Dr. Matthew Sharps joins the show to discuss everyday dissociation

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good day. This is Dr. Jennifer Sharps with Mike Pilot. Today we're going to talk a little more about dissociation because it has such an incredible impact on people's decision making and how their life is going, uh, how they're speaking to their spouses, what they're doing at work, financial decisions, health decisions. So I invited Dr. Matthew Sharps back to the show, and he and I are going to have a discussion about dissociation. So, Dr. Sharps, could you define dissociation again for our audience?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

You know, the funny thing is, probably not, because it's a very, very complex con uh concept. Typically it's defined as a state in which your mind is somewhat diffuse and things may seem unreal to you, okay? But that's only part of it. Much of dissociative study over many years has been focused on just, so to speak, the bad end of the distribution, dissociative identity disorder, the multiple personality disorder is what it used to be called, without noticing the fact that normal dissociation exists in everyone. So it's not just a case of, oh my goodness, it's some kind of pathology where I feel weird and I don't see, I don't know, maybe maybe Bigfoot is there, I don't know, and uh I missed my turnoff, which will happen. You drive past the turnoff and you're daydreaming, you miss the turnoff. That is dissociation. But it's not dissociative identity

Defining dissociation and how we project expectations onto others

SPEAKER_01 1:28

disorder. It's the everyday thing. So I think a much better, frankly, definitional, it's not official. It's the one we put forth in our recent book, uh, in fact, our brand new book, Dissociation and Belief. Dissociation is the ability to literally dissociate, to disconnect your mental activity from the physical reality around you. Okay. You move into your own mind. And that can allow you to be more creative. You can do new creative and inventive things. Unfortunately, you can also invent things that are just horrible, totally chaotic new ideas that make no damn sense, and you can get invested in them and off you go. And we see this happening in every walk of life, from the most everyday to events that affect nations and even the world.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

You and I had a friend years ago, and this person was in a very bad marriage with a very interesting spouse. And both of us came to the conclusion that he would be really in love with her if only she would be somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Aaron Ross Powell That's an interesting old concept, yes. Because the fact is, yeah, you see a person, you're attracted to them. Human beings are effectively programmed to look for certain indices of health, and many of those exist in attractiveness. You know, uh you know, clear skin, clear eyes, uh things that in the ancient world indicated a freedom from parasites, things that you know, today we have pharmaceu pharmaceuticals, but back in the day you didn't, it was pretty damned important to make sure the spouse this is true throughout the entire universe of the animate universe of living creatures, is the spouse healthy? So attractiveness, to some degree we're programmed to seek it out because it indicates a probably decent reproductive future. Well, the point is, though, there you see this person, you see they're attractive, and frankly, literature, fiction, all these things don't help at all. There's a tendency to confuse beauty with niceness. And that's there, I'm sure there there are nice, beautiful people. There are honest people who are attractive, and there are other attractive people who are just plain rotten and tend to lie a lot. And of course, there are also people like myself who could not win a beauty contest if all the other contestants were mountain gorillas. I always try to be fairly honest about life, all right? So beauty and honesty, decency, niceness don't actually necessarily correspond, except in every story and every movie you've ever seen. All right? And the point is this: you're looking at this beautiful or handsome, whatever you call it, attractive human being, okay? And you manufacture a personality for them. There's somebody in there that is just as wonderful as the outer body, and you can create that, and then they start acting like total jerks. They get to see you out of, you know, oh, can I borrow this money that I'll never pay back? Oh, by the way, and can can my can my old friend, old lover, move in with us for a while, things like that. Okay. You're going, oh, well, look how kind he or she is, even though the old lover was such a disaster. He or she wants them to move in with us. Isn't that wonderful of them? And you're sitting here now later on you're sitting here going, it's one of one one of these sort of, you know, d what in the world are you doing moments, all right? But you've seen this. I'm sure you as a clinical psychologist see this more than I have, where there's that person in your office and they uh your your clinical office, and their spouse is divorcing them and has basically stolen their house, their income, their children, everything else, possibly their dog, okay? And they're not angry. They're astonished. How could this horrible person have suddenly appeared inside this body which clearly used to house poopsie or whoever it was, okay? It turns out that poopsie was actually Adolf Hitler, and dissociation kept you from recognizing that.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Aaron Ross Powell I think our mind is very powerful. And sometimes we decide what we believe reality is, and then we never question it again.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Aaron Powell I think that's absolutely true. And one other point, something we've

Cognitive dissonance and the impact of childhood frameworks

SPEAKER_01 5:24

also discussed in previous uh podcasts here, cognitive dissonance sets in. Once we really believe something, we we've got an investment in it. And cognitive dissonance is the fact that the more you invest in anything, and that can be a monetary investment. It can also be uh effort you've put in, uh you know, emotional investment. The more you invest, the more you value something. You're not gonna give up. That's why people in horrible marriages, they think they're gonna come out of it, you know, sh have a drink and get on with life. Okay, or maybe not have a drink, that could be quite destructive, I guess. But then they're basically they they they they collapse for a year or two because they put so much into trying desperately, so to speak, if I can continue that metaphor, to turn Adolf Hitler into poopsie and it never worked. But they can't believe it worked. That investment will then cause a tremendous, a tremendous cognitive dissonance, tremendous inability to see reality as it is.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

And I think the prior framework that people have contributes to that dissociative response. And what I mean by that is let's say you grew up in a home where one of the parents, or maybe both of the parents, uh had less than adequate coping strategies, I'll just put it that way. And so you learn behaviors such as taking care of people, making sure people are okay, and then you marry somebody that requires you to take care of them and you turn them into somebody in your mind that they aren't really that person. And now you're kind of stuck in this long-term relationship. But because of that prior framework of understanding of what you've done and learned as a kid, you continue that behavior without ever questioning it.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Aaron Ross Powell Absolutely true. Prior frameworks for understanding are among the most important forces really that exist. We pick up an awful lot of our our dealings with the world from watching our parents,

How media and culture shape our prior frameworks of understanding

SPEAKER_01 7:29

watching our siblings if we have them. Perhaps to a lesser degree watching our community, except in the modern world, much of our community is in media. And I recall fact that you and I were watching an old Western the other day, in which you've got these horrible, horrible people that in the last five minutes of the show turn over a new leaf and the townspeople accept them as going to be wonderful. They're going to steal everything the townspeople had, including the horse they rode in on. But you don't see that. You see them taking care of it. I'm currently working on some some research for for a for a different project, a new book. They required me to look at some old fiction for the early 20th century. And one of these was one of the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was written sometime in the 1920s. All right. Anyway, the plot, I'll do it very, very quickly. This woman knows where Tarzan's great treasure is, okay? So she's recruited a bunch of gangsters to steal all the treasure. And in the course of this thing, they knock him unconscious, they poison him, they kidnap his wife, they kidnap him, they both get escaped, then they wind up being attacked by cannibals as a direct result of this woman's behavior, okay? She's uh destroys their life. And in the last few pages, and I got it, but I love Edgar Iceborough. She comes up with some amazing things. Last few pages, she suddenly says, Gosh, I'm so sorry I did that. I want to come home. She, oh, sorry, she used to be their maid many years ago. That's how she learned all about the family. Can I please come back and live with you? I promise I'll be good. Oh, sure, little lady, come on back, and they take her back in, et cetera, et cetera. That's a bad idea. That's a bad idea. But you are supposed I mean, it's a part part, certainly of the Christian's world ethos is to forgive and forgive and forgive. Well, you can forgive without necessarily giving them your car keys. All right. And here, if you will, Tarzan and Jane, it's not like the movies. They own this huge ranch in Africa, et cetera, et cetera. So they say, yeah, sure, fine. You've proved yourself completely untrustworthy. In fact, you've nearly killed both of us about 85 times. Well, no, that's too much. 18 times in the last 85 pages. Yeah, have you have access to everything we are, and by the way, we'll trust you completely. Um frankly, it shows a certain degree of dissociation. I Okay, I know that's uh a silly old book from many years ago. Realize that those books were so popular that they resulted in Igorized Burroughs Ranch, which actually resulted in a town in Southern California being called Tarzana. Now I know these those old books are not really that that that critically that explicit to us today. But they're there in our collective past, and they're there forming part of the prior framework of the people who made those westerns where the townsfolk go ahead and accept the horse thieves, and yeah, come on in, you know, marry marry, maybe they're all males will marry our daughters, etc. Um, it's catastrophic and people don't recognize this and say, I am making my decision based on what I think now. What I think now was formed over your entire life and all the media you consumed and watching your parents and watching the people around you, and not all of them make good decisions all the time.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

And I want to be clear, we're not saying that people can never change,

Recognizing patterns of behavior over empty words

SPEAKER_00 10:23

but when you see a pattern of behavior over a long period of time, and it's it's very toxic behavior, uh lying, cheating, stealing, whatever. And that person suddenly says, Oh, you know what? I'm sorry. I I shouldn't have done all that. Resist the urge to go, oh, it's okay. You're going to be fully trusted because you have no evidence that that person has changed. Words don't really mean anything, actions mean things. And so so often we believe what people are telling us. And there's a great quote, and I don't remember who said it, but she said, When I show you who I am, believe me. And I love that quote because so often we listen to the words and then we make up this story that corresponds with those words. And that may or may not be reality. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 11:33

I think it's absolutely correct, yes. Because certainly a person can make a mistake, one or two mistakes, in fact, or a person can find themselves in circumstances they just don't know how to handle. That happens. It's not that human behavior is not changeable. The fact is that an awful lot of the world of political psychology works, and it's a bit predicated on human beings being able to change. But when somebody has spent a very, very long time, for example, in organized crime and has been having a wonderful time doing it, and they're still pretty much, well, in organized crime, and they suddenly tell you that no, no, they they've they've decided to devote themselves to bird watching, all I'm saying is you better count

How to pull yourself out of a dissociative response

SPEAKER_01 12:12

the damn birds.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

So how I know what I think, and I'll share that in a few minutes, but from your standpoint as a researcher, Dr. Sharps, how can people pull themselves out of dissociative responses?

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Aaron Powell That's a very important question. It's one we could spend a heck of a long time on. We don't have it today, but let me start with a very, very brief, apparently a non sequitur. We studied the best ways of training people in counterterrorism environments to find bombs, all right, training them for this. And we found that we were able to get a fantastic level of performance by operating in three areas. One is the prior framework for understanding. The second is to make sure that's explicit, and the third is to make sure it's feature intensive. Now, what I mean by that is that a person can look at a situation and say to themselves, okay, what are my proclivities for dealing with this? What is the baggage I'm coming to this for? And a good a good psychologist, one who gets it, it can be very helpful with this. But it's not just what is my baggage here. It's not just, what am I like? Let me talk about what I'm like. I'm kind of nice, I'm kind of this, I'm kind of that. It must be explicit. What do we mean exactly? What is in the conduct of this individual that's causing us these problems? What is in our own context that's contributing to that? And here's the final factor there. To understand our prior framework, we just talked about, and explicitly how that framework is making us deal with the explicit realities of right now. Okay? This is my new girl or boyfriend, and but and I know I'll be with them forever. Granted, we've only had one date and they asked me for money. Okay? You

Feature-intensive processing versus gestalt thinking

SPEAKER_01 13:50

shouldn't be and that does happen. Okay. You shouldn't be simply here going, oh, BSBS, but I love them. Okay. First of all, yeah, but I've known them for six hours, and they were already looking at my wallet. Hmm. Okay. Feature-intensive versus gestalt processing. Feature-intensive processing is we look at every day detail. The table we're at right now, there has some a little bit of food on it, various things, okay. A feature-intensive analysis of that table would take me a long time to go through each bit. So if I was going to clean the table, I'd just use a gestalt thing. Here are some dishes, I need to put them away for washing. Here's some garbage I need to throw that away. That's all I would do. But in a complex situation, if I was setting this table for a formal dinner, I couldn't do that. I have to think about each fork, each knife, et cetera. Well, if you have to do that for setting the table for formal dinner, imagine how important that is in the details of life, in a marriage, in a career, and dealing with your kids' welfare. Feature intensive analysis. And it's harder. The human default is the word gestalt from old old psychology. It means configuration or whole. To look at the thing as a whole th a whole thing, right? A configuration. Just looking at the table is messy. That doesn't tell you enough. But it's easier, isn't it? And why when you can get away with that? I'm just clearing off the table. Great. Setting the table for the former dinner, formal dinner, excuse me. You must go step by step, feature intensive processing. Now, this is not really sufficient, as we've talked about in our in our new book, Dissociation and Belief. We refer to what's called what I call analysis and aggregate. Because ultimately you're going to have to look at the whole table, so to speak, right? But you have to go back and forth between the appropriate gestalt and the feature intensive system, which is explicit, which acknowledges your prior framework. What am I coming to this situation? What kind of baggage am I coming with this to the situation with? And how explicit is it? I'm just saying, well, yeah, this w that was kind of bad. Why was that kind of bad? What were the steps? Are those steps being repeated now? The prior explicit feature-intensive framework that then moves back and forth between the holistic situation, yes, things are going okay. Let's keep going. They're not going okay. Well it's not enough just to say, wow, major bummer man. You have to go back and look at the features. What exact elements here are going bad? You do that in, for example, any plumbing job, any job of home repair. You have to do it in every walk of life. And those are the three keys. I think the prior framework. What am I coming to this situation with? The explicit analysis. Can I define what I'm really talking about here? What am I actually seeing in terms of its feature-intensive nature? What are the bits and pieces? What are the actual parts I'm dealing with here? That kind of analysis? I mean, it it it won't guarantee a better life, but it'll certainly help.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

I think people are so busy now that they forget to take a step back and self-evaluate and evaluate what's going on around them.

The consequences of constant scrolling and stress-coping habits

SPEAKER_00 17:03

I think people go to work, they work a lot of hours, then they come home, they scroll, they drop into bed and hope to God they sleep and they get up and they repeat without ever taking that step back and going, are my life decisions healthy for me? Am I making good decisions about my overall health? Am I making good decisions in what relationships I'm in, what friendships I'm in? Uh, is this working for me, or am I just used to doing it this way? And they never stop and say, is this a good idea? Are are these choices creating the life I want, or are they keeping me in constant chaos, but I'm never evaluating them? And I think sometimes it's easy to stay in chaos if if you're used to it. The problem is it doesn't create happiness, it creates a lot of tension, a lot of anger, a lot of resentment. Sometimes uh people will uh talk to me and they'll say, Well, I've been really depressed. And I'll say, Okay, so what what steps are you taking to not be depressed? And people that have worked with me for any length of time know that I'm gonna talk to them about sleep. I'm gonna talk to them about are they exercising, are you walking? If somebody's talking to me about being depressed, I am going to go through a feature-intensive analysis of what are they doing, how are they sleeping, what does their daily life look like, what are they eating, are they exercising, or are they just sitting on the couch scrolling and looking at things that adrenalize them? And I think that feature-intensive process helps people make better decisions. It keeps them connected to their life. I think that's one of the biggest problems with dissociation, is people get disconnected from their life. So life is kind of going on over there, and they're not stopping to go, wait a minute, I have now drank a 12-pack, and I have to work tomorrow, and I'm going to get about three or four hours of sleep with no REM sleep, and I'm going to feel terrible. Uh, is this a good idea? You know? And okay, so they do that for one night, but do they come home and repeat and repeat and repeat? Or at some point are they gonna go, you know what, this is a bad decision. I need to quit doing this because every day I wake up and I've done that, I don't feel good. So why am I doing this? What can I do instead? But if you're dissociated and life is going on over there, and you're not connected to your own life, then you can't make those decisions. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 20:04

I think it's absolutely correct. Dissociation is not a total disaster or wouldn't evolve to have it. It allows us some Cersei. So we can daydream a little bit, get away from whatever the crisis or tragedy is. But the trick is not to be doing that all the time. The modern world contains something that's never existed before, which is the Internet with these consistent supernormal stimuli, consistently seeing things larger than life. And almost all of them are worse, all right? Constant chaos, constant horrible things you see as you're scrolling through the internet. It looks even worse than it really is. And then problems with your kids, problems with your spouse, the tremendously, if you will, overly formal structure of the modern world. Now, people assume, oh, it's not formal at all. Everybody's free to do everything, except look at all the forms you have

Breaking stress-induced repetition and the fallacy of "I need a drink"

SPEAKER_01 20:49

to fill out to do anything. Now, when people are in distress, there is a tendency to keep repeating perseveratively whatever our patterns are. But yeah, the prior framework for understanding, for one thing, you've brought up uh drinking. Well, if your prior framework is, you know what, every time I have a drink, I want to have three or four or five more. That might be something you want to explicitly acknowledge. But one of the uh again, TV, movies, okay, whenever a character's under stress, I need a drink. That is absolutely the time not to have one, because what you are possibly saying is, I'm having a problem here. The best way I can do deal with that is to make myself less able to do with the real world, stagger around for a bit, possibly fall over something that hurt myself, and spend some time vomiting. Now, granted, if if you vomit on your problem, it might go away, but it's not that you know, you can imagine, you know, in court vomiting is not a typically a social plus, or certainly in boardrooms, uh, you know, there are there there are various creatures that do projectile vomiting to force other creatures away, but in humans, it just doesn't work all that well. Therefore, let's drink enough Jack Daniels till we puke. Well, that's what You're explicitly saying when you say, I need a drink. But you think of it implicitly like, yeah, you know, Marshall Dillon, Marshall Troop, anybody else in Marshall in front of their names over the years. Yeah, I need a drink. And well, oddly enough, you never saw them vomiting on Miss Kitty. It didn't happen. So this prior explicit feature intensive framework, wait a minute, the last eight times I tried this, it didn't work out at all. Why not? Oh yeah, because I was so damn drunk. Also, you know, whatever whatever it is you did or whatever it is the spouse did, etc. Domestic fights between spouses, they keep repeating the same patterns over and over. Under stress, we tend to repeat. And the only way to keep from doing that is once again, I sound like a broken record here, if anybody remembers what a record was. But that's my prior framework. A lot of stuff from the 20th century, technologies that no longer exist. It's still there in my mind. But broken whatever it might be, the prior explicit feature-intensive framework is about the only way to cope, especially with novelty in difficulties you may be facing. Because if we approach a situation today with techniques that might have worked 10, 20 years ago, uh times have changed.

Learning through healthy imitation and finding a mentor

SPEAKER_01 23:16

We have to acknowledge that explicitly, both in our personal lives and and in the larger world.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

I usually tell folks, find a mentor who is making good decisions, they have happy relationships, they have good work life balance and mimic them if you don't have those skills, right? If if you have those skills, great. If you know what you need to do, then do it. If you don't know what you need to do, find somebody who does and mimic their behavior. You know, go sit down and talk to them. Ask them questions. What do you do when you get stressed? What do you do when you can't sleep? Find somebody who is successful at it and talk to them. Because so often people don't know what to do. They don't know how to change. They don't have those skills. The people they grew up with don't have those skills. The people they're working with don't have those skills. And so a lot of times I think people just feel like, well, I guess it's just the way it is, you know. Yeah, well, I'll sleep when I die. You know, I keep hearing that, you know. Well, how about we change things so you can sleep? How about we reconnect you with your life so that you can make different decisions so you're feeling better.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Right, exactly. Because actually I'll sleep when I die. I've heard that a few times too. No, um, when you die, you just rot. That's important to have the distinction there. Uh, the actual way of phrasing that is if I don't sleep, I will die. That's what's important. But you're absolutely correct. Uh human beings, one of the ways humans, and for that matter, many other creatures, um learn is through imitation. The great difficulty is we tend to imitate those who we see as powerful or rewarded for their actions. That was worked by a psychologist named Ben Dura many years ago. Well, the thing is that you're constantly provided by media with examples that no one who is sane would want to follow, okay? I I personally I see quite a bit uh in media and on the internet, extolling a gang lifestyle. Okay, it's gonna be wonderful, you know, songs, oh well older song, it'd be like maybe, maybe, you know, maybe it's because I'm a gangster, okay, et cetera, et cetera. I remember uh something that was from from specific research. Street level gang members are street level gang leaders, excuse me, the street level ones are making less than minimum wage. And they don't have dental coverage, and they need it because people keep shooting at their teeth. Okay? The reality is that's a very bad example to go down. I remember when I was doing work with various populations, having young, young gang people say to me, What do you want me to do? Go work at McDonald's? Well, I don't talk about McDonald's specifically, but lots of companies of that type. Yeah, if you do a good job, you get promoted, you wind up with a pretty decent lifestyle, a pretty decent house, decent dental coverage, and nobody shoots at your teeth anymore. So, yeah, I think you're absolutely correct. If you don't have the skills, you don't know anybody who can really articulate the skills. Imitate people who are where you want to be and what they do. Now, there's people you can't, okay? Imitating the king of England, well, that's not going to go very well for you because nobody's going to make you the king, pretty obviously. But this is so important, the realistic assessment of where we are, and that has to be feature-intensive. What resources do I actually have? What demands am I actually facing facing? What if those demands are real, and which ones are I am I creating for myself? And which ones are gestalt, where you can't really deal with them. If somebody says, for example, if you're in a if you're if you're single and you're trying to get a relationship, people say, Well, you're not man enough for me, you're not woman enough for me. What you need is exactly what do you mean by that? What are the specific things you're asking for? And when they tell you, oh, if you i if you don't know, I'm not going to tell you, or you should already know that. You understand this person doesn't understand what they're talking about. They are incoherent, and therefore you need to go somewhere else. Um, the classical world is seen as somewhat pompous and inaccessible, but you know, Socrates held that there were two major causes of mental illness. Now there are many others. But the causes were ignorance. I don't really know. Okay? I don't really know who this person is. I don't know why they're telling me that these things that I should be doing for myself and for them. Okay. I don't know why they want my credit card information. Once you have those facts in mind, you may see them differently. But the other one was discord. Discord. If things are chaotic around you, you you can't focus, you can't recognize the true pathways toward what I need to be doing. And it's not a bad idea then to just get out of that discordant situation, maybe lock the door and turn the cell phone off. Think about what you're doing, perhaps write down what you're doing, write down the steps, things that if a clinical psychologist like yourself, which I am not, things you you you advise uh patients to do, clients to do, is to create prior in this case, prior before they go on, okay? Prior explicit feature-intensive frameworks of the steps to be covered, okay? And the steps can't be, I will win the Olympic Games. They can't be, I will get the Nobel Prize. They can't be, you know, I have a PhD in experimental psychology, but you know, I want a PhD in organic chemistry, too, because that was my worst subject, and I want to prove I can do it. That would be an idea that I, speaking as an experimental psychologist without any clinical certification, I would refer to that idea as just stupid. Okay? It's a really bad idea. It won't work. Okay. On the other hand, you know, I'm gonna reduce, yeah, I'm eating way too much sugar. I'm gonna reduce that. I'm never gonna eat any sugar again. It's not going to work, is it? Okay. But I'll reduce that. I'll reduce this. Okay, I'm gonna do this. You know, I'm gonna start running five miles a day. Well, that may not work. Could I walk half a mile a day? That may be a bit much right now. I was injured, okay? Well, I'll start by walking down the end of the block. This week, the next week I'll walk farther. An explicit plan, an explicit feature-intensive plan. And of course, then we have to stick to it. But yeah, the learning through imitation, as well as the understanding through rational thought processes, which really only operate if you create the proper framework explicitly and in feature-intensive terms. I think these are the the ways. I I don't know, I can't say if they would be the ways to mental health per se, per se. Uh but but but there's certainly ways toward a a more productive future for yourself.

The "best friend" strategy and creating a psychological blueprint

SPEAKER_00 29:48

I often tell people if you're stuck, ask yourself what you would tell your best friend to do. Because that kind of pulls them out of that dissociative response. Uh now, if they go, I have no idea, then that means they need some skill building. You know, or they need to go mimic somebody who's successfully doing this. But then there's other people who've been dissociated, and when you say that to them, they know immediately what they would tell their best friend to do. And I'm like, then go do that. Oh, but I can't do it because, you know, this person will be mad at me or that person will be upset at me. I'm like, yeah, but you get to have a good life. You get to take care of you. I'm not telling you go destroy everybody or the heck with everybody, but at some point you get to set boundaries and tell people no and take care of you. And if you would tell your brother or your sister or your best friend to do that, maybe you should be listening to that advice because it sounds like in your gut, you know what you need to do and you're talking your way out of it. But again, being very aware of that tendency of cognitive dissonance, but also that dissociative response is really important to understand that we all have it. But the more you evaluate your life and make a plan, the better your life is gonna be and the happier you're gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Aaron Powell Yes, it provides a blueprint for what you're gonna do next. Trying to build a house without a blueprint, you're gonna wind up well, I guess you could leave the hose running and have enough mud to build a hut out of it, but you're gonna have to have a blueprint. What you're talking about, I believe, very strongly, is the psychological blueprint. And you're you're not gonna get the house up without it.

Take step one: Simple weekly self-evaluation and closing

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Aaron Powell So this week, if you're listening to this, consider taking twenty minutes, go someplace quiet, and ask yourself, how's your life going? How are you doing? What is one area I can begin making really small changes to have a happier life? If you do that every week and you start making a small change every week, pretty soon you'll find that your life is going very well. But you have to self-evaluate first and then you have to make a plan. And it doesn't have to be a complicated plan. It could be, I need to drink more water, okay, start there. I need to walk a block, okay, start there. I need to not eat at McDonald's five days a week, okay, start there. But start because you deserve to have a good life, you deserve to be happy, you deserve to feel good when you wake up in the morning. So take step one and then keep going. I hope you enjoyed this. Don't forget to subscribe. And thank you for joining. This is Dr. Diana Priceharps from Mind Pilot.