With guest Michelle Steffes, we explore the art of resilience and pull back the curtain on how our brains can be sculpted by our experiences, to either hinder or help our ability to recover from life's setbacks. With Michelle's expertise in neuroscience and neuroplasticity, we dispel misconceptions and look into how daily habits and routines can fortify our mental muscles.
We also discuss the ripple effects of mindful morning practices, such as gratitude and cognitive exercises, which can help rewire a brain plagued by PTSD or other traumas. And discuss how persistent actions cultivate a robust mindset, challenging listeners to consider what exchange game they're playing with their daily choices, inspired by the strategies from Atomic Habits by James Clear.
You can learn more about Michelle and contact her on her website: IPV Consulting.
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
Share your feedback about the podcast. _______ Producer / Editor: Neel Panji
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams + position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in fostering resilience and trauma sensitivity.
With guest Michelle Steffes, we explore the art of resilience and pull back the curtain on how our brains can be sculpted by our experiences, to either hinder or help our ability to recover from life's setbacks. With Michelle's expertise in neuroscience and neuroplasticity, we dispel misconceptions and look into how daily habits and routines can fortify our mental muscles.
We also discuss the ripple effects of mindful morning practices, such as gratitude and cognitive exercises, which can help rewire a brain plagued by PTSD or other traumas. And discuss how persistent actions cultivate a robust mindset, challenging listeners to consider what exchange game they're playing with their daily choices, inspired by the strategies from Atomic Habits by James Clear.
You can learn more about Michelle and contact her on her website: IPV Consulting.
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
Share your feedback about the podcast. _______ Producer / Editor: Neel Panji
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams + position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in fostering resilience and trauma sensitivity.
If you're wired in, if everything you wired in, from baby to today, from your influences, your peers, your education, your skill sets, your value systems is things that have devastated you, traumatized you, hurt you, damaged you and the feedback has been nothing but producing more inner turmoil, or self-sabotage as they refer to it. As and for you, resiliency is going to be almost impossible at the beginning. Okay, it's going to seem like an uphill battle and like you're always losing that battle.
Manya Chylinski:
Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski, and my guest today is Michelle Steffes. She is a coach and author, the host of the Reframe and Rewire podcast, and we had an amazing conversation about resiliency, of course, about neuroplasticity, and you know the importance of habits and daily routines. I think you're really going to like this conversation.
Manya Chylinski:
And hey don't forget, we'd love for you to find us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe, and if you want to share your thoughts, you can leave us a review or there's a Google form in the show notes. We'd love to hear any feedback. I'd like to know what listeners like and what kind of content you want more of. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the show, michelle. I'm so excited to be talking to you today. It's a joy to be with you, manja, and before we learn a little bit more about who you are and what you do, I wanted to know if you could have any superpower, what would that be?
Michelle Steffes:
Oh, I think it would be to be able to pour in enough confidence, willpower and discernment in people to help them win in life.
Manya Chylinski:
Oh, I like that and I'd like to sign up on the list to get that. Well, thank you for sharing that. I think that's a really good one. And now just tell us a little bit. Who are you and what do you do?
Michelle Steffes:
Well, I'm Michelle Steffis. I have been in the company IPV Consulting now for 11 years. Actually. I founded the company back in 2012. I'm a speaker, corporate trainer and an executive coach. I'm also the author of two books, which I think we're going to be talking about today. So I'll reframe and rewire. We're going to be talking about how you can rewire the brain. I've got over 10,000 hours of study in neuroscience and neural plasticity, as well as understanding behaviors and how to shift and change the neurochemistry to create a strong state of mind. And then the same type of theme is in my machine and side made book. So I authored two books and I just love people.
Manya Chylinski:
Excellent. Well, I'm excited to be talking to you today about the topic of resiliency. So, given your background, I'm sure this is something you think about. What? How do you define resiliency and what do you think about the word I?
Michelle Steffes:
think resiliency is not so much what's happening around you as what's happening inside of you, and learning how to not only take control of that but how to set up habits that create you create a, I guess, a situation where you're a winner every day because you decide to stay in control of your inner life.
Manya Chylinski:
Okay, now I have been quoted on this very podcast and in other places saying that I'm not a huge fan of the word resiliency, in large part because how it came into my life, which was after dealing with a significant trauma and not understanding that I actually had any resiliency. You know, what do you think of the word? Does it have any emotional content?
Michelle Steffes:
for you Well, I think for everybody. Every, probably almost every word of the English language is either going to trigger you or or have no feeling or whatever tied to it. But resiliency, it can be a trigger. I work with PTSD clients and I know that sometimes they feel like you're trying to shove it up their nose with a fork and and just get over yourself and move on and what's your problem? And you know all those types of things can be tied to it, so I totally understand that. On the other hand, I think resiliency can be a beautiful thought if you learn how to manage the self sabotage that comes from not only PTSD but from everyday life and the circumstances that surround you and how you deal with them, yeah absolutely.
Manya Chylinski:
What do you think people misunderstand about the concept of resilience?
Michelle Steffes:
I think most of the time, I know when I I'll go with. When I was young okay, in my younger years I assumed that problems could just somehow go away if I just do enough of the right things, or if I'm just nice enough, or if I do enough favors, or if I say yes, enough. And the problem is is that doesn't ever happen. That's a, that's a world of of, you know, fairy tales and rainbows and, you know, and unicorns. It doesn't exist, and so what I had to learn is, over time, how to manage life differently and how to accept the fact that, no matter what challenges come my way, I could still control what was happening inside of me, even in the worst of circumstances, and it took me a while to figure that out. But I will say to you that now more than ever and that's the reason I wrote the two books I'm realizing that it's your daily routine, and I'm going to be talking about the habits every single day that are going to make you or break you. Okay, can you say a little bit more about that? Absolutely so.
Michelle Steffes:
The mind is a powerful thing and, if you don't mind, I'd like to just spend a couple of minutes talking about neuroplasticity, because that's kind of the foundation behind what I just said and behind resiliency, and that's what you have in your brain. You have since, even before you were born. They were put together in your womb and even in the womb, as you hear voices and familiar sounds, you begin to form wiring. Now that happens at 400 billion actions per second of wiring in the brain and you form networks over time. So you have a network for your morning routine, you have a network for driving, you have a network for you know that afternoon coffee that you have to have, and all of these networks are built in to help you to just kind of operate out of your subconscious. Now I'm getting to a point here. So if you're wired in, if everything you wired in from baby to today, from your influences, your peers, your education, your skill sets, your value systems is things that have devastated you, traumatized you, hurt you, damaged you, and the feedback has been nothing but producing more inner turmoil, or self sabotage, as they refer to it as and for you, resiliency is going to be almost impossible. At the beginning it's going to seem like an uphill battle and like you're always losing that battle because you've wired in a lot of neural networks. You have a thousand trillion synaptic connections by the age of 35 that you formed, and at the synaptic level you're releasing neurochemicals.
Michelle Steffes:
Now, this is another important piece to this. I want to just touch on this too, because your thoughts and your actions are producing those neurochemicals. Now we're all familiar with chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin right, those are the happy neurochemicals, right? Yeah, so dopamine is a reward chemical, oxytocin is the love drug, and so on and so forth. But you also have stress chemicals. You have 16 neurochemicals all together, like adrenaline, cortisol, and that makes you feel a stressed anxiety. You feel stressed, anxious, upset. It can cause things like OCD, it can cause things like PTSD and all those sorts of patterns. So now we're hitting on the word that I wanted to get to, and that's patterns. Okay, so when you look at the patterns or routine habits of your life, from the second you wake up to close your eyes at night, are those patterns producing positive wiring? Are they therefore positive neurochemistry or are they producing negative wiring and lots more negative neurochemistry at the synaptic level? That was a lot of sciencey words in a short amount of time, but I hope it made some sense to you.
Manya Chylinski:
It did make some sense to me and it prompted a further question. So I mean, you're talking about patterns and you're talking about habits and I'm curious you know the neuroscience of what you just described what that looks like in somebody who is dealing with a particular trauma. So in a car accident, out of bombing, out of shooting, something like that, what is the relationship?
Michelle Steffes:
there. I'm glad you asked that and I'm just gonna use a client that I've worked with that has struggled with chronic PTSD. She's later in life, so she's definitely not young anymore, but in her childhood she suffered some horrible abuse From almost every level. I'll just leave it at that. We won't get into a lot of detail for her own privacy. But she struggled horribly and she had gone through counselor after counselor, therapy after therapy, psychiatric drugs, everything you could possibly imagine to try to deal with this.
Michelle Steffes:
But what helped her was realizing that she could at least be in control of her routine, the patterns of her day.
Michelle Steffes:
So, for example, just to start the rewiring process which neuroplasticity is the coolest thing in the world because you can literally rewire your brain no matter how it's been wired. Now, you can't do it overnight, but if day by day and this is what I taught her when you get up in the morning, if you start with gratitude, intentionally, maybe even writing things you're grateful for, like on your mirror, so they're writing your face the second you get up in the morning and you take time to feel the gratitude. So now you're gonna release that neurochemistry, you're going to also experience some gentle rewiring and then you start to lock in, say reading or listening to something that is filling your soul and helping you to think different ways about things, slowly but surely, as you listen, as you start to practice gratitude. I also encouraged her to pray, to meditate, to insert all these pieces into her daily morning routine, because a new thought or a new wiring process will dry up in 48 hours if you don't act on it right away.
Michelle Steffes:
That's why, if you go to a seminar or something, you lose it in two days, because your brain can only hold so much new connections it's gonna weed off what you don't use. So she had to stay at this every single day over a course of time. Now. At first she didn't really notice a big difference. She was still battling these constant nasty thoughts in her mind. But in about three weeks she started to notice subtle changes about how she was reacting and how she was thinking. They weren't huge, but they were enough to acknowledge the fact that what she was doing was working, and so we added more into her routine.
Michelle Steffes:
So, in other words, cognitive restructuring, where you reframe thoughts as they come to.
Michelle Steffes:
You start to look at things from a different perception or a different angle because of all the stuff you read and taught yourself over the last three weeks and because you're beginning to think from a different trajectory. Then, after another, maybe couple of weeks of that, we start talking about deeper things, like how to forgive, and that it's a journey, it's not an event. We talk about what you need to do in that journey. Well, in a matter of a few months, she was really noticing a massive evolution in decades of PTSD. So I go back to answer your question with that, after sharing that example, that if someone has gone through a trauma, it's not gonna be fixed overnight or with a simple pill or an injection or a few nice words. It's what they're gonna do every day. And the fact that you can do simple things in the morning over and over again and you can repeat it without really even thinking about it, but just kind of doing it Right, is it, puts you in this feeling of control and gives you the ability to start the rewiring process.
Manya Chylinski:
Wow okay, thank you for explaining that, and now that is very much an individual effort. That is something that I, as a person, would do your client or listeners individually think about our own resiliency, our habits, et cetera. But I also really look at resiliency through the lens of how our systems and institutions support or don't support our healing. That's true, and what do you think is the role of the organizations around us, our society, our systems in helping people recover from trauma and helping people build their resiliency?
Michelle Steffes:
Well, that's a pretty broad question. Yeah, I can honestly say that several of our systems, as you put it, are failing horribly, like devastatingly, and I personally this is my personal opinion believe some of it is intentional. I also believe some of it is ignorance. I also believe some of it is unintentional and just happenstance, because of, maybe, the way they were taught, or because of the institutions or systems they were exposed to, or whatever. Okay, now, having said that, I also think that there are some people getting it right.
Michelle Steffes:
How do you find those? That's the question. Right? That's the big million dollar question, if you will, and so it's a little harder to find those.
Michelle Steffes:
But if you really want to find the solutions that work, it has to begin with understanding some of the logic we've already shared, some of the science we already shared.
Michelle Steffes:
All of us have 100 billion neurons, all of us have the opportunity to practice self-directed neuroplasticities, which is what I just described. And if an institution or a system is not teaching at the ground level and helping you to connect the dots, and instead of just saying, well, you should, you should, you should right, and we just should, all over ourselves, and that never gets anywhere right, so, instead of just you, should, you, should, you should which just all that does to someone who's struggling with trauma or PTSD. It just makes them just feel even more defeated, right, because they know they should, right. So we have to find systems that work. Now, as far as the big question of, you know, looking at systems and broad spectrum, it's not healthy for anybody to allow themselves to become so exposed to so many cycles like news cycles and negative cycles of, say, family members or you know, and I know, sometimes you can't avoid all of that.
Michelle Steffes:
I understand that, but anything you could avoid or at least minimize is going to help that individual to narrow down their odds in terms of their ability to overcome what they need to and get the wiring done.
Manya Chylinski:
Right, and when I talk about the systems or the institutions, I am not absolving all of us from our own personal responsibility, but I know that we all live in a society and we interact with each other and we interact with groups. I'd like to dig in a little bit. At the very beginning of that, you said that you think that some people, some organizations or systems may not be supportive intentionally, and I'm curious not to call out any specific individuals or groups, but I'm curious what might be behind intentionally not wanting to be supportive.
Michelle Steffes:
Well, again, that could be a broad question because a number of reasons involved with it. Now, obviously, I can't get inside the heads of the people that are making these decisions, nor can I totally understand all of the elements that brought them to the place of being intentional. However, what I can say is narcissism is on the rise, and narcissism is incredibly dangerous to anybody that's trying to recover from PTSD, and oftentimes it's the cause of PTSD, and a lot of our systems are ruled by people that are incredibly narcissistic, so the decisions that are being made, whether they realize it or not, are deliberately damaging people.
Michelle Steffes:
And a narcissist will be the first one to tell you that it's not their fault.
Manya Chylinski:
Right, right, and so the decisions are being made through a very different lens that it is a lens of well-being and support. So, okay, okay, interesting. Thank you for sharing that. What is an important lesson about resilience that you've learned because of your work or your own personal experience?
Michelle Steffes:
Well, again, I think I can apply some of what I've shared to this point, and that is that my daily routine is the life source behind my ability to be resilient. And for me, you know I'm up at 430 every morning. That's when I start my routine. I've been doing it for over a decade and the reason that I am is not because I'm better than anyone else, because I'm certainly not. I can tell you right now. I argued with myself in the bathroom for 10, 15, 20 minutes when I first started this thing, and a lot of times I lost. But you know, it's something that I was insistent on training myself to do and over time, you know, I was able to rewire my mechanisms to not only enjoy getting up at that hour but do it automatically. So, anyway, I said all that to say this when I began doing this, I realized that it was like tucking myself into a charger and changing and reframing not only my state but my energy level, my ability to think on my feet. My health has gone up exponentially from this process, and a healthy person is always going to have to do a better job of being resilient. Let's just face it A relationship's got better. My business absolutely doubled multiple times over.
Michelle Steffes:
Learning that, that routine or the habits that I inserted into my world, and doing it at 430, was because you can't. When it comes to habits, you're never going to fit them in. You're just never going to say well, you know, I'll jog if I have time after lunch. No, you won't, I'll jog when I get home. No, you won't. Okay, it's like a freight train.
Michelle Steffes:
My date, once it does start, it's like a freight train, so I don't insert it at the front of the day. I'm not only not going to get the benefits of that, including exercise, prayer, reading, you know, meditation, all the things that I do, listening to the right things. But the second piece to this is what I call the exchange game. Okay, and it's realizing that all throughout the day, we are making, constantly making choices and being more aware of what those choices are and deciding to exchange them out for things that are going to build a stronger mindset, change the wiring and give me that resiliency is going to be absolutely essential, and so one of the first things I teach clients that I work with is how to, how to groom and and tune in to self awareness more more than ever, and that's the foundation behind emotional intelligence and then emotional intelligence. Then we'll give you the ability to take it even farther.
Manya Chylinski:
Right, wow, I heard everything you said, but I'm still stuck on the fact that you get up at 430 in the morning. I, if I wake up at 430 in the morning, I think, oh good, I get to go back to sleep for a couple of hours.
Michelle Steffes:
Well, a lot of the things that that I share with clients and I teach you know people to listen to are things that help them understand how other winners did it, and, in other words, I didn't reinvent the wheel. I looked at people who actually saw their dreams come to fruition and I learned what they do Right, and one of the things that they do is all the systems that I've locked into my life, and the only time I could lock those in is at the beginning of the day. Furthermore, I believe that if you start before everybody else, you get a head start every day. So these are just my, my beliefs, and I've seen it work, only for me, but for a lot of the people I work with and again, you're never just going to fit in new habits. It will never, ever, ever happen.
Manya Chylinski:
Never Right and I think well, I can only speak for myself, but I imagine other listeners will find this familiar which is thinking that I'm building a new habit and just not really finding the time to fit it in, as you say, and then suddenly being shocked that weeks have gone by and I haven't managed to build this habit. So, you know, we're talking about resiliency, and we're talking about reframing and rewiring, and we're talking about skills and things that winners do, and I guess I'm curious, just to shift the lens a little bit how do we think about those things if we're someone for whom, right now, we are just surviving?
Michelle Steffes:
Yeah, no, that's a great question. At this point in our interview and again when I'm going to go back to that PTSD client, they felt that very same way. I mean, they felt so overwhelmed and so consumed by their inner thoughts of self-sabotage and being haunted from the past, and overwhelmed to a degree that they didn't even know. They didn't even know where to start and were extremely doubtful that anything would help, at the point that I had the chance to work with them, and so I totally understand the question you're asking me, but it has to start with this tiny little things.
Michelle Steffes:
In fact, in addition to my books, which I recommend okay, we'll probably talk about that a little bit yes, the Ultimate Cabots by James Clear is a phenomenal book to teach this very concept, because what he says is even if, say, you want to work out routine, even if all you start doing is setting out your workout clothes and that's where you start and you do that for a couple of days, it begins to change your rewire, your brain, to think that you are a person who works out.
Michelle Steffes:
That's why your clothes are out, even if all you do is put them on and drive to the gym and you don't do anything, but you drive home, it starts to program and wire your brain to think I go to the gym every day.
Michelle Steffes:
And then, even if you only stay for five minutes and you go home now, you start to program your brain to think I go to the gym and I work out every day.
Michelle Steffes:
And so, whether we're talking about working out or we're talking about putting a habit or starting a habit or changing the way that we function, setting ourselves up for success is the most critical key to this, and that's the reason that I have the habits and routine that I built. If you've got to set yourself up for that success and you've got to create triggers in your life that push you into that success, yes, in order to reach that success and it has to, it has to click with your how you perceive yourself. So, if you never do anything to set yourself up for success, you're gonna be stuck in the same thought patterns that make you feel like a loser, that make you feel like you're defeated, like you can't get this, like it's too hard, and, and every day that goes by that you don't make an attempt, you're gonna feel that way and you're gonna think that way, and it's only gonna get wired in deeper and deeper and deeper right, right.
Manya Chylinski:
Thank you for that, and now we're getting close to time to wrap up, so I would love for you to tell our listeners about your book books up with an.
Michelle Steffes:
S. Thank you, yeah, so reframing rewire greatness through daily routine, which really has a lot of context that we've talked about. But there's a lot of heart Science as well. We didn't get to talk about how the heart, the brain, communicate and how would we shift those. It's a huge game changer. But there's also workbook pages at the end of each chapter. Okay, so you can get this book on Amazon. Okay, reframing rewire you can also get it on my website, ipb consulting dot com.
Manya Chylinski:
That's.
Michelle Steffes:
IPV integrity, people, vision, consulting, calm. And then the machine inside me, which was written for ages seven through fourteen, but it too has workbook pages at the end of each chapter and it's progressive, written for kids. But it's been endorsed by trauma specialists, educators, psychologists and and they've even said it's good for adults. But the interesting piece about this I'll show you just a couple real quick ones here is it has the neuroplasticity diagrams in it, oh yeah, and that also has little characters that I've made out of the neurochemicals, explaining what each character does and which ones we want to produce and which ones we want to scare away. Oh yeah. So instead of oxytocin we have oxy, and instead of dopamine we have dopey and and it's all we have court and on and on. So it's a fun, lively book 57 illustrations, 48 pages Anybody can read in 40 minutes flat, excellent. But it's also great to teach children the habits, because the last chapter is dedicated to the habits required To produce the right neurochemistry and the right wiring right absolutely.
Manya Chylinski:
Oh, thank you. There's some like really useful resources for folks who are looking to Rewire and reframe, or is it? It's reframe and rewire? So I will put a link to your website in the show notes so people can find your book. Is there any other way you would like people to get in touch with you?
Michelle Steffes:
Well, they can definitely do so through my website, ipvconsulting. com. There's a contact form in there that they can write me. I always check for those daily, so I would definitely get any messages that you have him to have questions, and I have a podcast reframe and rewire the same thing. If they have questions about my podcasts or suggestions of things to talk about, I'd be open. I'd be happy to have you on there if you want to be on there. And and then, last but not least, if I could make a quick mention, I have a give back program. With the Machine Inside Me book where I am, I've gotten lots of sponsorships and books and put these into the hands of kids at risk all over, and a lot of the Organizations have been organizations where therapy is required for children that are struggling With resiliency and and things of that nature.
Manya Chylinski:
Oh, excellent. Oh, thank you for doing that, Michelle. Thank you so much. It was lovely to chat with you and learn about your work and your thoughts about resiliency. Thank you.
Michelle Steffes:
Well, thank you, and if I can ever do anything else for you or anyone in your audience, I'd be happy to talk to them. So I appreciate the opportunity.
Manya Chylinski:
All right, bye everyone. We'll see you on the next episode. Thank you for listening. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did. So if you'd like to learn more about me, Manja Chylinski, I work with organizations to help understand how to create environments where people can thrive after difficult life experiences, and I do this through talks and consulting. I'm a survivor of mass violence and I use my experience to help leaders learn about resiliency, compassion and trauma-sensitive leadership to build strategies to enable teams to thrive and be engaged amidst difficulty and turmoil. If this is something you want to learn more about, visit my website, www. manyachylinski. com, or email me at manya@manyachylinski. com, or stop by my social media on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thanks so much.