How to Shift out of Survival Mode into Growth

In This Episode

To realize our hopes and dreams we need energy and clarity of purpose. But, the global pandemic has rocked our physical and mental well-being, leaving many of us stuck in survival mode. In this episode of the Elite HRV podcast, we speak with Jonathan Moore, founder of Legacy Coaching, where we explore the mindset and tools his clients have used to successfully breakthrough survival mode towards stability and growth.

Episode Guest

Jonathan Moore

Jonathan has a background as a brain-based chiropractor with over 20 years clinical experience. His main focus over that time has been on the impacts that stress has on the brain, and the results that overload has on the health of a person.

Website(s): Legacy Coaching

Social Media:

Episode Resources and Links

• The Revitalized Life Facebook Group

Show Notes:

00:23 – Intro

2:55 – How the pandemic has changed Jonathan’s coaching practice day to day

5:36 – How the brain fits into chiropractic practice

8:35 – The physiological difference between someone stuck in survival mode and someone with stress resilience

10:00 – “Wrestle or Run” stress response

13:25 – Getting back into recovery – or not

17:30 – How Jonathan’s practice tries to support their clients moving from survival mode to growth mode

22:00 – How mindset affects your ability to recover and reach your goals

28:00 – Creating internal stability

34:00 – How community and companions are crucial to sustaining your internal stability

37:15 – How putting forth your “best life” or your “performance life” on social media does **not** contribute to your inner stability

39:25 – What is success in “growth mode?”

46:00 – Legacy Coaching and where to find Jonathan

Episode Transcript

[music]

0:00:22.7 Vivek Menon: Hello everyone. This is Vivek Menon, with Elite HRV, and I’m your host today for the Elite HRV podcast. And today, I’m delighted to actually welcome back Jonathan Moore, who was with us a couple of years back, it seems like an entire world away it…

0:00:41.0 Jonathan Moore: It does, doesn’t it?

0:00:43.4 VM: But hey, Johnathan, how are you?

0:00:46.5 JM: I’m great, thanks Vivek, I’m wonderful. Thank you.

0:00:49.0 VM: Well, thanks for coming back on. I know it’s been busy for you, just a quick background for folks that didn’t hear Jonathan when he was with us earlier, Jonathan, you have a background as a brain-based chiropractor and you’ve been doing it for over 20 years clinical experience. Jonathan’s main focus over that time has been on really the impact that stress has on the brain and the actual physical results of that, that stress overload has on mental and physical health, and this is really important because the continual rise in chronic health conditions that Jonathan has seen and help people with, was really startling evidence that something more needed to be done. And so in recent years, Jonathan, you founded Legacy Coaching as a way of helping people to navigate the stresses of life, including all the fun stuff the global pandemic has created for us here, and so now Legacy Coaching is really positioned to help people over 35 who are feeling exhausted, stuck or unstable, really just suffering the effects of a changing world that is almost too busy to keep up with, and to really grow from that into a place of living with energy and clarity and confidence, and Jonathan, your passion is really helping people to break out of this rut and to experience a life that is full of purpose, and I personally, I love the term Legacy Coaching because it is really tied into that mission, but we’ll get into that, but… Yes, welcome back.

0:02:25.8 JM: Thank you so much, it’s great to be here. Lovely.

0:02:29.8 VM: Excellent, well, we have a lot to cover here. I know you’ve got some really interesting experience that you wanted to share, but first of all, maybe what I’d love to start with is this, it really feels like everywhere you look, particularly over the past year, as we get to almost our first anniversary of lock-downs and pandemic and everything else that’s happening, at least in the Western world, what are you seeing in terms of people you deal with in your practice, are they in survival mode? More so than ever before.

0:03:05.3 JM: Yeah, absolutely. And so I guess I do wear the two hats, the coaching hat and the chiropractic hat, and the thing that ties that together is, as you said, Vivek, the number of people that are sort of stuck in this place of survival and just the load that that’s having, especially as time goes on especially, as you mentioned, we’re at a one-year anniversary of this whole changed world, so to speak, and yeah, the load that that just continually creating, the wearing down that that’s having on people, it’s across the board, and it’s almost like nobody’s immune to it in some ways, but on the other hand, there are ways and there are people who are sort of navigating through that in a much better way. Certainly a lot of people who are just feeling under pressure under the pump and just can’t sustain that, that same intensity.

0:04:01.7 VM: And I know you and Jason have gotten to this from the last conversation, and for folks that want to listen, you can just search Elite HRV and Jonathan Moore, but there’s actual real physical changes happening in the brain as part of this constant load. Is that true?

0:04:21.2 JM: 100%. Yeah, I think then when we look at brain physiology and we look at what happens is we’re all wired to know how to survive, and it’s an automatic response that will happen in the brain, and interestingly, the brain will prioritize survival of everything else, and so as soon as the brain perceives, even if we’re not conscious of it, as soon as the brain perceives a threat to our existence to our survival, it will change its whole chemistry or change its whole physiology to help us to get through that moment, and if that change is sustained then it’s possible to see physical structural changes in the brain as a result of this ongoing stress and survival mode. Absolutely.

0:05:10.0 VM: And is that something that in your experience as a practitioner, you’ve really been targeting from a chiropractic standpoint, I’ve always been very interested in understanding whether practicing as a chiropractor, you’re dealing with skeletal and muscular issues, whether you’re actually dealing with deeper, more fundamental things happening in somebody’s physiology, including the brain.

0:05:36.8 JM: Yeah. Totally. It’s an enormous misconception that chiropractic is all about the musculoskeletal system, there are a lot of chiropractors who focus wholly and solely on that, and that’s absolutely fine. I don’t have a problem with that per se, but for me, maybe 16, 17 years ago, I started to look a little bit deeper because it seemed to me that the musculoskeletal stuff was a surface-based challenge, and I wanted to know what was driving that under the surface. And so, dove deeper into the neurology, dove deeper into what was going on at that level. And almost came back to some core principles. That the brain drives the function of the body, and so if we can start to shift the brain’s control and communication through the body, we can start to see not only the musculoskeletal system change, but other systems of the body change as well, and so that’s been my focus in practice, there’s a branch of chiropractic that deals with that, and that’s been, I guess, where I’ve worked with the most, and so let’s open up a world of possibilities of being able to help people in these stress places to actually get out of that survival mode and to start to have I guess more internal resource ultimately to be able to deal with what’s going on around.

0:07:00.3 JM: I guess when I talk about it to people, the focus is, and this is the same through the whole coaching realm, for Legacy Coaching, is that what we can’t necessarily do is change what’s going on around you, but what we can help with is to help to make you stronger in the midst of the challenge, and so think of it like this, imagine you’re in the ocean and the waves are getting big, the ways of life around you are getting enormous, a lot of the time, there’s nothing we can do to change the waves, but if we can help you to be a stronger swimmer, if we can help you to have a more internal resource to navigate the waves, then sooner or later you’ll be able… The waves will die down and you wouldn’t have been drowned in the process. And so that’s a lot of the, I guess, the thought process and the structure around how I work both in practice and from a coaching point of view.

0:07:53.4 VM: That makes sense intuitively, because we work with HRV biofeedback practitioners, and one of the things that the practice that is designed to do besides the breathing changes is what they call resilience to stress and ability to navigate stress, and so it seems to make sense with what you’re saying about, it’s not about avoiding stress or eliminating stress, but just being able to deal with the stress in such a way, deal with those giant waves in such a way that you don’t drown. So that does make sense, and I was just curious, what is the difference physiologically between someone who’s in that deep survival mode, barely keeping their head above water versus somebody who’s… Maybe climbing out of that. Is there something that you could see physiologically that’s different in those situations?

0:08:54.4 JM: Yeah, certainly the whole physiology changes, I talk about neuro-brain changes, neurophysiology in a moment, but again, just to recognize physiologically what will happen when you’re in that stress and survival response is your body will prioritize getting you through it, and so let’s imagine instead of waves for a moment, we’ve been confronted by a bear or we’ve been confronted by a lion, and I know some of the listeners, I’m here in Australia, we don’t have bears, we don’t have lions, we have kangaroos, they’re not really that scary. But I know that…

0:09:27.5 VM: You have lots of scary spiders… I know that.

0:09:30.5 JM: We do, we do. But yeah, we can deal with those, but in terms of something that you have to run from, again, listeners would have faced bears, I’m not sure if you’ve ever faced a lion, I’d love to know about that, but certainly you get faced with this moment and your brain perceives the threat straight away, and your entire physiology has to respond in a heartbeat to be able to recognize, “I’m under threat, I need to decide whether I’m gonna fight this thing or I’m gonna run.” And so it’s called The Fight flight process, most listeners would have heard of that, I like to call it the wrestle or run journey. It’s like, “Am I gonna wrestle this bear or am I gonna run for my life, and either way, my whole physiology must change to set me up for that moment.” And so, obviously straight away, we get a change in muscle tension and heart rate, why? Because everything’s turned up with adrenaline and cortisol, we’re in this place where we have to make that decision. We see a range of other physiological changes, we get postural changes as We brace to again, fight or flight, we see changes in blood pressure, we see changes in a range of different things that are going to facilitate this fight or flight.

0:10:46.5 JM: The other thing that happens is things that are not necessary in that survival moment, the wrestle or the run, they get turned off, they get turned off Vivek, because they cost too much energy in the moment where you’re wrestling or running… So what are those things? Well, digestion costs too much energy when you’re running from a lion or running from a bear, you need to divert the energy into strength and power, and so digestion will just get switched off, the immune system is an enormous consumer of energy, and so the brain will say, “I don’t need that right now. I don’t need reproduction right now, there’s a better time to reproduce, not whilst you’re running from a lion. So we’ll switch off reproduction.”

0:11:34.0 JM: We’ll also switch off logical thinking, that part of the thinking that comes from the pre-frontal cortex in the moment whilst running from the bear, one’s not deciding, “Should I take the track to the left or to the right? Last time I was here, I think it was a little bit shorter to go to the right, so maybe I’ll just head down that way.” it’s just a flat out run, and so these things get switched off as a matter of survival, failure to switch off things like digestion or immune function, reproduction or a logical thinking, failure to switch those things off, it may well result in being caught by the lion, why? Because we’re pushing energy to places we didn’t need it, so this is what happens physiologically. Absolutely healthy, normal. Practical response, it’s the priority of the body to do such things, but the question is, how long does the pursuit with a lion or the bear last?

0:12:29.5 JM: It really is. It’s gonna be a short pursuit that lion’s right on your tail, and you’ve either got up a tree and got away from him or done something to get away, or you’re lunch, and none of that matters anyway, but if you’ve gotten away, it’s a pursuit that might last at the most five minutes, I don’t know Vivek… How long are you running away from a lion for? Five minutes? 10 minutes would be a really, really long run, wouldn’t it? And so the body is willing to make all of these drastic changes for that short, acute phase to say, “I have to get through this right now.”

0:13:05.7 JM: But then we get up the tree, we then get up the tree. We got away from the lion, she’s no longer interested, and so she’s gone off to find a gazelle or something like that, and we’re up there and it’s now the moment of recovery, it’s now the time for the recovery to happen to get out of that wrestle or run place to get out of that fight or flight place, and now into a place where the body can reset itself, it can come back into a place of saying, “I need to recover, I need to bring my heart rate down, I need to bring that muscle tension down, I need to now get blood to the organs that are gonna help to restore me.” And so immune system comes on, imagine if we got a car in the back of the leg or something like that, now the immune system needs to come on to heal from those moments, so that when we climb back down from the tree, we have got the energy and the resources to do that survival response to wrestle or run once again because there could be another lion that’s right around the corner.

0:14:05.9 JM: And so here’s the thing, that acute stress response is beautifully designed for that short-term burst, but what’s happening in our current society is that a year ago, we faced the global pandemic, leading into that global pandemic, things weren’t wonderful in terms of the business and the load and the stresses that people were struggling with, it’s not like we came into this global pandemic in a beautiful position in terms of our health, in terms of our ability to cope with things, most of us were already tanked, we were already red-lining it and really pushing it…

0:14:42.8 JM: And then faced with something we never faced before, and so what’s happened is this short-term stress response has now become a chronic stress response, where those various same things are happening, but they’re not happening just for minutes, they’re not even happening for days and weeks, they’re now months and years that the body has been in a survival place and said, “You know what, I need more muscle tension, I need a higher heart rate and more blood pressure, I need less immune system, I need a less reproduction, I need less digestion, and I need less logical thinking.” And so all of a sudden, what was to be a short-term response is now, it’s almost a pandemic of its own, where we’re living in this place of chronic stress, and you can only imagine Vivek, what would happen if your brain was choosing to turn off your immune system, day after day after day, because if its over consumption of energy and you need it to survive each day.

0:15:42.0 VM: Yeah. This makes complete sense. And there’s so many sources of this kind of wrestle or run input into your mind and body, whether it’s the anxiety of modern work-life balance, whether it’s the anxiety of the news, which is worse than ever now, with the pandemic.

0:16:05.9 JM: Stay away from the news that would be my advice number one, turn off the news.

0:16:11.5 VM: And then we’ve got the other things we’re wrestling with, diet and exercise, and sunlight and sleep, and all these other things that all kind of contribute. So I guess… Certainly. I think the audience know… Most of our audience knows about this and is using tools like HRV and many other tools to lift themselves out of it, and how do you… What’s your experience tell you about going from there in that kind of mired in that fight or flight versus something that is a little bit more balanced and can prioritize healing and growth when necessary, and where do people go from there?

0:16:53.6 JM: Yeah. Absolutely, I think the opposite end of the spectrum to the survival end is the growth end, and it’s a journey to move towards it, it’s not a switch to flick, it’s not just a moment of saying, “Right, today, I’m gonna choose growth.” I think it’s a good starting point, but we have to retrain the brain and the body that it really is okay, and so I love the whole idea, and in Legacy Coaching, we put three things around this whole place, I guess, of how to move from a survival into a growth strategy. And one is to take a holistic approach so looking… Vivek, you talked about sunshine and sleep and different things, certainly taking a holistic approach around the way we move the foods we eat, the amount we sleep, and the amount that we’re stressed, we need to look at that holistically.

0:17:41.5 JM: We also need to look at it from a brain basis point of view, we can do all of the things from a health point of view to start to move it into growth, but if we’re still believing and seeing and living out of a survival place, the brain will always sabotage our efforts to move into growth why, ’cause this is the priority, we’re still running, and so you might be getting great sleep and good nutrition and even good movement, but if the mindset is in such a place where you have to keep up the whole time, you have to be pushing yourself the whole time, you have to prove something, for example, then that’s gonna undermine the efforts, so we look holistically, we look from a brain-based point of view, and I love data.

0:18:26.5 JM: We love the data side of things ’cause data never lies. And so tracking HRV is a fundamental part of knowing are you moving from growth to survival… Sorry, from survival to growth, also looking at tracking sleep is critical. I think they are probably the two biggest levers to be looking at, of course, tracking activity and tracking blood glucose, the other parts of data, but really to know how well are you moving from survival into growth, the biggest data pieces are how far into survival are you? In this your HRV measurement of stress and readiness? And then how deep is your sleep, because that’s your moment of saying, “How good is my recovery being?” And that does, obviously ties in beautifully with the morning readiness score that Elite HRV does, and those sorts of things, ’cause you’re understanding both what was my load and how good has my recovery been?

0:19:22.6 VM: And there’s a lot to dig into there. Which specifically with sleep, is it like… Are you waking up feeling refreshed kind of thing you’re looking for? Or is it something else specific to sleep, quality or quantity or… I’m just curious.

0:19:39.7 JM: Yeah, I think there’s a lot talked about quality and quantity and which one’s more important, and I’m not… I’m gonna sit right in the middle of that, I think they’re absolutely both critical. I love that whole idea of waking up, refreshed, waking up feeling energized and ready for the day. What that tells me is that during my sleep, I’ve recovered from the load I asked myself to do the day before, if I’m waking up tired, then I’m waking up in deficit still, I’ve spent more than I’ve earned and now I’m in debt. And it’s a common sort of way to think about sleep. Somehow in our society, and this is sort of taking on a little bit of a philosophical place, but I think it’s all part of it. At the root of all this is how we think about ourselves and how we wanna reward ourselves, and somehow in society, we’re quite okay as a general Western population to live with a cash debt. We live on credit, we live on these things and we think it’s okay, and sooner or later we will know it comes up and catches us, and I think the same mindset goes into sleep and energy, we feel invincible, we feel like we can live with that debt and we can just push on, but sooner or later it will catch up with us Vivek and it will have a toll, which is much greater than a financial toll in terms of living in a cash debt, living in a sleep debt and living in that place has major ramifications on health and life, really…

0:21:08.3 VM: That makes so much sense. So you know what’s funny is, personally, we have in our family, we try to hold ourselves accountable with sleep in terms of the amount of caffeine that we need to function for the day. So a bad day is like multiple coffee day.

0:21:31.2 JM: A three cup day today, so I’m having a bad today.

0:21:35.2 VM: Exactly whereas a good day is like a black tea day or a one green tea day right. A great day is a nothing day. I didn’t feel like I needed anything. I just have something ’cause I felt like it… And that’s when you know that you’re waking up with… Not in debt to use your analogy. Yeah, that makes sense. So then maybe going back to your earlier statement about what you’re looking for, one of the things you said was you’re looking for kind of a mindset shift, and that was really interesting, and so you could have someone who’s dialed in their nutrition, thinks a lot about this, buying all the latest gadgets and measuring a lot of things, but I think what you’re getting at is they need a specific mindset as well in order to thrive, focus on a story beyond just… “What am I doing wrong?”

0:22:32.6 JM: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think what you’re touching on there is what we’ve discovered is that the thing that holds most people back from getting into the life that they would love, I guess the place that they would love to sort of feel like they’re engaged with life really, really well, every day. There’s a million things you can do from a health perspective, there’s a million blogs to read and different things to do, and the question is why are so many people still struggling so much, even though they’re doing all of the things? And you nailed it Vivek, it comes back to the way we think, and it comes back to the story of the life that we’re living, and it comes back to the way that we view ourselves.

0:23:17.4 JM: And I think that those are key things to saying, “If we want to actually move into a place where we’re not constantly living in survival, but we are living in growth and it’s sustainable. We need to start to look at other factors as well.” One thing I’ve walked through personally, and I’ve helped a lot, a lot of people with, is the whole idea of living to prove something, and I know for a lot of people, especially the higher achiever, kind of like… We’re able to do a lot of things, we achieve a lot of things. We’re able to push the boundaries of what’s possible in our life, in our business, in our work, even our relationships, is that at some level, the lights go out at the end of the day, and we’re left with ourselves and we’re left with how we feel on the inside, and I can speak of my journey, and the reason I can do this is because it’s my journey, but I’ve seen it so many times, is that when I’m pushing and pushing and…

0:24:15.7 JM: This is something that I’ve journeyed through, but when I was pushing and pushing and pushing, there was this feeling of like, “I’m doing this for… ” It sounds terrible, and it’s not this extreme, but “I’m doing this to prove to everybody else that I can do it.” And at the end of the day, making other people happy and feeling empty inside was holding me back from moving into the fullness of what is possible for me, in terms of my life and my purpose and my passion, and so to be able to shift those sorts of things, it’s hard and it’s challenging, but they are the moments that one is able to go to sleep at the end of the day when the performance of life is all over, content with oneself, that what I’ve done today is to serve other people and it’s to help other people, is to move into my passion and my purpose. And it’s not to just prove to somebody else that I’m okay, but really, it comes down to saying, “Internally, I know that I’m okay. Internally, I’m in a place of strength, and stability, so I don’t have to live that way.” ‘Cause living that way will constantly have me checking over my shoulders to make sure that I’m doing the right thing, so talking about mindset. I think some of these things sort of weave in there, and there’s a lot of conversation that we could have around that, but… Yeah. That’s a critical critical point.

0:25:41.8 VM: That makes sense as well. Looking for external validation is always going to leave that feeling of potential, whatever you want to call it, insecurity or insufficiency or under-achievement versus find the validation internally. And thank you for sharing some of your background there…

0:26:16.0 JM: It really feels as Vivek… Sorry just to say, it really feels… It really leaves us feeling unstable, because at the end of the day, with those sorts of things, if we have externalized our own stability, if we’ve pushed that to the people around us and what they say, then on any given day, my day is dictated to by how well those around me are going. And so if those are around me, those that I’m close to, that I work with, that I bump into, time and time during a day, family and friends, etcetera, if they’re having a day that’s not their greatest day, then maybe they won’t validate me on that day, all because of what’s going on for them, but now my stability and my growth is completely dependent on how well they’re doing, and it feels very, very unstable, it feels very much like I can’t be confident that today is gonna be a good day, ’cause I hope that everybody else is having a good day that will boost me up. Of course, everybody else is thinking the same thing, and so we get stuck in that place and it can be a little rough.

0:27:06.6 VM: It’s really… That’s tough. And what seems like what makes it worse is when you look on social media and places where people tend to spend a lot of time on, especially now, more so than ever, if they’re stuck at home or not able to do something they would otherwise do. Now you’re getting that external validation quantified in terms of likes and shares and comments and things that just make it even more… Even deeper.

0:27:40.2 JM: So it really does.

0:27:41.1 VM: Yeah, how do you actually… Just curious, how do you actually help somebody change that mindset?

0:27:49.8 JM: Yeah, I guess it’s part of what we talk about in Legacy Coaching, it’s one of the three key fundamental parts of the system that we have, which is to create an internal stability, and there’s a lot of a coaching conversation that happens around that. Again, the three parts that I see to helping form one’s internal stability, and the first thing is one of self-discovery, it has to be a place of looking at who I am and that I wanna grow personally. So the whole thing around a growth mindset and that I wanna grow to move forward is absolutely critical to helping me discover who I am and that I’m okay, which is an easy phrase to roll off the tongue, but an enormous stumbling block for a lot of people to be able to say, “You know what, I’m Jonathan, this is the life I’m living, and I’m okay. Regardless of what people say and think, I know that I’m being true to myself, and I’m walking out the journey that’s in front of me, and I’m okay.” Very, very easy to, as I say, roll off the tongue, quite a large amount, and sometimes for people to get across, but critical to move forward to create that internal stability, the next piece that goes with that, and I think as this is crucial too…

0:29:05.9 JM: I think they’re all crucial, just by the way, is our internal dialogue, how do we start to shift our internal dialogue away from a place that has a potential self-criticism and self-doubt sort of mixed in everything we’re saying about ourselves and thinking into a place where we are actually able to see what’s going on inside and speak life into that, to validate that and to encourage ourselves that I am okay. Our internal dialogue will erode every effort to move forward if that internal dialogue is negative, and so getting that in place, I think is absolutely critical. And again, just as an aside, at the end of the day, when we’ve done everything and we’ve moved forwards in every way that we thought was possible, what we’re left with at the end of the day is our internal dialogue. And so I think it’s absolutely critical to be able to find the right things to say, not just to find a random affirmation that we just keep throwing ourselves, that may be a start place, but it has to be a belief inside that who we are is valid, and the third part to it, if we started with this self-discovery, personal growth piece, if we then looked at what our internal dialogue and how do we see ourselves, finally it’s…

0:30:25.1 JM: What’s the perspective do we have on our life, our place in it, and the world around us, and so sometimes we can feel like the world’s against us. Sometimes we can feel like we are the hero and nobody else matters, and these are perspectives that can be shifted and changed, and I think getting the right perspective of where you are, how you serve, how you love those around you, how you love yourself, I think these are all critical parts to getting that stability place where you can feel that you’re grounded, that your identity is secure and that you’re not looking for the external validation, as we mentioned a few moments ago.

0:31:01.6 VM: You mentioned a couple of things there that are interesting, one is that the term hero, hero on a journey and going somewhere, and you mentioned a couple of other things that seem like they speak to finding a purpose. Is that a part, identifying what that purpose is and being able to rely on that for internal validation, is that a part of this?

0:31:27.4 JM: Yeah, definitely, I think… Part of the human condition, certainly in the Western world, is that we lay down our dreams a lot of the time to pursue something that maybe somebody else told us was good, or that we wanted to do to earn money, for example, to earn a living, even if we didn’t love it, it didn’t really sort of jealous on the inside, we pursue these things and we lay down our dreams and our passions and those sorts of things, I think that it is critical to know what the story is for your life that you wanna move forwards to. I think unless we have a compelling story for our life which incorporates the purpose for our life and ultimately, I would say the legacy that we wanna leave, which again, by the way, it’s not just a cash legacy to the next generation, but it’s a legacy of the impact that we’ve made on those around us and to the world.

0:32:27.3 JM: If we don’t have a compelling story, then it’s hard to continually be motivated to pursue these things, and so I think finding a compelling story is also part of moving into purpose and part of the human condition, as I mentioned, is to give up on dreams to pursue the logical thing, and often you sort of get to the middle part of life, that 35-plus age and sometimes scratch your head and say, “You know what, I’ve pursued what I was told to pursue… I pursued finances, I pursued a career, I pursued family, I’ve accumulated things. And yet, I come to this place where I’m scratching my head and saying, What’s this all for? How did I get to where I am?” And I know for a lot of people that satisfied for a huge portion of people too, it can leave people dissatisfied that they’ve done all of the things that I thought was good, even being abundantly successful in doing those things. But have this feeling on the inside, it’s like, “What is this all for? Where is this going? What am I doing with my life?” And so finding the purpose around that and the compelling story and the direction to walking is also critical in moving into a place where life is moving forward and we’re not stuck in a rut of the every day.

0:33:46.5 VM: Now, we talk about… That’s really interesting, and you’ve mentioned the kind of expectations or definitions of success that are drilled into us early age or by looking at the neighbors or whatever else, that unfortunately, in many cases, unfortunately define people’s definitions of success and purpose and all that, do you see kinda the flip side to that, where having the right people around you make a difference, the other direction, where it actually does kind of help you develop the stability in this story, how does a community, I guess, play into this?

0:34:33.1 JM: Yeah, community is critical. And I think finding companions on the journey of people who are gonna help you to walk that journey, it’s absolutely crucial to being able to sustain it. We have to surround ourselves with people who are gonna call out the goldenness, they’re gonna believe in us, and they’re not going to expect us to get things right and be perfect all the time, and so the world is full of people who are wanting something from us and demanding something from us and really are validating us when we deliver something that’s kind of… Unfortunately, it’s everywhere. I think it’s critical to be part of a community or a tribe of people who are gonna call out who you are, the truth of who you are, what it is that you’re passionate about, and help you to continue to move towards that because it’s against the tide of what is common.

0:35:34.3 JM: Unfortunately, I think it’s the rhythm of the tide of what life should be, but it’s not the rhythm of the life of what is currently, and so finding companions, finding people who will encourage you, finding a community of people who will help us to move forward into a place where the stories of our life actually come together to energize each other is critical to getting to those places where life is not a rut is not a challenge, but we’ve broken out of that place and we’re moving towards something that matters, it doesn’t have to mean running away from your day job and putting it down and not earning any money and being a starving artist.

0:36:16.5 JM: So it’s not that at all, it’s to do something that actually matters to you on the inside, and that may be in the very job that you’re in at the moment, it may be the very thing you’re doing now, but shifting mindset into a place of why you’re doing this, why it’s important. I think those things are critical.

0:36:35.0 VM: And you know, what strikes me as interesting with finding that tribe, that community is ironically, our hyper-connectedness and social media and ability to access pretty much anybody anywhere, any time, might actually be a benefit in this situation, in terms of being able to find people that maybe have the right interactions with you versus the wrong ones…

0:37:02.4 JM: Yeah. Definitely. And here’s the two edge sort of social media, when it sort of… When Facebook emerged and Instagram emerged. Let’s talk about Facebook in particular when it emerged, it initially was about being able to connect with people that you haven’t connected with for a long time, and then it’s become this place that is about putting forward your best life a lot of the time, and one would hope that it’s authentic, but the truth is, for most people, we know that it’s potentially unauthentic. It’s like, “Here’s my performance life, here’s my show life, but the truth is, I’m struggling with X, Y, Z.” That, doesn’t make Facebook sometimes. Although there is a portion of people who will use Facebook as a platform for that, let’s not go into that right now, but Vivek what you’re saying too, that the flip side is that communities and tribes can gather around a concept of encouraging each other and calling each other forward, calling the gold out in people, that will help us move into a place where we’re able to be grounded in our identity, to be stable, to be living a compelling story and living from a growth strategy, so that now we’re actually…

0:38:17.9 JM: There’s a momentum, it’s easier… Sorry, it’s harder to fail, it’s easier to succeed because the conversation is around moving forwards and is around the hope that that creates rather than the current rhythm that we all become and trained to have life where you’ve got to just keep wrestling and just keep hustling, and just keep pushing and just keep proving… So I think social media has a place that can be brilliant and terrible, and it’s a matter of trying to shut out the distractions of the terrible and harness the strength of the brilliant.

0:38:53.8 VM: Yeah, makes sense. And it’s tough, it’s tough because there’s so much… What do we call it? There’s so much exploitation of psychology at play in those experiences that it’s sometimes really hard to try to use it the way you want to use it, so I do understand that. So then here’s a kind of related question then is what is success then for someone in growth mode, if you wouldn’t mind almost like summarizing, ’cause we started out on the health and getting the brain out of this autonomic mode into a different mode, but it’s actually a lot more than that, isn’t it? It’s a lot more about being… Finding that inner compass and then what you build on top of that.

0:39:45.3 JM: Yeah, so success overall, I think is… I can summarize it in saying, “To live with no internal conflict.” So to live with no internal conflict means that we’re at peace with ourselves, we’re at peace with the journey that we’re walking and the story that we’re living out, we’re at peace with what’s happening around us, both in terms of the stresses that we’re facing and the conversation that’s going on around us, and so we’re internally stable, we’re in a place where we’re able to grow and navigate despite the storms that are happening, the stresses in the world, and we’re grounded in who we are and why we’re here. And so to live with no internal conflicts, I would say that that defines success. Absolutely.

0:40:42.2 VM: Wow. And you know then even when you have those “bad days”, that it’s just part of the journey. Part of living out the story.

0:40:52.0 JM: Absolutely. And if you’re connected to a community and to a tribe that is moving towards these places, then your bad days are places that you potentially can be authentic, not to generate pity or there, there, it’s all okay. But to be encouraged and to be affirmed and to champions to continue to move forward even in the midst of the bad days, why? Because the community is a place of people that are looking to live with no internal conflict and looking to live in a place of peace inside themselves and purpose as they express the life that they’re grounded in, it touches those around them.

0:41:40.1 VM: And you know what’s interesting is, this is… You’re advocating and building a practice with the results that blends spiritual and modern east west, whatever you wanna call it, you’re talking about things that the wisest people of thousands of years have talked about. But also incorporating modern science behind things like nutrition and sleep and brain physiology, you’re incorporating modern communication methods, whether it’s social media, or others to find that drive… You’re incorporating HRV tracking and biomarker tracking, and so it’s really interesting to me that it’s kind of like transforming it for the modern world, but finding a way to thrive with some of the advantages that we have.

0:42:34.0 JM: Yeah. Absolutely. I think the principles that we’re talking about have been encountered by humanity for as long as humanity has existed. Is “Who am I? What is my identity? What is my purpose? Why am I here? But what will my life be? And how will I express that in truth?” And so I think that that has been a wrestle for humanity since the beginning, and so I think it crosses all generations, but as you mentioned Vivek, we sit in a place where technology can be our enemy or our friend, connectedness can make us feel more disconnected than ever, or actually more encouraged than ever, and so it’s a matter of harnessing those things, not letting them rule us, but harnessing them to help us to answer those questions that have been in humanity forever.

0:43:32.6 VM: That makes total sense. And I don’t know if you can hear this, but my younger daughter is crying because I think there were some injustice to her sense of purpose. She’s three…

0:43:44.7 JM: She’s three. Yeah, yeah, of course.

0:43:46.9 VM: Anytime that happens, this perspective and practice that you mentioned really will come back to top of mind.

0:43:57.2 JM: Yeah. That’s it. So at the moment, there’s some inner conflict there for her, and it’s a matter of identifying what’s created that conflict and how to find peace in the midst of it all.

0:44:07.9 VM: Right, exactly. Well, time flies, I know we’ve covered a lot, but there’s so much more we could just chat for hours on this… I would love to have another discussion to dig deeper into some of these more… This perspective around, “Okay, where are you going, what are you doing? How are you creating stability and creating this journey and story around yourself?” But in the meantime, is there… Have I missed anything about the perspective and going from survival to growth that we should touch on?

0:44:52.2 JM: Oh, Vivek, as you said, we could talk for hours about it, I think we’ve given an overview, and I think for the listeners to recognize that that survival is the priority of the body, but only for the short-term… Priority of the brain, but only for the short term. And so moving from that place is critical, again, we could talk for hours about what physiologically changes in the brain and what changes in terms of neuroplasticity and a whole range of things. Some of it is in the podcast that Jason and I recorded a while back, so some of that is there, but again, we could dive deep, I think for now, we’ve covered off a lot of things and probably is that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know, I think we’ve opened a range of questions and I’d love to dive deeper into discussion about them with you at another stage.

0:45:43.1 VM: That sounds great. And then in the meantime, Legacy Coaching, if anybody wants to learn more or to dig a little deeper… Is that the right place to do that?

0:45:54.1 JM: Yeah. So a quick background on Legacy Coaching, it was actually launched back in 2016-17, and we were doing a range of stuff, in fact, we were doing some stuff with Elite HRV in those days. I put it down for a little period of time to focus on my chiropractic practice, but in 2020, I actually sold that practice and merged it into another, so I now have a lot of space and a lot of time, which is being dedicated to Legacy Coaching, which is now being completely re-imagined into 2021, and so it’s my main focus now, it’s about to launch with a whole lot of new content, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about today is implicit in the systems that we’ve built, and so if people are interested, probably the best thing to do is to find me on Facebook, and I imagine Vivek, you can probably pop a link in the show notes or something, is to find me on Facebook, it’s… Jonathan S Moore from Legacy Coaching, and in there, we, links to exactly what we’re doing.

0:46:58.1 JM: What Legacy Coaching is about, there is a tribe that’s gathering around these concepts, and so if people wanna join the Tribe, it’s free to join that tribe and from there, and there’ll be a lot of discussion around these things, and of course, if people then wanna dive into the depths and go deeper, we’re a little late as you’re launching out our full-blown coaching program, which I’m really excited about it, and that’s gonna be a whole lot of fun, and so finding me on Facebook is probably the entry portal into that tribe, but also, that can be found through the website, which is just legacycoaching.io, is a little bit different, but legacycoaching.io, and you’ll find all about me and all about what we’re building.

0:47:39.6 VM: That’s fantastic. Yeah, and we’ll put links in the show notes so folks can just check that out, but that’s great, I just feel like there’s so many sources and people talking about five tips to sleep and this is the right diet, no that’s the right diet, and it’s easy, just control how you perceive stress and you’ll be fine, and there’s just not enough people talking about purpose and stability and getting the right people around you, even if you know nothing else, just being immersed in other individuals who are starting to think the same way and asking themselves the same questions should be really beneficial, so…

0:48:22.3 JM: Absolutely, I think a lot of those that extra content, the five tips to this and here’s the magic solution for that, just can leave people a lot of the time feeling like it’s something else to do and more to do and an extra thing, and sometimes it just adds slow, but it doesn’t actually create breakthrough, and we’re not interested in just coaching for coaching sake, we’re not interested in just adding content for consumption sake, in fact, there’s a whole thing we talk about, which is the over-consumption cycle, which we won’t even touch on just now, Legacy Coaching exists to help people break out of the ruts that they’re in, and what my purpose is, what gels me more than anything is seeing people move into the fullness of who they are, and to live with no internal conflict and to see what’s possible in that place. And so I’m not interested in just content for content sake, coaching for coaching sake programs for programs sake… In fact, there’s nothing that I dislike more than that, what I’m interested in is coaching for breakthrough sake, coaching for life sake, coaching for people sake. That’s what really matters to me.

0:49:32.9 VM: I understand it, and that’s really exciting. And hey, listen, thank you for taking the time to share this perspective and just this opportunity, really I can hear it comes from so much experience and thought and just learning by working with people, so we’re happy to share this, and I’m looking forward to another deeper discussion as well. So with that in mind, again, thanks again for taking the time to talk.

0:50:05.6 JM: It’s a pleasure. Absolutely, and happy to continue the conversation and yeah, we’ll see where that opportunity comes up soon and be able to dive deeper and help out the audience that you guys have done so much great work with to help them to quantify where they’re at. And I think to take people into a place where they can take what they’ve quantified and turn it into some changes in life is something that I’m loving the concept of working with you guys to see that happen.

0:50:36.6 VM: Excellent. Thank you that… That is our purpose.

0:50:41.6 JM: Yeah, beautiful.

0:50:41.7 VM: Cheers Jonathan, we appreciate it.

0:50:43.5 JM: Vivek, thanks so much for having me today. It’s been great.

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