't decipher what actually is dangerous and what isn't. And when I say danger, I'm not only talking about somebody attacking you, I'm talking about danger in terms of discomfort in our emotions. Right?
So we'll avoid getting frustrated, disappointed, sad, angry, and on and on, and on and on. And it constantly happens. It constantly, constantly happens. So we avoid sometimes very, very, very hard conversations. And I was talking, you know, I always use examples from my practice, but I was talking to a patient yesterday, a client, and you know, she actually disclosed to me,
that, you know, she had this kind of prediction about her mother's behavior in terms of addiction, but she wasn't sure. Anyway, it was so she said to me, I'm scared to find out the truth. And she was crying. And I said to her, I could understand that. Because if you did, if you did find out the truth, right, how would you feel? How would you think? And we went through that. And I said, let's just sit with that.
Let's not jump to conclusions. Let's not analyze this. Let's just sit with the fear of confronting these difficult emotions and what that's like to be with that. And she started, like tears just kind of came like so quickly and readily because nobody ever asked her to sit with that.
And when she did, you know, and she really did, she sat with it and she spoke about what that felt like to, you know, and the propensity to avoid it and how her body is communicating to her to run and to not show up for session and to not confront this. And when she did have that thought, like, you know what, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna dodge the session for today.
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And she was able to express it. So she didn't act out on behalf of it. She expressed it and then we were able to have conversation about it. And then she said, well, there's nothing I'm gonna be able to do about this. My parents are my parents, they're adults. I can't change their behavior. I said, okay, true. But does that mean that you're helpless? Does that mean that there's nothing you could do?
And then we went into, well, what does that mean to you as an adult? What does that mean for your younger sister, et cetera? So where she came from a place of feeling so helpless as if she is literally, right? Helpless then breeds hopelessness and stuckness. And then what happens when she's stuck? She cuts off. But guess what happens? It trickles into her relationships and she avoids, she avoids.
confrontation and she avoids depth in her relationships and she avoids intimacy and vulnerability and I could go on and on and on so much so that she's way above the age of being able to drive and she's never gotten her driver's license and I could talk about so many ways that this has spilled over her avoidance has spilled over in her life this is like a human
human frailty, we're all frail in this way because discomfort really affects us and it makes us want to run. It makes us want to cut off. It makes us want to repress. And again, this speaks for every part of our life. I have to say our habits, things that we're trying to cultivate that will improve our lives, changes we want to make adjustments. Again, I could go on and on and on, but yeah, really.
It's something some distinction you made or advice you gave that really resonated with me. The you were given the example of the parents in the line at the amusement park and how this you your kid was in the line. And one of the things that you did with your child was not not try to make him feel better by saying, it won't be scared. Your your your son was scared about King Dakar, which I totally get out of the frightening roller coaster.
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But instead of saying, it's gonna be fine, don't worry, you'll be like, instead of minimizing the fear, you really said, yeah, it is scary, and you can be scared and do it anyway. And I think that's such an important distinction because we have this very shameful relationship with fear and we try to, every time I hear,
a motivational speaker or coach say, don't be afraid. I'm like, what? No, like, how can you do that? Like, that's ridiculous. Like, that's not the advice. The advice is be with your fear, have a relationship with it, take a step when you're afraid. But if it's like suppressing it, first of all, there's nothing wrong with fear, right? It's just a feeling. But when we - Feelings are not dangerous. That's the other thing. Feelings are not dangerous. Yeah. I tell that to people, they're like,
yeah, like I could be fearful, but not be in danger. But our brain tells us we're in danger. That's part of the problem. Our brain definitely tells us we're in danger and we buy into that crap. We literally do. I have a sign on my door. It says, don't believe everything you think. We can't buy into that. That's the whole thing. And the other thing too is if we realized that it's always connecting us to our values,
We wouldn't be so fearful of it. So yes, the reason you don't want to go on the roller coaster is because you're scared you're going to die and fall off the roller coaster. Well, guess what? You care about your life and you care about being on this planet. That's a good thing. I don't have a problem with that. Right. So it's about your safety and that's okay. Like great that you want to be alive, right? But your brain is leading you to believe that you're going to die because you're going on this roller coaster, which again,
Yeah. So in the last few minutes that I have with you, I'd love for you to share about your book, The Ace Your Life, Unleash Your Best Self and Live the Life You Want. Tell us about your book. What made you write it? The Ace Your Life. Yes, it's my colors, my purple and teal. Anyway, it's predicated under acceptance, compassion and empowerment. And that's the method that it came up with. So it's a way of living your life, literally. It's a playbook.
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It's a playbook. I teach it these skills to kids, teens, adults, I mean, across the board. And what I love and which is so satisfying to me is like, I'll have people use the lingo. I didn't quite lead into my values today. I have to like, right. It's a very empowering, it's a very empowering approach. It's not based on belittling and berating and condemning and shaming yourself. It's based on empowering yourself. It's based on accepting who you are.
When I say accepting, it's not like accepting mediocrity. It's about noticing. It's about like sitting back and noticing who you are and working with who you are, your golden shadow, your strengths, right? Compassion, we never ever learn self -compassion. We learn to be compassionate towards others. We don't learn to be self -compassion. We don't even know what that is. When I talk to people about they're like, I don't know how to do that. And there's so many barriers. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's no playbook.
So the first chapter I start out is with, again, I'm very interested in biology and neurocognition and our physiology, and we need to understand that. That is critical. I always give a psychoeducation on our physiology and neurobiology because you're not gonna be able to really be, again, participate in acceptance, compassion, empowerment if you don't really understand the way you're wired, literally, physically wired. The second chapter is really around our values.
And there's a very prescriptive way of seeking out your values and understanding why they're important and also how to interact with them. And then I break it up into three different parts, right, which is acceptance, compassion, empowerment. I talk about the benefit, the barriers, I'm sorry, to each, because there are so many barriers, whether it's physiological, social, cultural, et cetera. And then I talk about how to integrate it.
How do we integrate it? Now, some people have an easier time or a harder time or a more challenging time with each part. So the nice thing about it is you could kind of weave in and out of it, right? Sometimes like empowerment is really around our habits and how to cultivate practices and how like you talked a little bit about yourself, right? What you do in your morning ritual and our habits. People have a really hard time with that. There's so many books on habits yet people are still having a hard time with it, right?
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So we know how to change behavior. That's not the issue. There's so many resources out there about changing behavior. We don't know how to sustain behavior over time. And a lot of it or most of it has to do with the avoidance that I'm talking about. It's constantly about the avoidance. And I talk about very, very specific ways on how to cultivate that for yourselves. And there are exercises. At the end of each chapter is a guided meditation.
to integrate the practice, there's a QR code that you could scan on, which gives you actually a guided meditation as well. I had to include that in my book because that is who I am. And I do feel that you always have to end your practice with, again, being grounded and also taking that space. It's a critical part of the work. Now, one thing that I do want to say about what you said before, which is so important, which was the distinction between mindfulness and meditative practice, et cetera, it doesn't have to be any way.
So you could try all different kinds of practices, find what works for you, just like with exercise. If I told you you need to do kickboxing, you would say to me, I don't like kickboxing. And then you would just not work out. No, there's Zumba, there's Pilates, there's yoga, there's a thousand different, there's walking. There's walking. I don't care what you do. I don't care what kind of mindfulness and meditative practice you do.
find the thing that works for you. It doesn't have to be a half hour practice. I don't care if it's five minutes of a practice, but to say I don't have time or I can't find the thing that works. Now that's a rationalization. And I came up with 30 different rationalizations that we come up with to rationalize our behavior. We do, we rationalize our behavior. Michelle, this was such a
Juicy conversation. I've had so much fun talking to you and I think your insight is just spot on and I love the work that you're doing. So thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show. Absolutely. Consider me a new fan. thank you. I think you're doing really great work and I really appreciate what you're doing and I can't wait to read the book. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks, Michelle.
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I feel like I can record a whole other podcast just extrapolating the gems from my conversation with Dr. Maidenburg. But if I had to put it all in a nutshell, there is you and then there is the mechanics of you. Your body, your brain, your nervous system, all the million little things that happen every second to keep you alive. The conscious you and the machine you
don't always have the same agenda. You may want to have an intimate loving relationship, but the machine you wants to avoid uncomfortable conversations. You may want to take a leap and start a new business, but the machine you says, whoa, whoa, whoa, that sounds really scary. Let me just put all these distractions in front of you so that I can keep us safe.
Mindfulness is the ability to observe and discern between your authentic needs and wants and that of your machine. Mindfulness is the ability to have both sides of you engage in a dialogue and get on the same page if you will. Now here's the thing, developing this practice is the key to it all. The success you want, the relationship you want, the business, the money, all of it.
depends on your ability to master this mindfulness. There's nothing wrong with fear. There's nothing wrong with avoiding or procrastinating. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to take a risk. This is all just part of being a human being in a human body. But you don't have to be limited by it. You don't have to succumb to it. The power in being a human being is that we have the capacity to discern
between these two parts of ourselves. It takes a little practice and you may need to constantly keep bringing yourself back to that awareness, but you have that ability. And that is the source of you getting in ownership. As always, thank you for joining me this week. Please remember that new episodes drop every Tuesday. If you have enjoyed the show, please share it with two or three people in your life that you think will be inspired by this message.
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If we work together, we can spread the message of empowerment to as many people as possible. And wouldn't that be sweet? I'll see you next week.