so what are you thinking right now? How about your feelings? What are you feeling in this moment now? Which one do you think drives your behavior, your thoughts, or your feelings? Well, I guess like most people, you would say, Oh, it's my thoughts, of course. My thoughts drive everything. Well, I'm here to lovingly confront you and say no, that's not true. Modern neuroscience now shows it's our feelings that drive our thoughts and therefore our behaviors. And if your life isn't where you want it, it's because you've been following the old paradigm, the wrong paradigm. And that if you want to succeed in life, if you want to reach your goals and achieve living in the greatest version of yourself, what we need is to develop emotional mastery. Welcome back to the Heal the Hurt podcast. That's what we're going to tackle today, the old paradigm that it's our thoughts that drive everything. Because isn't that what we've been told for centuries, that it's our intellect and emotions are bad? Don't have emotions, don't talk about

them. Don't deal with them, and if they ever come up, the emotions are the death of our intellect. And the problem in society is all these emotional people. Well, do you hear what happens when somebody says all that? They're very elevated emotionally. So, what does that tell you right there? Their emotion about the situation is driving their intellect and their behavior. Now, I'm going to give you the science behind it because just pointing out how obvious it is isn't enough. People need to know. Now, the first thing you're going to have to recognize is as I tell you about all this stuff, you're going to have some feelings. Most of those feelings are going to be negative. For some of you, you'll be like, No, no, he's wrong. It's not our thoughts, it's our feelings. You're going to get defensive, angry. You're going to want to shut down and push it away. You're going to have severe feelings about this new information. That's normal. And here's why. This is the first thing to recognize and

why we now know that it's our feelings that drive everything we do not our thoughts. The way we process information. Did you know that everything you touch smell see hear or taste all incoming information comes to your thalamus the emotional center of your brain with your amygdala all these different parts pieces which I'm going to stay out of okay so as you're listening to me all the information that's coming into you is hitting the emotional center of your brain and from there it's bouncing off of different aspects of that emotional center and it's looking for past emotional experiences to catalog all right what was my first experience with experiencing I might be wrong that I might have made a mistake childhood right think of it as a child you're an infant you're about to crawl down the stairs you're two years old mom dad no no no boom your first sense was fear I heard this shrieking voice I felt these hands grabbed me and pulled me back oh my god sheer terror now you don't remember that

you were two years old and just a child, or a year old and crawling, but that's what your brain is seeking. And so, the rejection of new information is that feeling that you're experiencing. And so, the thought of being wrong, you know, then later, older you get into, you know, school, and having the wrong answer, playing sports, and making a mistake. We've cataloged all the thousands and thousands of the life experiences where we made mistakes, where we didn't have the answer, the right information, and that's generated this enormous feeling of I can't be wrong. It's a total crushing of the soul that I am somehow weak and valid. There's shame in it, there's guilt in it, there's these overwhelming catastrophic feelings. And so, that's why, whenever, this is why it's so hard for humans to change, is because that cataloging of thousands of negative emotional experiences hits us before we ever can think about it and even consider the new information. So, you look at all the political strife in the world, all the social strife in the world.

What you're seeing is both sides refusing to hear anybody's information because they have decades of depending on their age, decades and decades of negative experiences with so-called being wrong. They are all reacting emotionally before they can ever get to the intellect. So do you see, if you want to improve your intellect in your response, you need to improve your emotional capabilities, your emotional mastery. Now, how was this discovered? Let's get into the science. I'm gonna fill this with tons of science from leading experts in the field to help you bridge that gap and calm those emotions down so you can accept this new information. So look, I'm just doing this not to belittle you, but to give you the knowledge so you can succeed the way you want and get the information you deserve. Antonio Damasio, a leading expert in neuroscience and all of this, was the first one to put this all together. Well, that's not true, but he developed it more concretely. And what he discovered was that emotion is an integral process to reasoning and

decision-making. And he discovered this when individuals who suffered brain damage to the emotional parts of their brain, and then they could no longer make rational decisions. It was just gone. These people who were highly intellectual, capable of running their lives, all of a sudden once there was damage to the emotional part of their brain, simple logical decisions that most people would make, they were making catastrophically improper, inappropriate decisions. All right, drinking on the job, like they could no longer use reason because the emotional parts of their brain had been damaged. Therefore, that's when he showed emotions assist greatly in our ability to reason. They don't disturb it. They never disturb our reasoning and our logic and our thought process, unless the emotional capabilities are defective or dysfunctional. And when do they become dysfunctional, defective, or dysfunctional? Either through injury or in childhood. All right, now what also another aspect he discovered is what happens milliseconds before a behavior is produced by the nervous system. What in that moment before the behavior, the nervous system, which is run by the emotions and primarily the

emotions that have been placed into our subconscious in our childhood. Those influences come up and influence our thoughts and our behaviors. Okay, you can't separate it and that's why this adage. You know that you know for science and for personal development, people and everyone for centuries have been trying to banish emotions and say don't ever deal with them, don't ever. It's our emotions that you know we need to stay logical, uh, even a family member of mine commented on my post, Well, I stay out of the emotional thing, I just use pure logic, and I'm like, this is why I tell that I share this information is because he's unaware that your best logic includes emotion, your worst logic is the attempt to suppress emotion. And where did we learn to suppress emotion in childhood because why most especially in the case of men. What were we told about emotions? You're weak, you're wimpy, you're all these problems with emotions. We're doing that to women now too. If women have emotions, there's something wrong.

and so the point is this: we have never matured emotionally as a species. That's why I always say the next wave isn't anything in tech. I mean, there're wonderful things happening in technology, but the next great wave in society is this: people are starting to figure out, Oh, my God, it's my emotions that drive everything. And so, as we grow emotionally, society is going to grow because it's my personal belief that the most emotionally developed person on this planet operates at probably about a kindergarten to first-grade level emotionally as to what we're capable of. And over the next one to 200 years, because we're so slow to change, because we're so underdeveloped emotionally, we won't take on these new concepts and learn them and develop emotionally, just like racism. It'll take hundreds of years before we really enact them, plus it, as a species, it takes us a very long time to change anyway. It'll take a couple hundred years, but that's going to be the next wave of development in the human species is.

we'll graduate to maybe second, third, or fourth grade emotionally, and that's when you'll start seeing changes in the world. Is when we can start navigating our emotions better because what happens in all this political unrest is you're just seeing infants on both sides of the aisle reacting to the pain that they've never healed and addressed. That's what demacio's research has shown. Your behavior is predicated on the emotional disturbances of your childhood, that's it all right taking this for even further back before we had demacio more science for you before demacio you know in MRI and all of this guidford godfried von leibniz talked about his famous quote is this nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses except the intellect itself. What that means is our intellectual knowledge is always based on our sensory knowledge things we've seen heard touched tasted smelled and those again are all catalog what he means he said accept listen to the quote nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses except

the intellect itself. So what is the intellect itself? That's the childhood experiences that have been catalogued, and therefore we have given them an emotional meaning. Because remember, the first three years of life, we have no cognition, we are a sponge of emotional input, our senses. And that's basically where our subconscious gets built. And so think of it, you're an infant learning to crawl, and you go crawling towards that stair. What happens? Mom or dad, rightly so, comes running over, screams at you, grabs you roughly, rips you away from the stairs. What did your senses just take in? Mom and dad's pure terror and fear, the rough handling, the shriek of the voice. You were implanted with pure terror before you were even consciously aware of it. Now, that's a loving parent, and that's why I say people are like, Think I blame parents, but that's a loving parent. And right there is trauma. That's a traumatic moment for a child. They don't have the intellectual development to process that. None of us do. That's why we are all

trauma beings. The experience of birth itself is sheer trauma on a child physically going from one world to a new world. Like we are all born in trauma. Severe emotional trauma. That's why the greatest skill we need to develop is emotional mastery, not thought mastery, because we are developing emotionally before we're ever developing intellectually. So we have all of these wounds that have been placed on us really in the first seven years of life. We've catalogued all of these thousands of emotional experiences. Now think about through the first seven years of life how many times as a child we made a mistake and heard from our teachers, parents, coaches, priests, whoever it may be, brothers, sisters, You're wrong, you're bad. Thousands and thousands of faces and words and actions of negative hurt. You're bad, you're wrong. Just bam, bam, bam, all of this trauma, trauma, trauma, emotion placed into us. That's why our brain, we process everything emotionally. And so now as you hear this information, you're, and if you're 20, 30, 40, 50, 70 years old.

and you're taking in this new information. My god, if you're 70 years old, billions of negative feelings all your life, that's what you're having to fight through to be able to accept. Oh my goodness, I'm not bad or wrong. Kenny's not saying I'm bad. He's not saying I'm dumb. Those are memories from the past. They're not about what Kenny's saying, but wow, that assault that I felt like I was bad or wrong or stupid. Wow, he's right, that is from the millions of life experiences which left me with that emotion. And then as I gained cognition five, seven, nine years old, I started to put a story on it that said I was bad, stupid, wrong. And so now when Kenny brings it up, that's why I want to shut it off or a political party or my best friend or my husband, wife, friend, whatever it is. Now I have the cognition, the intellect, and so you want to tell me after explaining all that that you need to develop intellectually and ignore.

emotion okay and you wonder why your life isn't working out like i'm trying to. I'm being a bit, I guess, crass, and I don't mean to be mean-spirited. It's just to me, it's so obvious, and it's heartbreaking that we keep selling this model to that everything, especially people in this field who keep selling the model that you need to be different intellectually. It's a gross miscarriage of justice. It's not kind or loving. It's wrong. It's not even how our brain and body works. And so my animation is a hunger to get across the right message. It's an emotion because what do I have now see now why am I so passionate about this like I'm going to turn it on myself because I had an instinct as a kid that emotion drew drove our life. And every time I'd opened my mouth as a kid, I'd get shunted. My dad was a severe intellect, an engineer. I couldn't speak. And so my intuition that this is how things were, I'm right.

it's proven, I'm right. And so, I'm right, I'm up here on my high horse. I'm right. There's all this emotion after years and years of being told I was wrong. That's my passion as I finally get to go, Hey, no, this is the way it is. And so, I get very energized about that. That's not an intellectual process, that's emotion. So now, do I still need to go back and heal that? Of course, I do. Am I working on it? Of course, emotions take a long time to heal. So now, can you see when I talk about in videos, you know, Joe Dispenza brought this up, that, you know, neuroscience shows us 95% of our life, we are reliving our subconscious. We are stuck. You think you're 30 years old, you're 60 years old, and you think you're making a decision in this moment. Like I just proved it to you, my animation was from what childhood, from being told I look at the world incorrectly. And so, when you see me get

excited in my videos. How old am I in that moment? I'm an infant, or I don't know, at least somewhere under 10 years old. I'm not an adult in that moment. There are aspects, but the emotion of it is primitive. And it's true for you too now. Instead of just saying that to you, I want to give you the process. We're going to start moving into the solution so you can start becoming an emotional mastery expert and develop the skills and tools that you deserve to conquer this. Now, the first thing we have to do is again work on that messaging that there's something you know you can't be wrong. Like I know, I know how it works. I have to prove it emotionally to you before you'll accept it logically. So I'm going to give you a process that's an emotional process that will help you bridge that gap so you can grasp it emotionally, which will then allow you to grasp it intellectually, which will then allow you to change your behavior. All right, remember my initial question: What are

you thinking what you're feeling. Well, let's just deal with one part of that. What are you feeling right now? Pause and contemplate. What are you feeling? If you don't know, many 70% of the population doesn't feel. They'll say good, fine. It's not a feeling. Are you feeling sad, angry, scared, frustrated, maybe um pissed off at me, or bored by me? You know, lots of it could be tons of different feelings. If you don't know, go to Google right now. Actually, better off, go to my website www.thegreatnessuniversity.com. Go to the free content section, scroll down, and there's a feelings wheel right there. Download it. Look at the feelings wheel. What are you feeling in this moment? Let's say you're frustrated. Okay, or let's say you're perplexed or a little uneasy. Maybe that's it since this is all new information. Maybe it's skeptical. That's a good one. Skeptical, not quite sure if what I'm saying is right. Okay, let's go with that one. So you're

skeptical now. Where in your body do you feel that skepticism? Stomach, chest, throat, head, shoulders. What is it? Focus on, focus on the feeling. Focus on. I'm just going to assume it's in your chest. All right, you can feel that in your chest or most likely you feel it in your stomach. All right, so feel really focus in like use every energy you can to bring that feeling of skepticism as high as possible. Like on a scale of zero to ten, get it to attack. Now what's your most recent memory of feeling skeptical? Something in yesterday, a week ago, a month ago. Was it at work? Was it a friend? Was it a colleague? Was it something you saw on the internet, a news show? What's your most recent memory of feeling skeptical? Do you remember it? Okay, now let's say you found something in the last week. What's the next memory? Say a year ago, contemplate that. Was it a fight with somebody? Didn't think somebody was telling the truth. Write it down, like write these down. What

was your most recent skepticism now a year ago. Now five years ago, what pops up? Were you married to somebody different? Is that when you went through a divorce? Write it down. 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Keep going back and back and back and back and back till you get to your first memory of being skeptical. Are you one of the very few rare people who can remember at age two or three? Were you 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12 years old? Is that your first memory? Now what happened in that moment? Was that the first time you saw your parents lie? Was that the first time your brother's sister lied to you about something? What in your life did you find out was different than you originally thought it to be? What life experience happened and now you're hit? It's like, now it's big. Oh my god, that's the day I discovered the truth. Like for me, my skepticism was born when I just, middle the night, 10 years old, woke up to use the bathroom, middle of the night, open up the door.

boom, there's my mom passed out naked on the toilet. The day I discovered she was an alcoholic, skepticism. How could I trust anything after that? I thought I'd lived in this one world. Now I see there's this world. And as I talk to my dad on the couch, and I'm bawling, and I'm going, Dad, how long has this been going on? He goes, Kenny, it's been going on for years. My whole world, my whole understanding of my childhood changed in that moment. I was overrun with incredible feelings, one of sheer guilt and shame. As I said to my dad, my response was, You're kidding me. This has happened to me one time, and I'm feeling like this, and you've been dealing with this for years. I felt so small, so insignificant, that I'm this upset, balling my eyes out. Let's see. Do you see there? There's the child blaming myself. It's what we do. I immediately took blame because I was too young emotionally to use intellect. And this is what happens to all of us. Our intellect is

imprinted and influenced by our childhood emotional experiences. Your intellect is deficient or sabotaging you because you've been through trauma that's never been addressed, and therefore you get skewed intellect because that's what happens in a traumatic moment, especially as we age. We put a story to it, yet we're underdeveloped intellectually, and so our story is immature and improper. The story and definition I placed on my dad sharing with me that this has been going on for years was, Oh my god, I'm look how selfish and wrong I am. It's not true. How would I know? I'm not to blame, but that's what a child does, and that's the intellect that we then use to pick a partner or to pick a job or friends. Now, do you see what else I just proved to you? I just proved to you, though everything that's in my book and everything I teach in my book, Your Journey to Success. What I just laid out for you is what I call the worst day cycle. This proves that 95% of

your life. You are living in your subconscious because I just had you caught a catalog. How you have repeated the exact same pain and trauma from your childhood over and over and over and over. You have re-victimized yourself repeatedly. We all do. Why? Because everyone's teaching intellect not emotion. So we're replaying that emotional pain against ourselves all of our life, all of our life. And that's why our behavior is the exact same all the time. What do we need to heal that initial wounding, that first time we felt skeptical? That's how you change your thoughts, your feelings, and behaviors. Because if I can change, do you see how I'm using my intellect now to reorient the story of my father and how the shame I felt when he told me that my mom's drinking had been going on for years? I can look back and go, Oh my God, Kenny, that's so sad that you did that to yourself. I can see myself playing the role of my father, hugging me and going, Ah, Kenny, see if my father had.

been taught these skills. If my father knew emotional mastery, if we as a society quit giving this, I was about to swear, this terrible message that thoughts are everything. If my father had been taught emotional mastery, he would have recognized in that moment, Oh Kenny, no, this isn't you. You didn't do anything. You're perfect. It's okay. It's wonderful that you're crying. You should cry, Kenny. It's very scary what you just experienced. Tell me more about your feelings, Kenny. But see, now I can do that for myself. I can love that little child that wasn't loved properly. Not because my dad's a bad dad, no one taught him. We don't teach any of these things. My dad loved me perfectly in that moment based on the intellect we have taught people. We're not teaching the right intellect. We need to teach emotional intellect. And then my dad might have been able to give me a different message, which then would create different thoughts and intellect, which then would have created different behaviors. But because as a society we haven't talked about the

worst day cycle. We haven't thought of any of this. I ended up destroying my life, most of my life, and reliving that victimization. So what are the other solutions? It's recognizing, as Candice Pert talked about in her book The Molecules of Emotion. I'm going to give you a book list here if you're a junkie like me and you want to get in if you need that scientific proof. I'm going to give you the scientific proof of it. Emotions are constantly regulating what we experience as reality. You are coloring everything you see, touch, smell, taste, and hear through an emotional prism before you ever get to intellect. And so if your life isn't working, that's an expression of your emotional situation, not your intellect, not your capabilities. Like you're operating well below your capabilities because you don't have the emotional regulation to navigate these difficult situations. Now the other aspect is our nervous system. As Candace points out, our nervous system is not capable of taking in everything in the environment. It can only scan the outer world.

for material that matches i see our nervous system your amygdala. All of these feeling processes as you're doing anything in life, it's scanning the outer world, and it's looking for matches, things that align to the internal patterns and past experiences. That's what our brain does, that's why I talk about all the time, all attraction is when we're attracted to somebody, our brain and body in that adrenaline rush and butterfly feeling, it's going, Oh my god, this is my trauma partner, I get to relive the exact same chaos of my childhood. Oh my god, they're so hot. That's what the butterfly feeling is, that's it, that's it. Candace Purd is the one who put all that together, Antonio Damasio. Now Bessel van der Kolk, another, he's an expert in trauma and how, see when you start putting all these pieces together, all these different experts who discovered different aspects of how emotion run our life, and you start collating all of this together, you're like, Oh my god, it all, it's the pieces to

the puzzle that's the problem when everyone's teaching thought. They're teaching the border of the puzzle thought matters, but it's the border of the puzzle, right? What's our favorite thing to deal with in making a puzzle? Putting the border pieces because it's easy. What stinks? The middle because everything looks the same. Everything's very intricate and difficult. How do I discern all these different parts? Well, why is that? That's just how it is for us because we've never taught emotion. We don't know how to identify those internal emotional pieces that go in the middle of the puzzle. That figure out why I picked this person, why my why life is the way it is. That's an emotional process. Well, that's basically what I did. Is I got all these pieces to the puzzle and they gave me the solution to the center of the puzzle, the emotional aspect. How do we find it? That's how I figured out the worst day psych all of this. It all ties in vessel vanderkolk. The only way we can

change the way we feel is by befriending our internal experience and our past pain. That's it. We must become an expert in those moments in childhood, loving moments where mom and dad ran, screaming and yelling, and scooped us up just before we toppled into the pool as an infant. That was traumatic on us. So was being born. So was being yelled out when, as an infant, we threw our bowl of cereal in the air. And of course, there were the other traumatic moments where our parents were tired and exhausted, and they just yelled, Shut up, I don't, I can't do this right now. Or like in the case of my mother, See, I don't. I was talking to my sister this weekend. I have no memory of this. I was too young. But my parents were 16 and 18 when they were married, 21 and 23 with four kids. So my mom was 21, 22 with four kids. Well, I didn't know this. I was too young. But my sister was older. She'd yell, and my mom would just yell.

scream, you guys are too much, and she'd go lock herself in the bedroom. We had to raise ourselves. I have no memory of that. Well, that explains why I get so fearful of abandonment. Also, I have a brother. We're less than a year apart, so I'm one, a year old. I'm the apple of my mother's eye, gone, boom, new baby. My mom has to, I mean, my younger brother's an infant, he has to be the priority. All of this happened before I have any memory of it. I suffered severe abandonment. One day, I am the sole focus, now it's gone. That's how these things happen, and so then we repeat it. And so my life history has been, I pick women and men who one day, out of nowhere, gone, disappear, no explanation, just like a one-year-old infant, just like my mom's drinking. She'd be sober four to six weeks, and then in a walking coma for seven to ten days. All I've done is relive the emotional events. No thought process can heal that, that's not where the solution is.

the solution is in the pain of those moments of feeling that and reorienting the pain becoming the mother and father for ourselves that we didn't have in those moments. Not always because our parents are bad people, but because they're perfectly imperfect and they're human. They're doing the best they can, but if we want to have the best intellect, we need to have the best emotional intellect, not thought. So if you'd like to start that journey, I work with people individually. I have private groups, I have classes. All of that is paid. I want to make this a sales pitch, but if you're willing to invest a little bit of money in yourself, get some books. If you want to learn how and convince yourself, pick up Antonio Demacio's The Feeling of What Happens. I will warn you, he is highly intellectual. You will need a thesaurus and a dictionary to read this. This ain't easy reading. This man is, you know, incredibly smart and gifted. And that's why he's at the head.

of neuroscience in this field, all right, and just discovered so many things. So if you like a challenging read, this one's for you. All right, now the next book is by Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion. This will help you dive even deeper into how our emotions run virtually every aspect of our life. Finally, Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. This will help you see how the traumatic moments we experience get stuck in our body. This is what causes illness and disease, and this is why pandemics and everything need to be looking at the emotional disturbances we experience throughout our life because they play out physically in our health in every aspect. And there are a lot of exercises in here to help you heal and turn around your emotions. And finally, my book, Your Journey to Success. I lay out the whole worst day cycle for you, also the beginnings of how to recover from all of these things too because remember we need to reorient the subconscious and the emotional experiences we had. When we do that, then our thoughts and stories about

it change then our behaviors change that's the process out of this again. Please go to my website www.thegreatnessuniversity.com. That is your source for everything free. It has tons of videos, tons of articles, free downloads, exercises that'll walk you through the recovery process. Doesn't cost a thing. If you decide you want to take it deeper and learn about my private groups, learn about my master classes, or one-on-one coaching, you can find the information there as well. So if you know somebody who's stuck on the old paradigm of trying to change their thoughts and you'd like to help them bridge that gap and start achieving the results they want and learn emotional mastery so they can change their thoughts and their feelings and their behaviors, please share it. Leave me your comments and as always, enjoy the journey.

How To Change Your Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors

How To Change Your Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors