E53 - Your Body is Your Brain ft. Dr. Amanda Blake Artwork

Red Beard Embodiment Podcast

Alex Greene is on a mission to bring the power of embodiment to people all around the world. This podcast focuses on how embodiment practices, trauma healing, and knowledge about human nervous system can help us find our ground, discover new sources of meaning, and create connection in an ever-changing world.

The deepest change is embodied change.

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Red Beard Embodiment Podcast

E53 - Your Body is Your Brain ft. Dr. Amanda Blake

July 12, 2024 • Alex Greene • Episode 53

In this episode, Alex Greene is joined by Dr. Amanda Blake, author of 'Your Body Is Your Brain' and a master in the field of somatic leadership coaching. Together, they take a deep look into the intersection of neurobiology, experiential learning, and leadership, unpacking how self-awareness and embodiment can be critical tools for personal transformation and effective leadership.

Dr. Blake shares her journey from studying human biology and psychology to developing her unique approach to coaching, emphasizing the impact of embodying positive qualities like joy, confidence, and ease. The conversation also explores her game-changing research on embodied self-awareness, its correlation with emotional and social intelligence, and the outstanding results from integrating body-oriented practices into coaching.

Listeners are invited to embark on a journey of personal growth and discovery, inspired by Dr. Blake's innovative work and insights.

Key Highlights:

00:00 Unlocking Joy and Confidence: The Power of Practice
00:32 A Deep Dive with Dr. Amanda Blake: Exploring Body and Brain Connections
04:51 Embarking on a Journey: From Biology to Leadership Coaching
23:10 The Genesis of 'Your Body is Your Brain': Bridging Skepticism and Science
28:31 The Scaffolding of 'Your Body is Your Brain': A Guide to Embodied Intelligence
40:02 Exploring Biobehavioral Blind Spots
43:34 The Intersection of Psychotherapy and Personal Growth
44:39 Introducing the Body Equals Brain Course
49:44 Deep Dive into Doctoral Research Findings
01:12:37 Future Aspirations and Closing Thoughts

Links and Resources:

Book: Your Body is Your Brain https://www.amazon.com/Your-Body-Brain-Intelligence-Relationships/dp/0999368109/
Website: https://embright.org/

0:00

All right. I am very, pleased and honored to be sitting down today with Dr. Amanda Blake. And, I know Mandy a little bit personally through a couple of intersections, but I mostly know her through some of her work, her book and, some of her online presence. but in a brief introduction, Dr. Amanda Blake is the author of Your Body is Your Brain and the creator of the popular body equals brain course on the neurobiology of experiential learning, by the way, that your body is your brain is an excellent primer in basically the neurobiology of being a human. So it's a book I've, recommended a lot. and, in addition to being an author and a teacher. she works with, as a coach and with works with progressive leaders worldwide to help them become their best selves, enjoy life more and make a bigger contribution. Mandy is a master somatic leadership coach and holds a degree in biology, human biology from Stanford university. And her PhD is in leadership and management from Case Western Reserve, where she is a, esteemed, Fetzer scholar and a research fellow at the Fowler Center for Business and as an agent of world benefit. so that's just a brief professional introduction and just as a short sort of a side where, I, Mandy, where you and I first connected was at a Zen leadership program. And I think you, were you on location in spring green, Wisconsin? Yeah, for, the, Institute of Zen Leadership that Ginny Whitelaw, runs and you came for a program. So that was where I think we first connected. I think so. And yeah, I, remember that finally. I think you're the person that introduced me to the TRE work and the, some of the kind of potential for trauma release from that perspective. for, I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with that, but, They'll def, they'll definitely be familiar with TRE. Yeah. that's been a pretty frequent theme through the podcast. Yeah. yeah. So since that meeting, that was probably around 2016 or so. That was before the publication of your, did your book come out in 2018 or 2017? 2018 and just recently in audio book. So good for listeners of podcasts. So finally, after many requests, we finally got it out in audios. I am really excited and proud about that. Yeah, that's awesome. Very cool. so in terms of what we're going to cover and talk about today, basically, I want to hear a little bit about what we're going to talk for sure about Mandy's book and her related, course, the body equals brain course. And something I'm excited to talk about is her, research. She did some very interesting doctoral research on the topic of embodied, self awareness and in a coaching context. So we're going to hear a little bit about that. I hope we can hear a bit about your personal story, that led you into this work. What else are we going to hope to talk about? also maybe just other, things about where you're headed. And I also would like to include some about your particular sort of lineage of coaching that you've been immersed in for a few decades, a lot through the Strozzi style of, somatic coaching, but perhaps there's other lineages that you, that would be good to bring in. we're going to talk a little bit about some of the distinctions between, psychotherapy and somatic coaching, some of the overlap and some of the different frameworks. yeah. So that's at least a little bit of what I hope we, we talk through today. It sounds great. And I'm so excited. Alex to have reconnected with you and have the opportunity to have this conversation. And I think it's going to be really rich. So we'll just see where we go. you let me know what you want to All right. Awesome. Here we go. Off we off. We journey. Yeah. So let's start with a little bit of, maybe just total, background. I saw a little bit in your website and, some of the, but I'd rather hear it fresh from you, you were interested in biology, you studied there. Give us a little bit of how you got so curious about the body and then later the connection of the body to, and the, to the human being. Yeah, I'll try and do it in a nutshell. It's a really in, in my experience of it, it seemed to take a really long time. Like I'm not a person who stepped into adulthood and knew what I wanted to do. And when did it, it, it really took a long time. And in some way, like from where I sit now, I can actually look all the way back into my childhood and go, Oh yeah, I used to read age appropriate books about pregnancy and childbirth when my mom was pregnant with my brother. Like I was into it. I was like, wow, the human body. So fascinating. So amazing. And I also used to read books for kids that were about psychology and feelings and, warm fuzzies and cold pricklies. Some people might remember TA for tots, right? Like the, I was just very interested, even as a child, in what is it? What does it mean to be human? And what is this thing called life that we're all floating around in as a five year old? That looks really different from how it looks today. But, it's an interest that's been with me all my life. And then the other thing I would say is I, partly because I grew up in a medical family, partly because I grew up as an athlete, I went into college thinking I would go into sports medicine. And when I discovered the human biology degree at Stanford, it's actually a really, I'm, I just, thank my stars every day that I stumbled into this amazing degree program that is incredibly interdisciplinary and really takes a look at the human being. the basic premise is that you can't understand humans without looking through the lens of both the natural and the social sciences. Um, coming up as this kid who was an athlete in a medical family. Interested in biology and psychology, even though I wouldn't have called it that. And I stumble into college and I'm like, wow, I can study those 2 things at once. And then I also did a lot around, in that same major around how culture and nature influence each other. It's fundamentally the same set of questions, but in communities of individuals rather than individuals, alone. And, so that was my academic background and I found that it equipped me for no specific job at all. And I was a little bit adrift. I, took a tour of duty in education, which was interesting to me. I did a lot of, teaching early in my career. I took a tour of duty in, software development because I grew up in Silicon Valley, so you have to for a little while, great, learned lots of good things about business. Ultimately I landed in, in coaching and, and that seemed like a pretty right fit, but I had reservations and uncertainties until I landed in a somatic approach to coaching and both from my experience as a learner and an experience, my experience as a person who was transforming myself through somatic practice through embodied practice through contextualized movement practices. That was very profound for me, even as an athlete, even as a meditator, even as a person who had done yoga for many years, I, I found that very transformative. And all of a sudden, and finally, after, a decade of searching, I was like, oh, this is where all my academic background Fits in, apply to, right? this major that I had such a good time in, it was so this is, the major that's about everything. I was like, great. I can apply all of that to what I'm doing here. Right, then I, finally settled in and found a place that I felt I could call home in my career. It didn't come, without some skepticism, I will say. So that's, a lot of the impetus for the book was on the one hand, my life was being transformed. I was being transformed by a variety of practices that I was in. On the other hand, I was like, this shouldn't work. Like why? Does, dropping my chin make me more confident in my professional life, right? Or why does feeling my feet on the floor actually make me, speak up more, readily than I used to. So it didn't make sense to me. I wanted to go figure it out. I had an academic background to go figure it out. Eventually that became a book, a course and so on. So that's, I told you I couldn't fit it in a nutshell, but that's the no, but as that's a, pretty good nutshell. I have a question because when I was reviewing your book, and, when, first of all, regarding the human biology degree. Yeah. I feel like I haven't heard that. biology, bio major, biomed, pre med, you hear about it, but in terms of human biology, I, it, I, hadn't heard that as a major, so that sounds unique in and of itself, but I think I saw somewhere in your book and acknowledgement to, Robert Sapolsky, which who is, who has been a hero of mine, a well known author, the book that I first, landed on was, what is it? Why zebras don't get ulcers. Is that the title? Yeah. But so, he's a Stanford professor. So did you work with him? Was that, was, he a, one of your, professors? Yeah. So Robert Sapolsky and a guy named Bill Durham taught the core program and they co taught it from, really looking at the, from the standpoint of like Sapolsky held down kind of the biology psychology piece, Durham held down the cultural anthropology and ecology piece, and we worked with both of them for a year. I, so I had a full year with, each of these really incredible thinkers. And then many years later, I actually went back, to talk to Robert Sapolsky. I emailed him and I said, look, I've stumbled my way into this really interesting niche field of embodied leadership coaching. And I really am thinking that I would like to do a PhD to study the intersection of neurobiology and somatic learning and leadership. And he said to, I was sitting there in his office saying, this is what I'm interested in. I can't quite, I haven't landed on a program. Do you have any recommendations? What do you think I should do? He said, don't bother with a PhD. Just go write the book. And I was like, Oh, okay. Permission granted. Hmm. And I was already thinking at that point about writing a book, but I felt I don't really have my driver's license yet. Like I shouldn't really, who am I to say anything about this? And he said, no, Go write the book. And so I, that gave me a lot of fuel for Your Body is Your Brain and doing a lot of the research around that. All of, I did all of that. Prior to entering a PhD program, an idea that I had abandoned right. until I met my now colleague and another really important mentor in my life, Richard Boyatzis, who's author of Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership and a number of other books about leadership. I was actually almost done writing Your Body is Your Brain. I had the whole manuscript printed out. He and I were both speaking at a conference and I got in touch with him beforehand. And I said, Hey, can I pull you aside at this conference, take you to coffee and, just show you what I'm working on. And you can tell me if I'm going to embarrass myself before I publish this. And he graciously said, yes, we sat down. We had. And absolutely, we just had a blast having a cup of coffee. I showed him the central model of the book. I had the manuscript in front of me, put it in front of him. He said, I think this looks fantastic. And by the way, you should come study with me. And I was like, okay, tell me more. And I wasn't aware of this, but there was a, there's a wonderful program at Case Western Reserve that, is specifically built for mid career. Doctoral students that want to learn to do research at a very high level. And I, he, asked me to come study with him and he was my, my committee chair on my dissertation really guided me through the process of the research that we'll probably talk about today. Great. Oh, very cool. just a last note on Sapolsky. So as much, so big hero, actually I'm wondering if you got to go to, Africa with him Oh, I wish. No. In an impressive part of his, of his, work. No, but he's on my shit list right now because, I have, I am not, I am not feeling the, the, his latest work, determined. I have some major, I have some resistance. I have enough, look, I have enough resistance even to the title that I haven't cracked it open yet. Okay. I'm sure you've at least read a, New York times article or something, but hotly debated, some, big contentions. But anyway, we'll, I'll, we'll, give him a, we'll see where that lands. We, we can, learn from our mentors without having to agree with everything they have to say. And I have tremendous respect for him. Tremendous respect for him. yeah. Wonderful. Very cool. okay. So I'm, so coming back to, you meandered a bit, post college, et cetera, and then somehow, co leadership coaching. So Matt, and it you had some skepticism, but somehow somatic coaching was speaking to you. You were surprised by some things, but you were compelled by it. and I'm guessing, although I don't know this for sure, I'm thinking that you did coaching and you, were in that world for a period of time. possibly a long period of time before culminating in the book. Can you, is that true? And can you share a little bit about a little bit more about what kind of pulled you into that world and what that phase of your career was like, Yeah, so I was, I was actually working in Silicon Valley at the time when I started to get into coaching and my work there wasn't, I wasn't like, actually building software, but I was working for many listeners may have heard of the company into it. They do lots of financial software and I was doing, business education for the people that used that software and building education, business education into that software. So it's already on this. I had, done some things in education for young people. I was in, I had done some, outdoor kind of leadership oriented training. I had done this business education. Work, and I was finding my way into coaching in the early 2000, so maybe 2001 and starting to feel like, oh, this, there are things here that make sense to me and for anyone who was around the coaching world at that time. were also, let's just say there were also things that didn't make sense to me that I felt were like, not representative of who I wanted to be as a professional in the world, but the field has really matured and it has become more evidence based. And I was always very interested in what's the evidence basis for coaching. How is it that when we're, helping people and supporting people, not necessarily in a psychotherapeutic healing oriented way, but a, but a growthful way that is, psychologically relevant, like, how do we know that it works? How do we know what works? How do we, so I was always very interested in the evidence basis. And, and I was probably doing that for at least five years before I, I, found, got exposed to more embodied ways of coaching. And that first happened through a place called Strozzi Institute, which I know you have heard of. I don't know if your listeners will have heard of Strozzi Institute. but yeah, give it a little bit of a, Yeah, so for me, I actually got to Strozzi Institute because somebody handed me one of Richard Strozzi Heckler's books, another wonderful mentor in my life, a man who took his experience in martial arts and his experience as a psychotherapist and really married the movement practices of martial arts with psychotherapy as a path of personal growth. And he got very interested in leadership and started taking that work into more and more leadership spaces. So I started to intersect with that through a book that someone gave me. I came into that world, I did, quite a bit of study and work at Strozzi Institute for a period of time. And since then I've, also had many other teachers and mentors, so done lots of work with. Ginny Whitelove Institute for Zen Leadership, who you have mentioned already and who you and I both know, Wendy Palmer, who, and until her recent passing ran an organization called Leadership Embodiment. When, so Wendy and her daughter Tiffany have brought a lot of really wonderful learning and lessons into my life. Arawana Hayashi, who I have followed a little bit less, and have had less exposure to just due to time, but I love her marriage of theater and meditation. And so there, there've been a number of places and then, of course, there's the whole world of, somatic experiencing and Hakomi and, the sensory motor psychotherapy, I play less there because I'm not a psychotherapist and I've really wanted to draw the line pretty clearly for myself in terms of what I offer that this is about leadership development. This is about coaching. This is about present and future moment, looking and so I haven't I've been very explicit about, not getting trained in domains that I don't specifically work in, but having said that, you can see behind me, listeners won't be able to, but like I've got to, if it's been written down and it's about somatics and embodiment, it is on that bookshelf behind me, I've read a lot of Peter Levine. I've heard him speak places. I wouldn't say that he's been a close teacher of mine, but I've benefited from so much of the work and exploration that he's done. That's a Vandercock and so on. Wonderful. in that phase, so I'm, hearing the, mentors and, within the embodied coaching world and some and leadership development world, what was your practice like at that time? Were you, more of a, were you a one on one sort of coach? Were you a person who worked with teams? did you, what was your application, prior to becoming an author and an educator and maybe you're still doing a lot of coaching now, I'm not sure, but who was you, but before the book, who were you serving? Yeah. I do a smaller amount of coaching now and a lot more teaching, but, at the time I was doing a lot of one on one coaching. Mostly with people who were in positions of leadership inside of organizations that were trying to do something to do with, ecological sustainability, so Nike has a big ecological sustainability program. I worked with some of the people there, at that time I, Worked with some nonprofits that were in that space, and it was a mix. I would say, primarily 1 on 1 coaching and some team training more than team coaching, but team training around using embodied practice around. How do you find resilience? How do you be. smarter in an embodied way in difficult conversations. How do you, stand up for what your team might need at work, for example. So I was doing a lot of that kind of work when I was, when I was formulating the ideas for the book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, very cool. So then, so I guess then coming into the book itself, you, shared a bit about, getting the, permission, not that you necessarily needed it, but you got that permission, or that nudge from Robert Sapolsky, but, what were some of the, what were some of the pieces coming together? it sounded like, your own curiosity around, what's known, what's the evidence base for these practices that you've been a part of? So that sounds like one thread, but what are the different forces that were coming together that made you feel like you wanted to put this project together? I think there were a few different things. So one was. Yes, my own curiosity, but also a need to answer my own skepticism, right? The intellectual part of me that was hanging back and going, okay, I've had an experience that this makes a difference in my life, but I also don't buy it. there was a part of me that's this is all a bunch of woo, can I curse on your podcast? All a bunch of woo bullshit, right? it is, I don't buy it. And there was a significant chunk of me that was I'm going to say intellectually snobbish, right? An intellectual snob that was like, but none of this makes any sense. So I really wanted to figure that out for myself. that was one driving, I would say, almost hunger or thirst Okay. at the same time, like in very much in parallel with that, because I was getting, I was changing as a result of engaging in regular embodied, I would say, leadership oriented practice and the ways that I was changing were, really profound, right? I was, able to in workplace situations, speak up when I would have previously stayed quiet. And I could see that happen over a period of months with a specific individual where I was staying quiet. And I learned to speak up, similar in my intimate partnering relationships where I was able to speak up, in places where I would have normally stayed quiet. I was able to take risks on behalf of what I care about more. So whether that, again, is like speaking up at some. Let's call it a networking event or, or, take a swing from a business standpoint. Like I'm going to try something that I haven't tried before. So there were a number of ways where I got better at the things that were important to me in life. And while that was going on, I kept just feeling like people don't know this is available to them. And if they're anything like me, they're going to call bullshit before they even get a chance to try it out or to experience it or to see what's going on. So I needed to answer like my own, skeptical intellect, but I also knew there are a lot of other people out there like me that also are, They need a bridge. they need a bridge to bring them into this world. there's a trustworthy bridge, then they're willing to walk across it and go, what's over here? And I, also knew from my own experience and watching with my own clients, like for anyone who's open enough to put themselves in the experience, usually their minds are blown. Usually they're like, Whoa, I had no idea that I could get better at. X, Y, Z, right? Or, wow, I had no idea I was holding myself back in the following ways. And so I wanted people to have that. I wanted people to have the gifts that I had received. And so there was this combination of I need to answer this question myself. I think if I answer it, it will be helpful to other people. Let me go find the answers. I love that. okay. So let's talk about the scaffolding of the book itself a little bit. So if you're, if, it was, if one way to look at the book is it's the book you would have wanted to read. Maybe that's a way to think about it, to give a framework that was evidence based, made You know, had an explanatory framework for, these, embodied practices that were showing up in these settings. let's, yeah, just in broad strokes, how do you, how, what's the layout of the book? And, there's a few details I want to touch upon, but, let's just start with the, overview of it. Yeah, so I start the book really with an exploration of, what is it, what are we even talking about here? what is embodiment? What, how, does it work? How is this a form of our intelligence? And the first few chapters go through a story, a pretty dramatic story, actually, of someone making significant body change in their life. And then I talk about the neurobiology behind that. So how we develop what I call bio behavioral blind spots that get us stuck in habits and behaviors that actually don't get us where we want to be. What we want, whatever, fill in the blank. And so how we get in our own way, how we can get out of our own way by seeing those bio behavioral blind spots and starting to shift them and then looking at just some really basic neurobiology head to toe where, A little bit about how learning happens a little bit about different centers of intelligence. And then the bulk of the book is really about the process. So that's the beginning that sets us up. And then the remainder of the book really talks about the process of I take different stories. of many people, a few of them are from my clients, many of them are not my clients. There are people who've had these kinds of learnings and experiences and whose lives have been transformed by them. And I interviewed tons of people for the book. There's, maybe 16 or 18 really major stories in there. And I tell these stories about how people came to embody different aspects of their of emotional and social intelligence. And I chose that framework because I kept prior to writing the book, I kept seeing themes over and over about what, what was developing in me, in my colleagues, in my clients, right? And the themes that I kept seeing were things that fell into the description of emotional and social intelligence. Some listeners may know this, that our capacity for emotional and social intelligence, not only does it just improve our lives and make our lives better. It is one of the key markers of what sets apart outstanding leaders from average. What sets apart leaders who followers will say, I would work for that person again. I loved working for that person, and so I kept seeing these themes. They seemed really related and, I started to look more carefully at, research that tied or, related embodied learning to the development of emotional and social intelligence up until that point, most, I'll call it ESI for short. Most ESI training is, someone talking at the front of a room with a bunch of PowerPoint slides. And that actually, it can make a difference. There's research that shows like it's a learnable set of skills and capacities, right. But since the research I've done, it's clear it, that makes a limited difference. It's not nearly as much as. as we would ideally love to see. and so anyway, we were on how's the book yeah. That's how the book is shaped. and scaffolded. yeah. let me say one other thing about that too, which is the, there's a primary set of concepts in the book that I lay out about the difference between the neurobiological difference between conceptual self and self awareness and embodied self awareness, and we can distinguish those neurobiologically. We understand they happen differently in the body and the brain. Both involve the brain in our head and the neuromusculature of our body. But conceptual self awareness, It actually relies on different neuroanatomy than embodied self awareness and embodied self awareness is a fundament we've now discovered since publishing the book, it's a very fundamental underlying capacity that can increase all the skills of emotional and social intelligence when it's developed. So I'll just quickly define that term. Embodied self awareness is fundamentally about present moment, right now, attention, nonjudgmental attention. That's a little bit like a mindfulness orientation to sensation, movement, and emotion. Sensationally happens right now in the present moment. We can't actually feel it in the past or in the future. And so that process of embodied self awareness coming present to our felt sense experience in the moment, turns out it has just, it's just, a wealth of benefits. And I set out to write a book about leadership, but I say in the introduction, I failed because, although there are many leadership examples in the book, the truth is we take our bodies with us wherever we go. So it, this also affects our parenting and this also affects our, studying in school if we're students and this also affects, it just affects how we show up everywhere. Yeah, that was one of the things that stood out to me is that, as I reread it and when, in preparation for this call, I reread basically the first third and I was really struck again by how you tee things up with that, very powerful story of, of, Brian, Fipinger, one example of somebody who had a, through somatic practices had a very, transformative experience related to his own, history with abuse and, things like that. And, but, and, what really struck me was how, on the one hand you are. Yeah. You wrote a book about, a very fundamentally human experience, something that's, definitely transcends any one activity like leadership or parenting, or, it's a human thing. and then you develop it into a framework, a growth model and, a framework for growth. And, I think the other thing that sort of stood out to me was on, on one level using, Brian's, that introductory piece, from one perspective. he went through a big shift and change and you could look at, you could look at some of what happened. as, if he had a different life trajectory, he might have, he might never have worked through that content. He could have worked through it with a psychotherapist, maybe even a somatic, maybe a Hakomi or a sensory motorist or somatic experiencing psychotherapist might've been a different channel from which, for him to, create some, have some major shifts around his trauma history specifically, but what struck me in sort of your work is that it's really positioned within this, idea of, what is human growth look like? And you're speaking to it right now around, social and emotional, intelligent, intelligence, and how do these qualities start to emerge and I think, again, coming back to Brian, something lucky for him is that, he had this big experience and it wasn't, and then it was also embedded in a context around where he was heading in life and capacities. he was developing. And sometimes when I think about coaching and psychotherapy is phenomenal at the healing side of work. That's what it's, that's what it's all about. Built around and it's sometimes very growth oriented as well. I think most psychotherapists would agree to that, but it's not necessarily the explicit emphasis about where is somebody going, apart from healing at a psycho emotional level. Where's that leading a person? But anyway, there was something about the, arc of how you put things together that made that really clear to me. Oh, I'm, glad. I hesitated to, I really asked myself, do I want to Include a book, a story about trauma in the book. and do I want to start with that? Because this is actually not a book about trauma and it's not a book about trauma healing. Although Brian, both through a process of somatic coaching, but also, with the support of many other flavors of help and advisors, got through some very harrowing history in his own life. And, And his, and for him, his pathway into it happened to be through a discovery of somatic coaching with the leadership orientation. So there's, there are these many different pathways. And 1 of the reasons that I used, Brian's story right in the beginning, even though I was a little hesitant to include a story about trauma is because his story is such a clear illustration. Of how, when we, we shift ourselves from the inside in an embodied way, we actually literally see new possibilities. And in Brian's case, it happens that he recovered from, reversed a lifetime of colorblindness. So he had seen, you know this, but I'm just saying for listeners who have. Of like a lifetime of seeing in black and white, which is actually a very rare form of colorblindness. and, that was reversed through embodied practice. He actually, all at once. All of a sudden, suddenly could see color when he couldn't before. And that sounds absolutely bizarre and like medically impossible, but there is such a thing as acquired color deficiency. That's what Brian had. And, his color vision was completely restored to him. And the reason that I wanted to start with that story was, is twofold. One is I talk about these bio behavioral blind spots and they are literally blind spots. We don't know we're doing That's what I liked about it too. You, picked the most, dramatic example, but, useful because then that concept, it's a very dramatic example of a biobehavioral blind spot, but it also then really, it makes you ask the question. Okay. all what are my bio behavioral blind spots and what are other examples? And so I really liked that. I liked that choice. I'd say a bold choice 'cause it's such a strong story, but I think it then set up where you were going really well. I think so because the reality is, in Brian's particular case, he was very forthcoming about the, difficulties in his childhood, the difficulties with his first marriage and really his, he had this color blindness, but his bio behavioral blind spot was actually about intimacy. It was about whether intimacy was worthwhile. It was about whether intimacy was, possible. It was about whether intimacy had held any interest to him. And he had developed a bio behavioral blind spot around intimacy with other human beings, where, as he describes it, I never let anyone in past the foyer. No one ever really knew the real me and I wasn't going to let them cause that was risky. That was dangerous. And really, wise biobehavioral choice, which we all make wise biobehavioral choices in a very automatic, non conscious way. And, and, it's not because we're all traumatized actually don't buy into this current fashion of, sort of every, discomfort and slight is a source of trauma. I think that's, not helpful for people who have experienced severe life circumstances, nor is it helpful for the, for those who have experienced minor life circumstances who really are capable of, we're all capable actually of a great deal of resilience, right? so I don't really buy into that, approach. But on the other hand, we do all have biologically embedded habits of responsiveness to life that will set up blind spots for us. And when we get to see what those are, and we discover them in part, we discover them in part by working with people who know how to help us see them. But when we get to see what those are, and they're revealed to us for the very first time, it's Oh, I didn't know that I held my jaw every time I'm impatient with my spouse. But it turns out that if I relax my jaw and relax my eyes, I can actually just be a little kinder in those moments of impatience. It doesn't necessarily change my spouse's behavior. It doesn't necessarily change my assessment of what they're doing, but boy, can I be more relaxed in that situation? And that really changes the dynamic between us in a really positive way, right? Just by relaxing my jaw and softening my eyes in a moment where I otherwise would have tensed up. Right. so we all have these biobehavioral blind spots and when we can see them, and then choose to do something different about them. That's where that growth full path is. That's where that orientation towards growth and development is. I know you wanted to talk maybe a little bit about where's the overlap with psychotherapy and maybe I've said about that. I'm not sure, but I want to pause here and see Yeah, no, I think, we've I think we mapped that a bit. yeah, I think we mapped that. Yeah. I think what I would say is that the work that I do at any rate, it's not trauma healing work. Trauma could actually be healed along the way, but that's not the emphasis or the orientation. The orientation is where are you headed in life, in your career, and what did, what is it that you're envisioning, hoping for, building towards? And then how do you unfold into the person that is fulfilling on that dream, that is bringing that vision to reality, that is achieving those goals. And it is this process of unfolding and part of that is revealing these blind spots and finding a different way to move with them. Awesome. Can we talk a little bit about, how you took the content and the framework laid out in the book? how do people can read your book and they can learn a ton. if they then work with you, through, your course, Body equals brain. what's that how long is it? what's, what's it like to take the actual course with you? Yeah. that's actually undergoing a lot of change. So the story of the course was actually born out of the writing of the book. And I was writing this book and I just thought, it's, stupid to just write in my own little, cave and then throw something into the world. I want to know if this is like landing with resonating? Is it useful? Yeah. So I started actually, but, and plus I had all these colleagues who knew I was writing this book and they're like, I need your book. Can you get it faster? And I said, no, I'm trying, but I can tell you about it. And so I just convened a series of sessions where I told people, at first, just a very small group of colleagues. This is what I'm, this, these are the things that I'm putting together. This is what I'm finding. These research studies seem to support this. And it was through their questions that I refined my own thinking about what I was writing. And so the course and the book developed hand in hand. They do not exactly mirror one another. One of the things that I can do in the program that I can't do on the page is actually walk people through embodied practices, right? It just doesn't lend itself to the page very well I have a ton of books again behind me on the shelf that like write out various practice. You can't do yeah, no, I know. I know that they're always in a different color. Those exercise sections. Yeah. Yeah, and it's of the better books, they tell you seriously, stop right now and actually do this, Right and look no shade because it helps to have those things written down It helps to see it on the page, but you it's just It's a whole different experience to be in community with people where you're all trying it on at once. You can talk about it. You can ask questions. So the course has a lot more of that, but the course has actually been, in, a little bit of a hibernation state. The last couple of years, I'm working on a number of updates I originally put the course together, that was more than 10 years ago, right? And there's new research, there's new learning. There are things that, I wrote in the book that never got included in the course. There are things that are in the course that were never in the book. So I'm, I'm, currently in the process of updating that program, and it's going to look a little different in the future, and go more in depth in some areas, and some of the things that you can easily get from the book, I might just direct people to the book, right? The part of the course is read this chapter, watch this video, we'll come talk about it. Okay, so you asked like nuts and bolts details. I'll tell you what it was. it was a six month program where we meet every two weeks and in the off weeks you're studying something So there is something to read watch or learn and then in the weeks where we meet We come together as a community for practice and question and answer and all of that's virtual It's actually always been taught virtually and, power user of zoom back in, 2015 or 16 or something, right? I don't remember when I started using zoom, but way pre pandemic and, And, I, think I've really enjoyed bringing people together to explore this territory together. The way the course will probably look going forward is that there will be certain parts of it that really lend themselves well to self study that will be carved out for people to do on their own. Because one of the things that has been really tough is to have people come to me and be like, I want to take your course. And I'm like, Great. It'll be ready again in a year. I run it once a year. So people have to wait and wait. So I've, really been asked over and over. can you make something that I can just at least start with right now while I'm hungry for this? So I'm developing that and then there'll be another piece of the course. That's probably always taught, some in some relationship with me and it will, evolve. So stay tuned and for anyone who's listening and going, Oh, I'm interested in that, stay tuned to come over to the Embright website, sign yourself up and say, I want to know when the updates are ready. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. okay. So let's go, let's, I want to hear about your doctoral research, because you gave me the teaser version when we did our prep meeting. And since then I've been, that was, maybe a month ago, I've been thinking about that. so I'm hungry to hear a little bit more. So could you, If you're ready to pivot, could we talk about what you ended up studying, in your research and dissertation, tell us about it. And then I want to talk about your findings, so to speak. yeah, sure. Okay. Great. it's not, it's really, Alex, it's not even that much of a pivot because when I, met Richard and he was like, come study with me, the whole conversation was, I have all the theoretical lens, right? That your body is your brain. I laid out the theoretical case for the idea that your body is your brain, that you actually think with your whole cell. And what I didn't have was empirical data that said everything I wrote about. So I made the extremely risky move, which at times resulted in like a lot of hair pulling and one very scary night where I got the statistics completely backwards. And I was like, wow, I just tanked my whole career by through bad math, which is actually my, my downfall, yeah. bad math almost tanked my whole career. Then I got some help from someone who understands statistics better than I do. And he was like, Oh, you did this backwards. if you turn it around and do it the Things are perfectly correlated. turns out actually not only are they perfectly correlated, they're incredibly strong results. And, even though I, I went into the program. so I feel really strongly, like having a scientific mindset means having an open mind, having intellectual humility, being willing to be challenged, being willing to overturn, being willing to be wrong to, and to be wrong publicly and to overturn what you've said before. And so I went into this program and I frankly, I really laid my whole career on the line and it was, It was a scary thing to do, and it turns out a very empowering thing to do, because in the end, the results actually astonished even me. And I went in, with an open mind, but with a point of view. I had just written a whole book. I had an idea about what was going on. sure. let me just cut to the chase, tell you some results. but also how you framed it because or like the question that you asked. I think, didn't you you defined the term, embodied self awareness that was, so, yeah, layout the structure of the, question that was being posed. there were multiple questions, because I actually conducted multiple Okay. Okay. the, I actually started with a, people may have heard of grounded theory research because people will be familiar with Brene Brown. That's the kind of research she does. I didn't quite do grounded theory, but very, a very similar related method where, I was just talking to people who had either experienced a lot of in depth embodied training or who hadn't. And all of these people were coaches. And the reason I chose to look at coaches, apart from the fact that I'm a coach and I have access to that community of people, we talked about looking at a number of different possible populations. And I ultimately felt like it was most interesting to look at coaches because There's a large population of coaches that have been trained in conversational methods of coaching that don't have any experiential or embodied training at all. And there's also a fairly substantial population of coaches that have been trained in embodied methods. And that made it possible for me to compare that in a way that's basically apples to apples instead of apples to oranges. if I had done let's compare leaders to yoga teachers. That's not actually going to tell us anything that useful. So these people all had something really important in common, but they had one major difference, which was in their training. And so I started by talking to people. I just, asked a lot of open ended questions and there, I was just trying to understand the relationship between embodied self awareness and some of these. common emotional and social intelligence competencies. And then I went, I took what I learned from that research and I turned it into a survey where I could, ask a much more pointed set of questions. So in the first case, very open ended questions in the second case, very specific, using very specific, very well validated scales and measures, things like resilience, embodied self awareness, capacity for, flourishing and thriving ways of managing conflict, right? All of these are not scales that I developed, but research tools that other researchers have developed that I pulled together and said, okay, if we could get a bunch of. Similarly, to answer these questions and then statistically divided up between how did the folks that have conversational coach training answer? How did the folks that have body oriented coach training answer? What does that tell us? in that case, I was looking actually for 2 different things I was looking for, Do we have any evidence? Is there any, reasonable correlation between the development of embodied self awareness and the development of these emotional and social? Emergent, emotional. Yeah. And I was really looking to put points on the board statistically that would tell us yes to this, no to that and so on. And then, I was also asking another question, which is what actually develops embodied self awareness? Cause there's so many ways that we can go about this and we can do hands on body work. We can do psychotherapy, we can do, lots of, there are lots of like dance Yoga, dance, martial arts. yoga, martial arts, meditation. So I studied a number of those things alongside what is the impact of body oriented coaching. Okay. So let's talk about results. we had over 500, I think ultimately about 700, coaches respond to the survey. So that's a pretty decent sample size on enormous, but, way bigger than small and, the ultimate, outcome of looking across, I think we had to, throw away some incomplete answers, but we had maybe five to 600 people in total that we were looking at. And we saw that as embodied self awareness grew, as embodied self awareness rose, there were intra and inter personal competencies that came along with that inside the self. We saw flourishing grow. We saw resilience and adaptability grow. So these are just personal competencies. Flourishing is not an emotional and social intelligence competency, but it's something that I've seen over and over my practice. And it came up a lot in the more open ended research included that. All of those things grow at, above a 45 percent rate. And just to give you an idea, like an average effect size in social psychology and, psychology in general is around 20%. you'd be doing well, if you saw 20%, change. Yep. these are really big correlations, big effect size. You grow embodied self awareness. You grow a bunch of internal capacities and we think by extension that a number of other emotional and social intelligence capacities come along. The intra, the relational, the, I'm sorry, the interpersonal outcomes, there were 3 specific things that I studied, empathy, connectedness. And conflict management again, all of those came along with, with growth and embodied self awareness. Connectedness was the lowest that was at about, 20 percent you raise your, you double your embodied self awareness. Maybe 20 percent more connectedness. I actually think that's a function that lower number is a function of the measure we use. So I'm interested to redo that and explore that a little more deeply. But again, empathy and conflict management both grew at rates of about 35, 40%. So again, really high. so pretty unusually strong results. Unusually strong results. Then the other thing that, that, we found that was, something that I, a little bit suspected based on my own experience, but still was wildly surprised by the numbers and the magnitude. So I was looking at in research terms, what are the antecedents to embodied self awareness? What produces it? We looked at mindfulness, we looked at yoga, we looked at martial arts, we looked at hands on bodywork, we looked at dance, and we looked at embodied coaching. The only three of those that had an effect were, mindfulness, yoga, and bodywork, and they were all right in the same range. They were all just about, at a 4 percent relationship, meaning you do yoga at average levels of practice. Let's say you go to one yoga class a week. This is different maybe from being a yoga teacher, although we had some of those people in the study. At average levels of practice, one yoga class a week, maybe two yoga classes a week, you'll boost your embodied self awareness by about 4%. Okay. Not nothing. And there are a lot of confounding factors that will affect our capacity for embodied self awareness, genetics, culture, what culture you come from, but lots and lots of things. So it's not bad, actually 4%. And of course we know there's like tons of research about mindfulness, about yoga, about the very, Significant effects. positive effects that those kinds of practices have. So if you do that, keep doing that. It's wonderful. In terms of effects on embodied self awareness, in other words, your ability to, in the present moment, Right. while you're doing something else, pay non judgmental attention to sensation, movement, and emotion. Body oriented coaching blew the others out of the water. It was four times as much. So we, wound up now there's a threshold there, which is you actually need to be in it for a while. You need to put yourself into a minimum of 50 hours of training. that's maybe a week long workshop, right? But you put yourself into a minimum of 50 hours of training and all of a sudden at that point, there's a threshold where you start to see, 12%, 13%, 14%, 15 percent impact on growing embodied self awareness and it can, the, trajectory continues to go up the more time you spend in that kind of learning and practice. And surely that's true as well, although we didn't see it as much in the other elements that, the other practices that we studied, that if you went really deep and really long, you would get more of an effect. It just makes sense that would be true. The reason I speculate, and this is a hypothesis, it's not something that we have legs for yet. I, I would hypothesize that the reason the body oriented coach training is or body oriented coaching is so powerfully effective at developing embodied self awareness is because it's contextualized. So in the West, in a really deliberate and I think wise attempt to make some of these very valuable, practices that come from the Eastern world more palatable for the Western system to digest, they were extracted from their, deep spiritual context, right? Deep lineages of this is about how you become a better person. And it became much more in a Western context about performance or about relaxation or right. It really took on a little bit of a different flavor. Body oriented coaching will keep that contextualization and amplify it because fundamentally coaching is about how do you be the person you want to be in your life? How do you. Get what you want to get out of life. How do if you, if it's relationship coaching or career coaching or health coaching or parenting coaching, all of it is fundamentally about like, how do I get better about the things that matter to me in my life? And so if that's your starting point and you bring experiential embodied learning into that, it makes sense that if you're doing that in a way that helps you shift your attention to sensation, movement, and emotion, There'll be a bigger impact and then consequently a bigger impact on all of those outcomes that I spoke about like flourishing and resilience and conflict management and so on. Yeah. No, I love that. To me, you're, that explanation really resonates with me. both as a somatic coach, but also somebody who's done a lot of those other practices as well, meditation and martial arts and, to me, it's, really, so, that explanation rings true in the sense of, let's say you develop some. Some highly refined, application of embodiment in a, specific context. Let's say it could be anything. It could be martial arts, but it could be basketball. It could be swimming. it could be, doing certain yoga poses. And if And so through a, through training, you might well develop, much higher degree of capacity in that particular activity. But unless there's some work to, bridging between, okay, so, your you know what happens when you're in a, like, what we talk about in Zen leadership training. We, in Jenny's work, we talk a little bit about the concept of Kamae. Kamae means is readiness, is a readiness posture, all right. So if you just do martial arts and you learn Kamae or you learn readiness, probably you learn it pretty well. The more experience that you have in that situation, but unless there's some, context around, is there something within that can also apply when you're conversing with your spouse, when you're, at a job interview or conducting a job interview? the skill in the one domain easily might not transfer. You could just, you are in your other habits when you're in a work setting or something like that. And so that your explanation makes a lot of sense to me because a coaching environment is really all about building self awareness, not only embodied self awareness, although that is excellent. But then the self awareness to, all right, how is that relevant? Where else might that show up? What are some areas where that's not showing up? Why isn't it? What would make that be able to, what would, move the needle on that? So I, wonder if that explicit contextualization is exactly what makes, gives it that, that higher efficacy that you're talking about. I strongly suspect that's the case. And like I said, I think more research needs to be done before I feel like we put a pin in that, but I strongly suspect that's the case. And I would say so much of my work has to do with helping people find a place in their life where, I can just think of a variety of qualities that clients have, come to me wanting more of. Why I want to be more visible at work, or I want to feel more confident I'm experiencing some imposter syndrome, or I want to be able to set boundaries, or I want to have more delight in my life, or I want to, experience more ease. All of these things, like 90 percent of what I don't know if that's true. I fold that number out of thin air, but it just feels like the vast majority of what I do is help people go, where in your life do you have ease or confidence or patience or joy? What does that feel like? What's the experience of that? Okay, how do you apply that experience? How do you bring that experience? How do you practice a posture of joy, a facial expression of joy, the breath of joy, or, of ease or of confidence and how do you practice that when you don't need it? And then you get up on the stage and you're speaking to 5000 people and that confidence is there. It's available to you. It is embodied. It is something that is easily accessible to you. It emanates from you. It is. You, what you are being when we look at the definition of what does it mean to embody? It's an expression of, or, yeah, like in a characteristic expression of, or a tangible manifestation of that's what it means to embody. So how do we become the tangible manifestation of Compassion, connectedness. compassion, right? And so much of what I do is helping people find. Oh, I, do have that experience somewhere in my life over here. I know what that feels like. Let me practice until it becomes second nature for this other domain where it's not very available to me Yeah, yet. Not very available to me yet, right? And then you get to, and then you can see, maybe, I hope, with, for people who've hung with us and listened this far, you can start to hear, like, how I said at the outset, this was life changing for me, and I think it can be life changing for other people. this is the book. That's how. totally. All right. So I have one question. Just this is maybe listeners already understood this, but I don't, so just coming back to the years, five to 700 people sort of sample. So I love hearing how you, set that up. And then, you looked at those measures and, and it sounds like what you correlated was, people who had developed, you measured in some way embodied the development of the increase of embodied self awareness and then that, and then showed that with an increases of embodied self awareness, there are, increases of these on across these other metrics as well. But my question is is the reason you chose, coaches that had embodiment and not, and, ones that had not had embodiment training, were you, was your study providing the, the somatic coaching that was leading to the, increase in embodied self awareness, or were you just looking at two groups and you were evaluating to what extent they had already cultivated that embodied self awareness or not through their, Yeah, it was not an intervention study. It was a survey study. And, and so no, it's some of those people are people who have been through my particular courses, they may also have done other things. And we measure, what are all, where did you get your primary coach training? How much time did you spend, how would you rate the level of kind of conceptual to embodied? Orientation of that training. So we looked very carefully at where people had already been trained and some of them had been trained with me, but the purpose was not to measure a particular style of intervention? No, it was, I actually really wanted to stay away from a particular style of intervention because I don't think that's as generalizable to wider, options, right? So if we understand what is it that produces embodied self awareness, probably it has something to do with contextualizing and rooting this embodied experiential, experience. Behavioral learning in what you care about and where you want to go in life. Like we think that's what does it. that's much more powerful than saying you have to go study with this one, school this. You got to do this technique. so I there are many places where as right and as your listeners will know where you can develop these skills and go to the one that draws you we're not all gonna, we're not all gonna, we don't all taste flavors the same. We don't all see color the Yeah. We don't all see about Brian Kempinger, right? go, you gotta go to the place that, that really draws you, that's wonderful. Okay. I want to, end our conversation. If you're, if you still have energy for it, just to ask a question I often do at the end, which is a little bit like, you've talked about what's where you're up to the present tense and what's alive. And I'm always curious about, so where are you, headed? What's, next? What's coming down the pipeline. What's just curious if there's anything you can share about, upcoming aspirations or, intentions or anything like that. Yep. let me share things that I can things that I know I can deliver on and things that are more aspirational so so one of the things that I'm working on that I'm actually super excited about and Have had a wonderful group of people helping me test this over the last nine months or so I'm writing another book. That is a companion to your body as your brain is fundamentally about a customizable template where you can develop your own practice. In a sense, it's a little bit codifying some of what, I do in my coaching practice and making it again, like more accessible to someone who can just off the shelf, do something. It is not What we were talking about before, which is do, step one and then step two and then step three, and then come back, and move your arm like this and then come back to the page and read what you're supposed to do next. It's not that it really is. It really is much more about, finding the, quality that's going to make the biggest difference in your life, confidence, patience, compassion, joy, et cetera. And just discovering a variety of ways that you can practice that in an embodied, way. anyway, it's the practice companion to your body is your brain. I'm super excited about it. I'm really excited to share. the whole thing, it probably won't be ready for another year or two. So people's interest is piqued stick around, also coming down the pike in a much more aspirational way. And much less clear about a specific, what's going to come out of this. I, i, when I founded in bright, when I started even my original coaching practice, I was mostly interested in working with leaders who were working in ecological and social change spaces, trying to build a better world, right? And there's a, the, entire framework of the book, your body is your brain is built around the idea of becoming your best self in order that you might build a better world. And I'm in a transition point having finalized my PhD, I'm now working on this companion book, but I'm also transitioning from having really focused a lot on the become your best self part and wanting to focus more and finding my own interest, energy, curiosity, drawn a lot more into the build a better world part. And what are some of the very specific ways, that embodiment has a contribution to make an embodied leadership development has a contribution to make to people who are working, for example, to mitigate climate change to work on conservation and biodiversity to work in, depolarizing the, very vituperous and hateful conversations that we seem to be in as a society. There are some really important things. These are not the only important things that the world needs, but really important things that I particularly am drawn to that I am rooted in from way back in my undergraduate education, that have been themes for me in my life that I, that haven't gotten their fullest expression yet. And so I've got a lot of ideas, cooking and some writing going on and, Scheming in the background. I'm really excited to, To play more in that space as time goes on. Nice. I like, I'm glad to hear about that. yeah, maybe we're, maybe this is a good place for, completion in terms of, I guess maybe a closing comment or I guess closing update. You mentioned at the beginning that I think, is it the audio book version of, your body's your brain that either just came out or is about to come out or what's the story there? It ca it came out several months ago, maybe about six months ago or so now. And, yeah, I'm, so proud of it. My sister-in-Law is an award-winning voiceover artist. She read the book, and she did such a good job that I. Who wrote the book, have read the book approximately 17 million times. And frankly, I'm so bored of all those words. Like I've seen them pass in front of my eyes more times than I care to count. And I listened to her read it because of course I had to do all the editing. And, first of all, she did a fantastic job. There wasn't much editing. But I was riveted. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is so good. Like I'm, I was actively listening and I didn't expect that because, for, if you haven't written a book, you don't know this world, but you get to a point where you're no longer doing the big picture idea that you are literally pulling grass with tweezers, right, right? So I've been in it at that level of depth. And even so she was able to make it come alive for me. I love the audiobook. I'm so happy and proud, and I love that I got to collaborate with her on it, Oh, that's awesome. Very cool. Was there anything else we should include just in terms of closing comments? just if there are people who, absolutely check out the book, but if you want to find me in my online home, that's Embright. org. E M B R I G H T, dot org. Sometimes I spell that so fast I don't even know what I'm saying. Embright! Embrighten your, yourself! You brighten your world. yeah, and we'll put that, we'll put all the various links, in the show notes, in the various places that this podcast goes out. but, Mandy, thank you so much. This was a rich and wonderful conversation. Yeah, Alex, thank you for inviting me on. This has been a blast. really enjoyed reconnecting with you. And, also just appreciate your depth and your humor and the questions that you asked. So thank you. This is really fun. Great. Thank you.