BSB 100
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Size Brilliance Podcast, episode 100. Can you believe it? I am so thankful to have you join me, tuning in, and if this is your first episode that you're listening to, welcome and please like, share, subscribe, follow all the things, and I hope you find as much joy in this episode as I have had in creating it.
Since it's my 100th episode and I am on my way to a holiday party, so I'm all red and green, gingerbread man on my shirt and I'm ready to go. I wanted to make this episode a little bit special and I'm going to give you three pieces of advice that have been so profound that they have changed my life.
So this episode is the April's best advice episode. And because this advice [00:01:00] was so profound to me, it's something I still share with my clients today when it comes up. So I hope you enjoy it. And here we go. Piece of advice, life changing advice, dare I say, I was given when I was in my late twenties and a friend of mine, we were at this bar and I'm sure it was something to do with relationships or whatever.
'cause what else do you do in your late twenties at a bar, but like, get together and talk about life. But, whatever I was worried about at that point in time, she turned to me and she said, _"April guilt is optional. You don't have to feel it."_ And that blew my mind. It was like the first time in my life that somebody said,_ "You know what?_
_Just let it go."_ Like, what point is this guilt serving you and guilt as an emotion out of my now [00:02:00] decades plus career in doing mind body work and as a physician and before that in management, all the things. Guilt is such a funny emotion. When I first started learning MIND/BODY techniques, I had graduated from med school.
I was learning this technique called neuro emotional technique, and in that technique, you pair trapped emotions in the body with Chinese meridian systems. And they have this emotions chart and you go through these different emotions on the chart. But one day I noticed that guilt was nowhere on that chart, and my clients often came in to me and said,_ "I feel guilty about X, Y, Z."_
So I had an opportunity to speak to the creator of this technique. And I asked him why guilt was not on this emotions chart, and he told me that guilt was too hard to place. He said that he [00:03:00] really struggled for a long time about where to put guilt on this chart, what Meridian to assign it to, and he just couldn't do it.
He said guilt as an emotion itself. It was far too complex to be narrowed down into just one meridian, because within guilt you find regret, embarrassment, shame, humiliation, all these other different sub emotions that are under this umbrella of guilt. And that's why he left it off. And I have also found that with my own clients, and I no longer do neuro emotional technique, but I do my own form of MIND/BODY technique and I like to split apart complex umbrella emotions like guilt and help you find what is the lowest common denominator emotion in this.
What really is driving [00:04:00] this feeling that you think of as guilt, but is more complex than that. So if guilt is something that you're experiencing, try to get more specific. If you didn't use the word guilt, what other word would you use? Is it something like embarrassment? Is it regret? Is it shame? Feeling bad.
Because when you get rid of just this umbrella of guilt, you actually get closer to letting it go when you can identify what specifically is trapped in your brain and body. And if you need some help with that, let me know. That's my jam. I love to do that. But that was the first piece of life changing advice is _guilt is optional_ and we tend to do it to ourselves.
We torture ourselves with guilt. It's not like anybody else is out there pointing a finger at us and saying, you are [00:05:00] guilty. You should be guilty. You should feel ashamed. And if they are, that's a completely different issue to deal with. But usually we take on guilt ourselves and it's just a feeling of punishment that we give to ourselves.
But you know what? You don't have to punish yourself. This is your permission that you don't have to feel guilty. You don't have to ruminate whatever it is in your mind. If you have regrets, if you have embarrassment, if you have shame, you're not going to be able to move past them if you keep torturing yourself with them.
Whatever happened, it is what it is. It was what it was. The faster you can move through that to let the guilt go. This is your permission slip, the faster you're going to heal and go on and do great things with your life. So guilt is optional, you don't have to feel it.
[00:06:00] Piece of advice number one. Alright, now we're gonna fast forward, um, by about two decades. So at this point I am probably around 40. I would have to say I was working as a physician in a really busy clinic, and it was so busy. I had pretty much perfected being able to see o ne patient every seven minutes.
So that's gonna work out about seven patients an hour. Now, that's not something I ever wanted to do. That's not why I became a doctor in the first place. But there we were. And this one day it was really busy. I had been at work for about three hours , so that's about 21 patients already. It was barely noon, and I am looking out in the waiting room, and it was a packed waiting room, and I knew it was gonna be that seven per hour pace for several more hours.
And I just hit a wall. I [00:07:00] just said to myself, I, I don't really wanna do this anymore. I don't think I can do this anymore. So, kind of half jokingly, I walked up to the office manager. Her name was Carmen, and I said, Carmen, what would you do right now if I just said, you know what? I quit. I'm, I'm walking out right now.
She looked me dead in the face. Love her for this, and she was only probably in her early thirties, herself, early mid thirties, but so much wisdom packed in little Carmen, but she looks straight at me and said this,_ "Dr. Darley, you are a grown ass woman and you can do whatever you want to do as long as you're willing to face the consequences._
_And if you want me to call the owner of the clinic right now, I will. What do you wanna do?" _And she was okay with whatever I was gonna say in that moment. But her [00:08:00] advice, _you are a grown ass woman and you can do whatever you wanna do as long as you're willing to face the consequences._ That was so profound to me.
It stopped me right in my tracks. It stopped my little pity party, and it made me think outside of my own pain and exhaustion in that moment. So I started to think what would happen if I did walk out right now? Am I willing to face those consequences? I would lose an income. All of these patients in the waiting room would be inconvenienced.
They'd have to reschedule. This is not what they had in mind. They were in pain. I was their pain doctor, right? I was gonna give them the solution to get out of pain, and here I am having a pity party. I got over myself so fast, I went back to work and I said, all right, Carmen, you know what? You're right.
Send the next one back. I'm ready. And that was what I needed. It was like a mental slap and it was what I needed [00:09:00] to reframe things quickly. And go, yeah, I can do whatever I want. And I'm not trapped. I'm not stuck. I, I have a choice here. And I chose to get back to work. I chose to get back to, to doing the business of doctoring even if it was busy.
Even if I was hungry and I was thirsty, I was tired and my shoulders hurt from my doing charting all the time. But I wanna give that same advice to you. You are not really stuck. You do have endless choices. And this actually is going to lead me into advice number three. So piece of advice, number two, piece of advice number three, sort of piggyback on one another. To finish up, you are a grown ass person. You can do whatever you want as long as you're willing to face the consequences. So you can choose whatever you want. The [00:10:00] choice is yours. You do have choices. You may not always like them sometimes. And if you don't like the word consequences, because that can be really scary for a lot of people.
Then just switch it out. Switch it out to something like results or outcome, another word that doesn't make you feel scared or like you're going to have a big loss. Because our brains are naturally risk averse and they will pinpoint and narrow down on loss when in reality it may not be loss. It's just a redirection.
You can choose whatever you want. You are free to do that, but you're not stuck, and I think this is a really important point I wanna get across. If you're choosing to stay where you are or you're choosing to put up with some scenario, own that as your choice.
Be accountable for the consequences of that choice. It's not happening to [00:11:00] you, it's happening for you, but what you allow will continue. So think about that. That's advice number two. You are a grown ass person and you can do whatever you want as long as you're willing to face the consequences. All right, advice number three was not actually given to me by a person. And it's a kind of a compilation of a couple of different sources. There was an article I read by a journalist who, it was a business article, I think it was in Entrepreneur Magazine. And he was talking about the difference between a goal and a wish. And his example was, if you wanna run a marathon it's not enough to say, I wanna run a marathon as a goal. You actually have to become the type of person who gets up and runs every day. And if you're not willing to do that, then it's a wish, not a goal. Then as I started learning more about neuroscience, we talk [00:12:00] about this concept called self-agency.
And self-agency in neuroscience is your ability to do things. You can do things. It's just whether you want to do them and whether you're willing to do them.
Your brain will love to trick you and tell you that you can't do things. And how many times in your life can you think back and somebody would say to you, _"Why don't you just do X, Y, Z?"_ And your immediate thought is, _I can't_. And you might think you're being practical or logical because you'll immediately give some type of evidence.
_I can't because_ maybe it's time or money or whatever. Your brain is really good about finding evidence about why you can't do something. So here's advice number three. You can do anything that you want. The true limiting factor is not that you can't. But you have to discern whether you want [00:13:00] to and whether you're willing to, so let me rephrase that.
You can do anything that you want. So what do you want to do and what are you willing to do? Because your actions on whether you go for something or not, it's not about can or can't. In reality, it's about want and willingness. That's my advice to you. You can do anything. Now, if you are in the space where you're still fighting your brain when it's trying to tell you you can't, and that maybe saying things like, I can't, like, I can't afford it.
I can't go, I don't have time for that. I can't. If you find yourself saying more of that than keeping the options open, then you know what I could. So let me think about it, or, yes, I can. That is something you wanna work on from a neuroscience perspective because it's incredibly empowering to realize _Yes, I can._
And then [00:14:00] again, to take that self accountability to go, all right, if I can do anything. Anything is possible for me. I can do anything. What do I want to do? And what am I willing to do? And those two questions will really kind of help you determine whether you wanna run that marathon or not. Whether it truly is a goal or a wish, because you've taken this self-limiting factor, that neuroscience cognitive distortion off the table,. You can run a marathon.
Let's just get that straight. You can run a marathon. Do you want to? I don't. That is not my jam and I'm not willing to, so I'm gonna be really honest. That will never be a goal of mine, but I had to open up my mind to go, you know what, though? I can. If I ever changed my mind at some point in the future and I wanted to, and I was willing to be the type of person who got up and went running every day, then you know what I could and I would, but I'm not.
So that's the third piece of advice. _You can do _[00:15:00] _anything. So what do you want to do and what are you willing to do? _Because then now I'm gonna tie it back into piece of advice number two. You can choose anything you want. You can do anything you want. But you're not free from the consequences of that action.
And that can cause some people to have this analysis paralysis because they think _"I can't do it". _And then they think, _"oh, but what if I fail?"_ And this is the piece that needs to work in harmony is that you can do it. Every action will have some kind of outcome, a consequence, a result. And whatever it is, trust yourself to handle it because if you have not heard this extra bonus piece of advice, number four is you have a 100% success rate of handling your business.
You've already done it. You have handled everything that life has thrown at you and look at you. You're still [00:16:00] going. You have a hundred percent success rate. So rather than thinking about, _"What if I fail?"_, Just go, _"Man, I've already succeeded at tackling all kinds of stuff. I can do anything. So what do I want to do?_
_What am I willing to do?" _Alright, my friends, I hope that this has been helpful for you. And the Bite-sized Brilliance podcast was started about two years ago, out of a fit of rebellion against Instagram reels, because I had things I wanted to say, concepts I wanted to teach, that I couldn't wrap it up in 90 seconds or 30 seconds.
Now they tell you six seconds or less, and I'm like, mm-hmm. No. Okay. I would, I'm trying to keep this cleanish as possible, but I'm like f that if you are my client, you will clearly understand or come to know that I have the mouth of a sailor and I keep it very real in my sessions, and I wanted to do that with you.
And the best way to do it was through a podcast. [00:17:00] Where you get some real life advice on how to continue your 100% success rate at getting through any challenge at life with some humor, some wit, some grace, and a shift in your perspective, because that is all it takes, my friend. To launch you on a new trajectory, to choose a new timeline that you can quantum leap into.
It's just a tiny, tiny shift, and that's why bite-sized brilliance was born to be about 15 minutes or less. Definitely more than 90 seconds, but to give you a bite-size life lesson that you can take with you, share with others, and I am so grateful to you. And here's to a hundred more my friends. Thanks for tuning in.
Bye-bye.
