The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Life of Purpose: Tara Swart | The Neuroscience of Manifesting Your Goals - Part 1

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, a neuroscientist and former psychiatric doctor, as she explains the science behind manifesting your goals. In this informative episode, Tara delves into practical applications of brain plasticity, providing listeners with actionable strategies to harness their mental power and achieve their aspirations. Discover the neurological foundations that can make your dreams a reality in Part 1 of this fascinating two-part series.

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Duration:: 1h 5m
Broadcast on:: 01 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. Again, that's unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. So, yeah, "Magnetics" is a nice phrase because it really puts together how important emotion is. And if we talk about basic human emotion, the model that I've used in the book is of these eight basic human emotions. And because of loss aversion, five of the eight are what we call "survival emotion," though fear, anger, disgust, shame, and sadness. They're all things that we do anything to avoid and that's actually helped us to survive. The other end of the spectrum are love and trust on one and then joy and excitement. So those are the emotions that are behind magnetic desire, you know, the things that you really want, the things that bring you love or make you feel safe and trusting and make you excited. And then in between those two sets of emotions is surprise. And I do believe now more that I've been doing vision boards for a long time that I don't try to cover every aspect of what I want. I try to leave a bit of room for magic, basically. So, you know, you and I don't actually know everything, every good thing that could happen to us. So I like to leave a bit of room for something that I didn't expect to be able to happen. And 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 have passed you by. But the additional bit to that is that primes your brain to notice and grasp opportunities that might otherwise have passed you by. So manifestation is about grasping opportunities and making, you know, the things that you dream of into a reality. 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. Tara, welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Well, thanks so much for having me. Well, it is my pleasure to have you here. So I actually got your book by way of your publicist, The Source, and I loved it because of the fact that it was a science-based explanation of the law of attraction. And I've always been incredibly skeptical about people who could not back up all these things with research, despite the fact that I am a spiritual person and a lot of the guests here, as I was saying to you before we hit record, have been spiritual teachers. But before we get into all of that, I want to start by asking you, what is one of the most important things that you learn from one or both of your parents while you were growing up that have shaped an influence to you of becoming what you've done with your life? That's such an interesting question. So I would say, I resonated with a lot of what you've just said, because coming from an Indian background as well, I had some cultural beliefs that would be considered kind of new age, but they were cultural, so that was okay. But the really new age thinking, I was like, come on, prove to me that it works because otherwise you're just not going to. I would say that the best thing that my father ever did for me was, well, for a start named Mitara, which means star and is the Hindu goddess of strength, and then just tell me that I could do anything that I ever wanted to. I mean, that, and I think he must have said it so many times because it's sort of like an entrant memory. So, you know, it's like a pathway in my brain that I can do anything. I'm a star, just that positivity that you need as a child to give you some self-belief nature in life. Well, okay, so, you know, you're of Indian descent. Now, when an Indian parent usually says you can do anything and be anything you want, it's usually followed with a caveat of you can be any kind of doctor or engineer you want to be. And I know you're a doctor, so you kind of like, you know, one of my friends jokingly says that my sister is every Indian parent's dream come true because of the fact that she has pretty much hit every checkbox that an Indian like, you know, mother-in-law would say, okay, wow, I know this because my sister got married recently, but, and you and a lot of ways are kind of similar. Like what was the narrative around your house growing up about careers and making your way in the world? What did your parents tell you? Yeah. So, I was the first child. So, there was definitely a lot of expectation on me to conform to that kind of doctor lawyer. My brother is actually a lawyer, but I always felt that he had a bit more choice in the subjects that he chose. So, so what's interesting is that I think when you grow up, you know, with a different cultural heritage to where you are, which is, I imagine what you had as well, that there are a lot of dilemmas in conflict and dichotomy. And so growing up, our house was full of trinkets that my parents had gathered from their travel. But as a family, I guess, was too young kid, we didn't really travel very much apart from going to India to the grandparents and their, and I'll go to the castle. You can relate. Yeah. However, you know, soon as I was old enough to, I just wanted to travel like crazy. And that was slightly frowned upon, I have to say. I also, actually, like when I was about 16, my English teacher said to me, you are so talented, you should read English at university and try to become an actress. And my father said over my dead body. So he would never have said that I wasn't capable of doing it. He said, I don't want you to do it. So yeah, I absolutely went on this path of going to medical school. Even doing the PhD was very much about parental and teacher expectation. And you know, luckily I was smart enough and good at science that I could quite easily do those things. So it wasn't difficult for me to comply. However, I think with the travel thing, you know, obviously my parents had traveled a lot and had all these stories and these amazing, unusual things around the house that I think that strong message of you can do anything you want eventually surfaced. I mean, not till my mid 30s, but I actually believe that despite them saying this is what you should do, the sort of more, the deeper emotional resonance of you can do anything that you want eventually came out. I mean, much to their not liking it because, you know, giving up medicine is like cardinal thing. I can imagine. Yeah. So there are a couple other questions I have about this. I mean, you grew up in the UK. I grew up in the United States as an Indian American. Part of me wonders, what is it like to be the child of Indian immigrants in the UK and how does that contrast do you think to the experience that I had? You know, like, what do you think is different about it? I don't know. I have a few friends who are of Indian heritage that grew up and some cousins actually that grew up in the States. I think that the things that we struggle with are probably very similar. So I don't, I don't think it's that different, but you tell me if you think there is something because I'd be interested to know. Well, I mean, I think that for me, one, you know, I wonder what is the whole experience of going to school when you're a kid like granted, I've seen the in-betweeners and I'm like, okay, if that's the high school experience of young, you know, British boys, I think that sounds about like my high school experience. Just a complete nerd with no ability to get a girl and having nothing on my mind but girls. And so I think about that. And I wonder, you know, when my parents, you know, were with me, I was sort of the experiment because I was the first kid. And so when, you know, popular kids started coming out and people were buying nice clothes, they thought I was a complete freak of nature. And my sister came about to that phase in her life and like, oh, we've been all through all this before. We've seen all this. So they knew how to handle it. And I wonder, you know, you being the first, did your parents have a similar experience? Like I feel like my sister got away with things that I would never have gotten away with when I was at high school. 100%. So I feel like I was constantly fighting for my rights, basically, like, and they were to just to be like my friends. I mean, I was the only kid in my sort of group of friends at school that wasn't allowed to sleep over it. And I think that's more of a girl thing than a boy thing. So I don't know if you were, but, you know, I certainly wasn't allowed to dress in the way that a teenage girl in London wants to dress. And so that all, you know, came out on the ones that I was 18, but it's definitely a lot of rebellion in terms of that I could actually do the things that I wanted to whereas before I wanted to do them, but I couldn't. I imagine that the gender thing actually does make a difference, but I think the, you know, your place in the hierarchy of the sibling also makes a difference, because with the first one, I think that people who've moved hold on to their culture more strongly. So, you know, I was brought up vegetarian for the first five years of my life and then ate a bit of fish. But my brother, you know, he ate meat, he ate fish, he just, you know, kind of, I feel like you, like he could do whatever he wanted, but it was because I'd beaten that par, you know, it was sort of being a bit more flexible around the culture that you came from and the culture that you live in. Yeah. Were you born in India or were you born in the UK? No, I was born in the UK, but my parents came across, yeah. How old were you when you guys, well, or so you were born there, so pretty much you've only known growing up there? Yeah, I bet. Yeah, I've only known growing up there. And to be honest, it normalizes, doesn't it? So I was used to being that everybody around me being white and you don't really look at yourself during the day. So you're not very aware of what color you are. I remember going to India and just being stared at so much, feeling really uncomfortable. Like, I didn't belong there. So, yeah, it's interesting because you, belonging is a strange thing. And I think it's ended up with me feeling like a citizen of the world and so comfortable traveling and going to new places and having friends like in America, South Africa, Australia. But growing up, it was like I didn't really belong to any, you know, I was sort of different everywhere I went. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? 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In 4 weeks the typical new user can expect to lose 1 to 2 pounds per week. Individual results may vary. Yeah so something you said is that that whole sort of belief of I you know can do anything you know it was their prevalent throughout your life but yet you still followed this conventional path and it didn't surface until you were in your 30s. I don't think that's an uncommon story because I feel like half the people that I talk to are people who find themselves disillusioned with you know their high powered corporate job that they thought was going to make them happy or their amazing blog degree that nets them a ton of money and then they just leave it all. So I wonder you know you're you know a neuroscientist. So why does it take so many people so long to make that discovery and you mentioned you know before we hit record that you were parents when wondering how does the experience that you've had and the process of knowing what you do from writing this book and the work that you've done with people influence and shape what you do as a parent. So there's a lot lot there really isn't there um so I think that so the fact that the neuroscientist in me is saying that the longer a pathway has been developing in your brain the more entrenched it is the stronger an influence it has on you. So if for a long time people said you must do well at school you must go to university you know you must go on this career path then the reason that it takes people just in a generic sense longer to break free from that is that that's been the filter through which they've perceived life for the longest time. So and I think you know I'm so grateful for my education. I had an extremely privileged education you know I've got an Oxford University Medical degree I have a PhD in neuroscience and that's definitely let me be able to make the choices that I've made later in life so I'm under no illusions that you know huge part of my success is because of the the education that I have. So I think you know in terms of neuroplasticity and brain agility which are my two big things that you know areas of research the brain agility piece was really like well if I'm so smart at that then I should be able to do anything and it was only in my mid 30s that I really woke up and thought well what do I want to do and just to answer the second part of your question I'm actually a step parents I've got an adult stepson but I know that quite a sort of guiding principle for me is to not do the things that I absolutely hated about the way that I was brought up that that's quite strong and and I keep it very very simple that you know if you if they know that you love them and you give them boundaries that they feel safe then you just have to pray that you've instilled the values and then that will lead them to make the right choice of nature in life that you cannot well because especially because minor adults that children are tell them what to do um yeah so yeah it's interesting for me coming to parenting much later in life that where I can apply more psychological skills because I'm talking to an adult that that's really suited me I don't think you know that's kind of diapers sleepless nights would have particularly played to my strength so well okay so I'm so glad you brought up that you were a step parent because that you know raises a question of Indian parents I think have a very clear idea of sort of what family values and a family unit looks like and my guess is it wasn't hey I'm going to be a step parent to adult children like that's going to be the way that my family is so I wonder what is that dynamic been like in terms of navigating it with your family um well I had to be honest it wasn't that bad because I'd already got married once and got divorced which was the terrible bit so once I've done that I couldn't really do anything that much more wrong but I think they were just so relieved that I got married again at all but um yeah and yeah and then actually as you know what Indian parents are like um they completely accepted my husband and my steps on as their family and that you know there's never been any issue with that but I think you know both my marriages have been to people that aren't Indian and there's definitely been what you know certainly when I was in my 20s and I met my first husband there was a much bigger issue with that uh-huh so not being married to somebody who's Indian it's funny because I think about this a lot because my sister got married nobody expected in a million years that she would marry an Indian guy and she did and one of the things I noticed was how much tradition was involved in the wedding and so one of the things I always wonder when people of different races marry particularly those who have you know sort of this cultural heritage is how do you preserve and and choose to preserve aspects of Indian culture in your relationship with your partner and you know because I had thought about this a lot I thought to myself you know the first thing that probably is gonna go and I and I even wonder this with my sister right because we're from Andhra Pradesh and we speak Telugu and the guy she married is Bengali and I thought okay wait a minute the first thing to go potentially is language and I know for a fact that if I don't marry an Indian girl that is definitely gonna go out the window so I wonder how you think about preserving aspects of heritage and culture in a relationship where the person you're married to us out of the same race yeah I think you do have to give it a lot more thought obviously and I think language is so important that actually in my first marriage we both tried to learn each other's language and we were both multi-lingual so it was not that difficult and something that we were really motivated to do so that was that was nice um funnily enough having you know grown up in London and kind of kept the two things quite separate so having that Indian cultural heritage which I'm extremely proud of but more at home and not so much with my friends when it came to getting married I was absolutely without a doubt going to get married in a red starry I was not even going to consider a white dress so there was and I'm pretty you know strong-minded so there was no discussion about that even though I had not grown up wearing Indian clothes much at all really only for like religious ceremonies like once a year or if I went to India um but yeah that was that was definitely important to me and actually my house my first husband who's um white's bath african war um Indian clothes and so did his brother to the wedding um so I think it's really just about being so respectful of each other's culture I don't think it can be anything other than that and um you know India's just such an amazing country so we actually went there on our honeymoon and we you know traveled around there um several times um I've been to India as my my husband now and we're going again actually um just after Christmas so I think being Indian and Hindu or having that sort of you know eastern philosophy the sort of Buddhist into eastern philosophy actually makes it quite easy to have that in your life without it being to um own a rest on somebody else yeah you know I was writing about this the other day I thought this is one of the strange paradoxes of Indian culture right the one of the primary messages of our most important spiritual text of Bhagavad Gita is that you're not entitled to the fruits of your labor yet Indians I feel assess somebody's value in society based entirely on the fruits of their labor and I wonder what you'd have to say about that given the nature of the work you do and then we'll actually start getting into this brain plasticity piece um I do think there's something to that and obviously you know you and I grew up with that so I think there's a lot of you know caring very much about what other people think and what your children are doing and what other people's children are doing and that sort of thing but then you know I think we have the privilege of choosing the best bits and not necessarily taking the bits that we don't like so much so for me the spiritual part of it is really the part that I have brought into my life most strongly and so you know for instance my husband now who's half Canadian but very British um but to me that you have no issue you it doesn't make you feel less of a person or you know mistreated as a woman to be in service to others all the time and he said you are the person that's done the most for me in my whole life but you're the most free spirited person I know and so doing things for others doesn't demean you it doesn't mean that you're not a free spirit but I think that's very cultural for us you know that that um you know sort of being of service being helpful being generous being kind feeding people those are big parts of of that you know Hindu philosophy um and you know not being materialistic so yeah I think those are things that my husband and steps are now really appreciate about me uh well I think that makes a perfect segue to the book and you know I have my notes in front of me and these are the first two things that caught my mind that I ended up writing down or you know you say we've moved away from emotions to logic and facts and survival through competition became our means to an end we lost the sense of abundance that had got us so far and the sense that there was enough for everyone and then you say we've demoted depth passion and instinct and come to rely on the surface level capabilities of such as exams rote learning or transactional relationships that are more connected with material gain than joy we live a life dominated by stress and are too busy to really take notice of who we are where we're going and what we want from life and you know I think it's a it's such an interesting way to to really begin the conversation about what you do particularly because of what we just said about this paradox of spirituality and materialism that exists in the culture that we grew up in and yet you've also taken an incredibly science-based approach to this which is why I think I you know I said I appreciated this so much so with that in mind it wanted I'd love to just sort of have you addressed you know those two two quotes from the book yeah it's interesting hearing you read that I sort of feel amazed that I wrote that but then I listened to it and I think so true isn't it I mean that's how'd I see I mean that you know obviously I thought about it a lot before I wrote it and it kind of gives me goosebumps because that's you know the conclusion I've come to is that my emotions and my intuition are you know they're not those sorts of things are not valued by society logic and you know kind of material success is very valued by society I feel and actually you know my biggest message is that your brain is amazing and has so much more potential than than you know and that's why it was important to back it up with science to to show people that that's true but if you think about humans then how we've evolved and everything that we've achieved it is amazing but there was a time where we couldn't speak we could only grunt and gesture and it was that that intuition and instinct and you know that primal brain body connection that really got us to this next level but it's almost like as soon as we got to the next level we just threw away everything that we'd had before and I think we're starting to see issues with that now with social media and technology and you know lots of things you know all the psychosocial and geopolitical crises around the world and so I feel strongly that it is going to be about reconnecting to to nature to some of these ancient philosophies and I've forgotten the second part of your question well I do it I think really more than anything it was really I wanted to hear have you comment on all that but I think that that you know really one of the things I know you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation is that you basically focus on brain plasticity as your area of research so where I want to start is you know what are we actually capable of changing and how much can we change and I'll give you some context for this you know obviously we've had every world-class performer you could possibly think of here from performance psychologist to Elon Musk's ex-wife and two conversations come to mind for me that I wanted to ask you about in the context of this question in terms of what we're capable of changing at a certain age. The first was with Dan Coyle who wrote the talent code and you know another book about teams that succeed and when I asked him about certain skills for example athletic ability or musical talent he said you know you can get to a certain point in adult life where the brain plasticity isn't what it used to be he said can you get good enough to you know add a musical instrument to impress the hell out of your friends and family in your 30s yeah absolutely but he said are you going to be opening for you two at their next concert probably not and then I think the other component of this and this is one that's really interesting to me is when we look at sort of the you know larian surveys of the world the Elon Musk's of the world Justine Elon Musk ex-wife said you know this is not something that can be learned not that she wanted to be deterministic but there are certain people who are simply going to turn out that way and you know these aren't people who sit around reading self-help books to build their empires and so you know I wonder my sense is that there have to be some limits to what we're capable of so I agree with the way that Dan has put it but I think that because of that a lot of people think well you know I'm not going to start I'm not going to bother starting to play the piano because at best I'll be able to impress my friend but there's nothing wrong with that I mean if he started at the age of five you could be opening for anyone basically but just as you start later I think the issue is that people don't start and they give up because they believe I can never be really that good but I mean how many people open for you two anyway it's not necessarily about that oh there's the pleasure of learning a musical instrument and being able to impress people but to me there's always the twofold advantage of increasing plasticity in your brain so yeah I mean for example one of the you know the fifth language that I started learning a few years ago was Danish and I wasn't really going to use it that much in business or in life it was very difficult I picked it because it was Jeff Cooks I already spoke all languages and you know had lessons every week I was over 40 I can't remember exactly how much but 40 or 41 and I had lessons every week and there were 90 minute lessons and usually by an hour I was really hungry and tired so I started taking sort of junk food with me because I just might need sugar for my brain I had about eight lessons went to Denmark for a couple of weeks came back had my lesson and she said okay well we're done for this week I'll see you next week and I said has that been 90 minute already and she said yeah and I thought oh I didn't feel hungry or tired and then I realized that I'd induced enough plasticity in my brain that the pathway for Danish should become a reasonable pathway and I wasn't really enjoying it that much so I thought well I've got the neuroplasticity benefit which is what I really wanted so I'm not going to continue with it but I'm pretty sure that if I had continued I could have become you know not necessarily like native speaker fluent but fluent enough to go to Denmark on my own and you know absolutely go on holiday maybe even have some work meetings in Danish so I think it depends why you're doing what you're doing but the main message from my point of view about that false statement of you might get this good but you're not going to get that good is at least try because you're going to be a lot better than you are now and it will have what I call global benefits on your brain so as soon as you do something that forces your brain to become more flexible you actually get other improvements like emotional regulation ability to suppress biases ability to solve complex problems think more flexibly think creatively so who doesn't want that so I have a question for you out of morbid curiosity because I don't think I've had anybody in your position that I could ask this question to uh you know I asked it to Dan he kind of gave me some answer but Dan is more of a journalist you're more of a scientist so one thing I've always wondered is what 700 plus interviews and conversations with people like you for 10 years and reading hundreds of books has done to my brain like I always wonder what was my brain like before and one of my friends said your brain is like an encyclopedia of in referential information it's kind of mind boggling and you know I'm just curious from a scientific perspective or a neuroscience perspective like what do you think has gone on during this time yeah so yours is the kind of brain that when we all upload our consciousness to the internet I want to piece the view it was an everything that you know uh oh awesome so what would have happened with you don't suddenly I was having this conversation in a London taxi cab just yesterday because London cab drivers are famous for they do the knowledge which is that they memorize every street in London and takes years and there have been scientific studies that show that from before and after completing the knowledge the specific part of the brain which is part of the hippocampus where navigation and memory are stored that physically grows um and he was saying yeah but you know you're a neuroscientist so your brain must have grown and other people have done amazing things and I said well the reason that you're so interesting is that you've done one very specific thing and we can see that your brain's grown in the specific area that that's related to someone like you who I would call a polyglot you know who sort of knows a lot about a lot of things there won't be a specific area in your brain that we could measure um that's actually physically grown but your whole brain map which is very dynamic would have grown and changed over time and um you know I'll take a very good guess that your executive functions those one like ones I just mentioned emotional regulation and they'll be complex problems but you'll be better at that and I'm also guessing that you were brought up bilingual which means that you had a head start from the beginning because that's the single best thing you can do for your children your you know raising children from birth is bring them up bilingual wow wait I have to we have to ask you about that it's funny you say that because I you know prior to this project prior to unmistakable creative I was the person who got fired from every job I ever had um which anybody listening to this knows I won't beat that like a dead horse but yes I mean I think that over time the ability to finish the things I've started the ability to move at a pace that most people find unreasonable have all I think just developed as a byproduct of the work that I've done I you know I think to me I said you know the best part of writing a book is not the fact that you have a book at the end of it but it's who you become in the skills you develop as a byproduct of it because regardless of how the book turns out now you have the ability to take something very vague and bring it to life and work on something for a really long time and to me that was something I knew I said no matter what happened with my books I could take that and apply to anything for the rest of my life yeah absolutely I mean you're just firing off so many thoughts in my brain so one is going back to what you said about what's it like being married to someone from a different culture and with a different language I would have seen that as an opportunity to have a child that was trilingual from but you know from the time they started speaking so I would you know I would want to harness all the best bits of that and then just going back to what you said about Elon Musk's wife about you know some people can do all of these amazing things and not everybody can yes of course there is a genetic element to people's you know intelligence and capability and leadership skills and you know ability to think creatively but it's a lot less impactful than we used to think so you know from Darwinism we thought DNA is everything and sort of you know what happens to you in utero or in childhood doesn't have as much of an effect then it became a bit more equal but now with the growing field of epigenetics which is the influence that the environment has on your gene we know that lifestyle factors can actually switch on or switch off certain gene expression so it's become more dynamic again so yeah okay not everybody's going to be Elon Musk for sure but everybody has more potential than what they naturally reach and that's why neuroplasticity is so exciting so now before we get into the sort of six principles of law of attraction that you've laid out one thing I do want to ask you is why is the kind of thinking that you're talking about not more prevalent in our modern education system why are we not teaching people that they can get better at things because you know I think about my own life and I think about the fact that I was taught pretty early on that I didn't have any athletic ability and that was playing team sports at 42 I'm an avid surfer and snowboarder those things require athletic ability and so I wonder why you think this isn't more prevalent in our education system I'd imagine that educators have to be interested in the work that you're doing for better outcomes yeah it's interesting since the book came out in the States three different sets of people have said you should write the version of this for kids and young adult um and you know a few people have said this should be in schools you know you should be working with schools and actually that's starting to happen a little bit so I like Carol Dweck's work from Stanford and I think that her work on gross mindset has done something to advance that message um for children and in schools um I think it's very sad that it's not the case you know I'm not one of these people that wishes I was young and wishes I lived until I'm a hundred but I wish I'd known about neuroplasticity when I was 18 or younger because I think it would have allowed me to do you know to do a lot more um I would say that my parents they didn't really value sports so I wasn't really told that I didn't have athletic ability but it wasn't seen as important and then as soon as I was you know at university and then living on my own as a young doctor I was only ever in like sports clothes because I would just you know be doing physical exercise or sports like for the time um I was told that um because I wasn't good at art I was told at school that I wasn't creative and because I was very good at math and science but actually I was also really good at languages and history and geography and my parents wanted me to be a doctor I was very much pushed down that path and so you know even being on your podcast that's called The Unmistake a World Creative gives me a little glow of I am creative you know like for 20 years I believed that I wasn't creative because one teacher said that to me at school when I was at an impressionable age and that's the kind of thing that I really want to overturn I just you know I think children's brains are the biggest untapped potential that we have in this world for our future for everything and well we cannot be saying things like that to children it took a lifetime to find the person you want to marry finding the perfect engagement ring is a lot easier at blue Nile calm you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from blue Nile's jewelry experts who are on hand 24/7 to answer questions and the ease and convenience of shopping online for a limited time get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with code listen at blue Nile calm that's $50 off with code listen at blue Nile calm Ryan Reynolds here from mid mobile with the price of just about everything going up during inflation we thought we'd bring our prices down so to help us we brought in a reverse auctioneer 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like i said i love this because you backed it all up with science and you know i want to start with abundance one of the things that you said is abundance feeds our self-esteem and confidence helps us stay resilient during tough times and is infectious and generative creating a flourishing environment and community around us like attracts like and if you look around you you'll find positive confident people or friends partners or business partners with similar mindsets and i want to look at this from a scientific perspective because you know as we were talking about i think the law of attraction that the secret convinced people that they could just sit around meditating and thinking about the things they want staring at vision boards and they will get whatever they want now i tend to be a person who is rationally optimistic and i'll give you an example to frame this no matter how abundant i was thinking about it we tried to plan a conference recently we didn't sell enough tickets we had to cancel the event it didn't matter how positively i thought about it and i so with that in mind let's go into the science uh based approach to abundance can i ask you a question about that before i go into the science yeah please absolutely so i'm going to hypothesize that you were doing many many different things at the same time that you were trying to organize this event that's safe to say that's kind of my nature i mean i'm usually working on three or four creative projects at once do you believe that if the only thing you were doing was focusing on making that event successful you would have sold more than enough tickets uh i don't know to be honest no i don't interesting i i always find that when something like that doesn't work the reason is that i didn't put my full focus and attention on it um and i like to operate on the principle that not everything works in life and that you know definitely there are things that haven't worked out for me but that you know with a tangible event like that that if i wasn't distracted by so many other things and i put all of my attention into making that thing work that i could have um and this probably relates back to you know the message that my father imprinted on my brain from a young age and and what i've learned about abundance so let me let me take you then try and persuade you um that you can put on that event bigger and better than you're going to um so the strongest gearing in our brain and this goes very much back to you know cave times and where i talked about before we could speak and um how we evolve is so the strongest gearing is called loss aversion which is that our tendency to want to avoid losing something is much stronger than our tendency to seek a reward and the psychological effect of loss aversion is two to two point five times as strong as as gain um following you know trying to get gain uh and because that definitely you know helped us to survive the vibe as a species millennia ago it's been in our wiring for a very long time now i don't like the phrase hardwiring at best i will accept that there is softwiring which is the default that we all you know tend to go to especially if we're hungry or tired but um this is a really strong one it's been there for a long time and it's built to make us survive and so it's important and you can't really unpick that in the brain and make it go away so it is there but you have to make a conscious effort to not make every decision and choice and you know what you do and nice about avoiding loss and to make it about getting something positive in your life and it doesn't have to be an actual thing like a material thing it can just be it can be quite an intangible thing it can just be self-belief, competence, happiness um you know a relationship or it can be things as well um so basically to cultivate abundant thinking so that it's more natural for you to not default to that loss aversion um i think is very important so you know you quoted a few phrases that i'd used about abundant thinking but the one that i think is the most important now that i've been speaking about the book a lot more is the way that you think determines your life if you think everything's going to fail nothing good's ever going to happen for you that's probably going to be true right if you think that you know that being generous what goes around comes around so if you're kind to people that generally people will help you that the world is a foreign place then it's likely that your life will be a bit easier and more good things will happen to you and that that's the self-perpetuating sort of generative bit of it we need to understand that old wiring that we have cultivate abundant thinking and then gather and preferably note down because otherwise we forget examples of times that positive things have happened to you because you've believed that they weren't you've acted in a way that it's going to work out you've um you know allocated your time and resources to something because you don't have that fear that it's going to fail just changing the way that you think like that because and and we're all on a spectrum you know some people are naturally more like that and some people are very last half empty so just pushing yourself along that spectrum as much as you can is a really good place to start and that's why a picture is the first nor worth attraction okay so you're a neuroscientist so I know that you also are a very logical and rational person as well um and the reason I mentioned this right is we had uh this guy Alberta Savilla here who had talked about he was the director of innovation at Google and he talked about you know why you know most products fail and how to make her succeed and one of the things he said is the biggest mistake people make is neglecting data and loss aversion also can I feel become a cognitive bias that causes us to stay in something far past when we should so back to the example I gave you when I started looking at this I thought to myself you know we have investors that were fiscally responsible for if this bombs the losses that we've accumulated now will seem you know like a pittance in comparison to the ones that are potential uh potentially going to happen so I wonder how you balance what you just said with if the you know no matter how positive you are if the data disagrees with your positivity and your belief you're not you know you're you're not optimistic you're delusional yeah yeah we I so we absolutely balance it and that's why um I'm just going to relate this to something else that you've mentioned that I also speak about so vision board that's why I say you cannot just create a collage of your fantasy life and sit at home when it's a tunnel true um you can create imagery that relates to things that you deeply desire in your life um you know if you're not really really tall then it can't be I want to be a model for example um and if you don't have pretty decent hand-eye coordination then it probably isn't going to be some kind of sport either but it doesn't mean that you can't do it for enjoyment like surfing or snowboarding um the you have to pick things that are somewhat realistic but like the best version of realistic that you that you can possibly think of and you also have to do things every day to move yourself closer to reaching those goals it is absolutely not about being delusional and fantasizing about a life that you're doing nothing to try to attain um so yeah I mean I'm not going to put myself in danger because I believe that I can achieve something and I really do believe in that fail fast and often so the quickly you realize this isn't going to work out and you shelve that one and you focus on one of the other creative projects that you're working on and you give that more of your brain energy you're just going to be more successful so it becomes less about that particular event working out and more about your creative projects in general being successful as they could be okay so the other thing I want to ask you about this is this is something I've been writing about and since I happen to have you know a neuroscientist here is is when we fail at something from a neuroscience based perspective what are the keys to bouncing back from that quickly because what I realized right when I saw that this wasn't going to work was I I knew from previous experience that if we kept going down this path I'd be going into the beginning of the year with this energy under my belt and I was like I'd rather start the year with a clean slate so that I can have my attention a hundred percent on other things um and I remember texting old business partner he's like good he was like now you can focus on whatever is next but I think for many of us we tend to get stuck um in that sort of failure and let it become this very debilitating thing that you know kind of takes away energy from what we could be putting into whatever is next so are there ways to bounce back quickly from this there are and I would say that that's pretty much my life's work you know based on the neuroplasticity and the brain agility that I would say the third piece is about mental resilience and so I have seen in my coaching and executive advising work that the single point of different between let's say two CEOs or two you know found entrepreneurs in terms of you know having everything else being equal like qualifications and experience if mental resilience because it's a person that can keep going through adversity or bounce back when things go wrong and so you know I've had my own personal journey with this where you know sometimes things would really get me down and you know we all know the difference between the day that you genuinely say I'm afraid I'm you know I'm just absolutely full on the list with coaching clients at the moment so I'd love to work with you but there is a three or six month waiting list that people just want you so much more when you say that that when you know when your squeeze and your price goes up for traveling to a certain conference or something that people want you more and think you're better and I always think I wish we could just bottle that and use that even on the bad days you know like when when you're feeling like I don't have enough client work I'm you know I'm sort of not managing to to sort of you know balance the project and last very well but you had the the confidence to say my fee is something you know higher than than you normally charge so we know what it feels like just being on one of those good days where everything goes right where we're confident we you know we close the deal or we sort of get something that we haven't achieved before and it's his about trying to apply that not not in a fake way but trying to harness that positive you know abundant thinking as much as possible when when you're tired when you're not feeling great when things haven't been going well and I actually had a quote recently that really made me think of this which is any shock only lasts for 48 hours so you know any piece of bad news any disappointment I now sort of have a rule that the one or two days you can wallow in self-pity if that's what you need to do but then I never allowed to go on for longer than that but you know there are some things that we struggle with for a very very long time and I've actually thought you know since like you said when you write a book it changes you and since I wrote the source I thought you know I've worked so hard on those six ways of thinking and which includes emotional you know mastering your emotions and you know bad things can come from left field in life and you never know what they're going to be I'll be really interested to see how quickly I bounce back through the next thing that goes wrong yeah and everything that I've you know written about and learned yeah I always you know somebody I remember even with my own book you know I wrote this book called an audience of one reclaiming creativity for its own sake and one of the primary messages of the book was not to get caught up in metrics and my sister calls and she's like how's it going I was like ah it hasn't sold that many copies she's like dude that's the primary message of the book you basically don't believe what you wrote yeah I always wonder you know like you are that sometimes I think okay yes we're not immune to any of the things we write about even though we happen to solve these problems for people like somebody once told me that oh you must be the most self-actualized person in the world after listening to a few episodes of the podcast like no I'm like I'm probably one of the most fucked up people in the world this is why I treat the people that I do as my guest so yeah I've always wondered about that but let's let's talk about this idea of manifestation and magnetic desire because I like I said I think the movie The Secret and my mind in a lot of ways led to all these really beautiful careers for authors and other people that it also did a great disservice to a lot of people because they just you know tried to self-help their way into things and ended up going nowhere so let's look at you know the idea of manifesting from you know a science based perspective let's let's say that everybody listening to this says okay what I want to manifest next year is more money so let's start there how would we do that okay so a couple of things one is I don't necessarily want to go back but I did have an incident of extremely extremely bad new where I thought you know I was literally like a zombie for two days it was basically a terminal cancer diagnosis of a very good friend of line who's under 50 with three little children and it was literally it was on a Friday and it was like I've been sent home to die for the weekend and I sort of like I said I had the two days where I couldn't really function and then I thought okay I have to pick myself up because all I can do now is be there for that person and it could be days and actually I'm happy to say that over a year later he is still alive and he has been amazing but I also thought okay this is the worst piece of news I've had since I've written the book and and actually all the things that I'd learned did help me to sort of think differently and turn it around and so I'm not the most self-actualized person in the world either but I do think that that is it's possible to grow that capability and I think that's a really important thing to say and then another point that I want to make is that I don't really want to talk about I want to make a certain amount of money as that's the example because to me that's not that's the least thing that it's about and actually that's the motivation I don't I don't believe that that is a proper motivation for anything and that's often why things go wrong so as you know at the beginning of the book I write about set an intention and I think knowing what your intention is even if it is for making a lot of money is very important because it can't just be I want to make a lot of money and when I started up my business 12 years ago and I started doing vision boards within a year or two of that I did use to purchase a specific amount of money that I wanted the business to make in the following year um but to be honest at that stage it was more about the vibing and being able to pay my rent and my bills than actually making lots of money and later when that wasn't an issue I just made it more about abundance like for example I had a picture of a citrine crystal because that represents abundance and it was just to say like I'm not going to have to worry about money but then but let's make it about the things that you know are more about leaving a legacy or being in service to others um so I would certainly have things on my board that were to do with traveling to certain places um for example writing a book um um building you know building a business but but the primary motivation was not to make to make a lot of money um it was to do something meaningful to make a difference in the world to you know make my existence actually worthwhile um and if you also make quite a lot of money at the same time that you're doing that then great but I I really strongly don't believe that that should ever be the primary motivation and and I'll tell you why because I changed career in 2007 2008 so when I started coaching which was then mostly in investment banks um you know I was a former psychiatrist and I was specializing in stressed executives and you know I I worked as people who had colleagues that brought dead of heart attacks on trading fraud next to them and I worked as people who had stress induced but minor heart attacks themselves um and a lot of people that were suicidal and so many of them said I wanted to be a journalist or I wanted to be a teacher but I chose this job because I wanted a certain lifestyle and it took a shock like the global financial crisis to make people rethink why they were doing what they were doing um though I've actually really seen money make people very physically and mentally unwell um but they gave me another example. Fair enough I think you know when I when I think about what you said there about money one of the things that comes back to me as a conversation I had with Misha Takorsu who said she's worked with everybody from you know billionaire entrepreneurs and she said you know one of the things we don't do is think about what our own definition of enough is and you know when I came up with that definition when I thought about it okay what would I use the money for then it suddenly became a hell of a lot more meaningful to say okay not the dollar amount it's what I would do with this that I think really is where the intention came from it was like oh you know there are things that I know I want to do for example I saw my sister get married I was like oh okay right now this is not feasible for me that's one of the reasons I would want to make more money um you know I mean it was things like that so you know that would probably be one I'd wonder what you'd have to say about that but um I like the idea of an intention um so for example you know like I want to let's say that you know I want to get our business to the point where the people who are contributing to it like our community manager Elena are making you know like they're able to live the lives they want off of it and I'm able to live the life I want off of it which doesn't require you know it's not about Learjets or anything like that um pretty much when I remember when I ran the numbers I was like wow this isn't anywhere as near as big as I thought yeah I mean I think the interesting thing is that it's different for different people so for some people it will just be that I don't have to be in debt and yeah equally I've had a client who was a billionaire and I was doing this might surprise you but I was doing a self as DM exercise with them because you realize there was an issue there and um we were going to build up to some of the more critical issues like body image and relationship status and so I said well let's start with wealth because that's an easy one for us to use as an example of how this exercise works because they're actual self and ideal self and um though I said you know for you those could be like pretty overlapping or the same and he said well well no I don't I don't know if I actually even amabillionaire I mean I might have 900 thousand dollars and I'm often the poorest guy in the room so it's so relative um you can you know like you said it's about having enough and then I'd say the happiest people in the world are the ones who have enough and then a little bit extra to have a bit more freedom and joyous in life and if you know a few extra things that they really enjoy like you know for you maybe it's like you get married or for some people that travel um so the so the the mathematic desire is it's a combination of a very strong emotion so so something that you really really really want and then the the magnetism part is the abundant thinking and the vision boards and everything that you do to make that thing come true and so that kind of lead to manifestation which is the part where you actually you know bring that into your real life um so yeah magnetic desire was you know just a nice phrase because it really put together how important emotion is and if we think about basic human emotion um that you know the model that I've used in the book is of the eight basic human emotions and because of loss of aversion five of the eight are what we call survival emotions so fear anger disgust shame and sadness they're all things that we would do anything to avoid and that's actually helped us to survive at the other end of the spectrum are love love and trust on one and then joy and excitement so those are the emotions that are behind magnetic desire you know the things that you really want things that bring you love will make you feel you know safe and and trusting and make you excited and then in between those two sets of emotions is surprise and I do believe now more that I've been doing vision boards for a long time that I don't try to cover every aspect of what I want I try to leave a bit of room for magic basically so you know you and I don't actually know everything that every good thing that could happen to us but I like to leave a bit of room for something that I didn't expect to be able to happen and so the manifestation part is really that the extension of the the vision board becoming an action board which is that the vision board primes your brain to notice opportunities that may otherwise pass you by but the additional bit to that is that primes your brain to notice and grasp opportunities that might otherwise pass you by so manifestation is about grasping opportunities and making you know the things that you dream of into a reality. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. While you're listening are 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. What does it take to drive innovation in today's AI-driven world? Join executives from across industries as they dive deep into how technological advancements are redefining leadership. From generative AI to cybersecurity, cloud computing to sustainability, the conversations with leaders podcasts from Amazon Web Services covers it all. Join the conversation and subscribe today available on all major podcast platforms. We all have dreams, dream home renovations, dream vacations, or sending our kids to their dream colleges. 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