Self-Reflection & Self-Regulation: The Power Couple

We are going to go ahead and get up and running. Here we are two minutes past the top of the hour, so if you are just joining and you've not yet put your location in the chat, please do so. We absolutely love to see where you are reaching out to us from throughout the time that we're spending together today. I'm going to very much encourage everybody to put chats, uh, use the chat for questions. We're going to have a q and a section at the end where Sarah and I are going to address some of the questions that come up.

Yeah, that if you've got something that's pressing, if you got something on online, just go ahead and let us know in the chat and we'll try to address that as best as we can. We already got a quick status check, but I'll say it again. If this is your first Beyond Limitss, welcome. If this is not your first, welcome back. My name is Kevin, spent and I'm the Chief Growth Officer here at The Pacific Institute.

And on the first Friday of every month, we like to do this executive briefing series because we want to bring together a group like this one. Again, we're expecting north of a hundred individuals today. Thank you very much for giving us some time here on your Friday morning. The goal of a Beyond Limits session is we want to gather leaders, executives, business owners like yourself. We want to be able to share insights from our core curriculum.

We want to be able to tie that to current events. We want to be able to tie that to the salient things that are going on in the world so that we can apply what we learn towards our jobs or maybe towards our families at home. It's an opportunity to network and facilitate some connections, and it's, of course, an opportunity for you to learn just a little bit more about what we do. And if you're a client of ours, thank you for being here. We look forward to engaging with you in a different way today.

You've already heard her speak a little bit, but you have an absolute treat. Normally. The last couple sessions you've heard yours truly explaining some of our core curriculum. Today I want to introduce somebody who is going to be, uh, an integral part of Pacific Institute moving forward, if I have it my way, but is going to be an absolute cornerstone of the next hour of our lives. So Sarah is going to give herself a professional introduction.

You'll hear about the things that she does. So I would just like to introduce you to my friend. I met Sarah about four or five years ago, and like you are all about to experience, Sarah has a wonderful way of making an impact on others. She has a professional background in psychology. She has a, uh, quite a resume if you look through her LinkedIn page, but again, I'm going to let Sarah introduce herself on her professional credentials.

But my favorite thing that Sarah does when she describes herself is what you'll see on the main page of her website. So I would like to introduce Dr. Sarah Sarkis, who is part shrink, part performance consultant and part Jedi of the unconscious. Dr. Sarah Sarkis, it's all yours.

Thanks, Kevin. You didn't, you, you hid that very sweet opening from me because I cry at tissue commercials, so you probably knew you were going to get me teary eyed mission. Um, I'm so glad to be here. As I said at the beginning of the time, you know, in adulthood when you like people, you have to work with them to hang out with them. It's like you have to create projects where you can work together.

So we have been in fact doing that for almost five years. If you can believe this, you were one of the first people I connected with when I moved back to Boston. So welcome everybody. I'm really so glad to be here. Um, I wanted to do a couple of like housekeeping at the top of the hour and then we're going to dive right in.

One is, Kevin mentioned this, but you have a journal, like a workbook to kind of follow along. Um, and there'll be places where we have you because this is about self-reflection and self-regulation, um, where we're going to have you engage in those activities. Um, also QQA, we're Gonna regularly, sorry to interrupt you there, Sarah, but we are going to regularly be adding that workbook to the chat. So if anybody needs it, you can click that link, that will open up your digital workbook. You're welcome to print that out if you don't like trees, but it is a digital workbook, so you can just fill it right in on A PDF.

That's perfect. And there's no interrupting. You know, for me, conversation is better. So to that end, Kevin and I, uh, you know, he knows that I have a real disdain for talking at people. So, um, I try to keep these short and sweet and to the point.

I have a way with getting right to the point. And, uh, we're going to do that today. And then really the most important thing is that you leave feeling as though you were able

to ask any questions that you want and have conversation. Okay, my last disclaimer, because I like to show that I am well reflected, and for the most part well-regulated, which is the, you know, the darling of this conversation is reflection and regulation. So I'm going to apologize ahead of time because I swear, and I've had a lot of time to self-reflect, and I've had a lot of years. I'm nearly 50, I've had a lot of years to think I'll get better at it, and that hasn't happened. So I like to just apologize ahead of time.

Some sort of swear is going to pop out in the course of this hour together. Um, and I apologize ahead of time. Okay? So, uh, we're here. Self-reflection, self-regulation, the power couple, and growth and change.

The first thing I want people to do, put in the chat what you think the most important word in that mouthful of a title is. Um, and Kevin, since I can't see that screen, let me know when people have started to the word, The word self. The word self is flying through the chat on repeat. Some people have even chosen to put it in capital letters. Yeah.

So, okay. I'm glad to see that people see that this is about your own relationship with yourself, um, which is a very complex thing if you're anything like me. And also that is not the, that is not the key here. The key is the power couple. This is going to be a conversation about how this dynamic duo really shapes your leadership trajectory.

But I always like to say right from the top, I don't actually care about your leadership trajectory. I think that's great. It's lovely, it's a bonus. I care about your long-term relationship with yourself and how that impacts your interpersonal relationships and your work world is one of the places that this power couple will become a real, a real superpower. Okay, so let's move on.

Okay, let me just see. All right, so we're going to do in the interest of, um, in the interest of staying true to our mission, we're going to take a minute. People can, you can leave your computer, your, um, cameras on. You can turn them off. Everybody sounds muted, so that's helpful.

But if you're anything like me, you, your brain and your body arrive at the same place at different times. So I want us to take a moment, um, and I, you close your eyes and just begin to arrive in your skin and bones and let your breath be the cadence that sets that in and out. Even you don't have to alter it in any, any way, but begin to quiet your body and notice the interconnectedness with how your mind begins to quiet. And then notice that you can quiet your mind and your body will start to do the same. And that, that intimate connection between the two is the space that we're going to look at today.

And so just take a few more breaths and then when you feel like you've kind of arrived, your brain, body and mind have all arrived in this moment together, you can open your eyes. And this is one of those times where we're going to ask that you take another kind of 30 seconds or so and you have in your journal space to write down kind of what did you notice? How did you feel? Just free associate. This is going to become an important phrase, sans critique.

Um, and start to observe what it was like to just get quiet in your own body for a moment. And I'll try To also notice that in those workbooks or journals, there's, at the top of the page, it says, there's a place where you can put what's running through your mind. Middle of the page is what's running through your body. And then any notes can go down below. Great.

And as you're writing and you're thinking, um, two things I want to share is that the reason I do this talk, um, in lots of different capacities and places, and it's tweaked every time for who we're going to connect with, right? But, um, the, one of the most important things that's become really important to me in my, you know, old I've been at this a long time, we're going to hear my story in a minute. But, uh, I used to be completely non-practical.

And I have this urge to go call and apologize everybody who worked with me in the past because, um, my whole quest now is to have people realize. So what we just did is your first self-reflection and awareness practice. People say, well, how do I practice that? You just did, it takes 30 seconds. That's how simple it is.

So I'm trying to bring tools and tips that are cheap, free renewable, and they live inside of you. You possess the capability. I got tired of feeling like everything I was suggesting was beyond, behind some paywall. I want to draw our awareness to that. Okay, let's move on.

People again, please don't let my sort of train that's left the station stop you from deeply engaging inside the chat. Kevin and I are going to circle back to all the stuff that surfaces. Okay, let's move on. I like to just give a very quick, here's today's journey. We're going to look at the big picture, then we're going to tease them apart, the individual pieces.

We're going to do actionable tips and tools, and then we're going to have time to really connect the q and a. If you know me at all is my favorite, I would have a full 60 minutes of just q and a. I've been repeatedly deterred by everybody in my life from doing that. So here we are. Now we have a topic.

All right, so here's where I started. Okay, so a little context about my journey. Uh, I am Dr. Sarah Sarkis. I'm a licensed psychologist, certified leadership coach.

And I'm also the senior director of performance Psychology at exos, which is a performance, a large performance company, um, who has historically focused lots of its time and energy on professional athletes in the military. And then over the last sort of eight to 10 years has really turned what they've learned about high performance onto corporate and organizational health. But I started in, as I am a classically trained therapist. I still have a very small private practice in Massachusetts, very small. I had one in Hawaii for decade.

For a decade I lived there. And prior to that I was back here in Boston when I first started out building my practice. And this picture is really apropos for me 'cause I had a long-term practice filled with, um, really high functioning executives. But even before that, I was in forensics and my whole obsession was trying to understand the mind of, um, essentially serial murderers and, uh, serial criminals, right? So I've had a lot of different roles that I've played on my way to now being in a very different world.

But here's the thing that remained consistently true. I essentially ended up in Hawaii through a series of fun detours. And I spent a decade there where I really incubated this private practice. And what ended up happening is that I had all these c-suite executives from the Honolulu community who were my patients, and they were, um, hardworking. They were visionaries, they were building incredible things.

Um, but they found me after the wheels came off the bus. And, uh, the cost to fix Humpty Dumpty is enormous emotionally, financially, and psychologically. It is really hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And I started to tire of waiting for people to be broken until they would come in and, um, talk about how to thrive in life. And inside this time with people, one of the primary things people get really interested in is like, how does this work?

How does a therapeutic or a coaching relationship work? And so it sent me on a mission to try to understand what it is, what are the mechanisms by which we change our life? And by virtue of that, how we engage in all of our relationships and this quest, this quest to not wait till they're broken and to really sort out like what are the mechanisms that we can actually work with here changed everything for me. I, about eight years ago, I turned everything upside down and I really began to see my partnership the way Jane Goodall did in the truest spirit of observation, curiosity, in this relentless commitment to wonder. I didn't want to figure out anymore where things went wrong or what was wrong.

I really just left this game of suffering and I started to collaborate with my clients. And I, this is when I became a coach and I really left therapeutic office. This simple shift is what brought me to exos, where we work with Fortune 100 and 500 companies on the algorithm of sustainable high performance. And this is what led me to have a practice that became my living laboratory. Every person or team becomes an n of one.

And went about going on this adventure of how are we going to leverage this capacity that humans have this capacity for self-awareness or self-reflection. I'll occasionally use those interchangeably even though there is a slight academic difference. Ignore it. Um, and self-regulation. And how do we make that magic happen?

Okay? So what I want us to think about today is that this is a conversation about this dynamic overlap, this capacity for self-awareness and reflection, and this capacity for regulation. And they do live independent of each other. We know all of us, if we think about it, know people who have tons of self-awareness, but they actually struggle with regulation. And then we can know people who seem highly regulated, which is a very interesting thing that will take apart later on, but that are highly regulated, that actually have a rudimentary sense of self-awareness.

So they do live independent of each other, but there is a huge, there is a swath of real estate where these skills overlap. And this is where you get huge results. It turns out that these soft skills of self-regulation, self-reflection and self-regulation, they have very, very tangible results. And so what we're really talking about today is a conversation about a branch of psychology called emotional intelligence. We'll refer to it as ei ei refers to a different way of being smart.

EI is a key to high performance, particularly for outstanding leadership. This is a quote from Dan Goldman. He's kind of the founding father of, um, popular emotional intelligence. Okay? And this is the idea that understanding yourself is the critical step in your leadership trajectory.

So emotional intelligence is a framework. We're going to sort of breeze through a lot of this, but it begins with self-awareness. So this slide don't get too, uh, caught up on all the words. What I want you to see, starting at the bottom, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. When I work with leaders, I ask them, when they start with me, I'm sort of like, you know, what would you want to work on?

Right? Do and dollars to donuts. Most people respond at the social awareness in the relationship management level. And they say, I want to be a better leader. I want to have more influence.

I want to communicate better, et cetera, et cetera. It's all interpersonal, but emotion. The, the, the science and the psychology of emotional intelligence really allows us to see it. It's a, it starts down at self-awareness. So this is where we are today.

We're going to look at self-awareness, and we're going to look at self-management. I'm using self-management 'cause this is actual language from Dan Goldman's framework. And instead of self-regulation, they say self-management, but they're interchangeable. Okay? So the set of skills, it's that one is we're working on tools for emotional self-awareness and why it's important.

And with self-regulation, we're looking at self-control. I almost never use that word. I would say self influence, adaptability, achievement orientation, and sort of positive outlook. So those are all the things inside of this framework. And then once you've spent your time developing these con call them, uh, foundational layers, then you can move into the part that's interpersonal.

But notice that most people, we kind of want to skip these two and we want to get right to where we can be most potent interpersonal. Okay, this is the Kevin, how are we doing this one, even though went over this 25 times, Uh, you guys can ignore that QR code. Yours truly screwed that up. So the QR code does nothing that makes, but we can just go ahead and answer the question and ignore the technical problems that Kevin created. So do we have a poll?

Uh, we do. The poll just won't open up.

We're going to go ahead and you can put this in your user workbooks. So Sarah's got the question that I'll let her elaborate on. You can put in the answers on page four of your workbook to the question of how self-aware do you consider yourself? Okay, well then we miss seeing the data, but that's okay. We're going to rally this is us being flexible.

Look at me, Kevin, being flexible. Um, how, how self-aware do you consider yourself Not at all enough or too much? And, um, I, you know, generally what we're going to see, I'll just speak generally here, is we're going to see a normal distribution. A bunch of people think enough, a bunch of people think they are really self-aware. That's a whole other stuff.

The number one answer that's coming through the chat here is the word enough. Like if it was, Yeah, so we're in a bell curve, Extremely feud. It's definitely ding, ding, ding. Number one answer is enough. Yeah.

So it's good to know with a hundred participants and however many are answering, we're all falling into a bell curve. So that's reassuring. Humans are doing what humans are supposed to do. Um, this becomes important. So there, there's a bunch of research when, when we're talking about self-awareness and leadership.

And there was one research done by Harvard Business Review, and in their statistic, only 10% of the leaders that they polled were actually self-aware. And there's a very particular reason for that. Turns out there's a really particular reas reason for that. Um, but first let's define self-awareness. Okay?

So self-awareness is the conscious knowledge of one's own character, feelings, motives, sensations and desires. Uh, and I'd say all five kind of matter. It's also a way for you to start to think about your own relationship with yourself. Like, oh yeah, so what are my feelings? What are my, what's driving me?

What are my motives? What are my sensations? And if anybody has questions between feelings and emotions in the chat, put it there. 'cause we'll have a whole conversation about that. So this is what the technical definition of self-awareness is.

And it sort of sounds okay. Easy enough, right? But I noted to you that I've spent 20 years as a therapist. And so as I started to unravel this riddle in my own living laboratory of like, what are the levers that we play with and why is self-awareness so difficult for us, right? Turns out there's this concept inside of psychology.

It's called an observing ego, okay? And the observing ego is the capacity to observe oneself, son's critique. And I don't know if anybody else has tried to do that and noticed how hard that is. And it dawned on me when I started to learn about this ability. This is by the way, um, language that is not unique to psychology.

Sam Harris talks about this as the dispassionate observer. There's loads of philosophies, eastern philosophies that cover the same practice that we can do. But that statistic of 10% being actually self-aware, I think is tied to this very component. Observing ourselves son's critique is really difficult because a lot of times we are in the critique. We are in the critique of I'm doing it wrong, or I'm doing it right, I'm good, or I'm bad, I'm right or I'm wrong.

Or we're just self-loathing. And on the other side of people that felt their self-awareness is greater than average, sometimes we have like, we have grandiose beliefs about ourselves, right? So on one end lies self-loathing, and on another end lies grandiosity, right? Blind spots where we can't observe ourself because we're too wedded to the idea that we are right or good or doing it properly, right? And what I started to see inside my therapeutic practice was that this part, this developing, uh, the capacity for an observing ego, it's what we spent 90% of our time on. 90% of our time was bringing us back to a place where we could start to observe soms critique.

Okay? So let's talk about briefly what is the value in investing on self-awareness? Okay, so I'm going to sort of go through this quickly as I'm aware of time. But first is with practice, it is a practice. You get improved decision making by the way, because of the key fundamental role

that self-awareness plays in your growth of your own emotional intelligence, which is a cornerstone to your leadership success. You naturally model healthy team dynamics, it amplifies emotional intelligence. And other people feel that they don't necessarily know it. They may not say, oh, so-and-so's really has very high ei. Maybe they will, they'll say, I feel seen and heard, I feel listened to, I feel like I can communicate effectively.

These are the ways that it will be felt and perceived. Excuse me, one second. James, can you stop sharing your screen please? We can go ahead and work on that on our end, but Sarah, you can go ahead and keep going. We good?

Yeah. There we go. Thank you. Promotes effective communication and it cultivates curiosity, which, you know, there's a whole separate time that we should come back and just have a love fest on curiosity. Okay, now we're going to move on to the regulation side of things.

We're going to do another informal poll. When the blank hits the fan, I tend to hide in the corner. Stop, drop and roll or stand deliver. You can see we're starting to have you think about what are your regulatory impulses. Let's see the answers in the chat on this one as well.

You'll also have an option in your workbook if you want to keep track. So far, stand deliver seems to be the most common answer, sneaking its way through. So a highly a crew that feels highly self-regulated. Okay, let's, let's unpack it now. Let's define it.

Uh, the ability to manage our reactions and behaviors in response to our feelings and or things happening around us. Okay? And let's look at this again. Dan Goldman, there is perhaps, lemme see something actually. Um, there is perhaps no psychological skill, more fundamental than resisting an impulse.

So something I want people to think about with regulation, actually I'll go back to this slide. Notice how regulation reports to two sort of gods, right? There is the self and there's the world around us. We have to regulate ourself. And then that has to get translated into the world around us.

The other thing that I began to be really curious about inside my work with people both in therapeutic, um, domains and in coaching, which, you know, aren't that different, um, is, is that the thing that makes regulations so hard for many of us, it isn't the doing. And in fact a crew like you, by virtue of the fact that you showed up here, you are likely someone who has no problem doing things. But it is the role of restraint inside of our regulation game that is often the most difficult. We are often provoked by our own interior and from provocations outside of us interpersonally. And that role of restraint, we're going to, um, we're going to dig more into, okay, so this is, there is no skill more fundamental than resisting impulse dollars to donuts.

If all of us spent the next 365 days just looking at pockets of restraint in our life, our relationship with our ourself, that's where it starts. Then with others would be transformed. If, if there was nothing else you left with today, I would say, um, start to really pay attention to the pockets of your life, your interior life that require more restraint. So what are we regulating? That's really important, right?

Um, we are regulating two things and we are regulating it in this order. Nervous system. What are we regulating inside the nervous system? We're regulating focus in our mind, okay? And we're regulating energy inside the body.

Um, and if we had more time, I would go into the whole pathway

through which they are connected. We don't and we won't. Okay? But in the nervous system. Second, might be weird that a shrink is saying mindset comes second.

We are, we are managing our tolerance for discomfort. Restraint is all about tolerating discomfort. Doing is about acting, right? Restraining is how can, how hot can the pressure cooker get? And I can still have a poker face, right?

So we're tolerating discomfort. And then how much can we embrace failure? Which is really just how we learn. So we constantly fail until we put together some wins. Uh, failure as a teacher, and why do I say they come in this order?

Psychology is governed by our physiology. So for example, it's physiologically impossible for a well oxygenated body to have a panic attack. That's just a fact, right? So you may not know that, but that is a fact. I mean, unless there is a physical thing like a tumor presence of something else going on.

But if it is truly a panic attack, it is physiologically impossible for a well oxygenated body to have a panic attack. So breath is the antidote to an over anxious mind, right? And if you learn how to breathe your way through your nervous system responses, you will change your relationship with what we consider a psychological process, which is anxiety. And it can go back and forth, but primarily you will never solve a thinking problem with a thinking solution. You'll have to get neck down.

So what I have found in my decades is that actually many of the things that come in looking psychological, and they are on the surface, they actually require a physiologic approach to sort of chip away at the habit form, okay? Value on investment of self-regulation. I like people to know why they're doing what they're doing. You're going to see many of them overlap with the path, the previous one, right? So model healthy organizational culture, um, and improve sense of safety and belonging.

That kind of makes sense, right? When we as the leader are more regulated, think about if you are the leader of a family, otherwise known as a parent, um, think about when you manage to keep your s**t clear. There was my swear I got so far. I got so far in. But nonetheless, um, you, you can see, you can co-regulate.

It's a whole, um, part of developmental psychology and developmental neurobiology called co-regulation. So you get this whole improved sense of safety and belonging, team performance, that's all from this co-regulatory capacity. Um, and then an enhanced sense of wellbeing both inside yourself and with other people. And then improved decision making capacity. Okay?

Um, Kevin, we're referring to workbook, right? Yeah. So there's going to be an opportunity, uh, you can go ahead and explain, but those of you that have your workbooks handy, you'll notice there's some blank pages to fill in some thoughts here as Sarah explains. Okay? So in here I can have mine that I like to tell people and I want to kind of chit chat about it a little bit.

That's why we've left runway here. Um, but I never like to lead the witness. 'cause once I anchor us in what we're going to talk about, we'll never move off of it. That's just a law of anchoring. There's your tip for negotiation moving forward.

So I want you to take your time, take a minute or so, even though I barely have that kind of patience, take a minute or so and think about when you think about reflection, what are things you're already doing and or things you are not doing and you want to start doing. Hear the role of restraint in there. You have to stop doing something else to do this. Um, and, you know, come up. I have three that I actually cram four into three spots.

Um, did we want this in the chat too, Kevin? Because Absolutely. Yeah. You have the ability to put these in your workbook. So let's take 90 seconds or so.

Now, any answers you have, put 'em in the workbook. We would love it if you copied those answers and put 'em in the chat so we could see

Prompt again in case we didn't quite get it like me. Oh, So for this area, this is any of the practices that you're already putting in place for reflection. Sarah's going to share some really good suggestions with us, but we're going to see what the group comes up with first. Yeah, I don't like to anchor because we'll never move off the anchor. If I tell you first, Evan, you'll let me know when that time is up.

Yep. There's some really good stuff coming in the chat right now. A handful of people have said journaling. Uh, Michelle said going outside, morning sunlight, walking outside is a common one. Uh, a very honest answer from Chris attempting meditation, however, it's a challenge.

Me too, me too. Deep breaths, walking, meditation, yoga. Okay, great. I would say there's a common theme going here. Oh, love it.

Okay, so here's the ones. Remember I am doing this from the lens of there's gazillion things inside a coaching practice that we can do. But these are the ones that are like, other than our own willingness to be consistent. There's nothing stopping us a fan favorite as we could see stillness and meditation. Um, I see them as two separate things.

I do believe you can meditate and not be still. Um, but you can also do meditation still. And, uh, you know, still in your body you can do it guided and unguided. Why do I like, or, or let me tell you a backstory on meditation. Um, you know, back when I was a purist and probably ineffective, I, uh, di didn't, I didn't want to tell people what to, you know, I, I I was like, we don't do activities in here.

We, you know, we ta we do our deep work. And, um, and people would say to me all the time, I want something to do. I want you to give me homework. And I was like, really? Um, 'cause most of the time when people tell me they want me to give them something to do, all they really want is the resistance to then tell me why they can't do it or how they did it wrong or what.

So I'm like, but then I started to think, oh, okay, great, I'll give them something to do. And I would tell everybody, oh, you should start a meditation practice. I may or may not have had one of my own at the time, but it never stopped me from being, giving good advice. So I would be like, oh, here's the thing you should do. You should start a meditation practice.

And I'm not kidding you, I lived in Boston, then I lived in Hawaii, now I'm back in Boston and I have clients now in my coaching practice all over the world. So this is agnostic to culture, time, space, et cetera. Universally, they'd be asking me to give them something to do for months. Finally, I would give them something to do and they'd go, no, no, no, I want something real to do. And I'd be like, I don't understand.

So as soon as I saw that level of resistance, I just knew, I was like, Hmm, this is the thing. This is our thing, right? And so the reason that I like stillness and meditation is it is universally hard for us, and it challenges a few things. One, this idea that things should be easy, and the second is that there is a right or a wrong way to do it. People will be like, well, I do it wrong.

That's just not true. The research actually shows that through FMRIs, that whether you are a novice or, um, an expert, uh, meditator, the pathways inside of our brain that, that result in these benefits, mostly a central nervous system benefit, um, they happen in two to five minutes regardless of seniority of practice. Okay? So that is why I've stuck with stillness and meditation because I have just found such universal resistance. And then when people begin and I sort of say, people will be like, well, well how should, how much should I do?

And what should I do? I say, what are you willing to do? Well, I, you know, maybe five minutes once a week. Great, start there, Mayor. What you're saying there is that all the times in the past when I said I'm not any good at it, that wasn't a valid excuse.

It's not a valid excuse.

And notice that when we said that the practice of an observing ego sans critique. So you can hear right there that there is the critique present and that that critique is present in all areas of your life. You just don't see it. And when we sit still long enough, we start to see the critic inside of us and where it is holding us back, right? Okay.

My next favorite is reflection through journaling. I think some people said this also to know, um, like, so I practiced something from Julia Cameron's the Artist's Way. That's a book that's probably 45 years old now. It's sort of claim to fame is that Rick Rubin used that method to essentially find himself and then a gazillion artists along the way have used it. It's three pages, um, stream of consciousness.

By the way, your, your practice there is trying to silence that critic. And notice that I said trying to silence, I did not say silence. Um, so it's, again, you could do it for two minutes, you could do it for 30 seconds. Um, but just start writing out your thoughts. That book The Artist's Way is basically a 12 week workbook.

It's, it's really awesome. I highly suggest people check it out. She's like 85 now and still rocking it. Julia Cameron is the author. Um, but there's guided journaling.

There's loads of ways to do it. Last one where I'm going to cram into is the after action review and 360 feedback, right? So that's another tool for self-reflection. And notice that what I tried to show you here is that self-reflection can happen intrapersonally you with yourself. That I've also, then the last one is you, it's interpersonal, it's somebody else providing that feedback for you and why that can be so helpful in the, uh, process of knowing yourself more intimately, which directly feeds into what we're going to go to next, um, which is regulation.

So I'm super curious, same prompt here. You have in your notebook, you have space. What are your regulatory practices, right? Um, how do you practice self-regulation? And um, yeah, just give it some thought.

Um, and then also put it in the chat. And we are going to go through it in the same way. So we're starting to see some answers coming in in the chat. Yeah, tell me what they are. Um, you see saying breathe, uh, recording myself.

Wait, what was the second one? Uh, it said recording myself. Although that answer disappeared. So whoever put it, deleted it right away. Okay.

But let's see what else goes into the chat for those regulation practices Also. So people know any one of these takeaways could be a summit unto itself. Like, um, so, um, We've got focus on breathing, going for a walk. Think before I speak, take a deep breath, put chew on the other foot, take the dog for a walk. Um, put chew on the other foot, I believe is a metaphor.

It's a, it's a mental framing practice. Like, try to think about what the other person's point of view is so that you get a beat between you and them. Not literally put the other shoe on. I like this one. I record myself several times and I listen back, hear my emotions as I speak.

Hmm, fascinating Abstain from substance and alcohol. Uh, smart spending. Allow my brain time to process before opening my mouth. Ariel, do you teach a class on how to do that? It'd be amazing.

And where can I sign up? Yeah, If so, I, I think there's 99 people here. If so, I have your hardest client for you. She might be presenting right now. Um, all right, let's do this.

So what's my first step to getting, uh, to practicing self-regulation? It's begin to really develop a self-reflection and self-awareness practice. Okay, that's our very first step. So everybody who is saying the, those aspects of it, yes, yes and yes. Okay.

Uh, that's just me being cheeky to

reiterate everything we just said. Okay. The next one, after your breath and embrace challenge. So breath is your friend with regulation. If you have ever had, uh, cared for a child when they're very dysregulated a baby, they turn this and they're just trying.

And then you start to co-reg and you try to quiet them down, elongate their out breath, you're just doing a central nervous system practice there. It's a real service to intentionally practice it ourself. Most of us use between two and 5% of our lung capacity. It's pretty staggering. Um, there's a guy on YouTube who I think has a really beautiful anthology of very well researched resources on breath work.

And his name is Brian McKenzie. Um, so you can kind of get everything there. All the different styles and techniques. It's the closest lever we have to an actual on off switch inside of our nervous system. Um, I can't say enough about it.

I wish I knew about it when I was 20, um, versus, you know, 40, um, and embracing challenge. So you, you have to constantly put yourself in the pathway of provocation to work with your regulatory style. Um, and it takes time and effort, but it, it responds very quickly to techniques like this, breath work, meditation, move, people mentioned movement. All of those things really help. My third, um, and this is a whole summit unto itself.

Um, but repair your broken sleep patterns. Anybody who's had a kid knows that when your child misses a nap, you might as well cancel the next day. I mean, it's just not going to be a good day. And that is completely based on a regulatory, the regulatory relationship that sleep has with our nervous system. Um, you know, I told you in a past life I did forensics and as part of that I understood, um, I, I studied, um, the ways that people use torture.

Uh, they use aspects to torture us, right? And one of the ways that anybody will try to break you down very quickly is they will remove sleep from your equation. Disrupted sleep disregulates us quicker than anything else. And fixing our sleep patterns is the one of the single most important things that you can do if, um, your relationship with yourself and your right and your nervous system matters to you. And also, here's the other thing about sleep.

If you're in your thirties or forties and you're talking to me even up to about 55 and you're here, you might muscle through, but lack of sleep does not age well. There is n no research that tells us that it ages well. So that's, and that's a whole thing on how to repair our, our sleep. So if people are interested, ask specific questions in the thing. Um, okay, we're going to take a moment.

We want you to ponder, um, these two questions you're going to take just a minute. 'cause then that gives us a full 10 minutes to connect. So you're going to ask these two questions. Um, what was your biggest takeaway from today, right? What was the cream that rose to the top and how will that influence your behavior moving forward?

And one last little thing is be specific specificity is your friend. What I'm trying to do is frame your mind on very specific 1% things that you can actually do from what we talked about today. You do have a workbook page for this if you want to type your answers in. These are also notes you can of course keep for yourself later. And if you do, we would love it if you copy and pasted those notes into the chat so we can see what the biggest takeaways were and how that might influence behavior moving forward.

Actually, Sarah, we can go back to the question slide. Yeah. As we're starting to see some of the things

that are coming into the chat. Um, for takeaways, we're seeing breath for anxiety, meditation, and sleep. A couple of very good questions that we're going to go take a note of and we'll cover those in just a second. Thank you for putting those in the chat. Richard says, the profound connection between physiology and psychology, between mind and body.

I bet we're going to get a lot of questions on that one. Yeah, it's like, so when I started working at, you know, I started seeing it myself. 'cause you just couldn't, you can't get results in my world if you don't intimately equate yourself with how the body works. Um, so for sure I was primed to, to work this way even when I was working solo. But at EXOS I work on this team.

I have a team of eight, um, colleagues, and they're all men. And, and, um, one of my, my closest colleague I work with now is a neuroscientist. And we work so closely together because there is no way to have profound growth or change, even small growth or change without connecting those two. There's just, I, I have not, if I could find a way I would 'cause it would be easier and I would be, you know, I would've the secret to everything and instead I have nothing. And that's fine 'cause it seems truthful.

Uh, another Good comment that came in here is can't have a panic attack with proper oxygen levels. That was also a learning tidbit for me. I didn't know that till today. Yeah. So I didn't learn that until, um, when you're in grad school and you're learning to manage work with people that have panic attacks, but you know, unless somebody has a panic attack in front of you, like how do you do that?

Right? So what they do is they teach you how to have a panic attack, how to manufacture a panic attack. And that the, the, the realization came to me that this, the way to manufacture a panic attack is to breathe very heavily in and out of a straw. And I just dawned on me in that moment, I was like, oh, it's lack of oxygen. Oh, that's what's happening.

That's the physiologic, the lung, the brain is sending the lungs and the breath to be so fast paced that you're struggling to get your breath. Just like what they could induce. That's how you would work. You'd have, you could have a, you know, you'd be working with a colleague and they could induce that feeling. Then you can work them through it and it's all with breath.

So, um, that's a huge nod to physiology. Sarah, I think we can move forward to the question slide and this would be a great opportunity in our remaining eight minutes. For those of you that are here, we'll have a, actually you can go right to that QR code if you want, Sarah, just 'cause we'll keep that screen up. For those of you that are here, we would love to see some of your feedback. There's an opportunity to get a copy of today's slides as well as some opportunities to engage with The Pacific Institute.

If you scan that QR code, you're also going to get an email from The Pacific Institute that has that same information. So if you're the type that doesn't like to take your phone out and operate off of that, you can just click on the email and there will be the opportunity to get the slides and engage with us moving forward. But for the balance of our time together for the seven minutes we have remaining, we've got a handful of good questions that came in through the chat and we would encourage anybody to either come off of mute or put those in the chat now so that Sarah has an opportunity to elaborate on any of the topics we've talked about or she has offered to take questions that are off topic as well. Oh yeah, you get, you can ask questions about anything. I mean, if I don't have an answer I'll say it, but Kevin, while people assemble and we only have these seven minutes, what's a good one that's come up?

So one of the very good questions that I see on there is it says, can you talk a little bit more about Sand's critique and how to successfully grow when critic is strong? Yeah, totally. Um, yes. Okay, so you don't have to do anything about the critique. The critique is a, it's a natural part of what humans have.

We have this capacity, it's called theory of mind. But we can time travel, we can look in the past, we can project to the future and that's a blessing. But every blessing comes at a cost. And the cost is that through upbringing, through genetics, through trauma, um, through our attachment patterns and just 'cause life sort of kicks the s**t out of us. There's my second one.

Um, we go a little haywire at times. Um, here's the thing, don't focus on changing it, just observe it. I see you, I see you, I see you also, again, you are never going to think your way out of a thinking mode ever.

Get in your body, get outside, breathe, go to yoga, by the way, get in the cold. Go take a freezing cold shower. Watch what, how quickly one pain replaces another. That shift What you, what you just said. Um, I just want you to repeat it.

You'll never think your way out of a thinking problem. Never is such a That I try. And if I had that secret by the way, I would be all over everywhere telling that secret. Um, because I'm a thinker. So I'd like to think my way out of everything, but you won't.

So get in your body the critique. And so how do you do that? If you're practicing a pra uh, meditation thing, do breath work, do visualization, use a guided, um, a YouTube video. Uh, if you're going to get in your body right, then exercise, do something hard, um, replace it. Get out of your head.

Um, and also the key, key key is that you don't have to critique that you critique, you can just leave it that you critique. Oh, I noticed that I critique. I could see that I'm doing that. Can see that I'm doing that. There's a very distinct way that learning happens.

It's a whole science. But suffice it to say that here's like, here's the cheat sheet. Okay, before you can have change. Oh, I, I critique less notice I didn't say I don't critique. Oh, I critique less.

That's change. You have to go like this first. Most of us we realize we're critiquing after the fact. Oh, I was critiquing. Okay, then we can start to see, oh, I'm about to critique.

Or you can see it coming, but you still can't resist doing it. Hear the role of restraint. So you see it coming, the bus is coming and you're like, that f*****g thing is going to hit me. And sure enough, it hits you and you're critiquing. Okay, that's a whole phase.

But you saw it coming, which is growth over, didn't see it coming till after you passed it. Then you see it coming and now you're shoulder to shoulder with it. It's like you are in a fight. Okay? That happens for a while and then you get a shoulder length ahead of it.

There are technical terms for each one of those steps of learning, but I'm not going to bore you with them. That's how it feels inside you. The lived experience is, oh, it's back there. Oh I see it coming and it's still happening. Oh, I see it coming and I can kind of fight it and then I see it coming and I can stay a shoulder length ahead of it and notice I didn't say beat it, it is on your neck.

You feel its breath on your neck every second. It, you just have to be a shoulder length ahead of our b******t. You don't have to master it. Nor do I think we can necessarily There. We got another good slew of questions.

I'm going to float one to the top here. It says, can you comment about uncoupling the mind in stillness and reflection? Hmm. I would want to have a whole summit on what uncoupling the mind means. 'cause I'm not sure I buy into that assumption.

That question came in from Roy. Feel free to elaborate if you're still here. Another one there is Richard would love an explanation of what dollars to donuts means for people that are not from the Boston area. It means whatever I was saying, I'm pretty sure I'm right. And that was just a, a quick moment of communication clarity for all of us.

That's right. Uh, a question that came in from Christina, how can you regulate your sleep if it's consistently disrupted? Okay, super good question. So first of all, if people are interested in a summit on sleep, we should do that. Um, it's a fascinating topic and if you don't, sleep is so fascinating.

Um, it's pretty remarkable that we just go unconscious for a bunch of hours. We're just like there sleeping completely. You know, that's pretty remarkable. Okay? And um, so it's super complicated psychology.

Again, it isn't. Psychology is one piece of chronic sleep disruptions, but you are attached to a body that has hormones and those hormones for men and women go through a lifetime arc and they have a sleep architecture in there. Kids sleep one way, blah, blah, blah, women, 50 plus sleep a different way. So inside of there, I'd want to know all of that, okay? Plus it has a relationship with your adrenals, cortisol, all the kind of stress hormones and it has a big psychological component, but you can chip away at your sleep in small increments.

Here's the thing I would say about sleep. One is it's the only place that I think a wearable is helpful. If you can get access to a wearable for 30 days or a whoop your iPhone watch and you get your data, understand your unique sleep architecture, okay? And then the thing to know about it, there's a lot we can do. What's the number one culprit?

These things get this out of your room and face start there. If you cannot break that habit, your sleep will likely suffer. Everything costs something I make bad. I buy, I, you know, I spend my energetic money on things that aren't good for me all the time. So I have a big glass house and tiny stones.

But if you can't get the phone under control, you're going to, you're going to be swarming against the stream. The other thing, so a wearable is one 30 days of info. Super helpful. Two, you will often need partnership. You'll have to solve this with likely a physician to understand the complexity of the biology that you're bringing into the bedroom.

Um, and potentially a coach. And you're going to take it in small increments. If you have really disturbed sleep patterns, give yourself a year to correct it very systematically. And I'm reachable. You make contact me.

I have people that I think do great work at the physiological level. Everybody I work with sees somebody who helps 'em take apart their sleep. So if you're interested in that relationship, deeper contact me and I'll get you in touch with people who will help you understand the component that is nons psychological. In the interest of time for anybody who had a hard stop, thank you tremendously for being here. It is not rude if you leave.

Now we understand you have the rest of your Friday to go about. Sarah and I are going to stick around because it looks like there are some additional questions and we will keep the recording going. So if you had a question that wasn't answered, watch the recording later, go to the very end and see the answer. But for everybody who is here and was able to stay until the end, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

And thank you Dr. Sarkis for being here and giving us such a wonderful presentation for the last hour. Well, I'm always, I I have to. I'm the one that should be thankful and I am, I'm always really appreciative that anybody listens to my obsessions. Listen is, is, is an understatement.

I think people were engrossed, there's probably a lot of like nose prints on laptops right now with how much everybody was leaning into what you were saying. I'm glad. Are there any other questions we want to tackle? So it's on recording if people are going to watch it. There was one last one here that says, are there, uh, any tools or tests to measure our self-awareness level?

Oh, that's a, that's a great, um, question. There are, I'm not totally versed in that, but you're right, there is, but here's the truth. Those assessments are great by the way. So are personality assessments, I love them. They're kind of like a horoscope and they're, they're, they serve all these, they're a gateway to self-awareness.

But you will, you'll observe everything you need to know, um, by just choosing sort of more days than not. So four days or more, do a self-awareness practice. Do the same one do different ones. I'm telling you, by the end of 30 days of doing that, you'll be like, I do not need an as tool. I do not need an assessment to tell me about my style and my, my, uh, my aperture of self-awareness.

So yes. And One more good question that I saw that I looked down here came in from Shauna. It says, how can you slightly dull the sharpness of being too self-aware? Oh yeah. Um, it's such a great question.

Um, I would want to understand the lens through which you're defining two self-aware. 'cause sometimes that's synonymous with self-critical. And so you get back to square one where it's like, actually that's not self-awareness. Um, but if it truly is separate from self-criticism, self-loathing, et cetera, um, then what I would say is do it less, right? Like if you are, if you're engaging in tons of activities, you know, you're in coaching, you are in therapy, you journal, you meditate, you do yoga, you go to a breath work, it's like, well, I don't know, maybe choose three things.

But typically two self-aware statistically speaking is code for I critique myself all day long. I'm aware every single minute because I am in a constant state of self-critique. Does anybody else who is still here have any questions that they wanted to lob over while we are still here and recording in that case? Sarah, would you like the final word today? Just thank you.

Um, I love coming and getting to connect. Um, oh, and I will say this, this talk is typically paired with my very favorite practice when I do it in person, which is, um, cold immersion. So we do this talk, then we do buckets either feet or hands, or if I'm at a facility, when I go to some of these build these big companies, they have facilities with cold plunges. We do full cold plunge. Um, and so, uh, as people think through that idea of the relationship with discomfort, know that they're, I'm trying to convince Kevin and The Pacific Institute team to do a live version where we do all these activities.

So if people could start to harass Kevin, um, if they're interested in the full version of this, that's what I'll use my last few seconds to say. That was a quality use of the last few seconds. And otherwise, thank you everybody. I really, um, feel so fortunate that I get to do what I do for a living and I'm, um, very grateful that people, uh, I'm alive during a time where people are really interested in this kind of stuff. It really matters.

Now, that was a quality last word, so I'm going to turn off the recording at that stage. Thank everybody for being here. And just a reminder, we'll be back on the first of next month, which is also the first Friday of next month. November 1st will be our next executive briefing, and you'll have, uh, access to the registration for that here within the next 15, 20 minutes in your inbox. But thank you everyone for being here.