The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Life of Purpose: Tara Swart | The Neuroscience of Manifesting Your Goals - Part 2

Join us for our Life of Purpose series this month as we revisit some of our most impactful episodes. Dive deep into expert insights and practical strategies on health, performance, and community, helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment.

Join Tara Swart in Part 2 of our deep dive into the neuroscience of manifesting your goals. This episode continues to explore how brain chemistry, patience, creativity, and self-care contribute to achieving your aspirations. Learn how to apply neuroscience principles to enhance your goal-setting and achievement processes, making your aspirations attainable through scientifically informed methods.

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Duration:: 1h 15m
Broadcast on:: 02 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. Luckily, I've always had this perspective, but, you know, if it's not actual, physical, life, or death, then it's not that bad, and there might be things that you can do about it, and a lot can change in five years' time, or even, you know, five days or five weeks. I guess I'm very privileged that I've had that perspective, but I would say that because we get so caught up in our own emotions, that even when I do an exercise for someone, they say, like, you know, I'm going through this terrible situation and I can't cope with that, I say things like, well, what would you advise your sister if your sister was in that situation? Because that's still someone that you really care about, but you have one level of separation from being in the situation yourself. And you know, I do also like that question, like, how much will this matter in five years' time? Because you can take out about 50 percent of the things that people are worrying about with that question. I'm Srini Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds who've started movements, built driving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500 episode archive at UnmistakableCreative.com. So the manifestation part is really that the extension of the vision board becoming an action board, which is that the vision board primes your brain to notice opportunities that may otherwise be passed you by. But the additional bit to that is that primes your brain to notice and grasp opportunities that might otherwise be passed you by. So manifestation is about grasping opportunities and making, you know, the things that you dream of into reality. We talk about wanting this thing badly enough that, you know, we have intense emotion around it. Now, one of the things that I think is really fascinating about this is that that can also feel this like constant need of, you know, the sense that you're lacking this thing that you want so badly. And I remember this very specifically because I thought it was such a relevant quote to creative work at AR Raman, who's like this ridiculously famous Indian composer who's done every Bollywood movie under the sun. He had a documentary on Netflix coincidentally called Harmony, which, you know, we'll talk about it because I know you wrote a chapter about that. And one of the things that struck me that he said in that was that when you expect nothing everything comes to you. And you know, I wondered what that was about and what I realized was that it was what I saw is like, wow, this is a way of mitigating that sort of desperate emotion for the thing that you say you want so badly. Yeah, absolutely, because like you're taking me into the, you know, the finer aspects of the book now, which is that if you want something desperately, then what you're putting out into the universe is desperation. And that's actually specifically why I created the phrase magnetic desire because to me it's very positive, you know, it's magnetic at rooms, things to you and, you know, it's a desire rather than a desperate need. That's very important. So, you know, I have heard when I first started talking to my friends about vision boards and things, often people would use, and funny, we talked about language at the beginning and I think language, and then the words that you choose is super important. You know, if people said like, oh, you know, I'm just desperate to meet someone because my biological clock ticking or whatever, then I would say, well, then what you're asking for it, what you're basically saying is desperate, and that you can't use that kind of language. So that is, you know, it relates to the abundant thinking as well. So, I think I love that phrase if you bet nothing, everything happens, but to me that's too passive, that understanding how the brain works, I would think, you know, some people could be happy with that, but there are some things that I wish to achieve. There are some, you know, things that I wish to leave in the world, the impressions that I wish to have on people, and I'm simply not prepared to just say, well, you know, I won't think about it, or do anything about it, and all of those things will happen. I don't believe that. And I also don't believe that he actually has a word in it. You know, wait a minute, no, I'm, I guess that's a philosophy, not a way of behaving because you look at his body of work, and apparently, I remember his biographer said that it would be impossible for you to go through everything that he's done, even if you spend a year listening to nothing but his music. The guy has sold more albums than Britney Spears and Madonna combined, so I don't think it's, you know, his work ethic isn't, you know, working like crazy, but I think it was more about detachment from, you know, what could happen because the guy didn't even start out with the intention of doing what he's doing. He apparently was writing jingles for commercials, and somebody found out about it. Wow. Yeah. I love that. You know, and I do think that I do love the idea of serendipity, but when people say, oh, that was such a coincidence, I kind of say, well, actually, if you look at Aboriginal belief, so, you know, Aboriginal cultures everywhere, as they're in America and Australia and in India, the way that time is viewed in the Judeo-Christianic world is very fast present in the future. In Aboriginal cultures, it's more like concentric circles, and so they don't believe in coincidence or serendipity. They believe that it's because we view time in the wrong way. When you think, like, oh, isn't it amazing that I was just thinking about that yesterday, and then you and I spoke about that today, well, it's not amazing. It's because I've recalled that I was thinking about that yesterday because you and I are speaking about it. Now, if you and I didn't speak about it now, I just forget what I was thinking about yesterday. So that's, that's a tiny example. You know, sometimes it's things like, oh, it's really, I was thinking of you, and then I bumped into you in LA, like what a mad character incidents, and that's explained more by these, you know, more esoteric beliefs about how time were, and it also, something you said earlier reminded me of, have you read "Sidata" by Herman Hess? I love the way, I didn't understand it when I first read it, but the way he said, I can far, I can wait, and I can pray, and I thought, okay, that's not really that relevant to, like, the modern world. I'm not sure, like, what, you know, I can take away from that, but actually, when I practiced intermittent fasting, I really understood what that meant, which was that you feel hungry, that doesn't mean you have to grab something and eat immediately, you can wait, and your hunger will pass. And to me, that has a huge analogy for emotions, though I can feel angry, or I can feel sad, that doesn't mean I have to grab a bottle of wine, or, you know, or like offload, download all my emotions onto someone else, I can, I can wait, and I'm not going to feel that bad this time tomorrow. And it related to something, it triggered something in my mind from something you said earlier, which I know I can't remember, but I'm sure I'll remember when we listened to the FODCA. Well, it's funny, because I think 90% of my writing, when I write blog posts, are informed by something that somebody said when I was talking to them on the mic. Oh! Well, I think that also makes a perfect segue to this idea of patience, which I, it's funny because I feel that this is something that's an incredibly short supply in the world that we live in, especially when you see title book titles, like Six Figures in Six Months, and, you know, people basically look at these coaching programs or online courses, and they get upset that they're not getting a result within months when you realize, wait a minute, the person who's built this thing has been working on it for years. Yeah. And I think that the ability to go from idea to execution so rapidly has basically fueled impatience and then you layer this sort of social media artificially contrived ecosystem with, you know, immediate feedback loops and meaningless attention metrics on top of it, and what you get is impatience. So I wonder from, you know, one, you know, the one of the, I think things that really stood out to me that you said is that onboarding of any new skill takes targeted effort and repetition, the feeling that you finally got it and turned a new habit into second nature is a sign that your brain pathways have a rich critical mass. How do we develop patience in a world that is moving at breakneck pace and encourages to be impatient? Because I think back to something that I heard Nimal Ravi Khan say, he said, impatience, you know, impatience with action, patience with results. Yeah. I mean, it sort of relates back to the, if you expect nothing, everything comes to you, which is that you just can't, you know, have that desperate impatience needs for everything tough and right now. I mean, and I, I'm speaking as someone who's been guilty of being very impatient the most of my life. And actually it was the practice of vision boards that made me really believe that that's not the right way to be. So I learned to kind of, you know, in my 40s and after a lot of research and reflection. So well, let me start with, and also what I wanted to say was those, you know, that six figures some in six months or whatever, or the people who win the lottery or something, you know, or make, you just focus on making a lot of money and make it quite quickly or just make a lot of it. They usually mess it up, to be honest. So that's one of the reasons that patience is important, is that you slowly adjust to a new way of being a new life and new around as well. Because if you suddenly just get given, you know, $10 million, most people don't make good decisions with that money. So I think that's quite relevant. The patience thing is interesting because I would do these action boards for the next calendar year, usually. And you know, quite quickly, I was amazed that most of the things on the board would come true. And obviously it was in a very, you know, it was out in the open in my apartment. I would look at it every day. I was going through a huge period of personal development, and I was coaching, so you kind of have to, you know, walk the tour. And more and more, you know, I sort of got to the point where I was like, be careful what you wish for, because this stuff, you know, really works. And the more specific you are, it really works. And then there are a few things that they'd happen like after 18 months, not after a year or at the end of the next year. And I sort of became okay with that because I thought, well, you know, not everything has to happen in the next year. And I see that the things do happen eventually. And I found that really comforting. And I think one of the reasons we're impatient is that we think, well, if I don't have it now or it doesn't happen soon, it's never going to happen, but that's not actually a fact. So, you know, a lot of what you've spoken about with data is that we get data gets derailed, logic gets derailed by emotion. Then of like, you know, I really wanted to start up my own business this year or take my business to the next level this year, but it didn't happen or that event didn't work out. And it's about understanding that maybe it'll work out in the future, maybe it'll just take a bit longer than you thought and it does relate to that. I can wait, I can pray, I can fast, kind of thing. It's ahead of a funny example of that really a few because my friend is a professor of neuroscience. We did sort of check in at the end of 2050 and he said, you know, you said that this year on your visual board, you were going to find husband number two. And it's December, it's mid-December and that hasn't happened. So I said, yeah, that's okay. It'll happen next year. And so, you know, both speaking to him and then just getting to the point where I thought I said I want to get married again, but I don't really because I'm too afraid. I thought, okay, this time I'm really going to go for it. I made my vision board in December 2015 and I found to pick the big picture of an engagement ring in the Financial Times, so I put it top left on the vision board. And then I found this quote that I just liked. I don't normally put writing on my board, but it said Joy comes out of the blue. And in February 2016, so like just six weeks later, I met my now husband on a plane in the sky, which is out of the blue and, you know, later that year we were engaged. And so I did go back to my professor friend and say, well, you know, I have now found her husband number two. And it just, you know, one month into the following, one month and two days into the following year. So what do you think of that? And he was like, it's pretty, it's amazing, Tara. And he was, you know, that is, he said, when it got to the end of that year and you hadn't I just thought, well, she's going to give up on that now. And then, funnily enough that there was something about that ring. It wasn't that I specifically wanted that one. I was very happy with my engagement ring, but there's something about the color of a stone of the ring that was on my vision board from 2016, that this year, I thought, you know, I'd really like a piece of jewelry in that color. And then we went to Australia, I went on business, my health and came with me. And I read the news that these, you know, mines that produced stones of a certain color were closing down. And I sort of said, yeah, we have to get one really soon because the mines closing down and there won't be any left and then the price is going to go up. And, and my husband was like, oh, I don't know, you know, let's have a look maybe when we go to Hong Kong and then in Hong Kong, we didn't have a look. And I thought he's putting me off and he doesn't want me to have the item. And I still keep my vision board from 2016 next to my bed because it's the one where my life really changed. And I got into bed on life and I said, Oh, well, that, that stone is on my vision board from 2016. So I don't have to worry about it anymore because I know it's going to happen. It's just taking more time. And two weeks later, he gifted me the thing that I'd been napping him about a month. You could say that I had definitely like suggested very strongly that that's what I wanted. But, you know, I hadn't got it from 2016 to 2019. Yeah. And that's a very material thing, but there are other things like that that are less tangible examples to give you that it just happened the following year. So if you have parents, a significant other, just put pictures up of whatever you want all over their house. All over that, wow, you know, keep mentioning the word and say kind of, you know, make a sentence and then just insert the word pink for no particular reason and see what happened. Millions of people have lost weight with personalized plans from noon, like Evan, who can't stand salads and still lost 50 pounds. Salads generally, for most people, are the easy button, right? For me, that wasn't an option. I never really was a salad guy. That's just not who I am, but new work for me. Get your personalized plan today at noon.com. Real new user compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, the typical new user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary. 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So you know, you go into this idea of the genesis of the source and you say we become heavily biased in favor of logic when it comes to making decisions and measuring success. This is often at the expense of our deepest wants and needs. The key to maximizing the source is to allow each of the then the neurotransmitter pathways of the brain to fireball, maintaining a level of balance and counterbalance between them with constant feedback of information and allowing us to adjust the levels of our neurotransmitters and outputs from each pathway. The reason that struck me in particular is you're a business owner. If you don't look at your metrics, you're, you know, in my mind metrics are this sort of double edged sword, right? Clayton Christensen wrote this beautiful book called How Will You Measure Your Life. And I thought about it. I was like, okay, am I going to measure my life in book sales and podcast downloads? Well, that's a really empty way to measure my life. Or am I going to measure it based on the number of people who, you know, send me these really beautifully emails telling them how much a conversation has changed them. And yet at the same time, if you're running a business, metrics matter. So how do you balance those two things? Yeah, um, I want to answer this in a way that's useful to other people. So I think it's useful to talk more about when I was starting up the business when metrics absolutely did really matter. I mean, but they mattered because I needed to make enough money to live a little bit like if you put nothing, everything comes to you. I'm in the position now where my business, you know, has been going for 12 years. I get word of mouth referrals. I have a buffer in terms of by and on. So, you know, there's a lot of things, philosophies of you, as you said, that are easy to say when you've already achieved some of the basic things that you need to. I always said though, from the beginning that, yes, of course, I measured, you know, I did financial forecasts and I measured the amount of, you know, the revenue and the profit. But I always said that's just a measure, it's one measure of success for a business. It's not the reason that I do what I do. I think, and I'm guilty of this too, because I travel like crazy and I, you know, work really hard. So, we don't measure things like am I still enjoying what I am doing? Am I, you know, is every part of what I do, does it make me happy or are there some things that I compromise on because I need to pay the bills? Is this taking me away from my family too much? We don't tend to measure those things until they become a problem. So, I think use metrics, and obviously, if you're running a business, use financial metrics, but don't forget to use other metrics as well, because otherwise, you'll just become a slave to the financial metrics. I love it. Let's come back to the self-care piece. Let's go into, you know, I think we've in a lot of ways kind of unintentionally already covered a lot of the mechanisms of neuroplasticity about learning, perfecting, and retraining, you know, I think you kind of, you know, pretty much covered all of those. But then you go into this whole idea of a whole brain approach, right? Physical intelligence, physicality and interception, gut instinct and intuition, motivation, logic, and creativity. Talk to me about the role that those play in our ability to manifesting what it is that we want. Well, I think everything, really, because they're, you know, I brought those as the fundamentals in terms of the ways that we think and make decisions, and they relate to certain systems and pathways in the brain. And I've particularly put them in the order that I put them in because, as I said earlier, and, you know, you mentioned from the book, that we've just overplayed logic, themathively and downplayed things like emotion and intuition. So, but be able to unleash the full power of your brain. You need to pay attention to all of those six ways of thinking, which are mastering your emotions, brain body connection, trusting your intuition, making good decisions, staying motivated and resilient, and creating the life that you want. It's not about being equally good at everything, but it is about playing to your strength and feeling comfortable enough with the other ways of thinking that you can bring them in as required. And often for the reasons that you and I discussed earlier, like you were told that you had no athletic ability, that can be a reason that we block off the pathway that's about the brain body connection. Well, for me being told that I wasn't creative, that can be a reason that I don't focus on that pathway at all, and I make all of my decisions more logically or intuitively. So in terms of if we go back to the way that you think determines your life and that you can use your brain power to manifest the real world outcomes that you want, then, you know, your brain is almost like a well-oiled machine that you want firing on all cylinders. And so, paying attention to, okay, where are my strengths, and I'm really going to play to those, where are areas that I would benefit from developing, let's say emotional mastery or motivation, and what's something that I don't do, and maybe either looking at what's the reason that you don't do it, like you and I both identified one thing that we weren't really, you know, thinking of as strength. And it's not even always about getting all of that brain power yourself, but sometimes you might have a really intuitive friend, and say you might go to them to help you with that, if that's the pathway that you don't really use a bit, but if you're not using all of them, then you're not giving yourself the best chance to create the business that you want, to have the marriage that you want, to have physique and sports ability that you want. So, it's almost like it's not good enough for you to not use all of your brain power. And because of neuroplasticity, we can all do all of those things. It's just that we tend to default to our things that we find easiest to do. So in the section on emotion, I think there was one quote in particular that really stood out to me. You said the emotional profile of your family will have a big impact on how you manage and express your emotions. Now, I don't know if this is all Indian moms, like kind of beginning to kind of think it is, but my mom worries so much that pretty much my directive anytime I go on a surf or snowboard trip is a text message every day, letting us know that you didn't die. And I realized that that's just parents, like even now they're like text us when you get wherever you are. And I realized we started doing that to them after a certain point where like Texas, as they got older, we're like, please send us a text and let us know that you made it home. Okay. And it was kind of funny to see that, but having grown up, maybe around anxious parents or parents who make you feel stressed out, is it possible to overcome that given the impact that they've had on your emotional profile? And if so, how? See, this is a very, very interesting field because as you were speaking, I was thinking, well, chances are that we both have parents, you know, with similar age, we both have parents that went through some trauma during the partition of India. And so it's not just about what they were like bringing us up, but it's also about the epigenetic effect of trauma that they may have experienced in their life. So we know, for example, that into the third generation, survivors of the Holocaust, not just the children, but the grandchildren have altered stress responses. Now, this isn't always about things. So sometimes if you've experienced a certain amount of trauma, it can actually make you more resilient. So, you know, as I said, we switch on and off certain gene expression, but often if you've experienced trauma, then it does make you a very anxious person and that has an effect on your children. So we know that mommy rat, who are pregnant, if they are exposed to smell like peppermint and given a mild electric shock at the same time, then if you expose them to peppermint, they have a stress response because they are expecting an electric shock. And when the baby wrapped the bone, even though they've never received an electric shock themselves, if you expose them to the smell of peppermint, they have a stress response. So, there's both biological and psychological reasons that anxious parents can have an effect on you. And so if, you know, when I was at, when I was a medical student and we did pediatrics, we were taught the quadrant of intelligence and anxiety in parents. So basically, you can have an intelligent, non-anxious parent or an intelligent, anxious parent or a less intelligent, anxious parent and a less intelligent, less anxious parent. And actually, it's better to be less anxious than it matters how intelligent your parents are in terms of the neural development of the child. Which, you know, I think raises a lot of, it's certainly not meant to raise any guilt, but it raises a lot of questions in terms of what you expose your children to, how you learn to manage your emotions so that that's not passed on to your children, how you teach your children to, you know, do mindfulness and manage their own emotions. I think we just know so much more about it now than we did before, that I feel that you and I, you know, as we go into parenthood, will be much better equipped to deal with our own emotions, teach our children to deal with theirs and decide what we show them in terms of our own emotion. So in the next section, you get into this whole idea of physicality and interception and you show that energy is essential to maintain our ability to stay self-aware and manage our emotions, keep motivated when we're tired and distracted, rely on our intuition. And when we don't know who to trust, bring out of the box thinking into our life when we're in a rut and decide to stick to our life goals when the going gets tough. And when I look at this, the thing that I've said a handful of times, you know, when people have interviewed me is I don't think it's a coincidence that my surfing journey and my journey of being a writer are almost parallel to the date. It's almost like every outcome in my professional life changed for the better by becoming a surfer, which at the time, my mom was like, you're a beach bum who doesn't seem interested in a job anymore because it was a great way to pass the time when I didn't have a job after business school because it takes up a shitload of time and it doesn't cost any money. So I say it's the perfect hobby for an unemployed person, but it also made me incredibly happy during a time when most people wouldn't have been. So like what is happening there? Like why is it that, you know, when people do things like these action supports, like I can tell you I don't surf or snowboard for the exercise. Those are just convenient fringe benefits. I do it for the flow. Totally. I'm so with you on that I, I had an insight into that myself. I think because you and I, but all sorts of reasons that, you know, the cultural thing, the parent, the expectation, the education, we're very much in our head. Because, you know, so are probably most of your listeners and, and all the people that I work with. And so, and we're used to solving problems. We're used to dealing with mental challenges, but we haven't been so well trained at dealing with physical challenges. And I remember, um, I did the, um, as a child, but then I didn't ski for over a decade in when I was in my first marriage and I said, I came back to it as an adult. And I remember falling, well, not falling, but just sitting down on the side of a black run after a few falls and thinking, you know, I'm done, I'm exhausted, I'm cold. I'm not enjoying this anymore. And the people that were with me saying like, you know, get up, get up, come on, I really need to go and thinking, if I get up now, like the angle that I'm on, I'm just going to hurtle to my death. But then after a while thinking that I can't exactly sit here for us. And then just having this massive insight that this is what I demanded my coaching client. I asked them to make these huge changes, take risks, learn new things, push themselves out of their comfort zone. And I don't accept anything less than the best. And it really hit me that, you know, the physical and mental analogy is such a good one. So I think for you that it's been a way of exploring some territories in your mind that maybe it would be too confronting to do by going to psychotherapy or, you know, having coaching, and maybe wouldn't actually get you to the same point, necessarily, that you've used your body, which I also think was a pathway that you were a bit cut off from because you were told you didn't have the best ability to basically do therapy for yourself. Interesting. Well, let's get into this idea of intuition. I think there was one section about trusting your gut that really struck me. You said the gut isn't a second brain. It houses the enteric nervous system, which is one of the main divisions of the body's and it works unconsciously in much the same way you breathe and your heart beats with any intervention from your conscious brain. And I think the reason that really struck me was because I had a really, really bad case of IBS when I was younger. And that was actually the main reason I ended up sticking to surfing because I think it really helped with that. And, you know, the other thing you said is that a staggering 90% of the serotonin that works primarily in your brain is produced in the gut. So I remembered that story from, you know, the first time I caught a wave, but also something Danielle of Port Road and one of her books where she said she had this story about a Japanese business executive. Anytime he made a decision, he would do it after a meal. And if the meal went down OK, it would be a yes. If it didn't, the answer would be no. Oh, wow. I've never heard that before. Laughter. So with that in mind, one, can we can we, you know, like baby, you know, like baby? Can we, can we, you know, like basically improve the condition of the gut to have better serotonin levels? And if so, how? Well, so this is another very emerging and interesting field which is about the gut microbiome. And so when I was writing the book, I wanted to write a chapter on taking the physical care of your gut and I wanted to write a chapter on intuition. And then I had this crazy idea to put them into one chapter. And I'm so glad that I did because actually the research has really gone in that direction to show how connected they are. So basically, if your gut is not in good physical condition, then that gut brain interaction doesn't work as well and your access to your intuition will actually be clouded. And we've known for a long time about the neural connection between the gut and the limbic system, which is the intuitive part of the brain. But now we know that there's actually a three-way transmission between the gut neurons, the limbic brain and the gut micro, the bacteria in your gut. So there's that nerve connection and then the gut bacteria separately signal the neurons in your gut and to your brain through cytokine transmission, which is release of chemicals into the bloodstream. And so for all sorts of reasons in the modern world, antibiotic use, stress, alcohol, we've reduced the diversity of our gut bacteria. So I can't remember the exact number of hand, but compared to when we lived in the cave, we have like, you know, X hundreds of times less diversity of gut bacteria than we used to. So basically, the simplest thing is to take a good quality probiotic for a month and try to replenish your gut bacteria by eating a varied diet as fermented foods and prebiotic type food. And then you know, avoid stress, alcohol, and antibiotics. And then really work on honing your intuition through journaling. So yeah, there's again, it's a growing field, but there's some really exciting research about physical gut health and the brain. And actually, the research takes even further to the communication or the connection between your bone marrow, your immune system cells, and your gut microbiome. So, you know, our immunity, our brain health, and everything that comes from that, which is our, you know, our ability to manage our emotions, that's our intuition, everything else are intimately connected. We don't know enough about it yet, but it's a really, really exciting field. And so, especially if you've had IBS, I would definitely focus on, you know, doing some kinds of plans and then using probiotics and, you know, doing some food, food, and things like that. This podcast is brought to you by eHarmony. The dating app to find someone you can be yourself with. Why doesn't eHarmony allow copy and paste in first messages? Because you are unique, and your conversations should reflect that. 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And I look forward to seeing you inside our new Mighty Network. Let's talk about motivation. I think that this is fascinating to me. You say that having a strong sense of purpose correlates with wellbeing, it ensures we're goal-directed, motivated by a desire for a particular outcome that gives us the tenacity to keep going. It's funny because I worked in sales jobs at software companies where I got fired all the time, and yet I persisted with virtually no external reward for what I've done here at UnmistakeableCreative for more than almost a decade. And so I wonder, what is that about? Is it purpose that leads to that? Are we much more-- and it is a lack of purpose that leads to such poor performance in the working environment? Yeah. Well, you mentioned that you surf and so bored for the flow, rather than for physical exercise. When we're aligned in terms of our meaning and purpose, basically, when we're in integrity, when we-- and we didn't go into it too much, but you mentioned harmony when you mentioned that Netflix movie, and I also write about harmony, which is that you must be an internal harmony. So all of this, I really wanted to do this, but I did that for the money, that's not harmony. And then equally, if you were doing something that's great for you, but it's not great, but you're using child labor or something, then that's not harmony either, and subtler versions are the same thing. So there needs to be that external harmony, but also for us, and people call it head-hearted gut. I prefer to be a bit more scientific and say physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, but those things all need to be in some sort of alignment. But even if you use the example of the brain, the gut neurons, that needs to be in alignment to-- so often, logic tells us one thing, but intuition tells us another. And because of all the things that we talked about previously, it's really important to listen to intuition, because that's coming from the core of you, whereas logic, you know, and I know that we've bullied about this a little bit, but logic is often very driven by external expectation and by motivation that's not, you know, deeply purpose-led. And I love the Japanese concept that I mentioned in the book, Ikigai, which is your reason for waking up in the morning, you're why I do what I do. So it's funny, right? We're talking about perspective, and you mentioned logic, and I noticed the only part of the book that I actually don't have any other notes from, other than the header, was because I knew I was going to have this conversation, is logic, is a strange coincidence given our conversation. Well, I mean, to me, it's not a coincidence, because what I always, you know, in my teaching at MIT Sloan and with, you know, the clients that I coach, is that everybody's more than good enough at logic. If you went to school, high school, even if you didn't go to university, but, you know, especially if you went to university and you've, you know, been on a sort of typical traditional career path, then you are very, very logical and there are all these other amazing pathways in your brain that you could be just as good at. And that's why I focus on those things. And so, you know, I think that chapter is probably one of the thinnest chapters in the book as well. Well, I don't have much any notes from it. Yeah. Exactly. So let's talk about perspective. I really appreciated what you said about this. You said everyone is tested by challenging experiences such as bereavement, heartbreak or financial difficulties. This is all part of the rhythm of life. One question I often ask myself is how much will this matter in five years, perspective is about relativity and time as well as compared to the experience of others. And I think for many of us, we can look at that and we can understand this intellectually, but to put it into practice emotionally is far more challenging. And I wonder what is the key to developing that capacity when you find yourself in these situations? Yeah. I think, again, that's a little bit of a tricky one to relate. But I think for me, it started because I was a medical doctor. And so, you know, I've literally dealt with things where you ask the question, well, this matter in five years time, it could be the difference between someone being dead or alive. And so luckily, I've always had this perspective that, you know, if it's not actual physical life or death, then it's not that bad. Sometimes there might be things that you can do about it and a lot can change in five years time or even, you know, five days or five weeks. So I think, I guess I'm, you know, very privileged and I've had that perspective, but I would say that because we get so caught up in our own emotions that even when I do an exercise for someone like they say like this terrible thing, you know, I'm going through this terrible situation and I can't cope with it, I say things like, well, what would you advise your sister if your sister was in that situation? Because that's still someone that you really care about, but you have one level of separation from being in the situation yourself. And you know, I do also like that question, like how much will this matter in five years time? Because you can take out about 50% of the things that people are worrying about with that question. Of course, there are some things that will matter in five years time. And, you know, I mean, I think a really obvious one with my female friends and the female readership of the book is something like fertility. Yeah, that could really matter in five years time. So it becomes, it comes back to being much more about how you cope with the thing than the thing itself. And that's really, you know, a lot of what the book's about. So I think, you know, things like the master key system and thinking grow rich, what they're really about is you having mastery over yourself and becoming resilient. It's not about actually guessing everything that you want in your life. Well, that you think you want now, because you may not want them in five years time. Yeah, I mean, it's funny you say that because I definitely am not living the life that I wanted when I was 25 or when I was 30. I think if the 25 year old version of me saw how this had all turned out, they'd be like, what you traded in our, you know, shot at the corporate office for a wetsuit. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so could you're, you know, yourself in your 50s or 60s could pay something very similar or something very different. You just don't know. So, you know, that really also brings us to what we hear a lot of that which is being present, being in the moment, kind of, you know, enjoying the now and not worrying too much about the past or the future. But let's talk about creativity and raised awareness. I mean, obviously, it would be weird for us not to address what you've written about creativity given the title of the podcast. It's true. You say once we give ourselves permission to open up and play with lots of potential ideas and possibilities, creativity rewards us, enabling us to spot opportunities in unlikely places, it means we can sense when to take a chance and when to question or pursue something. It helps us hone a strong intuition, giving us the flexibility to recognize possibilities that might bypass us otherwise. I think for me, when I think about the creative capacity I've developed, it's largely been because of exposure to so many ideas, you know, like I always joke and say, I don't really know anything. I'm just a, you know, accumulation of people's ideas, people who are much smarter than I am. And so I always describe it as, yeah, I'm taking other people's ingredients, but coming up with my own recipes. You know, I wonder, one, you know, obviously, I think we all know, you know, creating anything is sort of a law of attraction at work. What does your research shown about this and what happens to this as we get older? Like, why is it that we see sort of a more, I know school is partially to blame for this because I remember, even in the Neville Ravi contest, he said, you know, the education system, unfortunately, rewards, replaces curiosity and creativity with compliance. So I guess really the question is, how do you get back to this? Yeah, I think it starts with a bit of a redefinition of what creativity is. So I think, you know, one of the reasons that I struggled with this is that I held on to the definition of creativity being about art or being in, you know, industries like film or dance or, you know, writing novels or whatever. And so I think the more that we understand that that's not what creativity is, that help. And so, you know, the redefinition that I've tried to put forward is that it's about thinking differently, about thinking out of the book, about imagining a different reality or the future, and applying, you know, either things that you know to a different reality or are, you know, taking completely new and different thinking into your current reality. So it's more, it's much more about that. Curiosity and playfulness are huge parts of it. So we don't really usually allow ourselves time to do that. So I think, you know, when you've been surfing and you're in flow, you've allowed yourself more time than the average person to think more creatively and therefore be more innovative. Yeah, so, you know, I've sort of how I've put it in the book is that you've created your life so far, you've created your home, you may have created some children, you can create the welcoming atmosphere when people come to your house. And so to focus on those, you know, areas that you have been being created, rather than to think that that gets squeezed out of you by school and your job and, and to make time for it, you know, like things like singing, it's always, it's always sort of, oh, no, I can't think. Well, actually, it doesn't matter if you're in tune or you're very, whether you're very good at it or not, actually just singing is you can just do it for the pleasure for yourself. And, you know, there are, we know that there are benefits for people who press themselves in that way. So I think creativity is about that expressive outlet for you, whatever it is. So your surfing is creative, but not everybody would see it that way. So let's talk about the idea of raised awareness. You know, so the more we experience something, the more we lay down pathways for that connection, our brains through neuroplasticity and increased synapses, and you basically define it, you basically break raised awareness down into these areas roles, secrets, beliefs, values and boundaries. Can you expand on those and what they mean and how they play a role? So raised awareness is basically about taking from non conscious or subconscious to conscious what driving your behavior or what has led you to be in the position that you're in today. And so this also relates back a little bit to what you're asking about with sort of like you know, the emotional style in your family. The things like roles and boundaries and values are generally things that are instilled in you by your family. And so we both talked about being the first, you know, the first child of Indian immigrant parents and that would have put us into a certain role. And the cultural heritage would have given us certain values. But then, you know, I think I sort of said that the difference between you and I perhaps because of gender was that boundaries may have been different from me. I realized I didn't have boundaries based on growing up with the mother that I did. Yeah, so I mean, you know, having very loose boundaries makes you a certain type of person later in life. Whereas if you have very, very strict boundaries and, you know, either punishment or humiliation, if you cross those boundaries or you have fear of even going close to that boundary, that makes me a very different kind of person. So it's really about, you know, the premise of the book isn't about, it's mostly about being forward looking, it's not about kind of, you know, trying to do therapy on yourself, but there has to be some looking at what created the individual that you are today. And I find that looking at those, you know, like what secrets were kept in your family. So it's, you know, the roles, boundaries, the values, and secret, and a few other things that they can be really important things. They're a big one that I hear people talk about is, or we didn't talk about money in our family. And, but funnily enough, these people often end up being financial advisors or bankers. So, you know, it's interesting that that may have driven people into a certain career, but it's so unconscious. But the more we can raise our awareness of why we've chosen certain things, the more that we can release sometimes terrible amounts of stress. We can stop fighting a fight that we don't need to fight anymore. And we can make, you know, new decisions about what we really want to be doing and how we want to be living and how we want to be feeling as a human. Well, I want to bring this full circle with the section on self care, because I think that you dedicated an important part of it. And I think in a lot of ways, I see it in myself often. I see it in our culture that this is, I think, one of the areas that is under threat because we're so gold driven. Like if you go to medium any day, and I know that I contribute to this, it's, you know, productivity hack after productivity hack, it's, you know, people eating soil and to avoid pay out spending time eating, which I think is ridiculous because we're Indian and everybody do centers around food. You know, I think that you basically broke it down into a couple of components, rest, fuel and hydration. And it was funny because I was reading the hydration thing, it was like, if you noticed your thirst, your lips are dry lips, you're way more than 3% dehydrated, and I'm thinking, Jesus, I'm like, I need to go get water right after this. Yeah, see, that's the difference between men and women. I got a large, you know, vessel of water to bring with me the podcast to make so that I would drink all the way out. I had to move from my spot where I'm normally at. So I normally would have to go, yeah, but I hear you. Yeah, I'm sure you're actually actually right. If we did a large statistical sample, that would probably be the case. I do see that. But you know, regardless of that, I always say to people, you'd never drive your car without topping up the oil in the water, but you'd come to work having maybe skip breakfast, not drunk any water for over 8 hours, grab the coffee on the way, and expect your brain to function as its best. It's just not, it doesn't work like that. You need to lubricate the chemical and electrical messages that pass between the neurons. And that's why, you know, I mean, I've had like, dandruff arguments with some of my CEO clients because I can see that they're dehydrated. And I literally once said to one of them, you were asking me to help you lead a massive organization through a digital transformation. But I know that you can't think as well as you could because you haven't drunk enough or so. And, you know, I got this guy to do food and drink diary and he was drinking coffee and like diet cola and wine and beer, but no water. And telling me, I can't drink as much water as you say I should because I'll be in the bathroom all day. But actually, he was drinking losses of the liquid. So I won that argument with you because I think I would probably like I'm thinking about just the last 24 hours. I'm like, yeah, I'd lose that argument with you too. Yeah. But it's such a small thing that you can do to improve your, you know, the, okay, so what? Functioning of your brain. So we would be in terms of, you know, I wake up at like 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. every day because it's like prime creative time for me. And of course, I drink coffee, but I also make a point to grab a big thing of water. So I'm curious, like, is there a certain amount of water or there's specifics? Like what, how would you suggest we start the day when it comes to dehydration? I mean, I take a glass of water to bed with me and drink it fasting in the morning because I know, yeah, by then I haven't drunk anything for seven or eight hours. Um, so the sort of the numbers are half a liter of water for every 30 pounds of your body weight per day, which, you know, for a small woman, like me is about one and a half liters for, you know, for some men, it's two or three liters, funnily enough, when I was in LA, when you and I first wrote to each other, I was dating with a really old girlfriend. And he loves my book and he's bought it for so many people, but he said the only thing I didn't agree with is that I'm apparently supposed to be drinking three days of the water a day. And he was like, that's the way to work. But then I said, well, you know, how much are you drinking? It's probably not, not enough. Like maybe three days you asked, but, um, my guess is that you're drinking a lot less than you. You could be, which, you know, is a good guest, but the PhD correct the most people. I noticed that, you know, my friend, Matt and I moved to Boulder recently and the climate is dryer there because you're up the elevation and we both immediately noticed and I was like, listen, man, my lips are chapped every day. Is that happening to you? Yes. I was like, okay, good. I was like, I wanted to make sure I was not losing my mind. But I realized like there, you know, you have to borrow and have three or four drinks. It's a whole different story. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Um, yeah, I mean, the thing is things like change of altitude or change of humidity or, you know, weather makes that a bit more obvious. But, um, and, you know, things like alcohol and caffeine that actually are diuretics that drain raw water from your system than the liquids that they put in. Um, so all I'm suggesting with those, the self care categories which are rest, fuel, hydrate, oxygenate and simplify is to do micro tweaks in each of those areas. So things like, you know, drinking extra glass of water per day, go to bed half an hour earlier, walk a thousand more steps a day more than you usually do. Just start with really small things like that. And then you actually start to feel better. I mean, for you, if the only thing you did in the next month was drink enough water every day, like the right amount, you would feel desperate. Um, and then if you think about adding in five or ten of these micro tweet, just, you know, the benefits that you can unleash for your brain power from that kind of self care is really why I talk about self care. I am going to track it. Yeah, I will experiment with it and track it and send you the results. Okay. That would be great. I'll make myself the human guinea pig for all the things you've talked about. Let's talk about food. Um, briefly, you know, it's funny because I always, I've written a little bit about food in my various books on creativity. It was like, I'm Indian, our entire diet is carbs. Like, there's no getting around it, you know, not that I eat that way. But if I'm at home, I know that, you know, being like gluten free, I have a friend who's gluten free, comes over and my mom's like, I'm really sorry, but I don't know what to make this guy, like, tell him to go get something. Uh, so let's talk specifically about diet because I think that our awareness about, you know, food has changed substantially over the last two decades. Um, so just to the record, my husband is gluten free and we went to India two years ago and I was amazed by how good they were. Um, so, and there's actually a book that you should buy if you're a parent, then read yourself called the South Asian health solution. It's by a doctor who works in Silicon Valley and it is life changing. Yeah. Um, so it's only one of my hedge fund clients who's who's of Indian origin gave me that book and I absolutely love it. And so, you know, we need to be teaching our parents as well that this carb heavy diet is so bad for us. Um, so, um, yeah, so from a nutritional point of view, just quite generally, um, you know, I, I tend to eat in a brain first kind of way. So most of us eat because we're hungry or we, you know, we're training for a particular physical activity or we want to lose weight, but no one really think what should I eat today? So I can be the best manager or leader. What can what should I eat today? So I can be creative. What should I eat? So I can make good decisions, but the brain, which is pretty tiny, like four or five pounds uses up 25 to 30% of what we eat. So I just eat really nutrition dent, you know, a lot of dark, skinned foods, like blueberries and black beans. Um, because the darker the skin, the more nutrients there are. Um, lots of green leafy vegetables, nuts and seeds for the magnesium and the other micronutrients. And then if you do eat, um, meat and fish, then the oily fish, you know, some lean meat for the protein eggs, avocado, all the good oils and fats, like actually key and coconut oil, olive oil. Um, so yeah, I eat a lot of the good fat. I tried to eat, you know, as much protein as I can, but I don't eat meat. Um, and I kind of prefer being vegetarian. So that's sometimes a bit tricky. And I really massively try to minimize the carbs. I don't eat any refined carbs. Um, it is hard, I think not to eat rice if you're Indian. It's just like a, literally like a lifelong love affair with a certain food group. But, um, you know, I do, because my husband's gluten free, we don't really have, um, any gluten in the house. So that helps to have just more variety. Um, and you know, there is some evidence that coconut oil with your brain power. Um, but if you're not from a culture like us, so if you're root, ethnically are not from a place where coconut, there are a natural, um, tree, then coconut oil can actually be quite bad. So you've got microbiome. So it's better to get the pure, um, MCT oil, which is medium tray, medium chain triglycerides. And, um, obviously, you know, bulletproof has been, um, yeah, I was going to stay in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I was actually on the, um, Dave's podcast and, um, so I'm a big fan of MCT oil, but I, you know, feel that I can tolerate coconut oil, but still MCT oil is better. Um, and then so the level one of the game is to eat regularly because your brain can't store, store, um, the resources for later. But if you eat well, exercise, eat quite healthily, drink enough water, etc, then you can do what's called time restricted eating. So for instance, I only eat between 12 noon and eight p.m. So I'm essentially fasting for 16 hours overnight. Even if you did eight a.m. to eight p.m. That is considered a fast. So again, in, um, Indian cultures, um, fasting is, is often part of it. So that can be something that, you know, people who eat too many carbs can try to do. And then if you want to take it really to the, the next level, then, um, intermittent fasting, which is where two non-consecutive days of the week you reduce your calorie intake to 500 calories for a woman and 600 calories for a man. Um, and like I said, I tried that a few years ago and the first couple of weeks you are really aware of being hungry and very difficult to like day within the 500, but you get used to it really quickly. Um, and it has such a strong impact on all that very unhealthy visceral fat that's around our organs in our abdomen. Um, so actually particularly for South Asian people, but actually, you know, for anyone, um, who has particularly who has best of all fat. It's a really healthy practice and it also has brain benefit. Wow. So you've got a bulletproof and, uh, you know, the, you know, brain benefits of bulletproof coffee. I mean, you know, I think it was funny because, you know, I think Dave has really kind of, um, bred this sort of culture of biohackers. And I know, I remember specifically underlining this. I don't have a quote, but you wrote about Pidaffinil inside of the book about how it actually just makes you more alert. So I wonder, you know, as a neuroscientist, like, what is your perspective on this whole biohacker culture? Um, you know, and then you look at things, you know, like microdosing things that Steven Kotler and Jamie Wilbur about instilling fire, right? Microdosing mushrooms. Uh, you know, like where is this all kind of unknown? Cause the other thing I remember asking Adam Gazali, who's a neuroscientist as well at UCSF about attention. And the, the consensus on Pidaffinil has always been, I feel like I haven't gotten a straight answer, but I saw what you wrote about it. So I wanted to ask you about it, but, you know, not just medapinal, but the sort of biohacking microdosing cult general. Yeah. Yeah. So interestingly, Dave's wife and I both have our MCT oil in matcha green tea, which has, you know, hundreds of antioxidants and nutrients in it that are really good for your brain. So I would say that on the spectrum or keeping things as natural as possible to, you know, basically biohacking with every drug that's available out there, I would say I'm more on the natural side of it. But as a neurofarmacologist, obviously I have to keep an eye on where this research is going. And at the moment, um, I'm not really comfortable with people using drugs that are designed for a certain disease to try to improve their brain power. And we do, you know, so I'll give you a definitive answer. Something like medapinal increases wakefulness, but it does not boost your brain power. And so the same friends, the professor of neuroscience that asked me about finding husband number two, that to me, it's a bit like biagra. It will improve your one off performance, but it won't save your merit. And I love that analogy. So, you know, there are lots to be honest, if you're not eating a good diet in the first place, then it's like you're putting, you know, a cherry on the icing where you don't really have a case. Um, so it, you know, that, that nutrition dense diet is something that I don't think most people are doing already. And then, you know, the other things that we've spoken about. Then if you want to add in some things that map the green tea, like coconut oil, like, you know, blueberries that you really have to eat, like 25 to get those sort of cognitive benefit, then I think, you know, there is a lovely growing field of brain, um, but kind of multivitamins, which is still all based on totally natural things that just, you know, give you that extra nutrition that you might not be getting through diet alone. And then there's things like micro dosing and using these, you know, drugs that promote wakefulness, which, you know, it's the, it's the direction that things are going in. So to be honest, if everybody else was doing it, I, you know, put a little bit like that drug limit, unless I wouldn't want to be the only person that's not taking it. But I would, I don't want to be one of the first people to try. You know, there's no way I would be asking you this question if I didn't have experience with it. So like, you know, yeah, I was like, Oh, wow, like I remember what I was studying for the GMAT. It was help incredibly helpful because I'd come home from work. I think more than anything, though, it was the wakefulness part. I was able to stay up more than anything else. Yeah. And it was funny, because even when I, you know, I went to Stephen Kotler's Zero to Dangerous Seminar, and we're talking about flow. And of course, naturally, my Daphneil came up and he said, look, he said, he said, we know for sure that the antidepressants, right? Like the sort of SSRIs, he's like, those are deterrence of flow. And I noticed the first, that was one of the first things I noticed when I took antidepressants was that when I would catch a wave in the water, the high had diminished significantly from what it used to be. And that was one of the big reasons. I was like, okay, you know what, like, that was, you know, and then I managed to kick them. And it was strange because I managed to kick them, not through a doctor, but gradually winning myself off. And then I was on a surf trip in India and I was so tired at the end of every day, I forgot to take them. And then I just stopped taking And actually, what people forget about that movie limitless in the end, he weans himself off the drug, but finds that he has the power in his own brain to do all of those things. So I was actually going to say to you that, you know, my preference moment to rotation tank. In terms of the not just like the short term, the short term benefits, but the benefits that people talk about in terms of things like massive insight and, you know, raised awareness. And I'm just preferring to keep it as natural as possible at the moment. But I'm not saying I wouldn't do it because it true. Well, this has been just mind boggling, Michael, I feel like I could talk to you for like three or four hours. And I have a feeling our listeners are going to want to hear more from you. So I want to bring those full circle and finish with my final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews with the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes some of your something unmistakable? I think I really think it's being very comfortable in your own skin for that authenticity. We all tap into that and we resonate with it and it makes us feel so good. And so, partly it's going against the grain, but I think it's having the confidence to go against grain because you're so comfortable in your own skin. To me, that's the thing that really makes, you know, a strong impact and impression and lingers. And that's what I would consider unmistakable. Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us to share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work as well as the book? Thank you. So it's a book. The source, the secrets of the universal science of the brain is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and they are the independent book sellers across the US and Amazon everywhere. I am most active on Instagram, Dr. Tara Swat. So Dr. Tara Swat, but I'm also on Twitter and my website, Tara Swat. Awesome. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. While you're listening, were there any moments you found fascinating, inspiring, instructive, maybe even heartwarming? Can you think of anyone, a friend or a family member who would appreciate this moment? If so, take a second and share today's episode with that one person because good ideas and messages are meant to be shared. This podcast is brought to you by E-Harmony. The dating app to find someone you can be yourself with. Why doesn't E-Harmony allow copy and paste in first messages? 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