Hello and welcome to the Soul Aligned Self-Care Podcast.
Welcome to Atta Uta.
I am so excited to talk about today's topic.
We were just talking a second ago and I'm very excited to get into it.
But before we start, I would really like you to share with the audience how you started
doing the work that you do and what it means to you and on a personal level.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me and we really had a great conversation and I think we forgot to
pray for a chord, right?
Okay, yeah.
You know, I have a bit of an unusual journey into becoming a doctor and psychology.
I started working at the age of 17 in hotels.
I come from a very conservative background, I've been here and female and it was in my
generation.
I'm not, my people are not the soul to go to university and I will, so I will listen
to how I phrase it, I will get married and I will have children.
So university degrees are wasted on me.
That's a bit of, not in a bad way, but this was just the vibe of the time when I was born.
Today, I know I'm very neurodivertian, so I'm highly dyslexic, dysplexic, dyscalculy and ADHD.
So of course, schooling was never for me in a way easy to get to where I wanted to go.
So I started working in hotels, which gave me the opportunity to travel the world.
So I lived in Spain, I lived in South Africa, I lived in Texas, I later on lived in Sri Lanka,
but I lived, I worked in a hotel industry for 10 years and then I said okay, I'm going
to buy that soon.
And I had enough money, 4,000, Deutsch market that time to have a little starter and the
starter came about when I read a little advertisement in a newspaper which said, do you speak English?
And I was like, yeah, I mean, a lift in South Africa for two years, I can speak English.
Do you like children?
And I was, don't mind them.
Do you want to teach English as if it would be a second mother tongue?
And at that time there was a company which was called Ellen DeRun and I started to work
with them and build up private business teaching English to children as if it was their second
mother tongue and the youngest ones are taught a nine months old or one nine months old.
And I did this for years.
So I started my first business, my first enterprise.
I started up with four children and 10 years later I sold it with 840 kids.
I had three learning centers, I had 24 members of staff.
And the reason why I sold it is, after 10 years, your start-up changes, right?
Either it becomes a proper business or it kind of goes down.
And I wanted to learn more and over the time of working with the kids, I couldn't really
inspired to learn more about developmental psychology.
I didn't have A-levels so the Germans wouldn't allow me to study English or psychology in any
shape or form.
They allowed me to do engineering which would have been a disaster because I mean, if I
would have engineered a car it would have broken down basically on the computer, right?
I came to the UK and I did a master's in creative writing after I sold my business.
And I did a bachelor in psychology, then I started a master's in clinical psychology which
I stopped because I had a cancer diagnosis and I had to overcome cancer.
Then I went to Sri Lanka and worked for the National Institute for Mental Health.
Then I came back from Sri Lanka, I did a college certificate in humanistic counseling and
then I did a doctorate in psychology.
Oh my god, for someone with ADHD, that's a whole lot of schooling.
That's a lot and let me tell you that is so interesting.
What an interesting person, I feel like we could probably talk for hours just about all
the different places where you've lived.
So that's really not just the education alone but living in so many different places and
learning about so many different people and cultures must have been extremely helpful in
the work that you do.
Yeah, so what is it that you focus on now in your work?
So I, I, with all this experience and of course coming to my job, much older right and having
worked across different, different lives, the people I work with today, they come
that quite specific I must say.
They come when they are really deeply stuck in their lives.
Be it after a huge, you know, health scare, be it because they sold the company, be it because
they do legacy so they're taking over companies from parents and the grandparents, be it mothers
who have, you know, families, they lead and they have to educate.
It's people who really want to change their lives because there is an existential longing
for something different.
And I, so I studied across different ontological world.
So I've studied in behavior, realism, I studied in existential philosophy and I've studied
in the in the science of the Buddhist mind.
So I'm quite broad.
So when I was with people, I can now of course draw from very many different theories, psychological
models, but also philosophy.
And this helps us really to get to the grid.
I mean, I've got this beautiful description from up from a client and she said, and it's
online so I can also reveal the gender, she said, it's a bootcamp.
She doesn't take any prisoners, but a boy, if you want to change, that's the person you
want to work with.
I like that.
That means it's effective.
So that's really nice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm not the person, you know, if you want to have a nice conversation, not saying, does
it this wrong?
I'm not, I'm not the woman you want to work with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't, person that somebody needs to work with, like they, when they really want to change.
So.
Yeah.
What, why do you think it is that people get stuck and do you necessarily think that stuck
is bad or sometimes is it needed?
So one of the, one of the tenons and here I'm bringing together behavior, realism, acceptance
and commitment therapy and existential philosophy and I do say these things because I want people
to know where I draw my knowledge from because it's not my knowledge purely right.
I'm sitting on a huge amount of, of course, previous people who've been in credit, if
you ever, nothing what we do and nothing what we sing is intrinsically right or wrong.
So being stuck in something is in its core, neither right or wrong at the beginning,
its data.
It's a piece of information that we have to look at very realistically with an understanding
of here is where I am today.
I'm stuck.
And then we can actually start analyzing what is the function of that stuckness because
if you are, let me give you an example, let's say you've been doing the same job for a
long time, you've been in the start up, you've been, you know, you didn't ask for the money,
you think you should earn because, you know, we all pitch together in a start up.
But now the start up is nine years old and you still have to ask for the money, you are
actually bringing to the company in your birth.
So now you stuck.
It's the same thing as three years ago, you were also stuck, but we need to understand
what is the function of the stuckness because the function of the stuckness could very
well be that you want to avoid to have a conversation where you say, look, that's what I'm worth,
that's what I want.
We need to have a conversation.
So in years, it is a sign of avoidance, which is not helpful, right?
Yeah.
So we always have to know what is it in service off?
And then we can make a move.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's really hard for a person to identify that on their own, which is hence the reason
why they feel stuck to identify what that reason is and what that, you know, and I think that
I'm speaking from like my own experience of feeling stuck at different times in my life,
most recently, right before I moved, making that decision to move took me five years.
Like I thought about it for five years and then when I moved, it was funny because everyone
was like, oh, like I wasn't really sharing that with anyone.
It was all in my head.
And when I made the decision to move so suddenly everybody, it wasn't sudden to me, but it
was sudden for everybody else.
Yeah.
Everybody's like, what are you doing?
So I've been thinking about this for like five years.
So this is not sudden at all.
As a matter of fact, it took me too long.
So very.
Well, that's that's that's a retrospective analysis, right?
To say it took me too long because now, of course, you have data around the outcome.
I find this really really interesting because the big stuff, big decisions, we have to do
with what Kirk had got an existential philosopher says, with the leap of faith, which means
we jump into something where we do not actually know the outcome.
So for that to be the Kirk got himself, he was religious, he was Catholics or faith for
him was a Catholic thing.
I would like to broaden that because I don't think it's it's it's purely relevant for
people who have faced towards a religion.
It has also got something to do with faith with myself towards myself around myself, for
myself and with myself.
Absolutely.
But the big thing, the big discussion, the big decisions we need to make, we have no idea
about the outcome.
We don't know how it's going to feel once we have moved.
We don't know.
We have an assumption.
We might have a guess.
We definitely have dreams and wishes.
But do you know how it feels when you open the door to the new home?
Do you know how it smells?
Do you know whether you like the sound?
So once we go to the place, to the outcome, once we are in that situation, once we experience
the outcome and the outcome is okay.
Most of the time then we turn around and we say, oh, I should have done that earlier.
Yeah, which is not fair on yourself.
No, it's not.
Yeah, it's not totally fair.
It's very hard.
And I think depending on your personality type too, so say if you're like the type of person
who likes to think that they can control things, it could be harder to leap into the unknown.
But I think whenever we're doing something new, we're always kind of leaping into the unknown.
Sometimes we just might have more confidence around whatever that topic is or whatever part
of our life it affects, I think.
Yeah, you're right.
I might be being a little hard on myself.
We are committed.
We are very good at being hard on ourselves.
So this retrospective judgment is not helping us.
I think what we can do is we can look back and say, where is the piece of learning I can
take from that?
Because I think it's really interesting that you said I should have done that earlier.
You say that, so there must somewhere be data in your memory experience that tells you
the stuckness or the sameness I am feeling now feels like stuckness and does not feel comfortable
any longer.
And the sensitivity around these triggers.
The sensitivity around taking these emotions and that's quite often emotional data, not
a rational data.
Taking these emotions as data into our life is really difficult because we avoid them.
Yeah, there's a whole lot of emotional data in there.
But it did turn out very well.
And I like the way you verbalize that.
The sameness that I was experiencing is now feeling like stuckness.
That's a very, very, I think that's a really good way to look at it because it didn't feel
like stuckness six months ago or a year ago, whatever.
And now it feels very much like stuckness.
And so what's the difference is?
And I think that's a really great place to start when you're trying to figure that out.
So I really like that.
I want to talk about using our emotions as data.
So we have all these different emotions that we experience.
And there's most of us, I would say, majority of the population think of emotions in different
ways like good emotions and bad emotions.
And I feel like when we talk about emotions and using them as data, we're going to like
kind of not use those perimeter any more.
Can you talk more about that and how we can start to do that?
Yeah.
So firstly, I think my group of people, so psychologists, we really messed that up big times
and say there are positive emotions and there are negative emotions.
I think this is a whole lot of nonsense.
We have emotions, we like and we have emotions we don't like.
We have emotions that are easier to feel, to have, to bear, to hold, to experience.
And we have emotions that are pretty damn hard.
That is for me and for I think everyone who listens, that's normal, we have, we know this.
But to say that difficult emotions are negative, I think it's utter nonsense.
We are neglecting the understanding that emotions are nothing else than an information of
how we are evaluating life in this present moment.
Let me say this again, it's a long sentence.
That's coming in me, right?
We have 30 words in the sentence.
Because you know, if you go into a bar and everyone turns around and says, "Hey, you are,
your emotions evaluate this as, oh, that's a joyful crowd, you know, I'm feeling happy,
do, do, do, do, do."
Now, if you go into the same bar, everyone turns around and grouse at you, I hope your
emotional set-up says, "Get the hell out of there," because this looks pretty dangerous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you go into a bar and everyone is crying, because they are just having had a wake,
and it's the person you know, and you, you not feeling grief, then something is missing
in your ability to understand the situation.
So every single emotion, and I'm just talking about the standard emotions we are having,
I'm talking about sadness, I'm talking about disgust, I'm talking about anger, I'm talking
about happiness, right?
And I'm, of course, about fear.
So these five basic emotions, which we know from quite robust research, and psychology
is not very robust in research, but that's actually robust research across the world,
across cultures, across age groups, across skin, Tyler.
We all have these five emotions.
So allow me to say Mother Nature, forgive me, but she's still a mother for me.
Mother Nature has not thrown these emotions at the world, at humans, and partly at animals,
for no reason.
So emotions have a reason.
So what I'm asking my clients when they say, "Ooh, I have a problem with anger, quite
often, women say this, oh, I shouldn't be angry."
What is the function of anger?
Why are we getting angry?
Not talking about aggression, not talking about hate, I'm talking about anger.
Tell me what is the reason for getting angry?
And people very often say, "I don't know."
But actually, anger comes when we evaluate a situation as unfair or not just.
So if you are kicking out anger, you are probably kicking out an evaluation of unfairness and
unfairness.
Fundamentally different to aggression.
So to me, Gandhi was probably really angry.
He was not aggressive.
So anger is a beautiful emotion.
It tells us something around evaluation and it gives us this huge amount of energy which
motivates for change if we know how to manage it.
But because we have put it in the dirty, dirty box, we don't learn any longer how to manage
anger.
Saying what sadness?
Why are we sad?
What does sadness teach us?
It teaches us we have lost something or someone of importance.
Are you really telling me this is not an important data point?
So all that nonsense about, "I shouldn't be sad, I have to be happy."
Does this mean when you have a cat you dearly love and is getting run over by the bus?
You want to be happy?
That's kind of psychopathic, isn't it?
Yeah.
So we need to understand the function of these emotions, of these primary emotions because
they teach us something about life.
Many women who are in relationships with people who are with partners who are narcissists
and many men who are in relationships with women who are narcissistic.
They are, for example, come to me, so I work a lot with that problem also because they
are consistently frightened, scared and they are very high levels of anxiety and they seek
their blame in them.
I am an anxious person.
My personality type is an anxious person.
All of them nonsense.
You know, this is me.
No, no, no, no.
It's just calmly, kindly, but always deeply linked to reality to understand them.
What's the function of the anxiety?
If we are avoiding that, what is difficult, we are not allowing ourselves to realistically
understand life.
And we are doing that by saying the rational mind is the right, mind, the emotional mind is
the nonsense mind, I think this is wrong.
In Buddhism, there is a beautiful metaphor of the first and the second era.
The first era is that what comes quite naturally.
Going back to the bar, everyone turns around, you know, they show you the fist.
Yeah, you better get out.
That is a functional behavior, it's a functional emotion for that situation.
If you are then carrying on saying that I shouldn't be scared, I shouldn't be more boisterous,
I should have stood there.
That's what they call secondary suffering.
So the secondary suffering is the negative evaluation of our emotions.
But other words, the fear of the fear, the fear of the sadness, this is where mental health
is used, the mental health, not with anxiety, but with a feel all the exact.
That is very, very interesting because I can, as you are saying that I have seen that so
many times and so many of the people that I have worked with, where they are in constant
judgment of the way they feel, even if it's validated that they should feel the way they
feel, they are in constant judgment of that feeling.
And you just really explained it in a way where I could understand it a whole lot better.
So I appreciate that, I'm sure the audience appreciates that too.
How?
I feel like in a world where I would say I'm just pulling this out of the air, 75% of the
time, people are kind of forced to live in a way where they're not completely aligned
with their values and constantly having to push down a lot of emotions because of that.
And what I mean by that is a lot of us are going to work with doing jobs that we don't
like, we're surrounded by people we don't like, we're not spending time with our loved ones
and our children and our pets and we're not spending enough time in nature and so on and
so on.
When we're, when 75% of the time, we're suppressing ourselves because of this, how can we begin
to start to embrace our feelings and use it as information in our daily life to help
ourselves move through them?
Yeah.
That was a long question.
No, you know, I'm really grateful for this question because I, I, I wonder very often when
I listen to the so-called gurus and that walk on stage and those, "Change your eye!"
You know, walk out of your jaw, don't give a mess.
And I think if you are a single person, cool.
If you have responsibility for somebody else but you, not sure because, you know, some people
might actually be interested in keeping paying their mortgage or feel it or not, not, not
sleeping rough or building somewhere else.
So let me just say, I want to use this as a warning.
If it feels simple, get the hell out of that because it's not simple.
If you, if you're in a job, you don't like and you have to endure the job and here comes
now the change at this moment.
That's the reality we have to work from.
We're not going to go into dreamy dreamy land or making a wish board for how 2027 is going
to look like or ask the universe because the universe doesn't really have it.
Because we have to go to a place where we say, "Where are we to?"
What we often do is when we are stuck in these situations and every single listener, I really
want you guys to pause here for a moment and think about our own life, if this is true for
you.
We are trying to avoid these, what the psychologists often say, negative emotions.
We don't want to think about how bad it might feel.
We go to that, you know, this positivity, just think about the good stuff.
And I think this is equally wrong.
We need to understand the good and the bad and the stuff in the middle.
There is a fundamental difference.
If you go to work and you don't like it, when you have a meaning for it that is actually
aligned with what you want, compared to going to work when you have no idea around the
meaning.
So very concrete example.
You go to a job and you don't like the job.
But you know that you are doing this job because it gives you firstly the money you need
and secondly, once I am holding both truths, I don't like the job, it gives me the money
I need.
Once you stop fighting that you are living with this duality, the fighting costs you, the
cost you your life.
Once you hold the duality with care, what then shifts is perfect.
Because if I only say I have to do it in order to have money, the half to start putting
you into that wheel.
You know that is, is it that?
So it puts you in this hamster wheel.
I have to, oh my god, I really hate it.
Okay, but I carry on.
You go into that overthinking, hypothetically excited, you said, then you are kind of done.
What I am asking you to do, it is really difficult.
It is easily sad.
But this is where we spend a lot of time when I work with my clients is to hold the duality.
I do, I notice I'm stuck and this does not feel good.
I also notice I haven't got a way out at the moment.
And I know maintaining the status quo keeps me afloat.
This is not losing life.
This is not I suck in doing life.
This is nothing of that.
What this is is a brave and courageous move towards acknowledging the reality of your life.
And once we have this reality, then we can start moving about.
And it is not the big star.
You know, and once was asked by a newspaper, what do you think about the people who walk
out with the big, do do from work?
He said, well, if they can afford it, go for it, I'm a drama queen, I love drama.
But if you can't hold the repercussions, why would you do that?
It's the smaller stuff that we need to look at.
What is actually under your control?
A narcissistic boss is not under your control.
Something that this is not under your control and stop trying to control it in their lives,
for example, the person's control.
So on a global, on a group picture, what I would say, need to understand the reality and
we need to bear the duality of doing something we might not burn for.
Don't like the word burn.
Let me take this back.
I'm looking for us, while knowing that the job we are doing keeps us of it.
And once we can, with this, in this uncomfortability, because it's an uncomfortable place to be,
that's why we are avoiding.
And while we are having the bottle of wine in the evening, that's why we are, you know,
not talking to people or that's why we say everyone is an idiot or that's why we,
you know, once we hold this tool, true to us, then we can start thinking about it.
Where are these islands of control where they can bring you into the day?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I agree with that so much.
So 100%, it's almost like just acknowledging it almost kind of like releases it.
And you know, just acknowledging the situation helps you to move forward or through it or whatever.
And bringing in, finding those little, those little wins that you could bring in, you know,
whether it's just, I feel like it could be something as small as, you know,
having your workspace reflect your, your, your likes, you know, like so bringing plants into your office,
changing the lighting, improving the workspace, you know, like doing all these little things
that you do have control over just to make it as pleasant as possible.
Would you agree with that?
Like just finding those little mini things that you can control?
Yes.
I would not even go so, so, so, so happy.
Because what, what, what you're saying is we have a, the choice we are having is between
good and bad.
Sometimes the choices we are having and forgive my language, no.
Sometimes the choices we are having is between shit and the little less shit.
Yeah.
Right?
Mm-hmm.
And it's still a choice.
And the reason why I say that, there is a beautiful book, it's by a guy called Victor Flanker,
a Jewish, a Jewish physician who was captured by the Nazis, went to concentration camp and
he wrote a book which is absolutely brilliant.
It's called Man's Search for Meaning.
Oh yeah, right.
Yeah, he writes about how he survives a concentration camp.
And every student, so I used to lecture at university, I stopped at every student who wanted
to be mentored by me had to read the book.
And there's one scene, one scene, it's just the wrong word, right?
There is one writing in the book where one of the Nazi guys, if we're guards in the concentration
camp, takes them to pick up, it's cold, it's winter.
He's wearing shoes, he's stolen from a body that was still warm but had I not taken the shoes,
he writes.
Somebody else would have taken them, I would have died.
So he wears the shoes and he's pulled out into the free country and he has to pick up stones,
scrolls and stones just because the Nazi can do it, just because they have the power.
And he describes when he picks up this stone which is a bit like a rock and the Nazi just
hit him with the back of, is it a barrel, the back of a gun in that?
And he said and I had this rock and it was just him and me.
And in this moment I could have taken that rock and I could have hit him and he would have
died.
And I think everyone who reads the book probably would say, yeah, sure, just go for it,
do it.
And then Victor Frank was says and in this moment I understood choice.
So this guy sits in a concentration camp, he doesn't know, his wife is still alive, he
doesn't know whether he's gonna be alive in the next half of the hall.
He's freezing, he has got frostbites, there is snow hole, there's no hole.
And he says in this moment I discovered choice and the choice was hitting him on the head
and for sure getting shot by somebody else, not hitting him on the head and maybe having
a chance to live another day.
That's what I mean, our choices are sometimes between shit and shit here.
But what he also said, I've chosen not to hit because my meaning was survival.
It's not a good time and a concentration camp, right?
It's not going back into niceness, it's going back into suffering in its purity which he
choose in order to have the chance to survive.
And I find this so incredible inspiring, maybe because I'm German, may very wealthy because
of course my history of what the history of my country has a very close relationship to
that book.
But I think this teaches us something about choice even in moments when everything around
us is out to get us, right?
He later founded local therapy which is a therapy in, I've studied local therapy is a
continuum therapy which has in its quarters understanding if we have meaning we can endure
suffering very differently.
So I urge everyone who listens who has a really difficult time to break courage into facing
that what is difficult and it needs courage.
Because you need to understand why are you facing it in their lives, the understanding of
meaning.
I think that there's a lot of people that need to hear that right now, especially in
the United States.
And I haven't read that book yet and I've kind of forgotten about it.
I remember hearing about it and it's on my list.
And now I'm definitely going to push that up to the top of my list because I want to read
that.
I'm kind of amazed by being in such a distraught situation that he was able to make that
choice because he was under so much constant pressure and suffering that he made making
a choice that really was probably, I don't know if I want to say right or wrong choice
but probably the right choice for him.
But I'm amazed that he was able to do that, like to think that through because if I was
in the same situation, I don't know if I would have made the same choice.
Or maybe we all think that we would possibly not make that same choice.
I don't know.
I'm sure it's different when you're in that situation.
I would go ahead, I'm sorry.
And he made the choice for himself.
He did not make the choice not kill.
He made the choice so he could live.
And I think that is really beautiful.
So this was not about the morality of killing or not killing, which is a whole different
topic.
It was about the meaning of carrying on with suffering, bearing in justice.
Of course this guy must have been super angry.
Angry is not the right word.
But this energy, this life charge of course must be there.
And he makes this choice.
And this is not because he was super human, super human, don't exist.
Sorry, Superman and all of you guys.
These possibilities to pause as you hear me now and to really notice how I am in life
at the moment.
This is where transformation lies.
Not in the loud, not in reading more, not in doing more is having this understanding of
and now I pause and now I check him in a genuine way.
And then you can make rational decision in the highest stressful and emotionally know
the situation.
Because you're not setting them up as opposites, you are allowing in the duality.
And I think that a lot of people don't take the time to pause.
I don't think that that's one of the biggest issues that we have is the fact that we're
not slowing down in pausing because a lot of people are overwhelmed and I understand why
they don't pause.
You know, what I call the hamster wheel of life where you're just going, going, going,
going and you got the blinders on.
And not taking the time to pause, not taking the time to check in with themselves and just
see how they're doing.
And I think that hopefully all the listeners can see the importance in the pause, allowing
yourself to pause.
I think that's extremely important.
I want to ask you, I feel like I could talk to you forever, but I really want to ask you
about your book, The Minimalist Guide to Becoming Resilient.
And I love the name.
I also, I didn't write down the little catchphrase, but I love to the catchphrase.
I can't remember what it is off the top of my head.
Do you remember what it is?
It's like something about German being a German and then German impression.
Yeah, I love the head, yes.
I love that.
Tell me a little bit about this book.
I love reading books and this is definitely going on my list.
I'm going to read this.
I wrote this book because I think for many, many, for many, many people who work with me,
it's always, a couple of things always come up again and again and again and again.
And I can, I can work with ex amount of people.
I can't work with everyone.
But I think that the, the stuff that has helped people, it was distilled over years.
I gave a lot of talks around resilience.
I realized that half of the human race doesn't know what resilience is because they buy
into this idea of demolition derby.
So people, do you know what resilience is?
Can I quickly go into that definition?
Would you allow me to do that quickly?
Yeah, definitely do that.
So the idea what many people have for resilience is and if you guys would see me, you would
see me like, you know, swiping my hand down my shoulder is it doesn't matter what life
serves me.
I can't be bothered.
That's not resilience.
That's what I call a demolition derby.
I mean, you guys in the States, you have demolition derbies.
The Brits don't have it.
The Germans have it.
So when I used the word demolition derby, the Brits, they looked at me and I'm talking
about it.
And I have to tell them it's you.
So you throw a couple of cars onto a course and then they bump into each other until they
die.
So if you carry on walking through life with this understanding and it's your choice, it's
your, it's your choice.
If you say, I have to be the person who cannot be bothered by disaster and by suffering and
by life serving shit, by all means carry on.
I will predict, like in the demolition derby, you're going to die.
But there is one thing too many and the engine is going to break down all this.
The chassis is going to be gone for the cars or all the tires burst.
But that's stuff.
It's not resilience.
Resilience actually comes out of, out of engineering.
So what they do is they clamp a metal sheet between two hands and then they stress the
metal sheet by putting on weight.
So what the sheet then does, it bow, it yields, right?
It yields under pressure and at a certain point they let the pressure go and then the shield
goes back or the metal sheet comes goes back and the resilience is then measured in engineering
around the bouncing back.
So what this actually teaches us is you can only learn to become resilient.
If life serves you enough stress and pressure that you can't hold it any longer and that
you have to yield.
If you don't have this level of pressure, you do not know whether you are resilient and
you cannot learn it either because there is no way you need to yield.
Number one, what this also teaches us is that it is no to yield.
If you are refusing to yield under pressure, you're going to break.
Yes we can't, we can come back from being broken.
It's just a very different book.
Yeah.
Number three, there is a point where you need to be active to come back to a place which
is a new threshold.
So that means resilience is an active part you have to engage with when you feel religion.
And when we take all of these data points, what we then notice is we need to have skills
to become resilient.
This is not a given and we need to train these skills on a day to day basis so that
partly we get better at them when we are not in war so we are doing our boot.
But when we are in war, we have a different skill set but it also teaches us that when
we are in this really high pressure situation, we are not scared any longer that we have to
yield because we know it's normal.
And that's why I wrote the book because I wanted to have something that people can open.
So I write my books, I write my stuff in the time frame how long, how much time you have
to go from tube station to tube station.
I want people to be able to have one paragraph which gives them a very precise definition,
microtraining, a different perspective which they can read between tube stations which they
can take into their lives immediately.
No flask.
A good book based on research.
It has the voice you hear now so I am writing as I am speaking.
Not a lot about, you know this is why I wrote the book and I want to inspire people.
It's not about me.
It's about you having a very clear instruction on how to become and learn resilience.
So it's a book full of all the skills.
Yeah, it's quick.
I like how you have little blurbs that you could read quickly and then bring them into
life.
I absolutely love books like that so I am very excited to read it.
Thank you so much for sharing that and thank you for joining me today.
I really appreciate all your knowledge and but before we go I always like to ask my guests
if they could share their own personal self-care practice that they use in their life on a
maybe a daily or weekly basis that helps them, you know, with stress and anxiety and overwhelm.
So one of the things I love working with is anxiety and the reason is I am so good with
it because I am so full of it.
Same, yeah.
And what I would like to give to people is the ability to be understanding to themselves.
Yeah.
So when I have a day where it's really difficult, it's not that I am not getting up into my job.
I also want to be very clear, I have two drugs I am taking, one is coffee, the other one is
work, so I am a full-blown worker.
And I always serve excellency and when I have times where life is simply purely difficult,
I mean I lost my home for example, there wasn't really good whilst I had a full clinic.
I acknowledge that.
I acknowledge that part in me that is scared, that is sad and that sometimes comes to a point
where she says, you know what, I can't do this any longer.
And rather than going to the, oh, you know, but you've got to be kickers and guard is to
again to be with me in that moment and you say, you know what?
Yeah, because it is bloody hard.
And you're not getting where you need to go and it feels unsafe and you are sad, it is
hard.
I see that I acknowledge that.
And what's the meaning of going to work and doing the best you can anyway?
That's my self-care.
I love that.
Thank you for sharing that.
So how can people connect with you and work with you and all that stuff?
Where can they find you?
So website, you know, it's drut.org.
So the shortest name on the planet, my parents were very stingy, you know, they gave me three
left.
I love it.
I love it.
It's a bit, but you know, on the website they find everything.
I'm very happy to share a couple of exercises if you want so you can put them on your website.
I've got a couple of audios with just guided trainings that help you to calm down, to
help you to have a little bit of a pause.
If you, I have a YouTube channel, which is called just ask psychology, which is basically
around psychological concepts.
Everyone is blabbing about, you know, every kitchen psychologist is talking about people
who have no freaking clue.
And it's just very doubtful.
It's sometimes I have people there who want to ask me questions.
So if some of you listeners say, look, I have a question.
They can always, they can always email you and I just make a 10 minute video out of it.
It's about, you know, having a toolkit in your life that allows you to live life with all
emotions, with those ones we like and with those ones that are much harder to bear.
Okay, perfect.
I will put those in the show notes and anything that you want to share, you can send over
to me and I could put that in the show notes as well.
So people can find you and connect with you.
Thank you again for being a guest.
I appreciate you and I appreciate the work that you're doing in the world and it was such
a pleasure talking with you.
Yeah, it was.
It was.
Thank you very much for having me.
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