Hey, guys, and welcome back to another episode of your Brains Coach podcast. My name is Angela Shurina, I'm your host, I'm your Brains Coach and your Executive Coach. Here my job is to bring to you best, most recent, interesting, inspiring, cutting-edge, useful and applicable to your life, brain-body tools so you could get out there, take better control of your thoughts, of your emotions and, most importantly, actions to create life experience that you absolutely love living. And today, guys, I've been waiting to release this episode for so long because the guest on our today's podcast, dr Jeff Karp, his work, is what I'm so passionate about living our life to the fullest, and not just aspiring to do so, but learning and applying tools from biology, from neuroscience, from psychology all these tools to again live our life, our days, to the fullest.
Speaker 1So Dr Jeff Carr is a distinguished biomedical engineer and professor at Harvard Medical School in MIT. His pioneering work in drug delivery, stem cell therapeutics and medical devices has led to the creation of 13 companies with multiple products in development on the market. Inspired by nature's ingenuity, Dr Kerbs' lab has developed groundbreaking technologies, including a tissue glue capable of sealing holes in beating heart, and a lot other inventions. His contributions have gathered significant recognition, with over 175 peer-reviewed papers accumulating more than 35,000 citations. Jeff holds over 100 patents and is a fellow of esteemed organizations including the National Academy of Inventors, the Royal Society of Canada and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Beyond his research, Dr Karp is dedicated to mentoring the next generation of bioengineers, with over 30 trainees from his laboratory securing faculty positions.
Speaker 1His personal journey overcoming learning differences you would never think that someone like Jeff had ever worried about any learning differences, but here we go. So his learning differences has inspired his development of life ignition tools, about which we're going to be talking on this podcast, a set of strategies aimed at fostering personal and professional growth, which are detailed in his book Lit Life Ignition Tools Use nature's playbook to energize your brain, spark ideas and ignite action. Guys, without further ado, please tune in and enjoy our conversation with Dr Jeff Karp and, most importantly, take a note and apply the tools we are talking about to your life to light up your brain, light up your life days and live it up to the fullest as often as possible, creating more fulfillment and the life you absolutely love living. So please enjoy.
Speaker 2So great to connect and thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 1It's my pleasure and I'm so excited to have you on. We've been with friends and also listeners of the podcast talking about your book a lot, so very excited to have you. Where are you connecting from?
Speaker 2I'm connecting from Boston. Well near Boston it's a place called Brookline. I do a lot of cycling and I pretty much can get anywhere in the city within 30, 40 minutes.
Speaker 1That's amazing Igniting your brain while moving.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1You got it. Can't wait to discuss more of the tools and more of your work. Jeff, thank you so much again for being a guest on the show and for writing your book, which we're going to talk about in detail. Elite Life Ignition Tools Use Nature's Playbook to Energize your Brain, spark Ideas and Ignite Action. You energize your brain, spark ideas and ignite action. What I found on the internet you are a biomedical engineer and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, probably a lot of other things. What I also found very interesting you're called bio-inspirationalist. My question, my first question, is how do you usually introduce yourself when talking about your work and what you do in the world?
Speaker 2Wow, great question. Usually I introduce myself based on whatever I'm thinking about in that moment, and sometimes it changes. I'm curious about so many different things in the world and my mind is all over the place just in terms of ADHD. But sometimes actually often it takes me into this place of incredible places. New things are constantly coming into my life.
Speaker 2But yeah, I'm a professor at the Women's Hospital.
Speaker 2That's my home institution, and my faculty appointment goes through Harvard Medical School, where I'm a professor, and then I also have appointments at MIT, at the Broad Institute and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and so I run a research lab that focuses on the process of medical problem solving, and a lot of work that we do is bio-inspired.
Speaker 2We turn to nature for inspiration and we've looked at all kinds of creatures like geckos and snails and sandcastle worms and spider webs and jellyfish tentacles, and, through studying examples in nature, gain ideas that we would never have had had we not started thinking about nature. And then, with those ideas, we apply them to the problems that we're focused on and like tissue adhesives or developing diagnostic devices for cancer, and then we try to overcome some significant challenges that we face to create technologies that can actually make it to patients in a short period of time. So that's my work. And then I'm on this path of evolution, this path of intention, and so I spend a lot of time just thinking about how I can be more intentional and trying to tune into the cues that I get constantly from my body and my mind and interaction from other people and experiences. And then I try to actively practice rituals and tools and practices so that I can try to rewire my brain, just to be more intentional in my day-to-day thinking and actions.
Speaker 1Intention, I think, was one of the key words throughout the whole book. Speaking of the book, what made you write the book? It seems to not directly be related to the work that you do in the world. What made me write it?
Speaker 2I was contacted by an agent in New York like maybe seven and a half eight years ago, and this agent, heather Jackson, had read some articles on my work in bio-inspiration and was interested. And so she reached out and said hey, how would you like to write a book about this? And I was really excited about the opportunity and I held off for a few days just to reflect on it and it occurred to me that while I was interested in writing a book about bio-inspiration, I was more interested in writing about some of the struggles that I had earlier in life with undiagnosed ADHD and learning differences and how my teacher wanted to hold me back in the second grade. And then I had this transformational experience in between the second and third grade which led to me having this awareness that I started to develop tools to survive in school and in life and then I started to use those tools to apply to my passions and I said I want to write about that and Heather said, okay, that sounds great.
Speaker 2So that's how the book got started and my wife reminded me around that time that so many things that you forget that you do in your life that can be brought back into your mind with various experiences, and my wife reminded me that I used to carry around this little, these little notepads, and I would just take ideas. It wasn't really like journaling in the traditional sense or just write for hours or whatever, but I would just write thoughts like throughout my day, like throughout my day, and so it was like taking the collection of all of those thoughts and observations and processes that I've been engaging and iterating and tinkering with, that I wanted to share.
Speaker 1And with the intention? What was the main intention behind writing the book? Do you want to help people to use their brain better to overcome, maybe, some of the same struggles? What's the like, deepest desire behind writing the book, behind writing?
Speaker 2I've always gravitated towards. One part has been to find processes that work for me, and then the second part has, and so that's a lot of experimentation through that and a lot of challenges in that too, because I find a lot of experimentation through that and a lot of challenges in that too, because I find a lot of things that don't work well for me, but then when I find something that works well for me, I immediately want to share it with other people. Just, I have this desire to to share and and I think that we all have so much to learn from each other because we all have such unique wiring and experiences, and I think, yeah, I've just driven to share what I've learned with the hope that it could help somebody see something from a different angle, change a mindset, people to have other processes or see other possibilities that they might want to experiment with in their own lives.
Speaker 1Yeah, I guess, as Humanity, we all want to experiment with in their own lives. Yeah, and I guess, as humanity, we all want to share our experiences and tools so we could help each other. Somewhere in the book you wrote this be present for somewhere along the line. So be present for a deepest desire for all of us to thrive. I feel like, in some form or fashion, a lot of us, like what we work on, is driven by that desire. How can we help each other to thrive?
Speaker 2Yeah, and I think that that I, yeah, no, I agree, agree, that's really true.
Speaker 2I think we're also there's this challenge too, because it's so easy to become desensitized by things that we see it's so easy.
Speaker 2There's certain aspects of psychology that I think are like survival-based coping mechanisms that actually take us away from thriving, and so I think thriving really requires intentionality and purpose and requires us to step through fear and hesitation, to help each other, see things from different angles and have those important conversations and to have the checks and balances in our lives.
Speaker 2If you look at companies, for example, just as a framework that the CEO of a company will report to a board of directors, and so, even no matter how incredible the CEO is, there's always these checks and balances in our organizations and in governments and this transparency that exists, and I think that we also need to have that personally in our lives. We need to have ways of knowing when we're getting off track and ways of knowing when we're starting to think or act without intention, because it's so hard to, I think, in today's society, because things are so fast, we're so busy, there's so much technology, there's so much stimuli coming at us, it's hard to be in touch with your intuition and with your values, and I think that is really a key part of thriving.
Speaker 1Yeah, just remembering or feeling what's your intention, what might be your purpose, and then bringing all of the resources that are available to you to serve that and your book. What really made it stand out for me is that it feels like it's this book is written exactly for that purpose. You have that sort of intention, a purpose in life, and now how do you go about fulfilling it? And first step is figuring out how to use this very powerful computer between your ears to help you to fulfill that mission or create that vision. So, if you don't mind, let's jump into some practical tools that will help our listeners to take better control or use more capabilities of the brain so they could also live with more intention and create more impact or bigger vision for them and the world. Absolutely so. You started the book with the chapter of activation energy. Could you expand more of that, why it's so important and why you started the book with it, and how people can control that or use this knowledge to do more of what they want to do in the world?
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely so. Activation energy is something that I learned about in a chemistry class a long time ago and essentially what it is. For example, let's say you have a glass beaker jar and you put a molecule in there and it's moving around in the water and then you add another molecule, so you have molecule A and B and they're both moving around, but nothing's really happening other than just moving around. And then you add some heat and now they start moving faster, right. And then you add more heat and then they start moving even faster and then you add more heat and then finally they collide and a reaction occurs and they bond together, right. And so the activation energy is the amount of heat or energy that you had to add the system for the reaction to occur.
Speaker 2And so when I heard about that, when I learned that, I immediately was like wait a moment, there's an activation energy for everything in life. Like just there is for every chemical reaction that occurs. Some reactions require more energy, more heat, some reactions require less heat. And I started to think wait a moment, there's things in my life really simply, if I want to go eat a chocolate bar, then that's a low activation energy thing for me, or like junk food, things that are sugary and taste delicious, that's, it doesn't take much energy to go and get it. But if you want to eat, let's say, like lots of fruits and vegetables, and you want to make sure that you have a balanced meal, every that requires more energy. Right, like you have to be, you know you have to. When you're at the grocery store, you have to be shopping with more intention. And versus the junk food, it just, you see it, it's more visible, it's calling your name. And then the same thing applies for, let's say, if I want to exercise right, and I haven't exercised in a long time.
Speaker 2So what happened is, last summer a friend of mine, Michael Gale, called me when he was on his bike and said that being on his bike is his happy place. And I immediately resonated with that and I thought I love biking. And then immediately I jumped to the thought of why am I not going out on my bike? We have more than one bike in the garage. And so I came back and I started thinking like, okay, I wanted to bike that day, but I knew it wasn't going to happen, because I think what happens is often we set our goals too high and we don't achieve them. And then we start practicing not achieving our goals, which then gets us into the cycles of self-shame and kind of negativity.
Speaker 2And so what I did is I thought about it as activation energy. So what I thought is okay, I'm going to do one thing a day and hopefully each step will lower the activation energy. So one day I put air in the tires, but I only let myself do that. And then the next day I cleaned up the bike, just wiped it down, and then the next day I hung my helmet on the, got it all ready. Anything I needed was there water bottle and then the next day I put the bike somewhere where I would basically run into it or see it, like every single day. So every step reduced the activation energy. So now all I needed to do was find 10, 15 minutes and I was ready to go. And last summer I'd biked a thousand miles, and this summer this year I'm on track to biking 2000. Yeah, it's been like amazing.
Speaker 2And so that's to me like the how you can look at things as activation energy is really. We hear like breaking things down is helpful, but I find thinking about the energy required is really helpful. It kind of takes the breaking things down is helpful, but I find thinking about the energy required is really helpful. It kind of takes the breaking things down in steps to the next level, because it's connecting more with the truth of what needs to happen, because you actually do need to exert your energy in order to take the steps, and so I feel like framing the energy required to do things, and some things are pretty high. So I feel like framing the energy required to do things, and some things are pretty high.
Speaker 2If you want to change, if you want to deepen a connection in a relationship or if you want to change a behavior that you have, maybe you have a lot. I found myself, for example, in a lot of meetings. I would do these back-to-back meetings and I would just be bringing the energy from the last meeting into the next meeting and I started to recognize that and it wasn't very productive and there were things like that that I wanted to start changing and I started thinking okay, there's an activation energy. What's a step I can take to reduce that and get on towards making the changes I want to make?
Speaker 1Yeah, I found also the image that you had in book very useful where you pushed the ball, like the amount of energy there is, yeah, this drawing of a person trying to push the ball over, I think, this small hill, and I guess the bigger the hill, the more energy you need to push that ball and the ball is the action.
Speaker 2Exactly, yeah, yeah. The energy required to get the ball rolling down the hill is another way to frame it in your mind rolling down the hill is another way to frame it in your mind.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah and yes, and I guess those routines and that you create, they lower the energy more and more because you already don't need to, for example, prepare the bike or the water, et cetera, your gears, you already done the work and so the energy to do the action is smaller and smaller, to the point that you almost flow into action, exactly. And so what's your recommendation to go advice? When people try to do certain things and then people say I procrastinate on things, so what can they do to do that less and get into action on different projects faster? What?
Speaker 2are some of the steps. Yeah, I think one thought to me is procrastination can be both a good and a bad thing, just dependent on the situation and what's going on at the time. I find sometimes that procrastination can actually get me into the flow state and if I leave something to the last minute then I can get into this hyper-focused state. The challenge sometimes and often that will work for me, but sometimes it doesn't, because then there's too much anxiety and it can bring on negativity as well If you wait too long and you haven't taken the steps along the way. And I think there's a lot of. I think there's so many possibilities to just address the question that you're asking, where so many things that we want to do in our day, and maybe it's something at work where we want to kind of move beyond what we're. Or maybe we've been given a task and we're not that interested in it and so we'd have this procrastination. Or maybe at home there's certain things we want to do around the house but we just can't bring it. We think about it, but then we get into this negativity because we're not doing it, we're not taking the steps. And I think there's so many possibilities and the challenge is that often, when we are not doing the things that we really want to do, it's because we're living a narrow range of possibilities or a single possibility, like we see that there's no. It's almost like we start shaming ourselves as, okay, we're not doing this, I want to do this, I'm home, I could do it, but I don't feel like doing it and that's what we lead. But there's so many possibilities in there because, for example, we could start having conversations with people in our community or our friends, our family, and basically start saying, okay, what do you do when you get into this situation? And right, and sometimes, for example, there's Mel Robbins. I don't know if you've heard of Mel Robbins, but she's yeah, so she has this five, five, four, three, two, one. So it's like what you do. And so, again, that's one possibility, right.
Speaker 2So it's like what you could do is, if there's something you really want to get done, you could put yourself in front of it and then count down and when you hit one, you just go for it. You don't let yourself talk, you don't talk yourself out of it. So to me, that's one possibility that you can engage and you could try right now. It may or may not work for you, but it you know you go into it because you you know it works for her and it works for a lot of people you know who've tried it. Right, but it may not work for you, and so you give it a try, and then let's say it doesn't work for you.
Speaker 2But then you start thinking, okay, what's another possibility? And maybe you could think of it just in terms of activation energy. Like maybe there's just like a if I need to go and mow the lawn, but the lawn is like a massive lawn and it takes me like hours to do, maybe it's okay. What if I just go and do part of it, right? What if I just go out and just do a small little section and I don't let myself think about the rest of it? And then what happens is the next day you get home and you see the unevenness of the grass, right, and so now it's in your face and you're like, oh, that doesn't look good, I don't like that. Now you have even more motivation to go out and do the next part. So I feel there's all these different ways to start to address it and there's ways to build up the energy to do it as well.
Speaker 2You may also want to just make another small change.
Speaker 2If maybe what you do sometimes like for me, what I'll do is I'll make a small change in another area of my life, because sometimes people need to experience that something is changeable in order to change something that's bigger.
Speaker 2These like silly examples, but they actually work is like you can change the hand that you brush your teeth with, and the thing is it feels weird when you do that and it takes longer, and it's oh my God. And you almost feel like you're like oh yeah, I'll try it. And then next thing, you know, you look and your toothbrush is in the other hand, right. You, your mind, was like no, there's too much resistance here. But if you keep going, you start to notice after three or four or five days that it starts to get easier. You're starting to become more efficient. It takes less time and once you do that, you're like wait a moment, I can change that. You start to get in touch with the fact that you can change something, and if you can change something small, you can change something a little bigger and a little bigger and a little bigger. It's like that type of thing.
Speaker 1Yeah, I feel this activation energy it has these different components of physical energy, like actual energy you have, because somebody might just be fatigued and tired and they just literally don't have energy. But then there is also this psychological part, whether that's making it easier through habitual repetition or creating change and getting confidence. And here I also want to touch upon on something you talk about. In the book a lot is the importance of knowing your why, and I feel like understanding that aspect of it also has a lot to do with this activation energy. There is a saying by, I think, viktor Frankl, or maybe other people as well, like when, if you have, if a person has big enough why, they'll figure out the how, yeah. And so I feel like if something is really important and you tap into that, like your why with that action, that's where you can find that needed activation energy to start almost anything.
Speaker 2Absolutely yeah. So one of the tools actually is called Inlet, is called Get Bothered, and it's all about tapping into motivation, so identifying the cues that move you to act, or it's like you change something and then realize that you care. One example would be, let's say, my lab. We work in trying to develop therapies that can help patients and my lab was located offsite actually in Cambridge, near MIT, for several years and we had this opportunity to move to the Longwood medical area in Boston and actually be right in the hospital, and so we made that move and to me that actually it reduced the activation energy to be persistent in our work. Because now every day I see patients, I see people who are like these are the people that were trying to develop therapies to help right, like when I yesterday I was sitting in the Longwood area having my lunch and there's patients walking by me, there's parents with their children who are they're going to the children's hospital and that's very motivating right. That actually reduces the activation energy to take the steps.
Speaker 2And there's a social justice activator, brian Stevenson, who says be proximate, and what he means by that, or stay proximate, which is if you're, let's say, you're, committing to a particular cause, to help certain people. You want to be like, get yourself in that community and interact with those people as often as you possibly can, so you'll constantly be thinking about the problem or the challenges that you're trying to solve. It's so easy for us to remove ourselves from the problem. I think it's human nature, like when I was younger. I remember in school this really just struck me. It was I learned about this saying not in my backyard, so it was like how, from like an environmental perspective, we have our landfills, our dumps outside the city. So it's out of sight, out of mind. We're not thinking about it. But imagine if you had to drive by your landfill every day. You might start thinking about changing your behaviors of what you're buying, because you see the pile getting bigger. You smell it right.
Speaker 2So I think it's really important to consider that. It seems like human. As we've collectively formed these communities and the broader society, we've somehow been pushing the problems out of sight, out of mind, and I think that, to me, is we can do this with intention. We can find ways to like even, for example, the content that we consume online, like we can update our social media feeds so that we're looking at things that are going to motivate us to act and do the things we really do. And I've been doing that, like I've been changing most of my social media to nature videos and people who are doing conservation and people who are helping patients and things like that. So it can, it's. We need those reminders, those nudges that.
Speaker 1So we need those reminders, those nudges yeah and I love this idea of reminders and nudges so you don't just try to remember the reason for action or your why what inspires you, but actually your environment nudges you into that remembrance and you can create your social media and social circle and everything that you see to remember why this is important and ultimately, that will help you to act more often on the inspirations and values that you have.
Speaker 2Yeah, actually, another thing too, I think is part of it, I think is also breaking the cycle of self shame, because that becomes a heavy load on our backs. That makes it even more difficult to act, because I feel like there's just and I personally talking from personal experience, but also from others that I've spoken with. Another example is like just recently we have this election coming up in the US and I had my ballot and I was like, okay, I gotta go mail it. And then I'm like, okay, why didn't I mail it? I'm going to take the dogs out. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go walk the dogs to go mail it. And then I get outside and I don't have it.
Speaker 2And so I think the immediate thought in my mind is shaming. Oh, what so stupid? Why didn't you just pick? Why did you saw it? And then you left the house. Why didn't you pick it up and grab it?
Speaker 2And it was like maybe it's because, jeff, your mind just hyper, focuses on what you're doing at that moment and you can't actually you don't have this ability to diversify have your attention be applied to multiple things simultaneously.
Speaker 2So I see the envelope, I'm thinking about it, but then I have to put the leashes and the harnesses on the dogs.
Speaker 2And I'm doing that like in a very intentional way, like I'm being careful, I don't want to hurt the dogs as I'm doing it, I'm doing it gently, I'm speaking with them and so. And then I get outside and I don't have it, and so I think to myself, okay, maybe there's something else I can do. Maybe, instead of so thinking, okay, maybe there's something else I can do, maybe, instead of so thinking okay, that's part of me, that's my wiring instead of getting upset at myself for having that wiring and getting into this cycle, that just is not helpful what I can do is I can say, okay, the next time I see it, maybe I can move it to a different location, or I can put it in my jacket pocket, or there's all sorts of possibilities. And so, to me, part of it is trying to break that cycle of self-shame or negativity that we have, these expectations of ourselves that we fall short of achieving, and that, I think, reduces our chance of doing things. So we need to find ways to break that.
Speaker 1Yeah, and many things you reminded me of. Yeah, and many things you reminded me of I think I want to jump into. What you mentioned here is asking yourself different questions to engage your curiosity and your thinking in a different way that actually serves the situation so you can take better action either now or in the future. Right, and so in the book you also dedicated, uh, one chapter to the questions leave for the questions swap, caution for curiosity and the deeper dig of and and that idea in this chapter that, uh, the questions that you ask your brain, that you prime your brain with, really can uh change how you then approach the world. Could you talk more about that?
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely, questions have been such a big part of my life and, in particular, I think that one of the challenges is and we've all been shamed for asking a stupid or a dumb question at some part in our life by a teacher, a parent, a friend and I think that actually creates a lot of problems for us because, number one, we hesitate or we have fear to ask questions, we talk ourselves out of asking questions. How many times have you sat in an audience and you had something come in your mind and you're, oh, should I ask it? Should I not? Is this important? Will this help other people? Will people think this is a stupid question that you're, oh, should I ask it? Should I not? Is this important? Will this help other people? Will people think this is a stupid question? That kind of a thing.
Speaker 2And then I think the other challenge that it's presented to us is that questioning is a skill and we need to ask questions, to ask better questions and because part of it is. I think what I learned when I was younger is anytime I asked a question, I could hyper focus on the answer for a few moments afterwards and whatever was said in that window would imprint in my mind, I could connect it to other things that I knew and I could recall it later. So there was like this energy of questioning right, like when you ask a question. It somehow has this ability to focus our attention like a laser for a short period of time, and.
Speaker 2But I've also had these experiences in my life where I got, for example, I got into graduate school and I found people around me were asking these questions that were just blowing my mind. I couldn't, like they were unbelievable questions, like right to the heart of the issue, and I started to gravitate towards self-shaming why are these questions not coming to me? And instead, so, to break that cycle, what I did is I did pattern recognition. So this is something that I think everybody can do, right, if you start to think about, oh, maybe, like you can improve, you can focus on observing patterns around you, and when you start to do that, it deepens the understanding of behaviors and thinking and actions and how things work. And so what I did is I said, okay, I want to ask those questions. So I was motivated, right, like I want those questions to be my questions, and I was like, how do I do it? And so I started to write the questions down. Actually, so I would go to seminars and I would be focused. Everyone would be focused on what the speaker was saying. I was focused on something different. I was focused on the questions people were asking at the end of the seminar and I wrote them down and after a couple months, two or three months, I started going through the list of questions and I was just looking and the next day just just flipping through and just letting my mind swirl around a little bit, and then finally it was like boom, I figured it out.
Speaker 2It was like a light bulb moment because all of a sudden I realized that there was a rationale behind each question that was being asked. And in fact not only that, there were like four or five different categories. So some people asked about was the experiment working? So there was a whole bunch of questions, because in science some of the experiments are really complicated and you can generate faulty data if your experiment's not working properly. So there were questions like that, questions about did the speaker overstate their conclusions? What they concluded at the end of their seminar, was that actually supported by the data? And then there were questions about were the results actually important? If they were developing a diagnostic for blood and they did all of their experiments in saltwater saline, their results might look amazing in this simplified system, but if they put it in blood it might not work. So they haven't done that yet. So they haven't done the most important experiment and there were some other questions.
Speaker 2So once I started to realize the rationale behind the questions, then I all of a sudden, like I had my detective hat on, I was like taking notes, I was listening, with the intention of these different categories. You know, it was like experiment working and I'm focused on that. Are they overstating their conclusions? And I'm thinking about that. Are the results actually important?
Speaker 2Thinking about that, and then so the questions other people were asking are now coming to me. And then not only that, I'm like really curious about it, like I'm. Actually, by focusing on questions and improving my ability to ask questions, I'm leading more with curiosity. And then I'm also starting to come up with ideas for the next experiment they could perform or applications that they could apply their work to. So it's not only allowing me to putting me on this path of leading with curiosity or tapping into curiosity, it's helping me tap into creativity too. And so questioning I've realized in my life, questioning is a skill and no matter where we're at, we can get better and better at it, and one of the ways I think that's just really exciting and fun and pretty easy to engage is just listen to the questions that people around you ask, and maybe even write them down and just take a look at them and start to think about why are they asking these questions? And when you engage in that process, those questions start to become your questions your questions.
Speaker 1Yes, that is yes. Questions. Such a fascinating tool, because for me it's like it's this hack into, yeah, to open the gate to curiosity and learning and neuroplasticity, right once you learn how to ask the right questions. Tony robbins said the quality of your life is the quality of your questions, and and so I feel like it's once we master this art and science of prompting, with the right questions, our brain, we can start rewiring it so much easier, and not only our brain, but also brains of people around us. Yeah.
Speaker 2And actually, if you're okay, there's a little section from the book about questioning that I'd love to read, just like a short paragraph that I think really illuminates this point. So here's how it goes. Questions are like excavation equipment versatile tools for action. Questions can cut like a backhoe through old assumptions, or like an archaeologist's trowel and brush that uncover buried artifacts or gems, or like the sculptor's chisel that releases a masterpiece from a slab of marble. Or think of a Swiss army knife, the everything tool. A sharp question can pry the lid open on a conversation, cut to the core of a matter, tighten the screws of a loose concept. You can use a question to accelerate a conversation or slow it down to allow time for reflection, and then basically I say yeah, I like to think of lit questions in the larger sense as fire starters, lowering activation, energy and generating the spark for dialogue, exploration, critical and creative thinking and curiosity.
Speaker 2I like that there's so many different metaphors in there, but like the Swiss army knife is a way to think about it and the questions really are our best technology and I think when you start and to me that's also one of the ways of being intentional is that if you wake up each day and you say I'm gonna try to ask, I'm gonna listen for questions that other people ask around me throughout my day and I'm going to try and tune into one that I just a question that I just really I'm interested in, or one that excites me, or one that I would like to ask, and by doing this you can also deepen connections with other people at social events or some people like the people who connect the most with other people are often the ones who ask questions that are deeply connected to their curiosity.
Speaker 2Ask questions that are deeply connected to their curiosity and so starting to think about oh, how does that person, how do they connect so easily with other people? It's often the questions, and by just observing the questions they're asking and thinking about it, those questions will start to become your questions and then you'll be able to connect more deeply with other people.
Speaker 1Yeah, and you can then design yourself your interactions, your skill acquisition. And that also brings me to the next point that I wanted to discuss. One of the tools is the chapter in the book Pinch your Brain Attention First. Pinch your brain. Attention is your superpower. That's what it's about, and I feel like questions are fundamental tools to be able to bring your attention where you want it to go. And in our today's world, if you don't know how to operate your attention, how to master that, it's like you're probably never going to go anywhere where you want to go. So if your questions are like also this powerful toolkit, can you talk more about pinching your attention toolkit and how people because I believe it's also one of the, again, foundational skillset these days how people can become more masterful of commanding their attention versus it being pulled all over the?
Speaker 2place, absolutely so I think you're exactly right Like one of the ways to think about this. I think it's important for us to consider what we're up against as well, and there's a trillion dollars spent every year on marketing and advertising to hijack our attention algorithms to pull us into things, and that's an incredible force, and a lot of it is not. When we engage, we're not operating through our own intention. We're not necessarily we don't wake up every day.
Speaker 2For example, and even in the mail, right there was this envelope that arrived like last week and it was from the casino in Boston. And I went, I was about to open it and I was like, wait a moment, did I wake up today with an intention to read about the casino in Boston? And it's no. And it was like, okay, if I open this, I'm probably going to see some things that are going to capture my attention and I'm probably going to look at it, I'm going to read it, I'm going to engage it, and so I basically just picked it up. I had ripped part of it open, but I picked it up and I put it in the recycling bin and that was it, and then it was out of my mind, and then I was able to move on, so it was like I didn't need to engage that, but it was drawing my attention in.
Speaker 2And I think that's the challenge that we're up against is that when we're online, we have that type of gravity, that force acting on us constantly, and so I think we need attention is our greatest resource, and online it's a battle for our attention and just massive amounts of funding and people who are working super hard to figure out our psychology so that they can pull our attention away from what we really want to focus it on. So we need a tool, I'd say more now than ever before, to train our brains to be able to focus our attention at will. So to use our intention to focus our attention, just think deliberately and to adjust our thinking throughout our day in meaningful ways. And this tool came to me actually in between the second and the third grade grade, where I was struggling with undiagnosed learning differences and ADHD and I'd get off the bus and I'd be because we had moved out to the country and I'd be ruminating in this place of negativity because nothing was really working at school. But one day I was walking along this driveway which is pretty long, was like a thousand feet driveway and I encountered something I'd never encountered before, which was a bat. And when I saw this bat, it was amazing to me, because not only was I shocked to see a bat I'd never seen one before but all this negativity, all these thoughts in my mind, it was almost like they were squeezed out. It was almost like my brain was being pinched and I was focused entirely on the bat. And so I started to think wait a moment, this is showing me a possibility that I hadn't observed before. Maybe I could intentionally pinch my brain. Like what else could I use this as a tool? And you got to remember, like, back then things were, I was really struggling, and so I was.
Speaker 2I went, my mind was always turning, trying to find ways to survive in life, and I started to think and so one of the ways that people can do this? And so I started using it as a tool. But like, for example, you can take anything on your desk or in your environment, like this pen, and I can start to say okay, you know, usually just pick up a pen, you write with it, you put it back down. But if you pick up something on your desk, you know say, okay, I'm going to notice all the colors, right, and all I was the light reflecting off of it and all the patterns and the writing and what does it say? And start looking around in a very intentional way.
Speaker 2Now you're trying to just observe it and in that moment you've actually you've used your intention to focus your attention. You've deliberately switched your attention from whatever it was on before to this, and that's like a bicep curl for your attention. And the more you do that throughout your day, the better you get at focusing your attention. And so when you're outside, you can look at the texture of the bark on the trees, you can look at the color of the leaves, the way the sun's reflecting off things. Stop and look at the clouds and the shapes and start to notice things, the nuances around you. You start to notice patterns and colors and as you do that, you start to engage your own ability to focus your attention on the things that you want to focus it on. And it's important to practice it, but it's very accessible and easy to do. So if you just keep at it, you'll start to be able to really pinch your brain at will.
Speaker 1Yeah, being able to push with this intention and focus your attention on what you want to pay attention to is important. I also want you to tell our listeners a little bit about the skill of okay, I can push my attention or focus my attention somewhere, but what do I do when my attention is being pulled by something I don't know? Notifications, emails, advertising, social media how do I deal with all of that? Yeah, so there's a number of tools. How do I?
Speaker 2deal with all of that. Yeah, so there's a number of tools that I use to deal with that. It really depends on, I think, one is if you have an intention in a moment, that is itself a force that creates energy to be able to deal with distractions, and so what do I do? But if you don't have an intention, then it. So just having an intention is important, right? So I think sometimes we have things to do, but we don't set the intention to do those things, so we just oh, we'll do it later.
Speaker 2So in that moment you can easily be pulled. So let's say that I want to. I've decided in this particular moment I want to write that article that I've been wanting to write, or that grant proposal or whatever it is, and I find myself being distracted. What I do is I'll get a piece of paper and I'll write the word distraction on the piece of paper and I'll put a circle around it and then, anytime I feel the pull of a distraction or I catch myself in a distraction, the pull of a distraction or I catch myself in a distraction, I'll put a check mark through that circle.
Speaker 2the word distract and what that does is it doesn't necessarily stop you from engaging in the distraction, but it intercepts the distraction so that it creates a moment of awareness that you are being pulled that you are engaged in a distraction and to me that's the first step, is that to be aware of these distractions, because sometimes you just you don't even know like you're so in this energy saver mode, this autopilot mode, and you just find you're like, oh my God, now it's been 20 minutes and I've been looking at all these YouTube videos and right, or sometimes what will happen is I'll go to YouTube to look for something in particular and then on the side you see these things that draws you in and the next thing you're lost. So sometimes also what I'll do is I'll watch. If I go to YouTube, I try to watch things like full screen so I can't see the other things that it's suggesting to me, or zoom into that one like window. So that's one one thing. I call it the distraction disruptor and I'll put that, put the checks down, and then sometimes that can also tell you if you have a lot more check marks one day than another. It can tell you like maybe you didn't get enough sleep or maybe you had too much coffee and you're crashing, and they can help you to inform you for behavioral changes that you might consider making. Oh, I need to go to. I'm really distracted today, maybe I need to go to bed earlier, and so things like that.
Speaker 2Another thing that I do is sometimes I'll put my phone so I can see the screen and I'll put on a stopwatch when I start working.
Speaker 2And then, when I feel the urge to be distracted, I'll look and I'll say, okay, can I go like one more minute or two more minutes without being distracted?
Speaker 2So I turn it into a little bit of a challenge and so I call that the challenge clock, so I just I try to, and then often what will happen is that I'll be like, okay, one more minute, two more minutes, and then 10 minutes later I'm still working.
Speaker 2And then the other thing that I'll do is I do these like almost like nano meditations and one of the meditation practices that I engaged previously and I still use it from time to time transcendental meditation, or it's like single word and it's like a mantra, and you say the word over and over in your mind, and what I'll do is, if I feel the urge to be distracted, I'll just for 10 seconds or 15 seconds, I'll just close my eyes, I'll just say this word over and over, I'll open my eyes, and most of the time when I do, that the urge of the distraction is gone. So I find this I've observed that the distraction is not a pull that's going to last forever, it's just a pulse. Distractions often are, I find, come in pulses, so they come and they're intense and then they go, and so it's like, once you start to recognize the rhythm of the distractions, that can also be helpful recognize the rhythm of the distractions.
Speaker 1That can also be helpful. Yes, so many tools from nano meditations to bringing awareness with check marks, to just the process of being distracted I think our listeners can definitely put it into good use. I also personally found what helps me is when I'm distracted. Yes, first, like you said, having an intention about what I'm paying attention to and what's important right now definitely helpful because, like my brain knows, this is important and the rest is called qualifies as distractions. But also, when I'm distracted, I have this what I call thought note, meaning I just write down what's the distraction is like, what's the start, what my brain wants me to do, and then I dedicate 20 to 30 minutes at the end of the day to go through the list. And is any of this still makes sense or was it just temporal? You know flux in the system that came and was gone. So that's been, yeah, very helpful to me as well. Because also, sometimes you feel, oh, maybe I'll miss out and maybe that's a valid idea.
Speaker 2Oh, that's so interesting. Wait, can you give an example of that? I'm so curious about that.
Speaker 1Yeah, so I'm, let's say, I'm working on writing my newsletter and there is this thought popped into my head oh, this might be interesting. I don't know this piece of research and what's this guy name? Or what's this, what the meaning of this word? Or I want to watch a video about that. And or sometimes it's just like I need to do my grocery shopping and I don't want to forget, like, what to buy for dinner. Right, this pops into my head. I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna use a piece of paper and write down this thought and dedicate 20 minutes after this work, about, let's say, 12 pm, to go through the list and see what's important and what I need to take action on.
Speaker 1That's great yeah and that allows my brain to let go of this idea that I might miss out on something or that might be valuable, et cetera. Like it's all there, you can get back to it.
Speaker 2Yeah, I totally relate to that. Yeah, it might be like I'm going through my day and I'm like, oh, I need to book that flight and then next thing I know I jumped to this and then an hour later I'm still like trying to book the flight, and it's okay I could have. Now I'm off the task that I really wanted.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, but if I write it down and say, okay, book flight later, then I can come back to it and at least I have peace of mind that it's not on a piece of paper right beside me.
Speaker 1Exactly that's peace of mind. That's what I'm looking for and that just writing things down allows me to get it and continue with my task. I want to return to the idea that you also mentioned about not having enough sleep, or just the physicality of attention as well, which I think in the book you mostly focused on the movement. Get hooked on movement. It's the key to evolutionary success, where you wrote how movement changes the way our brain works. I want you to, I guess, expand a little bit more on the physicality of how our attention works and how it trimes our brain to different states, and how we can use it to benefit from it.
Speaker 2Our brain to different states and how we can use it to benefit from it. Yeah, I think that many of the tools kind of work in synchrony, and so, for example, the tool of getting hooked on movement I think is so important. And in fact, if you think about 10,000 years ago and before, we were all nomads, we were all hunters and gatherers, we were outside working hard all day long and wouldn't make sense to go exercise because we're working outside for survival and if you exercise you could deplete your energy so that when you needed it to move or go hunt or run away from something, you wouldn't have it. And so today, in modern society, a huge part of the population is not really fending for survival every day. And so then the challenge becomes we still have that primitive wiring in us that is like conserving energy in our brains and our bodies, so we gravitate to this energy saver mode. We haven't evolved out of that yet. I feel like that wiring will go away over years, but it'll probably take hundreds or thousands of years for that to go away. So we have this wiring that doesn't serve a lot of us today, but yet that wiring dictates our actions and our thoughts, our thoughts, and so to me, getting hooked on movement is we need a tool to be intentional about moving our bodies, and we need and I think one of the ways I think about it is we need to find ways of moving our bodies that feel good to us, and it can be very personal.
Speaker 2Some people like to go for a run. Other people it makes them feel terrible, or they can't because of bad knees or things like that, or they're prone to injuries and things. But there's so many things that we can do to move our bodies, whether it's walking or whether it's engaging in certain sports or hiking or having an exercise bike at home, for example, and I think it's important that we experiment and not just experiment to do it, but actually to tune into and be open to the cues of when I, for example, go cycling and I come back, I feel amazing for hours afterwards and I could just go for like a 30 minute bike ride and I feel good for a long period of time, and so it's like getting in touch with the good feelings and it's if I go, and sometimes that even requires a pause. Connecting both the get hooked on movement and press pause is another one. So it could be like if I go for a bike ride, maybe I want to come back and I want to have just.
Speaker 2Maybe I go for a walk afterwards and I just I'm like, wow, I feel really great, because if I come back from a bike ride and immediately I start working, I might not recognize the positive benefits I might. So you want to experiment with that as well, so that you're really getting in touch with how the movement you just engaged in is impacting your mind and your body, because when you move, it floods your brain with positive neurotransmitters dopamine, all kinds of amazing things and those neurotransmitters stick around for a long period of time, and I think it's something that is so easily accessible, but yet we're programmed not to engage because of this primitive wiring.
Speaker 1Yes, this kind of our own brain sometimes works. It feels like against us, but that's exactly that primitive wiring that was designed to help us survive, which isn't that helpful anymore. And also, speaking to movement, I think so many people still don't realize that it's such a literally brain changer. Whenever I want to feel confident or empowered, I know that I need to go and get some heavy squats done, and I'm going to get it consistently, with a guarantee. I don't need any brain enhancing drugs and mood lifters et cetera. I'm going to get it. Or if I want to be more creative but still alert, like doing yoga, I need to keep a notepad by my side because so many ideas just start popping up.
Speaker 1Yes, and once you understand like how, for example, movement and physical stuff is powerful to change your brain in a very specific way, it becomes like a toolkit of self-change or brain change, self-enhancement in itself. So I love that you put that into the book. You're also the example of walking and creativity. Yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, and some of these other neurotransmitters are not just helping you in that moment, but they're helping to support the growth and maintenance and survival of neurons, like brain-derived neural growth factor. There's all these factors that are being produced. So it's not just, it's just so important to move and to get, to find ways to get hooked on movement.
Speaker 1Yes, so thank you for including that chapter. Really loved it. And, Jeff, we've been talking for almost an hour and I want to be respectful of your time. Even though there is so much in the book that I don't know, I feel like we need a second episode of the podcast. Maybe we'll do it, yeah let's do it.
Speaker 1That's awesome, Because I'd love for listeners to learn more about these different tools to help to enhance their brain and their mind and be a much better operator of that amazing machinery. Today, I'd like to be respectful of your time and finish our podcast. What are some of the final thoughts maybe advice or inspirational thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with to be inspired to take better control of their brain and also live life with more intention.
Speaker 2The one thing that I just think about pretty much every day is how we're all at the switches. We are, we're at the. We can turn the knobs, we can flip the switches in our lives. And, pardon me, hold on, maybe I'll do that one again. Hold on, yeah, just take a drink please do again.
Speaker 1It's recording. I can edit it out and ai will help me to make the most of it okay, perfect, perfect.
Speaker 2One thing that that I really just think about every day is is how we are all at the switches. We are all. We all have that ability to make changes in our lives, to identify possibilities that we're not seeing in this moment, to really see that we are only using a small fraction of our amazingly powerful brain. We have this prefrontal cortex. That's like the biggest. If you take the ratio of that to the whole brain, I think ours is the biggest of any animal and we're only using a small fraction of that on any day.
Speaker 2And our prefrontal cortex is where we think about thinking, it's where we have emotional regulation and it's where we can really have intention.
Speaker 2We can use that, these parts of our brain, to achieve anything we want to achieve, like we can deepen connections with other people, we can learn to cultivate creativity and cultivate curiosity in our lives and lead less with ego and get in touch with these cues that we're getting, and we can better emotionally regulate that the interactions we have with other people are.
Speaker 2We're able to be kind to each other and to lead with gratitude, and I just think there's so many possibilities, but we tend to only see a single possibility in any particular moment. And that's why it's also important for us to share what we're working on with other people, like our paths, our evolution, what's working, what's not working, to have those conversations, because we all have this unique wiring and unique experiences and we are observing the world in such unique ways and we can all learn from each other. And when we start to engage like that, we start to be able to shift our mindset, we start to be able to see there's other ways of looking at the world, there's other ways of being in the world, and to me that's just so exciting.
Speaker 1Yeah, such a powerful message, Jeff. Thank you so much. We are so much. More than often we give ourselves credit for Amazing podcast and conversation. Thank you so much again for your time. One last question when can listeners go to learn more about your amazing work, to connect with you, to get your book Like? What are some best places online?
Speaker 2Hey, yeah, so my website that I put together is just my name, jeffcarbcom, and there people can. Actually, I put the first chapter of the book up that people can get for free, so you don't even have to buy the book, you can just download it. There's a little pop-up that if you wait a few seconds we'll show up. But there's lots of other kind of information there that's not in the book, and ways to reach out and things like that.
Speaker 1Amazing. Yeah, we're going to link this in the show notes and we'll all be looking forward to part two. And thanks again, jeff, let's stay late.
Speaker 2Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you for the conversation.