Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Why Do We Keep Repeating the Same Mistakes? | Kati Morton - EP 781
16 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: Why do we keep repeating the same mistakes?
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You know what's frustrating? Going out to dinner, excited for the meal, and then spending the next few hours regretting it. For a long time, I thought certain foods just didn't agree with me anymore. Garlic, onions, pasta, even healthy foods like beans.
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Chapter 2: How do childhood experiences shape our adult behaviors?
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I think in general, as humans, it's a very, I know people always say, there's a lot of people online that'd be like, I don't like to be around other people. I prefer to be alone. Or we want to be like the different person, the loner, the weirdo. And where people are trying to take ownership over that. But to this research's point, there's such a huge part of our culture
creation as humans that are about us being connected and mattering to other humans.
Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.
Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming.
Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends, and welcome back to episode 781 of Passion Struck.
We are now into week three of our series on the connection crisis, and we've been exploring a deceptively simple question. What makes people feel truly connected? Last Tuesday, I was joined by Greg McKeown, the best-selling author of Essentialism and a leading voice on how we design our lives around what truly matters.
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Chapter 3: What role does perfectionism play in our emotional patterns?
We discussed why connection, significance, warmth, and human flourishing are not just soft ideals, but the absolute essential ingredients we need to build thriving teams and communities. Those conversations focused on what happens between people
But today, we're turning inward because sometimes the greatest barriers to connection aren't found in our workplaces, our friendships, or our relationships. They're found within ourselves. Most of us have experienced the frustration of repeating behaviors we promised we'd stop. We overwork even when we're exhausted. We people-please when we know we should set boundaries.
We stay in relationships that no longer serve us. We chase achievement long after to stop bringing fulfillment. And no matter how much self-awareness we gain, we often find ourselves returning to the same emotional patterns again and again. The uncomfortable truth is that many of our most persistent behaviors were learned long before we ever had the language to understand them.
As children, we develop internal blueprints about love, belonging, approval, conflict, and safety. Those blueprints don't simply disappear as we grow older. They operate quietly beneath the surface, shaping our decisions, our relationships, and our reactions in ways we often fail to recognize. My guest today is Katie Morton.
licensed therapist, mental health educator, and bestselling author of Why Do We Keep Doing This? Her work has helped millions better understand the hidden emotional patterns driving their lives and how they can begin creating meaningful and lasting change.
In today's conversation, you'll learn why perfectionism, burnout, people-pleasing, and self-abandonment are often rooted in old emotional adaptations rather than personal weakness. We discuss why awareness alone isn't enough to create transformation, how childhood experiences shape adult relationships, and why curiosity may be one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our lives.
If you've ever felt trapped inside a version of yourself you've outgrown, This conversation will help you understand why. Before we dive in, if this episode helps you better understand your own patterns or gives you language for a struggle you've been carrying, please share it with someone who might benefit from hearing it.
Taking 60 seconds to leave a rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts helps us reach more people searching for these conversations. And make sure you're subscribed on YouTube so you never miss an episode. You can also download the companion workbook and access our free weekly reflections right now on my sub stack at theignitedlife.net. Now let's dive in with Katie Morton.
Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Absolutely thrilled today to welcome Katie Morton to passion struck.
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Chapter 4: How can self-awareness lead to meaningful change?
Hi Katie. How are you doing today?
I'm doing well. How about yourself?
I'm doing fantastic. I'm doing it here because in Florida we've had a little bit of a cold streak and growing up mostly in the Midwest and Pennsylvania. I love a few weeks of the cold, especially as we get into the summer.
I'm in Texas and I feel you on that. It's finally cool. And I'm like, Ooh, winter is upon us. And I get excited.
Yeah, I hear you. I moved here from Austin, so I am very familiar with Texas winters and springs.
Yes.
So I want to start with a question that I've been sitting with myself. When you catch yourself doing something that you know you've outgrown, maybe it's overworking, over explaining, trying to push through. How quickly do you notice it today compared to earlier in your life?
That's a great question. And obviously depends on the situation and how egregious the action is. However, I would say that back when I was younger, I don't know if I ever caught it because I wasn't really aware. There was a huge chunk of my life where I didn't know that overworking or pushing myself through or trying to do things perfectly was bad.
I think that realization came around for me probably in my mid to late 20s. And then I'm 42 now. And I feel like in the last five years, I've gotten much better and I'm able to identify it more quickly. I would say now it probably takes me sometimes just a couple of days at most a week.
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Chapter 5: What is the connection between people-pleasing and self-abandonment?
Oh, why are you doing this? This is so stupid. I don't know why you keep doing things this way and thinking it's going to be different and making it worse. And so now when I catch myself doing something I'm like, what is it that I'm afraid of.
That's usually the first question because I operate in that perfectionism overworking burnout space when I'm scared of something like I'm scared of scarcity of finances I'm scared of losing a connection. I'm scared of, I don't know, people thinking that I'm not intelligent or that I can't do something properly. It's always, for me at least, I've learned very fear-based.
So the first question in my head to myself is usually, what am I so afraid of?
I think that's a question that needs to be asked more, because fear is what typically drives many of the actions that we have, and especially our self-abandoning behavior that we allow ourselves to inhabit. Today, we're gonna be talking about your brand new book, Why Do I Keep Doing This?
How to Unlearn the Habits Keeping You Stuck and Unhappy, which I'm thrilled to say was a Next Big Idea Club must read, and one of their top books that they picked for the year. I know personally how big an honor that is, so Katie, congratulations.
Thank you. Yeah, I was so privileged to be part of that list.
Before we go into the book, I thought maybe it would be best to start inside one of your stories, because I think it's a story many of the listeners can relate to. I related to it because it happened to me too. You describe a time when you were snapping at your husband, you resented walking your dog, and you felt irritated by the very life that you had worked so hard to build.
I know this all so well. And then judging yourself along the way for feeling that way. When you think back to that version of yourself, what was the first signal that you missed?
I think probably exhaustion, which I know people are like, how do you miss exhaustion? Doesn't it just knock you down? I think when I'm in that space, when I'm in this overworking burnout, push through type of space in my brain, I don't check in with my body. I just think about, I have to keep going. This is what people are expecting. I don't want to let anybody down.
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Chapter 6: How does anti-mattering contribute to feelings of loneliness?
I know for me, it presented itself a little differently. I've recently been reading Rebecca Goldstein's new book, The Mattering Instinct. And in it, she talks a lot about the laws of physics and then goes into entropy. And then she does a clinical and philosophical review of dysthymia. In my case, this is what I experienced was dysthymia.
And I remember at the time I was working at Lowe's and all I could say was that it didn't happen overnight, but it was like the days were suddenly becoming less bright. And I couldn't figure out why. I finally went and I saw a therapist and that's what he diagnosed me with. And he said it probably at that point had been occurring in the background for eight or nine years.
And then unfortunately, it ended up carrying forward into severe depression. And at one point, I think whether it's exhaustion I went through, it's becoming more and more common to people. Did you find that not only in your research, but the patients that you work with as well?
Yes, I do unfortunately think that dysthymia and depressive symptoms are more and more common. I can get into why, because I think there's a lot of different causes. I've seen it grow exponentially since COVID. And part of that, I think to what you and I experienced, this overworking burnout type of, I guess, behavior pattern happened because we were brought home from
from work so we don't go to the office as much a lot of people are still working remotely from home so there's no separation between work and life and so it makes it easier to keep working or keep doing things because you're just at home and you're just doing it anyways i also think we're more disconnected from people and so i think that the isolation that we experience has made us more lonely and has exacerbated any depressive symptoms and
Also, because our as a whole, I feel like our world, but especially our nation in the United States is very divided can make us feel alone there too. I think there's just a lot of different factors that are as bad as it sounds to say it so abruptly, but so many factors making us feel bad.
When I started to really do research on this, and I have a book, The Mattering Effect, coming out on October 6th this fall, I started to really try to uncover why do we have all these epidemics occurring of burnout, disengagement, loneliness, helplessness, The list goes on and on, including, as you mentioned, depression and anxiety.
What I started to see was that these were symptoms of something larger. And so I started to look into this more, and it led me to a gentleman from Toronto, Canada, named Gordon Flett, who's now a retired professor from the University of York. I know in the book you have a chapter on belonging. I wonder if you ever thought about connecting it to this concept of anti-mattering.
I love that phrase. I'm not familiar with his work, but now I'm going to have to look him up. My husband's from Canada and York has a special place in my heart. They've reached out years ago using some of my videos to help train their police force. So I'm always like, oh, York, Ontario.
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Chapter 7: What are micro-choices and how can they reshape our lives?
But the anti-mattering I feel it viscerally when you said it. I think it's a very powerful term. And I think in general, as humans, I know people always say, there's a lot of people online that'd be like, I don't like to be around other people. I prefer to be alone. Or we want to be like the different person, the loner, the weirdo. And where people are trying to take ownership over that.
But to this research's point, there's such a huge part of our society creation as humans that are about us being connected and mattering to other humans. Part of that, you could think back to caveman days that it would be in my best interest to be connected with you, John, and to have other people in our group Because that would mean we would survive, right?
That was increased our ability to survive because you could be hunting, I could be gathering. There's all these different roles that people play. And I know people might say, oh, I hear that all the time and whatever. But I think we devalue the impact of mattering, of connection with other people and act like it's not as big of a deal to our survival still.
I know we're not in caveman days, but I would argue that Just as we were talking about all these things that can come up, whether it's the depression, the anxiety, the irritation with your life, all of these symptoms and signs that I think could be soothed.
And we could actually look into research on the polyvagal theory about how soothing to our system it is for us to be connected to other people, to matter to someone else. How important, just think about how good it makes us feel if we're having a tough time and one of our friends calls to just check in. or if we have a family member who comes over to see how we're doing, that is so impactful.
I remember when my dad passed away when I was 24 and my husband still brings us up because he didn't realize this was important is tons of people at the time when it happens, show up for you and are like, I'm so sorry for your loss. And that's wonderful and beautiful. However, I will never forget the people who kept showing up like a week after, a month after checking in. How are you doing?
Again, because my well-being mattered to them. And that was so necessary at the time. It was so soothing, so life affirming. And we can't discredit it. So I love that anti-matter because we need to matter to people.
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Chapter 8: How can journaling help uncover hidden emotional patterns?
It's part of our biology.
For the listeners, if you want to learn more about this, I interviewed Gord on the show last year. It was somewhere in the 500s, if you want to search for it. But the New York Times just did two articles based on his research. And when I was talking to him, he laughed about it because he said it only took them three and a half decades to finally write the article.
Zach Mercurio also wrote a great book about this called The Power of Mattering. And then the Harvard Business Review did a large, I think, 5,000 word piece on it. So lots of good sources on this. Katie, I want to go back to this exhaustion you were feeling because that's also something I felt. I was an executive at Dell after I left Lowe's. And I think like many people, I didn't learn my lesson.
I just kept trying to work my way through the conditions I was facing. And when I got to Dell, I was in a global role. I was traveling overseas. I was in one of five continents every two weeks out of the month. And then I would get home and it was like I was playing catch up. So I was working 100 hour weeks.
And what was so tiring to me was while all this was happening, I really felt myself becoming less and less seen. It was like I was almost invisible because I felt like I was worked to death and I was given all to a system that didn't even care about me. Because no one was asking how I was doing. No one really cared. They just expected you to do the grind.
And what I found is it was just adding up. It was as if I started losing the meaning. And as I've talked to people, I think this is one of the reasons people are feeling so disengaged is because we treat them like a cog instead of a person.
Yes, I agree with you there. I think to back to the mattering that we have to matter. I think there's a big piece that we've learned. If you look at research about how things operate well in a business setting, people need to be rewarded and they need to feel appreciated for their effort. Like you said, it felt like nobody cared. Just like a cog in a wheel.
And as long as you do your thing, that's not fulfilling. And I did a bunch of research. This is probably.
oh god 2017 maybe about burnout in particular and what i learned through that was that when we put in a ton of effort like you're doing these hundred hour weeks the effort that we put in has to be at least commensurate with the reward that we get and people always think oh reward is just so i make a good paycheck that's only a part of it we have to feel fulfilled we have to feel like people appreciate it and we often forget about that piece of reward
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