Transcript of What If Thinking Harder Is Keeping You Stuck? Overcoming Decision Paralysis with Brent Lupia

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to The Edge.

Hey, hey, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. Guess what? You're not talking about it. So today we're gonna— with Brent Lupia, and today we're going to be talking about what happens When the brain that learned to thrive on urgency, consequences, and immediate feedback finds itself facing uncertainty and problems that thinking harder don't help. We're talking about what happens when intelligence itself becomes a loop. Whoo, I've been there. Why capable people get stuck inside complicated decisions and how thinking outside our own heads can change everything. So let me tell you about Brent. Brent is a performance and clarity coach who works with founders, operators, high-responsibility professionals whose ability to think harder has stopped producing better answers. Guys, we like better questions in here. He is the creator of Externalized Sensemaking, a structured approach designed to move complex thinking out of the mind into a form where patterns, contradictions, assumptions, and constraints can be seen and worked with. Before moving into coaching, he spent 18 years in security and intelligence operations.

He worked with the US State Department, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security. He went overseas to Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, Iraq, where he built mission-critical symptoms, emergency response tools, tracking platforms, and analytics in environments where mistakes had real consequences. So today, Brent, took all of that and helps you think clearer. How cool is that? Brent, welcome to Notes from the Edge. How are you, my friend?

First off, thank you so much. That was the best introduction I think I've ever received in my entire life. So

thank you very much. Isn't it amazing when somebody else does it for you?

I appreciate it very much. Thank you so much.

Feels different than saying I'm awesome, although I do say I'm awesome. So Brent, it's Notes from the Edge, man. We're gonna just jump right into this convo because I'm excited to dig into your work. Okay. All right. So because I think you might be talking straight to me, I'm just gonna go ahead and come forward with that. You say you work with people who have reached the point where thinking more or harder stops working. So what is happening when we, when we get in that stuck intelligent, can't think our way out of it loop?

Well, let me put this in a simple context first. So if you're someone that has high intelligence, right? What does that mean? You got a big powerful brain. If you just stay in that big powerful brain, guess what? Inside yourself is an infinite domain, right? Anything is possible. Space is limitless, right? Get out of your head. The moment you start catching yourself— it sounds so simple. It really does, Lisa, but it really is that simple. The moment you start catching yourself—

It sounds so simple. It's not, man. It's not. I'm an intelligent woman, so thus, I spend a lot of time on thinking loops. I do, I do.

But here's the beautiful thing. Externalized sensemaking, we mentioned before, I know we'll get into it later. It all came up with this, beyond with a pad, just a piece of paper and something to write with, right? Right. So the—

You went old school.

Yeah, I mean, right? Well, because here's the beautiful thing, right? You can, you can have, you can rely on technology, right? Your phone, iPad, whatever you have with you. However, being able just to write, you'll be able to— you'll notice that instinct is easier to access wherever you are, right? Yes, you can have your phone on you, but your phone can die. If you just have a natural habit that you build, that when there's something that you're looping on, you just find something to jot it down. Because here's the beautiful thing. Right. The moment you take something out of your head and put it on paper, right? You put it on a chalkboard, you put it somewhere outside of yourself. Now guess what? it no longer lives in a limitless environment, right? It no longer is boundless. It has to, um, it has form,

right?

Right, exactly. It has to abide by the rules of this reality, right? So the moment you put it down, first it stops being so scary, right? Because how can something be scary that you can literally just write on a piece of paper, right? It's the things that we don't know Are the things that we're fearful of. So the moment you can just write a part of that idea down, you're already building momentum. You're already heading in the good direction, right? Because you're starting to label it. And human brains, for the most part, we like labels, right? So just write the idea. And I know it sounds simple, right? As I said before, just say it out loud, just put it out loud. But it's like anything else. In order to build awareness, to build that observer capability, it just building these tripwires, right? The moment you start catching yourself looping, ask yourself, hey, let me write this down. Why am I looping on this? Yeah.

And you brought up the word observation— favorite word. Observation is not neutral, my friends. The minute you observe it, it is already starting to change. That is quantum physics. That is quantum mechanics. That has been proven. So, and if it's on paper, you can observe it. I— Brent, what I, I think is a cool exercise— I don't do it enough, but But to just spend 5 minutes automatic writing, like spilling it out, whatever comes out, no grammar checking, no editing, no nothing. Shut the page, come back to it the next day. Really cool messages you'll have for yourself. Really cool messages. So you spent years in environments where you had to make quick decisions or there were some dire consequences. So what happens to the brain when somebody trained on immediate feedback suddenly enters, let's say, leadership, entrepreneurship. It seems like a strange switch, my friend. Honestly, I'm gonna be honest with you. None of my guests have linear paths to how they're helping people now. They just don't. They have the weirdest career resumes with some gaps and some weird stuff. And mine's the same way. Oh my gosh.

Well, to answer your The question has a lot to do with my partner. Okay. She would see how I would just— we'd be out at dinner, right, at a restaurant, and I would just engage with the server. And in 3 or 4 minutes, right, I would be able to just glean something about them, right? Whether how they talk, their posture, whether they had some interesting information, whatever it was. And then I would just talk actually with them. And then oftentimes I would, me being me, I would just impart some wisdom onto them, or I would say something flattering, just me connecting with that person right across me, right? Like treating them as a normal human being. Yes. And then my partner looked at me, she's a very savvy business owner. And she's like, you should do coaching. And I was like, what do you mean by coaching? She's like, no, you should sit down and talk with people, help them out because you have this ability to see these patterns and just talk with people. That is uncommon. So she was the one that provided that linear path that you mentioned, because to be honest with you, you're absolutely right.

I would have been just like most of the people that you've dealt with. I wouldn't have seen it as clearly. But you know, I had a great guide. I still do. So I appreciate it.

Well, guides are important. Mentorship is so important. And it was transformational coaches that were the game changer for me. That's why I became one. That's why I support them so highly. And this was after doing everything in the clinical arena, you name an acronym, DBT, TCBT, neurofeedback, brain mapping, EMDR, whatever it was, ART. I did it all, and I was still waking up going, I don't know if I want to do this. It was pretty bad. Um, and it was transformational coaching that helped me see how powerful I am and that we just need to harness that power skillfully, um, to help myself and help others. But yeah, transformational coaches are so important. And I think the reason, Brant, is— and talk to me about this As a coach, are you not interested in helping people move forward? Isn't that the goal?

So, uh, could you ask the question in a different way? Are you saying that—

Yes. Rather than, like, talk therapy, you know, talk therapy is just we're looking backwards, we're talking about stuff that happened. So transformational coaching, usually, depending on the modality that you teach, has a different approach. So, and your approach is the externalized sense-making. I love senses because we're so not into our senses. Um, so talk to me about that. Let's kind of— let's rabbit hole down that way.

Okay. So, uh, the answer to your first question, what I find that makes me a little bit different, and this got actually quite clear to me last night, I was talking to one of the people that work at the gym that I work out. And I mentioned I was going on a podcast, and, uh, he asked me like how the coaching business was going. And I told him, look, man, if I could be in a 90-minute session with somebody and I see everything clearly and I can just, you know, guide them along the path and they able to walk it, and in that one session they don't need to work with me anymore, that's a success. You did your job. Exactly. That's how I view it. But His experience is actually— it really impacted me because he said, well, you know, I find that when I've worked with people, whether like therapists or something like that, he says, I always have this feeling that like they're holding back a little something, you know. So they'll say, you know what, I'll book another session, right? And, uh, he said like, I feel like this one is— I get strung along.

I said, well, look, I can't speak for those people. What I can say is people— I find that if someone's in that profession, whether it's therapy or coaching, they're genuinely there to help, right?

Of course they are, right? Yes, absolutely. Everybody that worked with me was trying to help me. Yes.

Yes.

We're all individual. And it takes what it takes. And for some people, it takes searching for other modalities that exist, you know?

Yeah. So that's—

talk to us about yours. I want to hear about yours. Sensemaking. I just love that word.

Well, I appreciate it. Um, it took me a little while to kind of come up with that, uh, but it's really simple. Well, at least from, from my perspective, all it really takes, right, is I'll be sitting down with somebody and I have a pad off to my side, right? And, uh, I will start listening to them talk. And what you'll notice with a lot of people is that they will make a definitive statement and then 5 minutes later they'll kind of make another statement. However, these 2 statements cannot coexist in the same reality. Now, a lot of people miss this, right? Because especially if you're active listening, you could be sitting down for 10 minutes straight and they are just dumping information on you. And actually, that's where— Right. Right? And this is where the— my method came out, is I was actually talking with my partners around Christmas And we were having this really in-depth conversation, and I didn't want to interrupt her. And she's just giving me all this information. It's going like 8 minutes straight. So what I noticed was my hand started doing this on its own on the table.

Oh, wow.

But there was no pen. And then I, I saw that. I said, hey honey, do you mind if we just pause real quick? I need to grab something to write down because I don't want to interrupt you, even though I know I just did, but I don't want to do it again. And then I ran and got a piece of paper, and I started writing down the key things that were standing out to me. So she was able to finish Right. So she feels heard.

She got it out.

She got it out and she's hearing it. I then have my little notes and then now I can start giving back what I'm hearing. Right. So one—

See the patterns, right?

And you make them feel heard, right? Because you're literally saying something back to them and then you can just go from there. Right. There's inconsistency. You can ask. And then here's the biggest thing. And Lisa, I'm sure you've gone through this yourself. is as long as you're coming from a purely curious place and non-malicious.

Yep.

Go forward.

Curiosity and compassion must-haves on your—

Right? Because I find that a lot of people get caught up because oftentimes the truth hurts a little bit, right?

Sometimes it's not fun

when

you look at your reality and you're like, oh crap. This ain't fun. Right? How the hell did I get here? Yep. The

truth is the truth, right? And

it's there,

right? It's there. So what's really taken me a long time, especially as I've been learning how to unmask— I didn't get diagnosed neurodivergent until very end of 2023. So it's still new for me. And I'm still learning a lot about my brain chemistry and And why the world was so different for me for most of my life.

And why you can pick up on things, right? Yep. And that's the pattern recognition. Yep.

I'm so grateful that, you know, I, I'm grateful that I wasn't told how my brain really worked when I was a kid, because what it forced me to do through my entire life is like saying, I know I'm weird, I don't know exactly why. However, I need to figure out how everyone around me works.

Yeah.

Right? And I was driven by that. And fortunately, the military, you know, they put me in intelligence work. So I got, you know, I learned how to, you know, do pattern recognition there, and additional training and some behavioral science training. And then, um, but the people I worked with in my entire career, it helped shape that. Right? Um, and now, and then, and then the final piece of the puzzle was finally saying, hey, This is why you're weird. This is why you are you. And I'm like, wow, that makes a lot of sense. And, uh,

it did. When you do get the, the, the— yeah, I hate labels, I hate diagnoses, but they are starting places for healing. But you do have that aha moment of, oh, okay, that all makes sense now. All right, I know why I was so crazy now. All right, all right, it makes sense. Okay, so Externalized sensemaking. I come to you like, I'm feeling stuck in life. I'm not sure what's next. I just, I'm just not feeling it. I'm looking around at my reality. I'm not liking it. So walk me through what changes when we take a complicated problem and find the patterns and find the systems. Systems, put systems, because I can tell you're a systems thinker too, of course. Systems in place to, to help people move out of that, that stickiness or that stuckness or that lack of joy? You know, we want people to really fulfill their mission here and fill their purpose and live with meaning and intention. So how do you get people there?

Well, again, and I think you can relate to this, is we can't get anyone anywhere. Right. And I think you asked me this question before, uh, in chat, is, uh, you know, why can't we do the work for someone? Right. And here's the thing. You can do the work for someone sometimes, right? If the work is internal and you're seeing the pattern clearly, or what you think, what you think you're seeing clearly, and then you give them it straight out, right? They didn't discover it themselves, right? Mm-hmm. It's like, okay, great, I hear what you're saying, but now it's inorganic. It's like the movie Inception, right? You can't plant an idea in someone's head, right? Same thing if you say it out loud. Well, their body will likely want to reject it, right? Because it didn't come from them, right? So there's that, right?

So your idea— my daughter does it all the time. She came, right? She came to you, wow, I got a great idea, I just sold my thrift store stuff on my shop. I was like, that's a great idea, I've been telling you to do that for 2 years instead of asking me for money.

But you can't say that or it ruins

it. You gotta plant the seeds. And what's so weird about us as humans is you can say it, I can say it, another coach can say it, but it's the 3rd coach that says it that it finally goes ding ding ding. Right. Isn't that weird?

Yeah. Yeah. So what I, what I'd like to do is I, I ask the questions that force them to answer. And this is what I'm talking about. The way that my brain works, like if I actually talk the way that my brain thinks, I think I would have very few friends because it can be very robotic. I'm glad you laugh at that. I mentioned that to someone yesterday and they just looked at me.

I laugh about switching brains all the time, and we're both like, hell no. Oh, I appreciate that.

That's good. It's good to know that I'm not alone. So I've done a lot. I've done— I continue to do the work on making that gap tighter, right? Like, between like how my brain really works and then still communicate as close as possible, but then still be able to relate to people, right? So, but in, in coaching, or even if I'm just talking to a friend that's going through something Right? Perfect example. Yesterday I was talking to one of my friends at the gym, and they were like, "Yeah, I'm I'm feeling a little a little pudgy, a little out of shape." You know, because I commented some say, "Ah, looks like you've been cutting." Like, "Yeah, I've been cutting weight, but like you know I had a little too much fun over the weekend." Um, and you know it seems like I'm working backwards. And I'm like, "Okay." So we talked about it philosophically, right? A little bit. And they kind of got to the solution. And then I said, you know what, I would— let me just ask you a straight question. Did you weigh yourself this morning? And they're like, yeah. Okay. Was it more than you expected?

Like, yeah. Okay. Did you follow your diet? They're like, no. Okay. Did you hit all of your workouts? They're like, no. Okay. Why are you surprised that the weight on the scale is higher? And I asked him, like, like, genuinely, like, well then why?

And then he just looked at me. There's no common sense to that. It doesn't make sense. What do you expect? Is that what you're saying? You're like, you're a what-do-you-expect coach, guys. If you want Brent as a coach, you better be ready to be pulled out on your bullshit. But you need that. We need that. We really need people that can help us see Because sometimes we just— maybe we're looking left and we just need a guide to go, yo, yo, yo, look over here, right? Just gain that different perspective. And it sounds like that's what you do for people with the way that your brain works, right?

Yeah, it's—

I was gonna say, what happened with your friend? Did he get it? Did he get it?

He looked at me. He looked at me and then he's like, He says, you're right. He said, it's that simple. I'm like, yes, it is that simple. But I said, the simplicity is what makes it complicated because we're used to things being complicated. So the moment the solution is simple, our brains are like, ah, that can't be it. And guess what?

We do that with like healing, oh, recovery work. Yeah, it can happen, friends. It's This is, this is my, this is my— I, I can't even think. Um, trauma healing does not have to be a trudge, and it does not have to take years. Does not. There are so many modalities out there that work very, very quickly. Like, listen to Brent. He's like, maybe 1 session, maybe 2 sessions, maybe 8 sessions. It, it takes what it takes. But when you have the tools and you're done, you're done. So yeah, soapbox. That's the word I was looking for. It's like, get up on my soapbox. So, um, yes. Um, okay, let's talk about clarity, the word clarity. Um, your statement, clarity is delivered once, responsibility stays with you. Explain that to us, elaborate on that for us.

So this is an extension of what we were just talking about previously. The analogy I like to use is, um, hike, right? You've got 2 people and it's an 18-mile hike, right? So it's gonna take the whole day, right? So you gotta start really early. Now this hike is beautiful. It's up in the mountains, right? It's like early fall so that they're kind of snow-capped. There's a glacier in the distance, right? And this viewpoint that you've seen on social media that is to die for, right? But you gotta scramble over rocks. There's mud. You gotta, you gotta hike up a 45-degree angle, right? You earn the view, right? And so when you do make it to that view, right, they always say like, you know, it's not about the destination, it's the journey, right?

Yeah.

What they're saying is the person you are at that viewpoint, at the end of that hike, is fundamentally different. You've been tried, you've been tested. Every time you wanted to quit, every time you said to yourself, oh, I need to slow down, or, you know, like, uh, I've got it way over my head. We said, I made a commitment and I don't feel in danger, so I really am just like chickening out. I can continue to move forward, right? I know I haven't had enough yet. And you know, the next— sometimes if you can't answer that right away, the next question to kind of challenge yourself is like, am I willing to live with myself for quitting right now?

Right?

It's a heavy one if you really want to put yourself in a corner.

Regrets sucks.

Yeah, right? You're like, no, I don't want that, right? So I'm gonna make it. So they get to the view and they'll love the view, right? And they'll appreciate the view. They'll see so many things they've never seen before. Plus they'll see through new eyes because they've changed. Now the other person, guess what? As the first person goes off down the trail, the second person goes to a helicopter and flies the 18 miles and gets dropped to the destination. Now guess what? That viewpoint is still beautiful. Yeah. It is still knock you out of your shoes and it will fill your heart with beauty, but you're looking through the same eyes. You didn't earn that view, right? The person that deserves to see that view, you're not them. So even though you got all that information, right, you literally have checked the box. You're like, hey, I got to top Mount Everest. Yeah, but you're not the person that emerges from the top of Everest. by climbing there. You got put there. And that's what happens with coaching. If you— or just helping anybody— if you give them all the solutions, if you carried them the whole way there and you dropped them, you've helped them for a moment.

And then the moment you're gone, you just set them up for failure because now they're— they've leveled up in life, but they haven't built the tools and resiliency to maintain it. You know, a shorter example, this is when people win the lottery. Right, versus someone who's worked their way up, right, and made a lot of money, right? They'll both get $10 million, right? They both get the $10 million, but one might end up spending it recklessly because they didn't build the resiliency, the knowledge, and everything it took in order to maintain that level of life. Where the other person grinded, had to educate themselves, right? Then themselves have been, you know, tried and pushed to the point where they can handle that level of responsibility. Same thing.

Yeah, they didn't earn it, so you're looking through the same eyes. I love, I love, love, love those analogies. I don't know, it just gave me a visual of one of the first hikes my husband and I went on. It was a really tough one. We found out later we were both faking the hell out of it, trying to make it look easy. It was hard as hell. It was hard as hell, but most beautiful view you've ever seen. We definitely earned that one trying to pretend.

That's a beautiful relationship.

Yeah, yeah, we— I got, I got, uh, we work. We're both in recovery. We're both in addiction recovery. We're each other's accountability partners. The thing is, Brent, is we do not have the luxury of not working on ourselves. We don't. So he's got to do his work. I do my work, and we meet in the middle when we can. So, um, something— and, and that's another thing, guys. If you're stuck in those— listen, here's one. thing that Brent does for you. He helps you identify those patterns. So see, in my own life, I kept picking the same person in a different body, and they were terrible choices. So if you're doing that and you can't figure out why, Brent is right here. Brent, how can people find you?

Well, uh, you go to my website, brentlupia.com. Has all my socials on there. I'm on X, I'm on LinkedIn and YouTube. And I actually have an assessment quiz on there. I think it's 8 questions. And it's just easy things someone could take. And I have all these resources to let them know what, you know, what type of mind they might have and how to possibly move forward through it.

I love that. Work with the mind you guys got. That's what you do. Don't hate on yourself. Have some compassion, have some curiosity. Edge note, guys, from Rent, work with the mind that you've got. Figure yourself out and lead with some curiosity and take the long hike. Take the long hike.

You know, it's funny when you mentioned the, you know, the journey with you and your husband you've been on, like, you can't skip a day of work, right? Every day you got to show up, right? Earlier, we talked about like the level of work that we have to do, right? And it could, it could be, it could be months, Right? Could be years, it could be weeks. What I find that the shortcut to healing, the shortcut to growth— would you like to hear what that is?

Give it. Yeah, we all do. We're on the edge of our seats, please.

Accountability.

Oh, we didn't talk about accountability. Yes. Okay, clarity and accountability. We got, we got rabbit holed.

That's what people think about this, this podcast, though, right? Exploring.

We're exploring with curiosity. All right. Accountability is very important in the work that we do in recovery, for sure, right?

No, for sure. And this is why accountability is so crucial. It also taps into the greatest power of the individual, which is ourselves, right? Once you understand the only thing you can truly control is yourself. Everything outside of you, it's a mirage, right? It might seem like you're able to control it, but history is filled with people that have, you know, critiqued and, and, and fine-tuned everything possible, and they felt like, oh man, there's no way this is going to not come out the way I want. It still does, right? So when we can learn that, A, we can only control ourselves. It frees us from a lot of stuff, right? If you suffer from anxiety— what's anxiety? Modeling out, especially with brains like you and I, modeling out thousands, millions of different realities, conversations that will likely never happen, but we have to be prepared, right? We have to have a response for everything. Okay, but if you

realize the conversation we had 2 days ago that we're still thinking about— Yeah, we're like, I should have said this. Oh, I could have done this. Right.

But if you realize like, okay, hey, uh, I can't control the other person, right? I can control myself. All right. So I'm, I'm just gonna focus on that, right? I'm gonna focus on me. And then the accountability, when you can combine that with accountability, when you realize that if the only thing you control is yourself, that means you choose everything that happens to you. That means choosing your perception, choosing your actions. And, you know, people will say, yeah, but I was forced into it. Yes. Life can hedge the situation in a way that it feels like you have little to no power, right? However, you always do. And that is so hard for a lot of people to understand. And the more you can embrace that, the quicker those cycles go through, those healing cycles, the learning cycles, the growth cycles, because you'd be like, nope, that's on me. Right? And I can only control myself, so I'm just going to focus on things that I can control and not repeat that behavior. Guess what? You just took something that could take months, now it's weeks. Now, the reason why there's a delay still— and this is what I suffer from, and tell me if you go through the same thing— is my mind is pretty quick.

I can learn things pretty fast, especially if it's things that I can iterate quickly, like coding or like working on Excel or something like that. Entrepreneurship, though, has been, you know, very difficult because it's a world of ambiguity.

Entrepreneurship, you got to be the marketer, you got to be the sales guy, you got to be everything. You got to be this guy. Yeah.

It's tough. But when you, when you can focus on what you can control, and you realize that, hey, everything's on me, then it's a nervous system. Right? So you can understand it up here first, you can learn the lesson. But guess what? We're, we're tissue. We're, we're biology, right? We're not robots. So our nervous system is still used to doing things the hard way. And this is something that I'm still experiencing every day. Like, I'm not immune to it, even though I know all these things. I'll do the internal work. I'll understand something. I'm like, oh, this is a better way of communicating. I will no longer communicate this way. I'll communicate this way. I fully understand that. Guess what? The next 4, maybe 10 conversations, I will still end up doing the old thing. I'll still do the old thing. And then you can easily beat yourself up like, oh, I'm regressing. I forgot. I'm not doing the work. No, no, no. Give yourself grace. You're human, right? You will make mistakes. And the fact that you remembered, right, this observer role.

Totally.

It's like, oh, hey, hey, like Brent, like, we're not going to talk like that anymore, right? It's not as helpful. We're going to do this next time. Like, ah, Brent, you're absolutely right, right? And then what you start noticing is enough repetitions, you— right, like, that's why the more you can just get, you know, exposure, right? The more exposure you can have to it, guess what? You just cut that window down even more. So that's why I say accountability. And, um, it's— yeah, it's one— man, it's, it's so important. What— and and then the accountability with the understanding that you can only control yourself. The deeper you can understand both those principles, that is a shortcut to life with, with everything— self-growth, trauma healing, you name it. Um, because you can— if you wait for the world to show you what you feel you deserve, you might as well just—

oh,

you know,

you're gonna be waiting. You wait. What I love about what you just said is it's It's, um, surrounded by, uh, conscious choice. We always have a choice and intention, right? We always— friends out there, what he's saying is you always have a choice, no matter what's happening, about what you're gonna do with you. Brent, I love that. Absolutely beautiful. Okay, before I let you go though, I have 2 questions I always ask each guest. Are you— and guys, don't worry about Brent's website. It's going to be in the show notes. It'll be clickable. So you can go on there, click on there, uh, take the assessment. And then, um, if you feel like you want to dive deeper with Brent, uh, definitely reach out to him. So Brent, are you ready for the first question, my friend?

No, but let's go anyway.

All right, let's go. Let's play. All right. In your own life, and be honest, what did you perform In order to survive? And what did setting that role, mask, or performance down do for your life? Wow.

You just go right for the jugular on these questions.

I do.

So I want to make sure I'm catching this correctly. So I don't lose focus. So the premise of the question is, what did I do to perform to essentially survive? And then in that performance, what did I feel it costed me?

Yeah, that's a great question too. What did it cost you? But if you have put it down, how did your life change?

Oh, okay. What did it cost or change? Okay, so what I can tell you— performance, man. And this is stuff I've unpacked in the last 2 years. Stability. My brain When I was a kid, I would—I didn't realize how much I saw until I was an adult. But I would see you know these micro expressions. I didn't realize were micro expressions. To me, they seemed so loud. They seemed so grandiose. But to other people, and if I explain like I didn't see them make that face, I'm like, oh, you didn't see their. Their eyelid quiver, or their corner of their mouth kind of turn a little bit, or how their, their voice just kind of like cracked a little bit on that word, right? Just all these little things that were natural for me. And growing up as a kid, seeing all these things and hearing people say one thing but their body language is doing another— oh wow, it was so hard for me. And then so what I did was I I didn't know this, but subconsciously I just became a stabilizer. I'm like, okay, well, I can see all these things. So I took responsibility for everything.

So I was like, okay, well, hey, you know, these people aren't getting along. So I'm going to build a bridge here. I'm going to perform and, you know, make people laugh. And, and I just want everyone to be happy. Right? Because I didn't have a great childhood. What that cost me was Who I was? I didn't really know who I was. And to be honest with you, I'm still discovering who I am now because it was again it was until I got diagnosed when I realized and and realized like the brain that I have and how different the world is. And that's the other thing too that I don't think people realize. We can see things in life so clearly, but a person next to us can be absolutely blinded to that. And if anyone likes to argue that, look at movie reviews. People are in the same theater seeing the exact same movie. One person says it's their brand new favorite. Another person says, my God, they should burn that and never show that to anyone again. It's the same reality.

Yeah.

Right. So it wasn't until, yeah, I got diagnosed and then, and then all of a sudden, it starts peeling back. Right? You start becoming aware, like, of what is really you and then what is a version of you, you know? And, um, started questioning myself whenever I always say like, oh, that's like, of course they would know that. How could they not know that? That's been most of my life because that's how clear things were to me. And then what's allowed me to do that is pause and ask myself, okay, Brent, we understand it's really clear to you. Maybe ask a follow-up question to see if they're actually seeing what you're seeing versus making an assumption, you know? And that's where I'm at now. So I guess to round this out, I wasn't asking a lot of those questions growing up because that's unstabilizing. So the price I cost was I have this observability and I'm seeing what I'm seeing. However, I do not believe in myself enough to ask the important questions. So when you become a stabilizer, everyone around you will have a fuller life than you, right? And, um, an analogy that I like to give people is, um, and this, I, I partially borrowed this from my partner, but she likes buckets.

Uh, she does financial work, but is it like people get in the habit of pouring from their bucket fill other people's cups or their buckets around them, right? But what ends up happening is, uh, the pour-out rate is usually greater than the pour-in. So you run low or empty, right? So when you start believing in yourself, start loving yourself, you naturally become more courageous. You naturally become more confident and brave, and you're more willing to have the harder conversations. You're more willing to ask the conversations that might be stabilizing, right? Because you rather know what the truth is than to live in a version that makes people feel that they're happy. But because how aware you are, you know they're not. And you, and you came up short on being able to cut through that noise, you know? So—

Yeah.

But I can confidently say now moving forward is, uh, I, I, I have the hard conversations. I ask the hard questions. Um, because honestly, Lisa, I am getting— I'm tired. You know what I think? After being diagnosed and you start realizing, you start realizing like how easy it is for someone to not self-sabotage, but to say, to sell themselves away. Everything that you don't say, every action that you don't take that you know is right for you, every boundary that you do not set, right? You're literally telling the world that everything besides you is important. And a lot— I find that at least Western society has convinced us that us as an individual, we have to be careful when we talk high about ourselves, right? Good about ourselves, loving ourselves. Well, the problem is then people get so out of the habit of not feeling great about themselves, or at least not being able to talk about themselves, then they've literally just lost the thing that's supposed to anchor them in their whole life, which is a healthy relationship with themselves. He's right, everything comes from us, you know. And, um, and I'm glad this— I finally found myself, you know.

Yeah, isn't it nice? Isn't it nice to just enjoy your own company and go, I'm a pretty cool person and I'm cool with that, you know, rather than hating on ourselves or having our inner critic run amok? And you're right, Brent, I— it was a strange moment for me as well to realize other people's brains didn't work the same way mine did. It was a weird moment, surreal, I would say. So I love the way yours works. I understand it, and I can see how it would be very skillful in the coaching arena. So So I'm excited for some people to reach out to you. Last question for you. All right, you may have already answered it, but you may have another answer. What, what do you want human beings to be talking more about that we're not talking about?

Oh man, that we are not as different as the world has convinced us that we are. Everyone's going through something, right? And, um, there's a powerful phrase I heard about 10 years ago, comparative suffering, right? You know, um, and another thing that follows right after that is, uh, the worst thing that ever happened to you is by definition the worst thing that ever happened to you, right? So all this to say is, it's so— God, this world has gotten so polarized. split down the middle on everything— sports teams, politics, you name it. It seems like the world technology is devised and leveraged that so like people get pushed to extremes, right? But when you realize like, no, it's like we're all part of the ocean. We're just, you know, unique waves, unique expression of a greater whole. You know, I— that's not mine. That's, uh, Alan Watts and Carl Jung. But, um,

I

love it. No, that's not mine.

So good.

But yeah, yeah, we're all part of the ocean and we're just, you know, unique expressions of it, right? And, um, everyone's going through something. Um, you know, even people that don't seem like they love, they do. And people that seem like they don't hate, they do, right? And people that probably are the ones that doesn't look like they're carrying any pain or hurt are probably the ones carrying the most, right? And, um, if we approach things through genuine curiosity The amount of healing and closeness that will follow, it would be immeasurable. Because I feel like the world has lost its genuine curiosity for other people, and it's become— we've become disconnected because we are a community, right? You know, I think everyone at the end of the day would just rather a world where people just treat each other well. And the way that starts is being curious of who you're sitting in front of and not making quick assumptions just based on what you're observing, you know.

I love that. So beautiful. We are all in this together, my friends, and that's what this show is about— letting you guys know that each one of us has our own struggle. Um, I love guests like Brent who come on and let us know that there is struggle, but also all of our guests are still out here helping people, because that helps us heal as well. So, uh, thank you so much, Brent. Friends out there, I'm going to ask you guys the same question listening. What are you performing just to survive or get by? And what might setting that role, mask, or performance down do to lighten your load just a little bit, my friends? I am your host, Lisa Lacey, here with our special guest Brent Lupia. And when you find the answer to that, we will see you after the break. The Edge. Thank you, Brent.

Thank you, Lisa. It's been a great time.