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The Kristen Boss Podcast
Ep. 233 The Missing Key to High Performance: Why Your Nervous System Runs the Show
00:34:32
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I see with brand new eyes no, I've never been so sure Take my head let's run into the unknown this is the beginning. You are listening to the Kristen Boss Podcast. I'm your host, Kristen Boss. As a best selling author and performance coach, I'm on a mission to share about sustainable and purposeful approaches to both business and life. Each week I bring relevant topics that I believe are necessary to create a life of purpose, significance and meaning. Entrepreneurship is about so much more than growing your bottom line. It's about who you are becoming in the process and building a life that is truly extraordinary. Entrepreneurship is really just the beginning. Hey friends, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm excited to be back. I just had a long weekend of double header soccer games, lacrosse tournaments. I don't know who else is a sports parent listening, but before I became a parent I thought I didn't, I just, just didn't realize how much my life would be sports. Driving my kids to and from practice, our weekends, being on the sideline, uh, my husband coaches my son's soccer team and he loves it so much and then we were just at a tournament all day and so shout out to all the other sideline parents who are dragging their families to sports complexes in all kinds of weather this time of year. You solidarity, solidarity friends. Who knew that this millennial life would would be filled with back to back sports events? Anyways, I'm back to be. I'm glad to be back to the episodes. It feels good being back talking to you guys week after week. I appreciate your reviews, your kind messages after the really raw, vulnerable three part episode series where I kind of share about, you know, my time away from the podcast, coming back, how I was surprised that my healing was actually facilitated in rebuilding and starting something instead of silence. So we're going to kind of continue the conversation a little bit, but talking about it in a different way. I kind of was setting the stage for how everything that happened for me, understanding my own blow up, the things falling apart. I really started to understand. Even though I was a certified mindset coach, trauma informed, taught, certifications can teach productivity, can teach all those things and even knew, you know, I had this idea of what hustle was before this all happened and realizing, you know, even my first book Pivot to Purpose, leaving the hustle culture behind, I think I was just barely scratching the surface of how I understood hustle at that time. And now having more experience and more time and maybe more life behind me, I now understand what hustle actually is. And understanding that hustle, for me and for most people, to be really honest, is a survival response. And we're gonna unpack how our survival response hijacks a better way of living, a better way of life, a better way of approaching things. But it's often what we default to when we feel unsafe in the world in some way. Unsafe triggered lack of security. So I kind of shared all of triggers in the first three episodes, like my need for validation, my need for worth, my need for security. And if you've ever, if you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's really just essentially the needs of, of the basic human needs and how we have our needs for like, basic food, shelter, water, you know, can those needs be met? Okay, and then the next, the next one would be, do I have security? Meaning am I making money? Can I pay my bills? Do I have shelter? And then you have the next level, which is, you know, do I have belonging or a sense of community? And then, you know, and it keeps ascending. And the highest of it is self actualization. And so when you realize, when you start to look at your life through understanding the hierarchy of needs, you start to understand our motivations for why we do what we do. And essentially, if one of our needs feels threatened, if our sense of security feels at risk, then of course we're going to have some sort of response to that. And very often it's going to be a survival response. So that's what we're going to unpack in this episode. I'm going to be sharing with you kind of the, the real secret to high performance and the hidden driver behind your behaviors. Because if you're like the students or the people, I work with, my clients and now I've worked with people, people in corporate settings, in government settings, in all kinds of jobs. And I can tell you, at the end of the day, we're all human. And we all have this thing called a nervous system. And we all have a way. We are wired to respond to our environment or wired to respond to external stimuli. And so I'm going to quote Stephen Covey and he said, you know, between stimuli and response, we have this amazing thing called choice. We have the option to choose differently. Uh, but oftentimes the reason why we're exhausted and what I see most of the time, I will say 95% of the time, how I observe people, how I've worked with clients and even business owners in any capacity is we are often left, when we're left to our own Devices we operate in reactive loops instead of taking the time to pause and, and respond from a different place. Because when you are, I will tell you. For me, I didn't realize how long I was living with a survivalist mindset. Even though my environment, there was nothing to survive, but my brain was still thinking like from a survival based pattern, like, how can I, how can I secure my resources? How can I ensure I have security? How can I ensure I have belonging? Like, my brain was kind of stuck in these loops of trying to figure out how do I establish security. Unfortunately, what I was looking for was security outside of myself and being like, okay, surely my business can give me security, other people can give me security. And I didn't know how to resource myself with those things. And I really do think that is a skill that we have to teach ourselves, that we have to learn. And depending on our life experiences, we. Some people never learn how to resource themselves with validation, self worth, enoughness, security, confidence, those things. They're just constantly outsourcing it to things beyond their control. And therefore, because it always feels beyond their control, they never feel like they can have security or self worth or confidence or any of those things. So what I first want to unpack for you guys is this idea of like, why do we have a survival response? And I. Survival response has been shaped by. Oftentimes it's shaped in our childhood by the environment that we were raised in. And so, you know, you may have been brought up in a very stable, safe, loving, secure home, so you didn't have to, you know, fight for security or, you know, you didn't feel like your entire world was in chaos from day to day. Whereas I'm gonna give you an example. We were running, we were doing a corporate training and we were talking to people about their survival patterns. And one woman said, oh, my survival pattern is this. And I said, oh, tell me a little bit about your childhood. She said, oh, well, I'm one of nine kids. And I said, oh, interesting. She's like, I usually feel scarce and I feel like I always have to fight for my resources. I said, is that how it felt as a kid? She said, yes. In fact, at one point she's like, my dad used to cut up meat and leave it on a platter, just. And we would just all kind of fight over the food. And sometimes like, I'd go hungry. And I was like, oh my gosh. And so that experience shaped, in a lot of ways, if she's, you know, was a child, that shaped how she viewed the world of like, there might not be enough for me. It's a, it's a, you know, there's a platter of meat and if you're not first, you're last, meaning if I'm not quick or aggressive, or if I don't get in there, I'll go hungry. And that, that deeply shaped her, her psychological behavior later in life. And there's more to it than that. And I'm not gonna like psychoanalyze that, but that was just to give you an example. We often have. We are shaped by our environments and from our child brain that doesn't have the maturity of an adult looking in. We have our child brain with limited view of the world, seeks to understand the situation and we end up narrating what we think is happening. And I was talking to an expert on this and they said, unfortunately, unless there is an adult narrating for the child, letting them know, like, hey, it's not your fault that you didn't get meat. We didn't plan this out for you. It's not because you're weak. It's not because we don't love you or whatever. It's. But the child will think they will default to something must be wrong with me. They will naturally default to shame. Which I found interesting. And so this is when I was talking to that expert, they were saying, this is why narration to self and others is so important. But especially when we're raising our kids or we have people around us, but especially with our children is helping them make sense of their environment without leaving them to their own devices to try and interpret it themselves, which will likely be, I'm wrong, I'm unworthy, I don't belong. So because of that, we have, you know, we have these circumstances that our child brain is like, oh, if I want my, if I want to feel safer, secure, the best way for me to do that is getting out of Dodge and hiding in my room. That might have been a certain child's like, survival response in the home they were raised in if, if they, if things were volatile, never stable, never secure. And so that child might have, you know, developed a sense of like, the best way I feel safe is to hide in my room. And you know, that might carry into adulthood where that person might be extremely conflict averse and they kind of, you know, really, for lack of a better term, run from the room when there's conflict or chaos or it might be the opposite. You might have a child that, that chaos is normalized and therefore they don't know how to sit with stillness. And then they become an adult that continues to create chaos because it's all they know. It's what they've been conditioned around. So stillness feels very scary for them. And it's all because of what we have familiarized or been familiarized with from a young age. And then that's shaped these survival tools that we, that we build and create as children. We end up carrying those into adulthood. Now it served us as kids, but when we, when we still operate from survival responses in our adulthood, it actually ends up hurting us. It doesn't help us make more mature decisions. We end up, you know, constantly defaulting to what I'm going to call like our lower brain, our survival brain, which is the back of your brain versus the front of your brain where that's where you do. That's where your creativity and your critical thinking and your executive function and your strategy and your productivity and your time management and your ability to prioritize tasks, all of that happens in the front of your lope. So of course, like, if we are in a place where we are only thinking of survival, which for us is like outrunning a grizzly bear, our brain isn't thinking about how to prioritize tasks. All it's thinking is, how can I outrun the bear? And so this is what I was noticing with people I was serving is like, how is it that we have people that inhale personal development content? They buy leadership books, they buy courses, they buy to do lists, they buy planners, they attend classes. And yet when it comes to actually being able to implement what they learn, there's a massive gap. It's like they're filling their head with knowledge. But when it comes to the implementation or the learning, because guess what? Learning happens in the application of our knowledge. Knowledge is just knowledge. It's static until we actually do something with the knowledge and then it becomes applied knowledge. I like to think of everything we learn as theory until we apply it and do something with it. And then I find with applied theory or applied knowledge, suddenly the knowledge is, is sitting in my brain differently. I understand it differently. It's, it's again, practical. There's the practical work, there's theory work and there's practical work. And we kind of learn this in different modalities of education. And it was the same thing when I, when I was a hairstylist or when I was training for hair. It was like I learned all the hair theory. And I could tell you by a book, like, yes, I know that Blue and orange, you know, they counteract each other. They're opposites on the color wheel. I know red cancels green and blah, blah, blah. I could sit there and memorize a color wheel, but having a client sitting in my chair where I'm looking at how the light refracts off their hair and being able to be like, all right, they're a level six natural, but they're probably going to pull this. Like, having. It's one thing theorizing, it's another thing. When we actually have the opportunity to practice the knowledge in real life. And this is where I see people cutting their legs out from under them all the time, is they're not able to apply the knowledge. Until I realized, okay, what is it that prohibits people from implementing? Um, and I actually heard this concept called. We are dealing with something called the infobesity epidemic, where we have people that are constantly consuming information. We have no shortage of information out there. The problem or the shortage we have is people actually applying the skills in real life and being able to integrate the information in their everyday life. And how they actually execute the implementation and execution is where it all falls apart. And I know this because I would give people all the knowledge and they would still. I'd watch them just spin out day after day, or I'd watch them, you know, go a million miles an hour and then burn out 30 days later. And then they need to go into recovery for a while, and then they're like, okay, now. Now I'm broke and nothing's working, so now I have to go back in and, you know, go 100 miles an hour. I was actually just telling a client this. I said, hey, I feel like you only know two speeds, and you only have two stories with those speeds. You're either going zero miles an hour or a hundred miles an hour. You're either succeeding or you're a lazy loser. And she's like, oh, yeah, you're right. I was like, first of all, I hear you. My brain loves to offer me that story as well. I was like, do you have a second gear or third gear that you. That we can sit with and acknowledge? Like, is there a is. Do you. Do you see a maintenance or a sustainability or an optimize? And it was just interesting that her brain was offering her those stories. And so because of this, because there's this massive gap between what people intend to do with their life and what they actually do with their life, I was like, why is it. And that's when I realized the nervous system is the hidden driver behind absolutely everything we do. Because all of this strategy is in our frontal lobe. Our ability to execute and you know, be strategic, have critical thinking, that happens in the front of our brain. But when we are dysregulated, meaning when we are feeling triggered or unsafe or, and by. Just to clear that. So, so if you're like triggered unsafe, like, nothing's wrong with me, my house isn't on fire. Well, it's not the same for your nervous system. For me telling somebody, like, hey, go make a post online and talk about this new thing you're doing to their nervous system or to their body, it does feel like their house is on fire. Meaning like all of a sudden they will have elevated heart rate, their breathing will pick up, they'll feel tightness in their stomach, they'll feel sick. I know some people that get a. Of fatigue, like suddenly they need a nap. Like their body's like, woo, this is too much, shut her down. You know what sounds really good right now is a nap. In fact, we have, we have a client we're working with right now that as soon as she actually gears up to do something, her body interprets something as anything unsafe or scary. Her body, she starts yawning, she's like, I'm exhausted, I'm tired. And it was just. Her body doesn't feel safe with her mobilizing or taking action in a way that maybe where she would have to feel some fear, uncertainty, doubt. Because honestly, anything we do new, anything worth doing, whether it's learning a new skill or growing a business, it requires some level of emotional vulnerability. Meaning I'm willing to feel emotions or feelings. I don't like feeling. Ask anyone being like, hey, do you like feeling uncertain and feeling doubt and fear and confusion on a daily basis? No one would raise their hand and say, you know what sounds really good is if somebody could dose me with a heavy amount of uncertainty right now, that would just really make my day. No, it's like as, as human beings, our brain is, is designed for certainty, which is why we tend to move towards black and white thinking. Which is why people tend to not want to change their mind. Because when you are willing to unpack or look at a belief you've held for a really long time, in order to change your mind, you actually have to weather a valley of uncertainty and confusion. And that feels deeply vulnerable. And so no one wants to volunteer for that. I will tell you, anytime I've had to be willing to look at things differently. There's a certain level of vulnerability there, of being like, okay, I'm going to feel a certain level of uncertainty. And again, our brain is always looking for certainty. It wants black and white thinking. It wants to be able to land on something. And I can't think of anything more uncertain than being a business owner or starting a business. Like, every day I'm like, I have no idea. What measure of certainty do I have today? And oftentimes I will tell you. If you want a great mental exercise to do when you are spinning out and you're in doubt and confusion, ask yourself this. I promise you this will. This will make a huge difference for you. And you could do this with your kids, do it with yourself or a partner. Ask yourself, what do I know? What do I know to be true? And what you're actually forcing your brain to do is go look for the facts instead of. Because where all of our emotional charges is in our interpretation of the facts or the story, the assigned meaning, we're giving the facts of like, okay, what do I know? Well, I know that I have, you know, this percentage of followers that actively engage with me on Instagram, or I know that, you know, I have this salary and I make this per year. I know. Like, again, going back to the facts, what do I know? What do I know to be true? And sometimes our beliefs can sometimes feel like true facts for us. Being like, I know that I'm a great speaker. Well, it's my opinion. That's an opinion I hold about myself. But it feels deeply true for me. So for me, if I was to ask, like, hey, what do I know? I would feel comfortable writing down, I know I'm a great public speaker. I know I'm great at motivating people. It's okay to actually let some of the what do I know be beliefs you deeply hold about yourself and that they feel to be true. Because in the moments when you're spiraling, I promise you, you will need those, like, identity anchors to kind of hold you afloat when things feel rocky. Ask me how I know this. I feel like this has been what I've been doing all year long, is like, what do I know to be true? And then how do I want to move forward? How can I provide myself a measure of safety when I'm about to do something that my brain feels is deeply unsafe? This is why, friends, understanding our nervous system and how we are wired to respond to stressors or stimuli that our brain interprets as unsafe is the key to everything. Because you cannot be a high performer. You cannot Be productive. You cannot be a time management ninja unless you are somebody that understands how to regulate your nervous system response or your stress in real time. And I can tell you, for me, I didn't realize how, how often I was operating from a chronic state of dysregulation, meaning I was constantly operating in fight flight. My nervous system was on fire. Which makes sense as to why I was exhausted. My way of seeking survival in the world is I either have a fight response or a flight response. I'm primarily flight. Like I have to be busy doing and that for me is running away from things. It's like if I'm, if I'm busying myself, I don't have to think about the things causing me pain. Whereas a fight response, they are more. When I am in action, I feel a measure of control and my way of establishing safety in the world is to gain control of the thing I feel is out of my control. And so that's the fight response, the flight response, and then the freeze response. That is somebody that's like, hold up. I. They tend to retreat within and they, they over internalize or they are ruminators, they are overthinkers. They're also going to be, they're going to be the people that like, if you want to know, like, they're great at data analysis, they're great at looking at every possible angle. Angle. Oftentimes people that are freeze response will misdiagnose themselves and think it's a perfectionist mentality. But there's actually a difference between, you know, protecting yourself against failure, the feeling of failure, and holding yourself to an impossible standard and it always being better. There's actually two different drivers there because we actually found that some, that people in our programs are like, oh, I misidentified. I thought I was a, a perfectionist. And I was like, tell a perfectionist they'll still get work out. It just won't be good enough. It'll take them, they'll do a few iterations. Whereas somebody that's in a freeze response, they can't even get their workout because they're so busy ruminating over the quality of the work. And then they think, well, if I just do a little more research, have a little more information, I'll feel confident enough to move forward. I find these people to be, you know, they inhale content, they inhale podcasts and information. And in fact, it actually makes them feel worse because now there's so much information for their brain to sort through that they feel even less confident taking Action. Because they're like, I have so much information. What am I supposed to do now? So that's like a freeze response. They retreat within. They, they, they struggle to mobilize or take any action. They shut down. And then lastly, there's the fawn response. And I kind of touched on this a little bit last week, but this is like, this is your, you know, the way when my world feels unsafe, my way of, you know, solving external chaos is I'm just gonna, I'm gonna be the peacemaker. So long as you're okay, I'm okay. If you're okay with me, I'm okay with me too. Oh, you're not okay. You're not at peace. Okay. The only way I'm gonna feel at peace is solving all your problems so that I don't have to. So that once you're calm, I can feel calm. Or. You know, the worst thing for a someone in a fawn response is to find out that somebody's upset with them. Like, the world, the world might as well be ending. Or for them to, like, to ask them, like, hey, what's your opinion on this? And the idea that their opinion might upset somebody in the room or somehow cause some sort of conflict. They would rather die. They would rather die. I, I, I joke because I, I work with. There are people in my life who I deeply love who do have the fawn response. And I actually have to encourage them. I have to lean in with them, and I have to, I have my, my work. Knowing that about them is I want to create safety for them so they can lean in and engage with me. So my way of doing that with people that I know are this type, I say, hey, I just want you to know this is a great, this is, it's a safe space to disagree with me. I want your pushback. I want your feedback. If this is too much, I want you to tell me no. I need you to tell me no. So I have to, like, almost push them to give them permission to have an opinion or, you know, so to speak, disrupt, Disrupt the piece. And I, I have to constantly frame that for them. Like, hey, I just want you to know there's no wrong answers here, that this is a totally safe place for you to give me this feedback. It's vital that you give me this feedback. It matters. And then someone with that response feels safe to engage. So all this to say, like, every decision we make, how we show up in the world, how you show up in your business, how you show up with your families, Your spouse, in your marriage, in your workplace, on social media. Goodness. I just feel like all I'm watching is dysregulated. People constantly react to stimuli online. It's like it. No wonder, no wonder social media can be a complete dumpster fire. Because no one's taking just a beat to. When they look at a stimuli or a post that makes them feel a certain kind of way, they're not willing to put the phone down, take a breath, allow their brain to register, I'm not actually dying. The house is not on fire. There's not a grizzly bear chasing me. I just feel a certain kind of way about this post. I'm going to breathe, going to step away. Which really is a form of regulating your nervous system, getting it out of its fight flight fawn freeze response. And guess what happens when you do that. When you're in a fight flight response, when your nervous system is activated, you're just in your survival brain, your rear lobe, the back of your brain, I like to call it, like your amygdala is on fire. When that is activated, your frontal lobe, which has your critical thinking, your ability to be curious, your ability to empathize with others and maybe put yourself in their shoes, that all happens in your frontal lobe. Which is why I'm like, you know, why we struggle to have good, constructive conversations with people we disagree with is because we have rear lobe conversations instead of frontal lobe conversations. Everyone's just like, their amygdala is on fire and they're yelling at each other and we wonder how we can attain world peace. This is it, guys. This is my pitch. This is how we attain world peace is teaching people how to get out of there. Their rear lobe when they're activated, calm down, pause, take a beat, regulate, get into their frontal lobe and access critical thinking where they can ask, how do I want to respond to this? What is a response that aligns with the person I want to be in this world? But so often we don't take the time. We have lightning fast reactions. And so this is where it goes back to the statement like, between stimulus and response, there's a choice. Um, I'm even going to say there's a difference between response and react. And I see most people living their life making business decisions, leadership decisions, marriage decisions, parenting decisions from constant reaction. And that is a really exhausting way to live, my friends. And so this is, this is the one little tool I'm going to give you. Right now is the moment you sense like the elevated heart rate or the the tightness in your chest, a clenched jaw, the sick feeling in your stomach. You will. There are going to be some instances that are going to feel a lot more for lack. I feel like our generation has abused this term. But it is what it is. It's when you feel triggered, like you have a bodily response to an external stimuli. Just if you're like, I can't think of one and be like cool. Picture your kid having a full blown meltdown in the middle of target. There you go. That the best thing you can do is just pause, take a beat and breathe. Even if just two slow breaths, just inhale through your nose, count of four. Exhale through your nose, count of four. Just that alone will slow your reaction to the stimulus. You'll be able to take a beat and be like, okay, wait, how do I want to respond to this? It takes practice, it takes time. But this is, this is the gift. And so there's a lot more to say about this. I will say this, this conversation, I'm going to call it like nervous system intelligence. Understanding how our nervous system interacts with our everyday, with our everyday environment. Not just at work, not in your leadership. It bleeds into every area of your life. And this isn't about being somebody who never gets triggered because you need to be. That is how your, your body does need to feel alarm like it does. That's how it's kept you alive. Like that'd be like to be. If your ambition is to be like I'm never going to be triggered ever again and a bear comes at you and you don't feel triggered, I'd be like, there's a problem. You actually your survival response is not working. It's not to be not a triggered person. It's to be an aware person, to understand when a trigger is hijacking. When you're, when your nervous system is hijacking your brain and you're making decisions from your monke brain or the back of your brain instead of the frontal lobe where all of your, your best decisions are there. And that is where curiosity and empathy lives. That's where all those things happen. And I will say we are, I think at the early. Like some people have been having this conversation for a long time. I would still say this is not a mainstream conversation. I've been talking to so many business owners and leaders and they're like, yeah, we're not really we, we know about fight flight but we think about it in the sense of like emergency situations or you know, severe trauma. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. This is in our everyday life. And I feel like this is a newer conversation. It's, it's specifically in the world of personal development, high performance and leadership. And that's when I knew. I'm like, that is where I want to go because I can hand people all the information. But if we don't teach people how to integrate and regulate so they can actually live better and lead better than what is the point? Because I will tell you, part of my story was realizing that I was such a deeply dysregulated person and I didn't have the tools, I had the mindset, I had a lot of knowledge, but I didn't understand how to actually apply this in real life. And so I'm excited about having more conversations. I've got some great guests coming on the show and we're going to be talking more about how to approach life and business from this place, from a regulated place versus a reactive place. And we're going to be having more conversations about like failure and all the hard parts of business. And coming back from, from a setback, from your 500th setback, what it is to be resilient and gritty and all those great conversations. Now listen, we have created a free quiz where you can figure out what your primary stress type is. But on top of that, we have developed something called the adaptive personality type. And there's 10 different stress types where we have identified how your nervous system responds response to stress. In most cases, like it's your dominant stress response. There's 10 different types. So, you know, there we have like the Fixer, the Controller, the perfectionist, the, the Hustler, the Escapist, the over analyzer, the. Oh, what's the. I'm blanking on a few. The Shape Shifter, the, the Peacemaker, there's, there's like two more and I don't have them totally memorized. I should though. But we have a report. If you are somebody that is obsessed with personality reports, this is a 26 page report that tells you how your adaptive personality type was formed, how it shows up in life, work, relationships, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, what your blind spots are, how it affects you in business. It gives you specific blind spots and strengths in business. So if you're like, okay, I want the report. We have the link in and it's for purchase. We have the link in the show notes for you to check out. But if you're like, oh, I just kind of want to take the free quiz that's totally fine. But if you want like a really beefy 26 page report to understand yourself differently in this lens and be able to really change how you go about your life, you're going to want to click that in the show notes. Otherwise, we will see you guys in the next episode. Have a great week. That's a wrap for today's episode. Listen, if you love what you heard here today, I would love for you to leave a real quick rating and a review. This helps the show get discovered by new people. Be sure to take a screenshot of today's episode and shout us out on Instagram. We'll shout you right back out. If you'd like to find additional resources or discover how to work with me, head to www.kristenboss.com. it starts right here.