Clint Murphy  00:03

Welcome to the pursuit of learning podcast. I’m your host, Clint Murphy. My goal is for each of us to grow personally, professionally, and financially, one conversation at a time. To do that, we will have conversations with subject matter experts across a variety of modalities. My job, as your host, will be to dig out those golden nuggets of wisdom that will facilitate our growth. Join me on this pursuit. In the last two and a half years, a lot of us have had mental health challenges. And whether it’s regret, or other emotions, we haven’t necessarily had a toolkit for how to deal with them. In today’s conversation with Dr. Bill Howatt. We discuss how we can live today for tomorrow’s emotional well being. We tackle how to use micro skills to approach our mental health in a way that will make us stronger, and able to deal with the challenges that we have in every day. This was an absolutely enjoyable and fascinating conversation. And I hope that you enjoy it with us.

Good morning, Bill. Welcome to the pursuit of learning. Before we dive into your book, I’d love to start with, can you give the listeners that may not have met you a brief bio and history of you so we have an idea of who we’re talking to as we go through your book this morning.

Bill Howatt  01:52

Thanks very much, Clint. Nice to be here to have the opportunity to have a conversation with you. So a quick bio.  How I typically introduce myself is in three buckets. I found that the easiest way to organize my mind.

Bucket number one is someone who spent over 30 years in a clinical setting seeing patients in a clinical environment researching an area of work mental health, started out in forensics, psychology, moved into addictive disorders, did a lot of work around supporting folks and dealing with mental illness and mental health issues. So that was one bucket.  So crazy illusion, I know something about mental health after 30 years.

The middle bucket is I’ve spent a bunch of time also in the corporate world too. So sometimes people think us academics and counselors and psychologists live in you know a different world which we do. We have different perceptions of how things and workplaces go but I decided to challenge myself to work in a workplace. I spent 12 years on Wall Street and various consulting roles. I’ve filled in everything from you know, supporting the role of a chief of staff, to a COO role, to HR roles, leadership roles, and was Chief Research at Morneau Shepell, which is now been acquired by TELUS, chief of research of the Conference Board of Canada, of a business and I’m involved in digital mental health development too. Most recently a new company, we have a start up right now we’re really excited about called MFIQ around teaching folks how to develop mental fitness habits.

And then finally, the last bucket, which I think is the most important, why I like doing this. So I live my entire life with a mental illness. We don’t come with science. So I’m the kid who grew up in the foster home, I’m the kid who failed grade two, I’m the kid who couldn’t read or write til he was eighteen. And so when I write and I create, and I think about things, Iactually look at it through that lens that it’s important for context too,  is what is mental health and what is mental illness. And we probably get into that some today. But I look at it through a lens of helping people learn how to regulate their emotions, because I think it’s a skill we don’t teach people.

Clint Murphy  03:58

Well, why don’t we dive right into that? Because the teaching aspect is something that I saw when I read the book as well was that the emotional regulation is something that is not necessarily taught inside the school system. And you brought this one up when you were looking at it through the lens of the reputation and something that you wrote was “something that damages our reputation is how we react to challenging situations emotionally”. And like you I don’t believe emotional literacy is necessarily mainstream skill like reading or writing. And I do love that my youngest son, who has some of the same mental health challenges that I do is as early as grade three started with emotional regulation coaching. But I recognize he’s lucky that I don’t think is mainstream,  Bill. So why is this so important and why do so many adults still not understand their emotions? How to cope with them and regulate them?

Bill Howatt  05:17

It’s a great question. So if we step back and think about what we are as human beings, we’re pack creatures, we like feeling a part of a pack, we like feeling accepted by the social folks that were around. So many times what many of us whether we know it or not, we are actually behaving in a way to be approved and accepted by other individuals. And sometimes that means we will actually not display what we’re really feeling so that we can actually fit in. And so we’ll, you know, have that kind of mindset we’re supposed to behave a certain way.

So for example, many individuals think they’re supposed to be positive, they think they’re supposed to be calm, they’re supposed to be able to not get angry.  Anger’s a bad emotion, talking bad about other people. So some people think that’s not appropriate, or they may set some boundaries around what they’re doing and how they’re actually interacting with other individuals. The challenge is, that’s theoretically of how we need to behave when things are going pretty good. But the problem is, is that many of us may not have actually understand that whenever we get hit by stress, we have a difference between what we want and what we have. Physiology and our brain, the fight or flight response kicks off and our vagus nerve kicks off and cortisols and all those wonderful things happen. Well, some of us may actually not be trained or prepared once we go into our fight or flight and reaction system and get caught in dysregulation. And we can’t control what’s happening in our environment, then we go into a self protection mode. And the self protection mode is to actually protect yourself from how we feel.

Very specific example. How many people do you know, Clint, go to work, work really, really hard, don’t feel validated at work, don’t feel purpose at work, don’t feel that they’re really respected, may not feel like content per se but they’re there because they need a paycheck. And they want to try to figure out how to develop a meaningful career for themselves. They build up stress all day, at the end of the day, they feel depleted, feel empty, and then they’re caught in these unpleasant emotions. And when they’re caught in these unpleasant emotions, that’s what they call the dysregulation in that state. This is why what we do many of us without realizing as human beings, we look for feel good behaviors, like some food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, videos, buying, we’re looking for things that we can do, because we can’t control our mind what’s happening in the world. So we look for feel good behaviors that are just to try to help us numb that feeling that we have, and when we’re caught in that numb. So what I want to try to do more, and I think you actually said it, is focusing on interpersonal skills, because what is mental illness, mental illness is intra personal disruption, of thoughts and feelings, that creates interpersonal disruptions with other people.

So when I see patients who come to me with anxiety, or depression or other issues, they’re still highly functioning individuals, they dress themselves, they figured out how to use Uber, people need to understand mental illness has nothing to do with IQ, or it has to do with how they’re experiencing the world that can impact a degree of functioning. And so mental health is basically for the Layperson to think about it.

Mental illness is functionality. Mental health is not mental illness, mental health as a percentage of time we spend in a state of flourishing where we feel good charged positive emotions versus unpleasant emotions. And what I’m trying to teach in this book is unpleasant emotions aren’t our enemy. We need them. Genetically, we need fear. We need regret. We need anger. We need shame. Because all these are in our DNA. You don’t have to teach you any of these emotions.  They are neuro chemicals, but emotions only give you information. They don’t tell you what to do, or what to think.

Many human beings when they’re caught in anger, believe that anger, or that experience that iis happening right now is what is making them punch someone, throw something. But the reality is that no human being makes you do anything. But here’s the problem. If you have a mental illness, or your strain of mental health, your reactivity is going to be much higher, and your capacity to put on your neurological break is lower and if you happen to be in neuro divergent, meaning ADHD, ADHD is an executive functioning disorder. It’s not a emotional disorder, it’s how you’re actually processing, routing and interpreting and decision making. So you have someone who’s a neuro divergent, for example, that’s struggling with their mental health, that can become very complexing. Because one is processing, and one is emotional regulation. So it’s almost like it can actually double. I can tell you speaking, firsthand, living my entire life being ADHD, auditory, auditory and visual dyslexic, and having anxiety and trauma from years of childhood is that I have a tremendous appreciation of how the powerful frontal lobe, the midbrain, and developmentally in our basal ganglia can store a lot of habits that are programming that are self survival habits that may not be in our long term best interest. If we don’t understand the map versus this or experiences.

Clint Murphy  11:01

My gosh, there’s so much to unpack there. And I also identify with what you’re saying as someone who’s lived with ADHD my whole life and has had a decent amount of mental challenges that I’m I’m working my way through and depression and anxiety being two of them. So completely identify with what you’re talking about. And what I read and a lot of the tools that you bring up in the book are things that I’ve been learning and using on my own journey. So it was very appreciated. And so for the listeners, what we’re talking about is No Regrets, How to Live Today for Tomorrow’s Emotional Well-being. So that you can find that we’ll have Dr. Bill’s book in the show notes and a link for you to go to. So when we start, where I’d love to start going backwards now and then we’ll work our way through a lot of what you were just talking about is all the way at the beginning of at the end of the introduction, where you said, “The end goal for emotional well being is not an event, it’s a lifelong pursuit, no different than maintaining physical health. If you want to be physically healthy, you’ll learn to push yourself make hard choices, such as exercising, controlling your diet, versus the easy choice of doing nothing more than sitting on the couch in front of the TV. Emotional well being is the same. It doesn’t happen randomly. It happens when we make it a priority and do the work required to make it so.  The long term benefits are increased contentment, happiness and fulfillment, the holy grail of human experience. If you’re open to this possibility, you may discover in a relatively short time, you can learn to have all you need to experience happiness from within.”  So when you think about that, and you think about what you’ve written in this book, and then the tools and the exercises that people can do, why do you think it is that we focus so much on physical health, in society, with our children, with people in the workplace, but very little is done around the concept and idea of mental health?

Bill Howatt  13:04

Yeah, I think I’m gonna take a crack at it. It’s a complex answer. I think it’s because of allopathic medicine, traditionally, what we’ve actually prioritized in population health. Now, if you think back just in the 1960s, you know, what the life would be for transgender, someone who had gender identity, you know, they were mostly back in those times having challenges, meaning, mental health is a very, in my mind, an evolving, nascent maturing practice, where what’s happening is, is a mental illness. And some people may or may not agree with me on what I’m about to say, other doctors. I don’t think there’s an absolute cure. I think it’s symptom management. I don’t think that once you have anxiety or depression, you know, if based on state dependent learning, based on situations, based on your resource management, based on your practices, based on how you manage your emotion, you could have a relapse, same as addictive disorders. I think what we’re starting to realize the more and more we’re realizing it is that this is not genetic. This doesn’t It can happen to anybody. In fact, one out of three Canadians in their lifetime will experience a mental health concern of some sort. It’s now starting to become more normalized, that human beings are more fallible. So the reality is, blood pressure was pretty easy to measure.  Cancers, so you can have very absolute diagnostic testing. Now if you realize what we’re really doing in mental illness when I see patients is subjective. And some will disagree, but it’s what the person is reporting and what others are reporting to validate their symptom load and what happens when we do is we get our baseline and then we actually start to put in how what type of therapeutic approaches can we do to mitigate them and the some of it could be pharmaceuticals. It has come play a place in symptom relief. I prescribed for many, many people is that they can be so so short term. It not doesn’t necessarily have to be a long term, it can actually help people regulate.  My challenges is the concept that mental illness is something you just give a pill for. That’s not, in my mind, proper efficacy, because we all have mental health to regulate. So if I had somebody who was you know, had an impairment, mental illness is an impairment, so if I’m a diabetic, and I try to explain to people what I live with is for me, my mental illness is like, my sugars in my insulin.  If I don’t get this stuff right, if I’m not working on my mental fitness, if I’m not working on my emotions, I could be off. So the answer to your question is, society is we haven’t really got parameters because mental illness is being talked about as if something’s wrong versus actually understanding there’s, that doesn’t mean something wrong with you. Like diabetes I mean, that’s to me, you have a chronic disease, mental illness is a chronic disease. That happens usually, in many people happens to things that happen to them their childhood experiences, neurological development could be genetic, more susceptible to it. Or it could be exposure to a rape or a traumatic event that could lead to some issues around post traumatic stress, etc. But what I think what that lay person needs to understand, a diabetic can function very fine and there is this world if they get the proper treatment and follow their physical health plan. We haven’t gotten to the point yet as society where I can come up and say hey, Clint, what’s your mental health plan? What’s your mental fitness? What are you doing to keep your How do you keep those positive emotions like the losada ratio, three positive emotions to every one negative emotion, keep that up, you’re going to spend more time in flourishing than languishing. If you can spend 60 to 70% of your life in positive emotions, that’s pretty good. Because ultimately, what good mental health is, is learning how to live well, when you feel unwell, because being a human being, you’re gonna feel unwell, there’s just going to be shitty days, but there’s going to be shitty moments, and why the heck we put into our culture, we’re supposed to feel good all the time. That’s not realistic. It’s not the human experience. And so we can learn. And that’s why I picked regret, and we’ll talk more about it.  Regret is the most powerful transformational negative emotion we have, if we pay attention to it,

Clint Murphy  17:32

And so a lot of things in there, and two that really jumped out at me. One is the lack of visibility. And so when we think about physical ailments, a lot of them can be visible, or they can be measurable. Whereas with our mental health, it’s not necessarily easy to see, nor measure. In the second one, which is why I think conversations like we’re having today are important is people have a perception that if they report it, or they talk about it, they’ll be perceived a certain way, the stigma, if you will, of mental health. Now, I don’t think that’s gone. I think it’s still there. But the more of us who are willing to be open about our challenges, and able to demonstrate, hey, look, I’m still living a highly functioning life despite depression, despite ADHD, there are ways to do it. Have you been seeing over the last few years with more conversation around mental health during COVID? Have you been seeing an improvement in that area or would you say that the stigma is still strong, and people aren’t necessarily willing to talk about the challenges they deal with in their lifestyle?

Bill Howatt  18:50

I’ll tell you what I’m seeing? It’s a great question. So the answer is stigma’s still strong, peer, organizational and self. Part of the challenge is, is employers I believe many employers, so probably 70% to 75% of employers today are doing something with intention for mental health. Here’s what the rub is. They’re doing stuff, planning it, not saying oh, let’s be very careful to generalizations. Okay. There’s planning and then doing stuff. What do I mean by that? Hey, let’s do bow. Let’s talk . Very great day starts. But my concern is like, that’s wonderful on that day. So what about the other 100 364 days? Okay, that’s great. But we can be talking about this all the time. Sending someone off to a resiliency workshop. Great, wonderful. But if you get on a do a resiliency workshop for one or three hours, that’s equivalent to getting on a Stairmaster for 25 minutes and thinking you’re ripped. Like there’s no habit development of this, it’s information. One workout doesn’t make you fit. We have to realize that learning mental fitness, mental hygiene, cognitive hygiene requires repetition over and over and over. So my rub is to answer the point, very specifically your question, employers, and this is gonna get to it, employers are planning more, they’re doing more.  Why we’re not getting the impact we need, why we’re still having short term disability, why we still have stigma, why we still have people not accessing services like they need to, because we know the ones when they do are getting pretty good outcomes. Like when we just finished a study with CPA and Mental Health Commission, many people who access psychological services tremendously benefit for symptom relief. And then that gets that doesn’t mean they’re cured, that gets them the opportunity to now to feel they’re more emotionally able to start to develop the skills for quality of life, right? It gets them out the door, but we’re not spending enough time in the check. So Plan, Do, Check, Act. We need to spend more time and see.  Slow down, less is more is what we do working. And so I think what happens is employers with good intention, so like a big stew, you’ll hear employers when I work with larger, yeah, we’ve done that we’ve done that we’ve done that. And my response is, however, do you know if it’s working? Well, we had we had our 80% of our people did it? Yeah. Okay, that’s cool. Did it work? Well, how do we find that? Well, we have to sit with them. And seeing from level one, there’s knowledge. Level two, understanding.  Level three, how’s that helping them in their jobs and their quality of life. And so until, Clint, we slow down, less is going to be more We do a few things well.  Somebody goes, what do you mean? Well, in my role when I work with the large, large organizations, globally now, is they say to me, Dr. Bill, what do you think we need to do? And I say, if you’re doing these three things right, right now we can we have a foundation, they go what’s that.  One, do you know what the employee experience is in regards to all the psychosocial factors, stressors that are happening in the workplace, and the hazards, that’s all the emotions, fatigue, a lot. And all those programs, protective factors, you get your baseline to know what’s working, not working so you’re not guessing.  You got the employee’s voice. Number two, do you have a proactive mental fitness plan where you’re helping employees learn how to develop skills to self regulate, and by the way, the environment is a part of their experience. So this is not just sending them off to meditate. This is helping them develop mental fitness skills. But if you’re dropping rocks on their head and screaming at them, and yelling at them, and not providing a psychological, safe workplace, I don’t care what mental fitness plan they do, it’s not going to work. So you need to pay attention to helping them develop those intrapersonal skills and interpersonal skills. And then taking accountable for what you can control, like a CEO can stand up and say to SLT team, hey, we’re not going to scream at our employees, hey, we’re going to pay attention to our employees, we’re going to learn to listen with humility, we’re gonna have the courage for them to possibly think different than we are. And we’re going to hear their voice. That can be done in organizations. And the last thing is, becoming a leader today is hard. You look at any organization, only 30% of the entire population, whatever will stick their hand up to want to be a leader.  Being a leader now, the future of work will require leaders to have more skills and emotional well being and emotional regulation and co-regulation.  It’s not going to be just task orientated, you actually need to like people, you actually have to be somewhat interested in how they feel and experience the world. And so let’s not assume that leaders who don’t have self knowledge, self care and self awareness, because Clint, if I’m your leader, and I’m emotionally in turmoil, myself, and fear, and I’m living in a world where I’m concerned about making mistakes, and if I make mistakes, I’m not good enough. So I’m caught in shame as a leader, and I’m worried about not being imperfect. And that shame holds empathy for me, for myself, and from you, what kind of experience are you gonna have, you’re gonna have someone who’s edgy driven, versus a leader who’s able to regulate their emotions, be open to the possibility that Clint, you’re going to have issues at the most inconvenient times, because I have something I need to get done the next two hours. And this is not the most convenient time. But guess what, that’s what leaders sign up for. They sign up to deal with, to facilitate, to help employees work together to achieve the organization’s Northstar. And so becoming a psychological safe leader is learning how to move from what I’m doing to how and if I can learn how to move from what to how, and that’s a skill so if you get good data, which I’m doing, I support my employees mental fitness, and I start to build psychological safe leaders. I get those three things right. Then all my supports like employment assistance program, extended benefits, crisis management, all the things you have put in a good plan. Those are great supports, but we need to focus more employers upstream on prevention. And the reason why I write books like this Clint, and why I’m doing what I’m doing is because I work with so many organizations that I want to make sure it’s clear, and this other group, so I think you’ll get this one. Lots of employers have gyms and gym and buy gym memberships. But did you know that you actually need to do something to get fit

Clint Murphy  25:34

The yeah, Yeah, buying your fitness world membership, and then not going to fitness world is not going to work. The So why do you think it is that leadership has been evolving so much to the point where the EQ skills and emotional intelligence, we’ve been talking about it now, let’s say 30, 40 years.  Daniel Goleman, I think really popularized it. And I want to say that was in the 70s, 80s. But it’s really flourishing more and more. And like you’re saying, going to becoming more and more important as we move forward? Why is that? Why is it so much more prevalent for young leaders today than it was a decade ago? 20 years ago?

Bill Howatt  26:22

Great. So we have decided as a society, and how we parent, how we raise and how we actually want to evolve, to be inclusive, include different all the stuff I believe, 100% we needed to do, but when we raise our children, I was raised fear was a medicine. Okay, me like you, you know, you could get spanked, you know, like fear was a parenting weapon, getting spanked, grabbed by the scruff. I mean, in even in junior high, you’d see the VP grabbing people by the ear, running them up the hole, that was common practice and more where I grew up. But what happens is we started to evolve. And when I got children, it was you don’t touch your children, you don’t spank your children. And I think what we forgot to do is the lessons verbal skill. So we went to a society of bribery, where we just give we bribe and we gave and we forgot how to develop difficult conversations. That’s okay for us to struggle and it’s okay for us to fail. We kind of you know, we forgot some of these basic skills, because we didn’t actually have them. I’m not saying fear is right. I’m not saying and of that’s right. You know, someone has been abused. I kind of like, I don’t like hurting people. But I do think there is a been a skills gap. And as we evolved into society, where you’re allowed to ask why. See, I was on I never even thought to ask the question, why until I was 40 years old. I played University football. And this is a true story. In my 10th year of coaching University football, I was doing graduate work, and I was working. I coached the offensive line, I had one of my linemen came up to me at the end of practice, and he said to me, Hey, Coach, why do we really have to run? And I looked at him, I said holy moly, what a question. So I called the head coach over and I said, I go, Hey, coach, and his name was Sonny Wolf, an amazing head coach. I call him over and I said to him, why do they run and I don’t know exactly what he said. When I asked this question, I was kind of ham and cheesing it. He says different times we’ve evolved, we need to answer the why questions. So I think what a part of what’s happening is the expectation, the emotional, how I feel, KPMG and all these big consulting houses, and you can go to any of them, they’ll talk about what’s a primary recruiting attraction for the new workforce is employers who care about how they feel. Think about that, it’s not just a paycheck anymore. What the great resignation, if anyone’s paying attention and quiet quitting, that is a value based decision that people are making, that they want to live their life, and not actually work for 40 years and give everything away. And you know, and you think about what happens if you don’t have healthy of nothing. So it’s a lot of people are realizing is that, holy moly. I started my job with health. I went to get wealth, I gave up my health. Now I’m 65 and I got no health. So what’s my retirement going to be like? I spent 40 years to get wealth to retire for what? I’m already sick. So there’s a my when I look at my children, that then they’re in their 20s, their frame of reference about owning a house and white picket fence. They’re in a different mindset. They want to have experiences.  They want to enjoy each day. They want to have a life. They know money’s important.  They know a bunch so I’m not trying to say that, you know, they’re entrepreneurs. I’m one of them and kind of, you know, thinking that way. But it’s we’re in a different time. And I think employers need to understand that. And I’ll say this to you quickly to think about and get your reaction. If I go to you, and I do this and I say do you treat employees better than photocopiers and they look at me go, course we do. I said what if I say you don’t and they say to me, what do you mean, Bill? Well, they get access to a photocopier. That’s money. Yeah. To get access to employees, money. They go, yeah, photocopier, you locked the door, insure it for water damage, etc. Yeah, benefits that kind of thing. Employees or benefits, protect them, sick time, disability, all that stuff. And here’s where it gets interesting.  With the photocopier, what’s the source of energy that drives the photocopier? Electricity? What’s the source of energy that drives the workforce? Don’t tell me money, that’s access. Don’t tell me benefits, that’s insurance. What’s the juice, that’s a culture, a place where people want to come with purpose, they feel value, that’s emotion.  See, engagement’s all about creating pleasant emotions, and mitigating unpleasant.  Psych safety meant preventing mental harm promoting mental health. Now, interesting, back to the photocopier, some lovely human being comes every 30 days to do preventative maintenance, whether the machine needs it or not. What’s the preventative maintenance for a lot of employees, we wait until they break, and we tell them to go to EAP or worksite safe.  Well, we got to get ahead of this, Clint.  We’ve got to start realizing mental fitness, psych-safe leaders, getting that and paying attention to the culture and behaviors can create a place where employees feel psychologically safe, welcome, included, drive fear out and remove silence. What are we really doing? We’re creating positive emotion. Yes, emotions matter. Because employees that have more positive emotions will be more potential, they’ll have more potential, more productivity potential, less likely to leave, less likely have mental injuries, mental harm. This is all about emotion, if we can get it right. And I mean, I’m not I’m simplifying. I mean, you know, I know. Here’s the other thing that’s really important. And I apologize for saying a lot. You can everyone feeling really well, Clint. But if you don’t hit performance results, it doesn’t matter, you still got to you got to balance hitting results, you got to get your results. So it’s important because if everyone’s super happy, and you’re not making results, there’s no there’s there’s no jobs left. So you have to figure that how out.

Clint Murphy  32:03

That is the key right there is if you’re able to hit the results, while being a workplace, that people thrive in, feel safe and enjoy coming to, your turnover’s low, your engagement is high, and you ought to be more likely to hit those results. But it’s a completely different mind shift from historical leader, let’s call it historical leadership models. The And you nailed something when you were talking about your kids. And as I think about my my boys, they’re 14 and 11. And the oldest playing offensive line. So you know, you could be coaching them someday if you’re still coaching at university. So the old model, we graduate, we go to school, we buy a house, we get married, work till 65, have a good retirement fund.  Part of the problem for this young generation is that model doesn’t even work anymore, the ability to come out of college and get a good job – lower.  The ability to buy a house – almost gone.  And where I’m speaking from Canada, Vancouver, but your ability to buy a house – pretty diminished. And and you go down that list, my ability to get to 65 and have money for retirement – gone.  Now at 70, 75, you start to look at it and you say well wait a second, I’m going to I’m going to work until I’m 75. And my life expectancy is 80? Where’s the rub? And so I see a lot of young people saying, well, if that’s the if that’s the timeline I have, then what I do in that timeline, I need to enjoy it every day. I need to have those experiences, because it’s I’m not going to get all these white picket fences or two and a half kids and so what you’re seeing in your children and I’m seeing already in mine and their future is what worked for my generation, and I may have been one of the last where it worked isn’t working anymore. And so they’re shifting how they deal with life.

Bill Howatt  34:23

Yeah, I agree 100% with you. And I think one of the one of the challenges for employers is is that even the lifecycle when we talk about retention now, you’re not really, in my opinion, like a lot employers that are paying attention. It’s a law of G meaning the lifecycle of a lot of businesses under 15 years, if you pay attention to you know, turnover and mergers and startups and fails. There’s a lot of volatility, you know, like they’ve been the original Ben Franklin companies.  Well, there’s none left. So if you kind of look at it, lots has happened over the time. So lifecycle of employe and when I work with CHROs, and I say, What is the lifecycle ofan employee? In other words, if we can think about if we can have our turnover and pay attention to what the North Star is, that we can actually really help in understanding, what can we actually fit into someone’s experience to help that block that they want to go to the next block. And I was thinking about this, if you look at a lot of CVs, I’m pretty sure you probably talked to a lot of people, Clint, go, Hey, five year block, what percentage of your workforce is going to be here for block one, what percent of your workforce are gonna be here for block? It’s a different way of thinking about it. So if I have block one, what am I going to pay attention to? For the first year, I’m going to pay attention a lot around our culture, our values, psychological onboarding, creating of space, do I understand their career development paths, because not everybody wants to be the CEO. Then you have people try your high potential talent, you have your A talent, you have your B talent, people can categorize it. See, I’ve always seen myself as a B, I don’t consider myself super, super brilliant. I just think I really, really good work ethic, because I’ve been dealing with a disability my entire life. And so what what I feel is I outwork a lot of people, like I’m a grinder, I’m am old left wing grinder goes up and down the boards.  I grind. There’s a lot of people that. are like, I’m just . When I worked in Wall Street for 12 years, I was in awe with how smart they were. But because I had a few PhDs, I created the illusion I was smart. But these people were really smart. And so what happens is, is that you, we have a different way of, in my mind an opportunity to be thinking about the employee experience to your point, and helping them create those experiences. And I think that what you’re saying is really critically important. What experiences do we want them to have in the first five years to earn the right to get them for the next five years? And what’s the in that sec, block two from five to 10? What do we want? And then for block three, and then block four and block five? Well, you’re not going to get a lot to block five.  This this math is not there, you’re not having many people.  A, is your business going to be around for 25 years? It’d be awesome if it is. But statistically, the math is not on your side, you’re gonna be there for 25 years. So I think we need to rethink the employee experience. And when you come down to what is the employee experience really about? It’s how do I feel about where will I go? And really, ultimately, another way to think about it too, Clint, and I say this to leaders all the time, what percentage of your work, what percentage of your workforce are coming for purpose, value and feel included? What percent are coming for a paycheck, and those paycheck folks are often languishing, discouraged, and through neuroplasticity programming and learned helplessness, they actually they don’t know there’s an if you don’t know there’s a possibility to feel different. That’s where you get stuck, because it to go right back to what you said earlier. We don’t teach people interpersonal skills, and we don’t support them to develop it. Because at 59 years old, I had to go through, like the pandemic was actually pretty good for me because I had to slow down to stop and deal with me. I wasn’t just out on an airplane all the time and creating an illusion I had because it was Dr. Bill, and it was Bill and everything. And Dr. Bill knows what’s going on. But Bill if you if you know what I was laying down as someone with a mental illness, like always worried about being good enough, because that’s all the programming I had in my life from being a kid and being able to slow down and focus on me was there’s no ending of this. I mean, I’m not there yet. I’m just saying I want to make the point is that I think the fragility of emotion in the human experience is pretty can be fragile, doesn’t take a whole lot. You know, that old expression, we’re two meals from revolution, like we if we can get human beings it’s, we can get stressed. You know, death by suicide is happening all the time. It’s because people get caught in emotions, where they actually want the pain to stop. It’s not about dying, it’s stopping the pain. So these conversations, we need to have them more and doesn’t mean anyone’s broken. Just means they’re experiencing symptoms, like you break your arm doesn’t mean that you’re broken. We know how to fix arms. We know how to help people get through emotional flus. But if you don’t know what’s possible, and you think that’s going to be your entire life, then you’re in a pickle.

Clint Murphy  39:20

Sp let’s pivot and we’ll start to get into some of the ways people can deal with this. And so as you said, we can use a plethora of different emotions, we’re really going to zone in on regret as a powerful one, but what we learn can be applied to others as well. And so the first part for the first question on that on regret itself is a three parter for you. Like to make it easy on you, what’s the common definition of regret that we’ll be working with today? And can you share the difference between and I thought this was wonderful. Living with regret, versus having regret because that’s really what we’re trying to do is flip from living with it, to having it. And then doing something with it is my understanding when that I took out of it. So So I’ll pass it back to you.

Bill Howatt  40:08

Yeah. So regret is a it is something that happens to us automatically. So for example, let’s use this scenario, you’re in a relationship with someone you deeply care for. You have an issue where something comes up and you react, you say something or you do something, you don’t listen. And they come to you and say, Oh, I don’t trust you, or I have this issue. And because of your neurology, you get into reactivity and get into defensiveness, and you don’t listen, and you’re trying to, you know, you’re not owning your behavior, for example, and all sudden, they break up with you. And then they leave. And then you’re sitting there pondering what just happened to me. Someone was with me I really loved.  One conversation, we spent years together, and this one conversation, I didn’t meet their need, and then they don’t trust me now which, and they left me. So you sit there, and you replay it in your head, and you believe if I only would have said this, you made a mistake. And you’re sitting there with that mistake, and that mistake now is the point where all the emotions of pain and grief and all that. So you get caught in that. And so what happens is there’s a moment where you can actually stay in that regret, and replay that. I call it in the book the regret snare, you can go self medicate, you can hide, you can replay this and, and there’s some people that have things they’ve done in their life they regret for their entire life. Wholesome, it defines you as a person and you get caught there.  Where what can happen, though, with a wonderful thing about regret is you can use that what you call mistake as an opportunity to learn, to grow. So that in the future, if you’re in the exact same situation with another partner, and they come up to you, and they say, I don’t trust you, you’ve developed skills to realize that instead of reacting, let’s sit and listen deeply understand what their concerns are, and can stay there until I know I am 100% convinced, not only do I understand, but they understand I understand to take so that person feels validated, and then you can move forward versus defensiveness, you can own your behavior.  They may still make a choice because the thing about relationships, you choose them, they choose you. It’s not a need. It’s a choice. So that kind of thing is, so when you’re caught in that, regret can be an opportunity. We’re always going to have regret.  there’s no like regret, I say no regrets as a title of the book, however, the point being is I want people when they have a regret, they don’t need to live with regret forever.  They can learn from their mistakes to grow. But you’re always going to have regrets, you’re always going to make mistakes, because you’re not perfect, you’re always gonna go, wow, I could have done that different. But there’s two types of regret. There’s one form of regret from when you make a mistake, which I talked about in the book like that breakup. And the other form is, well, I wanted to go to university, or I wanted to go on this trip.  Life goes by very fast, and the what we know that creates some of the most emotional challenging pain for people that that how that impacts them is the things they didn’t try. So in that, going back to my relationship example. If you were trying to love somebody, and you’re not perfect, and you had an emotional reaction, but you believe you were trying, with the possibility you’re going to make mistakes, we’re not going to be perfect.  That that experience, you don’t need to have that define you if you develop the skills, but you need to have the how your brain works. That’s one of the things I talk in the book about, how to navigate your brain, how to navigate your emotions, how to navigate your thoughts. These micro skills, that it can give you the tools to be able to manage an emotion like regret or any other emotions. So you can move from dysregulation to regulation where you can start to choose who you want to become versus feeling the mistakes you make in your life to find who you are and will become and I feel that this book, the reason I wrote it is as a part of my mental fitness series. The first book I wrote on stop hiding was around fear. Second book I wrote around cured loneliness was around authentic emotions and loneliness and isolation. And this one is around no regrets.  Now pause for a minute, Clint, and think about what holds a lot of people in languishing and stuck emotionally.  Fear. Well, why do I stay in the job? Well, I won’t get another one. Why do I stay with someone I don’t love?   I won’t get Fear, money, some fear relationship. I don’t feel like I have lots of fuse Folks feel isolated and they don’t have a relationship with themselves. But then emotions, dealing with these powerful unpleasant emotions or regret I think, is one that many people get stuck in. From all the years of clinical and I think during COVID, there’s lots of regret people have. about. And that’s why some of the, I believe regret is one of the engines that has driven some of the great resignations.  People regret it, that they were stuck. And now they made changes and moved. Because they didn’t want to they didn’t want to feel like I’m in a job, I can do something different.  That future, I want to try something different. So they’re acting on it, and versus getting stuck in it.

Clint Murphy  45:25

Yeah, I had another guest who said that they would rephrase those two terms and great resignation, they changed to great reflection. And people started to reflect, well, what do I really want in life? What purpose do I want? What values? Where do I want to be that fulfills them all? And it was more a quiet contemplation of well, I’m going to go to I’m going to go search out where I really should be.  And so people took the time to think about that. And so you mentioned in there, and there’s so many things to chew on and play with. the I mean, the whole concept of emotions, negative loops, I always think of my life in terms of three biggest changes, one of them was learning to shut off negative loops or learning to shut off my monkey mind. And that was for sure one of the biggest life changes I ever had. And to some extent, that’s where you talk about the ,and you mentioned it, was the snare, the regret snare, that we get stuck in that loop. And the only way out of that loop is through accepting and releasing the regret and or it could be emotional, whatever we want it to be in our loop. What does that look like for people, Bill, and maybe we can jump into the first tool, which is realization because unless we realize that we’re in that loop, or we’re in that snare, we’re not going to find our way out of it.

Bill Howatt  47:07

100%.  of you are I am  Happy to answer that. So that we call that self awareness or self knowledge, right. And so if you don’t know what regret is, or understand what emotions are, or, or understand a name and negative emotions, actually not the worst thing in the world for you. And then once you start realizing what you’re doing and regret. So for example, replaying things over and over and over or, you know, or trying to actually, you know, I don’t know if I use the word self medicate. But that’s basically what people will do is, they might get caught in at risk behaviors to try to numb. I do worry a lot of people are living in a state of numbness.  They’re trying to numb themselves because of all the unpleasant emotions they don’t know how to deal with and regret being one. So the whole concept of regret snare is to give someone an opportunity to normalize, that it’s normal for somebody who gets stuck and regret and regret is driving their behaviors. And what the challenge with this is, some of this can be done at an unconscious level. So once you start developing habitually habits, that you actually become your formula for feeling good.  Not so much the chase is around focus, hyper focus, and maybe necessarily just on the regret, you’re hyper focusing on ensuring you feel okay, so that self soothing of your emotions, the chase happens, whether it’s gambling, or for some not saying it to hell, or alcohol, or drugs or buying, it’s things that people will do, or go buy stuff that they may or may not need.  It’s a way to try to move towards positive emotions.  It’s a way to escape unresolved issues. I still feel not good about it. And the thing about unpleasant emotions, you know, they can compound it. You could have regret. You could have guilt.  You could have shame. You could have grief.  You can have numerous different emotions happening at one time.  Around one event too, and none of these emotions by the way, take any training to learn how to do because they’re all this neuro chemicals that if we don’t understand what’s happening, that we those those kind of bring down our energy. And if we’re actually not looking, understanding how there could be opportunities to learn from those, then they become like the hot stove. I’m trying to figure out how to escape them, and not paying attention to the damage I may be creating for myself, for others to escape my unpleasant emotions, right? So I start using family money for gambling, or alcohol, or other things. And I rationalize I need to do that to feel well. My escaping from my emotions can hurt other people.

Clint Murphy  49:50

And so I’ll use me as an example and we talked earlier about ADHD and how that can impact you and when you think about the escaping and the numbing, are there certain people that are more susceptible to taking the numbing agent too far? So for example, some people can just have, I think you talk about this a little, they can just have one or two drinks, and that’s not an issue.  A glass of wine with their wife on a Friday.  For other people, and maybe there’s, I don’t know if there’s an addiction genetic or or whether it’s drugs, whether it’s alcohol, whether it’s gambling.  Once they find that numbing agent, they go quickly from some use to very quickly overuse. And it’s not a glass of bottle of wine with your wife on a Friday, it’s a bottle of wine to yourself four times a week.

Bill Howatt  50:51

Yeah, it’s a great Yeah, so what happens is, most of these behaviors with the exception of just a couple of chemicals, become psychological facilitators before they become physically addictive. However, in the process, some people may have, based on their genetics, may have a greater tolerance, so it takes some more alcohol, to feel the effect. All right, and you know, they just so they drink more and more to get kind of that little buzz that most people enjoy off a glass of wine or, because it kind of influence it, though many people don’t realize alcohol is a depressant. And if you drink enough of it, it’s going to eventually start to shut down your frontal lobe. And that’s, you know, you start to kind of try to explain to people, you start to kind of shut down all the way back and you drink too much, you shut down your brainstem and you die. That’s why we get to, you know, alcohol overdoses, which happened for some people. Now, what’s important for us to realize is that there’s a part of your brain that a lot of people don’t realize.  Your D4, your D4,  and I talked about this in your in the book is that the D4 receptor is our most powerful motivation to move towards things. It’s a great driver, I’ll give an example.  I’m having frustration work to the difference between what I want what I have, I got home, and I’m sitting down in front of the TV and my brains gone, I don’t feel very good. And all of a sudden out of my head or nowwhere my brain goes, potato chip. Now, not that potato chips are bad. You know what I mean? Brain goes potato chip, you like potato chips, potato chips, and then all of a sudden, your brain goes, yeah, there’s potato chips in the Yeah, but if it’s late, I don’t need eat them, and then the brain goes potato chip. And so all of a sudden, you get a tension build up, and then your brain starts going potato chip and the urge gets the tension build up and the person goes off, oh for god’s sakes, and they don’t even realize that they go, they get the potato chip, and they take a bite of the potato chip. And all of a sudden, they’re anchoring their brain that potato chips is the solution. And then what happens is without realizing as they start to eat more than potato chips, by the time they get to the bottom of the bag, they don’t feel very good. Because the rewards over.  See the push was to get you there. So the same thing with people start drinking the push to get them there, but because of tolerance, it takes more to get the same feeling. So people went through time, that’s one of  the challenge is with alcohol. And people start drinking more, because they build up a tolerance. And what happens is, if you if to your point, if you start doing it more and more and more, and then it can move into a point, well you get tolerance, you get the high but the hangover’s the withdrawal. Well, when people have alcohol in their blood all the time, and it becomes habitual, the physical dependency to offset the illness because they feel physically ill is to drink more to stop. And so what happens is a psychologically and physically can get into this substance use disorder. And it can happen, people depending on younger folks can, you know, under 25 can get to this more quicker than a 35 year old because of brain development. And it does damage your physiology. But what’s the point I think the most important is all these habitual habits can sneak up. And so you’re asked a question around, you know, okay, who’s more susceptible? Well, I’m going to say to you, I’m not going to blame it all on genetics. I’m gonna also base it on your toolbox to be able to mitigate adverse behavior, and to be able to realize, holy crow, I’ve just been drinking for the last three days to feel good. And I got nothing else in my toolbox other than to have two glasses of wine that goes to two bottles of wine. And now I don’t have anything in my life that makes me feel this way. That self awareness can be a red flag sign. And if we can get a society where I could actually come to you, and say, Clint, I’ve drinking been three bottles of wine or two bottles of wine for last three or four days. That’s the only thing I’m like, I don’t know what the hell’s going on with me. Then I can get help, because that behavior’s not the problem. That’s a symptom. What’s the problem? Well, my wife and I aren’t talking anymore. I don’t like my job or I feel trapped.  We’ve got to get to the problem to be you know, and what I used to say all the time I did my postdoc at UCLA School of Medicine specializing in addictive disorders. And what you get, you got to get the alcohol and drugs out of a person first, then you start the journey to deal with the underlying cause.  Thenn you move into mental fitness to create maintenance, protective factors and moving towards their Northstar to become the person they want to be. Because as Martin you know, like Martin would say and learn, optimism is pretty hard to be have a have good mental health, if you don’t know who you want to be, right. Like, what who do you want to be? What’s your identity? What’s a good life look like for you, and every one of us have a different perception of that. It’s not just stuff. It’s not just what besides like a paycheck, it’s what is the good life look like to you.

Clint Murphy  55:50

And so when we start to think about that, if you look at that, while we’re doing the drinking, while we’re doing the drugs, while we’re doing the gambling, part of the problem is we’re deceiving ourselves, and it’s hard to necessarily see why we’re doing it or that we are doing it when we’re engaged in that self deception. So that brings, we’re fast forwarding all the way to the last and we’ll jump backwards to some of the other buttons. But that’s when we need to hit the reset button. Now, but if we’re stuck in that self deception, how do we know to hit the reset button and to start? And you know, before we even start, one of the things that I’ve always found really powerful is, once I learned it was before grabbing a drink, or before grabbing the bag of potato chips, before grabbing the drugs is to ask yourself by doing this, what am I trying to avoid? What don’t I want to sit with?

Bill Howatt  56:52

I Love it  and I’m gonna give you something to think about. So you’ve heard of CAA, you know, Canadian Auto?

Clint Murphy  56:59

No. Oh,

Bill Howatt  57:00

Where your car breaks down AAA?

Clint Murphy  57:02

Oh, yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Bill Howatt  57:04

Isn’t it interesting. If I go to my I drive an Acura and as a pornos press button things, put your foot on it? If I go out, I bought CAA because I know the possibility that when my car breaks down, I don’t have the answer. So I took some education, I bought the card, if I go crashed my car, because if I open it up, and it doesn’t start, I could look at that car for the rest of my life and not know what to do.  Why I write the last chapter and reset, you will never be able to do reset. And here’s the key point. Unless I know there’s a possibility I might need to do a reset and learn how to do the reset one and right now when I don’t need to do the reset, because human beings are fragile. And guess what, if your wife leaves you and cheats on you, and takes your dog and all your money, that’s a major significant emotional event. High probability, you’re going to be really thrown off, especially because what you’re grieving is not only what happened to you, but the loss of your future. So you just lost your future. And most human beings don’t realize what they really are grieving, is not just the event, but they lost their future. And so now I’m emotionally overwhelmed. And what happens, I started engaging in, you know, potato chips off. That’s reasonable, because that’s the behavior I might have had before without paying attention that I stored as a strategy that I never amplified before. Maybe I drank a lot in university, maybe drank a lot, whatever it is. So those behaviors are there, and we start amplifying it. But if I know, by preparing my good mental health and develop a mental health plan, I know there could be times where I get whacked by life. And if I understand that a part of a skill is learning how to manage that risk behavior and naming them and go three days of wine, I’m going to stop. And if I can’t stop, I need help. If I make a decision that I can’t stop potato chips, or I can’t stop wine or anything before it becomes pathology, that doesn’t mean I have an addiction. It doesn’t mean I have a mental health issue. It doesn’t mean that I’m broken. It doesn’t mean anything. It means I’m discouraged, like Alfred Adler said, I’m discouraged, I’m frustrated, I have a concern, I’m challenged. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. And I need to get some support so that I can figure out how to move towards who I want to be. And without guidance, I may never be able to do that.

Clint Murphy  59:31

So what we’re doing is we’re arming ourselves with the button in advance of needing the button. Because unless we know it’s coming or could come, we don’t know how to set up our safety valve.

Bill Howatt  59:45

Yeah, I tried to say to employers all time, but a lot of employers have EFAP programs. The problem is that I love them, I think they’re very, very powerful, not negative at all. But the challenge is pay attention to what you’re doing. It’s a generalized prevention program with all kinds of tools in it, that I’m in dysregulation where there’s a cognitive impairment, I’m not as smart when I’m really stressed in processing as that.  The average reading level in Canada’s approximately comprehension is around 52% of the population reads at a grade six level meaning readings not in jam for a lot of people. It’s a kind of a losing art. So what we’re trying to do so I’m saying to folks, when people are calm, take one thematic from EFAP and give your leaders cue cards and talk about one somatic about EFP a month. So if you need to use AFAP, here’s the journey. If you have to use depression care, here’s the journey. If you need diabetic care, here’s the journey. If you need elder care, here’s the journey. If you need manager support, here’s a journey.  Verrsus assuming here’s this beautiful website, and I’m gonna go in stressed and figure out how to navigate it, and then call some stranger because I don’t know what that experience is going to be. Because privacy is a major concern. It’s a big barrier for some people. So I love what you just said, it’s preparation. It’s like your AAA, your CAA card, get your card on board, get yourself ready. Why do you have jumper cables in your car? Because a possibility my car could need to boost, but you know where they are, you made a decision. I don’t think we spent enough time in preparing how to weather unpleasant emotions, or how we can actually manage because of cognitive dissidence. And I think it’s important.  If my self talk comes from exactly what I’ve told myself, the unconscious brain doesn’t know the difference between good and bad. It really does. It just actually takes the your garbage other people say about us that we believe to be true, or what we say about ourselves. And if we actually listen to, you know, between those 12 and 60,000 thoughts you can have in a day. And many of us have a negativity bias, we can be programming ourselves in a version of us that’s not true that no one else sees, like how many people do you know, Clint, you do this all the time.  They’re walking around, the world would see this version. But alone, there’s another version of posture, they feel like they’re living each day trying to get away, not get caught. And that’s this, sadly, a lot of it is emotional literacy, and their self programming. And that’s why I think these kinds of books like No   Regret, and The Things We Do are helpful because they can move people through a journey to discover that they might have some control over the buttons they process, the decisions they make, or the feelings they have.

Clint Murphy  1:02:37

Oh, absolutely. And before I ask you the next question, I’ll definitely do a plug for EAP. I think it was roughly 17, 18 years ago, someone recommended it to me, when I was living in Bermuda. They told me from what they’d heard about me before getting there that I you know, I wasn’t the person, they’d heard of… I took them up on it, I called the EAP line and I was diagnosed with ADHD and depression. So that was the first time, I was 26. And so you know, the first time I found out I had ADHD, and depression, and the depression was having some significant impacts. And so that was, you know, a major life change. So having someone armed with the ability to have the conversation, bring it up in a way where it was accessible was definitely life changing for me. And so for people out there, you know, don’t be afraid to talk about it with your team. Or even if you think you may need it, don’t be afraid to call the line.  It can change your life positively. And so you just mentioned belief systems and its massive how some people because once we program ourselves with our belief systems, we put lenses on. And so you know, you have a conversation with someone and you say something positive, but they hear something super negative. And part of that is they’ve so conditioned their own belief system, that they almost don’t have a clear glass that they can look through, and they don’t have rose colored glasses, it’s just black and everything that comes in is negative because of that conditioning. So you know, you talk about in your section on how the brain works,”that we must understand that our emotional well being is influenced by what we decide to put into our belief system. We each have the right to program our brain for what we want to believe. However, we must know it’s what we’re doing. Or we may default to negativity many of us have a natural default that’s more negative than positive. We can make a massive change to our emotional well being when we accept the brain is not fixed and we can learn how to wire it to be more positive by tweaking our belief system.” So that whole concept because you know depending on the number.  I always error on 35,000 thoughts a day and 90% of them are negative, and they’re on a loop. So we’re hearing them every day. I’m not good enough, I’m an imposter. They’re gonna fire me. What if they find me out? So we’re just repeating these thoughts over and over until we believe them. So how do we shut that off? Not shut it off, because we can’t shut off thought. But we can choose the thoughts that we accept. How do we do that, Bill?

Bill Howatt  1:05:32

That is great question. I think one of the most important things is to first, understand that we’re doing that for self protection. So it sounds counterintuitive, like it’s like the person that goes, how did you do on the math exam, oh, I failed, I really failed. I sucked at it, so that they’re preparing to fail. But then you will notice they got a 98. And then after every time you go, Oh my heavens every time you say you suck, but they put themselves in a dark place to get ready to protect themselves for what could happen versus saying I crushed it. I killed it. I did great. So what they’ve done is they’ve learned over time, by self downing myself, I’m not setting expectations, and you know, so to them or to me. And so what happens is what people don’t realize that their belief system starts to train people how to treat you, and you start taking roles on.  Like, I’m not good enough for you. And I say that all the time. Well, you may not invite me to the football game, because I’m not good enough for you. Because I start to take on a role you start to treat me you the role I am. And so what happens is we start taking the scripts so what the reality is, the people who authentically care about us will challenge our scripts. And I had a friend the other day, so you know, I’m not really really good at that. And I said, oh cool, so would you be interested in my point of view? And they said, What’s that, Bill? And I said, That’s not my experience. They go to me, Well, my experience, I’ve only been around you for the last 40 years of my life and my experience is this. Clearly you’re having different experience. And they looked at me and said, well, you don’t think I’m this, this and this, I go, that’s not my experience. This is my experience of what I see. And they thought about it and they go, Oh, okay. Because to your point, that loop they’re running is not meant to hurt them. This is what people mean. Like, it’s not a bad, terrible thing. Because all behavior is not good or bad. It’s just not helpful. And what it is, is that self protection part of it, it has comes at a great cost, reduce our opportunity cost, meaning the opportunity to believe in what we’re possibly capable of doing, to dream or to see things a different way. And so we lose those that programming dismisses mental rigidity, capability, and our mental flexibility. Like when someone comes to me in therapy, and says, You know what, I’m like, I really, really think it’s this I go, okay, great. So what else could it be? And they’ll go, what do you mean, but could be this? What else could it be? And they go, this is interesting. If they had a really negative thought, and I’ve done this for over 30 years, the next one’s negative, the next one’s negative, then it’s neutral, then they run out and then have to go to positive. And I go, okay, cool, so do you notice something, that there’s possibilities here. And so what happens is, is that the brain, will does not our unconscious brain, it doesn’t bias us, us, .  It’s not some mysterious weapon working against us, it’s us. It’s internally, but it happened for a reason to protect us. But it’s just not helpful to think you’re shit. So what happens is, if but how did you get to that point of not feeling good enough? It’s like, real quick, I’ll tell you a quick story. My father was a bartender. As a bartender son, and we’re having a conversation one time and he asked me real quick is, why does that girl, not get up and talk to that guy? Or why does the guy not go talk to the girl? So I don’t know. I said, go ask them. I walked over the Guy. Guy says to me, look at me, look at her. So then my father goes through this whole story that the moral of the story is that person would rather to suck inside and fail and be miserable inside that they’re not good enough versus going out and making it official. Because unless they ask, they don’t know. So better failing on the outside than in the inside, but many of us are okay failing on the inside. Because we feel it’s safer to suck than going on the outside and making it official. Because the possibility is they might be just feeling the same as you and it’s okay for them not to want you.  The same way it’s okay for you not to want them. So if you have a set of rules for how you want to choose people, people have that allowed to have the same set of rules to choose you, but it doesn’t define you. It’s like I said to my friend the other day, he said, Oh, no one likes me. So you see that woman over there you like her? No, not my type. Huh, what if I walked over and told her, how would she feel? And he goes oh, you read the reality is, you can’t force relationships, you can’t force this. But our thoughts are very malleable. And I can tell you after 30 years, and here’s a lesson for anybody. And this is maybe one of the best kept secrets in the world. Think about this, takes you some people 2,3,4,5 months when I was in practice to get to me.  Pretty busy, sad, but I only have so many hours. So they were miserable for months, they come and just not me, a lot of psychology therapists have the same experience. 10 sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, some emotional freedom release. 10 hour.s Isn’t it amazing after five hours of therapy, people say how they feel. Like, it’s not the five hours of therapy. It’s what you did, in between therapy, of retraining your brain, that you’re retraining your brain to think differently, that’s creating more positive emotions, and less unpleasant. So you’re feeling better. Therapy is a process. But the magic happens with what you do with yourself and what you’re creating the habits, right. So that rour because you think about how’s five hours, or 10 hours going to change 10 years.  Doesn’t. But what we’re really doing is state management, symptom relief, creating a possibility to discover who you want to become, because your emotions are out of the way. Right. And that’s what we really do. And that’s really what I feel no regret, we create those opportunities.

Clint Murphy  1:11:30

And one of the things you talked about there, there was three things I definitely want to zone in on since these are the some of my favorite topics. The, You talked about CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and one of the things that I identify with it that you also brought up was the concept of the negative thought audit. And so personally, I found, you know, when I say like three major life changes, understanding negative thought audits, and that was the way I was able to learn to shut off my monkey mind. And it’s something so simple for people to be able to use on their own on a daily basis. Can you take them through the concept of how they can do a negative thought audit, whether they do it in their head? Or whether they do it by journaling? What does that negative thought audit look like for people in order to learn to not accept those negative thoughts, Bill?

Bill Howatt  1:12:23

Yeah, so there’s a lot of ways to do this. But at the at the crux of this is what a thought audits doing is actually naming the thought and then owning it. So you go, if your thought audit is you go, well, I’m not good enough to call so and so or I’m not good enough? Well, by writing out, I’m not good enough, you’re owning that thought. And then you ask you say to yourself, and this is really what it is. Is that how I want to be? No? What do I want to be? Well, I’d like not to be that. Okay. What would you be? What could you be? Or what can you do? And this is where the help seeking behavior. I don’t know. I’ve never had an experience in my life that was anything else. And that’s always in my experience. Wrong. Because I always can find with my clients a time where they were brilliant, a time where they had an experience. But what happens is, it’s a 98 to theory that happens to that point in time, that that time that experience becomes 98% of who they are. And that emote like that thought at that time, I suck. That’s 98% of who I am. Everything about, you know, I took my walk my child to school today, I fed my dog, cleaned the car, all the stuff we do, we kind of dismissed.  All the positive things, I’m just making up stuff.  That thought becomes who we define ourself being. The part of a thought audit around is challenging them that we created the thought. We can ask ourself through different exercise why we have it, what we want. But it is really getting them to name the thought, and start challenging what they want to do, that it’s not what they want to think about themselves and start moving towards what they want to become. And then a part of it is to accept. This is where if I heard you use the word monkey brain which is a big thing around meditation. There’s a high possibility, stinky thinking is going to jump in your head. And that regardless of how trained you are, those thoughts will come. And if we don’t fight them, the thoughts will leave. And why do they come sometimes?  Could be years of programming, they just randomly come. Every 7932 thoughts, I suck comes up and the more we learn how to manage it, the less influence they will have. But if we start naming and noticing and then we can start a process of moving towards. The biggest part of this kind is I can shape my thinking. It don’t have to do by myself too. If I’m really really overwhelmed, I can get some help to get those muscles working, start my habits and create some accountability and some discipline

Clint Murphy  1:12:33

And that’s at the conscious level and I love that you tackle both the conscious and unconscious aren’t just because the second half of it is, the quote we’ve used the most on this show is, “until we make the unconscious conscious, you will forever be led by it and call it fate” by Carl Jung, because the second half of this is the unconscious belief systems that we’ve hardwired into ourselves over time through, whether it’s trauma, capital T, or lowercase t. We’ve all had that wiring that, you know, as a child, as you said earlier, it was there to protect us, to serve us, and it’s no longer serving us. It’s just hard wired belief systems that are negative. So we’ve talked about how to address the more conscious, it’s still a little bit unconscious, but it’s more conscious, because it’s our thoughts and we can learn to regulate them. How do we deal with this hardwiring that isn’t visible, these belief systems that are so embedded in our nature? Bill?

Bill Howatt  1:16:02

Yeah, it’s the exact same way I think is and without trying to oversimplify it, I’ll use creating micro skills and habits, that we do it at a conscious level that can actually through repetition, what we fire together, wires together, so the brain is very malleable. So if you say to yourself, you know what percent of the time do I spend on unpleasant emotions versus pleasant emotions. And we spend a lot more time on unpleasant emotions than pleasant motion, I try to coach make unpleasant emotions a place you visit, not live, okay. And so what happens is, is that it’s through developing, think about if I want to increase my biceps or my cardiovascular, you’re actually training your brain, how to create more pleasant emotions through thoughts, actions and things you do. And being clear what’s good enough is for you, and knowing what your good is, and continue that discipline, knowing that you can change that. And you’ll do that at a conscious level. And the more you do it at a conscious level, you’ll start training your, basically your reptilian activating system, your brain will start actually noticing more what’s good in your life, and spend more time on that positive versus looking for what’s wrong. Because this is happening at an unconscious level. But it also has, there’s heuristic shortcuts, that happened, it must be my fault first, so we could start overwriting programming, the more we do practice consciously. That’s why journaling is really powerful. That’s why following programs are really powerful. That’s why having an accountability partner is really powerful. That’s why tracking our emotions daily can be really powerful, it’s like stepping on a scale, your variance. If you do this stuff, 90% of the time, you don’t have to be perfect, follow it 90% of time. And here’s the key. Even when you’re feeling well, you do it because that’s why a lot of people sadly, when they lose 30 pounds, gain it because the target was the wrong goal. It’s not about losing 30 pounds, it’s about becoming healthy. So mental health is not just about getting rid of symptoms. It’s about learning to love who you are, and being satisfied with who you are. And becoming content that you’re okay as you are. That is a mission that you will never ever end there is no goal line.

Clint Murphy  1:18:17

And so a big part of that that you’ve talked about a number of times is knowing who we want to be. And it brings up this whole concept of designing our life versus living the life that for some people on autopilot, life just happens to them, versus choosing. Well, what is my life going to be and you know, you’ve talked about Northstar a couple times. I always say a person without purpose is like a ship rudderless at sea. That’s in fairness, a quote from someone some time ago that I forget, but the so you talk about the five core pillars that we need to be thinking about when we’re designing that Northstar of who we want to be. Do you want to educate people a little on some of the core concepts that we should be thinking about for ourselves that help us on that path? Which again, is the process that we want to be on?

Bill Howatt  1:19:20

Yeah, I’ll get into it briefly and what I will say to you is that I think one of the one of the things that I’d like to make sure people understand as to why we do this, and I didn’t put it in the book, but most people six months after they die, have three people that might think about them. And then two years after they die, they might have one or two. And so what happens is we spend a lot of our life worried about being good enough for other people. But after our life, there’s no one really around paying attention so we can actually start focusing on, it doesn’t matter what other people think. We design our life to be who do we want want to be? And at the end of it, because when you’re gone, no one gives a rat’s other than your children? Maybe. But are they going to think about you every day? Are the kids like, you know, like, my both my parents go, do I think about them every day. So once you’re gone, so in other words, we spend a lot of time worrying about external approval, versus locking down and defining who we want to be. So when we die, what do we want people to remember, on the day we die? And who do we want to be for ourselves to validate who what kind of person do we want to be? That’s our want, that’s our vision, and what’s our purpose and our behaviors and our habits and the things we’re going to do to get to that, and the exercise we put in the book are getting those concepts, to getting that foundation and taking the exercise, it doesn’t have to be done perfectly. It just needs to be done on a level, and there’s 100 ways of doing this. It’s about just actually knowing that you actually your life is a blank canvas, I don’t care if you’re 40, or 50, or 60, or 70, you still have time to paint it.  is no There’s never too late, you have an opportunity to define a name, who you want to be. And I understand that you might have lost a lot of relationships, you might have made a lot of mistakes. Well, welcome to being human being and so you can’t change what happened. So I want people to become mindful that because you start to become content with who you are and as long as you’re not hurting other people, not a sociopath and all that’s all that kind of stuff, then you’re actually becoming relevant to yourself. That’s the biggest gift for mental health.  That’s your identity. I’m relevant to who I am. It’s okay that people are not everyone’s jam. It’s okay that, you know, I may not get invited to all the parties.   that may like there’s a I start to define that the world doesn’t revolve around me. Nor do I revolve around the world. I revolve around myself creating and surrounding the decisions I want to be.  And the quality of the relationships I build, and the trust I build. And that will help me create the environmental experiences that charge me. Because we do need a healthy environment. We need people. We need validation. We need acknowledgement, we need celebration. That’s the environment and those days that are harder can give us the juice to push through to our Northstar.

Clint Murphy  1:22:16

That’s a beautiful way to wrap that up. Bill, we’ve been pretty wide ranging and circular through the book. Is there anything that we missed that you want to make sure that we get across to people that we didn’t cover so far?

Bill Howatt  1:22:30

No, I’d love to get people I love when people read the book. I love them when they go to Amazon and create their experience with it. You know, I love that. You know all authors like yourselves, we like getting testimonials, but I love reading them. The way that people can have anonymity. I love people who buy my book for their teams. And we sit and we talk, have conversations. I love getting feedback on how it’s helped people that can help me learn how I can come up with perhaps better ideas or learn from people’s experience. I don’t think this is the God in the boxers, Hundreds of hundreds of wonderful, wonderful books being written every minute, I just want to create my purpose on this is to share from my experience the things that I have done personally. And I wrote this book in a time that was challenging during the pandemic, to try to give some more tools to help people. So my big thing is, I hope your audience checks it out and buys a book and provides feedback. That’d be awesome.

Clint Murphy  1:23:32

And we’ll have that in the show notes for them. So what is one book that you would recommend for people that’s had an impact on changing your life.

Bill Howatt  1:23:41

It’s a heavy book. I apologize for, Fast versus Slow Thinking.  For me, Daniel Kahneman book was transformational for me because it helped remind me of system one thinking about how our bias and our faulty thinking. We can’t allow our thinking, the things that we create automatically define who we are. We need to challenge that our brain is a thinking machine riddled with errors. So what we think doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

Clint Murphy  1:24:11

It’s a great deep recommendation. I love it. What’s on your bookshelf right now that you’re reading?

Bill Howatt  1:24:16

Yes, I’m actually reading Covey’s new book, Trust and Inspire. And reading that because I really like how the he was vulnerable, sharing his own challenges around, be running, taking over as a CEO where they weren’t making money. They were doing great things for people, but they weren’t hitting performance outcomes, about how to balance performance and develop relationships. And the reality of what leadership really is, is about creating experiences for other people and being open to the possibility that other people may not be having the same experiences as you around vulnerability, around courage, around consistency.

Clint Murphy  1:25:02

I’m gonna have to give that one a go. I love almost anything that comes out of the Covey family. What’s one behavior mindset or habit you’ve adopted over the last year or two that’s been a major game changer for you.

Bill Howatt  1:25:14

Yeah, I adopted a mental fitness plan. I have a morning routine where I do my journaling, my walk, my water, my diet, my meditation, I have micro skills in place for to help me with my anxiety or so I’ll use deep breathing as a first aid kit if I’m feeling overwhelmed. So how developing and adhering to a mental fitness plan for me has been transformational. On my website on LinkedIn, I have what are called Dr. Bill memos. And I share my mental fitness journeys that I’ve been writing on my website, www.howatthr.com. I have all my Dr. Bill memos from over the pandemic of my experience, the sharing of my mental fitness journey, to show the kinds of things you can do to help move forward with your mental health.

Clint Murphy  1:25:59

It’s beautiful, I love it. Thank you, Dr. Bill, and where people can find you is?

Bill Howatt  1:26:06

BillHowatt.com is my speaking website, www.BillHowatt.com. And then organizations interested in psychological health and safety to get coaching, HowattHR.com

Clint Murphy  1:26:19

Okay, we’ll get both of those in the show notes. And thank you for joining me, Cheers.

Bill Howatt  1:26:23

Really enjoyed it, Clint.  Let’s chat more.  Take care, my friend.

Clint Murphy  1:26:28

Thank you for joining us on the pursuit of learning, make sure to hit the subscribe button and head over to our website, thepursuitoflearning.com where you will find our show notes, transcripts and more. If you like what you see, sign up for our mailing list. Until next time, your host in learning, Clint Murphy