S7E4: Behavior Change Isn't Just Unconscious

Hello, hello my favorite people on the internet! Dr. K here, and I am pumped to be back with another episode of the Experience University Podcast! Today’s episode is about behavior change in your unconscious AND conscious mind. This episode paints a picture of how your brain works like a garden, and it explains behavior change as a system. Be sure to follow along for more episodes in the coming weeks!

Today we are discussing:
Currently at a Neuroscience Event (1:12)
Your Brain is Like a Garden (2:10)
Behavior Change: Conscious and Unconscious (4:53)
Brain Can’t Replace Lifelong Problems with Something Good (8:10)
Behavior Change is a System (10:19)

Visit the Experience University website for more information!
www.experienceuniversity.org

Connect with us on our socials!
Facebook: Experience University
TikTok: @DrKDoesParenting @EventswithDrK
Instagram: @kristin.malek

Transcript

Dr. K:
You are listening to the Experience University Podcast with Doctor K. Season 7, Episode 4.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to Experience University, where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Doctor Kristin Malek.

Dr. K:
Hello, hello, my friends. If you're listening to my podcast episodes back to back to back, then you will notice that I sound a little different and that's because I'm on the road. I'm traveling, I'm at a conference event training thing right now, and I'm on a different mic. So I hope everything's coming across okay. I checked it out a few times.

If you're new to the podcast. Welcome! I'm so glad that you are here. I am going to share a lot of valuable content today, but it might almost be in a little bit of a ranty bit. So I hope you all can bear with me and get all the fantastic nuggets out of this that I really feel called to share. What am I doing in Austin, Texas? I am attending a neuroscience training conference event, and it's a little bit of everything all in one.

I read something yesterday that at first, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so true. This is so great. And then I sat there and I pondered on it and I said, you know what, this actually isn't true. And I wanted to share a podcast episode with it in case it resonates with you and just to add a different thought perspective to it. 

Now, at this neuroscience event, it had on the very front page of one of these participant manuals where they give you all the content. And it said all behavior change is unconscious. And I'm a behavior change designer, and I know a lot about the conscious and unconscious mind and the critical edge between them. I don't know that I actually agree with that. 

I like to talk about the brain as a type of garden. I say the unconscious mind is your soil and the critical wedge is kind of like that weed barrier or, you know, the top layer that's on top of the soil.

And then you have all of these things that grow, which is your conscious mind. You could have things growing that are beneficial, and you could have things growing that are not beneficial. 

So when you're young in your environment, particularly between 1 and 7, but also between 8 and 12, they're just different periods. Like, 1 to 7 is your imprint period, and 8 to 12 is kind of the modeling period where you're looking up to other people and kind of copying and seeing

what they do and how it works for you. And then you have your socialization period. There's all these defined periods of your brain development. Now, all of those seeds kind of get planted when you're younger. And so you have all these seeds planted in your unconscious mind. In those seeds, you could be growing a lot of things later in life. You could be growing weeds that are not beneficial. You could be growing flowers that are just really pretty and just make you feel good. You could be growing vegetables that really feed you and nourish you. 

There are a lot of things that come out of seeds, and I haven't heard anybody else use this analogy quite in the way that I use this analogy. I use it in a lot of my keynotes and a lot of my trainings because oftentimes we just think about weeds and not weeds, but there are really so many different things that grow from these seeds. 

When you get older and you realize like, hey, maybe I'm not exactly the way that I want to be. And so maybe you go to therapy or you're doing positive affirmations or whatever. I like to say that this is so critical, but it's kind of like taking a weed whacker or a lawnmower to the top of the soil. So you see all these weeds that you don't like and you cut them down and then they keep coming back up. Then you cut them down again and they keep coming back up. And you cut them down again because you haven't actually dug out the seed from the unconscious mind. The better you get or the more therapy or coaching or self-transformation and self-growth work you do, the faster you can cut down those weeds. You could cut those weeds down multiple times a day. But you still have that spark of a thought. You still have that thought that happens in your mind that you have to address and cut down.

Some of the things that I love in neurolinguistics, and some of the alternative forms of therapy that I am skilled and trained and have experience in, can go into your unconscious mind and kind of dig out those seeds, which is really fascinating. And I absolutely love what I do in terms of coaching and in some of my trainings.

So when you sit there and say behavior change is all unconscious... Yes, and?  I would say yes, you're digging out and replacing that seed, which does kind of dictate some of your behaviors. But if your conscious mind and your unconscious mind, if they never link together, then you're not going to have that behavior change, right? Because just like when you have weeds or flowers or vegetables that are growing up top, you have to tend to both. Your vegetables are not gonna nourish your mind if you don't eat them. You can let them sit there, and you can let them rot. Your flowers are not going to continue to grow unless you water them.

So the seed is just one part of the equation and then getting through the critical wedge is another part of the equation. So we could go into your brain and you could say, I want to dig up the seed and that's awesome. You could dig the seed. It doesn't mean you're planting a new seed. And if you are planting a new seed, it doesn't mean you're watering it. And just because you're watering it, doesn't mean it's strong enough to get through that landscape barrier. And just because it gets through that landscape barrier, it makes it up. It doesn't mean that it's going to actually produce a vegetable, right? So there's lots of different portions of it. 

I really loved this statement at the beginning because I said yes, oh my gosh, someone's acknowledging the unconscious mind. It is so critical. And then again, as I sat there and I thought about it, there's so much more to this garden of our brain than just planting the seed. And it really kind of made me think about a lot of different areas of my life.

I just had a coaching client breakthrough who had been dealing with anxiety, like their entire life, crippling anxiety. They had done everything. They did different forms of therapy. They had done spent like $15,000 on something crazy like getting the helmet that you wear that tries to rewire your brain. EMDR, which I have my feelings about EMDR, I think can be useful, but your nervous system has to be in check first. 

And so, if you are looking at EMDR or if you're doing EMDR therapy and it's not quite sticking for you, I would almost recommend taking a step back and trying some internal family systems therapy, some IFS therapy. Now, of course, this is the opinion of me. I'm not giving you official medical advice. Check with your provider. You know, all those liability statements that I'm inserting right here. But if you're finding some of these things don't work in this therapy, I always recommend that IFS, internal family systems, because it really does a great job of getting your nervous system in check. Anyways, that's a side, a side rant - a side story. 

I'm working with this coaching client of mine, and he has been dealing with this anxiety throughout his entire life. There are many things we did. We did a breakthrough. We were doing lots of different steps. I got to a point, and he's very highly educated. He had a lot of questions that he wanted to ask. And there's one step that was a limiting belief, a kind of state change. And I was trying to explain some different things in one way and trying to be super PC.

I was explaining how sometimes in our body, in our nervous system, in our brain, you can't take something that's been a lifelong problem and just replace it with something good. Case in point. If you truly loathe yourself, if you do not love yourself at all, and you're having positive affirmations every single morning that you're saying, and your positive affirmations are something that's so unbelievable that your body can't even feel like an inkling of truth in it, then it's really not kind of stick. It's kind of like when you plant a seed in your unconscious mind, that's like a weed and it's starting to come up and you keep cutting it down every day and then you're adding like fertilizer to the soil. You still have those underlying deep dark kind of beliefs and you're adding fertilizer in this case, positive affirmations to it, to try to make it a happy,

thriving environment, but you still don't have the seed for the flower. I hope this metaphor is making sense for everybody. It seems to be one of the favorites in my trainings or my speeches. 

Now, what I was trying to explain to him is you have to take this negative state and you need to make it neutral first. So you have to take this, “I live in crippling anxiety,” and neutralize it.

You have to neutralize it. Dig up the seed, check your soil, make sure your soil is good, water it, and make sure everything's just really nice in your soil. It's just very neutral. Your nervous system is really calm. You're not having these crippling doubts or beliefs. Then, you can plant the good seed, right? It's a stage. It's a process.

This doesn't work in every single case. And a lot of beliefs, you do have to change it negative or positive right away. But if you have something that's so crippling, that's so negative, that's a limiting belief or abandonment issues or addiction issues or all of these things, you have to kind of neutralize it first. There's a lot of tools and processes and things that I do with this.

But I just wanted to give this example of how everything has to work together. It was just so fascinating the last few days that I've been here and the different people I've come in touch with and the different learnings that I've had from different sessions. And this was really speaking on my mind and on my heart.

Behavior change is really a whole system. It's very holistic, and that's why I do have like 27 certifications and certificates across eight different industries because I do feel in our world right now we treat everything so siloed. We favor specialist careers when you spend an entire career niching into one tiny area. And I have a niche. I've niched into events, but being in events and experience design and behavior change design, it's everything. And that's what I love about it.

I get to do the coolest things in sound therapy and reiki. And in event design itself, in neuroscience, psychology, and urban design because we're setting the structure up for flow. In place-making, marketing, and branding because it's all integral to this experience. and it's the same with your body. 

Just thinking about diet. I, again liability issues here right now, I am not a licensed dietician or an RD. I'm not trying to give you advice. Talk to your medical providers, all that stuff. But you should also think about how we're so focused. This is the food for your blood type, this is the food for your gut microbiome, this is the food that you would eat for the hormones that you have, or this is the food that you would eat if you have this medical condition. We treat everything like it's so separate, but it's really all together. And that's what's kind of frustrating. And I will say, ChatGPT is a really great starting point for some of these things - like looking at things from a holistic standpoint. But remember, it's only as good as the questions you ask. And that is a great lesson for everything in life. The information that you get, the information that you process, and the behavior change that you're looking for is only as good as the process and the questions that you ask. 

I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed making it. Make sure to like and subscribe. Leave that five-star rating. I look forward to our next episode!

Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Experience University Podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode.