Evoke Greatness Podcast
Do you have an insatiable hunger for growth and knowledge?
Are you interested in hearing the stories of how successful people have navigated their journey towards greatness…all while stumbling through valuable lessons along the way?
My name is Sonnie and I am the host of Evoke Greatness, the weekly podcast driven by my curious nature and fascination with the champion mindset. I am a HUGE book nerd and a wee bit of a "control enthusiast" with an obsession for motivational coffee cups.
On this podcast, we share the ups and the downs, the highs and lows and all the lessons learned in between. It's my most sincere hope you hear something in one or maybe many of these episodes that resonates with you and reminds you that you’re not in this alone.
I believe that a rising tide raises all ships and I invite you along in this journey to Evoke Greatness!
Evoke Greatness Podcast
Unlocking Body Wisdom: How Somatic Intelligence Transforms Decision-Making, Resilience, and Leadership with Dr. Amanda Blake Part 1
This is part 1 of a 2 part series where you will learn to unlock transformative insights into the realm of somatic intelligence with Dr. Amanda Blake, the Author of "Your Body is Your Brain."
Ever wondered how leveraging the wisdom of your body could help you lead more powerfully and deepen your relationships? Amanda shares her inspiring journey, from her early fascination with the interplay between biology and psychology to becoming a trailblazer in integrating bodily wisdom into personal and professional development. Discover how body-oriented approaches can help you find purpose, build resilience, and achieve true greatness.
Explore the profound connection between emotions and physical sensations in this enriching episode. Learn about the interoceptive nervous system and practical strategies to combat burnout and emotional exhaustion. Get valuable tips on mindful practices and low-stakes activities that aid recovery, along with insights on minimizing sensory overload to support your mental and emotional well-being. To cap it off, we emphasize the significance of small, consistent actions in achieving extraordinary results. Your journey to evoke greatness starts here—don’t miss it!
https://embright.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-blake-phd-892195/
A rising tide raises all ships, and I invite you along on this journey to Evoke Greatness!
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Hey there, what's up everybody? Welcome to Evoke Greatness. This podcast was created for those of you who, like me, are driven by their curious nature and fascination with the champion mindset, if you have an insatiable hunger for growth and knowledge, or maybe you're just curious on how some of the most successful people have navigated their journey. We share the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows and all the lessons learned along the way. It doesn't matter what chapter you are on in your story Maybe you're just getting started or, heck, maybe you're halfway through. What I know is, where intention goes, energy flows. It's my most sincere hope that you will hear something in one or maybe many of these episodes that resonates with you and reminds you that you are not in this alone. As we venture into year two, I hope that you find a sense of connection and community when you're here, because we all deserve a place where we belong. My name is Sunny and I am so glad you're here. If you're new, there's a few things you want to know about me. I am a huge book nerd and a wee bit of a control enthusiast, with an obsession for motivational coffee cups. I believe that a rising tide raises all ships and I invite you along in this journey to evoke greatness. Welcome back to another episode of Evoke Greatness. I am excited to hop into this topic.
Speaker 1:Today. We have Dr Amanda Blake with us. She's the author of your Body is your Brain. Leverage your Somatic Intelligence to Find Purpose, build Resilience, deepen Relationships and Lead More Powerfully. Amanda is not only an accomplished author but a pioneer in integrating somatic intelligence into that personal and professional side of development. She teaches us how to use our bodily wisdom to find purpose, build resilience, deepen those relationships. Our bodily wisdom to find purpose, build resilience, deepen those relationships, advance ourselves in so many of the different facets and lead more powerfully. Amanda, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Well, I would love to kick off. How did you jump into what you're doing today, the current version of ourselves? Oftentimes it's like, okay, you know, the fascinating part is what led up to where you are now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, gosh, I always have a hard time doing the nut. I'm going to try to do the nutshell version for once, but we'll see, let's see if I can pull it off.
Speaker 2:I've always had an interest in the relationship between biology and psychology, dating back to like when my mother was pregnant with my baby brother, so from childhood really, I grew up as an athlete and I grew up in a medical family and I thought for both of those reasons that I would go into sports medicine and I started down that path and happened upon perspective on the world that interested me even more, which is the major that I was in in college really took the point of view. Major that I was in in college really took the point of view. It was a human biology major but it took the point of view that we can only understand humans by looking at us them, we through the lens of both the natural and the social sciences. So I had a lot of education in biology and psychology and then on sort of a community level in the relationship between culture and nature or ecology and anthropology, and that was just deep fascination for me in my very early formative years and people did all kinds of things with that degree. But it's certainly and it's interdisciplinary enough that it doesn't lend itself to an easy, obvious path or job, and I had many, many interests. So I did a tour of duty in education. I did a tour of duty in Silicon Valley, because that's where I grew up, you know. I did a tour of duty as an outdoor educator and guide because that was a big part of my life.
Speaker 2:Ultimately I landed in leadership coaching and executive coaching and it seemed more and more like this is kind of maybe the right fit in my career. And along the way somebody handed me a book that was about a body-oriented approach to learning and I went to study with the author of the book and have subsequently studied with many other people who do this kind of work and what I found was a place to finally bring all of my fascinations, passions and interests together, where now I get to support people in finding how they can be at their best their finding how they can be at their best, sometimes in situations of very high pressure, leadership situations, challenging personal situations, like how can we tap our best by leveraging the whole of our intelligence. And it turns out we have a lot more intelligence than we think we do, all the way out to our fingers and toes. So I can talk a little bit more, if you like, about that specific, like how I came to write the book and that part of the journey. If you think that would be interesting here, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know, I kind of stumbled into this more body oriented approach to leadership coaching and my own life was radically upgraded, like radically. I suddenly was able to speak up for myself in situations where I hadn't been able to do that before. I suddenly was able to take risks on behalf of what I cared about, take risks to play bigger in my work and my career. I was able to just do some things in the world that I hadn't previously been able to do and, frankly, it was better for me and better for everyone around me. And so, as one of my teachers used to say, right, it's better for me, I'm really better for everyone around me. I just became not that I wasn't a nice person before, but a nicer person, especially in stressful situations.
Speaker 2:And at the same time, I was super skeptical. I was like this shouldn't work, like why would it be that when I lower my chin or I pay attention to the way my feet are contacting the floor, or I put my shoulders over my hips, like why does that change how I show up in high pressure situations. Why does that change? You know what I'm able to do on behalf of a mission or a goal that I hold, so I was actually pretty skeptical and that was the genesis of the book your Body is your Brain.
Speaker 2:I had to go figure out for myself what's underneath all this. I could see that it was having a huge impact in my life. As I started using these practices with clients, I could see that it was having a wildly huge impact on them. But I was like I don't understand it. So I wrote the book, partly so I could understand it, but also because I felt like you know, this is very powerful. But if I don't understand it and I was resistant at first, you know I'm not the only one and people should have access to this. They. I would have needed. It would have helped me to have like a clear explanation of why it makes sense that you can actually change, change yourself and support behavioral learning through embodied practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think so many people think that some of that development in ourselves, both both personally and professionally, is relatively like surface deep, right, and is. We hear about things like the power pose. We hear about things like, oh, get this playlist, you know, get these something to to really trigger your mind, to get you amped up, and those things, though, they work in some situations. Sometimes it's about better understanding why they work, and so that's why I love to dive into topics that go deeper into this, and so, for listeners who may be new to this concept, can you break down what somatic intelligence entails and why is that crucial? How can it really shift our personal development?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great. So we do actually have intelligence, and I mean intelligence. If you look at kind of the researcher's definition of what cognition is, it's our capacity to know the world through our senses, right? So that's already very physical Know and experience the world and effectively make decisions about what to do in the world. That is what cognition is. So, when we're looking at what cognition is, there are intellectual aspects to that, right, like understanding a spreadsheet if you're making financial decisions, right. But there are also social and emotional aspects to that, like understanding if the person across from you is ready to hear what you have to say to them Kind, constructive, whatever it may be right. And so there are different forms of intelligence and we're used to thinking about that like that. There's, there's mathematical intelligence, there's kinesthetic intelligence, some people are auditory learners, etc. Etc.
Speaker 2:We have a whole form of intelligence that in the academic world is referred to as embodied cognition and it's a way of gathering information about experiencing and understanding and then choosing to act in the world, or sometimes automatically, sort of habitually acting in the world in ways that are based on that gathered sensory information. So we have this capacity for sensory intelligence and it actually influences everything we do. There's not a way for us to turn it off. It plugs straight into our decision-making neural architecture. It plugs straight into the neural architecture that helps us understand our own emotions. It's plugged straight into the neural architecture that helps us empathize with other people. And so we actually have this vast source of intelligence that, in contrast to all of our years in school kindergarten, through graduate school we spent a lot of time training our intellect. We actually just don't spend time training our capacity for embodied cognition, and that was true for me. I was an athlete. I spent a lot of time training my body for specific athletic feats, but that's very different from embodied cognition. Likewise, you know you might spend a lot of time paying attention to the body, or you might know a lot about the body. If you work in healthcare right and have certain ways of intervening with medications or with different kinds of medical devices, all kinds of things that you can do to intervene in the health of the body, that's also really different.
Speaker 2:What I'm talking about is an intelligence that comes from our fingers and toes, and one of the ways to think about that is like when the hair stand up on the back of your neck right. That's metaphorical, but also very real. We'll have these moments where we just have some spidey sense or like, in the same way that you know you stubbed your toe, you will know if you, in a manner of speaking, stubbed your heart, and so we have an embodied knowing, but we don't have 12 or 24 years of education that help us discern what it's telling us, help us make intelligent use of those messages. Then apply it, specifically in the leadership realm, and there's lots of other places you could apply it. It matters for parenting, it matters for decision-making about your own life, it matters in I mean, our bodies come with us everywhere, so it matters everywhere.
Speaker 1:As you talk about that spectrum of anywhere from kids to, you know, to professional adults, all the way through life, these things and the challenges that we stumble upon. We had talked kind of a bit before hitting record just on the burnout side of things. Right, but burnout, I guess really, when you think about it, when you talk about that spectrum, isn't necessarily just for adults. Kids can experience those types of things as well. Maybe they show up in different ways. When you think about those that may be experiencing things around burnout and stress and anxiety, how can people utilize somatic intelligence to navigate through those types of challenges that are sometimes, they almost feel, a little more emotional than physical?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, one of the ways to understand emotions and recent research on emotions suggests that emotions are essentially a bridge between the physical and the conceptual. You are experiencing your heart fluttering in your chest in a non-medical way, right? So we go. Okay, I can feel my heart fluttering in my chest. Well, do you feel anxiety or do you feel excitement? And the way you know has to do with your evaluation of whatever the situation is, right. So there's a physical sensation heart fluttering and there is kind of an interpretive evaluation, like I'm really excited about what's ahead or I'm really nervous about what's ahead, right? So emotions are kind of a bridge between the conceptual and the physical, and we actually don't experience emotion in the absence of physical sensation. But because of our neural architecture and also because of a number of different cultural pressures, we're not as used to feeling those sensations. They tend to be more subtle unless there's something very significant going on that's making us really nervous, for example. And so all of those physical sensations are kind of put on autopilot by nerve cells that are part of our interoceptive nervous system. Some listeners may know that term, others may not. It's basically the equivalent to our five senses, but inside of our body, right. So we're getting information from inside of our body, but those nerve cells are actually smaller, they are unmyelinated, meaning they don't have this insulated, fatty sheath that helps the signal travel faster. So, compared to our capacity to pay attention to the world outside our own skin, our capacity to pay attention to the world inside our own skin is kind of sensorily dampened. It's quieter, which is why we often close our eyes or go somewhere quiet, right, to try and get in tune with ourselves or get in touch with ourselves. So, all of that is to say, there are challenges and obstacles to sensing ourselves, but when we do, we actually gain all kinds of information. Okay, so let me make sure I'm on track with your question.
Speaker 2:You asked about burnout and stress and overwhelm and how we can respond to those situations. So, knowing that these quieter signals and these can be signals like hunger and thirst, they can be signals like physical exhaustion, but they can also be signals like the emotions that you mentioned in your question, right, which is, you know, one of the symptoms of burnout is emotional exhaustion and kind of a depersonalization of the people that you work with, the people that you're with every day. It's like kind of treating them like a number, because I just can't kind of face my daily responsibilities so that level of burnout. A lot of times we'll either have strongly heightened emotions, so we'll get really emotionally reactive, maybe with a lot of sensation behind it, or alternatively, we might have really dampened emotions with a lot of dampened or numbing of sensations. Both of those things can happen.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that I think is really really useful for contending with all of that and this I'm speaking from personal experience here, because I ran into a period of pretty severe burnout where I actually had to step out of working for a period of time.
Speaker 2:It was pretty significant and one of the really important lessons that I learned from that is the importance of rest and the importance of quiet.
Speaker 2:Now, that's a luxury that not all of us can find, but where it's possible to put your body in a circumstance of rest, so really downshifting and a circumstance of quiet, it makes it much easier both to hear those signals and to respond to them and it also serves a really important restorative function for the physical body that needs literal physical healing and reconstruction in situations of burnout.
Speaker 2:Healing and reconstruction in situations of burnout One of the things that I personally found really useful was to was actually to just do puzzles, which is not something I've ever really done much of in my life. But there are lots of different forms, like very simple doodling, artwork or doing puzzles, the kinds of things that are not about giving your brain a lot of input, but allowing your brain to concentrate in a focused way, but not in a way that's like super high stakes, right. So doodling, coloring books, puzzles, whatever your sort of preferred form of allowing your whole brain and body to rest In a kind of active way. Right, it's not just sitting in a hammock, although that can help too, but sometimes that's not even quite all that we need.
Speaker 1:It makes me think immediately. When you said quiet, I don't necessarily think that doesn't always mean like, okay, going into a quiet room, but I think it's almost like about decreasing the those sensory, those notifications. A big thing for us nowadays is our phones, our devices, and the number of notifications and the number of times we actually physically touch and pay attention to our phone can be physically and emotionally, psychologically draining. And so I have found that when trying to focus on something or really trying to just like have that time do not disturb on your phone, where you're just not getting those notifications being shot at you, Sometimes it's like enough to give your brain and your body just a little bit of a break from those constant sensory stimulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know Cal Newport does really great work on this, his work on digital minimalism, and I think there's and deep work and all of that. There's any notification on my phone that I don't actually require for my daily survival. It's off. So for me personally, notifications are mostly off and the ringer on my phone is off for most of the day unless I'm expecting a call, and I'm really deliberate about that because I'm an extremely distractible person. So I actually need all of the support I can get to. You know, look, when I need to look at the news, I can go look at the news when I have time to look at the news. I don't actually need to have that incoming at all times. So different people will have different requirements, but I definitely encourage, as a way of supporting your own capacity, to listen, to hear experience I don't even want to say listen to it makes it almost sound like somehow I am separate from my body but like to actually experience your own somatic intelligence. The less input you can have, the better somatic intelligence. The less input you can have, the better, and one of the things that I want to point out here that I think we tend to lose sight of is.
Speaker 2:It's worth remembering that our bodies are and I mean this incredibly literally made of earth.
Speaker 2:We're not made of anything else, although you know we're like 70% water and the rest of us is materials that come from the earth.
Speaker 2:Right, so we are made of earth, we are part of nature and if you look at the pace of life in nature, right, like what is an organic pace? What is happening in your garden? What is happening in the trees that grow on your street? Even if you live on a city block, they'll flourish in the spring and lose their leaves in the winter. They go into a period of dormancy, they have a period of rest, right? So really looking at what nature needs and treating your body with the same sort of care we might want to treat the earth. We are made of earth and it's worth remembering that we are nature and we go want to treat the earth. We are made of earth and it's worth remembering that we are nature and we go best at nature's pace, and so much of our lives are consumed by trying to keep up with a mechanical pace of living, and that actually really compromises our capacity to tap our somatic intelligence, our embodied cognitive capacities.
Speaker 1:Being aware of and really intentional around what you're allowing in. I think, like you said, I think we're probably all very easily distractible. The world has been created to distract us. From a technology perspective, we have all of these things. Most of our laptops have 55 tabs open. You know, when we're trying to have a meeting, like there's people coming in. You know, hey, just just got to ask you something real quick, we're just being bombarded.
Speaker 1:And so I think the intentionality and what I it's reminds me of something I tell my kids, which is be careful what you put in your ear gates and eye gates, eye gates, and you know what are those things that we're paying attention to. To, uh, to your point, if you want to know what's going on in the news, like we can actively take the action of going in, either turning the TV on or looking, you know, at our favorite news site or whatever, if we want to seek that out. But just, I guess, not being aware of how much is coming at us all the time and how much of an impact that has, I really would challenge people to have the intentionality around. What are you allowing in and how is that serving you, your body, those around you, how you're showing up, how you're feeling, how you're thinking. You know there's just there's so much to it and staying even just on that, on that side of factoring these things into our leadership.
Speaker 2:Can I say something about that? Because one thing that's occurring to me and this is actually critical from a leadership perspective is you're in the driver's seat, so don't let anybody else tell you what you need to pay attention to. You're in the driver's seat and one of the ways I learned this.
Speaker 2:Many years ago I lived in a really small town in Alaska where we this was sort of pre-cell phone era. It was a very small town, we didn't have phone lines in the town itself and we got mail once a week. So in the event of an emergency, yes, you could get across the river and, in the space of like several hours down a dirt road, get to a hospital, but really our communication with the outside world was mail once a week. Really, I have to say that totally reset things for me personally around how responsive I need to be to the world, because everything went on just fine without me and and I got on just fine without the daily onslaught and I went back into my daily life right, and there's news every day and things to pay attention to and demands on my time, and that's fine. I could respond to all of those. But it really changed my orientation to I'm in the driver's seat, and not everything actually needs my immediate attention right now.
Speaker 1:Right and just the awareness of that, the awareness that you have the power to control that yeah, the awareness that you have the power to control that yeah. Thank you so much for listening and for being here on this journey with me. I hope you'll stick around. If you liked this episode. It would mean the world for me if you would rate and review the podcast or share it with someone you know may need to hear this message. I love to hear from you all and want you to know that you can leave me a voicemail directly. If you go to my website, evokegreatnesscom, and go to the contact me tab, you'll just hit the big old orange button and record your message.
Speaker 1:I love the feedback and comments that I've been getting, so please keep them coming. I'll leave you with the wise words of author Robin Sharma Greatness comes by doing a few small and smart things each and every day. It comes from taking little steps consistently. It comes from making a few small chips against everything in your professional and personal life that is ordinary, so that a day eventually arrives when all that's left is the extraordinary. Thank you.
