You know that feeling you get when you’re sitting on your butt, watching a movie or reading a book, scrolling through your favorite Instagram posts or simply staring out the window at something amazing—and you just don’t feel like doing anything else?
Even if sitting on your butt might have launched you into some guilt before last week, now you know how useful this behavior is and how much you need to allow yourself the time to rest and relax.
Now you know the reason why resting is the number one secret to success in any venture—because your ability to rest signals to your body that you’re SAFE.
When you FEEL SAFE, you have
complete and total access to
100% of your brain.
And… last week you saw the three neuroscientific facts that support you in using 100% of your brain—no matter what you’re trying to accomplish:
- Safety: We humans are wired for safety—last week you saw how feeling safe increases your capacity to accomplish anything.
- Decide It’s Good: We have the ability to decide whether anything we face is “good” or “bad.” Today we’re going to unpack this ability so you can see how it moves you forward, and then you can use it anytime.
- Use 100% of Your Brain: Once we know we’re safe + we’ve decided that our circumstances are “good,” we have full access to 100% of our brains, which also increases our capacity for rest. Today we’re going to unpack the connection between you feeling safe and the power behind you deciding that whatever you face is “good.”
Revisiting the 411
- Safety: once you know how important it is, you can choose to carry your safety with you—simply by paying attention, asking questions, and paying attention to the answers. Attention is the tool your conscious mind uses to assess your surroundings—and keep you safe. The biggest threat to your safety is walking around on autopilot, with no attention to what’s happening around you. Attention keeps you aware—it gives you the widest array of choices in any situation.
Real-time Example: When it comes to the current challenges we face in the world, the number one element that’s fueling an enormous amount of violence is the portion of the population who are feeling unsafe in their own country, feeling left behind and feeling unheard. That’s made safety everyone’s #1 issue right now.
Practical Application: Feeling unsafe leaves every human with only 3 (biological) options: fight, fly or freeze. That’s why paying attention is your secret weapon—so you can focus on how you want to move forward. That’s how you replace “AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!” with “What’s happening right now?” and “What do I want/need?” and “Where do I want to go?” and even “What kind of future do I want to build?”
The element of safety fuels my current mission to make sure that everyone around the world knows about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to democracy. In case you missed it last time, or are seeing it for the first time now, here’s that link I created for the shortest, clearest, explanation of it: https://tinyurl.com/4djh4y9v
- Decide It’s Good: We humans have the ability to “make a heaven of hell” or a “hell of heaven” because of our amygdala, the part of our brain that integrates emotions, thoughts and decision-making. If you’re a BTS fan like I am, you might have enjoyed Agust D’s song “Amygdala” last spring. What’s so cool about this song is that it’s a very useful map for connecting to this powerful part of your brain that helps you MAKE that hell into heaven so you can move forward. Honestly, it’s worth checking out—you’ll see why I joined millions of fans around the globe singing with him: “…My amygdala, my amygdala, save me from here, hurry and get me out of here, yeah yeah.”
Real-time Example: Every single day the media brings us stories from around the world that can leave us feeling like the planet is burning down around our ears. Wars take precedence—Ukraine and Gaza are front and center. Then there’s social unrest across the US with this election cycle—and the violence that’s erupting in Britain and other places around the world. It can be very easy to feel like all this violence is BAD—except for one thing: when we assess anything as bad, our biology puts us right back into danger. Our lack of safely eliminates our access to our brain—so all we can do is “fight, fly or freeze.” The worst part of reducing our options to only those three is that it keeps us stuck: we can only DO NOTHING about anything that’s happening. That’s because all we care about (biologically!) is keeping ourselves and our loved ones SAFE. (When you get right down to it, that’s the foundation of all war, right? We’re biologically primed to FIGHT when we’re threatened.)
Bottom Line = We can choose to be stuck (“this is BAD!”) or we can choose to find the “good” underneath anything that happens.
Practical Application: My role model for this application proved it in the mid-20th century; I’m one of the millions of people globally who’ve been using it successfully (for the past four decades) because it’s the perfect antidote for the feeling that everything’s BAD and all is hopeless. It always helps me to have access to 100% of my brain, while it expands all my options in any situation.
My role model, Viktor Frankl—who shares this experience in his (still!) best-selling book, Man’s Search For Meaning—was a prisoner of the Nazi’s in Auschwitz. He tells of walking on a forced march for days in the midst of winter, with rags on his feet instead of shoes, and rags on his body instead of the warm clothes required by the bitter cold. He used his amygdala to transform his hell into heaven: by deciding to pay attention to his memories of his beloved young wife and their life in Vienna, he kept himself warm on that march where so many perished. Every single day for those years as a prisoner, he focused on the meaning he could make of everything that happened to him—he kept himself focused on the “good” amid the deepest evil. Not only did he survive those atrocities, he made it his life’s work to create a map for all of us to do it ourselves.
So here’s the invitation for us now: instead of focusing on all of the horrors around us, we can look for what good that it brings out of us. (Remember how bad COVID was—yet focusing on what it brought out of us changed the whole world in ways that would never have happened otherwise.)
The question to ask yourself here is “What good could this difficult (”bad”) situation bring out of me right now?” Focus on THAT—because the idea of “good’ and “bad” is totally subjective! This is where we can “make a hell of heaven” or “make a heaven of hell.” So the trick is to decide that everything that happens, no matter how crappy it may feel in the moment, is “good” because you can use it to grow and develop—and maybe even tell a great story about it later.
There’s ONLY ONE REASON for telling yourself something is “good” when it’s clearly “bad” and that is to have access to your brain, so you can think about what you want to do next.
- Use 100% of Your Brain: There are people who will cavalierly mention that we only use “a fraction” of our brains. In a way, that’s kinda true, especially when you’re only counting the “conscious” part of your brain. Neuroscientists tell us that our conscious mind—the attention-paying part—only accounts for 3-5% of our experience.
Most folks have no idea how much MORE of your brain you can access when you learn how to tap into your unconscious, which accounts for 95-97% of your experience! (Stay tuned for more about that in future Playbooks…)
It’s also true that we only play selective attention to what’s going on around us—so if we didn’t pay attention to something, it doesn’t exist for us. More importantly, neuroscientists have proven that it’s not what happens to us that matters in our experience, it’s what we make it MEAN.
Clearly, the end of this week’s Playbook is no place to start a deep discussion about your brain! (I promise to save it for later and make it FUN.)
So let me leave you with one final thought to wrap up our conversation: you making the decision the get up off that couch will bring you the most satisfaction—joy, even—when you’re confident of your safety and you’re willing to use everything that happens to you in the service of your goals (whatever they are!).
Whenever you’re ready—I’ll meet you out here.