On September 9, 2024 we published a show titled, Your Nervous System Is Controlling You & How To Master It. My guests were Jennifer Mann and Karden Rabin and my muse was their new book, The Secret Language of The Body. In our long conversation, Karden brought up his “Emotional Cold Plunge” exercise and I was incredibly intrigued. He gave me access to his community at somiainternational.com/ which I joined and went through the exercise. I ended up engaging more and just felt really attracted to Kardin’s guidance and spirit and found myself wondering how he had ended up where he is today. HIs bio says, Karden is a nervous system medicine practitioner and an expert in the fields of trauma and psychophysiological disorders. Over the last fifteen years he has combined principles of bodywork, brain retraining, and somatic trauma therapies and helped thousands of clients across the globe heal from chronic pain and illness. Karden is the Co-Founder of SOMIA and a regular contributor to Bessel Van Der Kolk’s Trauma Research Foundation and has led programming for The Wounded Warrior Project and Starbucks. But what you are about to hear is that Karden had severe asthma and almost died. He was very neglected as a child and often in tears, bored, and alone in his pain. From this, up to age 19, Karden says he became, an asshole. A bully. He was mean and used cleverness and criticism like a sword.Being a poser was identity and he worked to get tablescraps of validation from cool kids. He was good at making fun of people to get a laugh. But then…something happened. Something that drove him to become obsessed with uncovering the physics of what drives people and discovering the laws that no one is immune to. Today his ambition is to help as many people as possible. I bring you this story because I think you will resonate and it will help you see and understand yourself better, and how you can take your pain and heal it as you help relieve people of theirs. Find him at @KardenRabin

Every Monday I bring you an author with a new book. But in my personal studies, I’m just as equally reading and rereading books from years past. Classics, in my opinion. In 2010, Greg McKeown published his book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, and it quickly became a classic. He became an instant guru on looking at our lives and our work and asking, “What is really essential?” I sat down with Greg and Tom Ziglar a few years back to understand essentialism better. You will hear, it is not about minimalism. It’s more about making the right and best decisions. Putting decisions to extreme tests. Being in control. Greg says that in an emergency, “Everyone is an essentialist.” We get on task, on target, divest ourselves of non-necessities, and do what is most efficient, effective and successful. So can you really live every moment like that? Let’s see.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You hit me, I hit you back. You disrespect me, I disrespect you. That would be the opposite of grace. Grace is generally considered offering a kindness, anyways. When it’s undeserved. I don’t feel the culture gives much value to the idea anymore. We are afraid that letting a wrong go unpunished will enable others. But as our mental health continues to decline and we find more people in more relational conflict than ever, I wanted to dig into the lost art of grace. So I sat down with Julia Baird. Julia is an Australian journalist, broadcaster, and internationally bestselling author who contributes to the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald and is a cohost of the Not Stupid podcast. She has a brand new book out, titled bright shining: how grace changes everything. I dug into the hard questions around grace and ultimately came away asking myself, what kind of person do I want to be? What behavior will add the most to my life? One who errors on the side of grace? Or tit for tat?

As a guy, the concept of compassion has little place in my life. Especially as an athlete, there was no value in compassion. You ignore any pain and keep going. It reminds me of the depiction of the army sergeant yelling at the soldier to suck it up and march on. As a culture, I think we still put more value on sucking it up and keeping going and being indifferent to ourselves, than having compassion. Though we miss that we can still keep going when the circumstances demand it, and have some needed compassion. Compassion is having concern for others and ourselves and the opposite of concern is indifference. I can’t find value in indifference to self, in normal life, outside of maybe sports and the battlefield. Seven years ago I sat down and had a conversation with Dr. Kristin Neff about it. Kristin received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, studying moral development. At the time she had done a TED talk with millions of views, and published a book, “Self Compassion”, The Proven Power of Being kind to yourself. I talked with her, as I perceived the value of self-compassion. But in truth, it’s taken me a long time to let it actually integrate into my life. I wish I’d stuck with it then. But, better late than never. I spent some time recently discussing self-compassion with my own therapist, and am bringing this conversation back to benefit us both.

You may well have heard of Upworthy. Upworthy is a media brand that focuses on positive storytelling. They have millions of followers on social media and email subscribers, who tune in to hear good news. Upworthy recently came out with a book, that focused on key areas of human goodness, and it is just stories. Just incredible stories of the best of humanity that people share with them each and every day, at a great amount. The book is called Good People and I was really curious as to what led the authors to sift through the stories and land on certain categories, such as chapter one which is, "The Kindness of Strangers." They shared how many stories came in of what we generally call, random acts of kindness. Following is my conversation with the authors, Lucia Knell who is Vice President of Upworthy, and Gabriel Reilich who is head of content and innovation. I think you'll find a really uplifting, inspiring and honestly, equipping discussion here. It really bolstered my faith, which bolsters...everything.

I think we’re all well aware that our culture has fallen into the idea of being busy is being important. But I’ll admit that even in trying to shed this, I still find myself busy. I just agree to things without counting the cost. But then I find myself struggling mentally with bitterness and burnout and I just want to escape. So when this book, Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More, came across my desk, I was eager to have the author on. Israa Nasir is a New York City-based psychotherapist, writer, and the founder of WellGuide—a digital community for mental health awareness. She has a big following on Instagram at well.guide. In her focus on Toxic Productivity she tries to dismantle the myth that “doing more makes you more worthy,” and this is where I dig in with her in this show. My primary interest was how we associate our identity with what we do, and Israa and I really landed a lot on intention, asking ourselves why we do all we do? What is the outcome we are expecting and what need of our own are we trying to fulfill.

Anxiety is the new norm, and conventional medicine tends to view anxiety as a “neck-up” problem - that is, one of brain chemistry and psychology. So all the treatments are focused there. At the mind. At calming our minds. Getting calm. I agree with those, as part of the treatment. But what about our overall health? How does it factor in? My guest cites that the origins of anxiety are rooted in the body. Ellen Vora is an MD with her B.A. from Yale, a holistic psychiatrist, acupuncturist, and yoga teacher. She takes a functional medicine approach to mental health, considering the whole person and addressing imbalance at the root. Ellen offers a paradigm shift in our understanding of anxiety and mental health, suggesting that anxiety is not simply a brain disorder but a whole-body condition. It’s coming just as much from what we eat and how much we move and what we watch, as a neck up chemical imbalance. More actually. She has a book titled The Anatomy of Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming the Body's Fear Response, which is my initial muse for this conversation. Find the book anywhere and find Ellen at instagram.com/ellenvoramd/

We begin life with built in accountability. We have our caregivers, maybe siblings, then we go to school and have teachers. Hopefully we have close friends. Eventually we have bosses. We may have a spouse or significant other. Even our children can be a source of accountability to how we behave and how we live our lives. But at the core, the greatest source of accountability is from ourselves. If the only thing holding us in line is those in our lives, it’s somewhat artificial. Twenty years ago John Miller wrote a book called QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life. It literally became a classic in the business world, but the message is for all of us as individuals. I sat down with John some years back, along with Tom Ziglar, and we dug into what had made the message so popular and equipping. John said QBQ gets to the core of success: ourselves. Our actions and behaviors and responsibility. You can connect with John at QBQ.com. This conversation will give you insight into a core accountability you haven’t fully grasped and leveraged. The accountability with yourself.

Nedra Glover Tawwab is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Drama Free and Set Boundaries, Find Peace and I’ve had her on this show to talk about the messages in both of those books. Boundaries specifically is an area I greatly struggle with. Nedra is a licensed therapist and renowned relationship expert and has appeared as an expert on The Red Table Talk, The Breakfast Club, Good Morning America, and CBS This Morning, to name a few. She has a popular Instagram account @nedratawwab with over 1.8 million followers and recently spent a year posting what she called, daily nuggets, with the goal of uplifting, supporting and guiding her audience deeper into themselves. But what she revealed was that her primary muse was herself. These writings were what she needed to hear and hold onto for herself. She created a book from the entire year called, Consider This: Reflections For Finding Peace. The book has no chapters and is more like a daily devotional for peace. As you’ll hear at the top of our discussion, I feel like the book is an antidote for anxiety. I literally started at the first page and just started pulling out topics that resonated with me. We covered topics such as being aware of the energy we feel from others and guarding ourselves against negative energy. The benefit of making new friends and questioning some of our old friends. Paying attention to the signs when our peace is eroding and Nedra talked about an eye twitch she gets that’s a tell tale sign for her.. When it's appropriate to share about yourself. The difference between a grudge and a boundary. When is anxiety warranted? I think you’ll be inspired and equipped.