Dr. Jim Doty
Appearances
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
I walked into a magic shop and met a woman who... looked at me as a human being. So many people make judgments about people, and they don't recognize the past or the problems or the adversities they faced. And everybody deserves to be listened to. So this woman in this magic shop, she was a radiant being. She had a smile, a presence that made you feel safe.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
And this is a key, psychological safety, to downregulate your stress response. And she made me feel okay. She didn't look down on me when I was 12. As a 12-year-old, she looked at me as an equal, eye to eye. And that interaction with her changed the trajectory of my life because it changed how I saw the world.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
Having somebody take the time to look at you, see you, appreciate what you are, and taking that interest, it's very meaningful. And I try never to take that for granted. And even, and I hope every interaction, you understand that a lot of people are suffering. They're carrying baggage from their past, and that baggage is limiting them. And oftentimes, just...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
listening to somebody can profoundly change their lives because that's what people want to be heard. And sometimes it's just hello. Sometimes it's just a hug. So I always tell people, never forget your own ability to change somebody's life and also to recognize that oftentimes how somebody is interacting with you has nothing to do with what's going on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
It has to do with the baggage they're carrying. And so give people a benefit of a doubt. And so
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
know if you grew up in a background like mine typically there are two paths one is the path you become an alcoholic drug abuser have mental health issues the other is you over excel right overachieve then the path of the overachiever gets bifurcated there's one group who say nobody helped me i did this all myself uh i'm not going to help anybody else
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
Then you have the other group, which I probably typified maybe excessively, where I understand the pain people go through, and very deeply. So I'm very attuned to that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
That is a Buddha. That's water? And that's a Buddha centered on the pool. So you see it as you walk in.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
And it's a headless Buddha.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
Because it reminds you to not get lost in your head.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
Well, having complete lack of knowledge is actually a benefit oftentimes because you're not restrained by other people's opinions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
I think we already are.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
So let me start with the morning first. Every morning I wake up and I sit at the side of the bed and I do a breathing exercise. And the very nature of that breathing exercise shifts me into the parasympathetic nervous system.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
It's just slowly breathing in through the nose, holding it for four seconds, slowly letting it out. And I do this for a minute or two. You can sit, you can lay down. There's nothing that is prescriptive. And this is where people get lost about mindfulness practices. They somehow think you have to sit like a Buddha and do this, and they get all anxious about it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
There's no reason to be anxious at all. It's just to find a place where you feel comfortable. And then I go through this breathing exercise of slowly breathing in for four to six seconds, holding it for four to six seconds, slowly letting it out through the mouth. And then that shifts me into the parasympathetic nervous system or strengthens where I'm already at.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
And then I think of the joy and awe of being in this world. And I just sit with that for a minute or two. And that centers me for the day. And if I'm centered looking through that lens, then that actually creates the environment for me to manifest because I am in the right mindset. I'm calm. I'm thoughtful. I'm thinking about others. I'm not self-focused.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
And the very nature of that allows me to manifest. Now, I was going to mention in the evening. All of us have goals, all of us have intentions, and you can prioritize them from ones that are mildly important, moderately important, incredibly important in the time frames, and then you focus on them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
And what I will do is I will again write them down, whatever the top three are, and then I'll go through the exact same exercise I mentioned, which is to write them down, to repeat it silently, to repeat it aloud, to see it happening, and over and over and over again.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
All of those things strengthen the power and put you in the right mindset to have the greatest likelihood of you manifesting your intention. And the very nature of that puts you in the right mental state.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
where you don't feel you have to hide yourself, where you don't feel that you have to put on a show for everybody about how successful you are, and where you're just feeling comfortable with who you are and accept yourself. And the hardest, hardest part for so many people is accepting themselves as they are, not be lost in how they want to be. or lost in what could have been.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
And this is also a thing that distracts you from the energy you have to change things. Because if you spend 80% of your time on the past and the future that hasn't happened, lamenting, then you can never be present to actually make things happen. And this is the key. You have to be present. You have to be authentic. You have to understand your past. And you have to understand that
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
When you want something to manifest, yes, it is a future intention, but it's not something to get lost in. It's something simply to sit with instead of be pathologically focused on. As an example, I'm sure you've seen people who have sacrificed everything to get to the top of the mountain. Well, they've sacrificed everything to get to the top of the mountain to stand there by themselves.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Top Expert Advice of the Year: The Best of the Mel Robbins Podcast
What was the purpose of that? Our purpose in life is connection. It's not to so be focused that you don't have any connections and you're walking alone. It's to connect with people. I mean, many, many of the aspects of what we're talking about are the journey with others, not necessarily standing by yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
If you have an intention, you take a pencil, you write it down, you're actually doing something physical, tactile, Then you read it silently. Then you read it aloud. Then you visualize that. And you do that over and over and over again. What that will do is then embed that into your subconscious. And then these different cognitive brain networks get activated.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Yes, absolutely.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Yeah, so again, what you want to do is to use all of your sensory organs as much as possible to embed that intention. So by writing it down, by reading it aloud, by visualizing it, that creates the process where this gets embedded into your subconscious. And what happens is once you get this embedded, it activates different parts of your brain.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
And without getting too technical, one is something called the default mode network.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
But they're related.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Yes. So this is what happens when your mind wanders or you're daydreaming. And it's self-referential because it's internally focused, but it's where you create the narrative of who you are or what you want.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Absolutely. And that gets really activated and results in rumination for some people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
No, that's exactly correct.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Oh, absolutely. And it's available 24-7, and it doesn't matter what's happened to you before. You know, so many people get fixated, well, I don't deserve this because of. We all deserve it. So once this gets embedded and you create the narrative of who you want to be or how you see yourself, what you're doing is you're creating salience, okay? What's that word mean?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
It means making it important, okay? Once something is important, this activates what we call our task positive network, okay? And the task positive network has three parts. It has the salience network, it has the attention network, and then it has the executive control network. And once something is salient, what you're basically saying is, this deserves my attention.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
And by doing it in a very specific way, then that becomes important to you. That gets embedded into your subconscious as something to pay attention to. Once that is defined as something important to you, then that activates your attention network so that then you cognitively focus your attention on whatever that intention is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Once those are activated, and I use the analogy in the book, it's as if you have a file cabinet and you put this file into the file cabinet that says important stuff. And once that is there, then the attention network is activated, which is, as an example, a bloodhound. that says, okay, now there's something there. I need to track this down and figure out what's going on here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
Then you activate the bloodhound, and then that gets released. And then once that attention is focused, then It starts looking around through all the possibilities in your environment. And as soon as it identifies one, then your executive control network is activated, which in some ways is the thing that chases down what is in your subconscious. And this is how it works. There is no magic here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
This is fundamentally basic neuroscience, and it's something that we all have the ability to master by just doing these techniques whereby you are able to embed your intention. You do it over and over, and it's not as if one and done. And what I mean by that is some people wake up, and this is like a New Year's resolution. I'm going to do this January 1st.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
And then January 1st comes and you already fail the first day. You have to not have excessive expectations at first. What I mean by that is these are based on habit. What happens with habit? You start small. You don't sit there and say, I'm going to lose 100 pounds in the next month. You say, I'm going to try to modify my diet where I'm not drinking sodas. That's the first little one.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Control Your Mind & Redirect Your Energy to Self Transformation
And each of these little wins strengthens you. to actually then do the big thing ultimately. So you don't start by running a marathon on day one. You start by getting up out of bed and walking around the block.