I've Lost Myself. So Who Is in Charge Now?

"I've lost myself." Maybe you've thought it in the supermarket, the car park, or your own kitchen. This episode is the question nobody has asked you.

"I've lost myself." Maybe you've thought it in your own kitchen at 9.47 on a Wednesday morning, holding a cup of tea you don't remember making. You walk upstairs to find something and forget what you came for. Something in you has been quietly slipping for a while.

You're intelligent. You're capable. You've read the books. You've done the therapy. Maybe the coaching. Maybe the courses, the retreats, the breath work, the parts work. You know your patterns. And you still cannot make yourself move forward the way you used to.

You're probably wondering what is wrong with you. But that's the wrong question.

In this first episode of the show's new era, Dr. Amen Kaur introduces the question that actually matters. Not "what is wrong with me" but "who is in charge of my life right now?" Because the Self at the centre of your intelligence system has stepped back from the seat, and your thinking mind has stepped in to cover. It cannot. Not because you are not clever enough. Because thinking was never designed to run the whole system.

Drawing on the work of Manos Tsakiris at Royal Holloway, Antonio Damasio's research on the Self as an integrator, Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley on interoception, Eckhart Tolle, and Bessel van der Kolk's neuroimaging findings on trauma and the brain, this episode names what has been happening under the surface and offers one small practice you can carry for the week.

THIS EPISODE COVERS:

• Why the woman you used to be feels out of reach, and what is actually happening underneath
• The Self as an integrator, not a place in the brain (Tsakiris, Damasio)
• The sun and the rays: a new way to understand your intelligence system
• The Einstein principle applied to your overthinking
• The part of you currently in charge is not your enemy. It is scared.
• One question to carry with you every day for the next seven days

This is the first episode of the show's new era. If you have been listening for a while, welcome back. If you are new, welcome. What we do here is return, not reinvention.

The full Human Intelligence Framework lives inside the free masterclass at amenkaur.com/masterclass. It is where starting over actually starts

Free Masterclass: The Human Intelligence Framework

A walkthrough of the five stage method Dr Amen Kaur uses with high achieving women who have lost themselves inside a career, role or identity that no longer fits.

Watch it free at amenkaur.com/masterclass

About Dr Amen Kaur

Starting Over, Being You with Dr. Amen Kaur is the podcast for high-achieving women who have been quietly losing themselves inside the life they built. Dr. Amen Kaur, PhD, is a former scientist and former Partner at a FTSE 250 company with 20+ years of corporate experience. She teaches the Human Intelligence Framework, the Five Intelligences that orbit Your Self, and how to bring the integrator back online when it has stepped away from the seat.

Learn more at amenkaur.com/about

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Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not medical, psychological, or financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional for guidance specific to your situation.

Transcript

Feeling Like You Lost Yourself

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've lost myself. That's a sentence. Maybe you've thought in your mind when you're at the supermarket, in the car park, in your car by yourself, in your own thoughts. Just for a moment when you know you don't have to be the way everyone wants you to be. Or maybe you're standing in your own kitchen and it's 9.47 in the morning and you're holding a cup of tea, but you don't remember making it. It's like, when did I make this? Or you go somewhere, you go upstairs and you try and find something in what did I even come here for? You're intelligent, you probably got plans, and maybe you've made three plans, but you can't get yourself to move towards doing them. And you've read all the books, you've done the therapy, and maybe the coaching as well, and you're wondering, what is wrong with me? Like I'm just not myself. This episode is for that woman. Because not many people ask the right question. So many people say things like, What's wrong with you? But very rarely do people say, Who's in charge of you? Who's in charge of your life right now? I'm Dr. Emakor, and this is Starting Over and Being You. This show is for those high aspirational women who have been quietly losing themselves in a life that they actually built. What we're gonna do is different. We are not gonna add more strategies. We're gonna look at who is actually running the strategies that you already have so you can succeed. If you're new, welcome. If you've been listening for a while, I am so utterly grateful towards you. And maybe you've noticed that this has evolved. And this is where we evolved together. And I'm so glad that you're here. So it's Wednesday morning and we're in the kitchen and we've got that cup of tea. And we're really looking forward to it. And we've got this list of things that we're supposed to do in the day that you haven't quite started, but you really want to achieve them. You've got a meeting at 11 maybe, and you show up and it runs beautifully. And everyone around you thinks, she's got it all together. But underneath all of that, there's a quieter sentence running the loop. You might hear you say, and it's been going on for months, maybe years. You feel like you're doing this and it's like a role that you're playing. You know the name that people call you, but it doesn't really register. Like you know who you are. And you probably don't call it an identity loss. That sounds dramatic. You might call it like, I just feel flat, I've lost my motivation, I've lost my mojo or my spark, or I've always feel really tired or discombobulated. I love that word, discombobulated. I feel discombobulated or out of sorts or scattered or off-kilter or not feeling like myself. But the truth is you're capable of so much more, but you can't move forward in the same way you used to. You've lost that energy, that life force energy that used to drive you to make you feel alive. And you've done all this work, maybe therapy, you've read books, you're always looking at self-improvement and self-development. And you know you can do it because anything you've put your mind to, you've achieved yourself through your own knowledge, through growth. But there's something stopping you now, and it's so frustrating when you get to this point because it's, I know everything, but I still can't move forward in the same way. You see, underneath all of this, all of the things that we do, there's probably a quieter sentence that you haven't said out loud or wanted to say even to your own mind, you are maybe starting to wonder, is there actually something wrong with me? And because we wonder that, we want to hide it. We don't want to admit it to ourselves that we're worried deep down that maybe I just never will be able to get myself back again. And the thing is, you know, because you're intelligent, you're capable, and normally when you try to do something, you achieve it. But yet, this thing that just doesn't seem to let go. Before we go any further, I really need you to know there's actually nothing wrong with you. And by the end of the episode, you'll actually know why. You will know why and what is really holding you back. The thing here is you're actually at that threshold. You're not been procrastinating as if it's a bad thing, as if you should be telling yourself off. You have done all that inner work, maybe for years, maybe therapy, coaching, books, courses, retreats, breath work, maybe somatic, maybe parts work, maybe all of this that I've mentioned. But I really want you to honor what you've tried so far. Really acknowledge how much you've tried for a moment. And sometimes when I have been being quite mean to myself, and I really think about wow, you just kept going, girl. You just kept going. And I am humbled sometimes how much resilience there is in a human being to keep going, no matter what. None of these approaches are wrong. Actually, they're all really good individually. If there is just one problem in a certain area, but every single thing that you've done hasn't actually got to the core of the problem. It just feels like it's like a never-ending issue that just doesn't seem to go away. That's because you haven't got to the core of what is at the center of this all. And I really want to be mindful of the techniques that you've used. They actually do work individually, but that's just it. It actually addressed different parts of you as if each piece might be a problem. Maybe it's your thinking that you've been focusing on and positive mindset or your feelings, and you're trying to sit with your feelings, or your body, and you've been trying to do exercise or somatic work or yoga, or you've been looking at your behaviors and what actions you're taking, or maybe you're going deep into your belief systems. But the truth is, a lot of the times with identity work, it's not any of those individual pieces that is the problem. The problem is that we can't get access to the woman who is supposed to integrate all of and basically she's vacated the seat. And it's not because she's gone, oh, I can't be bothered with this, I'm going somewhere else. It's because she's slowly being pushed out. So this isn't a character flaw. This is really important because a lot of the time, especially if you're a high achiever, we can really be quite mean to ourselves. We think that it's a character flaw if we're not achieving as much as we should be. And it's not that, oh, I haven't figured out that one missing piece. It's actually something really simple and much more specific, and people don't really say it. Here's what's actually happening, and I want you to stay with me. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it, and it's going to be fantastic for you. Research is showing that yourself, the self, your identity is not a single place in the brain. And when neuroscientists look for it, they don't find, okay, it's located here. What they find is so much more interesting, and it'll make so much sense to you. Mana Securis at Royal Halloway published a paper in a quarterly journal of experimental psychology in 2017 that laid it out clearly. Your sense of self is built at the intersection at three streams. So there's three streams and they connect. And at the intersection of those, one, your body, what you feel inside your body is another, and how people mirror you back. So it's your body, and that's how you feel inside your body, and then social relationships as well. That is what makes up the self. And then Antonio Damasio's work goes further. Across his books, the feeling of what happens and self comes to mind. He argues that the self is a process, not a thing. The brain performs the self. And its primary job is integration, pulling body, emotion, and memory into a single congruent now. People like Eccartoli talk about the power of now. What he's really talking about is the presence that you have in this moment when you can be fully present in your body, in the now. And this is mirrored by what science is saying as well. Antonio DeMasio's work, he describes it as three layers of it. It's the proto-self, your body's consciously updating its map of its own internal state. So it's how you feel inside your body, the core self, the moment-to-moment pulse of you, like how you're feeling moment to moment, like right now, this minute, encountering this, how you feel in your body. And then the autobiographical self, what stitches the past and the future into the story of who you are. And we've all got stories of you know who we are. So sometimes people might talk to us and we have a story to tell about our life. For Damasio, all three layers have been working together. And when the integration work happens, you feel like you. And when it breaks down, the self fragments. Some researchers in Sussex took this into a specific experimental finding. They showed that emotional well-being is not about how well you sense your heartbeat. It's whether what you sense is happening is actually matching what is happening. And so the gap is where emotional dysregulation lives. And a lot of the time, if we have got emotional dysregulation, we numb, right? We numb and we do things like emotional eating or we scroll or we we're not present. So if there is something that you're meant to do and you're meant to achieve, but instead you're procrastinating, it's because you're numbing yourself because there's a gap between your body and your awareness of your body, like you can't feel it. And then as we close that gap and we start to feel our body again and it feels safe to feel, that's where regulation improves and we can feel alive again and actually feel like ourselves. So have you ever felt like how you imagine how you used to be when you were younger and you feel alive and you feel like I used to walk into a room and I had confidence. It's like when we lose our identity, we lose sometimes we think it's a confidence thing, but actually, it's not just confidence. So if we bring it all together now and we put it all together and you have a picture of it, yourself, your true self, your identity is built up of different streams and feeding into one integrator, that's the core you. So almost imagine like you are a sun with loads of rays of sunshine coming out, and that when you are able to allow yourself to have those streams and connect it to those streams, you're integrating all those parts of you. And your body is one stream, so that could be like a ray, your emotions are another, your intuition is another, your thinking is another, and then how you show up in the world, like how you your presence is that's another. And you'll get feedback for how you show up in the world. So all of that is integrated into who you are, like the sun. Now, what happens in high-achieving women who've spent maybe years ignoring their own signals and ignoring their own body or emotions, the streams don't disappear. You're still sunshine and loads of rays of sunshine, but you're not reading your own self. You're not able to read that information. Your body is maybe reading the room outside of you, but you're not reading yourself. Your emotions still have that information. It's you still have that array of emotions within you that you're connected to, but your integrator, your true self, has stepped back. It's not there. You've basically got like a cloud and you can't see the sun anymore about you. And it feels like that. We can't see the best in us because now we're focusing on performing and that pleasing others or doing for others has taken over. But because you're intelligent and because you've got that cognitive layer that is well trained in most of us from a young age, that tends to be the loudest. And that tends to be the one that is acceptable in today's world, like to be cognitive. So we focus in that ray the most, the thinking, the cognitive part of your brain. So your mind does what it needs to do, it takes over, and you start to believe that you are the ray rather than the sun itself. The ray is not the sun, it can't take over. Not because your thinking is weak, but because your thinking, your is not designed to take over the whole system. And what tends to happen is when it takes over the whole system, it starts to negate the emotions. And this is where I love Einstein. Einstein says something about this, and I want you to really sit with this for a moment. He said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we use to create them. This is the thing. Your thinking is not a problem. Your thinking is trying to solve a problem that is never going to be solved by the thinking layer itself. You've been asking the cognitive layer to do the job of integrating all those other areas like your body, your emotions, your nervous system. And it's not designed to. Even in the brain, we can see it's not designed to. It hasn't got a direct ability to connect to all those different areas. So you're not broken at all. The part of you that might be currently in charge, if you're feeling really emotional, that's in charge. Or if your nervous system is dysregulated, that might be in charge. And it's trying to fix everything, and it's not meant to do it. It's not designed to do it at all. And that feels really exhausting. It really does. It's so exhaustive from the amount of effort you have to put in to do that. And so just for a moment, just take a deep breath in and recognize it. It has been hard. Just take a deep breath in. Hold it and just say it out. And just know you have been doing a great job considering everything. And you're here right now. So the question we need to ask is not what's wrong with our thinking or what's wrong with my nervous system, why do I get triggered? Those parts are doing their job really well. The question is who's in charge? And here's the thing that most people miss. The part of you that is currently in charge, it might be the nervous system or your emotions or your thinking. It's not trying to be cruel and harsh. We've all got a critical mind. It's usually scared being put in that position. It's running the show maybe for 20 years and it's always scared. What if people realize I'm not as good as they think I am? And he genuinely believes because of it, the thinking, it's there's only one way to be successful, and I'm just gonna do it that way. And the only way is through thinking, and that's how we're gonna survive. And if you try and push it out, like you try and say, hey, just stop thinking for a moment. We're not gonna think this through, we're just gonna feel, it's gonna try and push it. What's all this emotional stuff? Stop being weak. It's gonna be like, no, you're not pushing me out of my seat. Because if we push, if you push me out of my seat, I know what I'm doing. We're not gonna survive. And one of my clients said this, I always feel like I'm my own worst enemy. And when she's starting to see, hey, that part that is like trying to take charge is not my worst enemy. They're trying to do the best for me with the resources that they have. It's just part of intelligence. And they're actually really scared because they don't have it all together, they don't have all the answers. That's when everything's starting to shift. When you can have more compassion and understanding towards what's happening within you and really understand your own inner system, then you think, oh, I'm not gonna try and get rid of any part of this. I'm just gonna stop letting it be in charge, and I'm gonna be in charge of this system instead. That's where your return comes. It's not reinvention of yourself or transformation. It's once you return, then you can transform those parts. Then you can be in charge of what you listen to in terms of your thinking mind and what you say, hey, I know I can do this. When we use words like reinvention, we're almost implying that we're not finished or that we weren't good enough. And there's too much of that going around as it is. You don't need a new you to be manufactured, like better, stronger, more optimized. And that's just exhausting whenever we think about that. The thought of having to reinvent our life or start over can sometimes be so daunting. But that's not what we need. We just need to return. And the woman that was designed to be in charge of your life hasn't gone away. She's just stepped away because the that whole thing about performing and being things for everyone else was just so loud that she just lost that connection to herself. And she's still there and she's still waiting to take her seat as the CEO of her life. Your job is not about becoming someone new. Your job is to see, okay, who is in charge right now? Is it my nervous system? Is it my emotions? Is it my thinking? Okay, let me take a deep breath and let me come back. And here's one thing I want you to do from today until next week, Wednesday. Not a lot of things, just one thing. At some point in your day, every day this week, just one promise. You ask, who's in charge of my life? Is it my nervous system? Am I feeling anxious? Is it my emotions? Is it my thinking? Who's in charge? Is it me? And when you, your ability, the real you, the true you is so loving, is so kind, it's so considerate towards itself, and it listens to those different parts, just notice, you don't have to fix anything this week. Just notice by noticing that's you coming back online, your real authentic identity self. If this has landed in any way where it's like helping you see yourself in a slightly different way, if you've heard this episode and you've been trying to name something for years, like I've lost myself and I don't know how to get myself back, I want you to know two things. First, you're not late. You are so on time and you're so lucky to have noticed. And the fact that the old way of your life has stopped working, isn't it fantastic? Because you have a chance of coming back to yourself now. Second, what we're doing on this show is just the beginning. The full framework, the five intelligences, they all work together. And that's the specific work of getting yourself back at the seat of your life. And if that's something you want to do, start inside of your free masterclass. You can find it at amoncor.com slash masterclass and come on over and I'll walk you through the whole thing. It's where starting over your life actually starts. And I'll see you next Wednesday, same time. Thank you so much for supporting me and thank you for being here. I'm sending you so much love. Till next time.