The Secret to a Quiet Mind in a Noisy World - E160

it want to finally take back control.

We always say we're going to teach people how to become the shock callers

and reclaim control as the dominant forces of their decision-making process. If you're ready to take back control of your attention, this conversation is going to be for you. So let's make sense of quieting the mind in this noisy world that we live in. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you

that your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise. How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Makes sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself,

reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Makes sense. Great morning, world, great morning humans, and I want to welcome you to another

addition of the Makes sense with Dr. JC podcast. I want to welcome you officially to the uprising of the sleep walking masses. I don't know why we are together here today in this moment, but I will say that I'm honored, and I'm also very curious to learn about it.

“So this is the secret to a quiet mind in a noisy world. Just as a preface, I'm in the process of”

fiercely writing my second book for those of you that haven't gotten it yet. This is the book that I just published. It's called "Make sense how to rewire your mind and transform your life and a lot of people have it." When you buy this book, you get access to a free mastermind that we have on the second Tuesday, so that'll be next week on Tuesday, and we go through the book. And this is pretty much the body of all of my work, but I'm writing my second book right now,

and I won't state the name of it yet because it's so cool, and I don't want to give it to anybody yet. As I'm writing this book, the essence of the book, and it kind of prompts this discussion today, is that I've just been in observation that we have this tendency as humans, and it's just the way that we're wired. It's not a weakness or anything, but we have this tendency to be a little bit careless with what we care about. And one of the chapters of that book deals with this concept

“that we entertain, of having a noiseless life. What does that mean to you to have a noiseless life?”

This discussion today is kind of like a little bit of an excerpt from that chapter, because it made a lot of really interesting discoveries. It's a very frustrating thing to try to live a noiseless life because of the way that we're wired to think that we would achieve that goal,

but I think by the end of this, you're going to have a new perspective, which is what we always

try to do on the make sense podcast. Hopefully that will arm and equip you with awareness of something new that might suit your needs, might suit your goals and dreams. It begins with a little bit of a question just to see who we're dealing with right now. Do you ever feel like your mind is always racing? Maybe it prevents you from sleeping? Maybe you feel a little bit scattered in our make sense ecosystem? We always say that we believe that everyone and that includes you and

me and everyone is highly capable, but just scattered. So do you ever feel like your mind is racing? Well, in this episode, we're going to explain how to stop overthinking. We talked about that last week, so we'll hit on that a little bit because it's so powerful. And we're going to learn how to reclaim our focus in a world. If you think about it, that's really designed to distract you. The most powerful commodity right now is actually your attention. If you think about it,

everybody's trying to grab it. Am I trying to grab your attention right now? Maybe it's not my intention to grab your attention. I think I'm coming from a place where I'm more interested in sharing something or paying something forward to you that will enrich you. But if you're going to spend some time with me right now, you're hopefully going to give this your attention. So it's

happening all over the place. But we're going to dive into why trying to quiet the noise never really

“seems to work and what you should do instead just simply find peace. I guess I would say that”

that would be a necessary goal of your day is to experience and find peace. And that's what this episode's going to be about. We're going to learn how to stop letting things like social media opinions, constant notifications, all those things control your mood and your life. We're going to learn how to stop wasting our emotional energy on things that don't bring you joy and success. So once again,

haven't made that decision yet, but this episode's going to be for you. So what if I could show you

“how to quiet a noisy mind? Would that be beneficial to you? For me, it saved my life over and over”

over again. It will save my life again today because my mind, I don't know about you guys, but my mind gets noisy. If you're tired of feeling mentally scattered, I want to finally take back control.

We always say we're going to teach people how to become the shock callers and reclaim control

as the dominant forces of their decision-making process and their perception. If you're ready to take back control of your attention, this conversation is going to be for you. So let's make sense of quieting the mind in this noisy world that we live in. So everything begins with a you see it on my hat and it's just a curious way of taking note of something and saying I haven't made up my mind about it yet, but it's got my curiosity or I've at least noticed it and we're going to circle back to

that in a little bit. But I've been extremely curious and I don't know if you have two about something

“lately. Have you ever noticed that there's moments in our life, maybe while it were on vacation,”

maybe after times of being in deep focus, or maybe in a moment of presence at a seminar or a retreat, I was talking to the plant medicine world. These were people that all go on these retreats

and they have these amazing breakthrough experiences. Could happen at a seminar, could happen from

meditation, but we just experience what it's like where everything feels quieter. So I don't know if you have any practices like that, but there's these experiences that we have in life where we get a little bit of a taste of what it's like to feel like everything in life has gotten a little bit quieter. It's just a joy. Like I said, it could even be vacation. In fact, that is probably that number one reason. It's not so much about doing plant medicine, but I'm going on that journey

once a year. It've been many, many times for about five years now to the Amazon jungle and I sit

“with plant medicine. Am I telling everybody that they should do that? I was called to do it, but”

that's one of the main reasons that I go out there is it's a great way to break free from myself. Joe dispens a who is just one of the greatest minds out there far as I'm concerned. He does a talk called breaking the habit of being myself. So think about that for a second. Is there value and what would that be like to break the habit of being yourself? I just think it's a great idea because I find like the idea of getting out of my own ways and indication that it's not an

extrinsic problem, right? It's me, right? So we go on these events and we experience what it's like to get quiet or you might even have a great day and you're in flow and you experience what it's like to have less noise and we come back from that experience or we wake up the next day and then we come back to our normal life. So I want you to kind of like this really experience what that's like to have this wonderful quiet clear moment and we come back to our life, our phones,

our routines and our responsibilities. I'm working on another episode we're going to talk about the

responsibility thing and that's an interesting topic right there. You know, I always like to ask

myself or I can ask you right now. Are you taking responsibility for your life right now or are you caught up in the noise? I always think it's fascinating when it comes to this idea of the noise. It's very hard to be responsible in the noise because the noise kind of gives you an excuse to not be responsible to be irresponsible. Now if you call it irresponsible it kind of sounds like a bad thing but sometimes we give ourselves a whole pass from responsibility in life with our physical,

mental and financial wellbeing because of noise. So that's just one to tuck under your pillow for later maybe is are you letting the noise give you that hall pass to step out of responsibility because who's in charge of your happiness, your joy, your fulfillment and your success? You are nobody else. The noise is not responsible for it and the eradication of noise is not responsible. So here's what's interesting about all that stuff that I just shared. Upon deep introspection of this phenomenon

where we have these moments of clarity and silence and then we come back to their craziness to the noise, I found that it's not that the world got louder because sometimes when you really experience what it's like to be clear and focused and you come back it almost seems like the world it's not just noisy it's even noisy or so it's one thing to have noise but sometimes when I go from clarity back into my regular world I almost feel like it's noisy or at least I notice I'm

like I become highly sensitive to it or something so it's not that the world got louder it's more

even more so I don't know if that resonates with anybody it's kind of like that first moment that we turn the lights on in the morning I'm very very much into quality sleep and this is a discussion in itself and two of the things that I do is I make sure that my environment is cold but also very dark can't even see my hand in front of my face and I go through extreme steps to make that happen but when I go from that and I first step into the light I have to turn the lights on to go down

the staircase that's kind of what it's like it's like lights have never been so bright when you move

from the dark to the light just seems a little bit brighter than normal to go from piecing quiet and clarity into the noise and that realization can feel overwhelming so understand that we just put the o-word in here if you're feeling overwhelmed with life it could be an illusion you could just be highly sensitive to things that have always been there

“but your overwhelmed now because they're more apparent that's what we're discussing so it's about”

asking this question a lot of people come to me and ask this question how do I quiet a noisy mind in a world that never shuts up so if we feel like we're living in a busy busy world a noisy world right now god we've got the war going on we've got economy we've got all these societal things and our identity and the social media real that's telling you that you're not good enough all of that stuff it kind of can look like the world is not shutting up so how do I quiet my mind in a

world like that and most people I think start to struggle because they solve this the wrong way what people typically try to do to quiet a noisy mind in a world that doesn't shut up they try to eliminate the noise that's like as I said a couple weeks ago that's like trying to nail a piece of gelo to the ceiling that's like trying to drink water with the four to try to eliminate the noise and I know that we're probably thinking well I have noise canceling headphones and things like that

“but that doesn't eliminate the noise that just eliminates your perception of it so it's important to”

recognize that noise is always there so they've tried to escape it and they try to control it

there and and you know very hard to control uncontrollables and I always remind people that if you're feeling things like anger or frustration and all of those achy feelings very often you can always kind of dig into it and look deeper and recognize you're trying to control uncontrollable things but what if I told you that that's not how all of this works to try to eliminate the noise what if living a peaceful focused life isn't about removing the noise it's more about managing our focus

and attention with it our relationship with the noise and this is going to be a big big shift this is some good shift we're going to add this to your big pile of shift so here's the truth thoughts the thoughts in your head they're going to think emotions are going to move the world will keep

spinning the sun will always rise and distractions will exist these things don't require our

permission to show up so park right there for a second think about all this concept of the noise and the distractions and the unsolicited criticism that we get and the thoughts in your head none of those things require our permission to show up however they do require our participation to stay we're going to talk about not participating with everything not trying to eliminate it but just saying I'm not going to participate in that and you do that in some walks of your life

so unwanted thoughts feelings and distractions are not the problem the problem is our participation with them so once again feeding into this idea that we need to get out of our own way and this is why so many people in this world today feel overwhelmed it's not just that there's

“more noise remember I don't think that there's more noise right now it's more that we've”

become incredibly good at engaging with all of it now if you look at all of the avenues that the noise is coming through all of the channels well yes I could say that it becomes more difficult but the question is is there more noise I always like to look back at these crazy times like the barbarians or or even the civil war where you know the red coats and the blue coats would come and they would take a knee and basically everyone would die just to imagine what that was like back

then where the father of the house would be like hey children hey wife I'm gonna go die the

that the noise is always there you know the distractions but we just have more channels right now

“and this is why so many people feel overwhelmed the problem is not that it's happening it's that”

we're increasingly engaging with it and we're reacting to it and often feeding it I always say that what we consume on a regular basis ends up being what we assume so if we're consuming the news and negative things we're hanging around with the negative people all the time well of of course we're gonna assume that to be our reality we're giving too much emotional energy and meaning to these distractions that have always been there and they'll never not be there if you

have a good day and you find clarity like I said I go to the Amazon and I have this peaceful clear moment the distractions are still there I'm just not paying attention to them at that time but they're not eliminated my sense making machine is unaware of them I love to know that because I love the idea of being fully radically accepted of everything good days bad days they're all necessary you can't have light without dark this idea of giving things our attention everything

“seems to feel important sometimes when we're overwhelmed everything seems to feel urgent”

and it feels like it deserves our attention I see that very often people are involved in consuming the noise therefore stepping out of responsibility but then justifying why it's important even though they have no control over outcomes they're trying to build an airplane in the sky but they'll justify it and claim that it deserves their attention now that's an easy one but

we do that on autopilot so does everything need your attention or have we just never learned how to

filter what we give attention remember this comes from this new book that I'm writing that addresses this idea that we're a little careless sometimes with what we give our care to once you acknowledge this this idea that have I ever disputed and filtered you know in my book make sense we have this strategy this exercise called the sorting filter and it's just a simple process of allowing yourself to run things through a question filter is this important do I control this does this

support the things that matter most to me my desire to have a good day which today might be my last have you ever disputed any of these things that we have decided deserve our attention because instead of trying to silence the storm what we can do is just simply begin to notice it so that's the power of the hmm when I say hmm even though I don't have an answer yet

“which pisses people off sometimes I'm just saying noted but I'm not sure what I think about it yet”

because I haven't made up my mind yet I'm going to allow myself in this world that demands certainty and demands rapid response I'm going to choose to allow myself to think about it a little okay we're going to instead of trying to silence to storm we're just going to simply start to notice it and make that enough for right now and you can do this with your thoughts as well instead of identifying with every thought we begin to separate ourselves from it we start to see that there's a voice in our

head that isn't necessarily us there's a voice in your head that is not necessarily you and it's not speaking for you it's a separate voice it's a narrator you know some people would call it the ego it's a condition pattern it's a learned voice meaning that we've adopted it throughout life and it's it thinks it's there to keep us safe but could have reached its expiration date it's a learned voice that presents things as urgent I want you to capture that voice right now

tells you this is urgent this is meaningful or worthy of your attention but we're entertaining the fact that that voice that's pitching that to you is not necessarily you once you can see this everything's going to change so what I'm going to do right now and I would love to get some feedback from everybody I want you to just consider what would you name your voice now naturally the name for my voice is the dragon and what started out kind of as an exercise of me just identifying that

there was this voice that was basically bullshitting me it gave me the ability to say the dragon is

talking a lot right now now I've actually moved to the next phase where I've been bodied the dragon because I found out how I could work with it and it became a superpower of mine to embrace my fears but what would you call the voice in your head this is a huge huge power move for the day

I totally forgot about Kazoo Kazoo is a perfect one and for those of you listening to the podcast this

“is patty watching live on YouTube miss you gram is what she goes by patty now has the ability”

when she has noise to separate herself from it and say well Kazoo's got a lot to say today

so just think about how powerful that is because what you're doing before you give that voice a name

is you're saying I have a lot to say I have a lot of noise but what you can do with this name is you can now give yourself a little space between it because you see it as a separate entity and you don't automatically absorb it as yours so once you can see that and you can give it a voice you can stop automatically believing it separate yourself from it I'll share another one we had a group the other day that I was talking about this topic and one of the members said that the

name of her voice was silly goose and I thought that was a great one silly goose and when the silly

goose offered her a bunch of bullshit a bunch of nonsense she'd be able to now greet it in

recognition and say oh silly goose you're so crazy but who the fuck asked you all right so this is how we stop being so reactive this is a tool this is a strategy this is a vehicle to take you to a place where you're less reactive less sensitive to this process the interface response system that's in the book makes sense is all about moving from reaction to thoughtful response but this is how we stop being

“so reactive we pause we say hmm that's what missed practice of cognitive distancing or we say”

silly goose and that gives us space between us and the noise so now we're starting to see that noise doesn't exist without our participation and our labeling and meaning a distraction doesn't become noise until we make it noisy so we pause we create space between us and this hypothetical noise and we move from unconscious that's why we say welcome to the sleepwalking masses we move from unconscious reaction to conscious choice and that's called the response and here's the realization

that changes everything noise only becomes noise when you agree that it matters sit with that a second noise only becomes noise when you agree that it matters so otherwise we don't agree that it matters and we separate ourselves from it it's not noise it's just clouds moving through the sky so take note when you get a chance to look up at the sky that the clouds don't make the sky

the clouds like your thoughts just pass through it and I always challenge people that don't

grasp that look up in the sky and pick a cloud and show me that that cloud is still there in the same place and an hour later or take some sort of time lamps photography and you will prove to yourself that clouds pass on by tell Ben Shahar who's you're gonna love his episode

“he wrote a book called Happy Your No Matter What he said and I think I've shared this with you”

before that if you don't pay any attention to the thoughts in your head like the clouds they'll go away they'll eventually go away I always like that visual if you last so one of those clouds and you grab onto them we're saying if you don't grab onto them they keep moving right but the moment that we do grab onto one of those clouds or thoughts or a name calling or a criticism unsolicited criticism the moment that we grab onto one of those clouds they become the

weather in our heads in our minds so remember what I said that this is something that requires your participation so we're entertaining the idea and there's tools to do this that we don't have to care about everything and everyone in life now I know that's controversial especially if you've decided and how did you come to that decision if you've decided something that you can't do anything about deserves not only your care but everybody else's if you're attached to that

you'll struggle with this idea can you entertain that not everything deserves our care attention and focus or participation now if we grab onto one of those things boom we get that weather in our mind and it becomes our mood our identity and your day if you're in a bad mood right now or even if you're in a good mood how did you get there you participated with something if you

forecast for your day this is the value of the morning ritual this is why I teach people the great morning rise up and once again that's another chapter in my book where I teach people how to reclaim control and actually choose which cloud that you're going to use right the one that best suits you but sometimes we make a mistake right sometimes we invest in the wrong property and this is exactly what happens when we're overthinking we spoke about the idea that overthinking

acknowledges that very often our thoughts are what we consider uninvited guests so we talked about

“that last week over thinking is what happens when we're trying to figure everything out that's what”

overthinking is please explain to me how overthinking is beneficial can anybody do that for me what we're doing when we're overthinking is we're grabbing clouds and turning them into storms remember we

always refer to that as the thought funder storm it's only a storm because we're trying to make sense

of it all and that's the nailing the jello to the ceiling it's very difficult it's impossible we live in a world where being a multitasker is something that we consider a victory so maybe the goal today is not to eliminate the clouds or eliminate the noise maybe the goal is to stop caring so much about the clouds if caring was a currency maybe the goal is to stop funding all the thoughts and the things that are showing up in the world that didn't require your permission

“remember that they didn't require your permission to show up but they do require it to stay so”

if we look at caring about things as a currency we're making some bad investments sometimes we're caring about things that are not really worthy of our care so to stop giving your attention

things that never earned your attention in the first place that's what the goal is today to stop

giving your attention to things that didn't earn how many times have you gotten caught up on somebody that just doesn't even know you doesn't know what it's like to walk in your shoes and they say something mean to you and it creates weather in your head the whole day did they earn that space in your head no but you didn't think about that because when you learn to do this stuff by the way you don't eliminate all of these things they're always there but you do prevent them from

being amplified into noise or that storm and when that happens here's the payoff we always want to know is the juice worth the squeeze when that happens something incredible becomes available to us things like clarity presence direction and tapped into our signal the right frequency so you're either in noise or you're in your signal now if you don't know what your signal is you would have to go through what we call in the book the north star exercise and create a north star

make it bright with a y and then look at the things that you would need to do to make more of it

“to leverage it into reality that's what the signal is so if you haven't thought about that process you”

might not know you know you might think that the noise is the signal you might think that focusing on things that didn't earn your attention is important it you'll protect it and justify it and this is what real attention management looks like by the way it's not controlling the world but choosing what gets access to our attention that hot commodity so this is not about eliminating distraction by the way that doesn't work I've tried it don't waste your time it's more about

becoming immune to it now in my book I call that becoming unfuck withable so I don't know if you see any value in becoming unfuck withable and in this current reality here in 2021 when we're doing this live where everything is competing for our attention this might be the most valuable skill that we can learn to develop in this world is to decide first you have to let yourself know that you get to choose to decide what gets our attention that's a big power move for today because the

people who win and achieve in life and achieve their goals and dreams and make it to the top of the mountain where the table of successes whatever that means to you are not the ones who avoid noise you'll

never read a book about somebody that is free of noise they're the ones that know how to care less

about things that don't matter so when you see me wear a shirt that says breaking news I don't care or I could care less about things some people get pissed off some people laugh at that but what

before I make up my mind I don't rush to make up my mind so perhaps the next time that you take note

“of that voice that inconvenience or maybe injustice in the world that's a big one but this is in just”

what's going on in the world I'm not saying ignore that but maybe we can respond by saying something

like this hmm hello silly goose how are you oh wait a second I already know how you are please

forgive me silly goose but I'm not sure I give a damn I don't know if I give a shit about what you just said yet I'm working on my relationship right now with the things that matter most and my signal

so if you don't mind I'll have to get back to you because I don't need to rapidly

“respond to something that I didn't ask for remember it showed up without my permission I'll get back”

to you and I'm not yet certain when I'll get back to you so you're free to move on until that time so here's an anchor thought for you for the day as we close the noise doesn't need your permission to appear but it does need your participation to stay without your participation your life therefore becomes noiseless so that's it for today remember if you learn something today it's giving it away sharing with others paying it forward which is what I'm doing right now

“that helps it stay so if you learn something today give it away that's how it's going to stay”

and that is also how you leverage a good day that's it for today to support the make sense with Dr. JC podcast be sure to subscribe like and share as well as follow the make sense sub-stack for free daily quotes live streams and blogs and remember learning without action is just another form of distraction if something hit home when you learn something today give it away that's the only way it's going to stay see you next time if you liked the show please take a moment to rate

review and subscribe it really does help the show to grow thank you for listening