Super Awesome You - Achieve your goals and conquer your motivation
You know how it's easy to be encouraging to your best friend? And just as easy to be mean to yourself and count yourself out? Did you know there's biology behind that?
Each episode covers how our neurobiology tries to help, but often gets in the way of us achieving our goals. We'll talk about steps to take to push past those barriers, and be the very best (super awesome) you!
The host, Sam, holds a degree in Neurobiology and has been obsessed with motivation, goals, psychology for nearly a decade now. He is a former spin instructor, a current runner & marathoner, an entrepreneur, and podcaster.
Super Awesome You - Achieve your goals and conquer your motivation
Doing something new is an act of courage.
What if the fear of trying something new is just your brain's way of keeping you safe? Join me as I unravel how our evolutionary instincts can hold us back, sharing my own experience of taking that first brave step into the unknown. Our brains are hardwired to seek safety and acceptance within social groups, which often makes venturing into unfamiliar territories daunting. Yet, by understanding the roots of our fears, we can begin to dismantle the excuses that bar us from enriching our lives with new adventures.
You can find the song of the week on the weekly playlist here on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2wxmDClsiebNBJ2B3Jut5u?si=5edd46976ddc4630
doing something new is an incredible act of courage. Hi, my name is sam and I'm the host of the show super awesome you on the super awesome mix podcast network. You can find more of the show's content at super awesome you on instagram and threads. If you are enjoying the show or if you're a first-time listener and really like it, please take a moment to leave a five star rating and review on your player. It helps a tremendous amount to kind of grow the show and get the word out there that this exists and hopefully just makes the world a little bit more super awesome as we all work on ourselves and enrich our lives, which, by the very nature of doing that, tends to enrich the lives of the people around us. I really greatly appreciate it. I love doing this show and I will talk to myself till I'm blue in the face, but I would be lying if I said that you know it wasn't more rewarding knowing that I have a growing base of listeners and that I can be a positive impact on each of your lives. It means a lot when I receive that feedback, both personally and through reviews and emails. So spread the word. Okay.
Speaker 1:Acts of courage, and specifically the act of doing something new requiring a lot of courage. If you are like me, whenever you need to sign yourself up for something new, it can be a very scary thing and you can make a lot of excuses as to why you're not going to do that thing or why you'll never do it, and you can kind of just sit in that comfort of the excuse really indefinitely. There is a reason for that and we've talked a little bit about this on the show before in earlier episodes, I think around season one. But we tend to take an evolutionary look at everything, right, like our brains are programmed. Millions of years worth of programming has gone into it, with this fear of being an outcast, this fear of being cast out into the cold and basically dying of starvation and, you know, being kicked out of the village. It's not a good feeling, right? No one wants to be kicked out of the village. No one wants to die of starvation. We are programmed to keep ourselves alive and we do that through a lot of different strategies, as animals. You know, we tend to not think of ourselves as pack animals in the same way as like dogs and wolves, but we basically are in a lot of respects there, you know. Just go to any middle school and tell me we're not pack animals, right Like you can see people self-organize into various cliques. Just go to a cafeteria in a middle school or just remember back to your days being in a cafeteria in middle school.
Speaker 1:We all tend to kind of organize and find safe areas to be with and to feel like we fit in. Fitting in is an important strategy for us as people, because that typically means that we gain access to resources. That resource could be in the form of actual food and money, you know, for example, being fed by your family. Your family likes you enough to feed you, I would hope you know. At the very least, right at a minimum, these types of things are important. It can become more complex. The resource could be attention, it could be social status, it could be popularity, which gains you some kind of other benefit, right Like a feeling of self-esteem and self-worth can be derived from popularity in a school or work setting. All of these things, basically, are programmed really deeply in our nature. We want to fit in and we want to feel like people accept us, because the alternative is very scary. The alternative is that people don't accept us and then we are an outcast and people don't want to talk to us. They want to communicate with us, and then our brains really jump to the worst case scenario. We're very good at that and, like I mentioned, we just tend to think oh no, I'm now going to be cast out into the cold and I'm going to starve to death and that'll be the end of me. That is generally where we arrive whenever we think about doing something new and something different. This honestly plays out all the time.
Speaker 1:I will give an example from my own life. I wanted to join a run club here in New York and there are so many run clubs, I mean, and they're just growing more by the minute. There's just countless run clubs, all the way from two people run clubs to clubs that have thousands of people that take part in it. To show up to these things as an individual, being the new person there, unless you are really extroverted, it can be kind of a terrifying thing. And I'm not an extroverted person by nature. I tend to be a little bit more on the introverted side. So to show up and be a complete stranger and even worse, to look at everyone that's kind of there and feeling like they all know each other and you're the newcomer. It's not a good feeling, right? So there is this sense of discomfort that I have to put myself into to and instead my brain just comes up with a million excuses as to why I shouldn't even bother.
Speaker 1:It will start to say things like well, you're kind of too late to join that club. Look how established it is. Everyone's going to know everyone. They're not going to know you. Are you really going to go up and introduce yourself? What are you going to even talk about? What if all these people are so much more experienced than you and you just end up looking kind of foolish standing there? And you just end up looking kind of foolish standing there? What if you're not wearing the right shoes? What if you're not wearing the right clothes? What if people make fun of you because you know you're older than the average age of a run club or of this run club, and it can just kind of go from there, right, you get the idea it will berate you down to a pulp and the logical conclusion then is to be like okay, brain, I hear you. I just won't go to the run club because of all those reasons. I'm too old, I'm too out of shape, I'm wearing the wrong shoes, I don't look cool enough, I don't know anyone, and then your life stays completely the same. That is, unfortunately, how most things go.
Speaker 1:Whenever you want to do something new, you will talk yourself out of it because we are afraid of sticking out. You know, our brains are afraid of what we don't know and the act of doing something brand new is there are a lot of unknowns, and we might feel a little cast out, we might feel a little strange and we might you know, quote unquote be putting ourselves in danger, according to our brain. Because here's the thing that is actually really rudimentary about our brains we don't have nuance from a biological point of view. Everything in our biology, everything in our brains, is an on-off switch, it's all binary, it's all ones and zeros. You know, our neurons basically sit right next to each other and there's a gap between them. That's known as a synapse, and as information travels from one point to the next, you're basically just saying OK, turn off, ok, turn on, ok, turn off, ok, turn on.
Speaker 1:And to say that there's no nuance is a bit of an oversimplification, because there are gradients, right, like our body does tend to kind of work. Through gradients, you can release a lot of a neurotransmitter. You can release a little bit of a neurotransmitter, you can block those transmitters, et cetera. You know, to give you a quick example that you can relate to, if you are a caffeine drinker, over time you realize that you need to drink more caffeine to get the same effect that you had whenever you first started drinking caffeine. An even more extreme example is, you know, an addiction to like nicotine or heroin or something really, really addictive, where at the beginning you only need a little bit to feel something, but unfortunately, by the end you need a lot to feel something and then you get into overdose and all the sad things.
Speaker 1:So okay, putting all that aside, the core principle here is that our brains work generally as an on-off switch. That is especially true whenever we are thinking about doing something new and our anxious brain kicks in. You know, the amygdala lights up and starts to send us a bunch of fear signals, because we go from like a green, happy state to a red, fearful state, and that's it. There is no shades of green and red, it is I'm happy and I'm content and I feel safe. And there is oh, my goodness, I'm going to be eaten by a lion and my life is over, and that's it. That is the nuance that your fear center offers you. It truly is like I'm okay and I'm good, I'm not okay and I'm going to die. And that's part of the issue in our very modern world where, thankfully, my goodness, thankfully for the most part and for a lot of us on this planet, we do not have to actually be in the state of, oh, I'm going to die, right. But we have those feelings so often throughout our day.
Speaker 1:If you're like me, like sometimes you get an email and your heart rate immediately jumps. Do you ever notice that Especially, let's say it's an email from a boss or it's an email from you know the state or the IRS, or you know some kind of authority figure in your life, and immediately, like your heart rate just like spikes and I have to catch myself and say, sam, just an email, calm yourself, because our brain again, you know, we go into that anxious state and we don't know that an email is not going to hurt us. In this exact moment I'm sitting in a comfortable room, you know, and there's not a line and I'm not a gazelle. That actually ended up being a mantra of mine for a very long time. I am not a gazelle, you know. I'm not out in the wilderness worried about an animal randomly attacking me thankfully right.
Speaker 1:But to our brain's point of view it is a green state, red state In the sense of, again, green is safe, red is danger, an immediate danger, and you know you're in trouble. So to do something new is basically triggering that red state, because we don't know what's going to go on on and there's a lot that those things are comfortable and they are safe and unfortunately I tend to as as I think most people do tend to stay in the safe zone. We tend to stay in the green zone and we never want to leave it because our brains convince us that that's what is best for us. Unfortunately, our brains again are a little out of touch with where we are in the modern world. But fortunately we have evolved kind of past that you know, binary one and zero state that a lot of other animals just continue to be locked into.
Speaker 1:We have this magical thing like the prefrontal cortex right, like our thinking brain, our modern brain, and we can start to train ourselves to listen to that voice trying to keep us comfortable and keep us safe, and we can instead say thank you voice, I hear what you're saying, but I'm going to do it anyway and I'm going to go to the run club anyway and I'm going to apply for this job anyway, and it will be very uncomfortable and again that voice is going to just claw at you and desperately try to get your attention and say no, no, no, you're making a huge mistake. What are you doing? This is terrible, and you have to say again thank you voice, but I'm doing it anyway. There's a strategy that will help a lot with this. By the way, there's at least a couple.
Speaker 1:The most powerful one for me is that if this is something that you could actually do with a friend nearby, for example, like joining a run club if you can join with a friend and your first day there you at least have someone you know, that will help a tremendous amount for overcoming that activation energy and overcoming that fear. Right, because again, your brain is worried about being an outcast, and here you're offering it this safety net. You're saying you're not going to be an outcast. Look, you've got a friend there. At the very least you have someone that you can talk to. And so then the two of you together are already like a little bit of a click, like you've got each other. You're like the otters holding hand in the ocean, right, you, at the very least, can hold on to each other.
Speaker 1:So if it just goes sideways, you know you might not work for applying for a job. Right, you can't. This isn't Step Brothers. You can't apply for a job at the same time as two people. So that might not work in that case. But In that scenario, what I would offer for you to do instead is imagine that your friend is coming to you and wants to apply for this job. And your friend is qualified. They've got many years experience. They absolutely would rock this job. And you always have those friends back Like. You believe in them strongly, you love them to death. They've been in your life for a long time.
Speaker 1:Imagine that they are coming to you and they're saying hey, sam, I found this job. It would be perfect for me, it pays well, it's, you know, it's remote, it meets all the things that I'm looking for and it would be a huge promotion. But you know, just not feeling like, let's say, that they have some doubt about it. You know, this friend is just a little doubtful about clicking apply. You as a very good friend, what are you most likely going to do? You're going to tell them hey, apply, do it. You know, like what's the worst that can happen. The worst that can happen is they reject you, but your life then remains the same and that's fine. They rejecting you doesn't mean that you're cast out in the cold. It just means you've learned a little bit now and you can try again some other time and you can tweak your resume or you can reach out and ask why they rejected you.
Speaker 1:Like there's a million avenues that open up from this and it is not an end, all be all moment. This will not define you as a human being. That's probably what you would tell this friend of yours who wants to apply for this promotion at this job. Okay, well, guess what Like that friend is you? So now you've kind of encouraged your brain to take a different point of view and realize that you will be kind, helpful to an external person. So you should very much be kind and helpful to yourself and hopefully that is just also enough of a strategy for you to click apply and see what happens. So I say all of this truly as a reminder that doing something new is a huge act of courage and there are strategies for making it a little bit easier. That we've discussed Bringing a friend, pretending that you are a friend and you're giving, you know, a little bit of coaching to them and you're removing yourself from that first person point of view and becoming kind of a third person point of view. It's a very powerful tool whenever you need some talking to. You know, I'm going to add a third strategy, which is to talk to an actual friend of yours and tell them what you are thinking about doing and have them encourage you to take that step. All of those things reduce that fear in our brain that we will be alone and we will be outcast, and reminds us that we have a safe space to fall back on and that it doesn't have to be. You know, green state, red state that there is actually a lot of nuance in between, and opening that email will not be the death of us and joining that run club will not be the death of us and all these things. You know, ideally and thankfully, 99.9% of the time, life will go on and we will have learned something about ourselves and we'll most likely be really grateful that we took the shot at all.
Speaker 1:Ever since recording last week's episode, I have just been nonstop smiling because I spent most of this year. You know, I started season two in January. I had a couple of new episodes and then I got kind of freaked out about all of it and I was like who really wants to listen? Like who cares what am I doing? And I talked myself out of it. My brain, you know, kicked in overdrive and was like you're wasting your time, no one cares, you're bad at this, you'll never be, you'll never be good at this, you'll never be a huge voice, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:And it wasn't until recently again, you know about the marathon and talking about that last week. It wasn't until then that I started thinking I can do hard things. I'm going to do hard things, I'm going to start to publish this podcast again and just see what happens. And I published it and thankfully I've actually gotten a decent number of listeners last week and I've gotten some great feedback from friends that have listened to it and from others. And not just that has been rewarding, but truly just the act of recording it, publishing it and editing and sending it out into the world. I've been on cloud nine. It's been great.
Speaker 1:Why? Because I learned that I can overcome that, that negative voice in my head, and I'm learning that more and more as I kind of branch out into the world, realizing that I don't need to be beholden to my fear center. I don't need it to tell me that I can't do things. I can appreciate it, I can listen to it, I can understand that. That's part of the process. But in the end, if something is really important to me and I value what I'm doing, regardless of the outcome, regardless of how many listens I get even if this gets zero listens I really enjoy being here right now recording this I'm going to keep doing it and that's going to make me really happy and fulfilled. So that is what you need to focus on and, hopefully, what you start to focus on have the courage to do something, because it means a lot to you to do it, because you will feel really good having done it, because you will realize that not only could you do that one thing that you thought you couldn't do before, but now you start to question and wonder what else can I do? And you can start to train your brain to overcome its own chemistry and overcome its own defense mechanisms and branch out into the world and honestly, surprise yourself, right? I say that a lot in this podcast. You will surprise yourself and I think learning about yourself and being surprised by yourself is one of the things that keeps us young.
Speaker 1:I think we get old the second we decide we can't learn anymore Because, truthfully, our brain will start to just kind of shut things down. We are very efficient animals and if we don't use something, our brain is like great, I can save some energy, let's throw that out. You see this all the time with muscle degradation and I'm sure you've heard the stat. You know, once you turn 25 or 29, basically, unless you are using your muscles every single day, or certainly every week, they will start to disappear off your body, like your brain, and your body will trade in protein for energy and it will be like well, great, you know, I don't need to maintain these large muscles, we're not using them anymore, and we'll just break them down, turn them into energy and that's that. And it will start to turn things into fat, because fat storage is good for it and all the different things that happen. Right if you are no longer active.
Speaker 1:That is very much true for your brain too, and I think that one way to combat that is to just learn, constantly be open to learn, learning new things and stepping out of your comfort zone, because your brain will keep up with you. It will begrudge you, it will say terrible, mean things to you, but ultimately it will follow you where you go. Say terrible, mean things to you, but ultimately it will follow you where you go. With that, that will wrap up week two of season three of Super Awesome. You, I really appreciate you being here and if you made it this far, please feel free to reach out at Super Awesome. You Feel free to share this with friends and family and let's grow, you know, let's grow all together. I hope you have a wonderful and super awesome week, as always, and I will talk to you soon.
