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Michelle P. Maidenberg, Ph.D., MPH, LCSW-R maintains a private practice in Harrison, NY. She is also the Co-Founder and Clinical Director of “Thru My Eyes”, a nonprofit 501c3 organization, and an adjunct faculty member at New York University (NYU) teaching a graduate course in Mindfulness Practice.
Her latest book is Ace Your Life: Unleash Your Best Self and Live the Life You Want.
We talk about:
- Identifying core values
- How do our core values help guide us in making sound decisions to foster our satisfaction and contentment for a thriving life?
- How do we learn to trust process over outcomes?
- What gets in the way of us keeping up with good habits and maintaining meaningful changes?
- Emotional avoidance
- ACE: Acceptance, Compassion, Empowerment
- How to cultivate self-acceptance and self-compassion to increase our overall well-being
- Bouncing back when things don’t go right
Find Ace Your Life wherever you get your books or learn more at www.michellemaidenberg.com
If you’re interested in interviews with professional, collegiate, Olympic and amateur sports coaches, check out my new show Sideline Sessions: https://sidelinesessions.transistor.fm/subscribe
If you find the show valuable, please leave us a 5-star review on Apple or a Spotify review.
About today’s guest
Michelle P. Maidenberg, Ph.D., MPH, LCSW-R maintains a private practice in Harrison, NY. She is also the Co-Founder and Clinical Director of “Thru My Eyes”, a nonprofit 501c3 organization that offers free clinically-guided videotaping to chronically medically ill individuals who want to leave video legacies for their children and loved ones.
Michelle is adjunct faculty at New York University (NYU) teaching a graduate course in Mindfulness Practice. She is a Board of Directors member at The Boys & Girls in Mount Vernon and is a member of the American Red Cross Crisis Team. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Westchester Trauma Network (WTN) in Westchester, NY.
Listen to Michelle’s TED TALK: Circumventing Emotional Avoidance. She is also a blogger for Psychology Today.
About the host
Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies. He is a leadership development and performance coach for professionals in a range of industries and consults with organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry to help communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano and LinkedIn
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What is The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders?
Are you looking for proven ideas to increase your influence, hire and develop an excellent staff, build a stronger culture, lead meaningful change, and form a strong foundation for teaching and learning success? This is the podcast for you.
On The Authority, leadership coach, storytelling strategist, and edtech advisor Ross Romano interviews the prominent education authors you already admire, up-and-coming voices, and experts from the worlds of business, personal development, and beyond — including Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Amazon bestsellers — to take a deep dive into their wealth of practical insights.
Whether you're a leader to seeks to refine your command of core educational strategies, learn new management techniques from those who have used them at some of the world's largest corporations, gain fresh perspectives on personal development or student success from practitioners across fields, or a little bit of everything, you'll find powerful content in this series.
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Authority Podcast here on the BE Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. I'm pleased to bring you a conversation today with Dr. Michelle Maidenberg, who is author of the book, Ace Your Life: Unleash Your Best Self, and Live the Life You Want.
I'm actually going to let Michelle introduce herself and tell you more about her experience and her credentials when we begin our interview because it is important as this. episode will touch on aspects around mental health and advice that relates to mental health therapy that I really want you to understand who she is, her background, and [00:01:00] where that's all coming from.
So I'm gonna let her tell you about that herself, but I will say that You know, this book really is all about finding and creating the thoughts, beliefs, self acceptance, self compassion, and empowerment to create the life you want to see, right? How to make decisions around core values how to bounce back when things don't go right.
So something that's pertinent, I'm sure, to all of us. Who at some point are encountering things that we want to do a little bit better or something new that we want to create in our lives. Before we get to the interview, I just wanted to send out a couple of quick notes and reminders and requests.
One is, if you are, Enjoying the Authority Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you are subscribed on Apple Podcasts, we'd love it if you leave us a five star review, leave any notes about what you enjoy about the show. That really does help other listeners to find the show. And [00:02:00] we have continued to pick up more and more new listeners as we've gone here.
And so we really appreciate all of you for being a part of this journey and for sharing your thoughts thus far. And you know, I'm excited about a lot of the guests we have coming up and certainly many of those we've had so far. So we'd love to just continue that process. So yeah, if you're on Apple, just hop over there to Apple podcasts and very easy to leave a rating.
Also if you are a parent or a coach of student athletes at the youth level, high school level, college, or really beyond. I invite you to check out my other show, Sideline Sessions. We are getting deeper into the first season of the show now, and we've had great episodes with Dr. Jen Welter, who was the first female coach in the National Football League was also a trailblazing football player before that, but she has a lot of amazing things to share.
We've spoken with Caroline McCombs, the head women's basketball coach at George [00:03:00] Washington University. Alex Auerbach, who's the Director of Sports Performance with the Toronto Raptors in the NBA and has a sports psychology background, so there's a lot of really interesting stuff there, and plenty of other conversations with gold medalist Olympians and coaches at the Olympics and touching on sports from baseball to swimming to basketball and football and many more.
And in our upcoming second season later in the spring, we hope to even expand on that even further. So anyhow if you are, yeah, if you have student athletes in your life and you're interested in learning more about what it takes to succeed and continue advancing through the levels or succeed where they are now, That show is really designed to help it's sideline sessions.
It's available wherever you get your podcast. And we'll also put a link below, so please do check that out. But until then, let's not delay any further. This is my conversation with Dr. Michelle Maidenberg.
[00:04:00] Michelle, welcome to the show.
Michelle Maidenberg: thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Excellent. So great to have you here and so many. important topics to get into and I'm thinking particularly because of some of the subject matter we'll talk about that it would really be valuable to start out with you telling the audience a little bit more about your your expertise and particularly your experience, the type of work that you do and who you work with, because I've given a little bit of your bio in the intro, but that's very surface level.
So I think maybe adding some substance to that would really help folks. where these ideas are coming from.
Michelle Maidenberg: Thank you. I wear so many hats. I have to say that. And I have to say I'm passionate about everything I do. So I hope that comes through. But I have a private practice in Harrison, New York. And I see you know, mostly teens young adults I see some families, some couples as well.
And they're all focused on the [00:05:00] treatments that I do, which are include both CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. I also do something called team CBT, which is kind of a branch of CBT. Acceptance and commitment therapy, which is ACT work. I also do structural family therapy, mindfulness, polyvagal theory that theory.
And then I'm also a certified eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapist. So that's EMDR. So do a lot of different things. And it really depends on the person I'm working with and the type of topics that come up, of course. And I also have a non profit, which is called Through My Eyes, THRU, and the mission is you know, we provide services free clinically guided videotaping for chronically medically ill individuals who want to leave a video legacy for their children and loved ones.
This is my second book, which is very exciting. I do weekly publication, both of YouTube, which is a guided meditation. And [00:06:00] then I also blog for Psychology Today and I have, which I'm very excited about, up to 1. 7 million readers on my blog, which is so exciting. Cause I, yeah, I really want to just help people and give people a lot of information to really live their best lives.
So I'm happy that people are reading.
Ross Romano: Totally. Yeah. And we'll, let's add to that audience here today. And so the subtitle of the book is unleash your best self and live the life you want. Right. And I'm putting an emphasis on you, but that's a big piece of this. Right. Cause I like you, you work. You know, you wrote the whole book about this and I work with folks too on kind of, holistic performance and career and life coaching.
And a lot of times people will sort of almost when they're first starting and they haven't necessarily thought through it as much. almost be looking for what's the right answer, right? And the the response is, it's whatever you think it is. It's creating [00:07:00] what you want that to look like.
And a huge part of that for me and what stood out here in the book as well, core values, right? And I wanted to start by asking you what does your process look like? Your advisement on identifying. for an individual what their core values are so that they can then go ahead and use them.
Michelle Maidenberg: So that's a great question. And I have a whole chapter on that in my book. So it's, I will try to summarize, but it is a little bit of a heavy task. So I do want to say that you mentioned the subtitle, which it's so interesting, because I think there Of course, people focus so much on the title, which is understandable, but you know, ACE stands for Acceptance, Compassion, and Empowerment.
And the subtitle, which is really important, is I use the word Unleash. Okay, and when I was writing this, that word was so powerful to me, because I truly believe that we have everything we need within us. [00:08:00] You know, and when I say unleash, it's already there. We're not like searching for things outside of us.
Most people think if I find the right treatment, if I find the right therapist, if I find the right this, if I find the right that, right? Like it's going to, again, fix me, which again, I don't use that word at all, right? Or empower me. But it's really, I think about it as when, if you think about a sculptor, or a sculptor, right?
You know, where you have like, let's say marble, like a slab of marble, okay? There's beauty in the marble, but it's not when you carve out the marble to have this beautiful, right, piece of art that you see its beauty and its essence. And that's how we are. We have all of that within us and sometimes we need to dig a little deeper, right?
We need to uncover the fog, so to speak, or the unconscious, which doesn't allow us to tap into our best self. because it's a hindrance sometimes. So, and that, listen, life is so short. [00:09:00] I can't even say that often enough because I see so many different unfortunately, because the line of work that I do, adversity in my practice of things that happen on a dime, like literally the unexpected.
And I could go on and on. I could share stories, but like, I don't want to sit and obviously make this into a very negative podcast, but you know, we can't take life for granted and not even a moment of it. So I really want to say that. So in terms of the value, my work really centers around values.
And if we tap into what our values are, we're able, it's a guide to action. In other words, It really helps with decision making. It helps to cultivate our self confidence. It helps to hone in on what's important to us. And I could go on and on. Like I said, there's a whole chapter. So in my chapter, it specifies, again, There's exercises whereby you extrapolate what are your core [00:10:00] values, and then you come up with a system by which you're able to say, what am I going to do on a daily basis in order to cultivate that value?
One important thing, and I just got off of a session with somebody, and I say this so often, but there's pain in values and values in pain, okay? What does that mean? Right? Because a person was who I was talking to. She's actually happens to be in the middle of law school. Okay. And you could only imagine how stressful that is, right?
But she was talking to me about a friendship that she holds high school friends. Okay. And she's debating whether or not to sustain that relationship or not. And that was what our conversation was about and it was very obvious to me that her mind was taking the easy way out, the path of least resistance.
Might as well cut off the relationship and then I don't have to deal with it, right? And unfortunately, [00:11:00] Because negative emotions and working through adversity is very challenging, right? The brain wants to take the path of least resistance, which would be to just cut off the relationship.
However, guess what happens? Then we're left with guilt and shame and regret and on. I don't have a problem, and I said this to her, I don't have a problem with her ending the relationship as long as she does her due diligence. And she's being very mindful about it. And she could emphatically say that she's done everything she can to lean in her val in into her values.
Okay? then she could make a sound mindful decision. It's too premature for her to make that decision right now. She will be left with residual feelings. And by the way, not to say she won't be left with conflictual feelings, even if she did end the relationship. 'cause she may, but it will be different.
There will be a different set of feelings, there will be sadness, there will be grief, there will be you know, disappointment. That's very different than guilt and [00:12:00] shame and regret. Those are very different feelings, set of feelings. So anyway going back to what we said, so honing in on your values and understanding that when you're feeling pain, it's because of values getting rubbed up against.
And if a value gets rubbed up against, you are going to feel pain. Okay? That's a good thing. That's a good thing. And I said to her, she's like, I don't know why I'm so upset about this, about my friendship, and I'm feeling so disappointed in my friendship. I said, because friendship's important to you. Like, do you not, do you want to be okay with that?
If you were okay with it, you'd be doing nothing about it, and you'd be accepting. mediocrity in your relationships, and you would not set boundaries in your relationships, and I could go on and on. Do you actually really want to have a life like that? And she was like I guess if you put it that way.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And I think that whole, that example speaks to that journey, I guess, [00:13:00] of getting to the point of learning to trust process over results and over and saying, look, if I understood what my values were, I thought it through and I had a sound process for making my decision. I can live with that they're either the results aren't always what I wanted or that there are additional outcomes that are not always perfect, but I know that I did what was within my control, right?
Now, if I do this repeatedly again and again, and my outcomes are always poor, then I need to re evaluate my process. But but in so many cases, particularly, well, personally, but also in, in those professional situations, one of the things that I talk about with people is when you're Again, it's personal and it's subjective as far as what's the right place for me to be, the right thing for me to be doing you know, what mission do I find motivating [00:14:00] and fulfilling, right?
Not just something that I think is good and important, but what do I personally connect with, Well, once I establish what my values are, then one, I can hold an organization accountable for having values and values that I align with and know if that's a good fit, right? If I haven't established that, I have no idea.
And I may end up making a variety of decisions that later on I realize, oh, I'm really unhappy with this and I don't really know why. Or I don't know where to make a change, right? So I did want to even talk a little bit more about the decision making process, but really using those core values and how we use them as a guide, not just as something that we say, this matters to me, or this is what I stand for, but to say, okay, I can apply this and I can make a decision that's likely going to lead me to a better situation for myself because I know what's core to me,
Michelle Maidenberg: Yeah, I love that question. It's [00:15:00] really it's really realigning so just to put that into perspective, it's realigning. Most of the time, the reason we have trouble making decisions is because we have a conflict in values, okay? If you use that frame, it is so incredibly helpful.
And I could tell you it's changed my life personally in so many ways. And when I teach people how to use it in that way, they find that they're so much more grounded in their decision making and they really are being their best self. And I, it's so, I have to say, it's so satisfying because I teach this to people of all different ages, but I love like when you have like teenagers, they're like, I really was in line with my values, right?
They'll kind of use my lingo and I'm like, yes! You know? So, when we have a conflict in values, what does that even mean, right? Now, when we make decisions, okay, we're not making decisions on whether we like vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream, okay? We're [00:16:00] making important decisions. And important decisions entail this inner, right, intense, sometimes emotional conflict.
So I'll use an example which constantly comes up for me, which you can imagine, right? I'm a parent of four children from age 15 to age 23. Okay, so really vast and varied, and I'm constantly in conflict with my parenting values and my career or work values. That constantly comes up for me just because of the very nature that I work full time.
And I always have to make decisions. Now if I have this idea that I'm going to walk away from making those decisions feeling completely 100%, perfectly okay, that's going to be a problem. I'm going to be in perpetual guilt all the time. When I feel the guilt, and I say when, because I'm going to have to choose, now the problem with that choice is my parenting values are formative and my career values are formative.
They're both [00:17:00] extremely important to me. So, moment by moment, circumstance by circumstance, That decision will be different based on what has to be formative, more formative for me in that given situation or moment. That doesn't mean that I'm disqualifying the other value. It doesn't mean that in general the other value is less important to me.
That's where we get stuck. Okay, that's where the guilt comes in. And I actually applaud myself. And give myself credit for having such strong values. So when I have to decide a career, what's a plan or whatever the case is, as opposed to a parenting one, when I am in conflict and I feel sad and disappointed that I can't attend my child's whatever, I'm like, wow, I feel really crappy right now, but I'm so happy that I'm feeling crappy.
Good for me, because that is a sign to me that I am a really attentive, attuned, conscious parent because I wouldn't want to be okay [00:18:00] with this. No, that's not how I want to be. I want to feel badly. And because I'm so attuned to my feelings, I could then, because this is another thing we do, we play kind of mind games with ourselves.
Oh, I can't attend my kid thing. So I'm going to block it out. and avoid my feelings about it because it feels too, I feel too bad about it. And actually that's counterproductive because then I can't really be true to myself. So as an example, I could say to myself, okay, I can't attend that event, but how else can I be true to myself so that I could show my child that I care about them, that I could attend or be part of that or participate in that event to the best of my ability without actually being present or whatever. I could see out of the box. I could come up with alternatives. I could attend to emotions and other people [00:19:00] because I'm so in tuned. Right.
Ross Romano: does that relate to that piece of if we are living in the land of emotional avoidance, right? And kind of eventually doing that repeatedly enough losing touch with our own kind of core feelings about those things. Is that part of what prevents the maintenance and of good habits?
You know, okay, we've established, we feel like we now have. These values in a process for making decisions. And yet there's something that's preventing us from doing that consistently and working through to the point where we've made a meaningful change in our lives. Are those some of the reasons for that?
Are there other reasons that contribute to you know, to the prevention of exercising the positive habits that we otherwise believe we have the tools to do.
Michelle Maidenberg: Yeah. So you're talking specifically about the negative emotions that get evoked [00:20:00] in those situations.
Ross Romano: Right. The negative emotions and then how we respond to that either avoiding them or you said when you feel like, okay, this doesn't feel good, but I'm glad it doesn't feel good. That's because it's authentic, right? I'm happy that I authentically am upset that I can't be there for my child's event versus.
I'm just saying, Oh, I wish I could be there, but I don't really care. And that would be a different thing. So even though it's, I can't do everything all the time and we have to make the best decisions we can on a day to day basis, because we have a variety of obligations and priorities, it's a good thing to stay in touch with.
I, yeah, I truly am disappointed about this and that's going to make me more tuned into what when is the next opportunity or what's a, what's an alternative opportunity to be there versus if I just block that off, then I'm losing that sharpness and that [00:21:00] attunement.
Michelle Maidenberg: So like the example I gave before with this law school student that I was talking about you know, she tends to kind of avoid, that's one mechanism by which she kind of cuts off, I'm gonna say. But we do all different kinds of things to avoid our feelings.
Right. There's another person I'm working with, which I was talking to her yesterday and what she does is she rationalizes. You know, so she was talking to me about a situation, a relationship often relationships evoke a lot of very strong feelings for most of us. And she she was talking to me about a person who lives far away, who she feels very connected to, and the person comes to New York and unfortunately doesn't spend or kind of give her the time of the day or spend enough time or makes enough effort to reach out to her.
Okay, and she's very distressed and kind of disappointed by this, etc. Right? So what does she do? I mean, so interesting. She [00:22:00] kind of When we're talking about she'll keep on going into this banter about, well I, I could see why she's like that because it's the kind of family she comes from and they all do this and you know, on and on she keeps on bringing up reasons why she shouldn't be upset about it.
Right? Or, well she's the sister of my my husband who died many years ago. She doesn't owe me anything, etc. I mean, all different kinds of nationalizations, right? And I'm like, hello, there you go again. Do you realize that you keep bringing up you know, excuses for why you shouldn't feel the way you do.
And she was like, Oh my goodness. Like when I made her aware of it, I said, you keep butting yourself. And she was like, Oh gosh, I do. And I said, what would it be like? What would it be like to just sit with God? This is really disappointing to me. that I really want to connect with this person and they're kind of they're not really giving [00:23:00] me their time. What is that? What would come up? Well, like, just sit with that. And we did. And of course it evoked very strong emotions. And when she was touching, And tapping into that, again, she kept on either rationalizing or talking about something else that's going on in her life distracting. That's another thing that we do, right?
A lot of different things. And I kept on bringing it back to her attention. Oh, there we go. Your mind, right? Doesn't want to sit with this. Look how it's resisting. Oh, my goodness. Look how it's resisting. Right? And then she would sit in it for a few more minutes, right? And we would be like, what's coming up?
And. Again, what it came down to, and it was really interesting that we allowed it to sit and fester, so to speak, right, in a positive way, because we really, what came up for her is actually rejection and abandonment that she felt formatively from her parents. And she had the same somatic which is a physiological response from this [00:24:00] person who was kind of rejecting her, so to speak, right?
Or what it was bringing up for her in terms of rejection. And that same visceral, physiological, somatic response that when it happened with her parents. So her brain and her body was mimicking and she slipped right into, I'm being rejected, I'm being right. And she got very distressed. And when we when we really kind of pulled it apart and understood it a little bit better, she was able to actually even be more expansive and recognize that a, that person's here for a very short period of time.
B, she isn't their biological family anymore. And she does have a lot of biological family in New York that she does have to visit. You know, and on, not to rationalize why it's okay, that's not the point, but actually being more expansive with like compassion so that she could foster the relationship rather than it being a hindrance in the relationship and she's carries resentment and frustration and etc right because then she behaves on behalf of those [00:25:00] feelings and what ended up happening which was really interesting is she reached out to her and she said to her Gosh, I realize when you come to New York, you have so many responsibilities and you have so many people you have to go visit.
And the fact that you even come and go out to lunch with me and spend an hour with me, I really appreciate the fact that you take that time and that you reserve that time for me and I feel so honored and respected and loved and cared about by you. And I really appreciate that. Wow. Wow. That person, the re the reaction that she had toward her was phenomenal.
So much so that she gave her two hours. Okay. And then instead of sitting in like, Oh, she's rejecting me. She just wants to see she appreciated, and she was so grateful for the two hours. And she was so present in the moment that she was with her rather than sitting with like frustration or resentment where she, her mind would be off and running.[00:26:00]
As opposed to being there and present with her, and it was so much more satisfying to her.
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Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And it also, I guess, reflects, there's a variety of different things jumping out to me, but you know, as, You referenced earlier the ACE in ACE Your Life stands for Acceptance, Compassion, Empowerment, and there's the cultivation of self acceptance and self compassion that are so critical to our overall well being and the things we so in some cases where we experience another person exhibiting, right, those towards us that we need to learn to do it toward ourselves.
And some people maybe have a mis, apprehension of these as that it's just not holding ourselves accountable or just saying whatever I do is great but truly that's not it, right? That it's about allowing ourselves, allowing us to understand our values, our intentions, [00:27:00] our aims, and to not get just stuck into some cycle of.
Mistake, mistake I'm off course because one thing didn't go wrong that we need to and if we're not able to do that for ourselves, how can we do it for others? How can we expect others to do it for us? But you know, why, I guess, why is the cultivation of those, of self acceptance, self compassion as priorities critical to, to kind of well being.
Michelle Maidenberg: yeah. Well, it's, it all really centers around that, to be honest with you, because it cultivates our confidence and our self belief. if we don't have, and by the way, we don't learn how to be self compassionate and self accept and you know, self accepting, we don't. There's no way we learn that.
It's not part of our culture. It's not how we're socialized, et cetera. If anything, we believe in tough love, we believe in all of those tactics and those, are known through research, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. [00:28:00] And if you think about it, years ago, right, which is kind of an antiquated way of learning, right, through like negative reinforcement rather than positive reinforcement and learning models, we know that negative reinforcement does not work.
It actually, it's, it produces the opposite, lack of productivity, ineffectiveness, and we see that both in leadership and business. You know, et cetera. And generally psychology of people. So like with a child, right, you're not gonna like beat, beat them to death, right? In terms of I'm talking about like, negative negativity.
But you're going to encourage them and that's going to foster their self confidence. So they're going to have the self belief and actually perform that's where it's all at. So same holds for us. We can't kind of beat ourself into producing and being our best self. We have to nurture ourself into that. Right. And I have to say that you know, so like, for example, when we're trying to accomplish something, right, people will [00:29:00] say to me, Oh, I tried this. It didn't work. Oh, I guess I'm not good at it. And they just, I'm going to drop it. And I'm like, No, that's not the way we operate. No, when we teach our kids, like, or through our parenting, for example, I teach my kids, you try one way, It doesn't work.
That's okay. You go to plan B, go to plan C, go to plan D, go to plan E and F and G and all through the alphabet until you find what works. You don't just give up, right? Because we have so much adversity in our lives. We can't just give up. We can't do that. Working out that's another good example, right?
People like, Oh, I tried it I tried it for a couple of days. I didn't see any results or I tried it and I didn't like what I did. And you know, I don't like doing that type of exercise. Okay, that's perfectly okay. Well, keep going. There's hundreds and thousands of different types of exercising you could do, right?
I don't care if you're walking up flights of stairs. Great. That's better than doing nothing. You know, I don't care if you're [00:30:00] doing Zumba, or doing yoga, or doing like kickboxing, or spin, or find your thing. It doesn't matter. Just move your body, you know? And I could go on and on, right? There's always ways to work through things.
So, Cultivating self acceptance. Cultivating self compassion is a practice. It's something we do on a daily basis, and it's something that we have to do with intention. It doesn't happen kind of organically on its own. So we have to learn how to do that. Again, I spend chapters going through Both what is getting in the way of our self acceptance and how to cultivate it, what's getting in the way of our self compassion.
And again, when I say what's getting in the way, it could be our physiology and our biology. It could be how we're socialized. There's so many factors that get in the way of it, by the way that we're not aware, we're not even aware of them and everything's backed up with research. And then how do we cultivate it?
Because that part of it, There's not a lot of information [00:31:00] about that. That's why I write about it, because I want people to know how to cultivate that. And we also have this idea that if we have self acceptance and self compassion, that we are going to default to a life of mediocrity.
That's BS. It's the opposite.
It's the opposite. You know, it's so funny. I actually, I feel like I've cultivated pretty sound confidence over the years. And I, and because I really work on this practice, I could honestly say that I feel like a pretty confident human being. So like some of my friends, like at times, they'll be like, Oh, look at you blowing your horn, tooting your horn and I go, I always say this, I go, there's a difference between, right, there's a difference between kind of self promoting and etc, and confidence,
You know, and self inflating and etc, right.
I I consider myself a self confident person. I don't feel like there's anything wrong with expressing that when I feel proud of myself. Like just [00:32:00] today just today one of my blogs, my recent blog I just got a, which I'm so excited, I just got an email like about an hour ago saying that it's been promoted, it's on Essential Reads, and it's on Essential Reads in a different topic area, which it's so funny because I was so So frustrated that they didn't put it in that topic area to begin with because that's the one I wanted it to be in because I know it gets more showing.
So, oh my goodness, I opened my email and it's like essential reads in that topic area. And I was like, literally, I almost jumped out of my seat. I was so excited. So what did I do? Like, I shared it with my loved ones because I'm so excited. Not because, oh, look at me. I'm so great. But it's because I'm proud of myself.
Because I want it to go out to people and help people, and I'm so pleased that it's going to happen, that I wanted to share that and connect with my loved ones on that information and news, because I know that they're going to be happy for me too. So, like, [00:33:00] they could say to me, Michelle, that's so great, I'm so proud of you, and I could say, like, I love the fact that you're so proud of me because I feel so loved by you.
And that's a connection and a relationship thing for me and that's very different. And that's because of my confidence, not because I feel like, oh my God, I'm so insecure that I have to have people's approval and that they have to like, like me and feel I'm so wonderful. No, that's not where it's coming from at all and not to say that I don't have insecurities because of course I'm a human being.
And of course that comes up for me No one's perfect and I have things I need to work on and then I continually do work on but but I think the moments when I could tap into my confidence are golden also.
Ross Romano: Right. And then there's, there are through lines through all of this, right? I mean, when you're connected to a personal mission in the work and the activities you're doing are because you believe in their value and you think they're helping others there's something more behind it. [00:34:00] Then when it does, when it achieves that thing, you really feel good and confident about that work versus sometimes right in, in security or over over the whatever personal promotion that derives from insecurity could be because I am feeling lost.
I don't really know what I'm doing here. So I'm trying to make my, I'm trying to make myself feel better about that by sort of promoting it. But so much of that is, I mean, it's, I mean, I guess one of the lessons to take away from that is we need to be comfortable with our own evaluations and how do we feel right and not worry about what are other people thinking and oh do they think I'm oh I'm really excited about this but I'm afraid to share it because I think other people are going to think I'm being self promotional.
Guess what? If I'm really happy with this and I'm proud of it and that's okay. me sharing might encourage them to share something they're doing or it may [00:35:00] form a better connection or it may just help them they may want to read that article and it may give them an idea that I shouldn't be afraid to do that because I think they're going to think this or that.
But I also would say so much of this seems to relate to those self beliefs core self beliefs and of course not to You know, make them, not to over, oversimplify them, but really, right? Beliefs are thought, right? It's what we think, and it's not factual. Now, beliefs that we've had about ourselves, or thoughts that we've had about ourselves repeatedly over the years, they seem to take on a different level of crystallization where they must be true but they're not.
And we can practice. trying different thoughts or say, well, what else might I think about myself? And I, and that one stands out to me, not only is so important in our own personal growth, but in the case of so many of our listeners who work [00:36:00] with students, who serve families, right? That we have to be mindful of the beliefs that we have about the people that we serve and why do we have those and are those productive beliefs and if they're not we need to change them or else we can't really serve that you know we are doing the same thing to them that we do to ourselves when we have negative beliefs about ourselves we put a ceiling on what we can do because we just don't think we can do it we don't have confidence we don't try and if We can do that to other people too by saying, well, I, I just don't think this kid knows how to do this.
So either implicitly or explicitly, I'm putting a cap on what. what's going to happen, what they're going to achieve. And so it's such an important thing to investigate to say, okay, if I'm having trouble making the change I want to make, is it because I haven't resolved some beliefs that I'm holding [00:37:00] onto about myself that I need to look at and say, okay, well, why do I have to, right?
You know, I think this but I don't need to but they can be an impediment,
Michelle Maidenberg: Yeah. So I wanted to just comment on something you said, which is really important. Because you were saying like that we should not care what other people think, or we should try to not care. So we can control our thoughts and feelings. Okay, we're going to care, whether we like it or not, because that is, we're taught our mind constantly compares us to other people, that's kind of a barometer and a gauge.
Okay, it's, again, our mind is really wired to protect us. from danger and discomfort. Okay. One way that it does that is by comparison and we compare ourselves from when we're kids when we're tiny plus keep in mind our, the way that in terms of our social structure, okay. It's predicated on [00:38:00] comparisons. We're constantly, like, what school you get into, and I mean, constantly, we're constantly in places of comparison. So we can't control that. We can't control comparing ourselves to other people. We could become aware of that. We could become conscious of it. And we could redirect our mind. Okay, what tends to happen, unfortunately, is people get frustrated with themselves.
because their mind is comparing and when we tell our mind not to think this way or not to feel this way or not to whatever, then we just end up self defeating, okay? And it actually, if anything, exacerbates and intensifies our thoughts and feelings. Okay, because if I tell you don't think about something, that's the thing you're going to be thinking about. I do this little test. I say to people, whatever you don't think about the number three. Like, try to get the number three out of your mind. Whatever you need to do, by the time, right, you leave, we leave this you know, speaking, I want you to forget the number three. [00:39:00] Well, if I come back to in a week from now and I say to you, what number did I mention?
You're going to tell me the number three. You'll remember the number three because I'm, because what your mind is doing as I'm telling you to forget the number three is it's remembering the number three in order to forget the number three.
Okay. That's what our mind does. Okay. So if we say, Oh, we shouldn't compare ourselves.
You know, I shouldn't compare. Like it's making me feel bad. Guess what's going to happen. So rather than doing that, it's like, Oh, there goes my mind. There it goes again, trying to compare me, right? It's trying to set a barometer to let me know and inform me of my expectations, to inform me of what's important to me, to remind me of how I want to be.
Thank you, mind. I need that reminder every once in a while. That's good aspirations. Yeah, I definitely do want to get to that space. Okay, let's get back to me now. How do I want to be? What does that look like? Am I there? Where do I need to go? Oh, okay. Right. So it's really kind of redirecting [00:40:00] and becoming more conscious of how often.
Now I could tell you some people do it like incessantly. You know, some people do it less often. I could tell you my mind doesn't really compare all that much to it. Be honest, that's because like, I've really worked a lot on training my mind. So it really like does come back to what do you want?
Checking in with my values, checking in because again, we can rewire our brain.
Ross Romano: right.
Michelle Maidenberg: There's studies that show we can rewire our brain through meditation, meditative practice et cetera, et cetera. And there are actually studies that show on actual scans. that the structure of our brain, we know that the gray matter of our brain, okay, that gets depleted through age, et cetera, actually gets replenished through meditative practice, through mindfulness.
Okay. So we can restructure our brain and really form new neural networks.
Ross Romano: [00:41:00] Right.
Michelle Maidenberg: And, but it takes practice. It takes practice. And that's one, I mean, it's so enlightening and so hopeful when I tell people this information and I actually say there's research, I can back it up. They're like, wow, they're like, that's so exciting to hear that because I thought, like, I'm going to have to write, like, just kind of, they feel helpless and hopeless that their brain is going to constantly do this forever and ever.
And I could tell you personally, I am a personal example. Of how we could change our brain because I've, I was in a very different space and I did have some adversity a lot of adversity while I was growing up in a lot of different ways which I share actually in the introduction of my book you know, in a lot of different ways.
And I've had to work really hard on restructuring my brain. I've really had to do that through therapy, through mindfulness and a couple of different types of methodologies. And it works. It really works.
Ross Romano: Yeah. [00:42:00] Yeah. I mean, it's so true. And even when we know that there's research behind it sometimes, especially if we're very convinced of the things we believe it can feel silly at first to, to try to believe something different that we just think is against the evidence. But,
Michelle Maidenberg: exactly.
Ross Romano: there's also there's two way relationship between.
you know, our beliefs and feelings in our actions, right? That, that we start to think that that we are only able to act based on the way we're feeling, but that we also can, if we want, if we really want to change the our feelings and emotions, that we can proactively, start to take the actions that we would take, and it'll make us feel easier said than done, because sometimes it's very hard to do things that are counter to how we're really feeling at a moment, but it can make a huge difference.
And to your point, right, that mindfulness and recognition of the [00:43:00] difference between Thoughts and reality is critical. Because those are all those opportunities that exist. We're getting close to the end of our conversation. I wanted to touch on before we end here, some of the advice that you share about, I would basically categorize it as bouncing back when things don't go right.
Right? Those things. Okay. We're getting We're really adhering to a plan here. We're sticking to it, but there's resilience there. There's you know, I think one of the pieces you share is around your three R's, but those various pieces to say, okay, here's how you kind of get yourself back on track, reset, and you know, and sustain this, self growth and improvement that we want to, that we want to achieve.
Michelle Maidenberg: So what did you specifically want me to address?
Ross Romano: just in brief what are a few ideas that you want to leave listeners with to, to kind of say, look it's inevitable, like this isn't always a straight [00:44:00] line, there's ups and downs, but here's a couple of the things that you will think of to kind of reset when when you get off track.
Michelle Maidenberg: So the whole chapter on empowerment is about resetting, just so you know. That's what empowerment is how do we maintain and sustain a practice? Because that is what is so, so, difficult, I find, or challenging for most of us. Right? We have all these skills and tools and understanding of how to live our life, right?
But it, it falters because sometimes for whatever reason we slip. You know, and we get ourselves in a rut, or we have certain feelings that captivate us, or we have certain behaviors that put us in a little bit of a tailspin, and how do we recalibrate, right, and we kind of ground ourselves, so, that's a whole other kind of conversation, but and I give very specific methodologies, and tasks, and also ways to think about things, so that you're really [00:45:00] recalibrating, and what does it look like?
To live a life where you're constantly like in for reinforcing and fostering the empowerment process because it is a process. It's actually a process. And I stipulate that in the book, but I also identify something called a fall slip and fall pattern, which we all experience. And that has to do with any habit or habits that we're trying to cultivate in our lives.
And it's important to recognize when that comes up so that instead of which is okay to slip, we all slip that you don't get into a position of falling. Okay, because there's a big difference between slipping for two weeks and falling for That looks very different cumulatively over a period of time and I talk about how to break the cycle, right?
There's eight steps that I've identified on breaking that cycle. And then I also talk about empowerment traits, like what are traits that we need to cultivate in our lives in order to be a person that will do the three R's, which is resetting, reconnecting, [00:46:00] reinvesting in your life. You know, and what does that mean?
Like coming back to yourself in the present moment and reconnecting without judgment right? Which is Again, really important. And then reinvesting, like what do you intentionally have to do that's in line with connecting to your values? So, yeah, there's all these resources.
At the end of each chapter, I actually include what guided meditation. that helps to integrate the information and hopefully people will continue with mindfulness practice after. But that's really where it's at. So I think that you have to decide that you're worth it. And I really have to say that you have to decide that you have worthiness and that you're worth putting time and effort into yourself. And that is a commitment and it's an investment. But I always say you are worth it. I believe every single person out there is worth the investment in time. And even if you don't think so right now, just [00:47:00] try it out, just try it out and try to fortify for yourself and prove me wrong, by the way, prove me wrong.
I have no, I tell my clients all the time, I go, you don't have to buy. into anything that I'm telling you, prove me wrong. I am okay with that.
Ross Romano: Yeah,
Michelle Maidenberg: I want them to learn themselves. I don't want them to just kind of be accepting of things that I say without proving it to themselves. So that is all.
Yeah.
Ross Romano: excellent. Well, listeners, the book, Ace Your Life, is available basically wherever you get your books, Amazon, Target, Walmart, Barnes Noble, Thrift Books. So check it out there. We'll also put the links below for Michelle's website and to her Psychology Today blog so you can learn more, read more there. Anything else listeners should check out?
Michelle Maidenberg: Yeah, just, my website has all of, obviously, all of my information and I'm happy to be helpful in any way. So, I just, again, I really, me. I really just want to say that life is short and you know, take advantage of every moment because you're worth it.[00:48:00]
Ross Romano: Yeah. And you know, by the time this publishes, it won't be totally the new year, but we were recording it very early in the new year here. So what better time to really take charge here, right. Of the changes you want to see and want to make in your life. So yes, if this is all interesting, you check out the book, check out the blog.
Find more resources. Also, please do subscribe to the authority for more in depth author interviews like this one coming every week, or visit bepodcast. network to learn about all of our 35 plus shows. You'll certainly find something else you like if you like this one. Michelle, thanks so much for being here.
Michelle Maidenberg: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.