Power, Projection & the Collapse of Personal Responsibility

If we don't try to see how these self-disruptive patterns distort our perception and make us miss opportunities to actually dig deep, be honest with ourselves, heal relationships, maybe even reflect back on something that you've skewed so wildly negative and split for years and be like, you know what? Being honest with myself, they were actually some great years of my life, and yes, I left mad because of X, Y, and Z, but they were actually pretty great. Do you know how healing that can be? I want that for you. I want you to stop splitting. I want you to be able to say, you know what? Things come with the good and bad. These are the things that I got from it that are positive, and these are the things that maybe hurt me on the way out, but nonetheless, I don't have to make anything the enemy just because I got feedback that hurt or that I wasn't willing to look at yet. Because one responsibility can't be actually metabolized internally, power immediately is going to absorb all of that, and you're literally just pushing all of your childhood wounds onto some boogie man up above you. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be written. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Welcome to another episode of Decoded. Today's episode is power projection and the collapse of personal responsibility. This episode is about power, but more specifically help people interpret it react to it and assign meaning to it. Power exists in every hierarchy you can think of, workplaces, families, institutions and governments. It determines access, responsibility, but most importantly, consequences. And because of this consequence piece of it, it activates some of our deep childhood wounds that inform how we are taught to exist and relate to power. Many environments that are labeled as toxic are not defined purely by abusive power. There are deeper childhood wounds at play distorting the perception of reality. They're defined by distorted relationships to power, where authority naturally becomes emotionally loaded and evaluation becomes deeply personal. And I know this is the hardest part. Personal responsibility becomes unbearable. This episode examines what happens when power starts to be interpreted through unresolved identity wounds. And when discomfort or self-sabotage starts to become reframed as harm. When responsibility is displaced because self-evaluation is simply destabilizing your nervous system. If this conversation creates friction for you, good. That friction is useful. I've said it since the beginning episode of decoded. I don't like to stir the pot to cause discord, but I'm not going to back down and shy away from having the conversations that I know if paid attention to and prioritized will help us heal the collective. I personally would love to live in a world where people can have meaningful conversations, can learn about each other and try to grow into a more unified field. But that isn't going to happen until we learn to establish something called metacognition. Metacognition is when you're able to think about your thinking. Think of it as a change in perspective. Instead of me reacting to you and being hyper focused on my internal feelings and my own potential insecurities being projected outward, I'm rising above myself and I'm observing the broader situation. So this immediately would lead you to think of situational awareness, metacognition and situational awareness, tend to go hand in hand. If as I'm speaking to you or responding to you, I can rise above and see the bigger context. I can see how this plays out long-term cause and effect. I can truly self-evaluate my own motives in the moment. I can start to poke a bit and see where I'm possibly in self-deception or where I'm through trying to be efficient, forming an assumption that's not 100% true. These are all functions of metacognition. And in virtually every study you can think of when they look at some of the top performers in the world, the number one thing that they have is strong metacognition of resilience. When you're in these states, you can think big picture and you can question yourself. You're not overwhelmed or overcome by your own feelings. So what you'll end up seeing today is that where this conversation takes a sharp division, are those who can think big picture and to see even hardship as moments of growth and opportunity versus those who can only think from their personal feelings and their personal wounds and are not able to ship into that metacognitive thinking. So my hope is that even if it does stir something up in you that creates friction, the goal would be to be able to look in the mirror and take some steps forward toward building metacognition. Because when we have that, our human collective is sound. When we don't, we have the power dynamics and toxicity that we experience today. So if you watch this podcast since the beginning, which I know many of you have, because I feel like whenever the podcast spot if I wrapped came out, I was getting constant Instagram DMs of like, I watched 1000 minutes. I watched 2000 minutes of your podcast. So thank you for your support. Love that. So if you've watched since the beginning, which I know many of you have, we talk a lot about break method, brain pattern spectrum sort of foundations and this conversation is no different, but I will try to fill in some of the gaps for you so that whether this is your first episode or your 10th episode, you can follow along and stick with us. We don't want to leave you behind. So one of the things we talk about pretty significantly in break method is the distinction between an abandonment oriented childhood wound and a rejection oriented childhood wound. And in break method, one of the foundational distinctions that we make between these patterns is not just how they behave on the surface, not just externally observable behaviors, but more importantly, where is your attention oriented? How are you perceiving reality? What assumptions are you likely to make? And how are you going to skew or distort the information to make yourself feel safe, knowing sadly that safety just means no one cause an effect? Abandonment oriented patterns tend to develop very strong situational awareness. Their attention is oriented toward what is actually happening in the environment, how the external variables are changing, and what needs to be transitioned or adjusted in order to generate a positive outcome in the future. So there's very much this metacognitive ability to rise above, think about the situation broadly, think about the people in the situation, and think many steps out at a time. This is, like I said, going to result in earlier experience of metacognition, but also a very strong sense of self-efficacy and an internalized capacity for self-regulation. And over time, self-trust is going to form through that repeated experience of solving problems, adjusting to the reality even if it's not what you were wanting or hoping for, and being able to respond effectively towards right in front of you. Authority and structure are often navigated pragmatically because they're not idealized. They just are. They're players in the game. They're not immediately projected into some sort of mommy-daddy narrative. And because of that, there are predictable frameworks that can be worked within without being a personal or frontier identity. Rejection-based patterns on the other hand are oriented very differently. Their attention is pulled toward relational perception and reputation management. So this means that they tend to be fixated on how they're being seen, how they're being evaluated, how they're being positioned, relative to other people. Their tends often to be this really intensified experience of comparison and contrasting. This focus comes at the expense of situational awareness, which in turn narrows your attention inward. You start to project your insecurities and fill in gaps and assume what others are thinking and feeling. You often assume what motivates somebody as well. And in turn, your presence becomes completely compromised. Your mind starts to oscillate between replaying the past through disordered negative lens, and projecting future often imagined outcomes that are similarly skewed. Self-trust also tends to be underdeveloped or at least conditional. It's experienced as something granted through recognition or validation rather than self-generated. Emotional stability is sought through co-regulation, with external feedback used to determine safety, worth and even direction what to do next. At this point hierarchy stops being neutral, and authority starts to carry an identity level meaning. Let's dig a little bit deeper on how brain patterns orient toward power. So if you don't understand how your own brain pattern orient toward power, everything after this is going to be theoretical. So I'll break down a little bit about how the source belief spectrum functions and how to take an educated guess at where you fall on the spectrum. You can of course always go to our website and do brain pattern mapping for yourself so that you can find out exactly where you fall on the spectrum. We do have a new website now. If you want to go to predictivemind.io, that's where all of our brain pattern mapping exists where you can step into that. And we do have some amazing new tools that come alongside it. So you can certainly use what I'm about to teach you now as we did. Kind of self-assess where you fall, but you're also always encouraged to go head over there and do the brain pattern mapping for yourself. So the brain pattern spectrum splits into equal left and right halves. The left side is the abandonment oriented side, the right side is the rejection oriented side. What makes it a spectrum is that certain qualities go up and down depending on how far you move left or how far you move right. If I were to start at the center and I work my way out step by step to the left, every step I take, my self trust is going to go up. My situational awareness is going to go up. How focused I am on work or purpose versus pleasure and relaxation is also going to go up. We also start to see a high level of self-afocacy and in turn hyperindependence. So if you get all the way out to that very far this left side, typically you have an overwhelming sense of situational awareness that could eventually lead you to become paranoid. You also, potentially if you're all the way on the far this left side, you're so hyperindependent that you've probably isolated yourself away from others. So you also don't have anyone else to step in and help you see that maybe you've become paranoid about the level of situational awareness they are experiencing. People also as you move too far out to the far left can start to become obsessive and fixated. So we see a lot of OCD type patterns on the very far left as well. If we go from the center out to the right, we see everything I just described go down but we see some other things come up in its place. So every step I take to the right, my situational awareness is going to continue to go down because you can look at the whole spectrum coming all the way across. It goes up to the left down to the right. So situational awareness every step I move to the right goes down. We also start to see self trust go down. We also start to see instead of hyperindependence, a tendency toward either codependency all the way toward dependency on the farthest right side of this spectrum. So instead of a self efficacy leading me to do it by myself for myself, there becomes this sort of learned helplessness desire to either do it with others or have others help you do it or look to mentors because mentors can somehow validate me to make me feel like I can do this. That is very unlikely to occur with left side spectrum people. We also start to see that in the place of situational awareness comes this relational q fixation and this is very important because this is driven from that place of desiring to control your reputation and wanting to be seen in a certain light judging your worthiness or your performance based on the opinion or approval or attention of others. So when you're doing this, what ends up happening is that you're often projecting and filling in gaps of what others think and feel right you're trying to read their body language or their voice tone or you're reading into their subtext and you're filling in gaps that are likely not there. That's kind of the whole thing with projection is that you can't accurately project someone's motive. You have to ask you have to talk you've got to dissect it so when we get into this right side spectrum. As you move kind of toward the center right to the far right you start to see a cluster of personality disorders emerge this is where both classical narcissism and covert narcissism exists it's also a borderline personality disorder exists it's also where dissociative identity disorder exists. So you can get so pronounced in these things that you end up losing your ability to level set with objective reality unfortunately. And what ends up happening is that typically those on the right they're looking to power an authority it ironically because to some extent they either loved and sought out validation or feedback from their parents or primary caregivers or wanted to seek it out but never. Quite got it but still respected that if they could get it would make them feel better these are the childhood patterns that predispose somebody to act this out in power dynamics. So little checkpoint here what's interesting is that those people on the right side of the spectrum their brain is seeking out structures to play out this sort of power dynamics seeking of validation or worthiness from essentially a parent but in the figure of power structure. And as you can imagine they likely end up taking jobs where they are not necessarily the boss they're not the primary risk taker they're not the one that's putting everything on their shoulders and doing independently that is not how they're wired but unfortunately they are wired to go into these support systems but with this underlying toxic pattern of wanting to utilize that system to feed their toxic pattern versus those on the left 10 much more to be inclined toward entrepreneurship. Or pushing their way through to kind of more of a management or executive level level role not really getting hung up in those middle levels. We use brain pattern with quite a few corporations and this is something that the more data we scan the more obvious this pattern becomes when you move from an initial hypothesis and you start running data through it and you're like oh that looks like something that looks like something when now you're getting into the tens of thousands you realize it's not just something it's literally every. This literally could change the world if we could get it into the right hands which don't worry we're doing more on that later 2026 can be a big year but you can see where interestingly enough the childhood pattern actually predisposes us to some extent to how we even play out our work and career lives and how we even align ourselves in power hierarchy or not. So let's think about it this way those on the left they're much more likely to see the power structure for what it is and think of it more as a nanomit object like here's the rules here's how I operate in the rules if I don't want to operate in these rules i'm not going to make it a personal thing i'm just going to go build my own thing and you know make my own rules right that's kind of a left side spectrum person right side spectrum person is not likely to be that way they're either likely to be obsessive and fixated on the rules and maintain. They're more of a people pleasing sort of engagement pattern upholding high standards being very performance driven train to do everything right because they always want to get that dangling care right there likely to be those people in that sort of organizational sense or they're the conflict prone type who are setting up their entire work and career life to kind of somehow always be at odds with the structure itself and when we're talking about this at odds with the structure itself this is one power struggles are going to start to feel extremely personal and we're not going to do that. And interpretation is going to completely replace observation metacognition completely out the window authority is something to become reacted to. For us to understand this fully we now understand the brain pattern spectrum i want you to also understand the distinction between co regulation versus self regulation and attachment styles attachment styles are all over Instagram i feel like everyone throws these around in general what we are talking about. Here with people that find themselves in meshed in these power struggles and toxic you know abusive and air quotes power dynamics what we tend to have is a person who is inclined toward co regulation. We've talked about this a little bit on previous episodes but co regulation as a child could mean i feel unsafe or unstable or scared or sad or insert xyz emotion and i'm going to go to mommy or daddy to make me feel better right there was somebody there to hug you to tell you it was going to be okay. And this is not necessarily the easy thing to hear but may play Kate you when maybe your parents should have been like. But you can't tell that to yourself right example i've seen this so much with my toddlers and i'm a firm believer that if you don't properly parent the toddler age ranges and you just convince yourself that they're going to magically outgrow it you create monster adults so he'd this warning. I've seen so many times hardly come over to me harley and river are iris twins in fact actually as of literally today they're both for only for a couple more weeks but they're both for right now and they have the kind of toddler struggles you can imagine two four year olds would have that are a boy and a girl. And oftentimes you know i'm watching the struggle go down i'm letting it transpire in an until it turns you know brutally violent with pillows or you know BB guns or whatever but i'm just kind of watching letting it play out and quite often. And then when harley or river they will run to mommy wanting comfort but it's paired with a narrative that's not actually based in objective reality river punched me in the face. One like hey you know what i watched the whole thing i saw that i bet that really hurt but did river punch you in the face or did you get accidentally hit with a pillow. Well my face hurts and i'm like it's okay that your face hurts but to tell mommy that river punched you in the face is that is that a liar is that the truth well i guess that's i guess that's a lie i'm like okay so then river accidentally hit you with a pillow and it hurt do you want him to say sorry yeah i want him to say sorry okay. Now i give this example because if a parent keeps it all honey he punched you oh my god if that happens over and over again the parent is either too distracted to call your child on their own bs and help them kind of recalibrate to objective reality or they just don't want to hurt your feelings they just want you to you know not freak out in the screen there's an adult outcome of that because you taught your child whatever i'm hurting. I actually can blame it on something else outside of myself instead of having to take ownership or having to level set to objective reality and that got comforted. So that can be one of the things that lead somebody to co-regulation because they're getting some sort of benefit out of it and instead of the parent trying to hold up the mirror and been like hey i'm sorry that you're hurting also x y and z i think there's an opportunity to take some personal responsibility here. When that doesn't happen there tends to be this sort of inclination toward these we'll call them toxic power dynamic repetitive experiences. So another way that this can play out that's separate of leaning on mommy or daddy would be through repetitive movie watching like having your comfort movie or your comfort food that you do over and over again what listening to the same song over and over again maintaining a pacifier a binky for like extensively long period. I know some of you are going to feel called out on this one but like still having a piece of your blanky like if you're an adult and you still have a part of your blanky i might be talking to you right now or even if you kept your blanky you know like past age four or five if your blanky was your safe place after four or five is probably this probably you no shame it just I know plenty of you. One of them is my sister I have many many a story over a blanky in fact this is a good time for a story gather around the campfire everybody my little sister was really obsessed with her blanky and I think my mom had gotten to a point where she was so frustrated with my sister's attachment to this blanky. I think we've talked on this podcast where my mom was reasonably unhinged so this should come of basically no surprise to you but my sister was about three and she'd like thrown up on her blanket or something you know what she was sick and when she saw that my mom was going to put it in the washing machine my sister lost her ever loving mind like started screaming around like running around the house screaming like a demon and finally my mom goes and I was there for the whole thing that's it. This blanky is going to blanky hell and cut it into a bunch of pieces right in front of her so did that help her co-regulation in such attachment or did it make it worse I think the way this particularly was handled it made it worse she would have needed to change the way she was engaging with the blanket at a far earlier time period this was obviously traumatic and made her latch even harder on to the next blanky but I digress this pattern of seeking comfort from something outside of yourself. The truth is that the root of many issues it's at the root of many sort of relationship conflict patterns that's the root of addiction frankly is addiction it's also at the root of inability to accurately self assess and pair that with drive and motivation. I think the point here is as we're unfolding these kind of two sides of the coin something in the middle is probably always what's best for humanity right we shouldn't be constantly burning ourselves out. But what opportunities are we missing by choosing comfort and potentially laziness especially at those moments when we should be turning that gear over that's right where if we learn to turn that gear up one we actually could be competitive in the arena. I know that this is maybe the hardest truth to stomach about this thread that we're pulling but what often makes people on the right side of the spectrum who end up finding themselves embroiled in these like twisty toxic power dynamics. Not ever level up the way that I'm sure it's at some point in their lives or in their deep dark corners of their mind they want that makes them not truly competitive at the same level is that they miss these opportunities to kick into the high gear to push themselves harder to use metacognition to be like how could I do this better how can I push myself more am I really doing all that I could because often these types want to take breaks they want they're not able to push them. And not just for themselves at that exact moment that they would need to push themselves to be truly competitive and that ends up setting up a bunch of problems that we're going to be covering later in the episode. Let's take a quick pause to welcome a brand new sponsor to the show Manu Quora honey. This is Manuca honey from New Zealand they approached me a few weeks ago and I got to try some of their products and I am absolutely in love but the best part is aside from honey obviously tasting good we all love the taste of honey. health benefits are out of this world. I honestly didn't really know that much about the benefits of honey until I started digging into it and all the literature that they provided to me. And there are different quality ratings of honey. One of the ratings that you can use is called an MGO rating. And as you can imagine, the higher up you go, the better the quality of honey. And the honey that I was sent was over 800 MGO. When we're talking about Manuka honey, we're talking about anti-inflammatory benefits, immune system benefits, GI tract benefits, and just from my past life in traditional Chinese medicine, it also can be used topically for different sorts of rashes and skin conditions. Aside from obviously tasting out of this world, this product is great to add into your daily regimen. I've been having my kids take it every single morning and literally every morning I'll hardly wake up and says, Mama, where's my honey spoon? So we're having a special offer for you guys today using the code BGHeal. This honey is incredible. I hope that you give it a try and thank you so much, Manukaura. We can't wait to keep promoting your products. So let's get back to co-regulation versus self-regulation. We've talked about kind of the really childhood precursors of co-regulation, but we know that this persists into adulthood. Sometimes this co-regulation also can lean into, you know, put it into workplace scenario. If I'm not getting a certain amount of attention or a certain amount of like accolades or adabois, then this starts to kind of dissolve, right? That is what makes me feel safe and like I'm doing a good job, right? It can't be something that comes internally. To contrast, self-regulation is the opposite. In fact, these people will not seek outside people, especially when things get hard. They go inward. They kind of come through the memory banks. They look for ways that they were in air. They lean on metacognition. And because they're naturally inclined toward hyperindependence, they solve the problem themselves. And sometimes they solve the problem themselves by going to distract with more work, right? Certainly, if you're that type, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So if we think about co-regulation, these are typically types that tend more toward anxious attachment styles. And then those who are self-regulated naturally tend more to be perceived as avoidant attachment styles. And in some cases, disorganized attachment styles. What's interesting is the avoidant disorganized often end up becoming authority figures, but because they don't look to authority. And those who co-regulate and are anxious attachment, they seek out co-regulation with authority figures. Maybe because it makes them feel safe if they're that people pleasing variant. But if they're that conflict prone variant, they're seeking out authority so that they can play out this toxic conflict cycle. Let's think about the reason for authority structures in the first place. And this one's an interesting one for me because naturally, I'm much more go with the flow. I don't need a lot of structure. I don't need a lot of order to thrive. I'm very good at just doing things on the fly. So having been in business for a really long time, I've seen different iterations of how I do things. And what's funny is if I do things kind of now my natural go with the flow, people will be like, oh, you need more structure in hierarchy. Like we need to know who reports where we like we need to know what their roles and responsibilities are. Cool. That's what you guys feel like you need. Let's do that. But then when you do that, we start to get the other thing. Well, it just feels like, you know, there's hierarchy and this is a cool. So no matter where you go, the reality is this. I've tried so many different ways. And I've been in other people's systems, right? I once had bosses, which I'll go into later in this episode. I haven't always just been the boss in my earlier life. I certainly had bosses one in particular that we shall discuss. And I'm able to work in somebody else's system. I'm able to create a system. I'm able to pivot on the fly if a system needs to be changed. But that is where my brain pattern puts me, which is a very entrepreneurial pattern, those that want to understand what's going to happen next and what the expectations are of them. They don't do well in this sort of constant pivoting. So this is where power structures and authority become very important. If you, I always use this example, if you had a car that had both driver and passenger with gas pedal break and a steering wheel, like what would happen? You'd crash in five seconds. You wouldn't go anywhere. So there does need to be an establishment of authority and direction who reports to who. And I absolutely see the value in that. I think it's important. I personally don't feel like I need those things to feel safe. But I understand that they make certain people feel safe. And that is partially the need for humanity to have structures like this. I don't think we've reached a place of our spiritual and emotional evolution to just completely like self-regulate and live in unity and harmony without any rules or structures. I totally see where this segues into political ideology too, which hopefully we'll be able to get to at the end of that episode. So the point of authority is to maintain standards and to allocate responsibility, but also to preserve the function of something. If there's no rules and responsibilities, there's no hierarchy, it can be hard for something to actually stabilize and function like the machine. When emotional regulation is outsourced upward, the authority tends to absorb the pressure that it was never really intended to hold. So if somebody naturally seeks co-regulation and they're operating inside of an organization, there tends to be a lot of projection and blame upward that wasn't ever part of the original intent of authority and power structures in the first place. For a person like this, neutral decisions start to be seen as a threat and boundaries can start to register as hostility or even worse, deeply personal. Even when leaning on the structure and power hierarchy, as they're intended to be utilized in the system with fairness and consistency, this twist can still be turned into domination and abuse. And even when these feelings register in you as personal in the moment, so it'd benefit you greatly to learn how to zoom out and see where you can take ownership instead of being so quick to let your feelings propel you right into projection. And this right here is exactly where projection tends to take root. We've covered the childhood etiology. We've covered why the childhood etiology of this is actually drawn towards support roles so they can play out this toxic cycle. They tend more towards seeking co-regulation toward being dependent on others and feedback from the system to feel good. And in this way, any authority or power hierarchy can fit the role of mommy and daddy. And when you put the wrong types of people in these roles, you're going to start to see your corporate structure crumble and you're also going to start to see threats of toxicity, cults, abuse, etc. So if you're listening to this and you're immediately starting to think about a boss from your past or a system or a person that fits this description, good, me too. I told you I was already thinking about one of my first bosses. So I want to jump in here and explain something because I think by this point, you know that my pattern is kind of the middle of the left. We've tacked about it before in episodes. When I was in college, it was my junior year. I was a PR major. I took an internship. I was living in LA and I took an internship working for this French woman. I'm not going to say her name, but she was very well known for starting the celebrity gifting suite. So this was all in kind of the celebrity Hollywood world of throwing parties and doing celebrity product placement, etc. So I had applied for this internship. I go to the internship and on the first day I get there and this sweet girl who was the publicist when I got there was typing on a computer because at this point, this was not really, I mean, this is crazy how old this makes me feel. But this was back when like laptops weren't really as much of a thing. So like everyone was working on a desktop computer at the office. So she's like sitting there and this woman was from France and she had a very aggressive leadership style, very demeaning, screaming in your face. I know like immediately if you've read, well, if you've watched the Devil Wearer's Prada, I feel like that character has the same sort of vibe as this woman, but this one was also just like overly aggressive. Miranda Priestly in the Devil Wearer's Prada is much more under the radar like low key shaming you. This one was just like screaming in your face at the top of her lungs and telling you the air and idiot. So I walk in, I see her screaming at this young girl. She's sitting there trying to type, she's crying, she's shaking and she's just screaming at her belittling her calling all kinds of names. And she walks away and I immediately think, oh my god, I have to help this person. I like cannot handle people getting in trouble like that and they're being all this tension. I immediately want to smooth it over and just put it on myself. So I go over and I'm like, hey, you know, I can let me step in here and see if I can fix that. You just like go to the bathroom, take care of yourself. So I take over writing this press release and on the Prada was for a cashmere sweater company. And I was like, I don't know what I'm doing, but like, we're just gonna do this. I just don't want her to get yelled at anymore. And I had no idea that what was about to happen next was going to happen. She comes over, she reads it, she meaning the woman and she goes, where this is fabulous. How long have you been doing this? And I was like, well, I'm just an intern. I'm just in school. She's like, well, now you are officially my publicist. And the girl poor girl walks out of the bathroom. She tells her she's fired. And I was like, this was not what I was trying to accomplish. This wasn't it. I wasn't trying to get you fired. I was trying to prevent you from getting yelled at more. So this was kind of my first experience of like stepping into help and then all of a sudden having somebody kind of elevate me. And I think big picture what ended up happening here was that, you know, and I've had this experience even with Sirized Biological Dad's mom. It was a very, very tough Japanese woman like from Japan, tough Japanese women. There are certain types of people where they're, they'd want to break you. They want to like push you and demean you and see if they can get you to break. I think to some extent thinking that they're going to pull out greatness in you. And if you've ever seen the view with Blash, like great example, go watch with Blash. And these when we're talking about abuse dynamics, like actual abuse of power, these are actually the archetypes that we're talking about. There's a part of them that believes that like pushing you to the point of breaking you and demeaning you is actually going to be the only thing that brings out true greatness in you. This boss was certainly one of those people. And good news for me is that I am not easily broken. And in fact, I look at these people as challenges. I'm like, huh, look at you. And to me, it never feels personal. Even if they're sitting there belittling me, like still to this day, my dad calling me a simple person, hurts more than any of the stuff that I've ever heard any of these people say to me. So I share this story because what transpired for the next couple of years, I think surely it made me who I am today. It made me, I learned how to push so hard I learned how to burn the candle up both ends of the stick and still show up like a million bucks. I learned so many different skills. She would throw me into anything. And I just was the, yeah, I'm going to figure it out. Yeah, I'm going to figure that out too. And I'll never forget this was my one breaking point. I was on an airplane going to visit somebody that I hadn't seen in a long time. And I hadn't taken a vacation in forever. And I'm literally boarding the plane. And I get a text that I have to be at her office in 20 minutes. And I'm like, you know that I'm leaving today. I've had this plan forever. And she basically pulled one of those. Well, if you want your job, then you're not leaving. So I literally thankfully was able to get off the plane. Thank God we didn't take off. And I went back to the office, persisted with my job for about two weeks, but that ended up being a breaking point for me. Where I'm like, why am I, why am I doing this? Why am I pushing myself this hard? And this brings me to I think a very important point. Despite all of this woman's like ups and downs and her screaming at me and like throwing me into this and that, even in those moments, if I look back, I feel so grateful that she prepared me, that she gave me access and autonomy to do so many different things that surely no one would have ever given an 18-year-old. Like I had no business doing any of these things at 18. And yet because I was able to sit there and take it and keep pushing and keep, you know, staying committed to the process, I knew that I was being pushed to learn something. I knew that I could use it as a growth opportunity, which I did, and that it was never going to make me back down. When that had eventually hit a point where I wasn't growing anymore, where I actually, I learned so much and then it started to impede my ability to have a personal life as an adult. That was when I realized this job was no longer for me. It was when I willingly walked away from going to see my friends that I realized I have out, like I've maxed out my growth, my growth, and what I can learn from this is no longer matching how tired and burnt out I am. I need to find something else. And you know what I didn't do? I didn't blame it on her. I didn't make it her being a toxic boss. None of that. I just said, hey, you know, having to not go on that vacation was a real wake-up call for me. And I'm young and I have a lot of life ahead of me and I don't think I'm willing to sacrifice all my personal relationships for this job. I'm so grateful for the opportunity I've learned so much. I hope that you'll give me a great recommendation and I'll stay around as long as you need until you're able to replace me. And guess what? It was fine. There was no drama. I look back at those moments only with positivity. And I can think, I can literally see her bright red face screaming at me and it brought out greatness in me. Now looking back on it, was that a toxic narcissistic abuse of boss? For sure, it was like right out of the playbook of Whiplash. But what's interesting is for a person that's placed left on that brain pattern spectrum, they could still take that lemon sort of throwing and turn into lemonade. Another thing that I think is important to look at would be, and I'm sharing these examples with you because sometimes when you're hearing real life examples, you can kind of compare and contrast what's gone on in your life because surely not all of you would have done what I would have done or have turned that into a growth opportunity that served as a really solid foundation for you moving forward. It made me so much more resilient and so much better everything that I do. In fact, I don't even know if I really would have been able to do what I've done entrepreneurially without that experience. So nothing but gratitude. Another experience that I think is important is years later, I had now been established in PR and I ended up, I was applying for this age as me as well. I was applying for a PR director position at MySpace, right? Super old. I feel old just as I said that. And I ended up getting to the interview level that I wanted to with that job and at that exact time, this other emerging social networking company came to me and said, hey, we want to make an offer. And what it ended up coming down to was the offer at this new emerging company was literally half of what I was offered at the other company. But what I would have been able to have access to and learn and grow and achieve while I was there and how much freedom I would have had to kind of be my own boss, to me was worth the pay cut. The pay cut was so severe. And I bring this up because there are people in the world that you're, let's say that you decide, like, I really want this job with the pays not that great and then you kind of take that job with the not so great pay. You might spend your entire time at that job presenting the person for not paying you enough. When the reality is you got yourself into that contract willingly. So never once during that job was I ever mad about not being paid enough. Anytime I would ever feel any sort of like disgruntled attitude or like, God, I'm exhausted or why I'm overworked, I would remind myself, like you did this to yourself on purpose. You wanted this job. You wanted the freedom. You wanted to not have a boss over you. So, you know, tough it out, buttercup, you put yourself here. And I think that is kind of the reframing and metacognition that many people on the right side of the spectrum can't deal. So part of what allowed me in that moment that I just shared of kind of intentionally taking a much lower paid job because I wanted to work there. I wanted that access. I wanted to not necessarily have this whole hierarchy of a boss system above me, which I surely would have had at my space. That moment was radical personal responsibility that I just called out. This like anytime I'd be like, oh, I'm not making enough for this. I immediately would have the metacognitive ability in that moment to be like, yeah, you did this to yourself. This is one of the keys of success. And if you're able to do this, the likelihood that you were going to have personal beef or drama or gossip with other people is very, very, very slim. This does not need to, if you can take radical ownership, this doesn't need to happen. Now, what you'll find as we kind of pull this thread even more is that once you are at the top of an organization, you can't control how the people on the right are going to interpret these things, which surely is likely to happen to you. Hopefully they will all watch this podcast. You can share it far and wide and we can help people recover from this because I think often these things are far more fixable than people are led to believe if they're only relying on their own feelings and arguably the echo chamber of like-minded people that they've collected around them. So let's dig into this concept of radical personal responsibility. When you have this, you're able to examine your performance, your behavior, and identity without collapsing your whole identity. Because your identity is not built on other people's validation or feedback, it's not unsafe to dig in there. Like, did I mess that up? Did I sound like absolute garbage when I did that? Just so that you guys know, for years, and I mean still to this day, I watch back pretty much every podcast that I do, every lecture that I do, not because I like to watch myself. In fact, quite the contrary, I haven't hated it. I learn how to become better by having to face when I don't do something well. Many people would be greatly benefited from doing this. When you're able to go back and watch the tape of maybe a moment that you thought that was great and you won't look back and you're like, nope, definitely fumble that one. Could have been stronger here. Could have made that point stronger here. More fidgeting here than I would like. When you're able to look at yourself honestly in that way and make corrections without it completely deconstructing your sense of self, that's when people start to become very successful and have that strong competitive edge. Human beings have to be able to do that if we want to be successful. But more importantly, human beings have to be able to do that if we want to be successful either in a group dynamic or in a couple. When you can't do that, everything turns into projections, splitting deflection, blame on the other person without being able to see your side of the street. So for some patterns, as you can imagine, this muscle toward radical personal responsibility is extremely underdeveloped. For people like this, their identity is often organized around concepts like things being fair or good or morally correct. And evaluation is something that will start to destabilize that sort of coherence. Feedback starts to become a form of threat. And the psyche resolves this instability through something called splitting, which is a complex psychological mechanism that causes you to split things into extremely good and extremely bad qualities. So what this typically leads to is for somebody to idealize and see somebody in a light that is overly positively skewed. And then as soon as there's any sort of feedback or any sort of perceived negative reputation that's on the line, then they only align with the bat. So they can't hold the good and the bad. So going back to my example of that crazy French boss that I had, I was always able to see the good with the bad. I was able to see that while she was crazy and screaming and like spitting and, you know, swearing at me, she also was brilliant and an innovator in her own field and was giving me opportunities that I wouldn't have anywhere else. So I was able to hold those two seemingly opposites simultaneously. When somebody has this right side brain pattern spectrum issue, they split. They can't do that. They can't hold two simultaneous things. There can't be a few of these bad things that make them human while also all these good things. And I think this also segues into something that I think is important for people, especially when you're looking at the career context, is to look at seasons of something. I knew that my season of that job with the French lady was expired when I realized this, I don't have anything left to grow from this that isn't, that is worth completely putting my personal life in the gutter. So does it mean that that whole, you know, two years that I spent there was a waste? Absolutely not. The nothing, things are a waste if you make them a waste. Things are a waste if you split at the end and destroy all of the good that's come out of it. If you basically wash away all the lessons and instead of having to face and take any accountability of your own role in this, you kind of try to package something up with a bone, be like, they're toxic narcissistic users. This is a cult and you try to just push it away. Then you lose all the lessons, you lose all the positive and you lose your ability to, again, kind of hold all these things that seem contradictory at the same time, which of course is a very important emotional regulation piece and component that shows emotional maturity. Splitting is a psychological mechanism that is dysregulated. It's not something that's actually beneficial. This episode is brought to you by healing Asana, my absolute favorite Asana on the market for a variety of reasons. Number one, my busy mom, I own a bunch of companies and despite my best efforts, I often don't know when I'm going to be able to sneak in 20 minutes of self care. 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You will not regret this. It'll be the best salon experience you've ever had. So when somebody splits, they can't hold complexity anymore. Complexity becomes intolerable and they want to try to split things into black or white. Authority of any kind becomes either cult like or immoral. Feedback is an attack or something sinister because they really know your motives. And boundaries become cruel. And I will be the first to tell you this process for people that get stuck in these sort of cycles. It's not conscious. It starts through self-deception traps that then eventually start to play into existing architectures with other victim-centric narratives. And often a surrounding of other people who seemingly function the same exact way. And this is where self-examination either happens, right? This is the moment. It either happens or it gets cast aside and labeled as an abuse of power or subjugation or a cult. Feedback isn't ever intended to collapse your identity. Feedback shouldn't be a trigger and yet for people that fall into this brain pattern type. Feedback ends up through that same sort of distortion that I explained through kind of the Harley dynamic with my toddler. Instead of being able to take ownership and say, oh yeah, okay, I didn't quite do that the way I wanted or that should have been better or where I can see where you asked me to do x, y, and z and i, did a, b, c instead. And that's not really fair. Do you know how many times I've had a situation where as the boss of a company, I ask like honestly, nicely and in very cleared, laid out language, I really need to do a, b, and c. Here's why you set the expectation. And then they do x, y, and z, get caught doing x, y, and z. But somehow you are the toxic narcissistic boss for not listening to their way, even though you very clearly asked for it to be done a, b, and c with reasons. This is something that happens often in power structures and hierarchy. Just because whoever is the leader or the manager of the boss asks for it to be done a certain way, that doesn't mean that that is narcissism. And I think to throw around that terminology makes no sense. And to be honest, if you're in a support role and you say yes, I will do it a, b, and c, and then you go and do it x, y, and z, who's actually to blame in this scenario. It doesn't matter if you think your way is better or if you think your way is more right. If you did the opposite of what the person in the hierarchy asked you to do, you are technically at fault. And I think that sometimes people have a hard time distilling things down like this. If somebody asks you, you have to keep track of your hours like this. Here's the sheet. This is how you get paid. And you decide not to keep track of your hours in a way that is honest and detailed. And you're like half fast at the end of the month being like, Oh crap, I forgot to this. Then you're just kind of making stuff up. If somebody goes and matches that against records and meetings that you said that you had, and the math isn't mathing, you're not a narcissistic boss for saying like, Hey, I realize that this may be something that you're gratitude moment, but you, you can't just make stuff up like this because I can see that this meeting didn't happen or that meeting didn't happen. Like what are we going to do about this? When you're in a situation like that, in that exact moment, I can't tell you how many times in my career that scenario has happened to me, it be hoops you. If you're a person that has found yourself in this dynamic over and over again, you have to be able to stop and say, Did I actually do exactly what they asked me to do? Did I uphold the standard of integrity? Did I actually forget to do this to the last minute and then half-asset and try to make something up? Do I feel underpaid? So now I'm trying to add different things into my invoicing spreadsheets that I can get paid more because I feel like I'm worth more. All of these things are dishonest. Even if you feel, right, if you're the type of person, but I feel and then whatever comes next, none of those somehow absolve you from playing by the rules. And the person that tries to uphold the rules or to try to hold the structure is not narcissistic or abusive for trying to uphold the structure. And as I reiterated earlier, I wish we didn't need structure at all. I wish everything could be a free for all. But the reality is that most businesses require some level of structure in order to function, just like cells need differentiation, et cetera. So in situations like this, I encourage you think about it. Have you been either on the receiving end of this as a boss or have you been on the giving end of this as an employee who is disgruntled for a variety of reasons and projecting that to whatever power structures above? Or you mad at mommy and daddy? This pattern, as we've been discussing, it really shows up so clearly in professional environments. And here's a few, I've outlined a few things that I think happen the most frequently so you can see if you found yourself in this position or on, again, either side either as the boss or as the employee. And this doesn't even need to be particularly just work related, any sort of group dynamic that has roles and responsibilities in some sort of hierarchy. So let's play this out. An individual accepts a role with defined parameters and the compensation is agreed upon. The scope is known and over time dissatisfaction emerges. Responsibility starts to create tension, skill gaps start to become visible and growth suddenly requires honest self-evaluation. To put it back into the context of some of the experiences I shared with you is how hard I'm pushing worth it for me anymore? Or am I resentful of something that now it's time for me to step back and let go? For people that fall on this bright side of the brain pattern spectrum instead of taking ownership, a narrative typically starts to emerge. Exploitation is really the explanation. Abuse starts to become their story and authority, no matter what becomes the villain. This shift actually preserves that person's identity and it avoids having to face the facts. Have I accepted a job at a parate that I agreed to? Probably us. Did I eventually become resentful and now I'm projecting onto the power structure? Probably yes. Is my resentment causing me to let entitlement take over and fixate on injustice? Probably. Have I assessed whether my work quality and output have been consistent enough to ask for a raise? Bring this one up because often what's motivating you to ask for the raise isn't actually commensurate with work output and consistency and a lot of people ask for raises at a time when they're feeling entitled or down and out rather than matching how consistent and committed they've been and how good a steward they've been within your workplace. So keep track of that one if you can see that you've had a pattern of that. If they can't offer me a raise, am I prepared to go find another job that I think can pay me what I'm worth? And that one's really important because before you put yourself into the situation, are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Do you, if you think that you're worth x, y and z and your boss chooses not to do that, they have an opportunity to be like, yeah, I can't pay you this. Well, I wish you the best of luck. You know, like I hope you find what you're looking for. Is it possible that what you think you're looking for only exists in your mind? I hope it does exist for you by the way. But in a situation like this where it's more based on sort of financial power dynamics, often if you run yourself through all those questions, you're not able to see those answers clearly and it starts to create this pattern of tension. So I want you to remember that you have to be able to ask all these questions. And if you don't, this is what it becomes instead. They're taking advantage of me. I could make more at this other job according to Google. They don't pay me enough for me to put in this sort of effort. Why should I have to follow the rules and jump through hoops that they're asking me to? They don't even pay me enough. Think for a moment, who's actually a fault here? Who actually committed to this sort of agreement within the power structure and now is letting their own internal resentment and comparison actually diminish their own quality of work? I can't tell you how many times I have seen this. And then instead of being like, you know what, you're right. My work quality has sucked over the last two months because I'm resentful and mad and I need a raise. At least that's honest. As a boss, I would have been like, hi five. Thanks for your honesty. Your work has actually really been shedding the last two months. Like, what can we do to change things up and fix it? But do you know how often that has happened? Freakin' virtually never. It's always something else. So let's shift this conversation to you who are leaders and bosses because you guys kind of got a crap end of the stick here. Leaders are responsible for the viability direction and performance of a company. And with this, often comes fiduciary responsibility. So with fiduciary responsibility, this means you are entirely responsible for all of the finances and the financial stability and the payroll and whether you are accountable to shareholders and investors, all of this falls on your shoulders. When you're in a role like this, you have to make decisions that you believe are in the best interest of your company. But this also means that you have to be able to live with that risk and liability solely on your shoulders. So the pressure that is on you is immense. There's nobody else to blame. You can't pass the buck. If you make a mistake, you could bankrupt your company. That's a very real scenario that entrepreneurs have to face all the time. And if you're somebody like me, you start to think about all the people who are dependent on that job for their income. So not only are you now thinking about your family and feeding your family and all of your risks and liabilities, but you want to keep people's paycheck coming. This is something that most people that are in kind of those middle to lower sections of the hierarchy don't fully understand. If you haven't been in it, you don't understand what that pressure feels like. And when you're having to gamble with your time personally and your own financial resources, especially when you have family or dependent employees and trying to make payroll, every single decision matters. So to you in a middle to lower tier of the hierarchy, you might be like, why does this thing matter? Like, why can't they just do it my way? Because people who are in that position of either owner, leader, or manager, they're seeing how that one decision affects things five rings out. And when you are that rejection based pattern, you're only thinking of why they didn't take my advice right now. Why do they didn't do it my way right now? Why do they have to make my way wrong right now? Why do they always have to do it their way? So whether it's an executive, a manager or a company owner, it's common for those underneath the hierarchy to call any sort of decisiveness and authority narcissism. But what isn't being taken into account is that the reason they're in that role is because it actually is their sole responsibility. They are the one that everything falls solely on at the end of the day. Anything that goes wrong, any fiduciary response, but it all goes on their shoulders. So they should be making that decision. Now, any great leader is also going to have a phenomenal team. I have an awesome team. I, Angel is sitting off to my left. I don't know what I would do in my life without Angel. Does that mean that, you know, I don't ever step in and give her my ideas? Of course, I step in and give her my ideas. But do I also take her ideas? Do I also give her autonomy to do things her way? Hell yeah. I don't try to, you know, run the video department on my own. I try to make sure to step in and provide feedback. And if I like something, I'm honest with her, but I don't try to take over her department and sit next to her and watch over her shoulder all day long. I would never do that. But if you think about how a business functions oftentimes, they're really clear directives. Like, I need X by this deadline. I need this by this deadline. And when people fail to meet those deadlines or to do things in the specific way that you asked, it's the same thing as a boundary. And if you're ignoring the boundary and you're pushing back on set boundary, you're no better than a teenager or a toddler. But now, whoever created the boundary is the narcissist. You know how I love to think micro macro. Let's scale this out one level bigger. Let's look at society and power because all the dynamics that we just talked about, they scale into institutions, they scale into government. Of course, they scale into religion. So I hope by this point, you've realized that some people's nervous systems actually tolerate hierarchy well because they don't see the hierarchy as an affront to their identity. While other people experience hierarchy as a threat, some people thrive with evaluation. Like, for me, years of my life, literally during my ski career were spent with my runs being analyzed on a huge big screen TV where the coach would pause it in front of all of your peers and draw and like critique your knee and ankle position, just rip you to shreds and then keep going. And then, oh, I'm going to rewind that one more time. Do it one more time. That sort of evaluation, if you're on the left side of the brain pattern spectrum, it builds you up. It makes you competitive. It makes you stronger. It makes you more resilient. If somebody says no, you're like, okay, I'm going to still figure out way. While others would interpret that same thing as rejection, critique. These orientations will shape your belief systems broadly. They will also shape your policy preferences. They will help you determine how you see moral frameworks, religious frameworks, and of course, how you interface with politics. These all end up being a question of regulation capacity, but also metacognitive regulation. How able are you to see the big picture in each of these moments? An example would be someone kind of middle center to center left would be more potentially flexible with maybe, for example, with politics, sometimes being kind of like more like classic liberal, maybe sometimes more conservative on a few issues, more libertarian, because they're seeing the bigger picture, thus not locking themselves into one form of thinking. Whereas often people on the right hand side of the spectrum end up getting more locked into whatever their perspective is. There's less wiggle room because there's less metacognitive abilities. So let's also think about it this way, because we've been describing these kind of two different types of personas. Type one tends to, and type one, meaning the rejection side of the spectrum. They tend to want things to be fair at any cost. They want everyone to be a winner. These are the types of people that don't want grades, and they believe that competition and negative feedback is somehow evil and destructive. And of course, that's as you're moving far to the right. There are iterations of that on the way, but in general, there's a deeper desire toward fairness and validation recognition that as competition ratchets up and a more meritocracy, ratchets up, those things start to become more dividing or more triggering. Then we have this type two person. Those who actually want a merit-based system, think a merit-based system is actually what works best for us as a human collective. IE, you get what you create through commitment, motivation, perseverance, and of course, sustained hard work. You believe that resilience creates success, and that if each person actually learned how to push themselves, they could have it too, right? It's not just me. This is available to everybody, but you have to learn how to push yourself. We talked earlier about how, unfortunately, this type one sort of egalitarian wanting everything to be equal ever on the winner, they are typically not the ones stepping into entrepreneurship and leadership positions. They end up ironically going into the support positions that are right smack underneath the hierarchy, and they often want to be seen, acknowledged, and validated in ways that their actual job or role isn't actually congruent with. Then irony number two, type two ends up going either to the top of management or owning companies. Some might even try to work for somebody else, but eventually they see another way to solve the problem they go out on their own. To me, I just find this to be the biggest irony. Micro-macro scale congruency, toxic relationship pairings with husband and wife, end up being the same thing with work environments, end up being the same thing with us personally and how we interface with policy and governments. Type one, just trying to feel criticized and not enough, cast aside and victimize while type two that they can't trust other people to follow through and have to take ownership and no one actually has to take responsibility. You can see where if we don't stop and try to see how these self-disruptive patterns distort our perception and make us miss opportunities to actually dig deep, be honest with ourselves, heal relationships, mend, mend relationships, maybe even reflect back on something that you've skewed so wildly negative and split for years and been like, you know what? Being honest with myself, they were actually some great years of my life. And yes, I left mad because of X, Y, and Z, but they were actually pretty great. Do you know how healing that can be? I want that for you. I want you to stop splitting. I want you to be able to say, you know what? Things come with the good and bad. These are the things that I got from it that are positive and these are the things that maybe hurt me on the way out. But nonetheless, like, yeah, I don't have to make anything the enemy just because I got feedback that hurt or that I wasn't willing to look at yet. Because one responsibility can't be actually metabolized internally, power immediately is going to absorb all of that and you're literally just pushing all of your childhood wounds onto some boogie man up above you. Authority will always become symbolic of your pain and struggle. Leaders will always become a source of tension and perceived abuse in any sort of emotionally driven container and systems of any kind. Even if right now you feel cool where you're at, the reality is that eventually in time you hang out in any system, you will eventually turn it into a battleground unfortunately. Which leads me to the topic of our next episode, which I'm really excited about. It's examining idolatry. And more importantly, how authority figures and structures are elevated and then potentially destroyed in an effort to preserve somebody's identity. Power doesn't actually distort everyone. Sometimes all it does is demonstrates the lack of medical cognition and the need for self-regulation in the people that it's actually housing. I hope this episode was informative. Surely for some, it was a little bit trickering, but I truly believe that if the people who end up doing this in the aftermath of feedback and opportunities where they could have learned and grown and actually been honest with themselves and take some ownership, so many other people's lives would be better off for it. You wouldn't have to just constantly create these sort of victim oppressor narratives around you or, you know, add in sort of spiritual lenses on top of it that make it even more nuts. So I hope that you sit with this. You look back and reflect at your life because I can tell you for sure, I've had a few wild bosses in my day. Every single one of them if I think back, I can always think about what positives they brought out of me. And if you're the type of person that likes to fixate and dwell on the negative, you're going to do that in so many areas of your life for the rest of your life and you really want to live like that. I don't want you to live like that. I want you to be free. So if this episode spoke to you, if you feel like somebody really needs to hear this episode, please share it far and wide. And I'm really happy to report, as of last week when we started up or season two, we were number two in mental health. So we're all the way up at number two, y'all. And I looked at all the podcasts in the whole world. I got to literally all not even in a category, just all podcasts in the whole world. We were number 88 last week. So keep sharing, keep showing up. I love doing this with you. And next week we will dig deeply into a dollar chain. Bye. Your brain isn't broken. It's running an old code. A break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions, and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring in 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is pretty up to. Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen?