Recap Of The Inner Edge Series

Wiring Fires First Under Pressure

Recovery Speed And Bounce Back

Performance Versus Identity

Defining The Inner Edge

Meaning Making Drives Physiology

Cognitive Defusion: I’m Having A Thought

Values-Based Action: Who To Be Now

Somatic Reset: Breathe And Ground

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Hello there, you made it. Ha ha, you did it. You made it to Trust Yourself Thursday. And you stumbled into the sweet spot. Yes, if you just got here, you have found an amazing podcast where me, Dr. Derek Sweet, where I sit with you at the coffee table of life and discuss being the best version of ourselves. So, sweet spotter, because that's what you are now, now that you're in the sweet spot, we've been in a wonderful series here called The Inner Edge. And for the past three days, we've been building something deliberately. On Monday, Making Moves Monday, you heard that under pressure, you don't suddenly become your best self. You default to your wiring. Whatever patterns you have underneath, whatever patterns you've rehearsed in in private, they kind of show up before your intention does when you're under pressure. It's just that way for all of us. On Take Action Tuesday, we clarified something very essential. We said that the edge is not who avoids activation. The edge is who you are when you come back, how fast you come back. So that your recovery speed determines whether one moment is going to spill into the next moment. That was Take Action Tuesday. Go back and listen about that recovery speed insight because it really speaks to how quickly you're going to not allow the other side to determine how you're going to be. On Wednesday, we named the fracture point. You don't react to the event alone, you react to the event and everything that is thought about you in the event. When performance and identity are fused, you're reacting to both things: the event and what people think. So every mistake in a context like that feels super personal because you fused your identity and performance. So that was on Win It All Wednesday. So I recapped for you the first three days. Today, today in Trust Yourself Thursday, we're bringing it all together. Your inner edge is your ability to keep your identity stable under repeated pressure. So you don't become somebody else when the pressure hits. You don't lose a sense of who you are just because you're under a lot of stress. And you know how you stay stable? Trust. Trust is what makes that possible. And that's why we have Trust Yourself Thursday. Because you see, when pressure hits you, your wiring, remember with Monday, we said your wiring just fires first. The amygdala feels it, and you're off to the races. Well, when you feel that surge before you think, your shoulders rise, your breathing shortens, your jaw gets tight. Remember everything we talked about? Your heart speeds up. A thought can form very quickly. But that doesn't mean that you're weak or anything. It's more like you're just patterned, that we have patterns that we revert to. So it's not just that something happened, it's really what you're gonna do next. Sometimes you carry the moment forward, your thoughts replay, and then your tone changes and it sharpens, and your next decision begins to feel dictated by the moment you had before, or your next decision feels rushed. Other times you feel the same pressure or the same stimulus or the same trigger, and you settle down faster, you have a different reaction. In fact, you don't even have fast breathing, you just feel pretty steady, you feel pretty good, it didn't bother you. You still had control despite it being the same trigger. You know what that is? That's your edge. That's the edge. But here's where it becomes a little personal. When something goes wrong, what do you make it mean about you when you miss a shot? Does it go to some place where you say, Oh my god, I can't miss another shot, I can't mess up? If you get into an argument or you have a tense exchange with someone, do you make that become nobody respects me around here? They don't care about me. Sometimes a mistake can harden into something, it can change into something, like I'm not built for this, I can't handle this. This is not me. It is what it is. It gets hardened into that. And you know what happens? Your nervous system reacts more to that meaning that you give the thing than to the event itself. Yes, if you believe the moment says something final about you, your body begins to treat it like danger. But if you believe the moment is temporary, then this too will pass, your body calms down faster, all in what you believe and how you think. So you have power in your brain to determine what's happening, and this is where trust enters. You see, trust means you do not renegotiate your identity every time something fluctuates. It means that your worth is not on trial in every moment. It means that you trust means that you you can feel activated, you can feel hyped up, but don't assume you're gonna collapse. It's okay. You see, the key is not to become fused or become one with your thoughts. I know it's hard to say that, but Stephen Hayes, a clinical psychologist, of he founded something called acceptance and commitment therapy. He explained this concept that many of us become fused with our thoughts. So if your mind says something like, I always mess up under pressure, and you treat that statement as the truth, your body eventually reacts as if your identity is actually threatened when you're under pressure and you feel the pressure differently. You see, Hayes teaches a concept called diffusion. Instead of saying I always fail, here's what he says to do. This is from act, this is are you, I want you to get this one. This is a really good one here. All right, this is from this act of commitment therapy, right? So he will he says, you say, I am having a thought. Ha ha. I am having a thought about possibly failing. Instead of saying I always fail, I always mess up, you say I'm having a thought that I am messing up. Just shifting your thinking to saying I'm having a thought about this, believe it or not, you begin to notice something. You notice something that you're not, and you notice something that you are. Because you are the one having a thought about the thought. You're not the thought. Does that make sense? That space protects your identity from shrinking to the size of the moment. That stops you from fusing with your thought. Stephen Hayes also emphasized this values-based action, right? Base your actions on your values in the middle of stress, in the middle of a storm, in the middle of an attack, he suggests you ask a different question. Who do I want to be right now? Not what's happening, not why is this happening, but who do I want to be in this? Who do you want to be right now? Not what outcome you want. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be composed, steady, disciplined, clear, calm? You can choose that. When you act from that answer rather than from the surge or the conflict or the attack, your trust in yourself grows. Yeah. So that's a kind of self-awareness that allows you to make a choice and to regulate yourself. So you're in a high-pressure moment, something has gone wrong. You feel like a flush in your face, you feel heat in your neck, you're mad, your shoulders lift, you know, your breathing shortens, you're worried, you get scared, your jaw tightens. You see, if you don't have awareness, you're just going to react immediately. This whole series about your inner edge is about noticing that, that you can interrupt. You can interrupt this process. You don't have to fire off the message, you don't have to fire off a reaction. You don't have to let your emotions become your behavior. So many people, myself included, when we get mad or upset or disappointed or whatever, we let the emotions become the behavior. When you have awareness of your edge, you can pause. Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm coming to my edge right now. I'm gonna hold up. And you can pause. You begin to notice, hey, my shoulders are tight, hey, my jaw is tight, hey man, you know my fist is balled up. You notice these things and you unclench them, you untighten, you notice that your breathing is shallow. So you do what? You take a nice slow inhale and let the exhale be longer than the inhale. We've been talking about that here on the sweet spot, that that's a way of resetting your entire nervous system. Yeah, you plant both feet on the ground, you feel the weight of your feet evenly distributed on the ground, you get yourself grounded. I'm not this is not symbolic. I'm literally saying when you feel stressed out, you feel anger, you feel disappointment, you feel like you might be losing it, you're coming to the edge, put both feet on the ground, feel them. Not symbolic. It's not symbolic. This is you signaling safety to your nervous system. You take the deep breath, you plant your feet on the ground, you sit square, you take back control, and you wait that one full breath before you say anything. One of my favorite statements is this. You know what? Let me think about that. Let me let me give that some thought and I'll get back to you. Let me give that some thought and I'll get back to you. That buys you time, that keeps you on the edge, right? That keeps you from going off the edge. You know what you're doing? You're you know, you you're slowing the moment down when you say that. Let me give that some thought and I'll get back to you. That's a regulation rep. That's a regulation. You are regulating yourself. You are guarding yourself from becoming something you don't want to become in the moment. And the ancient wisdom backs us up on this. In in Proverbs, it says, keep vigilant watch. This is Proverbs 4, verse 23. Keep vigilant watch over your heart. That's where life starts. Guard your heart. Guard your heart. You know what that means? That means you're not gonna let things take root in your heart. When something goes wrong, you pause and you ask, is this catastrophically global? Is this or is this some specific limited thing? Is this permanent? Is it temporary? Is it about to is this about my identity or is this about one moment? Like, what is this? Am I fusing my identity with this or not? Am I gonna allow that to happen? I'm having a thought about this right now. What's going on? Okay, you'll be surprised how just thinking about how you're thinking can actually help you in moments and taking that breath and grounding yourself. So you miss a shot, you're an athlete, you miss a shot on the court, your mind says, Oh my god, I can't handle this pressure. Oh, it says, No, this is no, guarding your heart means you say, All right, I missed that shot, I won't miss the next one. And you keep saying that until you hit. Absolutely. If somebody questions your idea and your mind says, they don't like me, they don't respect me, guard your heart, separate the content from the character. Okay, they challenged what you said. That's just what happened. They're not rewriting who you are, you're doing that if you allow it to happen. So you guard your heart. That's not about me, that's about what they said, that's their own issue. Absolutely, absolutely. So that's the idea. You see, if you remain steady and continue showing up by rewiring yourself in the moment, you don't allow the pressures to push you over the edge, and you speed up your ability to get back to your baseline, and that's how you grow your trust because you see yourself always being able to come back to center when things are going haywire, and that's the kind of person you want to be. This is your identity that you're gonna keep. Each time you feel the surge and you choose to be steady and calm and collected, your brain updates itself. It's like a computer, and it says, ah, this is who she's gonna be in this moment, this is who he's gonna be. Yeah, every time you feel a surge and you choose steadiness, your brain updates its prediction about you. Instead of encoding, I lose control, it you know what it encodes? It encodes I can handle this kind of scenario, I can handle this kind of stress, I can handle activation, I can handle pressure. And the next time pressure hits, the alarm is softer, the amygdala doesn't fire as much because you've been telling yourself and behaving and practicing your conditioning to be stable because you have a stable identity. You make choices, you pause, you breathe, you reset, you say, hmm, this is just one moment in time. This is not my identity, and your whole nervous system stabilizes because you stop attaching your entire self to a single outcome. A mistake becomes specific, not personal. A setback becomes situational instead of defining who you are. Over time, your sense of self becomes less reactive to the things that are around you, and your performance steadies. It steadies because physiology, biology follows interpretation. How you interpret things and what you believe in the moment actually sets up how your physiology and your biology is going to behave. So when you perceive everything as a threat, well, of course, your body and mind are going to react. But when your threat perception drops, your coordination and your sense of self improves, you'll find that your timing will sharpen, your decisions will become more deliberate, you'll spend less energy defending your identity and more energy executing your role because you're not even threatened. And that's the inner edge. That's how you build inner edge. You regulate your body, you regulate your breathing, you regulate your response, you clarify the meaning. Hey, what you when you said uh you don't like this, what did you mean? You ask second questions, you become more curious as opposed to defensive. Ask another question, right? And you choose clarity. You're yeah, you act from your chosen identity, you're in control. This is about you. Repeat this kind of behavior under pressure, and your trust in yourself will strengthen. For some people, it's about saying a quick prayer or having a mantra, something that stabilizes their identity in the moment. Greater is that which is in me, he, than that what's in the world. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Maybe maybe if that's not you, maybe it's just not today. Okay, maybe it's not the biblical phrases, maybe it's just you saying not today. Okay, just something that I stables your identity and steadies your performance. This is your inner edge. Trust it. You have more control over it than you think. You've been listening to The Sweet Spot. It is Trust Yourself Thursday. I trust and pray and hope that you got something out of this conversation that we had over the coffee table of life, and that if you haven't subscribed to The Sweet Spot yet, that today is the day you subscribe and that you you also share with someone. It's absolutely free, there's no charge here at The Sweet Spot. So, okay, it's trust yourself Thursday. I believe in you, I trust you, trust yourself, figure out your inner edge, don't let anybody craw make you cross it unless you absolutely have to. For science and for soul and for success. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet.