Using sensation to keep yourself calm - with Brian Trzaskos of Somatic Coaching Academy

#214: Brian Trzaskos has over 30 years of experience as a physical therapist and movement educator, and is a recognised expert in training health and wellness leaders.  He explains the benefits of somatic coaching, how subconscious behaviours control you, and how to control the sensations in your body. 

What you’ll learn

• [01:42] What somatic coaching involves. 
• [03:51] The interconnection of the mind and body. 
• [04:58] The bodily functions that the brain controls unconsciously. 
• [06:20] The different areas somatic coaching encompasses. 
• [08:43] The difference between emotions and sensations. 
• [10:09] Why you need to address the subconscious. 
• [12:00] How to address the subconscious behaviours that are holding you back. 
• [14:00] The different stages of altering your sensory state. 
• [15:45] How to use somatic practices to overcome public speaking anxiety. 
• [20:30] How to change and control the sensations in your body. 
• [23:23] The sensory base involved with public speaking and how to change how you feel when talking in public. 
• [27:35] The unconscious sensory information we experience throughout the day. 
• [28:49] The benefits of body scanning and how to redirect your attention to change your experience. 
• [30:24] How to recenter yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed. 
• [32:14] How to identify what state you’re in. 
• [34:33] Actionable techniques to alter an undesirable sensation you’re experiencing.

Resources mentioned in this episode
Please note that some of these are affiliate links and we may get a commission in the event that you make a purchase.  This helps us to cover our expenses and is at no additional cost to you.

• Quote: “What you cannot find inside of your own body you will never find elsewhere.”

For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/using-sensation-to-keep-yourself-calm/

Re-assessing your career?  Know you need a change but don't really know where to start?  Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

Transcript

0:00

If you found yourself feeling nervous about something, chances are you've given yourself a good talking to to try to quell those feelings of anxiety. But what about doing it the other way around? What about encouraging your body to experience the feelings you have when you're not nervous about something? That's what we're talking about in this week's episode. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the podcast where we're all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, you can find out more about that@changeworklife.com/coaching, and in each episode, my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. Mindset is a powerful thing, and you can do a lot with your thought patterns and processes. But is mindset always enough? What happens if you're trying to tell your brain one thing, but your body is screaming something else? Brian Trzaskos has over 30 years' experience as a physical therapist and integrative movement educator. Co-founder of the Somatic Coaching Academy, Brian trains coaches, therapists and leaders to reconnect with the body in meaningful and transformational ways. Brian, welcome to the show. Jeremy, thanks so much. Thanks so much. I love that. I love that introduction. I think you actually tweaked that a little bit and did a little research. That's really fantastic. Maybe just a little bit. Anyway, it's great to have you on. Let's start with what is somatic coaching. There's going to be a few people who've never heard of it. Yeah, great question. So, if we just break down the words for a moment, coaching, a lot of people know what coaching is. So, coaching, when we're practising coaching or doing coaching, we're helping someone to achieve something that they haven't been previously able to achieve. And we're doing it in a forward looking way, and we're doing it really through asking questions and with an understanding that the answers are already within the person. So, if we think about coaching as a profession, that's the framework of how it's working. So, somatic coaching, somatic means body, so somatic coaching is really body-referenced coaching. Now, lots of times when people are working with coaches, and there's so many great coaches out there, and there's so many great ways to do coaching, a lot of coaches come at it from an intellectual perspective, and they're asking intellectually based questions. And that can be really for people, but such as what you noted in your introduction, lots of times when people are out there taking action in the world, moving in the direction of somewhere they want to go, creating something they want to create, their thoughts are doing one thing, but their body's doing something else. And from a somatic perspective, what we know is that the body ultimately always wins that battle. We might think that we can force ourselves to take an action or force ourselves to think differently with our body feeling a certain way. However, the body will always leak what it's feeling out through our thoughts. It'll always leak it out through our words, it'll always leak it out through our actions, it'll always leak it out through our body language. And oftentimes, that will create discrepancies of how the person is presenting in the world. And oftentimes, that can create confusion for the people that they're talking to. So, somatic coaching, what we're really doing is really helping the body align with the thoughts, align with the words, align with the actions that someone takes, so that they can show up in the world in a really integrative, integral and complete way. I suspect we'll dive into this in a bit more detail, but it kind of felt like there's this disconnect, almost independence of the mind and body. I mean, presumably, the two are quite closely linked and do affect one another. Oh, well, certainly, yeah. I mean, they're one, really. I mean, it's interesting, the whole body-mind split that happened with Descartes so many centuries ago, and this idea that some professionals can help someone with their mind, and other professionals can help them with their bodies, it's kind of a ludicrous idea in a lot of ways. And it's kind of set us up, at least in the Western world, with that idea going forward where we do feel like we're split. And a lot of the movement now coming back to a holistic practise or holistic work is understanding that our body or mind are never separate from one another. We actually like to say that your body is your mind, actually, because your body is always representing what's going on in the mind, and the thoughts are a facet of that also. So, a lot of the work that we say we'd like to do here is, we put the body and mind back together again. It was never actually taken apart, but the way we've been doing this for centuries, at least in the Western world, is an understanding that somehow it was split, but never really was. But we still operate that way on default, it seems like, in the Western world. Does any of that relate to the fact that, something I hadn't realised was that the brain is actually controlling a whole lot of bodily functions completely subconsciously? So, like the beating of the heart and the function of the liver and the function of the pancreas and all that sort of stuff is still being controlled by the brain, we just don't realise that at all. So, is that kind of related to what you were just saying? Yeah, absolutely. So, there's parts of the brain, like the brain stem and the limbic system, which scientists, researchers call the emotional brain, is really running the body, right? It's running our digestive system, it's running our kidneys, it's running our lungs, it's running all those areas. An interesting little side note, though, as we're talking about the brain, is there are actually more connections going from the heart to the brain than the brain to the heart. So, a lot of the research now is showing that the heart is actually one of the primary, what we call bio-oscillators of the body. The heart is actually telling the brain what to do more often than the brain is telling the heart what to do. So, there's this interesting thing that can happen in that connectability, but that's a little off topic. But going back to what you were saying in terms of physiological functions, like posture, body movements, breath rate, breath rate we can consciously control, but if we're not thinking about it, obviously we're breathing autonomically, automatically. Those things are really run from key parts of the brain. Okay. So, I've sometimes heard this kind of divided into three parts. You've got thoughts, you've got feelings, emotions. And then, you've got the physical sensations, so maybe it's the hot flush or the butterflies in the tummy or something like that. Does somatic coaching look at all three of those? Or is emotions, I don't know, mixed in more with mind or mixed in more with body, or how does that fit in? That's a great question. I love that question, Jeremy. So, there's a couple ways you can think about it. One way you can think about it is that our body is a tangible part of ourselves, and it's also a local part of ourselves. We can locate our body in space. If I walk to the other side of the room, you can say, 'Oh, Brian's located over there now.' And I can also weigh my body. I don't like to do that often, because sometimes I don't like what I see on the scale come up. But my body can be weighed as a tangible part of it. Now, emotions, interestingly enough, they're not tangible in the sense I can pull them out and weigh them on a scale. I can't hold an emotion in my hand, for instance. But I can locate it, because it's located with my body. If I'm angry, and I'm angry sitting here, I can move my body to the other side of the room. You can say, 'Oh, Brian's angry over there now.' Now, thoughts, though, thoughts are both non-tangible, I can't hold a thought in my hand, but I also can't localise it either. Because, have you ever had a thought that just dropped in, you're taking a shower, and you're relaxed, and you have a new thought that came from God knows where sort of thing? So, where was that thought before it popped into your head? And so, on some level, thought isn't even really localised to us either. So, there's three parts of us as humans, we have a local and a tangible part, we have a non-local and non-tangible part, and we have a local and non-tangible part. And so, we have to realise we're operating at all three of those paradigms all the time as humans. And so, as somatic coaching, yes, we work with all three of those parts, because that would bring us back into an integrated whole of understanding of how we actually live. So, what are coaches who don't look at the emotional and physical side of it? A fair few coaches, I think, look at the emotional side, but maybe they don't look so much at the physical side. So, what's missing from the coaching that doesn't include those elements? Well, the primary thing that's missed, and actually, there's a little bit of a difference too between, at least the way we look at it here is difference between emotions and sensations. So, when we talk about emotions, we say emotions are actually made up of two things. Emotions are made up of sensations plus thoughts. So, an emotion like anger or an emotion like sadness, it's really a story that we're telling ourselves. And that story has a sensory component as a part of it. And so, I ask people, well, how do you know the difference between when you're feeling angry or sad? And people say, 'Well, I have different thoughts.' I say, if you're feeling the difference, though, what would it feel like? Oh, well, it feels different in my body. Anger feels different in my body than sadness does. And then, we're actually taught what those sensations mean, and then we make up stories about them, we call them emotions. So, working with emotions, actually what we found, gets a little bit messy. Because whenever you're working with someone's emotions, you inherently are bringing the story into the work also of why the person's sad or why the person's angry. And that can get very complicated when you're doing coaching practise. If you learn to work with the sensation that's at the root of the emotion, it gets much simpler, much more straightforward, and then you can actually shift someone's state, because you're working with the sensation base, which makes up everyone's state. So, I just want to kind of give that little bit right there. Now, as far as working intellectually, it's the same kind of thing. We have a little saying that the subconscious mind tells the conscious mind how to think about things. And as you noted, there are parts of our brain which are actually our subconscious parts of our brain that are running our body, and our body is being run from these subconscious parts. And so, if our subconscious mind is generating these motor outputs and these sensations that are coming into your brain, it's essentially influencing your thought processes. So, doing coaching strictly intellectually, oftentimes, people can rationalise... Have you ever seen this, Jeremy? You work with people in career coaching, and I love the phrase, by the way, 'making Mondays enjoyable again', I think it's just brilliant because I've worked in jobs where Monday was definitely not enjoyable. So, I love the mood you're coming at that with. But I'm sure you've worked with people in coaching where they're telling you kind of a story, and you can see that the answer to their problem is pretty obvious, or even see that what they're doing isn't going to help them get to where they really want to go. And as you're coaching them, and you're intellectually asking them questions, they're just rationalising why they keep doing the thing that keeps getting them stuck again and again and again. And part of that is because of what's happening underneath in the body, telling the conscious mind how to think about what you're asking, and it can create some resistance to change that way. Yeah. What's interesting there is when you talk about people getting stuck, because you inevitably get that when you're coaching someone, there is someone who is stuck, and just sometimes the intellectual level questioning, as you describe it, just doesn't seem to cut through. So, yeah, in that sort of situation, what are some of the things that you might ask as an alternative or some of the exercises you might give someone to see how you can break through that stuckness? Yeah. So, for us, we have a little funny saying, our sensation based motivation coaching saying is, it's our pickup line, it's our sensation based pickup line, is where do you feel something and what does it feel like? So, when someone feels stuck in there, so say we're doing some questioning, some intellectual coaching, and someone is just like either running around on a wheel, they're on the carousel going around, or they really feel stuck, then the next question would be, let's pause for a moment, what do you feel right now? Where do you feel something? What does it feel like? So, it's a body referencing question. And as soon as we can get somebody into their body referenced in their system, now we can actually start working on the underlying pattern that's keeping their cognitive system stuck or running in circles. Can you give an example of the sort of answer that someone has given to that question, and then where the conversation has gone from that answer? Yeah, absolutely. So, I was working with a client just last week, and she was stuck on a certain situation that she had going on in her. Actually, it was work-life. It was both her personal and her work, and it was kind of a combination there. And she was really kind of stuck with it. And I asked her, 'So, okay, right now, where do you feel something? What does it feel like?' And she said, 'I feel constriction in my throat.' Right? So, it was like a tightness in her throat. And then, actually, that's the start of the process that we use with people. Then, I ask a series of questions about, well, how often have you felt that constriction in your throat? How many times? What do you think it means when you have that constriction in your throat? And so, we start to get some more information about what the person believes that underlying pattern is all about. And we're doing that without asking them to problem solve what they think their real problem is. But we actually are getting now a body reference to understand what is stopping them from moving forward. So, we get in that body, and we ask a basic set of questions about what meaning they're assigning to that sensation in that location. And as we get information on that, then we actually start to work with it in the body in a specific way to change it and transform it into a different sensory state. And then, when the person has a different sensory state, they actually take new actions from that place. So, when you say a different sensory state, to use your example, someone there, they talked about having a tightness in their throat, are you then effectively taking them through a process where they no longer feel that tightness in the throat? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we're taking them through a process. And every change process, if you look across any conscious change process, whoever's doing it, they all basically have four parts to them. We call them become aware of, decode, modify, and reframe. But basically, I'll change processes. The first step is becoming aware of something. And so, in this case, this person became aware that this tightness in the throat is actually underneath what they think that their problem is. And then, decode. Well, we have to understand what meaning are we assigning to that sensation that the person's having. So, that's the second phase. The third phase is, do we want to actually do something with it? Are you interested in actually changing the underlying pattern? And if the person's like, 'Yeah, I want to change that', then we take them through a modification process. And so, different coaching systems have different ways to go through that modification process. We have a method, we call it cross-mapping, that we do with someone. And then, the last stage, that reframe or rebuild or basically recreating something new coming out of that change phase in the middle. So, any conscious change process you look at will have those four basic steps. You become aware of something new that's going on, you understand why it's happening, you decide what you're going to do with it, you change it, and then you rebuild on what you've changed to create a new action going forward to help someone move towards the goal that they want to create. Okay, so let's come up with a practical example of what someone could do here. So, let's say someone, they come to you, and they say that they've got fear of public speaking. They're in a job where they're expected to give presentations, and it scares the life out of them. And one of the things that they notice is that in the few minutes before a presentation they are experiencing certain bodily sensations. So, maybe they're feeling nauseous, maybe they're starting to feel hot, maybe they are aware of their breath getting shallower, maybe they're aware of their heart beating more rapidly. So, what do they want to do? I guess they might not want to feel fearful of the presentations, or they might want to kind of recognise that the fear is going to be there, but it doesn't then prevent them from performing, it doesn't affect their performance. So, yeah, someone comes to you with that kind of issue, where do you begin? Yeah. So, it's going to be different if they come to us right before they go on stage, or if we're working when they're not going on stage in like a session oriented thing. So, assuming we're talking about a session oriented thing there, so the first question we'd ask them is, well, where do you feel that? So, if someone says, 'I have fear of public speaking or fear of going on stage', and we'll get a little information about that from people, we do a pretty good intake on that as well from different scenarios, things that happen for folks. But the question next would be, well, where do you feel that in your body, and what does it feel like? What are the sensations that you're actually calling fear? We really dig down into those specific sensations, because we can work with those. So, once we've identified those sensations, then we ask questions like, well, how often do you feel this? Is this something you feel on a regular basis? How often? And someone might say, 'Every time I get on stage.' We might say, well, any other times? And sometimes that same sensation will happen during the course of the day for someone. They don't even connect it to the same or more intense sensation that they have when they go on stage. So, sometimes those patterns are underlying or happening during the day also, and they're not even aware of it. So, if they become aware of that, that becomes very powerful, because then they can actually work with that sensation when it doesn't feel like stakes are really big like getting on stage. But they can actually work with it during the day, like oh my God, I also have that same sensation when I talk to my boss. I also have that same sensation when I talk to that certain person in the office. And so, we can actually start working with that. So, once we identify the sensation, we get more information about it, what are the parts of the pattern that are included in that sensation, then we start to work with that sensation. And one of the things that we do with it, which is pretty cool, Jeremy, is we actually build, we call a somatic pattern for someone. So, every somatic pattern is four parts. We've talked about a couple of them. So, somatic pattern has a sensation part, a thought part, a word part, and an action part. So, when someone has that sensation going on, then we'll say, okay, so what thoughts occur in correlation to that sensation? And oftentimes there's all kinds of thoughts that come up. I can't do it. I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I could say something foolish, I don't want to embarrass myself. Those sorts of things. And then, we say, what words? When you had that sensation, what words, or how do you use your words that may be a part of that? And they might say, 'Well, I'm on stage, so I'm using my script.' And I'll say, well, but when you're feeling that way, how are you articulating? Some people are like, 'Wow, you're right, my voice becomes very weak, or I get very flubbed, I have a hard time articulating or slowing down, or I talk really fast.' Or they say, 'I don't say anything at all. I kind of go blank, and I can't speak.' And then, what are the actions? Some of the actions are, well, I move my hands really fast and wild. It might be my actions are, I just freeze up, and my arms are at my side. But we actually help the person become very aware of what the specific pattern is. It's a whole pattern, so it's not just fear of public speaking, that fear of public speaking is just a symptom of the pattern. So, once we know what the whole pattern is, they'll start seeing it show up in other parts of their life, and then when you work on it in other parts of their lives, and we help to reframe that pattern, go through that same process, then they can start working on it and creating a new pattern. And then, that new pattern they create, they can start actually implementing that pattern on the way to the stage, on the way up, behind, green room, and then even on the stage, and then after the stage as well, to help rebuild the whole pattern. And that's how someone can show up much differently than being in that fear state to being in something that they might call confidence. Confidence is usually the one that people use most often for that. Okay, so sensations, thoughts, words, and actions. I would have thought that you can work on three of those. The thing that I would be interested to hear what you have to say about that is the sensations piece, because that just feels like something that is very difficult to control of itself, but maybe when you work on the other three, then that affects the sensations. So, is that right? Are those the things that you're working on? So, instead of thinking this, think that. Instead of using these words, use that. Yeah. So, actually, we go to the sensations, we actually help people... So, the one thing, and this is really interesting, is that I do chat with a lot of people about this, and they have the same thoughts you do on the matter. Like, well, I can change my actions, that's pretty easy. I can change my words, that's pretty easy. I could think I could probably try to change the way I think about things. That makes sense to me. But how the heck do I change my sensations? And from a neurological level, sensations underpin all of our behaviour. That's how we're developing, even when we were very young kids. So, when we're young kids, there are sensations, we have a sensation that tells us we have to pee, we have sensations that tell us we're hungry, those sorts of things. And hopefully, as parents, we help our children identify that those sensations mean those things, so that we can actually help them then create a behaviour of, you know, oh, now you know when you need to get food, oh, now you know when you need to use the bathroom. As adults, that doesn't go away as adults. We still know, oh, I have to go to the bathroom because I feel something, I'm hungry, I feel something. And that same kind of motor sensory looping builds our whole nervous system as adults. So, whether we realise it or not, our actions are always influenced to a great degree by what our sensory states are, even if we don't realise it. So, what we do with somatic coaching is we actually help people learn to consciously transform their sensory states. And when you can consciously transform your sensory states, then your thoughts, your words and your actions naturally come into alignment with it. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't influence those sensory states by changing your action, by changing your words and by changing your thoughts, because it's all part of a pattern. But we know that if you really want to do it in a sustainable way, you have to start from the sensory base. Because if you sustainably change the sensory base, then everything naturally pours out from that. If you're not changing the sensory base, then you always have to consciously be trying to change your actions, consciously trying to change your words, consciously trying to change your thoughts, because you're always using it to consciously try to change your sensations. I think, why not just go change the sensations to start with? Because that's what's going to increase, it's going to flow upward from there. So, going back to our example of the public speaking, what is the sensory base that you're working with in that case, and what do you do to change it? Yeah, great question. There's a couple of things that we do primarily. So, one thing we do is, there's a whole series of somatic practises that we do with people to help them feel more embodied, help them feel more grounded. Because fear is often experienced high up in our body, in our chest or in our head, our belly, chest and head. And it can feel very light, and it can feel very kind of buzzy and very ungrounding. When I talk to anybody who experiences fear, I do a lot of trainings on this and ask everybody, when you experience fear, where do you feel in your body, and no one says their legs. Everyone says they feel it in their gut and in their heart and in their head and their throat, and they get buzzy and stuff. And so, it's interesting, it's almost like all the body processes go upward when someone experiences fear. So, what we generally just start with is help to get their body processes downward, get the blood flow down low in the body. And if you see people who are really confident, you can just tell because they look very grounded, they seem very settled, they seem very comfortable in their skin, and they present themselves that way. So, there's some basic practises we do just like that, and those are kind of general, global practises that we do with everybody when we do these things in workshops and trainings. Now, specifically, it gets even more interesting, so everyone specifically has a sensation unique to themselves that they associate with fear of public speaking. So, if I asked you, when you're public speaking, where do you feel it? You're going to tell me something, I'm going to tell you something different, someone else is going to tell you something different. And so, that sensation that you are experiencing, whatever it happens to be... Well, let me ask you. So, is it okay if I ask you that question? We do it here in a moment? Yeah, sure. Go for it. Okay, great. Jeremy, so when you're speaking, let's assume that, when you're getting anxious about speaking, where do you feel something in your body and what does it feel like? Usually, quite often it's in my head. I mean, what you were saying there, almost like a feeling of light-headedness, can't concentrate, almost like a floaty feeling. There's definitely that. Definitely aware of a heartbeat that starts to get quicker, and I might be more conscious of my breathing. There might be a feeling of needing the bathroom. The flight or fight mechanism kicking in. So, yeah, those would be some examples. Okay. All right. So, just for the sake of our example here, can we use floaty head? You just named a sensation, like floaty is kind of like a sensory description, and you said head. So, okay, Jeremy, for you, what's the opposite of floaty? It would be either grounded or weighted. Okay, great, perfect. This is great. So, then what we would do is we would ask you to find where you have that sensation in your body. So, where do you feel grounded or weighted? That's quite a tricky one actually, because I suppose it's most situations where I don't feel floaty. So, here and now, I feel pretty comfortable talking to you. I feel like I'm fairly grounded, weighted, enjoying this conversation. Yeah, yeah. So, anywhere particular, this is where it gets really interesting, any particular place in your body, in your actual physical body where you feel grounded or weighted? At the moment, sitting on the chair. Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. So, sitting in the chair. So, what we would do then is start working with that sensory experience that you're having, and we go through a series of exercises, we start growing it, we start working with it, we start practising with it, so that at the end of this experience, you're actually starting to build a pattern of this grounded or weighted sensation, and that becomes the start of a new pattern that you can build for when you do your speaking. So, really what we're doing is we're actually helping people access their sensory systems in their body. One of the interesting things, Jeremy, is right now, if I were to say, hey, how does your left big toe feel? You don't notice it until you ask that question. Exactly, right? So, right now, there are billions of inputs coming into your brain, billions of inputs from all of your body coming in with sensory information, but we only pay attention to what's salient. We only pay attention to the one or maybe two that we deem most important. And when we're going up on stage, what overtakes our whole sensory system is that floaty head from what you're experiencing. But you have billions of other inputs coming in. Now, if we can help you start to identify the power or the confidence or whatever it is that experience that you want to have in those inputs, then you can start to work with them. And that's a skill. That's not like a magic trick. That's a skill that you can practise and learn. Okay, so are we talking almost about redirecting the attention? So, where you're feeling floaty head, and you're standing at a lectern about to deliver your keynote, you redirect your attention to maybe how your feet feel planted on the floor or something like that? Yeah. Well, you would actually direct it primarily to where you felt most grounded in your body. So, that might be your feet when you're standing, but if you're sitting, it might be your butt on the chair. So, you actually move your attention to where you feel grounded, which is the opposite sensation of the floaty feeling in the example that we're doing together. It sounds like it's linked to the idea of a body scan, which I know is one of the things that you kind of do in meditation sometimes. So, is that right? It's kind of linked to that? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the things we use body scans for is to help people build what we call interoceptive literacy. It's literally just being able to describe the sensations that you have going on in your body. And that's hard for people sometimes to actually really kind of go, 'Oh, what am I actually sensing right now?' Because I'm so used to calling it something else. I'm so used to calling it being afraid or upset or whatever it is, or even happy or glad. And so, we help learn the ABCs, help people learn the Alphabet of their body sensations, and we use body scans a lot for that, and it's pretty cool. So, is there like a big red button emergency that people can press? So, obviously, if someone is in the comfort of your office or on a Zoom call, then they can spend some time doing the body scan and everything. And then, it's like everyone has a plan until they're hit in the face. So, what's the break glass here in case of emergency? Yeah, I love that question. We do have some emergency buttons, for sure. And the emergency button depends on which emergency the person is having. So, some people could be having emergencies where they're really wound up, what we call hyper aroused or hyper regulated. They're like really fight or flight, as you mentioned before. Other people could be having emergencies where they're in shutdown, where their system is actually shutting down. So, it's either too much gas or too much brake. And what we want to help people do is be right in the middle where they're on cruise control with their nervous system. So, if people are too much gas, and they're kind of flying, we have some emergency buttons. We can do things like shaking and what we call blithering to kind of try to vent some of the excess adrenaline and norepinephrine and those types of things. And then, we follow that up with some deeper, it could be some breathing practises or some self-massage practises, but we really love the body focus stuff as much as we can. So, we try to get in the body. We shake off the tension, shake off those chemicals, do some self-massage, and then do some breathing to get grounded and settled. If the emergency is, they're just shut down, and the brake is shut down, then we actually also do some movement practises, but they tend to be a little more gentle. Almost like we're trying to thaw out a frozen engine in the middle of the wintertime. We don't just want to fire it up and then take it off down the road, we want to actually let it warm up for a while. So, in those cases, we do some different breathing practises, different self-massage practises, different movement practises to help people warm the engine up, and then get them up to cruise control level. So, we do have lots of emergency button things. It just depends which emergency people are in. I love the idea of getting your cruise control, so getting that balance between putting on the brake or putting on the accelerator. So, just describe what someone could be feeling in those two states. So, how do they know? I mean, they might just be thinking something just is off here. So, how do you know whether you need to push on the brake and maybe release some of that energy, or whether you're in sort of thawing mode and kind of getting the energy in? Yeah, so a couple of them you mentioned already. When I asked you the questions about public speaking, you said floaty head, your heart rate starts to get a little faster, your breathing gets a little more shallow. Those are typically signs of too much adrenaline in the system, like fight or flight. Sympathetic nervous system dominance happens, and you feel like the whole system starts to wind up a little bit. Muscles get tighter. And cognitive processes get what we call disorganised in that place. So, you're still processing cognitively, but it's hard to put things in order. So, it seems like there's a lot of stuff coming in, but it's hard to kind of get it organised. I'm sure, on stressful days for you, if you had a phone call, then another phone call, then an email, and then a text and something on your desk, it might be hard to actually go, what do I need to prioritise here first? That kind of sense of overwhelms, that kind of fight or flight, those are signs of too much gas, too much accelerator in the system. And I think most people are kind of used to that. The shutdown one actually can be a little insidious, because we don't always realise when it's happening. So, the shutdown can be like we're starting to feel kind of fatigued, but even more so than that, we're actually kind of starting to feel weak and like we're having trouble actually getting out of the chair, we're having trouble getting into action, our muscles become very heavy. And cognitively, we become actually what's called disabled a little bit. And disabled, we get very foggy thinking. So, versus the other one, where there are still thought processes going on, but they're just disorganised, this is like the thought processes almost stop. And it's like I don't even know what do I even need to do. I'm not even sure. So, confusion is a very common symptom of that shutting down process when we work with people. So, what is a practise, what's something that someone listening to this can try today that's going to help them bring this alignment between sensations and thoughts and body? So, I guess the first thing that we can ask people is like, without going through the whole process, if you are having a sensation experience, whenever you have a sensation experience that you aren't finding desirable, let's say, and you're like, 'I would like to shift this', then the first step is just to find a better sensation. Just find any better sensation, however you can do that. And that better sensation might be getting up out of your chair and, again, shaking a little bit. That better sensation might just be getting up and walking a little bit. That better sensation might be taking your hand and putting it on your shoulder and rubbing your neck a little bit, doing a little self-massage, easy stuff like that. Whatever you can do to just find a better sensation, start there. And then, as you're experiencing that sensation, lean into it a little more and try to make it a little bit bigger. So, for you right now, I mean, I know you're grounded, you're settled, we're having this great conversation, and if you wanted to have a little bit of a better sensation, what might you do to do that? I'm honestly not sure. Some people are just rub their neck a little bit, just as an example. So, if you just kind of rub your neck a little bit, and that kind of stuff, and okay, so if you just kind of rub your neck, and as you're rubbing it, does that feel different than it was before you did some rubbing on it? What I was conscious of doing there is just actually sort of shifting in the chair a little bit. So, having felt grounded now starting to feel almost too grounded in the chair, and actually having a bit of a wiggle seems to help a bit. Okay, great. So, if you've got that wiggle going, and that wiggle is a sensation that you're like, 'Oh, that's kind of desirable, I kind of like that little wiggle sensation', if I asked you to just kind of wiggle a little more and make that sensation just a little bit more prevalent, make it a little bigger. And then, as you're making it a little bigger, as you're wiggling around like that, what thoughts naturally occur into your mind? Yeah, it starts to kind of feel a little bit less placid, a little bit more sort of energised. Not like massively so, but just a little bit of an uptick. Perfect. Okay, so a little more wiggly, a little more energy, you have a little more energy now. All right, now, if you took this wiggly kind of sensation and felt a little more energised out into the world, and let's say you have a conversation with a potential client or even at the grocery store or anything like that, what words would you be most likely to use? And you don't have to be describing the wiggle or the energy, but what words or how would you be talking? I feel like a kind of a calm enthusiasm. I mean, calm is kind of my default state, but definitely an enthusiastic kind of element to it. Great. Okay, so you have this calm enthusiasm. And then, what actions? What would your body be doing? How would you be holding your body if you felt this way, and you felt a little more energised, and you had this calm enthusiasm, how would you be positioning or holding your body? Or what would you be doing in the world? Yeah, probably slightly leaning in, getting sort of close to the curiosity. And maybe, if there's something like I want to dive into, I mean, I can feel myself now as we talk about it, using my hands more. So, probably doing that. Perfect. Yeah. So, what we just did, Jeremy, is we built a somatic pattern just really quickly. And so, what could someone do right now if they could do that, find that better sensation, and tap into it, really let that new sensation flood your nervous system a little more, so it becomes very tangible, very present. And then say, as I'm in that sensation, what thoughts naturally kind of arise into my awareness? Oh, okay, so I have some different thoughts. Okay, what words naturally are associated with that pattern? What actions would I take in the world? And then, you start actually practising that new pattern in the world, but your practise is starting always at the sensation base. And that starts to actually rebuild a different way of being in your nervous system. And over time, you can actually create new neural pathways and create new habitual states of being. And we like to say, when you have shifts in your state, you get shifts in your traits. So, the more state shifts you have, the more trait shifts you have. It's just a matter of practising at that point. This is great, because I've got a couple of networking events coming up over a couple of weeks, and I can see how I can just use this to get myself more into the mindset maybe a bit more quickly than I might otherwise do. Yeah, exactly. Because mindset isn't just between our ears. Mindset is your whole body. Your body is part of your mindset system. And when you get your body involved, again, naturally, you move out in the world in a very integrated way. Fantastic. Cool. Okay. What haven't we covered that you wished we had? Oh, God. I mean, I could talk for hours on this. Jeremy, I think we've covered quite a lot of stuff. Hopefully, this is valuable to you and to your community. That's what it's really all about. The more we can help people to live really empowered lives in whatever ways that they want to do that, that's really, I think, some of the most rewarding work we can do in the world. Cool. And if someone's interested to find out more, what resources can you suggest that they dive into? Yeah. So, there's a quote that I love. And it's not like an easy read, but it's from the Upanishads, but it's actually a quote that underpins everything that I do in the world. And the quote is, 'What you cannot find in your own body, you will never find elsewhere.' And so, what it basically means is that, if you're looking for peace outside of you, you're never going to find peace outside of you unless you first find it inside of you. If you want abundance outside of you, you're never going to find it outside of you until you find it inside of you. So, I come back to that quote again and again and again. What you cannot find inside of your own body, you will never find elsewhere. I love that. That's so true. Yeah, absolutely love that one. Brian, if someone wants to find you, where would you like to send them? Yeah, we're easy to find. You can get us at the somaticcoachingacademy.com. I will put a link to that in the show notes. Brian, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a fascinating conversation. You got it, Jeremy. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, hope you enjoyed that interview with Brian Trzaskos. The thing that I've really been trying since this interview is this idea of encouraging your body to remember what it feels like when you're not feeling nervous or anxious, or whatever feeling you're kind of trying to get rid of. So, to give an example, if I'm having trouble sleeping, or if I wake up in the middle of the night, and I have trouble getting back to sleep, as an alternative to those sorts of mental exercises when you're worrying about stuff, and you're trying to tell yourself not to worry about those things, I've as well as that been kind of trying to remind my body what it feels like when I am at that point of sleep. So, I'm kind of imagining this heaviness in my body and how my head feels and seeing whether I can remind my body to feel like that as a means to encourage me to get back to sleep. It has absolutely not been successful every time, but it does seem to be adding a bit more. It does seem to be helping. So, it's something I'd definitely like to try doing a little bit more. You'll find the show notes for this episode at changeworklife.com/214, that's changeworklife.com/214. And one thing you can do which is really going to help me is leave a review for the podcast if you haven't already. You can leave a review on Apple Podcasts, but you can also leave it on Spotify and some of the other platforms. Apple Podcast is still preferred if you have access to that, and it really does help people find me. So, if you get a chance, do please leave a review for the podcast. Next time, we're taking a fresh look at CVs. Since the last time I properly looked at them, AI has gone bananas. And one of the things I want to look at is how has that affected CVs in the context of job applications? Do humans still look at CVs, or is it done all through automated AI-powered ATS systems? It's going to be a really useful update on where we are now. So, if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to the show, and I can't wait to see you then. Cheers. Bye.