Dr. Gabor Maté Reveals The Unlikely Link Between Stress, Trauma & Disease

I was resentful I was tired alienated and depressed I had to wake up and start dealing with it how do we go about doing this you've lost a plot when it comes to kids they you up your mom and dad do not mean to what they do the Panic is wired into the brain and now you have a kid who going to be anxious all their lives and in this culture it's very much about tell me who you are I'm a doctor I'm a plumber I mean I'm that's not who you are that's just what

you do you can do experiments with adults where they're being evaluated and you measure stress hormone levels they're elevated for days what's the first thing that you would like people to do if if they're interested in changing their mindset the only right answer I know to that question is this episode is supported by hu gab welcome to high performance pleasure I want to start with a question I've I've heard you talk about the power of it in the past and the question is tell me who you are so when I say to you tell me

who you are what do you think well the only right answer I know to that question is that the question is much more important than the answer because any answer I give you would be limiting I mean I could say I'm a doctor I'm a writer I'm a husband I'm a father I any of those are only um aspects of who I am so I'm just a a person who's sitting here now hanging out with your question that's who I am and why is that such an important question because who we believe we are determines

so much of our behavior and our reactions and perceptions and interactions you know whether it's in personal relationships whether it's uh in politics and so on so um if I'm comfortable not having a definitive answer and just being with whatever is happening at the moment then I'm in the present but soon as I Define Myself by am one of the categories of my existence I'm leing myself to I'm limiting myself to that category and that's going to limit my reactions so you know we were talking about sports before you know if you define yourself as

say a Manchester City fan if that's who you are that's going to determine a whole lot of your reactions and you won't appreciate a lot of things that you might really appreciate if you didn't have that narrow definition of yourself and in this culture it's very much about you know tell me who you are I'm a doctor I'm a plumber I mean I'm you know that's not who you are that's just what you do you know so but live in a society that limits us through all these categories I I think it's a one of

the sins of civilization so so one of your most famous Concepts Gabor is around wholeness yeah and how do we all develop this sense of wholeness what are your tips on how we can do that then well actually it's more like how we lose it in the first place because I don't know if you guys are parents but there's no one day old baby that laes wholeness they completely themselves whatever they experience you're going to know about it whatever they feel they're going to manifest it whatever is in them to communicate they're going to communicate

it so it's more a question of how do we lose that wholeness and the English language is interesting that way because the World Health itself derives from an anglosaxon word for wholeness so the and wholeness is the natural state of any creature you know no animal loses wholeness in their healthy environment so more the more fundamental question is not how do we get to wholeness but how do we lose it uh understanding that can help us get back to it so how do we lose it um one of the needs of the child um we

can talk about human needs and as defined by Evolution not by some arbitrary New Age conceptual framework but just Evolution and so you might say that one need that we have without which we couldn't live is oxygen because we evolved in an oxygen filled environment if there was no oxygen we wouldn't exist so might say oxygen is an expectation it's a need that we have we also have emotional needs and expectations wired into us by Evolution one of them is to be seen for who we are to be accepted of who we are that's just

a need of the child if that need is met that child develops a sense of complete comfort with the who they are and and presence and holess however in our society and as a parent I can certainly say this it's so difficult for parents to really see their kids for who they actually are without projecting our expectations on them for who they should be or how they should be how they should show up how they should behave and so that we're not seeing the child for themselves we see we seeing the child through our own

expectations and anxieties other the child who's not seen for who they are they don't see themselves so they lose their connection to themselves that's just how it works it seems such a hard thing right to get parenting right do you know that famous poem by the British poet Philip lyen about uh [ __ ] up yeah they [ __ ] you up your mom and dad they don't not mean to what they do but you know they do not mean to what they do you know um look parenting has become far more complex and difficult

than nature intended it I just finished there's a lot of research and literature on how Aboriginal tribal peoples parent their kids much more healthy ways than we do today and I just finished reading a book published maybe 40 years ago now called the Continuum concept it's an American model and writer who ends up in the Venezuelan jungle six weeks away from civilization with these Stone Age people and these people they hold their kids all the time they don't put them down to sleep in a different room they don't let them cry not that they forbid

them to cry the child doesn't have to cry to be picked up because the parents are with them all the time and they don't judge and they don't berate they don't punish their kids and these kids grow up with an innate sense of their own goodness and their own wholeness and of course it's not the parenting task is not forced upon isolated individual parents who both have to go to work and not see their kids the whole day the kids are with the parents the whole day and not with their parents other adults other other

parenting figures you know it takes a village as the African saying goes now kids who grow up like that they have a sense of their goodness confidence in their bodies connection to their environment and a very positive sense of themselves so civilization for all its advantages of course we can't go back to being Stone Age trouble peoples but we've lost so much and if only we could understand what we've lost and do what we can in today's society to to bring back as much as we can um so that you know civilization of course all

these achievements scientific technical medical cultural whatever but we've lost the plot when it comes to kids and and and parents who need a lot more support parenting should be much more multigenerational much more communal uh parent should be supported to be with at home with their kids in the first months for sure um kindergartens and so on shouldn't be just about behavior and teaching of facts or skills it should be about relationship yeah because human beings are relational creatures by Nature so we could do a whole lot better uh you know and it's not up

up to individual parents it's a real social question look we all know the struggle of deciding what to eat but what if I told you that hu can make that decision easier their taster bundle has got eight ready to drink bottles including their black addition which has got 35 g of protein six daily Ed vitamins eight Complete Nutrition bars two hot Savory pots and a free hu t-shirt all you have to do is click the link in the description to unlock your offer now at hu.com slh highperformance and what have you learned then about how

we ended up in this modern way of thinking about parenting where you put your kids in a room and you close the door and let them cry until they don't cry anymore yeah you go back to work as quickly as possible to show your kids what a work ethic looks like you put your kids in full-time Nursery as early as you can so you can get on with the life that you wanted to live as a parent how have we ended up in in this way of thinking yeah um because we live in a society

who implicit but even overtly stated value uh is individual advancement and individual success and as soon as we put the emphasis on the individual we forget that we're relational creatures so when you go back to work early to show your kids a work ethic what you're really showing is that you don't care about them because if you care you know I'm talking about myself you know if when I was a young physician I was really a workoholic and really matter to me as being successful in practice what message did my kids get is that didn't

matter to me because if they mattered to me I would have been there with them on the weekends and in the evenings rather than being on call all the time so inadvertently we give our kids the message that they don't matter and when we don't pick them up I mean why do kids cry kids are wired um for connection with the parents the they literally wired their brains are wired for it not just our kids birds mammals this physiological neurological wiring for connection we're also wired for panic we're actually wired for panic why are we

wir for panic because what should I feel as an infant if my parents are not around I should feel panic because what do I do if I feel panic I Cry what does that crying do it immediately should bring the parent running to pick me up who shouldn't have put me down in the first place not according to ancient people's okay now what happens to a kid where they're having this Panic they're crying for the parent because they they physically need the contact emotionally and their parent ignores it the Panic is wired into their brain

and now you have a kid who's going to be anxious all their lives so again if you just understood the basic needs of kids and like you're a parent yeah okay when I was a young parent if you had asked me what is the greatest value to me I would have unhesitatingly I would have said the well-being and happiness of my family and you'd probably say the same thing correct yeah but if you actually looked at how I lived my life that's not what you would have concluded what you would concluded is that this guy's

highest value is advancement work yeah and his success as a physician so that my declared value which I would have been very sincere about um articulating was a complete odds with the value that I was actually living so my kids get what message did they get you know and what about people who listen to this and go well I need to work all the hours God sense to pay the bills to that's certainly true for a lot of people um partly that's a matter of how this Society doesn't value young life and we keep talking

about how children are our future we sure don't behave that way but but but given that this Society is like that then at least you should realize what the kid is losing by your absence and when you're with them really be with them don't spend your time looking at your cell phone watching television um vegging out on the latest football talk show you know spend time with your kids be with them and and and invite them to be in your presence so at least we should do what we can to compensate for what we've lost

I think in your writing gabo especially your new book The Myth of normal yeah you you pose some quite searching questions for the reader or The Listener to to ask themselves and I think one of the most effective set of questions I've read from your work is the compassionate inquiry questions that I think move us all closer to this this sense of being who we should be yeah would you explain about compassionate inquiry and why anyone can use it to their advantage sure so um it it goes back to when I was a family physician

and um I began to notice that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental that um certain characteristics or character traits were showing up more and more frequently in the people who got chronically ill and those character traits suppressing emotions and being too nice to always please other people just to give two examples nobody's born with it so these are traits developed in childhood in response to certain experiences which meant now those that self-suppression of emotions and being too nice and taking on too much stress in order not to trouble others stress the body they

lead to inflammation and illness in other words the physical illnesses that people were coming in to my office with weren't just bodily phenomena they represented emotional Dynamics and how they live their lives which also meant that if somebody come comes into with an inflamed joint I may have to give them an anti-inflammatory I may have to give them a steroid steroid I may have to give them medication to suppress their immune system which is attacking their own body but if I really was going to deal with it I would also have to say what's stressing

you so much are you saying no do you know how to say no when the world is demanding too much from you do you express how you feel which means it wasn't enough just to write a prescription I'd have to talk with them and uh now where I was working in the part Vancouver people couldn't afford private psychologists and the psychiatrists who are medical doctors who were covered by the medical plan they're not trained to ask these questions mostly they know how to prescrib medications I'm not I don't mean to sland their a whole profession

but mostly that's how they trained which means I had to talk to my patients so I learned how to listen so then I had to learn to develop certain questions and that's how compassionate inquiry r as is just for my own now also I to deal with my own Neurosis my own dysfunctions my own workaholism my own depression my own problems with my kids so I just learned to ask certain questions and then since then I'm not going to go into the long detail but compassion inquir has become a a therapeutic modality that we teach

to thousands of therapists internationally and it's also I write about in the book and there's some certain basic questions and I do believe that we all carry the truth within our El we may not have access to the truth all the time I certainly don't but ask the right questions we'll find the truth in ourselves so that's that's what it's based on I I think it'd be really helpful for people if Damen and I ran through the the six questions and you can just explain why they are important questions to ask ourselves yeah and then

you know people can note them down and yeah and they can do this themselves at home so the first question in your compassionate inquiry is in my life's important area what am I not saying no to yeah so compassionate that's an example of compassion in ch it's not doesn't Encompass the whole thing but I've mentioned this before there's a book written by an Australian paliative care nurse about 12 years ago it's called the top five regrets of dying people now I used to work in pal of care myself I looked after ter old people and

but she would sit with these people who are dying before their time because malignancy and she would you know get to know them and the top forret was that I wasn't myself I didn't have the courage to be myself I spent too much time trying to please others rather than you know so that's what I found as well is that people didn't know how to say no to other people's demands were suppressing themselves for the sake of being accepted by others so therefore this question in important areas of your life either in personal existence or

in in your work activities where already have trouble saying no if I ask you guys is anything come up do you have trouble saying no yeah I mean I'll I that's a real issue for me okay so would it be I'm not asking details but work or personal life or both both okay all right so then the next question follows which is what is the impact of your what is the impact on you of your difficulty saying no it's often sort of leading myself to physical and mental exhaustion exactly now are you both parents y

okay what's the word that the kids start saying automatically at age one and a half no no yeah time to put your shoes on no yeah you're right now why is that cuz nature is smart and nature knows that we have to develop a barrier behind which we can develop our own will and our own preferences so that know that the child says automatically at that age is their little fence behind which they can develop their own sense of self and their own will if we don't crush it a lot of people think now they

have a monster on their hands they have to crush it so now we now we have people that don't know how to say no so the impact is exhaustion fatigue y it could be frequent CS could even be serious illness so that's it's an important little thing that you're not saying there so that's the first second question is what is the impact so I'm saying to people identify where you're not saying no write down the impact this week where did I not say no what was the impact I was resentful I was tired I I

had toble sleeping I you know I got a cold whatever it was the third question is what is the belief behind your inability to say no so in your case Damian what there's a belief there if I say no what does that mean that people will reject me people won't like me for exactly saying no exactly so that if I say no I'll be rejected that's one story that people say now let's turn it around if you called me up to go for coffee and I was up all night with a sick patient or somebody

and I said no I'm sorry Damian but I'm not going to go to coffee with you would you reject me the opposite yeah exactly but you're afraid that you'd be rejected which tells me something about your childhood is that you got a certain message that you're only acceptable when you're compliant and then you internalize that and that becomes part of your personality it's not who you are it's just how you're programmed so the belief is if I say no I'll be rejected okay now they next question is where did I learn that and then we

can go into your life and you know and the fifth question is who would you be without that belief if you didn't have the belief that if I say i' Beed who would you be what's the answer yourself you'd be yourself You' be you'd be free yeah you know and then there's the sixth question which is certainly was true for me for a long time are there areas in your life where you're not saying yes where you want to say yes but you're not saying it maybe some passion some desire for self-expression some desire to

be out in nature or go hiking or I don't know play sports or dance or write or Draw or play music or other areas in your life where you're not saying yes but there's a yes that wants to be said and that yes that you're not saying is as impactful negatively as the no that you're not saying is this clear to you guys yeah yeah it's really clear can I there's two questions that spin off from this Cabo I'd like to explore one is quite pragmatic question of how do we learn to say no better

then first all by doing this exercise like like if you actually get the impact yeah if you really think about it you realize how important it is secondly if you realize that you'd be free that's worth something so basically it's just by noticing not by judging yourself but by noticing where you have trouble saying no what the impact is and that it's just a story that you're telling yourself no it's true there might be some people in your life that if you said no to them they' reject you that might be true because youve trained

them you've trained them that you're the guy who doesn't say no that's what they signed up for and all of a sudden you start saying no so this is not what I I don't want but then you have a decision to make who would you rather please them or yourself and and I can also tell you the people that really cared about you and really loved you they'd welcome it they'd say it's about time so it's not that you lose anything in the end you'd find a who your friends were yeah but the people that

reject you when you say no in order to honor yourself they are not your friends in the first place were they true yeah yeah which leads to my second question of how do we ask these questions is it better to we ask ourselves or do we have somebody that can help us and guide us through this inquiry you can do it both ways but in the book myth normal be set it up as a self conducted exercise sit down with these questions once a week write them out don't just run through them in your head

take a piece of paper not even a computer but handwritten where this week did I not say [Music] no what was the impact of me not saying it takes 10 minutes once a week what was the impact what was the belief if you do this regularly people have told me that that exercise alone has changed their lives if they do it regularly it's not that difficult I notice that you lean straight into Damian the presenter right asking lots of questions to gabal when he was doing that bit of work with you let me just ask

you like how it felt because when when gabal said people would say it's about time you can finally be yourself like even I felt a weight lift from me and I'm not even you and the truth is Gabel we've worked together now for 5 years really we've had a conversation about Damian's overwhelm and saying yes to everything monthly yeah for those five years so what were you thinking when you were talking I had my uh my wife's face in the head that that idea of at last that it was it was her it was her

word saying what was coming out of your mouth CU it's a frequent it's a frequent area of contention so the freedom of in terms of from in my personal life of where conflicts will often arise is because I've committed to something yeah because the fear of saying no well do you know something um it was here in London I think six years ago no five or six I was here for speaking engagement and my wife was here with me and it was like crazy busy I was overworking and she said to me um buddy you've

written a book called when the body says no that's one of my books when the body says no and she says no you better white one called when the wife says no because she wasn't going to put up with it anymore yeah yeah you know and partly I did decision to make do I bring my life in alignment with what I teach or do I present one nice message on stage and live a totally different life you know in my personal existence and it's an ongoing um theme see but what I take real heart from

that gabar is that that if you don't mind me referencing you're you're 18 now yeah yeah and and yet this is still a process that you're asking yourself this question yeah you know uh uh at your race it it nobody has it figured I suppose is what I yeah I take some kind of soless from when did you start asking yourself these questions what happened for you to ask yourself these questions what happened for me that the life wasn't working in my 40s I was uh alienated and depressed and uh I was successful but I

wasn't a happy camper you know and there were problems in my relationship I didn't like the way things were going with my kids so I was challenged personally and you know I had to wake up and start dealing with it it's an ongoing process I often say this that you know I'm 80 years old now and I'm glad I'm not as young as stupid as I was one when I was 79 you know so there there's hope for you guys too you know why I'm really glad you're sharing this is because a lot of people

say the same thing to me when I meet them which is you know this this show is called high performance right and they often say to me you know everything in my life is great yeah but I'm still searching for something yeah which is why I come and listen to your show and I think that what you've just described there as someone who was outwardly hugely successful inwardly was still was still searching well they're searching for themselves whether they know that or not that's what they're searching for they're searching for their truth and uh this

society reveres and rewards and [Music] um valorizes external success but all three of us know how many Highly Successful People in that conventional sense are totally miserable inside I mean totally miserable you can see it see I would say 60 or 70% of the people that sit across from us on this show yeah are struggling quite heavily with life despite the fact they've been invited onto a show called high performance and I think so often and it's it's a self-esteem issue yeah what would you like to share with our audience about self-esteem there's two kinds

of self-esteem you might say um there's what we can call contingent self-esteem which depends on how well you do and what other people think of you then there's genuine self-esteem which says I'm not worthwhile because I can do this that or the other I'm worthwhile whether or not I can do this that or the other now the people that you're talking about are very much caught in that contingent self-esteem that how they feel about themselves depends on how they perform and how they perceive to perform by other people but underneath that there's a hole and

it can never be filled from the outside and but that's what they keep trying to do so the more successful they are the more success they need I know that feeling you know that you know oh great my book is the best seller this week what about next week when it isn't then who am I you know and uh so it this Society values valorizes and and and and and the thoughts that contingent self-esteem and we do it in school to kids we do it in kindergarten to kids um and we don't understand that intrinsic

non-contingent self-esteem that is nothing to do with ls achievement or external um um appr probation how are we creating an environment of contingent self-esteem with our children Today's Show is sponsored by vant the all-in-one trust Management program now here at high performance we've tried really hard to create a safe trusting environment for our guests and that's why we've teamed up with vant because whether you're just starting or maybe scaling your company's security program actually having topnotch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever andant automates compliance for ISO 271 sock 2 gdpr and

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kids the message that they're only acceptable to you if they behave a certain way get success that's that they have to have success and if there's success you're so happy you know and otherwise you're not um by um not seeing them by not accepting their vulnerability but by demanding that they be tough or resilient you know uh um by constantly evaluating them in schools schools are schools are constantly evaluating kids I can show you the studies there's such a thing called evaluation stress you can do experiments with where they're being evaluated and there stress hormone

levels even when it doesn't matter even if they know it's only an experiment and you measure their stress hormone levels they're elevated for days because they're being evaluated it's called EV no what do we do to kids when we constantly marking them grading them and demanding that they behave this way and that way and they perform this and they perform that well we creating evaluation stress what should we be doing how should we be monitoring them at school again if you go back to human evolution how did K kids learn in the first place did

they sit in classrooms the whole day explored they explored there were outoors with adults under the benign supervision of adults they played free play now free play is one of the essential needs of childhood our brains are wired for play we have play circuits in our brains uh not only we do have you ever seen kittens or or puppies or or or elephant uh uh Cubs or or lion cubs they play why do they play because play is essential for healthy brain development and play is far more important for healthy brain development and learning than

academic uh instruction so we let our kids play not with machines but fee play out in nature and uh then they'd learn by watching us do things those kids will then develop a Natural Curiosity which will want them which will make them want to learn about history or science or art whatever they're interested in so we get it backwards we put the academic instruction and evaluation ahead of the child spontaneous development we both have daughters who are just starting at high school yeah so they're now starting to see the world of social media the world

of celebrity yeah what's that doing to their self-esteem it depends on how well they connected are to the parents if the primary connection is with the parents um then they're not going to dependent on what their peers think of them I mean it might matter to them but not going to be dependent on it but there's a book that I helped to write which TR it's called hold on to your kids why parents need to matter more than peers it's been published here in the UK as well and in 40 other languages it's not my

work it's the work of um psychologist friend of mine called Gordon newfeld I did the writing with him because he's not a writer but it's about the fact that in this Society kids get too hooked into each other way too early and now they get their cues on how to be in how to walk and how to talk and what's important from each other including they get the sense of value from peer evaluation and pure acceptance which is means now immature creatures now have enormous influence on each other's development which is not how nature intended

it there's so much of what I'm I'm hearing as a subtext here here Gaba around the three things that you spoke about that that that often trigger trauma for of us which is the sense of uncertainty conflict and the lack of control yeah would you expand on those fors yeah these don't um trigger trauma they trigger stress stress yeah so this is a research literature that says that lack of information uncertainty conflict loss of control trigger the body's stress apparatus which means that there's more inflammation there's higher levels of stress hormones and they're damaging effects

on the body so I'll give you an example um they take unfortunately in Laboratories they can do terrible things to animals so I'm not saying this with any sense of approval I'm just telling you one study that I read they took pairs of rats that were yolked to together and attached to their tail was an electrode which delivers an electric shock and both rats got the same degree of shock for the same duration of time but one of them had a paw fee that could turn off a lever that stopped electrical shock then they measured

their stress hormone levels those rats that had the freedom to turn off the lever had lower stress in their bodies than the ones who received the shock the same shock for the same period of time but had no control so loss of control is the major source of stress now in this Society where a lot of the large decisions are made Far Away by people you don't even know but they affect your life you know like uh some corporate Elon Musk decides to fire half the people that worked for Twitter which he did the first

his first day on the job but what do those people feel some guy who doesn't even know that makes a decision about their lives no that's the system we got but I'm saying that it's a nature of the system to impose a lot of loss of control on people in Britain right now I've been reading the papers there's this de debate about cutting off um financial help yeah for heating in the winter time the winter fuel payments you know those people have no control whatsoever y somebody in Parliament and Keith starmer is urging his MPS

to vote for this cut because we need to save those 20 million or whatever pounds now we're not going to do that by taxing the rich we're going to do it by taking it from the poorest how do those people feel quite apart from the cold they're going to experience how do they feel about the loss of control in their lives you know and that's just one small example and that they're going to get triggered they're not just going to be cold if they can't afford the eating even if they can afford it they're going

to be triggered by the you know minimally by taking some other by depriving themselves somewhere else yeah but the loss of control where just Pawns in somebody else's game it's tremendous in this society and this is where our own I guess mental strength comes to the for and one of your most shared and repeated quotes is we may not be responsible for the world that created our minds but we can take responsibility for the mind which creates our world yeah how do we go about doing that well yeah that's the whole thing that's the key

and um the Buddha said said 2500 years ago basically I'm paraphrasing him that it with our minds and our thoughts that we create the world that we live in so if you live in a world where if you say no you're going to get rejected and you can't handle that that's a very different than if you lived in a world where it's okay for me to say no you're creating the world with your mind you're creating your relationships and and your life with these mind programs that was developed very early in childhood so now you're

not responsible for that mindset I'm not responsible for my sense of Abandonment that that was my first experience or early experience in life but I can be responsible for the mind that holds those beliefs and I can recognize that these beliefs were program into me programm into me they're not serving me anymore I don't have to hold on to them so that's what I mean there it's very simple it just means um well no it's not simple at all conceptually it's simple yeah but it means that we don't have to be programmed and limited and

um predetermined by beliefs and mind States that'll be developed when you were kids and we had no choice in the matter we don't have to be so what would you say is the most effective way if somebody recognizes they have an unhelpful belief system yeah what's the most effective way anyone can start to rewire it well that is the first big step is just to recognize it um because until you recognize it you actually think it's reality and you think it's the only way reality can function once you realize that this is just a mindset

no you can do all kinds of things but the first thing is to keep recognizing every time that mindset shows up in your life so in my relationship with my wife if I find her not as interested in me as I might wanted to be I can either indulge in self-pity and see myself as a victim and being abandoned or I can notice oh I got the same stuff happening again that's curious what's going on so I can get curious about it turns out it's got nothing to do with her rejecting me it's just got

to do with she's got something else on her mind you know so just by noticing these habitual reactions um we developed the capacity to see ourselves uh uh a little bit from the outside and and not be dominated by these old mind States that's the beginning of it but to believe that we can change those mind States we need hope right it's more than hope uh almost anybody that I meet almost anybody if I question them they' be able to give me some example or they where they used to believe something and that belief caused

them grief then they s through that belief and not they don't I mean almost can you guys think of examples in your life of that can you not yeah where you have certain beliefs I also know people who will will listen to this and think well I'm so broken I can't be helped yeah and I would say to them I understand and that belief itself is a belief that belief itself is a mindset and it refers to a time in your life when you truly helpless and you're truly alone and truly vulnerable is that really

true is it true that you can't ask for help is it true that there's nobody out there who can possibly understand you is that actually true in other words I would take that belief itself that they're hopeless and by the way nobody's broken there's nobody broken we talked about this conversation began with this idea of wholeness we're all born whole and that wholeness is Health that can be refound in everybody so nobody's damaged goods nobody's broken as long as they have Consciousness there's plenty of stuff to work with that's that's not my assumption that's what

I know we've reached the point where we're going to offer you some quick fire questions sure this first one might be a hard one to answer quickfire but having listened to this really interesting chat what's the first thing that you would like people to do if if they're interested in changing their mindset Where Do We Begin read my damn book it's a great ad um what's the first thing one start questioning themselves don't take it for granted don't take your belief for granted what's the greatest piece of advice you've ever received and why you know

um when I was uh family physician I had this urge to write and I used to have a patient a Great Canadian poet called Warren tomman and Warren would come in and I'd look after his medical needs and they would sit down and talk and at one point I said to Warren Warren I want to I was in my 40s or maybe early 50s and I was really frustrated and there was something in me that had a sense that I hadn't fully expressed myself I haven't reached my potential yet and I said to him Warren

I want to write but I don't know what and he said Gabor you'll write when you have something to teach the world and that's the best thing anybody ever said to me because that's actually what happened so he actually the advice was really trust yourself you've written so many popular books you've been on the world's biggest podcasts you've worked with some of the most famous people on the planet yeah what are we still failing to understand about ourselves that is holding so many people back they were born whole and that wholeness can be regained um

been that's been the theme of our conversation today but that's the biggest one Cor what advice would you give to a young gabo just starting out on that Journey from Hungary to Canada what advice would I give to myself um first of all uh uh respect yourself but never take yourself too seriously um and you don't have to do it all and look more inside than to the outside because I I used to look just to the outside all the time and looking at myself was long and difficult process so I'd say U to say

just don't take it so seriously like you know just lighten up what's your biggest strength what's your greatest weakness um how can you look at me and ask if I have any weaknesses come on I thought it was a silly question um my biggest strength is my capacity to see connections between things uh in a way that a lot of people can't uh that that really is the strength um and to be able to communicate that my biggest weakness [Music] um I'm still concerned about who I'll be when I won't be able to do all

the things I can do now like who will I be then when I'm not out there on the podcast and on the book circuit and and talking and so then who will I be so my biggest weakness or biggest concern you might be is just still who am I when I'm not all that I can talk about it but if I examine myself honestly it's a concern of mine and the truth is one that you'll have to find out I eventually I'll find out if you could go back to one moment of your life what

would it be and why it' be I'm not going to talk about this in detail but there's certain decisions I made in my personal life that I would not make again that I would make totally different choices um choices that create a lot of suffering for people that I really love that's what I like to go back to and without going into detail obviously from those how have you learned to live with them by doing what repair I could but also by forgiving Myself by by recognizing that that's who I was that's how I was

programmed I you know I did what I did out of what I believed at that time so there's no no point keeping berting myself thing is to own it and take responsibility without allowing that to diminish my respect for myself and the final question that you want to leave ringing in the ears of our audience your one Golden Rule if you like to living a high performance life trust yourself trust yourself really trust yourself not your ideas but your true self just trust that it's there let it guide you because high performance is obviously different

for everybody and and for me it's have I done the best I can with what I understand and what I know and what my calling is maybe that's too many words follow your calling that's what I would say to people go well thank you so much my pleasure thank you guys struggling to find the motivation try this [Music] instead take it professionally not personally why are we postponing love and community and friendship I'm not worried if anyone fails as long as we are changing things for the good to have those kinds of friendships I think

are absolutely essential to being what we would call a high performance human being [Music] take back control over your happiness give the high performance app a try then see how you feel [Music]