Dr. Jeff Karp
Appearances
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
But as we get older, we lead these algorithmic lifestyles. We wake up at the same time, we have the same breakfast, we go to work at the same time, we scroll social media at the same time, we go to the same sites. We interact with the same people, same friend group. And so there's not that much new in our lives.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And when you start to infuse new in your life, and we do have this fear, we have this hesitation to do new, but when you start to do it, it just illuminates everything.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
There's so many ways that I use this. One example, actually just something I've been practicing recently just to intercept a rumination and to just shift my mind is I visualize, right? And this is just one of many possibilities. Right, but we're gonna do new people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Okay, put them on and take a look. This is something that is really simple to do new. And again, it's like a mind to shift your mind, to change your frame.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Everything turns into a rainbow.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
This is a tool that can help you see your environment in a different way. Like it can get you out of one possibility and into another possibility. And there's so many different tools that we can engage to do that. And I think that there's lots of practices and rituals and all kinds of things that we can engage.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And I think that's one of the limiting things about life is that we stay on one track for for too long. And so when we put on these glasses and now we look at the lights and everything is rainbows, then that ignites our curiosity, right? We start thinking like, oh, well, how does that happen? And if you start turning your head, you can see the rainbows start moving.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Absolutely. It's like, let's say you're walking and you look up at the clouds, it's hard to see them moving. But if you stop and you look up at the clouds, then you can see them moving. And when you notice the moving, it has this awe, this, this, it's like, wow. And you can see them sort of joining with each other. And as kids, kids can look up and see animals, but we can do that too as adults.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And I like to do that because, again, it's a way of getting out of my mind. We always hear like, get into the moment, be authentic. It's like, well, what's the process for doing that? I agree. Right? It's like, what are the steps to get there? And to me, to get into the moment, if we stop walking and look up at the clouds and we start thinking about the clouds, we're totally in the moment.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yes. Pause is so important. Pressing pause. And we need a tool to slow down. We need a tool to tap into intuitive cues. We need a tool to allow our brains to sync up, to process information and experiences. And so I noticed I was doing these back-to-back-to-back meetings all day long. I get to the end of the day, felt like I'd done maybe two marathons of work.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
That felt great, but there was something missing. There was something I couldn't put my finger on it. And being someone who's constantly tinkering with everything...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I started to experiment with, okay, what if I take a break in between my meetings, like five minutes, 10 minutes, and not a social media break or an email break or a texting break, but a true break where I do nothing or I just go for a walk. And I started experimenting with it. And what I noticed was transformational. I would...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
basically start thinking about something someone had told me a few weeks before, a few months before, and it would connect to what the person I just met with said. And I'd be like, whoa, we should get together and meet because this could turn into something completely new. I wouldn't have had that thought if I didn't press pause. And so...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
It's like we have so much information coming at us from every meeting we have. And a lot of it's in our subconscious mind. We need to take time for these thoughts to swirl around our mind to process them and to kind of place them. And I found that my best thinking happens when I do that, when I'm actually pausing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And there's a neuroscientist that I spoke to, actually interviewed for the book, and a musician, Molly Gerbrian is her name. And just amazing things that she said. So she said, actually, it's in the pauses is when mind turns into matter, right? So when we're learning, it's actually, our brains aren't rewiring in the moments that like, you know, so much of just, you know, engaging.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
It's actually when we pause, that's when the circuitry is really changing and the remodeling is occurring, you know, like during sleep, for example. And she said, actually, a lot of people, if they're practicing a skill that a lot of people will do is they'll, if they have one hour, they'll just practice for the whole hour.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And she said, no, no, no, that's not, the neuroscience shows that's not the best way to do it. She said the best way to do it is practice for 15 or 20 minutes, take a five or 10 minute break, and then approach it again. And this engages something called the startle effect.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And so the startle effect is where the next time that you approach something, you clue into your attention is focused on what you forgot, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
So let's say you try to build a skill, you learn something in 20 minutes, then you go back, you realize what you've forgotten now, because now you're applying it again, that hyper focuses your brain on what you forgot and helps you to imprint whatever you're learning. And so by doing that over and over, that's how we start to rewire our brains and develop skills.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I think it's difficult to practice new skills because of the way that we practice. And that's why one of the tools is actually fall in love with practice. Because what I have found, right, and through some of the people that I've spoke to and interviewed for the book, is that practice can become monotonous really fast. It can become boring.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
But there are, just like with everything, there's limitless possibilities in the way that we can practice. And so I interviewed the five times US memory champion, Nelson Delis, for the book. And I specifically asked him, Nelson, how... At some point, it's got to get boring, right? If you're just practicing the same thing over and over and over again. I said, what do you do?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And he said, well, sometimes when I get to that state, he said, instead of like, he would memorize like a 52 deck of cards and I forget how many, like 20 seconds or whatever it is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Like in a random order, someone hands him a deck and 30 seconds, he could memorize like the whole thing. And so I said, what do you do?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
No. He wasn't. He had someone in his family, I think it was his grandmother, who got Alzheimer's, and he never thought he had a good memory. And he was concerned that that would be his fate, and he turned to memory games and learning how to build his memory. And so he told me that what he does is he will insert a few extra cards in the deck. So he'll change it up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And he said that presents a new challenge to him that activates his mind and it makes it more engaging. Like when I was younger, and I was always the last chosen for sports at school, right? Actually, it was me and this other kid. And...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And I was probably maybe like 11 years old, 10, 11, something like that. And he would just stand with me and he would say, okay, shoot it there. Here's the angle. Here's how to do your hand. And over time, I got better at it. Like I was almost getting it every single time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And to me, that was shifting from the possibility of me just standing there trying to do it on my own to having someone supportive there with me, showing me how to do it. And so it was just, I was engaging in another possibility. It's finding the process that works for you. And when you start, I almost think of it as like a knob, like it's like click, click, click, click. There it is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Now I'm improving. And we need to be able to tune in to those incremental improvements and incremental progress in order for us to continue to advance. And to me, it's like falling in love with practice is the key to persistence. It's how we become persistent in anything in our life. If we can find ways to infuse joy into practicing, then we can keep at it for longer and we can be persistent.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And we all know that persistence is so important for progress.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
wow, I've experienced so many setbacks and, you know, just nothing has ever come easy to me. And I would say, you know, the way I would describe it really is that let's say I ended up talking about my experiences, just all of my experiences in life, really. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Like you have a big failure. I have a lot of big failures. Okay. So for example, um, I applied to medical school, got rejected from all three schools that I applied to. I had so many failures. I was the kid in high school who got up to do a Walkman sing and got booed off the stage, right? I'm that kid. Wow.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I tried out to be on student council multiple times and I didn't get on, although I actually did get on in my final year of high school from pattern recognition. I figured some things out. But yeah, I almost visualize it's like I'm in a boat. I'm trying to get to the end of the stream, right? And I am bumping into every single rock along the way, every overhanging branch.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I mean, that's sort of like my experience with everything. And so one of the massive failures that I had is with TedMed. I was invited, actually, Jay Walker, the CEO of Priceline, was the CEO of TedMed. And he gave me a call and he said, hey, I would like to invite you to give a talk on your bio-inspiration work, how you turn to nature for inspiration over to develop medical technologies.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I initially said no, because I was so frightened. I had not memorized anything since public school. But then I thought about it and I was like, okay, I will never be asked again to speak on this stage. And I went and I said yes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
So what happened was I practiced like crazy. I rented out the Kresge Auditorium at MIT, which is the biggest auditorium. I presented to four people, my family who were there. And I knew that talk inside and out. It was like 15 minutes, purely memorized. I had slides, I had animations, I had to get the timing right. I had to make it look like I didn't memorize it. There was all these sort of stages.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And I was ready to go. And I get to TEDMED. It was at the Kennedy Center in DC. And I practiced my talk and they suggest some changes. And I'm like, oh my god, I can't change it now. It's tomorrow. So I try to figure out how am I going to because I've memorized it. Then we go on stage beforehand, there's sort of like walkthrough and they say, by the way, the clicker only goes forward.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
It doesn't go back. If you go too fast and hit it, you know, you have to yell to the AV person, can you go back? And I'm like, there's no way I'm doing that. And they said, sometimes people freeze in the middle of their talk. They said, the two reactions that we've seen is one, they run off the stage. They said, don't run off the stage if that happens.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
The second reaction we've seen is people will actually start crying. They said, don't do that either.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I'm sure that's happened at some point. And then they said, just stand there and smile. And so I am like, you know, I'm ready to go. I'm like, I get a pack of Hall's in my hand. I'm eating them all right before I go up. I get up on stage. I have it so well memorized that I can think about other things. It's five high definition cameras on me being live streamed throughout the world.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
It's filled at this Kennedy Center in D.C., the president of my institutions in the audience. And I get to the middle of my talk and I think to myself, I missed a line. There was a line that I forgot to say. And my mind couldn't get unhooked from that. And I stopped in the middle of it for 15 seconds. I said nothing. Now, 15 seconds is a very long time to pause on this type of a stage.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Well, I was so nervous. I, you know, had this like visceral reaction where it was like this negativity came within me. I'm trying to think, okay, I can't run off the stage. I can't start crying. They want me to smile. The swear words are going through my head. I'm holding the clicker, trying to like use it like a lightning rod of energy. And you can see me like going like this with it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Like I'm smiling. Yeah. And I'm like, the only thing I can think of is to turn the slide. And so I hit the clicker to go forward. I turn the slide, a blank slide. And I'm like, and then I was like, what is that? I go forward again and something magical happens, which is I'm like, wait a moment. I know what I'm supposed to say on this slide. The last slide was a cue.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I know what I'm supposed to say there. And I just started up again. And as I'm walking off the stage, the stage manager whispers to me, she goes, we can cut that out for the YouTube version. And that was it. Somebody came to me afterwards and they said, I noticed you paused in the middle of your talk. And I'm like, I think everybody did.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And they said, but the fact you were able to recover is really important. And think about that. And I had actually been shamed earlier in my life when I gave a presentation, just one presentation, I've given so many, that imprinted and created anxiety and fear and every time I presented after that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And this allowed me to detach from that experience and gain more confidence because I knew that anytime moving forward, if I stopped, that I could find my words again and keep going. And so it's like this... This tool is focusing beyond failure.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
It's about finding ways to look at failure completely differently, to see it as opportunities where we can find our greatest insights and opportunities for growth. And to me, one of the key things in all the failures that I've ever encountered is that is just huge, it's so big, is what you were saying before, like we have these expectations.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Even the first time we try things, we expect we're gonna miraculously succeed in everything we do, right? Like that's our expectation, then we go in with that. And what I've realized is that if we reframe failure, like we learn in school, failures over here, successes over here, avoid failure, maximize success. I see it as a prerequisite to success.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I see failure as an opportunity to be creative, as an opportunity to explore other possibilities you didn't think of before. I see failure now as a way to learn. And that's the shift, right? So I'll give you an example where I think this will become really clear. The first talk that I was invited to give on Lit was at Stanford, right? Many months ago. I'd never spoken about it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I put all these slides together. I was super nervous. And I didn't even know how to talk about the book. I'd been writing it. I hadn't been communicating it. And I get there and I said to myself, you know what, Jeff? you're going to give it your best, but this is Gen 1.0. I said, focus on doing your best, but also tapping into the cues that you get from people as you're speaking.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
What are the insights so you can move to Gen 2.0 and 2.0 is going to be better than 1.0. So I was able to shift away from the expectation of giving a spectacular talk to to focusing on the learnings, the insights I could gain to make the talk better. Because I was like, there's probably going to be a generation 5.0, a 10.0, a 20.0, whatever it is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And that shift is basically focusing on away from success and moving that to learning, to gaining an insight. So you're focusing on the evolution. And that's changed everything for me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yeah, Rudy Tanzi is a neuroscientist who spoke about some elements of what you just said in the book. And he said that before he goes to give a talk, he says to himself, I am here to serve. And it's more like he's here for a performance. He's here to share. He's here to give what he has, his gifts, his work. And to me, again, it's just...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
what's that other possibility that can switch us from fight or flight and put us into that moment where we feel empowered, we feel connected, we feel like we're truly sharing what we have with everybody.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yeah, I am. I'm at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and I'm still wearing my bike shoes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Absolutely. Great.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
One of the tools that you can use in this situation is called flip the switch.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And it's all about recognizing patterns that don't match up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Okay. So here's an example of flip the switch. Okay. My ADHD really created a lot of struggles for me early on, my learning differences. And in the seventh grade, I was actually identified as having learning differences and ADHD, and I got some accommodations. And that was really a pivotal moment for me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
But what happened was, is that my ADHD was still really problematic and troublesome for me, my learning differences, and it just presented daily challenges. And so I really needed, everything took me two or three times longer than everybody else. I would constantly be staying after school.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I'd go in on weekends to meet with teachers, the ones that would be available all through high school, like, you know, whenever I could. I just, it was always like a, it was like I was trudging through, I don't even know what, but it was just slow, slow, slow progress and everything. And so I needed to find ways to become more efficient. And so I started to just focus my attention on efficiency.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And I was just so focused on becoming more efficient that over time, I started to become more efficient. I started to be able to do more. I started to be able to focus my attention At will, I started to be able to navigate the world in ways that I had never navigated before to be able to learn and to succeed in my classes. And I started to thrive.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And what happened was I got so addicted to the dopamine hits from my work because now I was just able to just do almost like two marathons worth of work in a day. And when COVID hit, everything came crashing down in my living room. I had realized that I was completely out of touch.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I'd be going to birthday parties and I would be trying to network with other parents who were there versus focusing on the purpose of the birthday party, which was to connect with my children. And I would be at soccer practices and I would be trying to get my 10,000 steps. I'd be walking around the soccer field You sound pretty intense. Over and over and over again to get my 10,000 steps.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I'd be going for walks with my dogs and I would have Netflix on the phone and I'd watch an episode of Game of Thrones as I took them for a walk around the neighborhood. You're that guy? I was that guy. I was that guy. And it was all because I had been so focused on just that I was just so addicted to the dopamine that I was getting from my work because I became very efficient.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I was able to do way more than I had ever done before. But that was actually taking me off track. Got it. And COVID was this unintentional pause where everything came crashing down, literally in my living room. And I was like, okay, I need to change. And that's where I engaged Flip the Switch, which is a four-step process.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yeah, thank you for that question. And thank you for tuning into this. Oh my goodness, wow. There are tools I'm going to share today that have literally transformed my life. They've transformed so many moments that have taken me from being in a rut, from hitting a plateau.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
So the first step is to notice your inner desire for possibility. So it's this idea that in that moment, I knew that there was another way of living, another way of being. There was something I could do that I wasn't doing and I felt disconnected. So I really was in touch with other possibilities that I needed to discover.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
The second step is to take stock of what's working and what's holding you back.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And I had developed these incredible efficiencies in my lab, in my work. Things were going extremely well. But at home, it was a completely different scenario. It's like I looked up and all of a sudden, my son was quarterback of the high school football team. My kids were teenagers. All these years had passed. And I felt there was something deep that was missing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
There was something more that I needed to engage. I needed to figure this out. I needed to turn inward. And so that is what was holding me back. And the third step was to consider other possibilities, other ways of thinking. And at the time, my wife... was engaged in sort of seeking out these answers to some spiritual questions that she had.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And she was speaking to some spiritual leaders in the community. And I was like, you know, it took me a while to kind of look around. I was like, oh my God, she's having these conversations. These are the conversations that I need to be having at this moment. I identified this was a third step. The other possibilities are right in front of me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And the fourth step is to take a deliberate step forward. And so I asked my wife to introduce me to these spiritual people that she was engaging and she did. And I started to meet with them. And I started practicing meditation. I tried it before and it didn't really work like apps and all these things. But I sort of was connected to transcendental meditation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
which is this one word mantra that you say over and over in your mind. And what I started to notice as I practiced it, and I practiced it for two or three months, that's all actually I needed. And what I noticed was that these thoughts would come into my mind. There would usually be an emotion associated with the thought.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And I'd be in the middle of meditation and I'd be like, oh my God, I didn't write that email. And I'd be jumping out of the meditation. You need a seatbelt in your own meditation. I needed a seatbelt. Or a notepad to jot it down.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
But one of the amazing things that I recognized is that as that was happening, I noticed that if I didn't jump out of the meditation, if I could hold myself there, that that thought and the emotion would actually subside. It would leave my mind.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And all of a sudden that became this light bulb moment for me because what I noticed was when I was in conversation with my wife, with my children, I started to notice the energy of the conversation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
from being disconnected from my family and friends, from being on a path where I just feel like I'm trapped in a cage and life is out of control. And today, I'm going to share tools that have literally lit up my life and allowed me to get on a path of intentionality, infused creativity,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I started to notice that if, let's say, my kids are teenagers and if they're speaking and all of a sudden I want to say something, I want to interject, the energy shifts from them to me and they stop speaking. And now it's on me, but that's not my intention. My intention is for them to find their voice, for me to be supportive of them and not for me to take over or for the attention to be on me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And so the meditation helped me develop tools for navigating conversations with people, with everybody. And now I'm very... in my mind during conversations, it's wired in. I notice the energy of the conversation and I feel like the ADHD brain, because it's bouncing around and people with ADHD often forget what they're going to say and that can be painful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And so you want to just jump out and say it. And through this process, I've been able to keep myself present so that I'm not jumping out and interjecting And whenever I do that, I feel like it's almost like this box appears in my mind. It's like a little checkmark because it feels like a win.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And when I do that, when I pause and think about that, anytime I've had just these moments of intentionality in my day, and I just pause in that moment and sort of check, you know, put a little check, it feels amazing. And it sort of fuels more intentionality.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Noticing your inner desire for possibility.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Is to take stock of what's working and what's holding you back. Mm-hmm. Because we always have things that are working for us and it's important to acknowledge them. Yes. Because that's empowering.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Because I think in our lives, we're often just living a single possibility. But in any moment, there's limitless possibilities. And to me, that's also one of the powers of diversity. One of the reasons why we need to flood our lives with diversity.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
diverse ways of thinking and to spend time with people who think differently, who have different ways of being, different ways of acting, because what it can do is it can help you to identify other possibilities. It's what we use in my laboratory for solving problems. We use diversity as a superpower.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
into every day to help me lead with curiosity, to connect deeply with the people that I love and care about, and to attune to the rhythms of life and connect deeply with nature.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Pinching your brain is using your intention to focus your attention, to think or redirect your thinking throughout your day in meaningful ways.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Okay, I'll give you an example. I brought two pens, one for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Well, maybe, we'll see. So the way that we can practice pinch your brain is to take something in your environment and focus your attention on it and notice the nuances, right? And so this is something you can do anywhere in your life. You can do it inside, outside, any room.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And so if I say to you, okay, hold this pen in your hand, like typically we just grab the pen, we write with it and we put it back down. We don't think about it because our thoughts are moving all over the place. And so at this moment, we could say what we're going to do is pinch our brain just by focusing on the nuances of the pen.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
So let's look at the pen together and say, okay, what are the different colors? What are the different textures? How is the light reflecting off the pen? Is there any writing on it? What does it say? Turn the pen around, start to look at it. And what we're actually doing here is we're using our intention to focus our attention. We're squeezing out the other thoughts and we're focusing on the pen.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Now, this seems really simple and you're like, okay, how is that helpful? But what I found is that if you do this, if you make a practice of it, And you can do it outside as you're going for a walk. You can look at the texture of the bark on the trees. You can look at the clouds. There's so many things to look at.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
When you start to notice the nuances, you start to also not only focusing your attention, you're connecting with what you're looking at. And there's this energy exchange that happens.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
So every time that you do this, it's like a bicep curl for your attention.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Very good. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Because when you have ADHD, your mind is filled with multiple thoughts that are just constantly bouncing around. And you're... frequently finding yourself not using your intention for where your attention is focused. So I think in today's society, our attention is so atomized because we have stimuli coming at us from every direction.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Online, the goal of companies who operate online is to grab your attention. Yep. And there's a trillion dollars that's spent every year to hijack your attention. So on marketing and advertising every single year. And so our, especially people with ADHD, they fall prey the most to these types of stimuli.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And so what we need to do is it's kind of like our attention, if you think of it almost like a muscle. Yeah. the more we intentionally or on purpose focus our attention, the more we are able to do that on command, on demand for other areas of our life that are most meaningful to us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Absolutely. I love that. Well, to me, I would first start by saying that one of the key things that really happened to me that was critical along my path is that I was a C&D student early on. I was nearly failing out because nothing was working. And I was thinking about this earlier today and I was getting emotional about it because I don't like to think about that
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
time too much because it was really difficult for me. All the labels I was getting, lazy. They asked me at one point, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a doctor. And they said, you better set your sights lower because you just don't have what it takes to do that. They said, you're never going to amount to much. And that really took a toll.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And the one thing, the one thing that kept me going during that time is the support that I had from my parents. And in particular, my mom, there were these speech competitions at the school that started, I think, in the fourth or fifth grade. And my mom wrote the speeches for me and she helped me memorize and I had never memorized anything before. And, and I was really, I had a lot of anxiety.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I had, you know, I felt lost, but she said, okay, let's start with one word. Let's move to two words. As soon as I was, I had a sentence memorized and then I had two sentences memorized and then I had three and four and I could tap into the fact that things were changeable, that I I could actually memorize something. I didn't think I could.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And then she would coach me in how to say it, how to give the speech. And what happened was incredible because I started to win competitions. I started to be the kid to beat. And I think that every kid, every person needs to have that one thing where they can tap into the fact that things are changeable.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
That one thing where they can gain that incremental confidence and tap into it, feel it in a very visceral way. Because when you do that, you can apply it to all the other areas in your life. Right. And that truly is what allowed me to keep going and to then start to develop these tools, which eventually I applied from surviving to thriving.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Well, I would start by saying the following. I believe in you. I will always believe in you. No matter what labels you get, no matter who has shamed you before, no matter what terrible things have happened to you, no matter what kind of self-shame you induce on yourself, there is a way out. There are infinite possibilities. The possibility you're living right now is not the one that defines you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
You can break out of it and you just need some tools and strategies. You just need to experiment a little bit in your life just to see beyond that possibility. And I am here to help you. I will always be here for you. And I am excited for what the future holds. Beautiful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And no matter what, I want you to know that there is at least one thing that you are good at that you can tap into and develop and it will inspire the world. That is so beautiful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I just have so much excitement for life and for what life holds for everybody. And I think that it's like, I have experienced so many setbacks, so many challenges, so many times when I've heard it can't be done, you can't do this, you're not good enough. I've experienced so many moments where I feel disconnected from the people around me, where I don't feel innovative anymore.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I don't feel creative. I don't feel like I can get myself out of this situation where I'm in a dark place, where I just don't know what the future holds, that I'm caught behind fear, behind hesitation. And what I've learned... in the process of my life and in writing this book and in listening to your podcast and all the tools and the reframes is that we need tools. We need rituals.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
We need practices. We need each other. We need diversity. We need to be seeing things from different angles and different frames of references. And this has a way of showing us new possibilities, other possibilities, so that we don't end up trapped in this linear way that our minds gravitate to towards this single possibility that we find ourselves trapped within. And it illuminates us
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
when we have tools and when we can actually do these reframes. And so I'm just really excited for everyone out there. I'm excited for you to, to experience lit and to, and I'm excited to hear what resonates and I'd love to hear your stories.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Absolutely. So my lab is literally focused on the process of medical problem solving. It's an ever-evolving process. It's highly iterative. And the major focus is how can we make academic discoveries and move them as quickly as possible to patients. And we do this
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I have some walnut milk if you wanted to try some of that. Yeah, there was an article in GQ on my breakfast that someone did.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yeah, yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Based on a lot of different things, one is the lab composition, which I'll talk a little bit about today, and just how we approach problems, how we infuse fresh energy, how we disrupt linear thinking and single possibilities that we might find ourselves within. And this has allowed us to create all sorts of technologies that are in clinical trials and have actually made it to patients.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
For example, we developed a nasal spray in the lab that we demonstrated could neutralize like 99.99% COVID-19, H1N1, influenza A and B. a form of pneumonia. So that's one example. We developed a needle that can stop in between the layers of the eye to deliver gene therapy to the back of the eye. It's really difficult to get drugs to the back of the eye for macular degeneration.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And that's en route to a clinical trial We've developed therapies to annihilate cancer, therapies for osteoarthritis. And it's really like a playground, if you will. People from all over the world, people with tons of different experiences and backgrounds and expertise. But we really have a North Star for every project, which is to help patients as quickly as we can.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I think creativity is one of these life forces. It's something that we can tap into. It's something that we are all born with. It's something that is flattened by our society and perhaps through the education system, depending on where we were educated and the circumstances. But I think with this sort of algorithmic lifestyle that we all lead, So many thoughts in my mind. I'm like, whoa.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
I'm like, yeah, because creativity, it's like, to me, it's just so exciting because we all have this ability to tap into creativity. And when we do, we surprise ourselves. It's literally like this thing that just lights us up when we tap into it. And I think that it's magnetic.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
there's gravity to it when somebody is being creative it just attracts other people like everyone wants to like oh what are you doing like oh that's so interesting how'd you think of that like something magical about creativity and so for my laboratory you know it's like it's one thing to try to make academic discoveries it's another to then take those discoveries and turn them into products that can help patients so like the level of difficulty just escalates yeah
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And so I've spent a lot of time sort of trying to figure out and actually experiment in my laboratory with processes to maximize creativity. So one of the things that I've noticed is that the lab composition is critical for creativity. Okay. And so I've tried intentionally on purpose to limit the overlap in expertise. Most laboratories, you have the same kind of expert.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Everyone in the lab has the same expertise. What I've noticed is that if we minimize the overlap, that we can really leverage the power of thinking differently. And that's sparks of creativity just start flying. In the lab, we have chemists, we have material scientists, we have biologists, immunologists, but we've also had a gastrointestinal surgeon, a cardiac surgeon.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
We've had a dentist in the lab. It's constantly changing. And I think when you start interacting with people who think differently, who have different skills, we've had people from 30 different countries in the lab. And when you're from a different country, you have a different education system. So you You think differently, you have different wiring, you have different experiences.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And to me, that's how you start to generate the sparks of creativity. And something else that I experimented with in my lab, which actually was like transformational, was I set up, and I hadn't seen this before, but I just was like, I need to somehow figure out how to get things more creative and people to connect. And so I thought, okay, presentation competitions. So I came up with this idea.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Yes. And then there's some guideposts. So you can't present on your research. You have to present on something that is one of your passions or one of your interests.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Or something you're curious about. I love that. And the goal is to take risks. This is a safe environment where no one's going to be shamed. And everyone's in the same boat from like a high school student to a PhD student to a postdoc to young faculty. And everybody presents for three minutes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And then afterwards, the questions are focused on constructively, what could you do to improve your talk? What did you really like about the talk? And then at the end, I give prizes for people. Everyone votes. I don't vote. And who gave the best presentation? Who took the most risk? And who gave the best constructive feedback? And we've had people in the lab couldn't have expected this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Somebody did a rap about the hamburger restaurants in Boston. Somebody showed up in a wetsuit and talked about surfing. Somebody played guitar and had slides going behind them. They didn't say anything during their talk. Somebody spoke about this permaculture effort they did in their backyard with hundreds of edible plants.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
Somebody talked about a bakery that their family had started and then had to shut down during COVID and they really want to set it up again. And what happened was this created this constellation of energies where people now were... They were learning about other people's curiosity, what other people's interests were.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
And when you get people talking, when you get people connecting, it creates this creative energy. This energy just starts to flow. And it's just been unbelievable.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
A life ignition tool is a strategy, a way to tap into something that you don't see in this very moment, something that could illuminate not just this moment, but your entire life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
They unlock it and everybody has access to it. These tools allow you to access your evolutionary inheritance. What is my evolutionary inheritance? Your evolutionary inheritance is the biology that you have that's working for you. It's the ability to sense the world, the ability to make decisions, the ability to evolve and to learn and to be inspired and to sense awe and to tap into creativity.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
It's what we all have access to. And when we tap into it, not only does it light up our lives, it lights up the lives of everybody around us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity
You know, one of the tools that I'm like, is do new because every moment there's limitless possibilities and we don't see those possibilities because of a lot of different reasons. I think one of the major reasons is that When we're younger, everything is new to us. First time crawling, first time walking, every grade is a completely different experience. Every sport, everything's completely new.