From Survive to Thrive: 3 Powerful Tools to Re-Connect with Your Superpower | Dr Adam Dorsay

TRANSCRIPT
From Survive to Thrive: 3 Powerful Tools to Re-Connect with Your Superpower | Dr Adam Dorsay - Dr Adam Dorsay

Roger: Does this feel like a break glass moment to you? Have you noticed that people are experiencing the sense of overwhelm, dread, and an inability to access joy right now with everything that is going on in the world? Have you noticed this in yourself? I've noticed this in colleagues and friends who normally find it easy to use their extraordinary talents to live into their purpose and potential and who are paragons of resilience.

And yet, in the last few months, I've noticed this become very difficult and challenging for them to show up, to connect, and to have meaningful impact with others. I wanted to talk with someone who was professionally trained in psychology to help me understand what people need to do to unlock the funk that is preventing them from thriving and maybe provide some powerful tools to help reignite the passion and purpose in people and maybe even in ourselves.

And that's what led me to Dr. Adam Dorsey. 

Adam: Be conscientious about how you allocate your time. Your time is your one non renewable resource. You can lose your health and you can get that back. You can lose your money and get that back. You cannot lose your time and get it back. So think about how you want to use your time.

Think about what is truly important. Think about what you can control. And if you think it's too late, as the Chinese proverb says, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. Start planning now. Time is going to pass anyway. You might as well, you might as well be doing the things that actually matter.

Roger: In his book and on his podcast, both called Super Psyched, Dr. Adam highlights the power of connection and the four types of connection. In this conversation, he illuminates and provides concrete examples of how to do the first type of connection, connecting with oneself. 

Adam: It's my contention that connection is the precursor to everything we want. I believe that when people say, I want to feel connection, they are talking about life force. They are talking about vitality. They're talking about things that bring them alive. And we each have a unique connection formula that is ours to figure out. It's a puzzle. And the only way we figure it out is by trying a bunch of things.

My mom was right when she said, try it, you might like it. And you were talking offline about how important it is for us to ascend that Maslow pyramid of self actualization. That's the only way we get there. We don't follow anybody else's blueprints. We have our own. And one of the places we get distracted.

Um, is by trying to follow someone else's blueprint and thinking that that's, that's our story. It's not. Our hero's journey is unique. Nature does not create duplicates. Yours and mine may have some overlap, but they are different. 

Roger: Welcome to the What Do You Know To Be True? podcast. I'm Roger Kastner. And for over 25 years, I've been working with leaders and teams to explore and co design new ways of thinking.

Working together and taking action so that they can unlock their potential and create meaningful impact in these conversations. I talk with ordinary people about their extraordinary skill, their superpower, and the meaningful impact it has on others. The goal is not to try to emulate or hack our way to a new talent.

Instead, the intention is to learn more about their experience with their superpower in doing so. Maybe we can learn. Something about the special talent in each of us that drives us towards our potential and living into our possibilities. If you're ready, let's dive in.

Hey, Dr. Adam Dorsey. Thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to be connecting with you. 

Adam: Roger Kastner. I'm so happy to be with you as well. 

Roger: We're going to learn more about your experiences with your superpower of connection and why connection might be even more important than ever. But first I want to share what I know about you.

You're a licensed psychologist and executive coach. Based in Silicon Valley, who works with high performers and professional athletes. You're the host of the award winning podcast, super psyched, where you interview world class experts inside and outside of the world of psychology about ways to improve our lives.

You've given two highly regarded TEDx talks, and you recently published your bestselling book, super psyched, unleashed the power of the four types of connection. And live the life you love your self proclaimed Lord of the Rings geek, a proud George Michael fan. Right. I, I, you know, back in the eighties in the Bay area, you could see me on a one on one with the windows down singing loud and proud everything she wants.

Um, and if we're ever going to go to eighties pub trivia night together, we'll make a formidable team. 

Adam: That'd be awesome. 

Roger: Anything else that's important for us to know about you? 

Adam: Sure. I'm a serious animal lover, as you know, I used to run the pet loss program, uh, Over at the humane society. I volunteered there.

The pet human bond is really big for me. It shows up a lot in the book Um, we've seen Evidence that our feel good endogenous chemicals, uh, hormones like oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine circulate more when we're in the presence of an animal. Since then, my wife and I have both incorporated our dog, who's a licensed or certified therapy dog into our practice, uh, to great results.

Another little piece of me, and I'm also a Hardcore, hardcore traveler. I've spent a lot of time overseas and learned a few languages while I did so. And if I was left to my own devices, I would just be doing deep dives into various countries. It would be so much fun. 

Roger: So I want to ask you something that I feel is truly critical right now, and maybe pets can be part of the answer. I think they definitely could be. Um, it's one of the reasons why I'm really grateful to be speaking with you today. And it, it's because I feel like we're at this break glass moment where high performers, high agency, purpose driven resilient people are feeling overwhelmed that they're unable to access joy and they're tapping out.

There's a lot of reasons why the epidemic levels of anxiety and loneliness that you talk about on your podcast, uncertainty with global crises, even the fear of layoffs from companies that are making record profits. And then we flip the calendar into 2025 and another level of heaviness seemed to set in.

Thriving or feeling super psyched seems to be out of reach for so many people right now. And so many of the people that Mr. Rogers talked about, like, look for the helpers. These are people that are traditionally the helpers, the resilient shepherds, those high performers that live into their superpowers and have meaningful impact on others.

But here's the thing. I believe connection can be a powerful antidote. To this collective amygdala hijack that people are experiencing. So drawing from your expertise and the collective wisdom from your podcast guests, let's break that glass here and give people some powerful tools that they can stop that amygdala hijack, lessen the feeling of being overwhelmed and move from merely surviving to truly thriving.

So what do you got, Doc? 

Adam: Well, let's just start with the word super psyched. Just to be clear, I don't want any of the listeners to think that super psyched means being happy all the time. It means being super connected to our psyches. Of course, I want people to be super psyched about their lives and to feel like they are connected to their lives and to feel that their lives are representations of something deep from within and something that is authentic.

But being super connected to our psyche could mean that you're super psyched. Could also mean that you're super in the midst of grieving and you're connected to your psyche as you grieve. But you were talking about joy, which is a very interesting topic in and of itself. It's something that many of us are taught not to really experience.

It's not really super punk rock to express joy. You're supposed to kind of cramp on it. Um, when you have swagger, you might be feeling joy, but you're supposed to look super cool. Particularly for males, but even for females, uh, the expression of joy in and of itself. is something that we tend to have stopgaps around.

And one of the first things I would do is ask people to laugh a little bit harder when they're watching a comedy. Maybe just 5 percent more. It would be authentic, and it will be authentic over time. I would ask them, if they're feeling a modicum of joy, I would ask people to ask themselves, Are you really expressing it?

To its fullest degree, I realized I was born on the enthusiastic side of the bed, but here's what can happen to us around joy or enthusiasm in and of itself. I was sitting in college expressing some spectacular enthusiasm of something and the woman sitting across me said, wow, you're so easily impressed.

Kind of looking at me askance and kind of. Low key kind of looking down at me and I came up with a retort that I stand by to this day I said no, I'm not easily impressed It's actually that I have a high capacity for appreciation for a guy who generally couldn't articulate his thoughts and feelings Very well at that age.

I stand by that quote to this day and I would ask each of us To ask ourselves, could we increase our capacity for appreciation of things? We've seen that gratitude and awe lead to more fulfilling lives. Uh, awe may be even considered gratitude on steroids. There's a lot of science on that. You were talking about a host of things.

Uh, I won't be able to attend to all of them, Roger, unfortunately, but here's what I can tell you. We can. As Ted Lasso reminds us, we can only control the controllables. And another thing I know for sure is that we are not very conscientious about how we allocate our time. We're not very intentional. We get sucked in like flies or moths to a flame to social media.

Um, spend time doom scrolling there. And yet we say we're so busy that we have no time to do anything. If we actually looked at how we're allocating our time, we're being sucked into voids, thinking that we're being productive by, I don't know, reading about being informed, finding out about other people's lives and, uh, on Facebook, uh, going into Reddit and learning about a thing that's fine, by the way, if that is really what you want to be doing with your time, but we can't say we're too busy to do the important things.

There's an old X, Y axis that. I believe comes from Eisenhower. He declared that there are two basic points on this x y axis. There is urgent and there is important. And oftentimes these days with a 24 hour news cycle and with all these emails and texts and all of the stimuli we get, everything seems urgent and yet we don't have enough time to deal with what is truly important.

I am one such person. And so what I ask people to do. Is to use social media. Don't let it use you create more than you consume. A lot of us are consuming social media at just large volumes. And I would have to ask you, is it good medicine? Is it making you feel more engaged with your life? My guess is it's not.

But what does make us feel more engaged with our lives and what does actually bring down anxiety and depression and a sense of connection with self, which is the primary connection. It's precedes all other connection is being in the creator's chair, creating does not necessarily mean painting. I'm a horrible painter.

If drawing was the only thing that we, we, we could consider our art. I would be tapping out immediately. But being on this podcast right now, I'm creating, you're creating, um, Writing is a form of creation when I'm doing my work as a psychotherapist and listening to people's stories and taking them in and being curious, I'm creating new neural pathways to accommodate these stories and learning more about the world from their subjective realities.

This is a form of creation. As I articulate. back to them, perhaps something that might help. Creation could be having a meaningful conversation with a friend and helping them out with a problem, or just laughing together is a form of creation. I would ask people, get more in your life. Act as if you have the camera crew of the office or Parks and Recreation doing a, you know, a mockumentary of your life.

And ask yourself, am I using my time in a way that is meaningful or meaningless? Is it feeding me or is it bleeding me? Oftentimes, if we just get more intentional, we can attend more to the important. So I learned very early on that aspiration versus actually putting your, you know, pedal to the metal, your rubber to the road.

Are very different things. Just getting started on that thing. Well, for sure, increase the likelihood that you're doing, you're going to do it. But it's that getting started is very hard for a lot of us. I've learned from various thought leaders that failure is just, I mean, Dory Clark says that failure is data.

Uh, Matt Abraham's told me that mistakes are merely missed takes. Guy Kawasaki said something akin to don't focus on getting the right decision. Focus on making the decision, right? So in other words, even if you've failed the first time, maybe. You adjust and you get it right the second time or some other time down the road.

John Hayes said our mistakes become the funniest stories over time. So if you want a rich, interesting life, get into the creator's chair. Be conscientious about how you allocate your time. Your time is your one non renewable resource. You can lose your health and you can get that back. You can lose your money and get that back.

You cannot lose your time and get it back. So think about how you want to use your time. Think about what is truly important. Think about what you can control. And if you think it's too late, like you and I were talking offline, like, wouldn't it have been great if we'd started our geek. Stuff at a very young age and we're living with compounding interest over the years.

That would have been awesome. Yeah, we would be infinitely further ahead than we are now But as the Chinese proverb says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago The second best time is now start planning now Time is going to pass anyway. You might as well, you might as well be doing the things that actually matter.

Roger: Oh, Dr. Adam, I love all of that. So much goodness. A few things, the laughter piece. I recently heard Jess Brane. Um, yes, Jess Brane, um, who works with people about laughter, shared a statistic that was amazing where she said, uh, research shows that children laugh three to 400 times a day. Adults laugh five to 10 times.

Adam: Who is this person again? 

Roger: Her name is Jess Brain. 

Adam: Love what she's saying. And this is, I didn't know that. I would have deduced that it would have been a horrible ratio, but this is outrageous. I mean, think about that. 

Roger: And we know with, with children, how quickly they learn. And when they miss make mistakes, they get back.

I mean, they feel like those mistakes are just part of learning. They're okay with it. There's no ego attachment to it. It's part of the process. But then once at some point later on in life, we, we, we forget to laugh. And Jess actually runs laughter workshops where it's a little bit like improv, but the goal is just to get people together to start laughing.

And you know what that feeling's like when you're in a room of people laughing. And yet it's not like we're going to a comedy club where there's stimulus to laugh. We're just laughing. And like that feeling that stayed with us lasted like 36 hours. It was amazing. Love that you started with laughter.

That saying about control, the controllables is something we, we hear, we understand, but I love how you turn that into, you know, become, you know, start creating, like get in the creator's chair because the, the idea of control, the controllables is like tapping into our agency. Um, But when we start creating, it's actually, you know, the activity.

Of agency, it is, you know, starting to do something and get us out of breaking those patterns that literally moves us from that amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, you know, the control, the controllables sounds good, hard to put in the practice, go paint, write poetry, like do a podcast, like whatever you do, go do that thing, because that's going to leave you with, um, just a much different feeling.

Then doom scrolling. 

Adam: Absolutely. You know, you're talking about laughter and I love just brains idea. There are laughter yoga classes that you can take where you literally go and you start walking around and start laughing. I remember in camp, there was a game called ha ha. What you do is you'd lay on each other's stomach.

I don't know if people can still do that these days, but. We laid on each other and the first person in this kind of sequence of a chain of like 20 people laying on each other's stomachs, a chain of humans. First person says ha, the second person says ha ha, the third person says ha ha ha. By that time, the whole place is laughing their asses off.

And, you know, Robert Plant famously in the song Remains the Same when he was singing Stairway to Heaven. Was saying in the whole in the forest will let go with laughter. And he says, does anybody remember laughter? I remember hearing that as a junior high school student. Uh, you know, that album had been out for a very long time, but I didn't understand that idea.

Does anybody remember laughter now? That means a lot to me. Does anybody remember laughter? Some people seeming like some type of. schadenfreude or joy at like, you know, just being snarky when people are just trying to bring levity. Honest. Innocent, decent levity to our situation, they won't, you know, dignify it with a laugh, uh, there are two, you know, whatever they are in order to just join, join in that space is what I'd ask people to do.

We're only alive for a very short period of time. If somebody says something mildly humorous, just go for it and laugh. Um, our bodies. Okay. 

Roger: We're going to take a quick break and be right back after this. Each. What do you know to be true? Episode is an opportunity to learn from and get inspired by our guests who are everyday people with extraordinary talents, making meaningful impact in their communities, the best, no cost way for you to help support this podcast is to subscribe or follow the podcast.

And leave a comment or a review. This helps us get the word out to other people and it ensures that you won't miss any future episodes. It's great to have you be part of this community and I'm glad you're here. Okay, let's get back to the conversation. So one of the recurring themes that comes from the conversations with my guests about their experience with their superpowers are three accelerators for creating impact with others.

And those are empathy, curiosity, and connections. And after reading your book, I know you'd agree with these three because your stories are filled with empathy. Curiosity and connection, and yet your superpower of connection is another layer of depth and richness. Please tell us a little bit more about your superpower of connection and who or what inspired it.

Adam: So glad you asked. You know, when I was a baby, my mom said that when she pushed me in the stroller, I was a hyper connector. I just seemed, based on my facial expressions and my eyes, to want to connect with everybody who walked by. And she said she'd never seen. A child so intently focused on connecting with others and lo and behold, that would be what would show up in my life, but it started off with kind of some bad news.

I was awkward socially and major learning disabilities. I didn't pick up on social cues in second grade. I invited every boy to my house to play and went through the entire list of phone numbers. Back then we had those and, uh, I got rejected. By every single boy in my second grade class, just to come over and play.

So I was not while I had this desire, the capacity to connect was not there. I learned over time. Oh, these are the rules of how to engage socially. And those had some side effects. By the way, it was not. 100 percent awesome. Um, but I did learn and I did make friends and then I decided because I had such, you know, a learning disability and such a hunger to connect.

But one superpower was language acquisition. So I spent time in Spanish speaking countries and connected with people in the totally different language, totally different culture. And I found it unbelievable when I was 20 years old, I landed in Japan. I got a scholarship to go there. And nothing I saw made sense.

Everything was fascinating and different. You know, I'd been to Europe and Central America and Israel, but I'd never been to a place where things were handled so differently like they are in Japan. And I decided to do a massive immersion. Like I wanted to learn the language. I want to learn about the culture.

I wanted to learn everything. Here I am this nearly six foot two, hairy, uh, Mediterranean male, uh, with very large shoes, which are awkward to take off in a Gen Con at anyone's house, because they say that intelligence is negatively correlated with one's suicide. So bigger, the shoe, the dumber, the person in my case, you know.

Clearly kind of dumb. Um, but I love Japan. Uh, it was a place for me to stretch my mind. Uh, the language was really challenging. It also only a few years ago, uh, did I realize this, but one of the reasons I did it was because it came from a fairly smart, successful family, where I was considered kind of the black sheep.

And I needed some irrefutable evidence to show my family that there was actually a brain between my ears and learning Japanese. As it turned out, Was one of those ways and I was unconsciously doing it by the way just a side note Yung once said, until we make the unconscious conscious, it will drive us and we will think it was fate.

It's just one of my favorite quotes. I'm obviously not saying it perfectly exactly the way he said it, but you get it. I was not conscious of the drivers that caused me to push through learning Japanese. Another thing that was interesting, by the way, that I think is important is I was willing to look stupid for a long period of time.

Most of us are not willing to look stupid, but I would guess I would ask you, what is something that is so important to you that you're willing to look foolish while you pursue it? That is probably going to be something that's very important to you. And I would say, please. Let go of your concerns that people are looking at you.

There's something called the spotlight effect. People are not looking at you as much as you think they are. In fact, they don't, they barely care. So be willing to look like a fool. Remember failure is just data. It's tuition. According to one of my other colleagues, um, it's. It's the price we pay to get where we want to get.

And you were talking offline about how important it is for us to ascend that Maslow pyramid of, of self actualization. That's the only way we get there. We don't follow anybody else's blueprints. We have our own and one of the places we get distracted. Um, is by trying to follow someone else's blueprint and thinking that that's, that's our story.

It's not our hero's journey is unique. Nature does not create duplicates. Yours and mine may have some overlap, but they are different. And so is our capacity to connect in what really allows us to feel connected. So after nearly 20, 000 hours of about 20, 000 hours of priding psychotherapy, I realized this word connection just kept coming showing up.

Interviewing, you know, well over a hundred people on my podcast connection again, all the books connection, but you look up the word connection and what does it even mean in the Webster's dictionary? It's very lackluster. It means something like connecting to thoughts, connecting to things, connecting to people.

Okay. That's not what people are talking about. You look it up in the American psychological associations definitions. There is no definition. So one of the things I aim to do with this book that just bit me in the ass and took hold of me. I knew I had to write it because. It's my contention that connection is the precursor to everything we want.

Uh, and that's why I call it super psych, super connected to our psyches. We want to live this life alive. We want to be alive while we're living. So the definition, and this was done, a working definition, a working definition with about 10 licensed mental health professionals was vitality, what makes us come alive.

Life force. It's a whole page. You, you saw the definition. It's a long definition and it's a working definition. But I believe that when people say I want to feel connection, they are talking about life force. They are talking about vitality. They're talking about things that bring them alive and we each have a unique connection formula that is ours to figure out.

It's a puzzle and the only way we figure out is by trying a bunch of things. My mom was right when she said, try it. You might like it. Try more things. See if there is vitality. See if there's life force, uh, some things that won't, you'll feel nothing and you'll think you're supposed to be honest with yourself.

Uh, if it's not there, it's not there. One of my favorite, uh, examples of this is I was working with somebody who you read about in my book, uh, a biologist. Um, and he would, you know, smoke weed and watch, you know, 70s TV and go to sleep and wake up and he'd face the commute and, you know, he said he described himself as having the dad bod of dad bods.

He was living a very kind of, I'll call it a limp handshake life. If you're been in a case and had a handshake and it was just limp or one of those awkward handshakes where they kind of put up their hand, not, he was living life. His connection with life was like that. And if I had a t shirt, it would say no limp handshakes, like.

That's, that's the bottom line, no limp handshake. And I would, the other alternative would say more cowbell. Because we all need, I mean, that would be the other defining characteristic. Uh, you know, the greatest SNL skit of all time also carried connotations that I think apply to life. We all need a little more cowbell in our life.

So anyway, this guy and I were trying to fish for something that would give his life more vitality. And he said that something he loved doing as a kid was gardening. Oh, fantastic. He's a biologist who loves gardening. Let's get started. So he started with something small, tomato plants. And little by little, the gardening bug took over.

And in a, just like an opposite of Kafka, he did not turn into a cockroach. No, he turned into This vital gardener with a really green thumb and instead of watching 70s tv and doing the bong hit he was drinking herbal tea and reading about gardening and going to sleep waking up early working out and getting his hands in the garden before work using everything he had he he was working out because he wanted to be stronger so he could garden better and now he instead of having the dad bod of dad bods he has Just a dad bod, as he says.

Um, and from that, I came up with, uh, an acronym all based on very solid research and the acronym is FEED. F E E D. Uh, so F stands for flow. One of the things we've studied a lot, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied this idea called flow, and it's been. One of the most important additions to modern psychology, it's when you're immersed in a thing and three hours could go by and it feels like 30 minutes and you've all experienced this in some way.

At some time. It could be an incredible conversation. Where has the time gone or you could be involved in a creative project and say, Whoa, I was so in it. I didn't even realize that time had passed. So that's flow E. The first E stands for educate. Uh, does it move your needle in some meaningful way? Are you learning something?

He was definitely learning and we also know that learning is an activity that causes more dopamine, more of our dopamine receptors are, uh, or endogenous dopamine is, is increased. Second E would stand for energize. Um, does it require energy and does it give energy back? You and I both know that the greatest things in life require energy, often sweat.

Sometimes it requires a little bit of a. Cost price for admission, maybe even, uh, activation energy, but on the other side of giving energy, we get the energy back. We can come back from a long bike ride and say, that was awesome. I'm. Exhausted, I left it all on the road and that was the best use of time ever.

Even though I was cursing myself as my legs were getting tired or full of lactic acid and hurting. The last letter D is, stands for depth. We're not just meaning based creatures. There's a fella who lives not very far from you. Uh, Michael Mead, who said that we are not just homo sapiens, we are homo symbolicus.

We are meaning chasing creatures. And for him, the biologist, all four criteria were met in gardening. He experienced flow. It was educational. It was energizing. And it was very depthful and meaningful to him. He started inviting people over to his garden, having barbecues. People were taking great joy. He was known as that garden guy.

And this was, this may sound like a, like a very simple thing. It in some ways is. And yet he found his thing and he's much more present at work. Um, his, his job is, is good. Um, it uses his education and we also found new ways to find novelty in his work. That's a whole other topic unto itself. Um, so, but now his, his, his long commutes to work.

You know, he's listening to gardening podcasts a lot of the time. I mean, he's, he's, he's just, he's, he's that guy. We can all figure that out, um, over time. And I have a funny feeling, uh, you know, you know, relationships are beginning to happen. So, you know, other, other, other good things come after we, after we find our thing.

But we first, you know, the first of the four connections is connecting to ourself, which is not a selfish act. It's not narcissistic. But it's, it informs all of the other connections that I described in the book. 

Roger: Well, and I love the thread between your last response and this response, where the biologist.

Shows, um, to become a creator. It was through the act of gardening, but through that experience, again, control what you control, tap into your agency, tap into that thing that excites you and provides energy. And he definitely experienced flow where he's, you know, losing, losing track of time and then. Also, you know, longing to be back into that, uh, listening to the podcast and inviting friends over to partake.

Um, it makes a lot of sense where you, where you ended up there with connecting with yourself. Once he connected with his self and tapped into that sense of purpose and the thing that gave him joy and energy. Now it, it impacts other parts of his life and then increases the connection with other people.

So it, it, it makes a lot of sense. You would want to start with. Connecting with oneself. So I'm curious to learn more about your experience between your superpower and joy. You were talking about joy earlier. So what is the relationship between joy and your superpower of connection? 

Adam: Love that question. And You've definitely found a good thing for yourself to do. You're very good at this, Roger. Not a compliment, just a reflection. 

Roger: Still, thank you. 

Adam: Yeah. So what I've found, not shockingly, and I've studied a lot about positive psychology, which is putting happiness under a microscope. I did my doctoral dissertation on that.

Topic, um, uh, treatment modality of positive psychological intervention. But what we know, uh, is when we do the things that incur flow when we do the things that we feel a profound connection with, it's more likely to bleed into other areas and by, like my son will say on a Friday, it used to be I did all my podcast interviews on Friday.

I did not do them multiple days, but I'd pick him up from school. And he'd say, dad, I love it when you pick me up after a podcast interview because you're so happy and you know, because the half life of the joy of doing the thing that allows us to feel connected goes flies in the face of the idea that hurt people hurt people when we're hurting, we end up hurting other people in our lives.

Like, let's imagine for a second Roger that you and I were having a long conversation, except for the fact that one of us had to go pee really badly, like really badly. I would ask you how much of the upload and download would either of us really hear and how would the, how would the, let's imagine both of us had a pee really badly.

People engage in conversations all the time at the wrong time. And when we are more open, because we've been doing something that is a true reflection of our internal worlds, we all have oceans within us when we do something that is. Authentic and just, you know, it, you've seen this before. You've seen people sing songs and you're like, yeah, he's full of crap.

And you've seen someone else sing another song. You're like, that was a real moment within this lifetime. We're meant to find at least one of the oceans that's within us. Many of us will feel pressured. I need to find my thing. OK, that's going to incur a lot of anxiety. Don't ask yourself that question.

Instead, ask yourself, what is one of your things? Because there are many things. There's not just one thing. You and I both do a lot of different things. Um, one of my things is I love barbecuing, smoking, and grilling. I love it. It's not my only thing, and I'm not a master griller, but when I'm doing that, I'm so stoked.

Uh, another one of my things is I love going for hikes with my wife. It's not my only thing. So don't think about the thing, because It's in all likelihood, you'll find greater riches when you explore what's meaningful and interesting and keep going down that road, keep going down that road, it will morph into other things.

Similarly, when we follow a thing that you're into, it will be hyperlink to other things and the next thing will be hyperlink to other things. My father, when he's, when he very kindly said during COVID, he said, you know, dude, you're not, you're not, he hasn't used the word dude, but I would say, dude, uh, you're not, you're not driving your kids to school.

Why not start a podcast? I've always wanted to start a podcast. He knew that. And now was the perfect time because I had an extra like five hours a week, uh, because I wasn't driving to school, uh, multiple days and, uh, didn't need to necessarily drive to the office. I could do a lot of it from home. So I created a podcast and I knew that the podcast itself would lead to a whole bunch of other things.

And it has. It's been a hyperlink to all kinds of cool stuff, but as a connector, like getting to talk with people about stuff that matters and you're experiencing yourself is like, my God, this is the best cup of coffee ever. Like getting to talk to somebody really smart about something really cool, uh, and leaving the interaction somewhat changed.

Roger: There, there is so much. I love that idea of pulling on many threads and the threads that produce joy. Tell you you're onto something. Dr. Adam, what do you know to be true? About your superpower of connection. 

Adam: This is when a cat meows in the background. Which is pretty hilarious because she was, uh, clearly wanting to connect with you and me.

Um, I know that if I don't pursue it, my life does feel like a limp handshake. I do feel a sense of dissociation. I know that disconnection is at the heart of so many things that we don't want. It's at the heart of depression. We disconnect from ourselves because we're thinking about the past, ruminating.

That's one of the features of depression anyway, uh, with anxiety, we tend to bad trip on the future. So when I, when I'm in a connected mode, my own, um, sadness and worries kind of melt away. And the half life of that activity lasts long beyond engaging in the activity. I know that I married well, I married a woman who absolutely blesses My need for connection.

She might at times find it a little bit, you know, amusing or different from her own But she recognizes that it's my superpower and because we're such social creatures It's important that she does. My kids have seen value in it and I feel so fortunate because a lot of us get kind of clowned on for our Superpowers and as long as our superpowers aren't harming anybody Um, there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure.

As I mentioned, there's, uh, and it would be my hope that the people in your life value the way you connect. Um, and if they don't perhaps take some time to share with them your subjective experience around that thing. Assuming it's not causing them any. Any, any problems. We all need to be aware of the pros and cons as well, and how to judiciously use our superpower.

Roger: Well, Dr. Adam, thank you so much for your time, for your wisdom. I will put the links to your website and to your book in, and your podcast. In the show notes so everyone knows how to connect with you Uh, if they have follow up questions or want to learn more, I really appreciate Everything you've shared with us and especially this advice for people who are in that You know, heightened level of threat response and to have that amygdala hijack going on as I do think there is a little bit of a break glass moment that we need to help people tap into, uh, their own purpose, their own joy.

Um, and I love the idea of finding the thing where you can be the creator and go create. So thank you for all the wisdom. Thank you for your time. I'm super appreciative of you grateful for you and thank you for allowing us to connect today 

Adam: Roger. It was a blast Thank you so much, and I feel truly honored to be on your podcast 

Roger: Thank you, my friend be well, bye bye.

Thank you all for being in this conversation with us. And thank you, Dr. Adam for sharing your superpower of connection with us. The question I'm asking myself after this conversation is where in my life am I feeling stuck and we're tapping into the creator with me. Well, help me become unstuck. What do you know to be true is a three blue pens production.

And I'm your host, Roger Kastner. We are recording on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish and Suquamish people to discover the ancestral lands of the indigenous people whose land you may be on, go to https://native-lands.ca. 

Okay. Be well, my friends. And of course, love you mean it.