#16 :: Everyone Is On Your Team, with Andréa Paige - The Institute For Aliveness
Positive impact. We all want to make it. Did you know that this has to start inside, with you and your way of being? Get ready to transform your life as you dive into the world of Andréa Paige, Founder of The Institute For Aliveness (TIFA). In a training focused on our nervous system and how it affects leadership, you’ll learn accessible techniques to level up before you try to level out. Don’t miss this!
The INITIATION: https://www.theinitiation.co/
TIFA: https://www.instituteforaliveness.com/
Vitality Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vitality-podcast/id1042394363
AndiX: https://andix.ai/index.html
Insight Timer: https://insighttimer.com/
Recorded on 01.20.21
TRANSCRIPT
Laurie Pillow: Welcome to the 100 CEO Project podcast. You guys welcome back to the 100 CEO Project podcast. Today, we're super excited to tell you that we've got Dr. Andréa Paige, aka Andi. She is a doctor of naturopathy and a master in what's called lifestyle medicine. Andi hacks into the physiological benefits of the advanced yogic practices. She makes the cosmic worldview accessible to modern man. Springboarding beyond her yoga and health career, she's also launched AndiX, and is currently working in bio data feedback and ethics in the world of artificial intelligence. Let me tell you, you don't play. Welcome to the show. We're excited to have you here.
Andréa Paige: Thank you, thank you so much. I love that. I don't play. I'm like, do I play though? Maybe I only play, like...
LP: That’s the power.
AP: Yeah, totally. That's great. Thank you for reading that bio. It's been a while since I've heard that because I left kind of my old career public facing in health about three plus years ago, and have been working much more deeply with CEOs, like things like this and with early stage startup teams, with multi-exit entrepreneurs and people in general to take agency in their own lives. And so what we're going to be talking about a little bit today is that pathway to agency to go beyond a sense of action reaction. And to come into a place where actually you have the power to choose how you show up in any moment, which actually means that you have the power as well to feel how you want to feel in any moment in time. And in the work that I do with bio data feedback. And psychophysiology is looking at what's beyond artificial intelligence. It's called intelligence amplification. And it's based within human physiology that through understanding, through... mindfulness is the technology that I've been using for more than a decade, through understanding everything that's happening in our body and the signals that our body sending us at any one time, we can start to better understand our interaction with our environment.
And before I lose anyone, I want to give you a really simple example, to just begin to understand what I'm talking about. All right, you're walking down a street somewhere, and some woman cuts you off and steps on your toe, maybe she's even wearing heels. And so it's like, Ah, that hurts so bad. We're not denying the pain feedback. That's there, right? It hurts, yet you have an immense ability to choose how you react in that situation. Most humans today have devolved from the wonderful glorious gift of our prefrontal cortex, where we have an ability to think outside of time and thus empathize, right, to think of the future or the past, or think of what it would be like to be in someone else's reality or existence. This is uniquely human. And so when we're in that situation, someone steps on our toe, there can actually be a space between action and reaction. And in that space is the gold. And so if you notice yourself just reacting to things and not thinking right, then you're functioning from your hind brain from the amygdala from what you've known as the reptile brain, perhaps, and you're not using the the beautiful benefits that make you human, which is essentially functioning from again, the prefrontal cortex from this ability to reason and to think outside of the present moment to think outside of a survival mechanism. So it's not just that that woman steps on your toe, right? And then you scream and probably get angry at her and you know, there's a whole domino host of reactions of, who she thinks she is? where is she going in a hurry? What like, you know, I am sure you can hear the commentary coming into your head now, rather, what if she steps on your toe, you notice the pain receptor, and you're like, Oh, that's interesting. That's pain, right? Rather than screaming or whatever it is, right? This is, this is essentially what any kind of meditative practice is if you want to call it yoga, or you want to call it Buddhist Tantra meditation or whatever, it's that ability to witness to notice your human experience to come outside of yourself and look back on yourself and realize that you are more than this mind and mental reaction of, you know, taking in stimulus in the world around you and immediately responding without thinking through the response or without feeling or realizing what's going on. And so she steps on your toe, right? Instead of saying, oh, and then cursing her out, or whatever it might be, I don't know you, we probably have a different variety of gradients of fire users or listeners here, and you say to yourself in your head, oh, that's pain. Okay, I feel that - take a really deep breath, because what that deep breath is going to do, and I'll have the both of you do it with me now, take a deep breath into your belly.
Yeah, that really like rich, juicy deep breath. What that does is it stimulates the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve comes from our brain, it's cranial nerve 10, comes down around to the side of the neck down through the front side of the body, and over where the diaphragm will push down on the abdominal organs and push out into the belly. This is why in yoga, it's called a belly breath. And so that belly breath, then massages the vagus nerve gives feedback to the system that we are not in an emergency state. This is not a time of flight or fight stress response, everything's okay. And you can have permission to bring the synaptic signaling to your prefrontal cortex, you can empathize here, it's okay, you are safe, not you have to defend yourself and react.
So we've all had that boss, who is you know, very much in flight or fight stress response pretty much all the time, right? You've had that person in your life. Maybe it's your father, I don't know. In general, we have to give empathy to them to realize how they're doing and what they're doing. It's not that they're a bad person, they just don't have agency over their nervous system. And this is why we have so much stress and anxiety, depression, disconnection, like a whole host of autoimmune diseases, other physical problems, right, etc, etc. divorce rates, like I could go on and on and on. This is the root cause. We don't know how to use this body that we've been given. We didn't read the user manual, the nervous system is like the motherboard operating system. And when we can learn to overcome that initial stress response reaction. I'd rather take time and space and breathe into Okay, something's here, this woman stepped on my toe. Right? I take a deep breath, I realize it's pain. Right? And then this is a really magic point. And I I came up with this a few years ago, and people like loved it. It was like kryptonite for many people around the world. It's this phrase, this idea: Imagine everyone were on your team.
Imagine everyone were on your team. Right? So back to this concept of play. Right? Imagine everyone were there to support you, everyone was there on your team to make you win in whatever it is, the game that you are playing, right and everyone here, even that woman who just stepped on your toe, she stepped on your toe to make you go two steps back so that you didn't I don't know, hit the red light or get hit by a car or something else, you don't know what's happening in the game of your life. But we have to all trust that what happens is here, right to support us in some way. And some people might want to link this to a higher purpose or some kind of faith-based thing. For me, it's really just playing with agency as a player in the game of your life, having authority as an author writing the book of your life, versus being passive and allowing things to happen to and through and from you. Right, so it's this this switch this great transition from passivity to activity. Right from disempowerment to empowerment, right? From falling victim to having agency. And this is a shift that when we do it, in one sense, we do it in every sense, because what we're doing thereby is retraining the nervous system strengthening and so many people's nervous systems have been run down today. At The Institute for Aliveness which is an institute that I direct to really train the doctors of the future. We are releasing a short course on vagal nerve rebuilding and building nerve tone again, for those who have faced burnout or you know, just have chronic stress state for the past 20, 30, 50 years of their life. What does that look like to come back into agency?
And really, it's that simple. If you take anything away from listening to this today, it is that concept that you have a space. There's a famous Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl who had a quote, you know, this quote, between Let me see, I think it's “Between stimulus and response, there is a space and within that space is the goodness.” and so that is essentially his secret. He said, as to how he survived the concentration camps for so many years. Because you see the most horrendous, horrible things happening in front of you. And if you can not immediately react and get mad and have an opinion. I mean, hello; COVID year was a pretty big year, especially for people in the United States with all of the political charge.
I've been saying, right for the past 12 months, this is not a time to have opinions. And that might feel hugely triggering for many people who are like but there's injustice happening. And it's like, Cool, well, how's your nervous system? Because no one can ever win when we are in a state of flight or fight, sympathetic nervous response. We have to get back to a parasympathetic response. And so when I teach yoga teacher training that we say to the yoga teachers, the most valuable thing that you'll ever be able to deliver or give or offer to someone is the understanding of how to, on their own walk from a sympathetic stress response state, to a relaxation state, because most people don't know how to get there on their own today. They need to go for a massage, and they need to do this or that. We have a lot of programs on Insight Timer, which is a resource, I can send you guys a link, that’s free that you can put on when you can't sleep at night, or whatever it is, there's a practice called Yoga nidra, which is psychic sleep and in the yogic sciences, and it walks you through rewiring your nervous system. It's used in hospitals, and rehab centers all around the world today, to really just reprogram this wiring of the system. And so the nervous system is our baseline.
Yeah, I want to also take a moment to mention because it's worth mentioning the emotional spectrum because often what happens is we get triggered, there's a physiological response, which is often on the nervous system level. So that's your boss's heels, their shoes, walking down the hall, whatever it is, or it's your employees not submitting something on time, whatever it could be, and you feel your throat clench, right, you feel your belly, tighten, you feel your breath, shorten or shallow, right, that's a physiological response. And then the emotions behind that are usually different varieties of panic or fear, or just distasteful, right? The emotions that you don't want to have negative emotions on that spectrum. And that, actually, believe it or not, doesn't have so much to do with your boss or your employee not showing up or whatever. What it has to do with is something that happened before you were seven years old.
This is intrinsic and extrinsic emotion. Intrinsic emotion is something that, you know, is what I'm talking about happened from a long time ago. Extrinsic emotion is something that had to do with that current environment. Extrinsic emotion, if it truly had to do with your boss, and that day in whatever, it's about one to three minutes that it will physiologically disrupt you after that, you'll be fine. You'll forget about it. If it's something that's bringing up a past trauma, which we all have, we're human beings and all human beings in the 21st century are heavily traumatized. I mean, we're living so disconnected from any sense of the natural world, from any tribal sense of belonging. I mean, we are pack animals too. And, and so it's no wonder that we're depressed and anxious. And we don't know how to use our nervous system or be alive in our body, right? We're taking medications up the wazoo, etc, etc. And yet, if we can remember, not only how to regain agency of our nervous system, but start to work through some of that early childhood trauma, again, that we all have - myself included, right? And say, what is this actually about? Right? What am I actually experiencing right now? Right? So maybe, I don't know, do either of you want to give me an example of something bad in your life? I can think of one too. Or a hypothetical of something you heard of your friends, and anyone listening can think of something as well. Just the worst thing that's happened to you all week.
Andrea Spirov: I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna say, Well, I was gonna share an example but I'm, uh, you know, I'm, I'm a recovering, living in fight flight or fight or flight person. So I appreciate everything that you're saying. I guess maybe it's more helpful for people. I think it's great to have everybody sort of think about this while they're listening to you, because you're so powerful in what you're saying. What, what are some examples that people could pull from their childhood? I've heard the gamut. Because I've done some of this work with like construction of identity in these different like, usually, there are three different phases of your life. So the early one, though, is particularly difficult for some people to remember. So what are some examples that our listeners could kind of think about possibly being there? And how do you apply those to something that could affect them in leadership?
14:40
AP: Totally, I love it. So worthiness is a big one, especially when it comes to being a leader. If you were told by your mother or father at any point in time that what you did either wasn't up to standard or wasn't good enough. And hey, this might not have been something that your mother or father overtly did, right? It might have just been, you brought home a piece of drawing and art project that you were really proud of at the age of five, and you presented it to your daddy and daddy was on the phone and busy and didn't give you the time of day to look at your art and kind of just threw it to the side - that imprint because under the age of seven, you do not have a fully developed rational brain, you are thinking in terms of symbology, essentially. You're not reasoning or thinking with intellect, and an ability to understand what's behind something that he's busy. He can't look right now, he didn't mean anything by throwing your paper on the floor, something as simple as that. And so a really good way would be to architect your childhood memories. Just remember, like, what stands out that it's weird that you remember, and you don't know why you remember it. And because there's hints, there's clues woven in there. I take people through extensive, especially when I work with CEOs, through extensive writing exercises in flow state writing, where you set a timer for 20 minutes, you put pen to paper, and you go and whatever you do, you just don't stop writing. Even if you're writing this is ridiculous. I don't know why when I'm writing, I don't know what I'm writing. Just go and you can do this on your own today. Right and see what comes out, see what memories come out and look at what stories you could have told yourself when you were younger. Right?
So a sense of unworthiness, something that would reflect to what I was referring to before when I said everyone's on your team. The opposite of that is that everyone's out to get me that I'm not safe here. Yeah, and so this is actually I mean, it comes from the foundation of psychoanalysis from one of Freud's main students, Wilhelm Reich, came up with five character structures or coping patterns. One is where you don't feel safe. And so you feel like you need to escape and leave. And these kinds of people will be the ones who will have ADHD, who won't be able to focus who won't be able to get things done, who won't be able to drop into depth of conversations, who will, you know, be a little flighty or defensive, you know, see here this, there's another type where people feel like they just have to endure, they just have to be there. They have this belief that life is hard. And it sucks, and yet just wake up tomorrow, right? Is that the story that you're telling yourself? There are people like me, I'm this personality pattern, this type where it's the aggressor. It's the one who like goes full force and believes that I have to do it all on my own, because no one is here to help me. Right. So it probably CEOs are mostly that type. Right? And so what happened in early childhood that made you feel that way that you were alone? And what can you do to reprogram that both on a nervous system level, because that'll, I mean, it'll result in a tremendous amount of avoidance, but on a level of teamwork, and how you lead and how you show up in in circles or in meetings. From there, there's the types where we have the masochist The one who self-harms, because they don't want to be here. And so that's the Generation Z is like big in this, which is scary. And we can love them more because of that, and everyone will be healed with a little bit of presence. If we just sit down with no devices, just sit down and breathe together. I mean, that sounds super hippie dippie, or whatever. And yet, what I'm talking about on a medical level is the nervous system. And that's something that we can't deny, because that's what a lie detector functions off of, is the truth of the nervous system. And so these coping techniques that we've established within the first seven years of our life will result in cognitive dissonance later in life, where we're telling ourselves stories that just aren't true. And yet, it's a filter that we're looking through, to see the world around us. And we can't we don't see the world as it is we see the world as we are.
And so a lot of this work that we do with the Institute For Aliveness from The INITIATION and cleansing, right, literally cleansing the body working with the practice of abstinence, in this case, abstaining from food, right, so we do long term, juice cleanse, fasting retreats, or from like the I run an 18 month program, as I said, training the doctors of the future to do their own work, right? Because how many practitioners have you been to who you know, they’re fat or their, I don't know, their mood’s a little off or something like that. It's not about knowledge, the doctors of the future will not have knowledge and definitely not knowledge of pharmaceuticals. It will be a deep understanding of how to live a life that's fulfilled with a nervous system that's calm. Alright, how to create more intimacy in all of our relationships, whether that's in a workplace setting, right? So it's kind of dissolving the idea of power structures and hierarchy.
If you have if you're on a power trip, and this is like an honest thing for anyone listening, why, where did that come from? Where did that come from your relationship, often with your father, right and a relationship with authority. And what would be beyond that? What would it feel like to actually be fulfilled because so many people for that, like the idea of fulfillment is so far off in left field.
Because we're so far away from ourselves at the end of the day. Yeah, so that deep breath is a homecoming.
20:19
AS: You know, listening constantly, these conversations, and I have this, this also this thought that someone will that I've heard, it's like, whatever you resist persists. So everybody, you know, you're talking earlier about, like debating politics and having opinions, and not having opinions being really smart. And so what is it gonna take for everyone to get that we all have to do this inner work before we can start solving those external issues? And a lot of people, I feel like, don't feel like they have any inner work to do. And like, even though I do the inner work constantly, I know, I still have more. It's like, the more you do it, the more you know, like how little you know, for example. So I'm curious, being a global citizen, as you are like, what kind of message do you have? Because our world is in a bad way. Right? Nobody's gonna deny that. So I don't know how I format the question. But that's what I'm thinking.
AP: I love it. Yeah, thank you. I'll dive in there. And then I'll go to the three. So what will it take for the world to wake up and realize that our species has devolved? I don't think it will take much when we have people broadcasting on mainstream news, using slurs and having very little sense of formality. Not that informalness is bad, but the level of intellect has dropped quite drastically, specifically over the past 20 to 30 years. And I mean, our slogan at the Institute For Aliveness is holding higher standards for our species, upleveling humanity. So what I do personally, as a global citizen, believe it will take - we have 50 students now in 30 different countries - is pervasive demonstration of what it's like to be an evolved human. So for these Type A go-getter personalities listening, right? If you are someone who's incredibly capable, and very much an overachiever, right? How can you show up and be a model because we don't pander down to the lowest common denominator. Right, we magnetize up to invite people to show up with more. And I think a really key missing element. I mentioned the tribal nature before I mean, I was trained as an anthropologist at the graduate level, is the fact that we have to come back into community on some level.
And I'm sure you've all heard, you're the sum total of the five people you spend the most time around? And so who are you convening with? At what level? What is the quality of the conversation? Is it about the latest movie or social media post? Or work gossip? I don't know, or politics, right? Or is it about the ethos of being human? Is it about doing this deeper work? I think that's a really powerful question. You know, normally people show up and say, oh, what do you do for a living? It's a very common thing for Westerners. You know, in the east, it might be like, Are you married? That's a different quality of question. But in general, what if we showed up and said, What are you working on in your life?
And I've held, I've held circles of strangers, especially during COVID time on Zoom, where no one knows each other, right? So you always have that kind of front, and you're nervous about what people are gonna think of one another? And it's just like, No, you know, what, share your intimate most things here. And I think that actually, things like Alcoholics Anonymous, give a beautiful demonstration of that quality of circle work, where we just show up in vulnerability. And do we have spaces where we can be vulnerable, where there's a bounty of unconditional love, that we can thrust ourselves into. Where it's not about being accepted or not? Right? Because we can be. And so that's something to really think about for people listening. Where are those spaces in your life? And how can you architect more of them? And if you're clueless and have no idea, ask, ask you can write me an email, you can write these guys an email, you can write anyone you can write your best friends and just say like, what can we do to carve out more intimacy and self development? How can we wake up every subsequent day, not just a better human because that's often like disembodied, but literally more involved, more evolved on a level of the nervous system, on a level of synaptic processing on a level of who and how we are automatically at the drop of a hat.
And so often, what this requires is to practice any kind of training, whether it's Brazilian jiu jitsu or training to run a marathon it requires a daily showing up and so what is that for you? I mean, for some it might be Byron Katie, The Work, right for others, you might be looking into the personality patterns that I mentioned.
From Wilhelm Reich great book on that is by Steven Kessler called The Personality Patterns. There's endless ways to do this, the Hoffman process that we liaise with at The Institute For Aliveness. And there's so many ways where you can just say, Okay, I'm ready, like, I'm ready, I want to become more, I want to be this evolution of what humanity is here to become. And so three super concrete things that you can do now that you don't need that community for, that you can do with yourself on your own, is take tremendous responsibility for what goes on in between your ears. No one else owns the real estate of your mind. You and only you design that space.
And so whether that's distancing yourself from media, media campaigns, things that are trying to - psyops in general - trying to make you think in a certain way, taking more time with your eyes closed, eyes closed, roll the eyeballs in and up towards the point between the eyebrows, eyeballs roll in and up and you focus there, you take several deep breaths, you feel the skin, on the forehead and the space between the skin and the skull.
Right, what that does is it actually starts to balance out the secretion of serotonin and melatonin. And if you have happiness problems, or sleeping problems, right that for five minutes on the train somewhere I don't like wherever you are super powerful. Mindfulness essentially, is what I'm advocating here in step one, that you re capture the real estate of your mind.
Second, take care of your body. So whatever that means, maybe, I mean, maybe for some people, it means hitting the gym. Sure, but for me, it's much more about sunshine, sleep in proper hours, eating in fewer hours during the day, that would look like intermittent fasting, right? Hydration, the human body uses and loses three liters of water a day, it's our responsibility to replace that chronic dehydration is the cause of most bad news, moods and irritability, along with constipation, which causes further bad moods, and irritability. So it's an ongoing process.
And then third, I would say detoxification. And so I mean, we live in a more toxic world than we ever have before. And I'm not just talking about cellular detoxification, although I am, I'm talking about detoxification of what's in the mind. And that was the writing practice that I mentioned before. And so through that, right under that whole process, hopefully, we'll be learning to recapture agency over our nervous system, taking care of the mind, taking care of the body, and detoxifying on all levels. And that's also detoxifying people from your life detoxifying relationships that you know, just like, okay, I've tried to magnetize this person up so many times, and they're just not ready. And that's okay, they don't, they're not supposed to be ready now. Right. So you know, just love them. Tell them you'll always be here. But this isn't something where you are going to continue investing weekly, or whatever, whatever kind of relationship it is. If it's your family, of course, you don't have the chance necessarily to leave them. That's work that you've been born to do. But you've been born to do it, because you can do it, there is no challenge you'll ever be presented that's greater than you can achieve.
AS: So, so powerful. This is extremely valuable information. I encourage everyone to listen twice. You traveled all over the world, working with people from all walks of life, from royal families to regular professionals. And you mentioned a lot of CEOs as well. In which countries or cultures Do you think people have things sort of more figured out when it comes to the connection between mind, body and an effective functioning society? And what can we learn from them? Those are my two you can choose.
29:02
AP: Yeah, I mean, I would love to answer that last one. But we don't have an answer. I feel like the Buddhist monks, monks in Bhutan have a lot figured out on a level of being renunciant from society. Right? But when you go and you live like monk on Main Street, there's a quality of innocence that has a potential to be tainted. So it's really about us coexisting and two worlds. And my prediction for the future is that we will get way more polarized and isolated in our human reality - the wild countryside spaces will become that much more wild and country. The digitized, fully technology-based urban spaces will become that much more of concrete jungles. And it will only be the privileged ones like us who will be able to coexist between the two. And so what that takes is a tremendous amount of resilience and agility and everything we've talked about today about priming the nervous system, about learning how to take care of our body about re-taking up the real estate in our mind puts us back in this space, where we will have that agility and that resilience.
30:17
AS: You lead a guided online fasting experience called The INITIATION, can you tell us more about fasting and what benefits it could have for people who want to become stronger leaders?
AP: We've had super like Fortune 100, Fortune 10 company level execs on our fasting program traveling around the world as they're doing it and what they've reported back because that's much more useful than what I could tell you. What they've reported back is that when they enter the boardroom, they have so much more clarity, everyone else gets the three o'clock, five o'clock yawns and sluggishness and whatever, and they're on, their on their mind is on, their presence is there, they're fully able to show up at a higher level of self. And this is something that I use in my life, when I'm in LA, throwing a big red carpet party. You know, I'm there, and I'm five days in fasting because I want to be at my best. And anything that I'm putting in. I mean, we have this big fallacy of food is fuel, and that's the only fuel and yet that disconnects us from our lifeforce energy itself, which is our actual fuel, right? It's how plants grow from sunshine. It's not that humans photosynthesize. But there is energy in existence that we don't have a connection to, right things like morphogenetic fields have only started to be explored in biology. And quantum physics, of course, is showing us so much more about energy than we never knew. So it's when you know, the spiritual sciences and science come together, that we can start to unlock, but the way that I encourage people to experience that is through your own living laboratory of your body. And when you become a scientist in your own body, and don't believe me, verify me, right, then you start to explore actually what energetics are. And so anything from having more energy to having a tremendous amount of mental clarity to showing up being able to show up as the best version of yourself rather than being in action/reaction, and then definitely the cleansing, the detoxification reorienting priorities, about what's important in your life.
And this is the biggest fallacy you guys know this very well, this is the biggest fallacy of someone who has busy disease today. Right? Have you given up the busy story yet, because it's a choice that you're making. And it is direct communication to your nervous system, it is a translation of your value system. And so when you do, when you are ready to give that up, right, there's a whole world beyond that is a world of agency, or you choose, you own your life. And so few people do that today. And I think fasting is a great, it's, I mean, it's called The INITIATION for a reason, right? It's an initiation into that, whether it's leaving a job, or starting a project, or leaving a project or leaving a relationship, or whatever it is, whatever it is that you're needing to detox or reset for. It's an incredible birthright experience to go in there.
AS: Where do we sign up?
AP: Yeah, I'd love to have you both on it’s amazing.
AS: I'd love to ask you how, for like someone like a CEO who has so much and so many people responsible. And you mentioned Fortune 10 companies, which were talking, you know, five, six figures of employee headcount. How do you reconcile the not being busy with the tremendous amount of responsibility that comes with being a leader of an organization that size?
33:16
AP: Yeah, so I mean, I learned lots of lessons from billionaires. I've been fortunate to be surrounded with several over the past few years, and delegation, and having good people that you trust, right, coming truly to that place where you can be receptive to whatever comes rather than needing to boss people around. And so anyone who's at that executive level, there will always be way too many things to do. There will always be way too many things to do, you will never get them all done. And so once we accept that, and we step back and say, Hey, but I want to live a good life. Architect your life, fit in slots for work, be really realistic about what's doable. And then architect that so there are people to support you so that you can make best use of your time and never say again, that you're busy. Make time for what counts and likely it's calling your mother. Right? It's doing those things that you know, just go to the wayside because you prioritize other things. It's drinking more water. It's taking a swim in the ocean, right? It's playing with a child or a puppy. And both of those are medicines, potent medicines. And if you've forgotten the joy of what it's like to be human, then is it worth it being alive? Because that's a decision that we make every single day. Yeah, more synaptic signaling in the prefrontal cortex please. Come back to empathy and come back to a remembrance of as a species, why we're here.
35:04
LP: Andi, you left us speechless for real. For everybody out there listening, you guys, Andrea already told you listen to it again. And I'm gonna say listen to it again and again, because what you shared with us today is this crazy intersection of insight, wisdom, and challenges all at the same time. And I'm going to tell our listeners one of my takeaways today, one of my favorites, is imagine everyone were on your team, it is a new year. And that's a great thing to stick up on your wall or to put on your device to remind you again, imagine if everyone were on your team. Thank you so, so much for sharing all this stuff with us. Now, how can people connect with you? How can they find out what you're doing? How can they get involved?
AP: Yeah, beautiful. And I want to add in just as you say that if we're taking pull quotes that I want all of you to take away are two questions that I incessantly ask Wherever I am, whatever is going on. The questions are what's actually going on here? Right? So if you are in a midst of a fight, or a political debate on TV, or like whatever it is, what's actually going on here? What are the unseen power dynamics at play? Right? Where are people acting out from their place of childhood trauma? What are the things behind the curtain that you're not seeing? Where's the money going? What's actually going on here, what that's doing is re instigating a process of critical inquiry that most modern humans have lost. So what's actually going on here? And then the second one is, what is this really about? What is this really about? Right? And not like what is this really about? But compassionately lovingly to yourself. Because this is a self question. What is this really about? What is this actually about? And that's with that extrinsic, intrinsic emotion where you can say, Okay, this is probably something childhood that is bothering me so much. So what is this really about? Because it's not about XYZ and that person and their story. It's never about the story.
So please go to andix.ai - send me a message there. I'd love to hear from you if you've listened to this, this is a very new audience for me.
And as I said before, we're super open to collaboration; me personally, or the work that I do through The Institute for Aliveness. You're welcome to join The INITIATION. We run every month a fasting retreat, and it's really that come home to self moment. And yeah, we’re Institute For Aliveness on Instagram and Facebook. Theinstititeforaliveness.com
And, yeah, yeah, we have lots of work that we do in developing nations as well as in royal family nations and small country governments. I also do a lot of work with the third smallest microstate in the world. Liberland where, where we're building a new country, essentially, on blockchain, fully decentralized. And really, all of my work is about building the future of humanity, whether it's in a vertical of physical health or mental health or societal health. It's structural reestablishment of a paradigm that works for us to be more human not to develop as a species, but to truly learn what it means to be human.
AS: Amazing. So thank you so much for being here. I want to know more about everything you just told us.
AP: Yeah. So glad. Thank you.
LP: Guys, we hope you've enjoyed today's episode. And if you did, please share it with your friends and colleagues who also have to navigate this leadership stuff. As you can see, this project is about to be a mini masterclass in every episode, best part, it's free. So if you like it, please do us a favor and take a screenshot, share it on social with the hashtag 100CEO, that's 100CEO. That way we can see things and share it in our stories. And finally, if you've got some insights you'd like to share and you're a CEO, we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at 100CEOproject.com or on LinkedIn at the 100CEOProject. Until next time, keep leading by example.
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Hosted by: Laurie Pillow, Andrea Spirov
Writing and research: Laurie Pillow, Andrea Spirov
Edited by: Laurie Pillow
Produced by: Laurie Pillow, Andrea Spirov
