Building a meaningful life in 2026 feels confusing. We have more productivity systems, more therapy models, and more optimization tools than ever. And yet, people still feel scattered, anxious, and disconnected. Today, I'm sitting down with Cory Firth. Cory works at the intersection of flow, performance, and work-life mastery. He's exploring education, agency, and what it really means to help people operate at their highest level.
This conversation isn't about hacks. It's about attention, agency, and how to perform well without losing yourself in the process. Let's get into it. You describe yourself as an explorer of the human ecosystem. Tell me about that. I just find myself very, very fascinated, very curious about what it means to be human, how to be a human.
Because there's no manual for this. And I think of it a lot like a video game. I don't know what, when you grew up. When I was a kid, I played a lot of Super Mario. And Super Mario World specifically was one of my favorite games. I'm not much of a gamer now, but when I was a kid, Super Mario was my world.
And yeah, I just can't help but relate to being a human as like, you know, being a little Super Mario, or a little game figure. And just, yeah, getting through life and moving through life. Everyone's doing it. And I think I pay a little more attention to the nuances and small little elements of what it means to be human and kind of going through the human experience. And I'm fascinated by that and documenting it and sharing it and learning more about it and being wrong about it and learning why I was wrong about it and adjusting and not being too dogmatic about my views is just very fun. And that's how I kind of approach my work and my life.
When you say everybody's doing it, you mean being human or everybody's trying to figure out how to live. Yeah, yeah, well, both. Yeah, yeah, yeah, both. It feels like both, especially right now with everything going on. It feels like everyone's trying to sort of, I don't know how you feel about this, but I feel like just sort of some sort of cosmic shift happening. I don't know how to put it any other way.
And I don't mean to sound woo-woo or anything like that, but there definitely feels like there's some sort of big shift happening. And I think a lot of people have a lot of questions and more questions and answers, even though we have access to more information than we ever have as a species. And so I think it's important to be exploring and to be sharing. Yeah, I agree. I do feel the shift. I felt it.
And I'm glad you jumped right in. I had that on here to talk about. And when we first started having our connection, we got quickly into that type of topic, spirituality, philosophy. So I'm sure we're going to cover a lot of that ground today. Let's do it. Yeah.
So getting into flow and performance coaching, did that come out of personal experience? Or was that more of an intellectual curiosity for you? Yeah, a little bit of both. I mean, when I was a kid, I grew up playing a lot of competitive sports, specifically hockey here. I'm in Canada. And I didn't know it at the time.
But what I was experiencing when I was outside in my driveway, shooting against the fence, or my dad would build us a rink every year in our backyard. And I could stay at my mom had to like drag me in, shut the lights off, drag me inside, you eat and like, take a break. Because I could spend hours and hours out there playing. And as I grow older, I stopped playing hockey for many reasons. But one of the reasons was it just became sort of a political thing, like any sports when you're a kid, if you show some sort of sign of talent. It sort of then becomes like, oh, maybe like, you should play competitive.
And then maybe this is something you could do, you know, as you grow up. It's like that in the States, you know, with football and baseball and things, I think. But here in Canada, hockey's hockey and hockey's like everything for everybody, right? You kind of born with a hockey stick in your hand here. So I was naturally pretty good when I was a kid. And my dad did everything he could to just steer it in the right way, direct in the right way.
And awesome, like, just super grateful for having that experience. But then like it was out of his control and the way that the organized sports is here anyway, and organized hockey is here. It's very political and it's very like, who do you know and that kind of stuff? And so if it came once it became that for me, I sort of just disconnected from it. And in that process of disconnecting from it, I kind of disconnected from that what I understand now to be a deep flow of just playing. And yeah, then as I got older, my priority shifted and my idea shifted around what I wanted to do for work and things like that.
And got into communications and started a communications agency and was doing really well at that. But flow started to come back a little bit there. Again, I didn't quite know what it was, just like this deep like immersion of focus.
But at the same time that attention, the attention I was directing or the focus that I was directing my attention towards wasn't really fulfilling and meaningful. And then I had some personal mental health challenges and things like that. And a lot of real like to be honest, breakdowns of my own constructs of identity and mental health. And through that process, I found flow again from a bit more of an intellectual pursuit at the beginning. And now it's just this kind of practice, I would say, this idea of trying to practice flow is the way that I think about it. I don't think of it like how I think most people think about it or how I guess maybe how it's been taught to us or how you would explore it intellectually, traditionally.
As in, this is a state that is in a lot of ways the way it's presented. It's designed for people that are athletic in these athletic pursuits or creative in the arts. But I think of it as a practice for everybody. And I think it's achievable for everybody. And I've learned now through my work with Stephen Kotler at the Flow Research Collective. I trained under him, Stephen Kotler is kind of the guy now.
He's taken a lot of the research from another guy, Mihajik Semihay of the 80s and built upon that with his research and all his books and literature. And then I did some training with him and a group of neuroscientists that studied P-Performance and Flow. And then just started practicing it personally and then started practicing it professionally and offering some coaching and developing some products and tools around it for individuals to access flow. And I really think, and we can dive into this and I'll take a breath, but I think Flow is really a tool for the world we live in right now. Where a lot of people are having a hard time being present and staying focused and and immersing themselves in the present experience at the present moment. And I think training for the skill of Flow or the practice of Flow can be just such a useful tool for everybody in terms of well-being and achievement and meaning and all kinds of things which we can talk about.
And I'm just nerding out on it and just super excited about it and love the opportunity to chat with you and others about this type of thing. Because it's just fun. Super fun.
Yeah, how do you define Flow? Is it a skill? Is it a state of mind? Is it both? Yeah, I mean, the simplest shortest description of it is effortless action. And that's not my description of it.
That comes from, I think it would be more, you could probably draw it back to Mihai, Czech Semihai. He's the guy who's sort of the godfather of it. I can pull some books out in the back afterwards and share some with you or for the viewers who are interested in diving in and do it deeper. But it's this idea of effortless action. So it's not like it's it's active. It's active presence.
It is another way to kind of think about it. And we've constantly heard of it as a state, this idea of the Flow state. And yeah, that's that's a great way to put it. And that term comes from a really interesting study that that he did in one of his books that I can share. But for me, I think of it as what I've learned from from Stephen Kotler in that work that I did with the Flow Research Collective is it is Flow is a repeatable cycle that we have available to us all the time. And the skill and the practice of entering into that cycle is what I'm talking about and what I think is very important to learn how to do.
And so the Flow follows a predictable cycle. It starts with there's four four elements to it. It starts with the the struggle phase, which is what everyone experiences when they're trying to focus on something. You know, you're sitting down to I'll use an example of like writing a book because it's just super applicable and easy for everyone to understand. You sit down and you want to start writing a chapter, let's say. But as you're starting to write, even if you have the idea and the theme in your mind, you still can't get your brain out of what happened before.
Maybe you had an argument with your wife at breakfast and now you can't get that out of your head or you have a big meeting coming up in the afternoon and you can't kind of get that out of your head or your to do list or your grocery list or you know, some things on your mind. It's hard to channel your attention towards that thing you're trying to do. And that is kind of by design. You have to have that focus or that challenge phase, the struggle phase in order for you to achieve Flow because your brain has to go and kind of warp in your mind. And then you can get into the present moment and a lot of people give up there. And so a lot of people that I speak with in a lot of ways, they say they can't focus or they can't get into Flow.
It's because they give up or they're distracted by something during that first phase. But you have to have that it's built in. So that challenge is built in and if you move beyond that you move into the release phase. And then the release phase is when things like nitric oxide come on and your brain sort of moves from the highly sympathetic kind of anxious state. Where you'd be in your in that struggle phase where you're frustrated without not being able to focus. You can't kind of get those things out of your mind and you really want to pay attention, but you can't.
And when you enter that release phase and those other neurochemical start to kick in, then you can start to translate into Flow. And then the beautiful thing about when you enter into the Flow phase, which is the third phase, is your sense of time disappears. And your self-consciousness disappears. You're never you're no longer wondering what time it is, how much time you have left to do this thing, what's going to happen next, what happened before. And you're not thinking about how to do what you're doing. You're typing without even having to think about what you're typing.
The words are coming to you effortlessly. Whatever it is that you're doing, you're not doing with actively thinking about having to do it. That's the effortless action part. You're taking action, but you're not trying to do it. You're just doing it. When I would play hockey as a kid, I didn't have to think about moving my stick and controlling my body and my skates and all that at the same time.
I was just naturally doing it. It was flowing and fluid. And that Flow state is that third part of the cycle, which is very much what a lot of people try to achieve. And they think that they have maybe a hard time getting there. And in that phase, that's when things like dopamine flood the brain and endorphins flood the brain. And from there, you have the ability to kind of immerse yourself in that neurochemical cocktail for roughly, for most people, like 90 to 120 minutes, if they're not distracted by all the screens and all the other kind of things that were distracted by.
And then after that, you need a break. So Flow is available to us all the time, but it's available to us in these sort of peaks and valleys. And I'll explain to you the kind of biology behind it in a sec. And so the fourth phase of it is recovery. And that's another thing that a lot of people miss, especially if they can get into flow and get past struggle and all that. They just want to keep tapping the well of dopamine and keeping the flow and keep focused on something or move on to the next thing and try to keep that flow and focus and the neurochemicals up.
But our neurochemicals go like this throughout the day. And so if you don't take time to actually recover and take a break and like a real break, not picking up your phone and scrolling social media, because that's more just dopamine. And hitting stuff, you actually have to like really take a break. And there's different ways to do that. We could talk about that if that's interesting. But that's the way that I think about Flow.
I know it's kind of a long winded way of kind of pulling it all together here, but we want to give the basis of what I think about or how I describe it. Yeah, no, that was great. I mean, I learned a lot just in that few minutes. You mentioned neurochemical. So is this something that's able to be measured when people are in flow? Are we able to measure that that we know that they've entered the state of flow?
Yeah, as far as I know, there's no like real time measurement of those chemicals, unless you're tapped into something like maybe like an EEG setup or something like that, which they have a lot of good studies on. But there's no like, there's no like direct to consumer wearable that would be tracking that stuff at this moment. Although I'm sure that's coming soon. There are some cool wearables that can help you like neuro stimulation tools that can help you get into flow a little easier or music and things like that. But in terms of measuring it, the best way to measure it is the acronym STIR, which is selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness and richness. And so there's like a survey questionnaire type research questionnaire that you can take.
And I use in my coaching actually just to kind of measure like how often someone does achieve flow and then after our work, how often do they achieve it kind of thing. And the idea there is the idea of selflessness is the absence of self consciousness. That's what I was describing before of like you're not thinking about thinking you're just doing. So you don't have any of that in your brain in your mind as you're kind of moving through whatever it is you're doing. Timelessness, I described that before. It's like the absence of time.
You're not really worried about time. You're just kind of in the moment. Effortlessness, as I described, you're not trying, you know, it might be challenging, but
you know, you're not really trying to do the thing. Challenge is a big, big thing too we can talk about. And then richness. And I think richness comes, it's a byproduct of presence. So richness is no matter what you're doing, it feels very immersive and it feels very rich in the experience itself. And so usually that's kind of what I learned from Steven Kotler in the Flow Research Collective is like a, that's a great simple mechanism for measuring flow.
And they've sort of described that as like you have to have kind of all four of those things. And I don't really necessarily think you do have to have all four of those things, those things to achieve flow, at least to the level that a lot of people desire it today. But when you do have all four of those things, that's kind of the sweet spot.
It seems like a lot of people confuse focus with flow. And it sounds like those are two different things. The acronym you just gave, is that a way of differentiating the two? Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, I mean, like I can focus on something but still be cognizant of time. Like I can channel my attention into something singularly, but still be self-conscious or still be sort of trying too hard, right?
If it's super challenging, I can still be focused in it. But yeah, I would say that's a good differentiator for sure. Yeah, okay. So, you said everyone has access to flow. But are there certain genetic predispositions that certain people have or certain people just naturally better at it? It's a little bit out of my wheelhouse.
You know, there's a lot of people that I see these days talking about having some sort of like neurodivergency or things like that that I think
you know, a lot of medicine and research and science is trying to sort of like define neurodivergency and things like that. But I think that's more of a limitation than it is real, a basis of truth. And I appreciate trying. I appreciate, you know, people that have, you know, let's say ADHD or something like that even. But I think, I think those are limitations. I think labels and things like that.
While can be beneficial to some degree, I think the way that things are pathologized these days, you know, in a lot of ways it's getting
a lot more people in trouble, not in drastic trouble, but I think limiting them and keeping them from it.
So yeah, I mean, like if you look, I got Alex Arnold. I know we were chatting a little bit of that offline. Like, you know, you study that guy and he has like no fear and they studied his brain and they actually, you know, they've seen that he has like a decrease in the fear centers of his brain. So, you know, I'm sure that there is. I just don't, I don't quite know. I don't, I honestly, it's a little bit on my wheelhouse.
Yeah. Okay. But in the people that I worked with, everyone's able to achieve it. It's just a skill. I think of it more as a skill than it is like this, this really hard to achieve thing. Right.
Okay. Um, what's something you think most of them will get wrong about flow? Hmm. Yeah. I think I said it before. It's this idea that it's like the state that you have to enter.
That's hard to enter and that it's only reserved for people like athletes and for creative types. Um, because I think we're all to a certain degree performing at a high level or wanting to perform at a high level and we're all creative. And so I think if we all think of ourselves as like creative athletes, for example, that doesn't hit with everybody and I'm not trying to go into the like, um,
Loggivity bro sort of angle or anything like that. But I think if we were to start thinking in that way and think of ourselves as performance beings that are inherently wildly artistic and creative, then everything we do is creative and everything we do needs a high level of human performance to achieve. And it doesn't have to be someone like an Alex Arnold. He just gives us a great example of what's possible at highest at the highest level. So I think I think a lot of people just think that like it's unachievable and I think that that's a real big mistake. And I really would love to decode that for people and normalize it in a way that people can see that it's achievable for them whenever they desire and again based on the biology and the other stuff I was sharing before.
Yeah, I see a lot of people online talking about performance and feeling like they are being asked to do too many jobs nowadays, too many things.
I think there's a skeptical view sometimes of productivity. People feeling like they're being asked to be these optimized versions of themselves. What do you say to that when someone kind of pushes back? Totally agree. Yeah, I consider myself a productivity anarchist or like a P-Performance anarchist where it's like let's do away with that. I think those words, you know, with social media and stuff, like things become trendy and people attach themselves to a moniker or an identity of something that they do or they do like what I've done.
I'm guilty of doing what I'm describing right now and I'm trying to get away from that because I think you're right man. Like I think the expectation that is an largely driven by social media, you know, in different ways of comparing ourselves to others. It's not real. Like what you see on social media every day is not real. It's someone's highlight real. It's not their actual current state of being and so they might be showing all these like fancy things they're doing and all these great things and all that and then we're kind of feeling like we have to keep up.
And I think a lot of people fall into the trap and again, there's no judgment to anyone. I fall into this myself of this kind of comparison hamster wheel and we sort of attach ourselves to these ideas of what goals could be for ourselves based on what we see other people doing. And it's sort of this idea of like bandwagon jumping and you know, I dig in with people that I work with around their goals and when you really get to it, like no one really knows why they have a goal for what they want to do. They've just been told that that's what they're supposed to do or or when I'm describing before is like they see other people similar to them achieving things that they think they need to achieve. And so there's not like a deeper level of purpose behind some of these things. So then they're exposed to all of these different things and then feeling overwhelmed by having to try to keep up with everything and it's impossible.
And I think in a lot of ways if people realize like what they see online isn't real, and it isn't real is something we could dissect a little bit. I don't mean it's not real. I just mean it's pixels on a screen. It's not what I'm seeing right now this physical desk in my environment, you know, and whatever you're doing in your environment on the other side of the world where I'm not at, that is real. And a lot of people need to get off that and out of that because we're consuming way too much content and it's overwhelming us. And so I think that's a big, big problem.
I don't even really remember the question that you were asking, but I just got a rambling. I hope that was kind of close. That was great. I loved it. You touched on something about identity and that's something I talk a lot about. I think people are comparing themselves to all these different people they see online.
They're adopting all these different identities and I think they are trying to optimize for it or if they're not they feel guilty because they're comparing. I think that's what we're experiencing a bit of a backlash from. People feel like there's guilt they carry about all of these areas of their life that aren't optimized in the way that this person is optimized for home decor and that person's optimized for fitness and personal health and vacations and job. We kind of pull bits and pieces I think of different people and we want to create this
collage of who we want to be. But we want to be good I think in all those things at the same time and unfortunately nobody has enough time in their day for that to be all those things. But I can see why people are interested in flow and productivity because they want to be efficient in each area. They want to be able to optimize the time that they have to be able to get the most output. So it's a balance I think we're all dealing with right now. Yeah, yeah.
The way that I think about it, just a riff kind of yes-ending with you there is
like I'm a I would say I'm a recovering biohacker like super obsessed for many many years. I think there's a lot of people out there. I think that that's it.
I think that's part of the shift that's happening. Yeah, for the last like 10 years or so there's been a lot of the biohacking, personal development and people have learned a lot but I think a lot of people run themselves in the ground with it a little bit. Yeah, tell me about your recovery.
Yeah, I think it's tough. Like I think we want, we chase some, I don't know, I'm not trying to generalize. I'll speak to for myself. I was always trying to chase perfection in who I was to other people in my health so that I wouldn't die because I was afraid of that or trying to control something or whatever. So I think it's a weird recipe that I think a lot of people can relate to of this idea of like, yeah, trying to be perfect, which I think is a big thing what we're just talking about. And then I think there's like this, this idea of control of having control of everything, feeling like everything's fine.
When that's not really natural, like I just moved out to the woods, I live like on 200 acres of beautiful forest and when I moved out here, I've never lived out in the woods before and I still have a kind of a connection to a bigger city. And now when I come out here coming back from the city, I have this like tense nervous system like coming back here, I have to down regulate, but I'm down regulating into chaos and order at the same time here, where it almost feels like there's this chaotic nervous system kind of collective energy of, you know, achieving, forcing, you know, completing, getting done, being productive, ins and outs like output, output, output. And if you look at nature, it doesn't happen that way. There's chaos and order happening all the time. And in fact, chaos is order at the same time. And I think that's another kind of skill I could be able to think about, you know, flow as a skill, I think embracing chaos as a skill as well, embracing, embracing uncertainty, which is there all the time.
It feels like a more, like it feels like the uncertainty is like more amplified in the world right now. But that's always been there. And, and I think a better way to think about things, at least this is from my experience, what's allowed me to calm myself into this without changing reality, because I can't change what's going on, what's allowed me to find a better place in it all was one focusing on myself rather than everyone else, and trying to find my own piece with who I am and where I am and what I'm doing, and, you know, my place in it all, but also moving from optimization to integration. So rather than thinking about like optimizing and tweaking every little thing, how do they actually all integrate with each other? Because if I'm just trying to get my HRV up, like, how does that integrate to like how I am with my daughter or how I am with my work or whatever, you know what I mean? So let me best not the best example.
But seeing out all of these things that I'm trying to optimize for, how do they integrate first? And then then it's a matter of what actually needs to be optimized, that optimization is still important. But how do they integrate first? And then a layer even more importantly, I think is more about alignment. Like, what are you aligning your actions to? And why are you doing the things that you do?
I keep saying you and I keep going out where else to keep keep with myself. And it's like, the thing that I found much more beneficial, and actually this is this came from some of the work I did with Stephen Kotler, is understanding your massively transformative purpose. It's one of those things that kind of sounds a little, boo, boo, boo, or maybe a little whatever. But I think it's such a missing link, you know, for a lot of people purpose and meaning, I think we don't we don't prioritize those as high level things to think about in our day to day. And there's many reasons for that. But I think when I started to do that more, and I started to think about, okay, what's the thing I'm going to get up for every single day, no matter if I ever achieve that thing.
And that's what the, that's what the idea of a massively transformative purpose is, is like, it's this thing that you could get up for the rest of your life trying to see come to reality. But maybe you never achieve it. But it keeps you getting up and keeps you moving towards that. And I think aligning myself, my actions, my, my buckets of my life domains and all the things I need to think about and care for and optimize or you know, keep up with. If I'm aligning myself to those things, then the integration kind of happens naturally. And then what needs to get optimized becomes more obvious, instead of it being all of the things all at once.
If that makes sense. Yeah.
That massive transformative purpose. Do you think it's better if you don't achieve it in your life? The people who do achieve a life goal often talk about having that, you know, breakdown afterwards.
You know, because now what? Yeah, I don't think of, I don't think of purpose, massively transformative. One, I don't share my purpose with people either. I don't think that I think there's, you know, the difference between purpose and goals is, is unique to describe here too. Like purpose isn't necessarily something you ever have to achieve. It's something that's more embodied, something you know, where you can live into every single day.
So I don't think of it as something like that. Although it might be like solving world hunger, like, because it's, that seems like such a massively impossible thing to do. You had at the same time kind of, maybe it's possible, you know, like, if it's really aligned to you and your heart, then maybe you're like, yeah, I can do this. And then when I think about in that instance is layering a purpose with something like a high heart goal, something that takes three, six, 12, maybe 18 months to achieve, but has a clear end date has something that that you can achieve. And then from there, there are clear goals that you can stack under that even that kind of break it down even smaller so that that high heart goal that seems, you know, impossible maybe or not impossible because the purpose would feel maybe more impossible. But the high heart goal that's achievable, but takes a long period of time, you break that down so you can kind of chunk it out so you can move towards it in a timeline that makes sense.
And it keeps you in momentum. And then to me, I think of goals as something that can happen every day as well, like goal directed actions. So the actions being more goals helps to trigger the brain for flow too. And when I break it down that way, it's very simple. I can have a big massively transformative purpose, maybe one or two high heart goals that I'm trying to achieve. And then I'm clear in my direction with everything layered underneath that.
And then every day I just know what the goal is. And I try not to overdo it in any other way, while also maintaining the other things in balance or maybe more at integration, in an integrative way rather than trying to balance everything because that's impossible too. Yeah. You and I have talked a bit about mental health and happiness. Do you think having that purpose is crucial, is key to having happiness in your life and being fulfilled?
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I think, well, I think a lot of people's purpose is to try to achieve happiness. And I think that that's kind of like a it's kind of a waste of time. I don't think I don't think optimizing for happiness is the right is the right move. I've tried that.
It just didn't really get anywhere because happiness is happiness comes and goes. Happiness is a symptom or maybe even an outcome of something that you can achieve or something you receive or something that happens to you. And it's not all about achievement. So yeah, I think having more of a purpose, it's something that's all will always be there, no matter if you're happy or sad, because I can still work towards my purpose without feeling good about it. Because in a lot of ways, especially if it's meaningful and it's and it feels big, then it's definitely going to come with challenge and heartache and frustration and other things. So yeah, I don't really think about happiness all that much.
Even people ask me, I'm like, yeah, it happens. Yeah, I like the way you described it as a byproduct. And that was something I learned not too long ago about happiness being temporary thing that that does come and go. I found that when I was focused on my own happiness, I was the least happy, right? It's a self centered view when I was not worrying about my own happiness, focusing on others, focusing on being of service or that massively transformative purpose that you talk about. That was when I was most happy.
That was when I was entering into states of flow as I could best describe them. Yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah, I just had an experience yesterday where I just had a couple of people corner me at this co-working space that I work at and just wanted to talk about mental health and psychedelics, which is the thing I'm interested in. And they were interested in my experience and my knowledge in the space. And it wasn't me educating them on things, although that was part of what was happening. It was more of just relating to them and in a way by me telling my story and what I've been through and my experience with these things, giving them sort of a sense of relief of like something different is possible and they don't have to be suffering with that.
And I got, man, I got so much energy. Even today, I'm still like feening off that energy. And I don't think there's, I think, yeah, those are the subtle things that like a lot of people don't try to like optimize for in their day. But man, when it happens out of nowhere, you're just like, you just want to ride that wave. But I think more people can do that if they thought more, like you were describing of like service. There's so much more that can happen there.
And that's that's not measurable. People will try to and maybe some people can say that there is some measure to it. But I don't think it is. I think it's just the spiritual nature of reality.
Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. People try to measure everything because there's that saying you can't change what you can't measure. I think it sounds like that something like that bullshit.
So you're a father. How do you incorporate your knowledge about flow and happiness and purpose into how you raise your daughter? Oh, man, I don't even have to. Like kids are just naturally in flow all the time. In fact, we were the problem. We're the reason why we don't, you know, adults are the reason why kids kind of lose it, I in my opinion.
But oh, man, I don't even really try. I'm not trying to like put it into the experience. I'm trying to receive something out of the experience of every time I'm with my daughter. So I mean, last night, for example, get home from school. And, you know, there's thousands of things that I should be doing work-wise and around the house and for my health. And man, we just played for an hour and like wrestled and
her imaginative play of, you know, taking care of her little baby dolls and her stuffies and and all this type of stuff. And it's hours went by and didn't even notice. And so incorporating it. I mean, it's always in the background. I mean, I can't stop thinking about this stuff. It's like something I'm very much passionate about and think a lot about and want to be able to like articulate it and tell people about it and all this type of stuff.
But an experience like that is like
I don't know, man, like it's on another level. Like I'm not going to, there's no way of capturing it in a moment and blueprinting it for someone else to experience. It's just the, I think in a lot of ways, it's the letting go of the ego, the self-consciousness, the need to be something for somebody else to just immerse yourself. It doesn't have to be even your own kid. Some kid, you know, you're related to or whatever, just being able to sit in that imaginative play with those kids is pure unbounded flow. And it's, I think kids were more involved with our work.
And this is something I'm trying to do. Maybe this is an incorporated piece is if kids were more involved and it end elderly people too. I think there's like a real sweet spot of having a connection to elders and having a connection to kids and having that involvement with them regularly. That is, again, something that's unmeasurable. Actually, there's measurements on some of this stuff, but it's so, so, so valuable. And it's one thing I'm trying to do more is like bringing my daughter to not waiting for bring your, bring your kid to work day, but like just bringing her to work.
And on days where I don't have a lot of meetings or whatever, the co-working space I work at is awesome for this. The people that work there just love having kids around and stuff. And she's out there drawing and stuff and I'll take a break from a call and come out and draw a picture with her. And my brain's moving in a different way and I'm more creative and I'm more, I'm more feeling abundant. I'm more feeling playful. And I think that those little things that are maybe a little bit more intangible in the ways that we move and operate through the day in the work environment have so much value for the output that I'm aiming to achieve in the things that I'm doing.
So there's, it was funny, I was kind of saying I don't try to incorporate it because it's just natural and it happens, but there is a way to do it and kind of build that in and integrate it in there that I think I'm trying to do more and I wish I wish it was more available for others as well. I would love to be at like this co-working space I work at is close to this, but like having like a co-working space that's very communal with like a daycare next door or like a Montessori school next door and then like an old folks home on the other side where like I can go and hang with someone who's like near the end of their life and just is like waxing poetically about their life or philosophy or whatever and like I don't know, I get a lot out of that. It's just not a prescription for anybody else but me and maybe you because I think you think similarly, but yeah, I think I think that type of stuff is so massive. Yeah, I love your answer and the way you started it because I asked you about how you incorporate your knowledge into raising her and you flipped it and said it's more of a receptive thing like she's in flow and I'm just getting some of that from her. I think from what you said, it sounds like we're being brought back to more of a natural state like children just are in the moment. They're not worrying about their productivity, they're not worrying about the future, they're not planning and as adults and the lives we live in the modern world, so much of it is about planning for the future and we're taking out of the present.
So it doesn't surprise me that people feel disconnected from that when we are separated from children throughout most of the day. We go off to work, we don't spend time with our children and the elderly are shuffled off to retirement homes and separated from the work force or the people who are of age to contribute to the workforce. So I think there's a bit of a disconnect and when you recover that, return back to your natural state of just being with other human beings, being present, it just triggers that dopamine, that flow state and it just comes right on. I'm trying to figure out how to live more that way. I think our modern world requires us to contribute and the economic system and structure that we've built for ourselves over centuries requires us to do work that we don't want to do, that takes us out of flow, that takes us away from our family and loved ones, takes us away from community and it's in a lot of ways opposed to this flow state. So when I talk to someone like you who teaches performance and flow, I sometimes think of those two as diametrically opposed in a way.
When you're performing, especially today at work, are you in your natural flow state or are you doing things that you don't want to do and when you're in flow, are you not focusing on productivity? Could you ask that a different way? Yeah, so do you see, how do you reconcile performance and flow? How do those two things work together? Yeah, I don't think it, I think of them as one and the same. I think when I'm at my highest level of performance, it's because I'm in a present state of flow.
The other thing about flow from more of a performance perspective is this the equal balance of the nervous system where through the struggle phase and the release phase, you're more in that sympathetic nervous system state of like high anxiety or high alert, high attention. And then when you're in flow and maybe even in recovery, you're more in that parasympathetic rest and relax phase. And when you have the equal balance of those two things, your nervous system is balanced and your nervous system covers everything, right? So you're not stressed, you're not overthinking. And so if you can build your capacity for flow, you're also building your capacity for higher level of performance. But again, I think it comes back to meaning and purpose and why you're doing this, like an accountant, for example, might not have a lot of purpose and meaning in the work that they do.
They can still channel flow through it, and there's different ways to play with that. But they may need to kind of look at it in other areas in terms of hobbies or things like that. And so yeah, I just think of again, it goes back to integration. It's like my work and my hobby, if my work's not something that has like necessarily a lot of meaning to it, but it pays the bills, and I'm kind of a happy ish there or I'm content there. But my hobby really brings me a lot of joy and a lot of presence and a lot of peace. That is going to directly relate and impact my work.
But if I don't have something like that, then of course, I'm going to be dwelling on the fact that my work sucks or what I do isn't enjoyable or whatever that may be. So I think of them as kind of one in the same. Does some people just have jobs that it's really not easy to achieve flow doing? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't see those people. Like most of those people kind of, there's already a level of like understanding, I guess, that they're getting to. It's more like that solution aware type person on like the sales side of things.
So I'm not necessarily meeting with a lot of those people. But I do have people that are yeah, like in these mundane jobs that come to me to figure out how to write a book so that they can get out of that job or start up a side hustle that can ideally one day replace their income. And that brings them to life. Like that brings them so much excitement and meaning and joy in the day to day where they can get completely lost from five to nine. And so that they're nine to five, you know, they're getting through it. And they know that there's like kind of a method to the madness or there's like a purpose and reason for that job.
So it kind of does bring purpose into their mundane job now because they know that that's the thing that's going to be the vehicle that helps them get to this other thing that they have this desire for. But if I can help them, or if they can start to build the skill of moving through whatever it is that is giving them a little bit more purpose faster. And I don't mean fast as in like speed and outcome and and force, but faster in any idea of like slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Then that job sort of becomes like a means to an end and they know that and there's something available for them on the other side. So those are the people that I that I connect with. So I guess if someone's listening to this that doesn't have that, I guess the prescription would be something like go go get a hobby and see where say where that takes you.
And in general, too, I was going to ask you is like, what's the, because you were saying like, I can't remember how you phrased it, but the thing that was popping up to me was to ask you like, when you were a kid, where did you get lost? Like where I was saying hockey? Like, where did you get lost in the present moment?
I mean, later it was sports basketball. I mean, I would play basketball even just by myself on an outdoor basketball court. I'd show up hours before other people showed up and I would just practice. And the time would fly like they'd show up and I'd be thinking to myself, oh, wow, I wish I had a little more time to practice because I was so into it. And before that, even younger just kind of, I used to take action figure toys and stuff and I would go out into the like trees and woods and stuff and just set up this entire world, this entire little battlefield or something and disappear into that. So those are the two things that surfaced for me when you asked that question.
Those are the two things that I think of. Yeah, so that's the, that's something I'll ask a lot of people that think that like they can't achieve it or they're having trouble with it is, and that's what you were saying, but it's kind of leaning into that idea of like, well, what's the thing that like got you there when you know you've experienced it before? If I ask people, if I describe what flow is, and then I ask them had they had that experience before, they'll say a lot of the times they'll say yes, but it has been a while or whatever. So when was the last time you experienced it? And the best option is to go, okay, well, what did you do when you're when you were a kid that you just found yourself completely disconnected from time and space and just were in the moment. And then I'll, I'll, I say prescribing, but I don't mean it like in the medical terms, but like, I'll go, okay, we'll go and do that.
Go take your action figures and go into the woods and play and and force yourself in a way through that uncomfortable, awkward, embarrassment feeling of like, I'm just doing this weird thing that I used to do when I was a kid and just see if you can, you know, lose yourself in it. And if it's not that, then go play basketball and see what happens there. Because what happens at the end of a flow state is your, your window of learning increases. So a lot of people that are, there's a lot of research on the critical learning window after a flow state that shows your ability to retain information is increased once you're out of a flow state. And so what happens in that recovery window for a lot of people, a lot of the time is the idea pops for them. The big thing that they have to do, the big action they need to take in the big project they're working on, or the big thing they're trying to achieve in their health and well-being or their relationships or whatever comes after flow.
That's why a lot of people get lost in the shower and they have all these amazing thoughts in the shower is because there's one singular focus when you're in the shower. You know where the shampoo is, you know where the soap is, you know where the face wash is, you know, you're not thinking about what to do in the shower, you're just doing it. So you're in the flow state. The shower's the best flow, the analogy of water, all that's perfect for that. But what happens in the shower for a lot of people is they get these ideas. It's because they're, they're absent of all of the other crap.
And so if you can get someone into something that they've reliably already know works for them to get that presence, then they can see how valuable it is. And then they can start to find other ways and inch their way into finding that in the more maybe critical or more important aspects of their life.
Yeah. You mentioned when's the most recent time or someone has experienced flow and I was trying to recall for myself.
I've experienced things with work. Recently I was excited again about launching this podcast, editing the first episode, feeling like, okay, I had something that I believed was going to help me work toward that massive transformative purpose. And editing it, I just got very much into that flow state. Like the day flew by and I started to become aware of time again and feel like, oh, the day's almost over, I want to get more done. I felt like I was kind of holding on to something. I got a little like my precious kind of thing like clinging to this like feeling of, of I'm achieving something, I'm doing something with purpose and meaning.
And another time that I experienced flow was playing basketball at my local gym, I would go regularly. And one morning I was just running late and I always practice basketball, even as an adult and try to get better and improve. And sometimes I get fixated on wanting more results, wanting to be better. That day I kind of just said, I don't care what happens. I'm just going to play, just going, am I going to worry about how my form is on my shot? I'm just going to let it fly and enjoy myself.
And I couldn't miss that day. Like it was just one of those days where nobody could stop anything I was doing on the court that day. And I was fully aware. I was like, I got chills, I'm getting them now even thinking about it because I was completely aware I was in flow. And you hear some of like the NBA guys talk about that, like when they're in the finals or something and they just said like, I knew it. I knew everything was going in that day.
And to me, those are different. One, I feel like with the basketball scenario, I just gave up trying to be perfect and trying to optimize and be and I just let my ego release. And sometimes with my work, I feel very excited and motivated. But I also am sort of tense in a way and holding on to something. Maybe maybe it is ego in that scenario. Have you come across that in your study or your experience?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, you know, I think the difference between like play and work is there's not as much pressure on you like whooping with your boys in like a weekly run around, you know, it's different than maybe having some pressure to have this podcast take off and replace an income or something like that. Right. So there's a lot more to it. So those two experiences, sort of, you're going to say that I was saying not for me. I mean, my basketball, I take a very safe.
Right. Right. But at the same time, you're not trying to like, it's not going to be something it's different in the way that like you're not getting paid for it or whatever. So there's like layers of different things that are driving you to take the action, do the thing that you're doing. But one of the, one of the things, so I really relate to that, I would say, so like sports and things like that, it's easier for me because I can let go of, I know this isn't going to be something I'm going to do in a to get paid for. So all I can do is just have fun with it, even if it becomes something I feel competitive in because I'm very competitive golf is one of those things for me where it's the golf, it's the worst and the best because it's the most obvious when you're in flow with golf than any other sport in my opinion.
And it's the most obvious when you're not. It's the tooth, one of the two things that I find people just get obsessed with for that very reason. Yeah, golf and surfing. Yeah, surfing, surfing is the, honestly, surfing is the best one. I've never, I've never been able to get up on a board, but I've tried a few times, but you hear a lot of people actually a lot of, a lot of Stephen Kotler's work is related to surfing and Mihajak Semihaj's work to extreme sports in general, which I guess surfing is kind of technically considered that I don't really think they call them extreme sports anymore, but
those types of sports are great. And that's where actually the origination of flow states came from, from those, I think it was skateboarders actually, where Mihajak Semihaj was researching and surveying skateboarders, I believe, and they kept saying flow. Oh, I would just get into this flow. I don't know what happened. I would just flow and flow and flow and he's like, oh, oh, everyone's saying flow, flow, flow, flow. And that's where the word came from, just like a fun little fact.
But one of the things I wanted to mention that I think is important regardless of play or work with flow is the balance of challenge and skill. There, the research that's out there, and I just share it because it's out there, says that the balance ratio between challenge and skill needs to be about 4%. I don't know why it's 4%. It's just 4%. But I don't get into the weeds on that. I just mean, the takeaway is you want something that's a little bit challenging outside of your skill set that keeps you engaged, but isn't too far outside of your skill set where you get frustrated.
And then inverses, you don't want something too easy where you get bored. So the sweet spot, a thing to think about when you're doing anything, work or play, if you want to achieve flow, and if you're really meticulous about it and trying to optimize for flow, let's say, is to try to find something that is a little bit challenging, but not too challenging, and not too below your skill set. So this is something I'll do with people like coaching clients, let's say, where they're saying, I can't do it, I can't get into flow. Well, then I'll say, okay, well, what are you trying to do? And they'll say something and it's too challenging for them. Then it's easy, okay.
Well, how do you make it smaller? How do you make it less challenging? But not too easy where you're going to get bored with it. So something like your video editing and stuff like that, I would argue when you first started, it was probably quite challenging, because you were learning how to, what camera to buy and how to use that camera, and then the audio, and how to optimize that properly in the editing stuff. Maybe I'm wrong there, maybe some other example, but you get what I'm saying, right? Like usually when you start out with something new like that, it's a high, high challenge and low, low skill.
And if it really means something to you, again, going back to purpose, then you're going to force yourself through how hard it is to then bring that ratio back. And again, you don't want it to go like this, because then you're going to get bored of it. So you kind of always want to play with this idea of like, how can it be a little bit more challenging where I can keep engaged with it without getting too bored or too frustrated? Yeah, that's a great rule of thumb is how to break it down into achievable goals that they're not so far to reach. Because that's easy to get wrong when you are looking for something that has purpose, it's probably a big goal. It's probably a big task.
And you're not going to reach that flow state if it's if you don't break it down into bite sized pieces. Yeah, that's where like the high hard goals and the clear goals and the Google daily goal action or goal directed actions come from, because then you can go, Oh, this thing's huge. It's a huge elephant, right? And then like, let's bite it off one at a time and break it way down. And then it's still a lines up. And no matter what you're in, you can always come back to, okay, well, this is too challenging for me.
This is where I've identified the friction and the friction's another kind of like, if I was to put a little bow on all the things I'm saying here is like frictions like another ding, ding, ding, where there is friction, there is the opportunity for flow, but you have to move through the friction, removing the friction or learning from the friction as a signal for where things are either challenging or not. If that makes sense, friction's a huge driver for it. But friction is what is gets in the way of flow. But it also is what creates flow. It's a really kind of kind of element of all of this, I think you mentioned staying in that optimal range kind of made me think of something else I wanted to talk about video games, they're designed to keep people in flow. They've spent a lot of time researching, making sure that these games keep people hooked, keep people wanting to play, especially young boys, is my understanding.
What do you think the responsibility is with this information, this knowledge, what we know about flow and how say video game companies use it or even tech companies over the years have studied how to keep their employees in states of flow. Are we, well, I'll stop there. I have some follow up questions. I'll let you answer that. Yeah, I don't think there's a study from the 60s. I forget the guy's name, but this is the study that was used to really drive a lot of the addictive social media features that we see today with like little notification bells.
And it was a study done on pigeons where they had pigeons in a cage and they would drip them food. And at first they would drip them food consistently. And then they would slowly stop dripping them food and then inconsistently drip them food because they would keep them coming back for more and more and more. Sometimes they would give them more, sometimes they would give them less, sometimes they would delay it, sometimes they would give it faster, that kind of stuff, right? That showed the ability to control someone. And the way that these tech companies you're describing, these gaming companies and these social media companies are designed now is for that.
They're not designing for people to be in focus. They're designing for people to be distracted and controlled. So they're giving you a little bit and a little bit and a little bit. It's all these every movie, every TV series you see now always ends on a cliffhanger because they're designed to keep you Netflix, Amazon Prime, all these tools, they all are working off the same similar algorithms of attention. And it's all these are what I call the attention merchants. They're they're they're farming our attention and not for our greater good for most of these things.
Although you could you could argue like with video games, it helps to increase certain brain capacities and things like that. Like there's research done on on I think neurosurgeons of how precise they are if you're their gamer in their work versus if they're not something like that. So there are benefits to these things, but it all is it all comes with a grain of salt. And so I don't think that they're necessarily optimizing for people to be in flow. They're optimizing for dopamine. And the more that they can get you to drip dopamine and keep coming back.
I mean, as as someone who's very much immersed in this, I'm still not without the tendency of getting lost in those things too. I think and this is not the question you're asking, but I think a lot of what individuals can do to mitigate some of those things that are happening is all based on environment. So it's removing those things from your environment or placing things in your environment that keep you from going to that thing that might be more dopamine driven. I don't again, I don't know if that was kind of answering it, but that's what I think about when you're talking about, you know, those companies and those little mechanisms that they have in place. Yeah, I've read in some of your work, your believer in environment,
designing your environment rather than relying on willpower.
Can you talk a little bit about that and how? Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is kind of like an upbringing nurturing thing too, right, where we're taught like that we have more ability to influence our experience through our willpower when and this is actually not this is not my own kind of ideas here. This comes from a lot of what James Clear wrote about in atomic habits and what he talks about a lot and others too. But yeah, environment trumps will every single time, every single time.
Like, like for me, that candy and chocolate and things like that, like that's my kryptonite. Like if that's in the house, I'm a dumpster. It is coming. I'm in my mouth as fast as possible. There's no like, oh, just have a but have a square of the chocolate. It's no, I'm going to eat the whole chocolate bar until it's gone.
And I can't control myself. And I don't need to try. The only thing that I can do is just not have that around. So it's putting things in place with like, you know, my partner is like, you know, don't buy that stuff when you get the groceries. And when I when I'm getting the groceries, I'm not even going down that aisle. Otherwise, I'm consumed by it.
So yeah, I mean, the summary is environment trumps will and that that is another kind of ring the bell kind of thing to think about in terms of skill building is is environmental design, lifestyle design. I think about, I think about it that way. And then in that moment, it can be kind of creative too. But another example, just to riff is like our phones. You know, our phones, all the apps on our phones, they're like little candy drops, like all these different flashy colors and logos and things, right? And so I actually have my phone is always set on grayscale.
So I don't know if you can see that. It's always set on grayscale. And then I use this this app called blank spaces and it turns all my apps into text instead of the little app candy app icons, I call it candy because it's like little gumdrops in there. And then I keep the ones that are like, I have like my access to people getting contact with me, but very limited so that I'm not I'm not distracted by that. It's a little small thing. So I think of it as like environment design is kind of another skill, modern skill that I think can go a long way for a lot of people when we're constantly thwarted by those attention merchants.
Yeah. Did you track your screen time after making those changes on your phone? Oh, yeah. Completely. Yeah. Completely.
Yeah. I try not to get too much in. I track cycles like all if I'm trying something new, I'll test with it without it kind of thing, whether that's phone or health related stuff. But yeah, dramatically. Yeah. And in a lot of ways, just deleting all that shit off my phone because it takes me a lot of effort to have to go to the app store and download the thing and remember my password and plug it all in.
But if it's not there, you know, I'm not I'm not distracted by it. And then again, another thing in the environment piece is like putting other things that are more enjoyable that aren't as distracting or as harmful to me in my environment that I can that I can do or you know, explore and play with. It's probably challenging when you create content for social media to do that, I would imagine. And yeah, it's something I wrestle with all the time. Sorry, I think you're gonna ask them. But now just that it's it most of these platforms require as creators to be commenting and engaging, not just posting.
And so I find myself getting sucked in at times, right? I my intention is going there and post something and then comments a little bit show my face in the community. But you know, five minutes turns into 90 minutes sometimes. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it's kind of unfortunately a necessary evil. I still haven't I all have to say whatever I say in this moment is is not fully complete in terms of my belief.
But I think, you know, if we're aware of this and that's where everybody is, then is there a way to kind of use that thing for good to share information about this? And to be an example. So to really like walk the walk and talk the talk and to do the things that I say. I recommend other people to do. I think that's that's really it. It's having the integrity of what I say be what I actually do.
And so. And the other thing too is like, you know, our phones are great tools, man. Like we live in the greatest era of human advancement. So to to go the complete other way and say like these are evil and this is that and blah, blah, blah. I think would be doing a disservice to like the beautiful nature of where we've come from. And I think it's just striking the balance of what works for for people and to use them as tools for good, even though they're kind of designed in a way that's a that this a little bit more manipulative.
Yeah, there's always the capacity for that. I mean, we had that that go on with television. We've experienced that. And there was educational television. There was it were shows that were educational like PBS and Mr. Rogers and those types of things and Sesame Street and you know, and Fred Rogers.
He used to talk about
how much television could be used to educate children and to expand their minds and make them feel safe and I mean, that there's really not another Fred Rogers like we we need more than that. Yeah. Yeah. You got to get a cardigan on and start to start singing the Mr. Rogers neighborhood. Yeah.
I mean, there's children. Yeah. Well, I do experience that with even my own content. So I prefer environments where things are slow and developed and a slow burn and not in your face and sharp fast cuts and trying to sort of hijack that attention. But that content doesn't really do well on these platforms. It doesn't get much reach.
And maybe that's okay. Maybe you find the right people and you find less of them, but it's interesting to try to thread the needle of how to make content beneficial for the consumer, but also attention getting. Yeah. And it's kind of like letting go of trying to change the world in that way. For me, I guess it's like I'm not going to be able to change that. I don't have the desire or skills or I don't think it's in alignment with what I'm supposed to be doing to like, let's say develop a platform that would be more what you're describing.
I would love to see that exist and take off. But I think kind of what we were talking about, and I'm not sure if this was before we get recorded or not, but this idea of some things that are changing. Like it seems as though there is a big shift in the wants and desires and needs of the public that it used these tools. And I think that it's too early to predict anything, but maybe we will start to see that. I think, you know, if you look at like alcohol, for example, this might be like a weird tangent, but you see like alcohol use is way down in younger populations and continues to decrease in younger populations. Will social media become something like that as the information shared in what's his name's book?
I forget it, but the anxious generation, the author there, I forget his name, but you might know it is popular guy. Yeah. You know, his research is coming out and getting a lot more popularity and showing the damage that social media and tech in general screens are doing to kids. And so, you know, I think that we're just kind of early in it, and it's our duty. Oh, I'm just saying our duty. I want to put this on anyone else, my duty to be a part of the change.
And so, for me, like when I think about this stuff in my house, like my daughter very rarely ever sees a screen. When she does, it's very intentional. We're sitting down there watching it with her and immersing ourselves in the story arc of whatever she's watching and getting excited with her. So it's not like a pacifying tool that we're using just to get by and distract her with something while we need to do something else. And I see a lot of it with parents, you know, in my generation that are thinking similarly around how this stuff might be is obviously affecting kids and know what can be done differently. So I think we're just early in a shift, but I think that I think that that's coming and whether there'll be another platform or these platforms will conform to the public.
Who knows. But when it's all driven by advertising, it's hard not to move in that direction. And so then you have to find economically, you have to find other ways to build these things sustainably. And I know people have tried and there's things that are being worked on, but I think that it's not just the tech and the features. I think it has to be kind of economical too. And so I think I'm excited for the future, given the uproar that seems to be starting around this stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. People are getting better at communicating with one another online finding people who share similar ideas and beliefs. I used to be on social media a lot in the early 2000s, early 2010s. And then I stepped away from it for a while. I'm getting back on Instagram.
I'm looking in the comments and I'm surprised at how different the comments are than they were 10 years ago. They were a lot more inflammatory. They seemed a little more careless. In my view, 10 years ago. It seems like people realize like they don't want to be that troll. They don't want to be.
Just throwing this bomb in the middle of the comment section of a post. I'm sure that you obviously can still find that, especially around political posts and things like that. But it does seem like people are evolving in the way that they use these tools just as someone. From my viewpoint, who stepped away for a while and come back. It seems a little more grounded, a little more self aware. Than it was.
And I don't know if that matches your experience. Yeah, totally. I mean, I get a lot more DMs than comments, which I actually like because then I can like really dig in with someone, especially if I post something, whatever. I know why this happens and I didn't really do anything about it until recently. But every time I post about ADHD, I get the most engagement on anything I ever do. Because I have just have a different thought around it or different perspective around it.
And it's not to say that my perspective is better or worse. I just share my perspective. And then that gets people going because I think that's related to identity. And I think a lot of this is identity based. We want to feel like we fit into something. And so when you're labeled with something like ADHD, let's say, then you've got a badge, right?
You've got something that you can carry with you and then you become sort of maybe an authority in it or something like that. You know, your opinion is different than someone else's and you want to fight for that opinion. So I totally get that. I stopped posting about it because it's not worth trying to gamify. Like I could post about that all day and my numbers would go through the roof. But it would be only gamifying that and not doing what I would be desiring to do was just to share my perspective and connect with people that want to learn more or align or whatever.
But also not necessarily be right about it either connecting with people when I'm wrong about something too. And so I get a lot of I get when it's something not necessarily identity based like ADHD. I get a lot of people reaching out and being like, have you seen this or that or whatever and like trying to give me more to think about or agreeing with me and saying thank you for sharing something or whatever, right? But when it comes to something identity based, that's when the keyboard warriors show up. And that's when they start to kind of like really nail in on those types of things. And I like that.
I like all of it, to be honest. But I do like what you're saying, which is like more people being more thoughtful of their responses and wanting to go deeper with it too. That's what it feels like to me is like when people kind of come into the DMs on things, they're wanting to go deeper with it, whether they're disagreeing with what I'm saying or they're agreeing with what I'm saying. They're wanting more connection. And I love that. Even if I did say something wrong, I'm willing to kind of learn about that and where I went wrong or what happened.
Or what your perspective is, if you're willing to share it, you know, I'm open to that. You just can't have that comment. You can't have that back and forth in the comment section. So I really appreciate the direction to DMs in a lot of ways lately, especially on LinkedIn. Yeah. Identity.
I find identity to be fragile. I've had different identities in my life. And when I was a child, an athlete, when my late teens, early twenties, I got more into art. And then in my professional career, I saw myself as a tech geek or whatever you want to call it in his software engineer. I've experienced over the last 18 months or so since publishing publicly again. A bit of identity collapse, stepping away from the career I had as an adult.
Finding myself in a way that doesn't fit into a box where I'm just being me and whatever that comes out like. I'm sort of riding the wave of. How does identity fit into your life? Do you see it as fragile? Do you see it as something we should be careful with? Or is it something we should embrace?
Hmm. I was just writing about this this morning, actually. And the framing that I'll just share the framing I was writing about because that's what sparked it. And it's like a nice little connection to what I was writing about in the question and see if it comes through. But, yeah, you know, I was kind of doing the same thing that you're just saying is like. Up until I had a child.
I was a human and then I was a son or a human and a son, you know, off the hop. Then I was a partner and an athlete and an executive and a boss and an employee and a consultant and a business owner and all these things. And then when I had a kid, it was like. Oh, you're none of those fucking things, dude. You're none of those things, man. And try to keep up with all those things if you want.
But the only thing that matters now is who you are to that little kid. And even that is still a fragile thing because I'll never know who I am to her as close as we are and as close as I assume will always be. I'll never know exactly who I am to her. And I'll never know who exactly who I am to anybody. And so I think this comes, I think it's deeper. I think it's big philosophical conversations, spiritual conversations.
But if I am like, I mean, let's just go right to it. Like if I am in the image of God or if I am, if I am created from the image of God and he accepts me just for who I am in this present moment, then it doesn't really matter what I call myself. It doesn't really matter who I am. And so I think what's more important to think about, which is tough, which is tough because a lot of things do seem to be identity based when you think about politics, which is where a lot of this challenge comes from, I think, at least from my experience with what I've seen. It's more important to think about values than it is to think about identity, because I think your values sort of shape who you are, which could be considered your identity. So I think about it more that way.
And I was playing with that this morning of like, what are my values and how does that make up who I am? And I think that does. I think it makes up more who I am than when it says on my LinkedIn profile, which changes all the time. I get into this too. As you know, I'm starting to share more and create more. Every day, I'm like, oh, I could call myself this.
I could do that. You know, this is because I'm so multi. I'm interested in all these different things. And like, there's no way to put it down. Like, like it used to be right where we still get my audio. Yeah.
Sorry. I just want the mic there. I just noticed it didn't flash anymore. But yeah, just. I got it got on the trap of like, I'm so interested in all these different things, whether it's psychedelics and flow and communication and language and philosophy and spirituality and all these different things human performance that they don't all seem to like. Connect.
Traditionally in saying I am this or, you know, whatever for for work. And that's kind of the beautiful nature of where I think we are in reality where it doesn't really fucking matter. It doesn't. I am interested in all these things and I've gone really, really deep in all of these things and take it or leave it and I'm just going to share it. And so I'm kind of going more broadly and not really attaching myself to this necessarily the identity of who I think I am, but more of the values that I. That I lead with or try to lead with and and the things that I'm excited about.
And that changes all the time. And I've let go of that being a problem because that's the other thing is like you kind of have to kind of put yourself in this box and work your way up the ladder and like. That doesn't exist anymore man mostly most people change titles like constantly where like our parents generation like my dad basically had a job at a. At a college for his whole life. That doesn't exist anymore. And so that's a beautiful thing and also a challenging thing when it comes to.
Yeah, the identity culture that we live in I would say. I don't know what your thoughts like let's go deeper on that with with what your what your perspective is. Yeah, you and I connected on our shared study of Alan Watts and. What was surfacing for me there was Watts talked about us having this need to justify our own existence. And defining that identity. I think starts at an early age children want to find their place especially when they enter school and they get.
Put amongst. People of the same age similar abilities they try to find their place in that group. And then it just I think compounds when they get to high school and when you get into the workforce everyone's trying to. Figure out what's my role. How can I contribute. How can I be of of value and have social currency in the world.
And I think people are starting to talk about this starting to question that starting to ask is that necessary for me to define that. Or can I just be myself can I find a way to live and work in a way that feels natural to me. That I'm not working some career where it's just really against the current for me I'm having to force myself to do this work. Like you said somebody who. Finds a more creative person writing a book. But they're forced to do a job like accounting and.
Something wrong with that job. But if that person is doing it solely for survival. Perhaps that's not. The right fit. Perhaps. That individual.
Can make choices to get away from that job. And that's on the individual level. I've started to ask questions about. What is our responsibility as a collective as a society are we okay with having people do jobs that make the miserable having a society in a system where a large part of the jobs that are needed for it to function require people to be very unhappy. Is that just something we have to accept or is that something we can change. And I think it comes down to a lot of micro decisions I wrote about this a little bit I likened it to a Ouija board and the way they move is from little micro tremors in our fingers and when everybody puts their finger down on the thing.
It just starts to move based on those. Collective micro movements and I think that's how our culture moves that's our society moves individuals making these micro movements and it all collectively starts to take on a mind of its own. And so. I think about that on a large scale and I think about an individual scale I'm I'm living my own life in the last couple years in a way that I think is trying to make my micro contribution. And I'm also trying to publish and talk about these ideas to get more people to collectively think about that. Yeah.
Yeah, it's a good way to put it. I like that a lot. Micro micro movements. I think that's all anyone can do. I think that's all anyone can do. Well, I mean, I was chatting with my my fiance there last night about just different things that are going on in the world.
I don't want to say certain things to get you flagged on YouTube, but we all know what I'm talking about politically right now these information that's come to light about certain things at the highest level of power. And what do you do about that? We're not talking about identity anymore, maybe, but how do you make change there? Or we're dealing with where I live here. There's talk about putting a high speed train in through this rural beautiful natural. Awesome.
Countryside that we live in. And what that will do for the environment and the natural habitats and and all of those things and it's like, what can you really do about that? You can go and petition to city council and hopefully they do something about it. You can rally a group of people and pick it outside of some, I don't know, politicians house or whatever. But what does that really do? And how do you create?
How do you affect change? I've thought about that a lot with my work in the psychedelic space too. And there is something you can do. Like there is the there's a recipe for change at a collective level, I think. And I think we're I just keep thinking it's hard to talk about because we're so early in something big that's happening. There seems to be stuff coming to light that's that's dark and dangerous and narcissistic energy type stuff that has to come to light for that to be dimmed and for that energy to go away.
But it's not going to go away without a struggle. And I think the more and more people. Like you and I and not to put ourselves, you know, on some sort of pedestal or anything, but you and I that are thinking about this stuff in an intentional way for maybe let's say the good of humanity or the good of culture and where we live and what we do and who we surround ourselves with in our community. I think the more and more that happens, which again, going back to some of the other stuff we were poo pooing on or I was anyway about connection and social media. It's like that there's there's change that can happen there. You and I would have never connected if that didn't happen.
Right. So yeah, I think I always live by slow. I'm thinking about getting attacked to slowly smooth and smooth as fast and I can't remember where that came from. I know I heard it from Tim Ferriss, but I don't think it's attributed to him, but little by little, like things can change and that goes with the other stuff we were talking about to flow and well being and focus and these different things like just. Make it smaller and and I think it the power and the change can happen in traumatic ways. Yeah, I'm going to keep that in mind for myself and the work that I'm doing try to.
Make it bite size in a way that can just build on itself because you're right. If we try to take on too much, it's. We don't get very far. Yeah, I mean, I have a thousand different ideas, some, my Google Docs and my notes of different things that I could be doing, but, you know, I keep spreading myself here and there and doing all these things like I get. It's nothing ever comes to be. So compound interest is massive.
Yeah. At the beginning of our conversation, you've meant you throughout the word anarchy and it's funny because I made a video the other day. I kind of. Sumbled into this idea that I might be an anarchist. I even said that in the video and the reason I said that was because I found in my research that anarchism is missed misinterpreted or the definition kind of changed over time. That it really was just about decentralizing power and not being in support of power that is coercive.
So it started in France and during the French Revolution and.
It was adopted by. Political groups that sometimes turn violent and so it got a bad name for it. So people think of anarchy and they think of bombings and they think of people trying to create chaos. And it's not necessarily chaos. It's just dismantling that centralized power that is. In coercive and abusive at times and it touches upon what you're talking about is these governments, these.
People that we put in office that we're finding we can't trust that we're finding don't have our best interests in mind and people are a bit disenchanted about it all. I think back to the 1960s and my parents, you know, they grew up in that time and it was a very revolutionary time. The baby boom and these kids that were. Changing the way. The politics in America. We're going and I think we saw a lot of people start communes and things like that try to create alternative ways of life.
And I think we have a lot of people that are living. A lot of them failed and I think. Or just about all of them failed and I think now. We have an opportunity to redefine how we're going to live. We have more tools available. We have the ability to communicate faster more efficiently with people all over the world.
We need to not just point out what's wrong. We need to replace it with something. That's where I think the shortcoming was. 60 years ago people didn't really know what was next what to replace it with. And they were a lot of times of these groups that were led by kids right early 20s. You know, I'm in my early 40s.
I think you're close to my age. We've got people who have more life experience now or thinking about these things. And I think we can do more we could take it a step further. And so that's my hope is that we can come up with something that's a solution or at least a step forward rather than just talk about what's wrong. Are you inviting me to start a commune with you? You got the perfect place for it.
I mean, I do actually. Yeah. There's like a few blocks. If I was to build in. There's like four or five plots of land actually down here that could be built upon it would be perfect. No, no, I totally agree.
And I mean, like, I think of this like this might seem like a different direction, but like. I'm an entrepreneur and my grandfather was an entrepreneur. And I think about this a lot where like back in his day starting businesses in like 60s, 70s and 80s. Was like such a hard thing to do. When like by the end of this call, we could have a business set up and probably have some customers buying something by, you know, the end of the time together we have. So like it's never been easier to do something like that, build a business.
And when you think about a business, it's kind of the same thing as building a community or building a system. You have to have something like that that is sustainable. And so yeah, there's a lot of people trying. I connected to a lot of different communities. A lot of people have some friends that are in communes and things like that that they seem to be working, but there's challenges in that too. Like this free society thing is like it's great until it comes to like the evil that we all possess that you have to tame the dragon that Jordan Peterson talks about a lot.
That still exists. So how do you account for that when you're in this free society, this open state? It sounds good on paper, but then when you try to actually live it, the reality sets in. And so when I think of anarchy, I think of it as like taking the good from something and then leaving the rest. Like when I think about productivity anarchy or personal development anarchy is my like highest level way of articulating it because that kind of productivity, peak performance, all that. Kind of fits into it.
And when you think about personal development, the good in that is like exploring yourself deeper and trying to be a better person for yourself in the world. That's great. That's awesome. But then when it becomes dogmatic and there's this method and that method and this, this guru and that guru and you see all the gurus now that are popping up in what's going on today and they were wrong or they were who you thought they were and they're peddling something. So I think of when I think of anarchy, it's it's it's yeah, breaking down the hierarchical elements of it and creating more agency for somebody. So when I think of a personal development anarchism, it's the idea of building agency up within the self to be able to evolve with the natural development and natural evolution of the human experience from a place of wholeness, not from a place of perfectness, not from a place of optimization.
I love the word holotropic, which is a word used in a common breathwork technique called holotropic breathwork and the word I don't know why this word isn't used in other places because it's a perfect word. It's the idea. The definition of it is moving towards wholeness, which we all are doing. We're all moving towards wholeness. And everyone's definition of it is different. And so when I think about the anarchist side of it when it comes to personal development, it's, it's agency around what I believe to be my connection to my own evolution and what it means to be a whole human.
And the more that I study that for myself, there's the better off I am the calmer I am. The more simple my life is the more I can articulate myself, the more other people are interested, and then the more that it sparks something in them to do the same thing. But I'm not in control of that. I don't have I have frameworks and things that might be useful, but there's no like blueprint for any of this. And if someone tells you, then I think they're full of shit. In a lot of ways, I think it's about taking a little bit from here and a little bit from there and playing with whatever makes makes it makes it your own.
And I think when more and more people in this might sound dogmatic in the whole process and I might be just a full of shit hypocrite. But the more and more you kind of do that, I think the more you can do that. I think the more and more you can create a level of agency for yourself in that pursuit of wholeness or personal evolution.
Yeah. You mentioned not having frameworks. How do you teach your clients if you don't use frameworks? What is your process? Oh, no, I have frameworks. I'll teach frameworks and things like that.
But it's not like there's this one thing or there's this other thing or whatever, because I like to pull from all kinds of things. So I'll bring in some Buddhist philosophy here or I'll bring in some more mental model mind setting type stuff over there. But I'm more looking at the individual and what their interests are, what they're connected to. Because if I start bringing some non-attachment stuff into that from the Buddhist philosophy, then they're not connected to that. It doesn't really make sense. Don't attach to the stories of your mind.
They're like, what do you fucking mean? So that doesn't work for everybody. So the thing that I think that makes me valuable to the people that I work with is being able to pull on different things and not being to one way or the other. And also being more experimental and curious than dogmatic and prescriptive, where it's like try this and experiment with it and take what you need and leave the rest. Like you might like four parts of it, but you might not like the other four parts of it. So then just don't do that.
Just take what you need and leave the rest. I think about it a lot with productivity tools. Because there are so many productivity tools and they all claim to increase productivity by this or that. But I don't think a lot of people really need productivity is essentially hard work and output. I don't think people, most people that do any sort of knowledge work, which about 70% of the current workforce in the world, or at least in North America is a knowledge worker. Most of those people don't need to be taught how to do something and get something done.
They more need to find the balance of everything else that they're missing, which stress reduction, nervous system regulation, emotional regulation, things like that. That's the tough part. com and then mixing it with like IFS therapy or something like that is that's what I'm trying to do is helping people see that it's not one way or the other. It's a better approach to make it your own. And you know, in the world we live in, especially when it comes to like people's health and mental health, you know, or productivity, any of those things, there is this sort of like we're trying to find a normalized standard for everything. Because it's easy for us to say, you have this, take this, it's going to fix that.
And it just doesn't really work like that. It might work for a little bit, and then it falls off and then there's another thing, and then there's another thing, and then if we keep relying on something outside of ourselves, we're never going to find a solution for it because I think it has to come from within. So if there's anything I'm dogmatic about, it's that it's the sort, the truth, the solution comes from within. And there's definitely ways for people to support and help you with that. But I'm looking for Sherpas, right? The Sherpa knows 16 different ways up the mountain, but he's letting me lead it and making sure I get there safely.
I'm not looking for someone who goes, oh, just get on this chairlift and go up. It's just that easy. Just take this quick fix, you know, because that's not, that's not in my experience, how it works or how it happens. You touched upon, I think, mental health a little bit there, and that was something I wanted to talk to you about because you had a TEDx talk that you did that was banned essentially, right? I mean, you talked about mental health and psychedelics. And they decided that it wasn't going to be able to be published.
So you have your criticism about the mental health community. What do you think it is that they fundamentally get wrong about mental health? Yeah, and in my TED talk, I go into that a bit. And I'm also like compassionate with it. You know, it's like, the thing for me is the way psychiatry was formed, if you look into that psychiatry was a pseudoscience for a long period of time. It was very much like not regarded as anything valuable for a long time in the medical community.
And then they pivoted in and around the 70s, 80s. I can't remember the exact kind of timeframe to attach psychiatry to science. But the problem is the science didn't actually match reality. And the science turns out it doesn't quite add up. And if you look at the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and you look into all of these different labels that we've categorized as mental disorders, there isn't a lot of science behind a lot of these things. If you look at depression, you know, it's not a chemical imbalance.
There's more to it than that. That's part of it. There's part of it. So my criticism is that it's very limiting. It's very much, it's biological because they needed that to then prove that it's valuable so that it could be a field of study and a field of medicine and a field of work. But it's left out so many other things, a spiritual connection, family, environment, stress, all these different things.
And so where I'm at with it today is like, you know, just the people are being diagnosed with all kinds of things at record highs. And the connection between psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry is a very, very interesting thing to look into and see the connections, especially in the US, with diagnosis and drug prescribing and the profit motives across both of those things. I just think it's worth looking into without going too far down the rabbit hole today with you on that. I think it's very important that people understand where all this comes from. And even some psychiatrists aren't even aware of what they learned and where it comes from and how it's all intertwined. But you do see a lot of them, when they do understand it, they come out and they change the way they're doing things and you start to bring it to life.
But it's hard to find that information, which is why I think a lot of what I shared in my TED Talk was why I kind of got banned. But I wasn't saying, you know, let's get rid of psychiatry because there's good parts of that too. There's so much value. I don't want to be misunderstood about this. There's so much value. I have friends and family members that have gotten a tremendous amount of value from the field of psychiatry and drugs too.
I mean, I talk about psychedelics. I would be a hypocrite to say that there isn't value in drugs. But I just think the way that it's being prescribed is something that we need to all take a look at as part of this bigger shift. What do you think so dangerous about what you said? Why do you think it got banned? Well, so Ted is highly, highly connected to higher education and higher education is in control of a lot of the narrative of everything in culture, really.
And so to kind of criticize psychiatry is criticizing higher education. And I think that was that. I mean, they gave me some pretty bullshit answer of why it was banned. They're just to cover their assets. If they're seen promoting someone who's criticizing psychiatry. And again, I think I don't know if you watched it, but if anyone watches it, you'll see that I was critical, but also like compassionate to know that like the basis of science to prove itself wrong.
And so keep bringing science into this to prove psychiatry works and it is valuable and it is what it says it is. But also look at how what you connected the dots from in the past don't match up anymore and that science is wrong. And how can we fix that? How can we get better? How can we improve it? Not necessarily completely disregarded.
And so I think it was more in that connection than anything else, but it's hard to say. I did watch it. And for people watching this, I'll include a link in the show notes because I thought what you said was balanced and I was very surprised that it wasn't published. So it's definitely something I think is worth a watch. I appreciate that man. A name that keeps coming up, Alex Honnold.
I have some questions about that. So, for people who don't know who that is, he did, he just did this climb on Netflix climb the Taipei 101. One of the things is the 10th or 11th, 11th all skyscraper in the world. Do you find that level of focus healthy that Honnold has? Is that something that we should aspire to? You've mentioned studying his brain.
Do you think that's something that we should try to work towards? All of us? Hmm.
I think obsession is a slippery slope. I think being too obsessed by something can be, can be damaging. Even if it's good, even if it's, even if it's, I mean, the optimization stuff we talked about, like, I thought I was, I thought I was being very healthy when I was doing the biohacker stuff, but I actually ended up doing some damage to my liver. Because I was so obsessed and I didn't have a balance or a nuance to it. And when I think about Alex Honnold, he definitely seems obsessed. And at the same time also seems very balanced in his approach to it all.
And I know they've studied his brain and he definitely has some, like, very different structural, he has a very different structural design there that kind of has him approaching fear in a very different way than most people do. So I think that's very interesting to study. I think, I think human achievement like that is very interesting to study as inspiration to do challenging things, but not necessarily to do something obsessively and something dangerous like what he did.
But I do think it's very useful for us to push the boundaries of what's possible. And I think he's just doing that at the highest level. And I don't think that there are many people like him. There's probably no one like him, to be honest. I just think I have so much respect for that guy.
And at the same time, like I said, this obsession is dangerous so the people that don't have a filter on that could take that the wrong way. It didn't seem to happen after he did his first free solo, but who knows, I don't think he's done. I think it's like you chose the 11th highest to then go to the 10th and the 9th and the 8th potentially, but I think the summary of it is from your question is, is obsession is a slippery slope and you don't know it until you've gone through it. That it's, it can also be very challenging and damaging. I remember learning about him. I recall him saying something about when he's up on the rock climbing, he can only focus on that one thing.
It's like your brain switches into this survival mode where you have, it just tunes everything else out because if it doesn't give 100% focus to this one task at hand, you're dead. And I think if you're someone who has a noisy brain, someone with ADHD or something like that, I would imagine you'd be drawn to something like that, something where you could quiet your mind almost in a meditative state in that flow state that you talk about. You mentioned that staying in flow is only about a 90 minute window. Is it any surprise that I think he climbed that tower in about an hour and a half? I totally thought the exact same thing. I totally thought the exact same thing.
Yeah. So actually, I want to, I went to explain that before the 90 minute window thing. So this comes from, I think it was Stephen Kotler. Anyway, I learned it through my work with this, the flow research collective. There's something called your all trading rhythm. We'll come back to Oxal Arnold and all this too, but I wanted to make this point about it because I forgot to before.
There's something called your all trading rhythm, which is the natural 24 hour cycle that governs your energy throughout an entire 24 hour period. It's similar to your circadian rhythm, but it's when you're awake as well as when you're asleep. So in your sleep cycle, you naturally oscillate between light sleep, deep light sleep, REM sleep and deep sleep. And throughout the day, you run through a similar pattern where typically for most people, when you're in sleep, you're in sleep. When they wake up, they have the highest level of energy available to them, obviously because they just rested and they're, you know, if they had a good night sleep. Even if you don't, you pretty much have that your highest potential of energy throughout the day.
It depends, but what the way that I think about it is kind of your peak energy windows or your peak performance windows. So you're waking up to the highest level of energy. And then that sort of stalls out after about 90 to 120 minutes. And then you need to rest and recover and relax really and do nothing. And then it comes back up and then it goes down and then it comes back up. And it's pretty fluid throughout the day.
Like you can pretty much track this and there's ways to track it. I have some ways of doing it. I could just explain it to you, but it's a tool I use in my coaching is you track these things to show where your people and energy levels are and when you need to rest and then when your peak energies are. And then you place your most important actions in the highest level of energy windows that you have. And then you actually recover so that you can rebalance the nervous system, rebalance the neurochemicals and rebalance your energy so that when that next peak energy window shows up, you have the full capacity to do whatever you need to do. So you're constantly placing the big important things in those windows.
And then typically people have about four to six of those windows throughout the day, depending on what they do and how their life is. But the problem is for most people, they start the day with caffeine and they stunt that that peak natural energy that exists. So instead of going as high as they can go, they're hitting caffeine right away, which stunts it. You don't really have value with caffeine until about 120 minutes later in the day and it can be longer sustained. There's many reasons for that. But the the peak energy hits and then instead of resting, they brute force it and they keep trying to continue that energy.
But what happens is it dips and without taking the rest, they can't recover properly so that when the energy does come back, they might get another little dip, but it won't be as high as it was before. And that eventually becomes like a flat line like when someone dies. So that's where a lot of burnout comes from because people are trying to force dopamine and endorphins all day long without giving them the recovery phase of when you need serotonin and oxytocin to wash over your brain and your nervous system to fully recover so that you can grab back that that high level of energy. And if you noticed in Alex Arnold's climb up the the Taipei building, there were like four kind of breakpoints where he stopped and recovered. I don't know if he did that on purpose, but he did stop. I am also blown away by the fact that he was tapped into a whole kind of like play by play crew down below.
And there are all these people ooing and eyeing over every move he made like that's wild his level of focus with that layer of distraction on top of that. But he would stop and he would talk to the people for a bit. He would adjust his shoes. You know, he'd chalk up or whatever. He was recovering in little micro bursts as he was going so he was conserving his energy all the way up. So then when he got to the top it looked like he did nothing.
And even when you talk to you saw the interviews after he wasn't like even gassed. He was barely out of breath. Because he, whether he knows it or not, and I'm sure he does because he's the highest level of peak athlete in my opinion. The recovery is such a huge component to this that a lot of people miss. And so yeah, for him to do that in a hundred and twenty minutes or ninety minutes or whatever was he did it. He baked in the recovery all the way through so that he was a consistent level of energy all the way through and a consistent level of output all the way through.
And he never burnt out. And that's the, these are the things that I think is what people can take of as an example from a guy like that who's doing that. Where you see someone doing something so catastrophically massive in terms of human feet. And he did it in a pretty, like you can, you can pull out the blueprint for how to do it. Not to say that everyone's possible to do it because there's many other components to the physical body and all those other things. Skill and, you know, grip.
His fingers are like giant sausages like he's clearly worked in other capacities too. But there's a blueprint for taking that and applying that to your life in a way that can help you with performing well, but performing well in a healthy way so you're not gassed out when you're doing your hardest work. Like for him climbing a fucking building. Yeah. I've become more aware of these rhythms that you're talking about since working for myself, working independently. You're talking about brute forcing it.
I think most people, they don't know that they can ask for these breaks. They work in an environment nine to five where it's not acceptable to take those types of breaks where we're not listening to our bodies. We're not paying attention to those rhythms. You've got the meeting and you got to get through it. And then they get that second cup of coffee in because they're trying to just brute force it. I think these conversations people are having online talking about what you and I are talking about here are making people aware of the right they have to assert their humanity in these rhythms in their day to day life.
I studied abroad in Spain when I was in college and I was in southern Spain. They were still living a slower way of life down there. And they took their siesta. And that was a three hour break in the middle of the day. It was the hottest part of the day. And they just had that built into their culture that they didn't work during those hours.
And they would go back to work afterwards and they would work later. m. and then go to dinner after that. It might be up until midnight out socializing and having at the cafe or whatever. But it seemed like they were more in tune with nature and the rhythms of the day than perhaps we are in North America. Yeah, 100%.
Yeah. I mean, we were governed by the Industrial Revolution of the factory bell. And, you know, if you look at pre-industrial revolution, society here in even North America was more natural governed by the rising of the sun and the falling of the sun. And that is more natural, but it's not as economical as punching and punch out and, you know, don't take a break or take a 10 minute break here and nicotine up or. Caffeine up and get back to fucking work. There's a whole there's there's a real fun history of all that too that we don't have time for.
But. Yeah, and I think one of the things in my coaching, I talk about a lot of people is burnout and a lot of people think burnout is is over work. But almost always you can attribute it to a lack of communication or a lack of value connection. There's a there's a few other reasons for. A few other root causes of burnout, then just simply overworking. But one of the things that I think I see a lot with the people that I work with is there.
At first inability to communicate their needs related to that, like how they work better, because like at the end of the day, if they're an employee in a company, the company just wants them to work better. And in a lot of ways today, more people don't care as much about how they get the work done as long as they're getting the work done. But we're still kind of governed by this nine to five Henry Ford Industrial Revolution structure, whereas a lot of people get more, you know, there's different people that get more work done in the morning and less in the evening and some people that have the opposite effect. And so the things that I coach up with my, my team clients like my corporate clients is exactly that. Let's find your peak performance windows. Let's find your all trade in rhythm.
Let's let's let's let's, let's then assign your work in that way and also bake in recovery so that sustained so that you're not just working better for the company. You're working better for you. And then in turn is better for the company. But we're just so fixated on this old way of doing things and this, this, what works don't change it kind of thing. But more time in never equals never. I'll say that confidently never equals more output.
Doing working smart requires you to, I think, work in that type of rhythm where you're working at your peak energy and you're resting so you have that peak energy consistently throughout the day. It just makes sense. And yeah, I love that hearing you say that with, with you doing your own thing because you are you. You're the last line of defense for everything you do. And now that you're, you're holding all of this on your own, you can't rely on a steady income and you have to work properly and smartly to make sure that what you need to do gets done in the best way in the highest leverage way and the highest leverage point is energy. It's not time.
It's not time. We can't change time. Everyone's like it's time management stuff. It's like, what are you doing? Trying to manage time. Like, I can't change how the earth cycles around the sun.
I can't stop the clock. I'm spending. So what am I doing? Why am I trying to manage time? Manage my energy. Manage my energy.
Manage my attention. Manage my focus. And then put all of that inside of time, the time that you do have and get smarter about that and meant so much changes after that. So it's not a whole idea of like the four hour work week, the four hour work day, all that kind of stuff. Like, that's real. But it's not in like building a system around it.
The system is you, the operating system is you. So if you can optimize that, then, then I think it's even much more powerful. Yeah. It's a good point. I think a lot of people misconstrued the four hour work week as a outsourcing strategy. Yeah.
Whereas you're talking about an energy cultivation and performance strategy. And even Tim Ferriss, I think, like kind of walks himself back a little bit from from that. And it's changed just so much from when you put that out. When you first put that out, it changed a lot of people's lives. And I got into it and changed my life and helped me a lot. But now knowing what we know now, I think, you know, there's a little bit of a difference to it.
It's still possible. It's just in a different way. And I think it's much more simple, much more natural. Like you're saying, like, I wake up, I have so much energy in the day. Like, I might as well get all that done there and then do the healthy routine. You know, a lot of people I see, especially my executive clients, like they come in with like, I've got to, I've got this, you know, 90 minute morning routine.
And I need that or else I can't function in the day. And then I, we start to do the Australian rhythm stuff and we analyze energy throughout the day. And we end up seeing with a lot of folks is, especially with men, more men than women in this case, is that if they actually punt out the routine to later in the day, and they have the agency to be able to do that. That they can get more of their work done as soon as they get up. So they're trying to get up at five so they get the routine done, but they actually have their most energy and cognitive capacity to do the hardest work then. Go and do that right away and then bring in the healthy routine stuff later on so that then the energy can come back again.
And you can actually even have another spark and another level of energy for even more. If that's what you're trying to do. It's not about more and more and more, by the way, it's about doing it healthy, but some people have this high level of capacity and responsibility. So helping them do that helps them do it in a much more healthier way. Because even the guys that have these like hardcore routines, they're still busting their ass and burning themselves out because they're not attached to the energy component part of it. Right.
And you mentioned guys men. It's mostly men that you work with. Is that mostly who's interested in this field and flow? It's actually not. It's actually mostly women. I have a lot of the people that I work with are women.
And I think it's just because the idea of flow and presence, it's a little, my judgment of it is it's a little bit easier for women to grab on to. Because, and this is not gender based, this is more of the idea of like feminine energy versus masculine energy. And the way that I attribute to that is the idea of like, or the analogy of like a boat at sea. A boat at sea. The boat is the masculine energy. It's in the captain and it knows where it's going and it follows the lighthouse and it sees the direction.
And the feminine energy is the water that moves with the flow of the moon right in the cycle of the moon and the energy of the environment. And so we need both of them. And so the I just think of it's the balance of things like the nervous system, the balance of the left and the right brain, the balance of discipline and surrender and the balance of feminine and masculine. So the men that I do see have a little bit more of a capacity for the feminine energy of surrender. I would say the surrender is more of the feminine. And then the discipline is more of the masculine.
That's not like that's energy right not gender. So in case anyone's hearing this and takes that the wrong way. So men are typically higher discipline. Women are typically higher. The ability to surrender kind of let go. And when we find the balance of it is when it's really, really powerful.
And I would say just it seems as though women more attached themselves to that. Because they're forced into discipline when they're a little bit more attuned for surrender, if that makes sense. And so you can they know how to be disciplined because they've been forced into it. It's not natural necessarily always to them. And so you can balance it out. And I think that's really the core, the core nature of like the fundamental root of what I'm trying to share with people and help people understand a little bit more because when they do those things come together and become really, really powerful.
Because if you're over disciplined, you're you're you're you're brute forcing it. You're too hard on yourself or too critical. There's, you know, burnout, all those types of things that happen. And then if you're too much in surrender, you're just kind of like, nothing's happening. Abundance and manifestation. Everything's going to come to me as it comes to me.
And there's no action there. So that that balance is really important. That's interesting. I didn't I didn't know that about more women being interested in in your work. Cool. I want to talk about something that you shared with me.
And you said this in a direct message to me one time that you've been thinking about that we have all these pills, therapies and tools. And yet we still have suffering. And, you know, do you see the elimination of suffering as something achievable? Do you think that we can achieve that? Is that something that you. Are working toward.
I'm working towards it for myself. And this would be the first time I talk about it more like publicly like this, because like a message like that is is is behind the scenes and I'm I love that you bring it up. But I think I'm still wrapping my head around it in general for myself. So in that like framing there, I'm only speaking for myself in this instance. And when I think about it, for me, suffering only exists in the four or five inches between my ears. I guess only in.
Well, it's not even true really. My mind is not necessarily here, but it only exists in my mind. And if I can help myself reduce or limit or eliminate suffering, then I have the capacity to then help others do the same. And I'm not quite there yet, because I still experience the five inches between my ears, creating suffering. But my belief around it is that I think it is possible. And I think it is at least possible at an individual level.
I think that there's some collective stuff like we were talking about a little bit that I don't I don't have my whole head wrapped around just yet and what's really at play in that in that instance. But I think a lot of what gets people into trouble when it comes to mental suffering, I'll just say that because there's categories of suffering to write that I don't want to be misconstrued on. But mental suffering, a lot of it comes from, and again, there's pharmacological stuff. There's, you know, psychological stuff. There's mental stuff and there's experience. But a lot of it comes from story, the narrative of what we're saying about what's happening in reality.
There's reality and what's happening, which I think is just the manifestation of consciousness. Like consciousness is just manifesting things, people and experiences for my human experience to experience, to explore and be curious with and play and appreciate. And that for me is just like a fundamental understanding of like Buddhist philosophy really is just to like play and explore and appreciate those are the exact words from from that side of things but that's my simple way of understanding it. And then if that's all that if that's all it is, then why does why does suffering exist? Well, I think suffering exists when we start to name and judge the experience. And that's that comes from story.
We have this experience of what's happening. You and I are sitting here talking. And previously, I might be thinking in my head while we're talking that you're judging me for what I'm saying. And I'll name it as interst judging me. And then I'll judge you for judging me. And then I'll create a sense set of consequences in my head that I respond to to mitigate that story in my head so that I get you to stop judging me so I stop judging you and then everything.
And then I'm judging you and then everything's fine. But none of that's real. All that's here. Because you're just sitting there. I'm just sitting here. I'm talking here listening.
I don't know what you're saying. And it's not really up to me to understand what you're saying. So a lot of this suffering comes from story. And I think frameworks and systems like we talked about before can help to help people understand that. And one of the things that I that I've learned through my experiences. And I think when I was in the work, he wrote a book called.
I forget what it's called now. But he has a little, he has a little, a really nice understanding that I think really is rooted in Buddhism and some Eastern philosophy. Where he talks about the idea of our minds being like the monkey mind. And the mind machine is running an automatic process consistently throughout the day, every moment of every day unconsciously that we're not aware of, which is constantly asking three questions. What is this? What does it mean?
How do I respond? And when you become conscious of that, and you find yourself in suffering, I like to think of it more as friction. Like when you notice something that feels like there's friction. When you're not necessarily be the highest level of suffering, there's probably a spectrum. So I call it friction. When there's some level of friction that feels negative.
A really good thing to do that I've been practicing. This is not a prescription. Cause like I said before, I'm still experiencing this and practicing, experimenting with myself is to ask those three questions. What is this? What does it mean? How do I respond?
And when I do that, almost always, there's nothing to do. Because when I name it, I'm just naming the thing that it is. What does it mean is when I start to implant the story. And how do I respond is those consequences, right? The name judgment consequence thing. So then if I start responding from these consequences that are essentially made up now through this idea of if I really run it back and as I've been practicing it, it's pretty accurate.
Then there's nothing to do. So then I just wait. And then when I know there's no friction anymore, when the friction subsides and there's nothing there to be worried about or on, you know, flustered by or consumed by or suffering from. Then I know what I need to do. And until then, there's nothing to do. So a lot of like coming up, coming back to all of this again, it's kind of maybe sounds like a bit of a ramble because again, it's still very fresh for me to be practicing this.
But I think a lot of it is basis, the basis of suffering, mental suffering for a lot of people comes from the narrative. And a lot of it's based in the past. And the past, if I'm honest, isn't really real. And this is again new for me to play with. So people might take that and go, what do you mean it's not real? Well, if you think about it, it did happen, but it happened.
It's not happening. So right now, what is real? Right now, what is true? Right now, what is actually happening? You might be suffering in the mind, but is it actually happening? So then what is happening?
And I find those three questions is very easy to help me get out of it. What is this? What does it mean? How to respond? And I can give you some great examples of even how it happened, moving into this house. We were at our old place and I was showering one night and the place was sort of like, I would say like the way I described it, it was kind of telling us we had to go.
Like little things were happening. The house was breaking down in different ways. And one night I was taking a shower late at night and my partner came in and she said, Hey man, you got to stop showering. It's leaking into the floor below. So we had the shower was leaking. And in that moment, I could have been so many things, right?
Angry, frustrated. I just want to take a fucking warm shower. I just want to go to bed. I don't have to worry about whatever's happening, all this damage and all this cost and all this stuff. And because I was sort of practicing this in real time, then at that moment, I noticed myself quickly go to what is this? What does it mean?
How do I respond? And so in real time, I saw myself actively doing that and actively noticing, Oh, I could be angry. Oh, I could be frustrated. Oh, I could be worried. Oh, I could be stressed. And I didn't do anything with it.
I went downstairs. I looked at the damage. I said, Let's go to bed. I know, I think I said, let's, let's look for a new house. And within a couple of weeks, we had a new place. And in a month, we were, we were out of there.
And it was like so fast. But in the past, when I was suffering with all of this, I might have been so consumed by what could happen because of this information, instead of just staying present with what it is, what it is, and moving through it step by step without getting lost in the story that is creating the suffering of what's really happening. Because again, going back to what I was saying before, my belief now is consciousness, creator, spirit, God, whatever you believe in is just manifesting people, things and experiences for you to play with, explore and appreciate. So I'm just trying to find the ways to play with it, explore it and appreciate it play with explore and appreciate. And then when I did that, I went from the house we were living in, which was again, falling apart to this amazing place that I now get to live in and appreciate. And it wouldn't have happened if the, I mean, it may not have happened a different way, but it wouldn't have happened in that moment if I got all stressed out about the shower leaking into the main floor.
You know what I mean? I don't know. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I'm trying to give an example of how I'm practicing reducing suffering and a bit of a way to think about it. Does your partner appreciate your practice? She struggles with it too though, because it's hard, right? I can't tell.
I, the people closest to me sometimes will, you know, it's the word, it's a word for it, but you know, practice this, like you got to do this, it's working for me, you should try it, you know, we try to do that with stuff that works for us right and everyone has their own ways of doing it. And it's, she takes, she takes a little bit of it, and she practices it. She appreciates my ability to not get stressed out as much as I used to. And that it's, I make the joke because it's funny when the ceiling's leaking and it's like, okay, I'm thinking about what this means and what to do with it and it's like, just fixed it's the leak. And I can imagine a partner being like, you need to deal with the present moment, like, get out of the philosophy, like, we need to deal with this. Oh, well, in that moment, I actually, I wasn't, I wasn't like giving her the philosophy while I was in it.
I was just actively, like embodying it. And I still took care of like, we had to take care of all these things, right? So we did it. But I just noticed because I had been practicing it so much that it became useful skill in the moment. It's like when you're practicing basketball, right? Like when you were really, you know, trying to make it back in your day.
Although maybe you still are, I don't know. You would practice a layup. You would practice your dribble. You would practice, you know, certain things, right? But then when it came to game time, you wouldn't have to think about doing it. This is the best thing for flow too.
It's like you're not thinking about doing anything. It's effortless action. So this all actually, this is kind of clicking for me in a new way too with the connection between suffering and flow where like, I don't, in that moment, I didn't have to think, Oh, what is this? What does it mean? How do I respond? I wasn't doing it.
It was just happening in real time. And it, and the suffering went away. And then what happened was things happened much faster. And I've noticed since that moment, because that's a big moment, right? We also got in a car accident, not long. And I think it was after that or before I can't remember.
But we're on a busy highway. My partner and I are in the front seat. My daughter's in the back. My dogs in the trunk. And we have a station wagon. So she wasn't like in the trunk.
But we have, we got rear ended on a highway, like a really busy highway, pretty nasty car accident. I think the car behind us was totaled. And I didn't feel anything about it. I didn't, not that I didn't feel anything about it, but I didn't have that like, Oh my God, we got it. Oh my God. What's going to happen?
Oh my God insurance. Oh my God cost. Oh my God. Oh my God. People injured. Luckily no one was hurt.
I got it. I was very calm. Even my partner says like how calm I was and she was and everybody was my daughters for. So like you would expect her to be crying of some kind. Even my dogs are pretty anxious. Dog.
She's an Australian shepherd quite anxious. None of that was happening in the moment. And I checked on them, saw if everything was okay. And then I went back to check on the car behind us, got out of the car. And the woman was frantic and just like completely beside herself. Everyone was fine in their car too.
And I just put my hands on her shoulders and I just said, I don't know why I did this. I didn't, I wasn't trying. I never thought of it. I put my hand on her shoulders. And I said, Hey, my name's Corey. It's nice to meet you.
This is not a good way to meet someone, but everything's going to be okay. We're going to get through this. I'm not going to take off. You didn't mean to do this. This is not your fault. Everything's going to be fine.
And in that moment, she just went. And just completely calmed down. And then, you know, things happen. We had wait for the cop and toes and. But I didn't get wrapped up in all the emotion of it. And that's another part of the story thing.
You know, there's another, there are more elements to this stuff that I'm playing with. But if I didn't get wrapped up in the emotion, which is essentially a sensation in the body being connected to a thought in the mind. And then we label the emotion as this thing we need to fix or change. If I'm not trying to fix or change it, I'm just with it. Then things are just going to happen. Rather, I'm in charge or whether I'm trying to or not.
You're telling that story. My eyes watered a little bit. I'm going to be honest. I think that's a powerful thing to react that way and to. To share that with someone react completely differently than most people would expect. I would have got out and been like, what the fuck?
I mean, that's a powerful thing. Like, if there was a video camera filming that, that would be a viral video. Because that's. That's a powerful moment. And I think I hope you're writing about that or sharing that in some way, because I think that that's a great story. I think we could all benefit from that type of outlook.
Yeah, I've never shared. I mean, all this stuff, like I said, when you asked that last question there, it's all new. I'm playing with it in real time. So. Even as I'm saying it, I'm kind of at the end going, I'm in the judgment of, what did that make sense? Is it?
Is this just my own thing? Or, you know, is this helpful at all? Or whatever. But yeah, I think that's like the basis of everything we've talked about today is like sharing your own personal experience is so valuable to helping others expand their experience. And I think the more and more people like you offer these spaces for this stuff, this type of stuff in this conversation. I just think it's so helpful for people.
Yeah. Yeah, well, I'm glad to have you. I want to close out here by asking you if someone wants to build their capacity for flow. What's the thing you'd recommend they do? Where should they start? I think it's the energy.
I mean, understanding the flow cycle and how that works is important. So like, especially with the struggle phase, like know that the struggle is part of it. The struggle is baked in. And it's meant to be kind of difficult. So starting there, but then doing a bit of an audit on your, your peak energy windows or your all trading rhythm. The way that I, the way that I kind of coach it up is for like seven days, some people maybe need to do it longer, but in a consistent week of seven days when your schedule is pretty much the way it normally is waking up with a setting an alarm for every 90 minutes throughout the day from like when you wake up to when you end your day, not necessarily right when you go to bed, but tracking when your energy is at its highest energy and mood.
When your energy and mood is at its highest tracking that and then tracking recovery time and when you need to recover and when you did or didn't. And what is happening there? And if you did recover, did it come up? You know, that kind of stuff. So tracking every 90 to 120 minutes, how you are. And then after that seven to 14 days, you can get a pretty good sense of where your energy is at and how it cycles throughout the day.
And then after that, then you can optimize and you can make some changes. And then there's, you know, a thousand other things you could do. It's all very personal and very individual, but that's a good place to start. It's great. I think that's helpful. I'm going to do that.
With that. Let me know how it goes. Yeah, I will. I will. I mean, I could sit here and talk to you for another two hours, but I think we'll have to save it for another conversation. We'll have to have you back on because I really appreciate your level of education, your personal experience that you infuse into everything you teach.
And I learned a lot just from this conversation. So I'm already extending an invitation to have you back on. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. And right back at you too. I really appreciate getting to know you and having this connection and this time with you is really great.
And the two hours went by. We must have gotten to a flow. Yeah. Perfect example flow in action. Corey, where can people find you? Yeah, my website, Corey for comm is the best.
And then LinkedIn Corey for I'm on other socials. I'm not really there. It's more personal and I'm not really under that much. But you can find me there. Just my name. Perfect.
That's easy. All right. Corey, thank you for being on here today. And I look forward to seeing what you do in 2026 and beyond. Thanks for all the appreciate it.
