Episode 261: This week I'm speaking with Amy Green Smith. We chat about speaking up and setting boundaries, fear and how this shows up in our modern lives, understanding our motivation, using progressive language, self-worth, hypnotherapy and the difference between “I can’t” and “I won’t”
Amy Green Smith is a certified and credentialed life coach and hypnotherapist, masterful speaker, and personal empowerment expert. Amy uses her roles as coach, writer, podcaster, and speaker to move individuals beyond limiting beliefs and sabotaging mindsets to a place of radical personal empowerment and self-worth.
With acute focus on helping people “find their voice”, Amy uses her popular weekly podcast, The Bold-Faced Truth, to address issues of worthiness, self-confidence, and letting go of people-pleasing to assist listeners in creating and living radically joyful lives.
Amy has been instrumental in aiding thousands of women in stepping into their authentic power and crafting lives they desire. She is highly sought after for her uncommon style of irreverence, wisdom, and humor and has been a featured expert in Inspired Coach Magazine and on Fox 5 San Diego.
Start stalking Amy at www.AmyGreenSmith.com and grab a free copy of her eWorkbook/Audiobook, Stand Up for Yourself Without Being a Dick: 9 Proven Challenges to Radically Improve Your Self-Confidence and Self-Worth. Grab Amy’s FREE-SOURCES at: http://amygreensmith.com/free
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 261 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/261.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist who specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
Today on the show, it’s a guest interview, and my guest today is Amy Green Smith. Amy is a certified and credentialled life coach, hypnotherapist, masterful speaker, and personal empowerment expert. Amy uses her role as a coach, writer, podcaster, and speaker to move individuals to a place of radical personal empowerment and self-worth, with an acute focus on helping people find their voice. She’s highly sought after for her uncommon style of irreverence, wisdom, and humour, and has been a featured expert in Inspired Coach magazine and on FOX 5 San Diego.
I’ve known about Amy for a number of years. I’ve had Andrea Owen on the podcast a couple of times, and Andrea and Amy have both appeared on each other’s podcasts, which is how I know of Amy. As part of this episode, we talk about Amy’s relationship with food and her body. It’s only in the last couple of years that Amy has discovered the anti-diet movement and Health at Every Size. She’s also someone who is in perimenopause and is seeing and experiencing body changes right now, so this was a very honest discussion with Amy being very open about the grief that has been coming up with all these changes and how she’s in the messy middle place with acceptance.
We talk about fear, something that comes up a lot for Amy’s clients, as well as with mine, and she talks about the four different fear responses from an evolutionary perspective and how they show up in our modern life. We chat about achievement and how to know if something is bringing you joy versus stealing your joy. This is a very practical episode, so Amy shares lots of different exercises that she uses with clients about speaking up and setting boundaries, understanding our emotion, using progressive language, and the difference between ‘I can’t’ and ‘I won’t’. Finally, we talk about hypnotherapy and what it is, and how Amy uses it with clients.
I really loved this conversation. Amy has a huge amount of wisdom, and there are so many practical takeaways from this one. Amy does love a swear word, and I assume that most people when listening to my podcast aren’t doing this with kids around, but if you are, just a heads up that this has more colourful language than the usual episode.
I’ll be back at the end for a recommendation, but for now, here is my conversation with Amy Green Smith.
Hey, Amy. Welcome to Real Health Radio. I’m excited to be chatting with you today.
Amy Green Smith: Hi, Chris! I am pumped. I am excited.
Chris Sandel: In preparation for our conversation, I’ve been going through your podcast and the free materials you have on your site. There’s really lots of directions we could go with this. I’m definitely an over-preparer and I have so many notes of things that I would love to touch on, way more than we’re ever going to get to. So I guess we’ll just naturally see where this goes.
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To start with, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing?
Amy Green Smith: Sure, let’s get all the boring credentialling stuff out at the beginning. [laughs] I’ve been working as a coach and hypnotherapist for the last – gosh, 12 and a half years. I think I originally went to coaching school in the mid-2000s and really officially launched my business in ’09. I have a bevy of different certifications along the way – neurolinguistic programming, emotional freedom technique, inner child work. As any good overachiever would do, just amassed all the certifications.
But really what I do in the world, and what I think we’re going to dig into a lot today, is twofold. There’s an internal component of genuinely helping people believe in their own intrinsic ‘enoughness’ – that internal self-worth, believing that you matter, that you have value, that you are deserving. We have lots of different vocabulary that we surround that with. And then there’s this external component of, okay, if I genuinely believe in the person that I am and I love who I am and believe that I’m worthy, how do I now communicate with the outside world?
I focus very heavily on speaking up for yourself, establishing boundaries, how to say no, having difficult conversations – like, what truly is the anatomy of a difficult conversation and how to set yourself up for success. A lot of those literal words and semantics that we just are never taught. Like, when in school are we ever taught how to have a difficult conversation really thoughtfully and empathetically? So that’s what I do in my little corner of the interwebs.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I would like to go back earlier than that and start with you and your background in terms of a lot of the work that I do with clients is connected to food and body and exercise and helping clients to improve their relationships in these areas. I know you’ve spoken to Summer Innanen on your podcast and Lexie Kite on your podcast, and I’ve had them as guests on my show too.
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So I’d love to hear about your relationship with food and body and how this has evolved over time. If we go back to you as a kid, how was food in your household? How was your relationship with food as a kid?
Amy Green Smith: This is quite curious because I’m fairly newly in a mid-size body. I’ve always been a fairly petite, small individual. At this stage in my life, I’m grappling with a lot of body grief. And not only in size, but also in age and in recognising that I’m perimenopausal, and there’s a lot of days where I’m like, “What is this? When did this shit happen?” [laughs] So there’s definitely grief involved with that.
But as far as the chronology of my life, for a bit of context, I grew up in a very conservative born-again Christian family. There were some real extreme issues with my mom around dieting. She still is in a fat body, and I say that with reclamation of the word ‘fat’. But she has gone through – as many Boomer parents, I think, did – constant dieting cycles. There was always something new.
I do remember my dad saying at one point – my dad was very small in stature; he had survived polio in the ’50s, so he was quite fortunate that he could walk unassisted. He had his own body image issues to work with, but even as we grew up, he never claimed ‘disabled’. That was something that – obviously we see that constantly in our culture that glorifies health, like we owe health to everybody. So there was sort of this repulsion around the idea of being a disabled individual. We were never taught, really, that that was the case. He would never have a handicapped sticker on his car, for example. He didn’t want to claim anything around that.
However, it really did influence how he showed up in the world. He had three other brothers; he was in the middle, and they would joke that he developed a really sharp tongue in order to defend himself, and then his brothers would have to be the muscle behind the mouth. [laughs] Would have to fight his battles. When they would bring that stuff up at family gatherings and stuff, he was so mortified and really embarrassed about it, I think largely because he was teaching us the ‘Word of God’, I say as an atheist. So he I think was embarrassed that he was behaving non-Christlike.
But my mom was an only child, so she received a lot of pressure around weight, specifically from her father. All growing up, I know that she was constantly doing Weightwatchers or Jazzercise or something. And I do remember one specific moment when my dad was talking about her weight loss and he was talking about it really specifically through a very compassionate and empathetic lens, but it was a really hurtful thing. He said, “I can’t imagine what that’s like to carry around an entire other body. It’s like she’s carrying around two people the whole time.”
I know he was trying to be gentle with that, but I know that that was extremely hurtful for her. There was a lot of disordered stuff around hiding food. It would be stashed under her bed. There was lots of shame around that. Lots of rewarding herself through food. Very punitive.
I can remember for myself, I was always a very petite, small individual, and my grandma would always mention that, like, “Oh, you’re so tiny, you’re so petite. When you were walking around when you were little, people were like, ‘Why is that baby walking? How is that baby walking?’” So apparently I was quite small. But I do remember very distinctly, my very first diet was probably – I think I was probably 12 or 13. It was around fat grams. I decided, “I’m going to have this many fat grams.” [laughs]
But actually, Chris, now that I’m thinking about it, I had a meltdown when I reached a specific weight that I could no longer ride these little go-karts that my cousins had – that were made for children. They’re made for tiny kids. So I had reached the weight limit that was completely normal, and I remember just having this meltdown that I was too big to ride this specific toy.
But then it was a series of going through high school in the ’90s with the waif model, being emaciated, being the main look and aesthetic. Many of us didn’t fall into that category, and I remember Kate Moss – I was very, very into modelling – as a follower; it wasn’t something that I did, but I followed a lot of fashion and stuff, and I remember Kate Moss coming onto the scene and it being such a disruption because she was one inch shorter than all the other models that were out there. [laughs] That was the sort of body disruption that was happening on the runway in the ’90s: God forbid somebody was one inch shorter.
So the idea of variation in body types, fat liberation, celebrating disability, celebrating gender, celebrating queer bodies, all of that stuff was not – there was one standard of beauty. And I was highly affected by that.
I can’t say that I had much pressure really from anybody in my immediate life other than myself. It’s been really interesting; I think probably up until about – it was at the start of the pandemic, even, so this was just a handful of years ago where I started learning about diet culture and I started learning about what it meant to really feed yourself. I went, holy shit, we’ve been duped! We have been bamboozled!
That’s really when I started to say, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not going to use language that supports that. One of the ways that shows up in the work that I do now – I have very few rules with my students, but I have two rules. One is you don’t apologise for crying or being emotional, and the other is you don’t apologise for what you look like. You don’t say, “I didn’t do my hair today” or “You’re catching me right after the gym.” We’re not doing that. No apologies for your appearance. We have too much other big shit to handle. So yeah, a little bit about the chronology.
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Chris Sandel: Prior to the pandemic and when you were finding out about this, were you constantly dieting/ was it on and off? What did it look like for you?
Amy Green Smith: It was pretty constant. I’ve always been fairly active as far as fitness and things like that go, but I’m not somebody who really loves exercise, where I’m like “Ugh, I just can’t wait to move.” [laughs] It really has been something that I’ve had to figure out what intuitively feels good to my body.
But as far as sustenance, oh, I was full MyFitnessPal tracker. I was constantly trying different things, and a lot of it under the guise of health, of course. Shocker. Seeing various nutritionists and trying different strategies, and ‘maybe I should do Whole 30’ and just the gamut. It was really exhausting.
I think one of the things that doesn’t get enough airtime is the idea that when we have largely women obsessed and taking up so much of their mental landscape and real estate around body and food, that’s less time to create a fucking empire. That’s less time and mental energy to give to your relationships or to fight systems of oppression. It helps us stay in competition with one another, which we know is a tool of the oppressor.
So yeah, I was very, very steeped in it, and I have to say that the last handful of years has been extremely grief-ridden. I have been working with my own therapist around that, but also with the tether between religious trauma that I’ve gone through and the connection with owning your body and trusting your body. That’s been really pivotal for me. Really early on, I was taught that the body is sinful and to kind of disassociate with the body, and that it’s really for others’ consumption. It’s not really for you. And at the same time, it’s really sinful and something to be ashamed of.
So there were so many different mixed messages, not to mention that pleasure was really demonised. Pleasure in food or pleasure in sex or in fun. It was about temperance and self-sacrifice, which I find not only detrimental but also highly abusive now, at this stage in my life. So it’s all quite tethered. It’s all a big fucking mess, which is why we do what we do. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: How liberating, though, has it been – I understand there’s the worries when you first find this information or like “How do I actually do this?” and that feels scary, but at this point you’re a coupe of years in. How would you describe it now?
Amy Green Smith: Oh, you’re probably not going to like this, Chris. [laughs] I have a friend of mine who is about a year sober from alcohol, and I have talked to her like, “Oh my gosh, do you feel so much better in your body? Are you sleeping better? Do you love it?” She’s like, “No, I fucking hate it.” I mean, it’s good, there’s definitely some good things about it, but she’s like, “I miss alcohol so much. I’m still continuing to make this choice, but I keep wanting to know when the payoff is going to be.”
And I think that’s what we don’t realise about how grief works. I’m still very much in the throes of grief, and there are certain things that I absolutely love. Like I definitely love not trying to calculate what I’m consuming or measuring food out, or if I have a get-together with friends, being like, “Oh, I already had a cheat day this week, what am I gonna do?” and just the angst around what I’m going to eat. So I definitely do not miss that.
But good God, I miss a smaller body. I 100% miss a smaller body, and I’ve really been grappling with the space of “Okay, Amy, that also means that you have fatphobia that you have not worked out yet.” So really coming to terms with that, like, okay, as much as I would like to feel like I’m woke and understand all this stuff, I still have my own fatphobia that I’m dealing with.
Here’s what I will say. At the very beginning, I felt like the pull to come back to the dieting side, this tug-of-war – I felt the pull towards the dieting side so much heavier. And I kept staying the course because there was this intuitive piece of me that was going, “That has not worked. That has not led you to body acceptance or to feel good.” So I kept going, okay, let me keep going to this other side of even body neutrality or acceptance of what is or further educating.
Understanding how the subconscious mind works, I recognise that one of the pieces of changing our subconscious beliefs is around repetition, so I’ve been very diligent about what I consume, who I’m listening to, the type of podcasts that I digest, what I watch. Keeping myself really aligned with the messages that I want to attach to. So I feel like I’m much, much more anchored in a body-neutral place now, but I’m definitely not done yet. There’s still a lot of longing for what was.
00:20:58
And it’s not just size. It’s youth. It’s feeling like, “Oh wow, my face is falling down. That’s new.” [laughs] And recognising that, oh, okay, the older you get as a woman, if you’re no longer able to be something for the male gaze, you become quite invisible. So there’s this real push-pull of recognising, “Oh, I’m not getting attention or I’m not getting checked out anymore” and then the feeling of “Hey, why aren’t you oppressing me still? Hey, why aren’t you looking at me like only a sexual object anymore? What happened to that oppression? I was used to that oppression!” So there’s a lot of reckoning with the gaslighting of that.
I can’t say by any stretch that I’m healed, but I do think that as we evolve and grow as humans, we’re presented with new chapters or realms that we’re able to dive into. For example, when women come to work with me, a majority of what we are untethering is just this belief that they are enough. When we can start creating that belief of ‘I am worthy’, it starts to have this ripple effect. And then inevitably what I see with them over time is now there’s a new thing to process. Now it might be weight, or now it might be relationship with money, or it might be relationship with men, or it might be relationship with religion.
There’s all these new levels of healing, but this is what I feel very strongly about: healing is never on our timeline, whether it’s physical or emotional. How many of us have had an injury and we’re like, “I’m ready to be back up and running!” and your body’s like, “Bitch, slow down. We’re not ready yet”? The same is true about our emotional healing. I get very fed up with that all the time, where I’m talking to my therapist and I’m like, “I’m so fucking sick of talking about this… and my healing is not on my own timeline.” It’s about continuing to take one step forward.
Chris Sandel: Thank you for your very honest answer with that, because I do think that it can be very easy to talk about this stuff in black-and-white terms, where it’s like “Before when I was dieting, all these bad things were happening” or “Before when I had my eating disorder, all these bad things were happening, and now that I’ve recovered all these good things are happening” and it’s this very binary and simple black-and-white dichotomy. And it’s just not true.
You are going to get to a better place with this, I don’t doubt that – and you’re still going to have times where you are still grappling with this because, as you said, you are now aging. So there’s going to be those things that you are knocking up against. I think it’s good that you’ve been able to share where you’re at because that’s the reality for most people. It’s this messiness with it all, and when you only present the concertinaed, perfect bits of something, someone listening to that feels like, “I must be doing it wrong. They’ve been able to figure this thing out, and yet I’m on board with some of it but then I have this questioning about this other thing.”
So it’s good to hear the richness of your experience where you’re like, “I’m noticing these benefits, I intellectually understand these other things connected to it, and I’m still struggling with these components and that’s because I’m in the grief process.”
Amy Green Smith: That’s right. It’s a throughline with all personal development. I find that I will have students and clients who will think, “Once I learn how to engage in a tough conversation or establish a boundary, now everyone’s going to do what I need them to do.” I’m like, oh honey, fuck no. There is some collateral damage. It’s not uncommon for me to see people who really, really struggle with people-pleasing or being highly invested in the opinions of other folks that once they start speaking up for themselves, they start realising how many individuals in their life actually prefer the doormat version of them. Then there’s grief and loss around relationships.
I oftentimes will talk about it in the terms of dichotomous emotion, where on one hand, you’re incredibly proud of yourself for voicing something that was problematic for you, but on the other hand, you’re incredibly hurt or disappointed or feel a sense of obligation or any other number of emotions.
I really think that the more we talk about the human experience and what that looks like in the terms of our healing, whether we’re talking about body image or anything else, we really set ourselves up for success when we get out of this binary.
Chris Sandel: When I’m thinking about the work I do with clients, I often think about it in levels, like, “What is the thing that is most important or what are the things that are most important at this level that you’re at?” Then once that’s accomplished, then we move on to this next level of things that need to be worked out. This is a collaborative thing of working out how we do this and in what order, etc.
But as you talk about that, if you get better with boundaries, the thing that then comes along with that is, “Now I’m having to deal with this other problem that that brings up even though there are benefits from setting boundaries.” I think that’s important to realise, like, “I make this progression forward, but I now need to deal with this other thing that then comes along with this as a consequence of speaking my mind.”
00:27:17
Amy Green Smith: 100%. Another nuance in the personal growth space that I don’t think gets talked about either is how we will take a certain concept, like people-pleasing, for example, and demonise it. We’ll say ‘perfectionism is always bad’ or ‘people-pleasing is always bad’. We want to get away from that. But let me tell you, if I have a heart surgeon who’s working on me, or a brain surgeon, I need them to be a perfectionist in that moment. So there’s certain times when these concepts that get thrown out either are quite limited and not as expansive as we need to give them, or we demonise or we say you always have to, or never, always, never.
With people-pleasing in particular, it is rooted in a primitive defence mechanism. It is an iteration of our fawn response, which is a completely normal way to engage with impending threat. If we think about our primitive ancestors, if you did not belong to a group, that meant that you would die. Flash forward now, when Susie in accounting doesn’t like you, on a subconscious level you’re going, “Holy shit, if I don’t please this person, I could die.” [laughs] Of course, we don’t consciously think that, but it registers in the brain as threat.
But there are certain situations, especially if you’re in a marginalised identity or intersection thereof, that people-pleasing 100% can keep you safe. From my own personal experience – I identify as queer, and if I were to be in a group of individuals who were clearly violent towards the queer community, that’s probably in my best interest to placate, for my own physical survival. It’s probably not the time for me to get on my microphone and go off because I can’t do much work for the resistance if I’m not here anymore.
So I think really understanding that all of these things have nuance to them – I mean, even the grief process. David Kessler and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross were really hesitant to even have five levels to grief because they knew people wanted to check off the fucking boxes of it. I think recognising that there’s a lot of expanse to humanity inside all of these topics we’re discussing.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Even with them, it got extended to seven levels, and then they said it’s not meant to be in order. People talk about comparison, you’ve got to stop comparing, and it’s like, we have an inability to stop comparing. We have evolved to compare because that, again, was important to understand the rules of the 100-120 people we were living with so that we could get along, because if we were excluded, that meant death.
So yes, we don’t want to be paralysed with comparison or have comparison have such an impact on our life that it has lots of negatives. But the idea that we can get to a place where we are never comparing is idealistic and is nonsense. It’s not going to happen.
Amy Green Smith: That’s right. Fear is another one. Our inner critic that jumps down our throat is genuinely trying to protect us. It’s going, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re embarking on new territory here.” Let’s say you’re starting a new business or you’re getting back into the dating scene, and your mind goes, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We’ve never gone down this path before. This is new. Are you sure this isn’t a threat? Let me send in all of this negative messaging.” It’s kind of like a best friend who has really shitty communication skills and they think that you’re always in danger and can’t decipher when something’s just new and when something’s actually a threat. So ‘let’s send in that same artillery no matter what’.
I oftentimes will say that courage cannot exist without fear. If you want to be a courageous, brave individual, it’s about looking our fear in the face and choosing courage over and over again. I’ve always hated the term of being ‘fearless’ because I don’t think it exists. In fact, I think there’s one documented case of a woman who did not have a fear response, and unless she is listening [laughs], that means everybody else, you have to engage with fear. Truly what that looks like is not an absence of fear, but a choice of behaving from courage over and over and over again.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I imagine the woman who was fearless, I doubt she made it that far in life because fear is important to keep us safe. There’s a great book that I’m blanking on the title – I think it’s called The Gift of Pain, and it’s all about the research into leprosy and the problems of why it occurs, and what they discovered was that you lacked the pain receptors in the body. So by not having the pain receptors, you would then put your hand into a fire or touch a hot stove or something would be biting on you and you would not know, or you would have injured your ankle with walking and you didn’t know, so you’d keep walking on it.
Without that feedback, things get really bad, really quickly. And I think it would be the same here: if we don’t have that fear response, we are going to be in trouble. So it’s like, how do I manage that fear response? How do I take the information that is useful from it and put the other parts to the side?
00:33:31
Fear is something that comes up a lot, and I know it’s something that you talk about. I think there’s like four fear responses that you talk about, so do you want to go through that?
Amy Green Smith: Sure. To your point, this gal who did not have the fear response, yeah, she would just walk into the middle of traffic and stuff like that. The same as what you were talking about with the pain receptors. The actual threat didn’t register. So yes, we do need it.
Let’s talk about that, then. Our four primitive fear responses – I’m sure many of you are familiar with this – fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These are most oftentimes associated with extreme threat. Let’s take an example of being attacked by a mountain lion, let’s say. If you were to fight, you obviously are going to be aggressive. You’re going to try to win. If you’re going to flee, you’re running away. Freeze, obviously we know what that looks like.
Fawning is something that’s a little bit newer on the scene that we’re talking about a lot more frequently, but fawning is basically placating. That would be like, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, here’s some nice meat! Go get it!” You’re trying to placate, you’re trying to acquiesce an aggressor or a captor or an impending threat.
All four of these have modern iterations. There are plenty of situations in our lives now where we are feeling a sense of threat in some way, but it’s not necessarily an end-of-life situation, like ‘this mountain lion might maul me to death’. But there are situations where we still register in the brain that it is unsafe, and that can be as simple as extreme deadlines at work, where you feel like “If I don’t do these things, there’s going to be such a negative repercussion.”
We know that the brain will scan for threat way more than it scans for pleasure because we’re trying to stay alive. So these start to iterate over time. Our fight response also shows up now as anxiety. So if there are situations where we can’t actually fight or tell the boss, “No, you’re asking too much from me and I can’t get this done in time!” and we can’t fight, it will morph into a sense of anxiety. That is a message. These aren’t necessarily negative things at all. In our society they are, because we hyper-diagnose things and we want to squash everything, pop the pill or whatever. And I do the same myself, so no judgment.
But we’re not looking at our symptoms as messaging, especially our emotional selves. There is a lot of information in how we feel. If you are experiencing a lot of anxiety, there’s probably a message there for you – either that there’s too much happening at work, there’s too much happening in relationships, you’re demanding too much from your own body and physicality. There’s something happening there, and it’s like, “Hey, hey, hey, we need you to pay attention.”
The next one is flight. If we were to flee, the modern iteration of that is depression. This is oftentimes why you will see folks who are in extreme depressive states want to sleep constantly, because it is a way to run away. It is a way to escape. But just like anxiety, it’s a message. It’s here to say, “Hey, I need you to pay attention. We’re sending in this symptom so that you recognise there’s things that need to be addressed.”
Freeze most oftentimes shows up as procrastination. It can definitely have other iterations, but that’s one of the most prevalent ways that it shows up. Also, I see a very, very strong correlation with perfectionism, where if I cannot be flawless at something, I’m just going to stand still. Or I’m sure you’ve seen this too, people who want to start their own business or become a practitioner or help other people and they’re like, “One more certification. Let me just get one more. Let me go to one more school, one more this. Let me just stay frozen in this space where I’m not really taken action on what I want to do.” It creates that freeze, that stagnation, that procrastination.
Then the fawn response, the modern iteration of that is people-pleasing. Like I mentioned before, there are some times when it’s totally called for and when it will absolutely save you, the same way it could save you from the mountain lion. But I would say far more often than not, especially as it relates to being invested in the opinions of others, far more often we are not actually in a highly threatened situation. We have just conditioned a defence mechanism that probably really served you well in your childhood. [laughs] Shocker, right?
A lot of times, if you’ve developed a strong people-pleasing tendency, or sometimes we’ll say “I just don’t like conflict” or “I don’t want to rock the boat” – we have all of these nice ways to say it, like we think it’s nobility but it’s really poison. We have all of these ways to say that, but it’s likely that you developed that early on, realising that “Ooh, dealing with an alcoholic parent, maybe the best way for me to stay safe is walking on eggshells and making sure that they’re okay and putting their needs first” and then you got to fly under the radar, and then here you are in your adult life going, “Why are all of my friendships and work relationships walking all over me? Why can’t I speak up for myself?”
It’s about figuring out, when do any of these modern iterations show up for you in a way that they’re actually not keeping you safe but rather impeding where you want to go in your life? And really allowing nuance with all of them.
00:40:36
Chris Sandel: When you’re starting to do this work with clients, is the first step with this really just that awareness piece of like “In what scenarios am I falling into each of these different four categories?” Or is it likely that someone has one category that they will typically fall into in all situations?
Amy Green Smith: No, I think, again, we’re so vast as humans that you might really get a lot of anxiety and/or a fight response around certain people in your family. Maybe you come from a family where you scream and yell, and that’s how you work it out. But at work, that’s not the culture that you’re a part of, so you go into fawn when you feel threatened. We have all sorts of different defence tactics depending on what type of threat we’re experiencing.
But yes, I think my clients and students would wish that they had a dollar every time that they’ve heard me say ‘awareness is the win’, because we can’t do anything until we’re really clear about what’s happening. I’ll often give them this metaphor of it’s like we have been avoiding this one room in our home, and everything else in the house is nice and pristine, and everyone can see all of these rooms, but not that room. We’re not looking in there, and I don’t want to see all the piles of shit in there.
Then finally, it starts bursting at the seams of the door and it’s starting to seep into the house and you just can’t ignore it anymore. It’s starting to affect the plumbing or all these other things. So you go in and you turn the lights on, and you are overwhelmed, because in this corner you see religious trauma, and in this corner you see all of this fatphobia and body image issues. Over here we’ve got Mom and Dad, and over here we’ve got work. You just go, “How on earth am I going to be able to sort through all of this?”
The work that we do is take each pile at a time and go, “Let’s work through this. Let’s get this out of the way.” Eventually what we end up with, after some time and effort, is a pretty decently cleaned room. Then every once in a while there might be some piles that start to accumulate in the corner, but you are aware of it, and you go, “Oh, I see you, body dysmorphia. I see you, eating disorder in the corner. Fuck no. I know how this goes, and I also have all of these awesome tools.” You can bust out your Swiffer and you can bust out your vacuum and you can bust out your organisational system.
And that really is how it works in personal development. It doesn’t mean you’re immune to developing more piles in that room; it just means that now you are aware of what’s happening and you also have the tools to handle it much, much quicker.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I actually really like that as an analogy. It’s not a one and done thing; it’s something that you learn the skills, but you then need to keep working on it again and again and again.
Amy Green Smith: That’s right. I oftentimes will say it’s a lot like tending to your health. But we don’t see personal development through that lens because we think we need to be fixed. We think, “If I’ve had enough conversations about my childhood or about my body or about whatever, I should get to a point where I’m done.” And that’s kind of like saying you’re done drinking all the water you need to drink or you’re done with all the dentist appointments you have to go to. It’s like, no. We’re never going to be done with that. We have to maintain.
And the same is true for our emotional wellbeing and our mental health. That stuff still needs your attention. So to me, it becomes about not something that needs fixing but just a new way of engaging with life, a new sort of operating manual, so to speak.
Chris Sandel: That makes sense. I think it would be useful to go through some of the different techniques that you use or exercises you do with clients or just other areas connected to all of this.
00:45:15
I know you recently had a podcast about looking at what is sustainable in terms of achievement, because I think achievement and what someone can do – we have this real hustle culture, and people should be doing more, and I don’t think that really sells people particularly well. For a lot of clients, they are reaching this point of realising they are on their own trajectory and they need to switch, or they’ve hit a point of burnout or they’re contemplating making that change because they see what it’s like at this point. So I guess just talking about the difference between achievement that fulfils you versus begins to steal your joy.
Amy Green Smith: That’s a great question. I think this can be applicable to anything that you have a value around. If you have a value around achievement, let’s say, essentially the way that I speak about value systems is that a value is a component that has to be present in your life in order for you to be fulfilled.
For example, I have an example around creativity. If I do not have some sort of creative project going on, I can feel it emotionally. So the idea is that it’s something that needs to be present in your life in order for you to be fulfilled, and the absence of that thing leaves you significantly less fulfilled.
Now, the problem with values is that there’s a very fine line between when it is incredibly fulfilling for you and then where it’s in control of you. What usually happens in that ‘in control of me’ phase is we say, “If I’m not accomplishing this thing, then I’m not worthy, then I’m not valuable.” It’s the collapse with our self-worth. We’re no longer saying, “I would like to achieve this certain thing” – maybe it’s a promotion, starting a business, writing a book, whatever. We’re no longer saying, “That is something that I know will bring me joy, I’m lit up by that.” Now we’re saying, “I’m not valuable or enough unless I accomplish that thing.” So now our worthiness is contingent on the accomplishment, instead of that accomplishment fuelling our life.
Another sticky one around values is impact or philanthropy or caretaking for others. There are some folks who genuinely are lit up by caregiving. But there is a very fine line of where that now is in control of you, where you don’t feel like it’s necessarily contributing to your joy, but now you’ve gone off the deep end into obligation.
Really the answer with all of this stuff is having a really clear understanding of “What do I value about accomplishment?” Let’s take that one in particular. Is this something that I actually value, or is it something that has been imposed on me by perhaps my family of origin, my culture, or even society at large? Is it a medley of both? Because that definitely happens as well. And what relationship do I want to have to accomplishment?
Usually what we can do with that is look at, where have things been painful? I’ll use a different value. I have a very strong value on accuracy and precision. I like when things are detailed and buttoned up and precise. There’s times when that really serves me, when all systems fire appropriately with a client and they get all the information that they need. And then there’s other times, Chris, when it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning and I am going back and forth between one tiny little line on my website and going, “Oh wait, does that need to be moved over to the left or the right?” Now that’s a situation where that’s not actually bringing me joy, that’s bringing me anxiety. That’s bringing me overwhelm and stress.
So when I look at, when does this value serve me? It serves me in these incidents. And then it is in control of me or steals my joy in these other situations. Really being clear about writing that out, like, “Here’s the emotion of fulfilment around accomplishment, let’s say, or here’s the emotion of angst, discomfort, frustration” – because as we were saying earlier, emotions are just messaging. They’re there to tell you, “Hey, I think this value is getting a little bit out of control. I think you’re collapsing all of your identity or all of your self-worth with this one particular achievement.”
So it’s not to say you’re wrong, you’re bad. It’s just to be like, hey bitch, let’s pay attention here a little bit. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: I think one of the things that came to mind when you were saying that was where it feels like it switches from being process-based to outcome-based. When the value is “I’m enjoying doing this thing and being in the moment and I’m enjoying it for its own sake”, that’s great. And then when it becomes about “I have to do this thing because this is part of my identity” or “I have to reach this amount of money or I have to do this thing”, it becomes outcome-based, and that can then start to suck the joy out of that value.
Amy Green Smith: I think this is another great opportunity for nuance, because I do think that there’s times when the outcome is so rewarding. If anybody out there is a parent who had a strong struggle with fertility and you finally get to the point where you’re able to bring a life into this world or you’re able to adopt or something, that outcome – my God, that makes the journey worth it.
I had a situation recently on a much smaller scale to talk about that value around creativity; my husband and I pretty much lose our minds around Halloween. We build props from scratch and we have all these animatronics and we work on things for months. I mean, Chris, it’s out of control. We’re going to a Halloween Con in February. [laughs] We might need an intervention. But the process of that, the journey of that, is a blast – and the outcome of Halloween night, when we are able to showcase everything that we’ve worked on, is also fulfilling.
I think the nuance, the place to look, is “Am I doing something either for an outcome that is for someone else’s fulfilment, or am I doing it for an outcome and I fucking hate the journey?” Those are the issues where I think we really need to look at, is that outcome actually worth it?
Chris Sandel: I definitely agree with you on that, and having the nuance with it. That was good for you bringing back the nuance.
00:53:08
One of the exercises that you talk about in one of the handouts you have is “What’s my motivation?” Are you able to walk through this exercise?
Amy Green Smith: Sure. The deal with how we are motivated as humans is we are typically either in the pursuit of pleasure or in the avoidance of pain. Those are the two major human drivers. Whatever we are going for or working towards is typically because we think it will either give us some sort of pleasure or it will allow us to avoid some sort of pain.
Within all of that is human emotion. What we usually are involved in or processing carries some sort of human emotion, and we’ve kind of been taught in our society that if it carries some sort of negative emotion – or what I would rather say is an uncomfortable emotion, because I don’t think it’s necessarily negative, I just think it’s uncomfortable – we go “Run away from that at all costs. Don’t sit with it, don’t feel it, don’t recognise what’s happening.”
So I think we don’t necessarily notice that we can fuel our behaviour from any type of motivator, whether it being an emotion that feels comfortable to us or a mission or a belief system or something that is of strong value to us. It’s not dissimilar to the idea of ‘the glass is half full or half empty’. It’s the same fucking glass. It just has to do with how you are perceiving it.
The same is true with motivation. You might recognise your behaviour, you observe your behaviour, and notice what you did in your life, whether it’s something you did or you did not do. Recognise, what was the motivation behind that decision? And almost always, it’s tethered to some sort of emotion. Not always, but frequently.
You could notice that let’s say you’re at work and you chose not to speak up in a meeting. So you’re looking back at the end of the day and you’re trying to categorise, what was my motivation of staying silent at that time? What were the emotions I was feeling? Hmm, well, I was definitely feeling a sense of fear and threat, like if I were to speak up, what does that say about me? What does that mean about me? Am I being difficult? Am I being adversarial? Is it my place? All of that.
Okay, what would that have shifted in that scenario if I would have been motivated by a value of impact or an emotion of competence? We can choose any number of motivators. If we were to look at that situation and do what I like to call ‘declaring the do-over’, where we say, “Next time, if I were to go into that situation and say, ‘I want you to behave from a place of confidence’ or ‘I want you to behave from a place of impact’”, how would your behaviour be different in that scenario?
It’s a way for us to basically shift how we’re looking at the glass. If we’re used to looking at it half empty, let’s shift and say, what if it’s half full? What if it’s filled with whiskey? What if it’s my favourite tea? I’m going to drink every last drop, right? It’s just about switching your perspective and how you engage with life based off of your values and your desired emotions.
Chris Sandel: When you’re then doing that with a client, are you having them say, “Cool, I’m going to continue to role-play this exercise in my mind so that when this comes up again, I’m going to feel like that person that values competency or values impact and it’s going to be an instant reflex?” In terms of the actual change work, what is the next step?
Amy Green Smith: That’s a great question. I oftentimes will say there’s something internal and then there’s something external. The internal is how we’re going to gas ourselves up, how we’re going to speak to ourselves, how we are going to do maybe some power posing in the bathroom before we go into the meeting. It’s the internal cheerleader, ‘you’ve got this’ sort of thing. And that might involve journalling ahead of time. I have tons of different tools and tactics that I’ll give folks.
Then the external component is going to be, what does that actually sound like? This is the thing that I tend to rehearse with students quite frequently. If they are going to go into this meeting – let’s use the same analogy – they’re going into this meeting, and what they really want to share is if they continue down the path that the company’s been going down, there are some severe impacts to their particular department. They want to be really clear about that.
So we’ll have a full conversation about exactly what it is that they want to say, and then we’ll talk about anatomy of that conversation and how that can actually be impactful. For example, if you refrain from using words like ‘you are always doing this’ or ‘when you send me these messages’ – if you remove that accusational tone and say something like, “When emails get processed like this” or “When certain things get communicated in this way” and you’re phrasing it like that without saying ‘you, you, you, you, you’ or ‘your department’, it lessens the impact. There’s tons of different things like that around, again, anatomy of conversation that we’ll really set up.
00:59:28
But one of my favourite tools is called the New Definition of Success. It’s basically three columns. In the first column, you give yourself full freedom to want whatever you want about this specific experience. So if we’re using this same example, in that first column you might write, “I really want to speak up for myself. I want to be heard” – which obviously we cannot control, but this is just full rein to dial in your order with the universe. “I want them to see it my way. I want them to change the different protocols so we can have a smoother impact”, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.
Then in the middle column, you write all of the things that you can actually control. “These are the things that I want to say to myself as I go in there. I want to remind yourself, ‘your voice matters’. I’m going to say over and over to myself, ‘your voice matters, your voice matters, your voice matters’. I want to handle myself with grace and kindness. I don’t want to raise my voice. I want to control the cadence. I want to speak slowly. I want to take deep breaths as I need to. I want to be kind and compassionate. This is how I want to show up.” So that’s a little vision boarding for what you want that situation to be.
Then in the final column, “Despite the outcome, my self-worth is defined by the following.” Then you get to decide that, because there is no fucking self-worth store that you can roll into and grab some enoughness. Even if you look at the dictionary definition, it is one’s own sense of self-worth. That means you get to call the shots on that. So in that final column, I say, “Even if I make a mess of this, if I don’t handle myself with grace, my worth is not contingent on this one scenario. My worth is already here, no matter what happens. I can course-correct. I am defined by…” anything you want to be defined by. “My compassion, my tenacity, my kindness”, whatever.
It’s a way to go into scenarios where we are really highly invested in the outcome and to let go of the things that are actually not in our control.
Chris Sandel: I really, really like that. And I like it because I think it’s applicable to so many different aspects. You were talking there about work, but as you were talking about that, I was thinking about a client who’s like, “I want to be eating more for breakfast” or “I want to start eating breakfast because I haven’t been doing that at this point.” We can still go through that same process of looking at, what would you like it to be like? What are the fears that are coming up that are connected to that? Even if it goes badly, how do you want to remember your enoughness?
Doing that level of planning and forethought to help have that be the best experience no matter what. And then you just rinse and repeat. You’re like, “Cool, let’s now reflect on how that went and then let’s do this again.”
Amy Green Smith: Yes. And I think what we don’t give enough space for is the emotions that follow suit, regardless of what happens. Let’s say you have a week where you are killing it on your eating of breakfast. So you have a subsequent emotion of pride and thrill. In our culture, we go, “That must mean I’m valuable. That must mean I’m enough.” And conversely, if we have an emotion that says “I should feel guilty, I should feel shame, I am worthless”, then we go, “That must mean that that’s true, that I’m not enough, that I am a sum of this one scenario.”
So I think it’s really important that we recognise that even if we have a situation where we’re kind of disappointed in ourselves or we’re not that happy with how we conducted ourselves or we do think we could do something better, to take those emotions and actually allow them to exist and just go, “Yeah, that’s kind of disappointing” and not make the jump to “That must mean I’m shitty, that must mean I’m not enough, that must mean I’m not valuable” – it just means the situation sucks. It doesn’t mean you suck. And that’s going to carry emotion.
One of the examples I use is I used to do a lot of community theatre. I would go on these auditions, and I would really, really want to get a specific part. I would give it my all. And then I wouldn’t get it, and that is going to incur some grief. That’s going to incur some emotional processing. So I would just let myself be disappointed. I would cry and be upset and have that sadness. Allow it to be there.
But what I did not do was take that and make it mean that I’m not enough, I’m not worthy, I’m a shit human. No. It just means I didn’t get something I wanted, and that sucks and hurts, and I just need to feel it.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, the Brene Brown difference between guilt and shame, ‘I did a bad thing’ versus ‘I am a bad thing’.
Amy Green Smith: That’s right.
Chris Sandel: Being able to realise it is okay to be disappointed about something that happened, and that doesn’t define who you are on some universal basis.
01:05:45
Amy Green Smith: Yes. One of the tools that I live to give folks around this in particular is a concept that I call ‘Find My Truth’. It’s an acronym. It’s FMT, and Find My Truth is an easy way to remember the FMT. The F stands for, what are the Facts? The M stands for, what am I Making up? And the T stands for, what is the Truth?
In some scenarios, you’re going to have to define your truth versus someone else’s truth. In the example that I just gave, the facts are I gave it my all, I went to this audition, and they said, “You’re not getting the part.” What am I making up? This is the part where we usually jump to conclusions and we go “I suck.” This is where we allow the shame. “I am wrong. I am faulty. I’m damaged” instead of going, what I’m making up is that I’m never going to work again or that I’m not enough or whatever.
Then the truth is what you want to come home to. It’s your authentic self. It’s getting outside of that inner critic and saying, the truth is, I’m not defined by one fucking audition. The truth is, I’m an incredible human. The truth is, it hurts to not get what you want. And then someone else’s truth in that situation might be – and we don’t know this, so this could be another thing that we’re making up – but the truth could be, the director doesn’t think I’m that good or doesn’t think that I’m enough. That does not have to be my truth. But that could also be something we’re making up.
But it can really be helpful in situations where the other person’s truth is really clear. For example, you might have a client who’s dealing with family who thinks that it’s an abomination that you’re not dieting. Like “You’re letting yourself go” and all of those horrible narratives. If you’re looking at this, you’re going, what’s the truth? The facts are, my mom feels this way about diet culture and I feel this way. We feel very, very polarized about that. What am I making up? I’m making up that I’m a disgrace, that I’m not enough, whatever, that I should just conform, that I should make her happy, that it’s my responsibility to take care of someone else’s emotions. What is the truth? The truth is, I am allowed to make powerful decisions for my body. Full stop. Whatever your truth is. But you might have to say, and my mom’s truth is very different than mine. But I’m going to allow that to be hers.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it’s not that you both have to be on the same page. You can be your own individual. And again, this comes back to the people-pleasing piece; this comes back to the dealing with uncomfortable conversations or uncomfortable emotions. But it doesn’t negate the fact that you can have that truth for yourself.
Amy Green Smith: 100%. So then that truth, whatever you come to as your truth, then becomes your new empowering self-talk. In that scenario I just gave, your new truth or your new empowering self-talk might be, “I am allowed to make powerful decisions for my body.” Or “I do not have to make excuses or I do not have to explain the choices I’ve made for myself.”
It could be any number of things, but that then becomes what you remind yourself of, over and over and over again, because that discontentment with someone else not approving of you or not being on the same page as you, not wanting the same things as you – that’s going to carry emotion. It’s going to feel like guilt. It’s going to feel like you’re doing something wrong, but you’re not. I have a whole spiel on guilt, which we don’t need to go into.
But in those situations, when I contend with those phrases from my mom saying shit to me about “This would all be simpler if you would just lose weight” or blah, blah, blah, those are the moments when, either out loud to her as a boundary or internally, or both, I remind myself, “You are allowed to make powerful decisions for your body.” Or you say to her, “Discussing what I choose to consume is not something that’s up for debate.” And you shut that shit down. [laughs] We could go into a whole thing around that.
So that’s how you would operate with the ‘Find My Truth’ tool.
Chris Sandel: For the ‘Find My Truth’ tool, you were talking about there in terms of your mother, sort of externalising it. But does it still work if you’re using it for the inner critic and internalising it? If we’re thinking about – I know with eating disorder recovery, there’s a lot of talk about ‘my healthy self’ and ‘my eating disorder self’. So I’m wondering if you think it would work for that as well.
Amy Green Smith: Yeah, absolutely, it definitely will. A lot of times what we do is take a certain set of facts that’s going on – like maybe you have an adverse reaction to a specific type of food that you consumed. That’s the facts. The fact is, this doesn’t sit well with my system. I feel nauseated or I get hives or something. What am I making up? I’m making up that I’m doing it wrong. I’m making up that my body is fighting with me. I’m making up that this has to be harder for me than it is for anybody else. What’s the truth? The truth is, you are figuring out how to have the most harmonious relationship with your body, and it’s just communicating with you. The truth is, my body is just communicating with me. All I have to do is listen. So yeah, you could absolutely use it internally as well.
01:12:03
Chris Sandel: Nice. Connected to this is progressive language. Talk about what this is and how it can be helpful.
Amy Green Smith: Ooh, I love progressive language. This really has a lot to do with how the subconscious mind absorbs beliefs. If you’re not familiar, anyone listening, it’s theorised that our conscious faculty of our mind is roughly 5% to 12% of our mind’s power. The subconscious is roughly 88% to 95%. Depends who you ask. But we can see that a large swath of our mind’s power is going to our subconscious, beneath our consciousness.
What’s housed in the subconscious part of the mind is our belief system, is our values, is our fight/flight response, is our habits. Oftentimes, when we try to consciously feed our mind with a positive mantra, like “You are allowed to feel what you feel” let’s say, or “I powerfully advocate for my own needs” – let’s say that’s the mantra you’re trying to adopt – if there is a counternarrative in the subconscious that says “Staying silent is safer than being vocal”, guess which one’s going to win? The subconscious sends in the guard dog, which is the inner critic that says, “That’s bullshit. You can’t believe that. That’s not true. You can’t advocate for your own needs.”
This is why when we try to use empowering mantras that are such a leap from where we are right now, the inner critic is doing its job, going, “Hey, that doesn’t compute with what we know to be true. People-pleasing is safe. What are you talking about?” Well, one of the things that changes what beliefs are held in the subconscious faculty of the mind – one is repetition; we talked about that earlier. Another is hypnosis.
But another major piece of it is that there is not such extreme cognitive dissonance. That’s what’s happening. Cognitive dissonance is just when we’re trying to hold two opposing belief systems. One is in the conscious, one is in the subconscious. If we are using something like progressive language, we’re making it more palatable for the conscious mind and for the subconscious mind so it doesn’t send in the inner critic.
So what is progressive language? Instead of saying something like, “I powerfully speak up for myself” or “I am capable of making healthy decisions for my body” and you’re like, “Fuck no, I’m not” – your instant gut kickback is like, “No, that’s never going to work” – progressive language is where we say something at the beginning of the statement like, “I’m exploring what it looks like to speak up for myself.” Or “I’m on my way to nurturing a healthy relationship with my body.”
Any type of semantics like that, it’s like is gives that little guard dog of the inner critic a little treat. [laughs] It’s like, “Okay boy, just settle down there a little bit.” So the subconscious is like, “All right, I’m listening” – because it’s not so far-fetched. It’s not so incongruent with what’s happening. You’re like, “I can get on board with being on the way to changing something.”
Language like ‘I’m exploring’, ‘I’m entertaining’, ‘I’m relearning’ – it really is honouring the journey, and it also allows you to start changing some of those scripts in a way that’s much more palatable for your mind.
Chris Sandel: I am doing this a lot already with clients around their goals. We’ll talk about, “What is something that you want to change?” Again, it could be the breakfast example. The thing that then comes up for them is like, “But how am I going to be able to do that forever? That just feels like so much of a big change and a big thing”, in the same way as you’re saying there’s this kickback from the inner critic.
So we can then talk about, this is an experiment. You’re doing it for a day or a couple of days or two weeks or whatever. It’s an experiment. This isn’t a permanent change. You’re just having a look at this. Let’s do this experiment, run it; what is the data, what is the feedback that you get? What do you notice? What was helpful about this, what was not helpful about this? It becomes a lot less threatening when it’s ‘we’re doing this as an experiment’ versus ‘you’re now making this change, and for the next however long it is that you’re going to live, you’re going to have to keep this thing up’.
Amy Green Smith: That’s right. Yes. I will oftentimes use a visualisation of, I want you to imagine that you are watching yourself as you’re going through this process – watching yourself on a movie screen. Observe that character. What do you think she’s feeling or he’s feeling? What is motivating what they just said? You’re examining what happened for you. And this is the same with what you just talked about. Whether it’s changing foods or how we’re engaging with food – okay, what was happening for that character?
It’s so much more voyeuristic, and we can give a much more objective assessment without judgment and go, “Okay, I think that character is still rooted in some fatphobia, or she’s definitely got some diet culture stuff. I can see that there’s an emotion of shame that’s coming up. I think there’s probably some religious trauma that’s happening.” Then when you’re giving that little assessment, you can go, “You know what? I think I need to journal a little bit about the correlation between my religious upbringing and pleasure in food.”
But that’s really difficult to do when you’re standing inside your own body, shaming it to death, going, “Why’d you fuck up the assignment?” or “I can’t imagine getting to that point.” If it’s just an experiment, just watch a show. Watch a little video in your mind. That can be a little more difficult if you’re not super visual, but even like what you’re saying – sometimes I’ll do a scientific perspective, almost like, you know those – I guess it’s not really a two-way mirror, it’s a one-way mirror, and then one person can see through it.
Chris Sandel: Like police shows.
Amy Green Smith: Yes, right. Almost like you’re standing there with a little clipboard and you’re observing the subject and going, “Mm, it appears that the subject is experiencing a lot of this, and we had some shame surface over here.” Then you go, “Oh, okay, here’s the items I need to bring up with my therapist. Here’s what I need to talk to Chris about.” It becomes a lot easier to dissect and move forward.
Chris Sandel: I agree. I think any time you can find a way around feeling like ‘this is about me’ – sometimes it’s like, “Let’s imagine that a friend was coming to you with this thing going on, and lo and behold, their experience is similar to yours; what advice would you have for that friend?” And it’s amazing the amount of information someone can come up with when it’s about a friend as opposed to “It feels like you’re about to ask me to do all of these things.”
Amy Green Smith: That’s right.
01:20:14
Chris Sandel: Another thing that you talk about is the difference between ‘I can’t’ and ‘I won’t’. I really love this. Talk about this.
Amy Green Smith: I’ve often thought a lot of times we will say ‘I can’t’ when what we really mean is ‘I won’t’. We’ll say something like, “I can’t possibly not text my ex. I just have to.” It really is an ‘I won’t’. So ‘I can’t’, at least in my mind, is really reserved for something that’s not humanly possible.
I can say, “I can’t sprout wings out of my back and go fly around the neighbourhood.” That’s not humanly possible. That’s an accurate statement. I can’t. But saying, “I can’t make peace with my body” or “I can’t create a thriving relationship with food” – no. That is humanly possible. What you’re saying is ‘I won’t’.
So I would really encourage you, as an exercise, as you’re going through your life, when you hear yourself say ‘I can’t’, ask yourself, is this not humanly possible? Or is this a matter of ‘I won’t’? I think more often than not, you’re going to find that it’s the latter.
Chris Sandel: How is this then coming up with clients, or where do you use this a lot with clients?
Amy Green Smith: It really depends, but in my world it’s almost always around speaking up or having a tough conversation, establishing a boundary. It’s “I can’t tell him that. I can’t say that. I don’t think I could ever be honest about that.” I’m like, can’t or won’t? And a lot of times what that is – and again, I see this very disproportionately with women – is there’s this belief that it’s important to take care of everyone else’s emotions over my own. So if anyone else is going to incur pain or hurt, I am responsible for that and I need to mitigate it and rectify it at all costs.
What that means for many of my clients is that they will lean on the crutch of ‘I can’t’ when really they absolutely are capable; it’s just that they won’t because they don’t want to deal with having to really sit with that idea of “I’ve always believed that I have to take care of everybody else’s emotions. Who am I if I let go of that?” There’s a lot to unpack, but that’s how it shows up typically for me.
01:23:09
Chris Sandel: What about hypnotherapy? This is something you made reference to in terms of your training. Talk about how you use this with clients. When do you use it? I haven’t really done or covered hypnotherapy on the podcast before, so you have the stage to talk about it, being the expert.
Amy Green Smith: I think what we don’t realise about hypnosis is that really all that it is, is a slowing down of the brainwave state. When we are awake, our brainwaves are at a specific currency or speed, and as we go to sleep at night, they will start to slow down. We pass through a brainwave state that’s called theta. Then when we go to sleep, we are in full delta brainwave state, meaning that they’ve slowed down considerably.
What’s important to understand about this is that that middle ground between asleep and awake – again, just a slowing down of the brainwaves – when you’re in that theta brainwave state, that inner critic, the little guard dog between the conscious and the subconscious, goes to sleep. What that means is if I’m feeding things to somebody in hypnosis, there’s not an extreme amount of kickback. That inner critic isn’t going, “That’s dumb! That’s not true! You’re not really in a forest right now!” It’s totally asleep. [laughs]
So it’s highly, highly suggestible. It’ll allow messages into the subconscious at a much faster rate than if we were trying to do that in our waking consciousness as we’re engaging in our life. That’s why it takes, consciously, extreme repetition, and that’s why so many of us throw in the towel, because we don’t have the stamina – and it’s not really realistic – to have all of that repetition in order for something to anchor into the subconscious.
What it feels like – I think many people probably have had this experience where you are driving somewhere, let’s say, and you get to your destination and you’re like, “Holy shit, I do not remember any of that drive.” That means you were in a hypnotic trance. Your subconscious mind, which houses habits and beliefs and all that familiarity, knows exactly how to get to your destination. It knows how to drive. You don’t have to tell your subconscious how to drive. It’s already embedded in the habits. So it gets you where you need to go, but your conscious mind is going over, “Ugh, I can’t believe my mom said that to me. I wish I would’ve said this. What am I going to do about” – conscious mind’s all fucking active, but the subconscious is like “I’ve got you” and gets you exactly where you need to go.
So we go through it naturally at least twice a day. Most of us do it more frequently. You can go into hypnotic trance when you’re reading a book or watching a movie, when you’re kind of transported. But we go through it naturally as we awake and as we go to sleep. One of my favourite little tactics that I’ll do is as I’m starting to go to sleep, I’ve noticed when I’m in that phase – and the more I practiced it, the more in tune I got with it – I can feel when I’m in theta, and that’s when I’ll just say all the positive mantras that I can say. [laughs] I’m like, “You’re fully capable of speaking your truth. You are a powerful badass bitch” or whatever. That’s when I’ll repeat those things in my mind to help them slip in a little easier.
But the way that it shows up with clients, I do a very specific programme with folks. The programme has nine different modules, and each module has an accompanying hypnotic track that goes with it.
01:27:19
Something that I think gets missed a lot in hypnosis and in meditation in general is sensory acuity. Not everybody is visual, despite how our society thinks that everyone is. Not everybody can do guided imagery. In fact, it’s incredibly frustrating because as you’re trying to see this forest and find your happy place, you’re like, “I cannot see a goddamn thing.” Now, we know that everybody’s capable because we all have our senses. If you are a seeing individual, you can visualise. But it does not mean that that’s your preference. It could be that you tune in way more to the kinesthetic and how things feel. You could be highly audio-digital, which means that it’s basically words and voice, so hearing statements or mantras or empowering conversation in a hypnotic trance is more therapeutic and healing for you. It could be more auditory. It really just depends.
What I make sure to do is when I present these hypnosis tracks that accompany the modules, I try to make them where they could work for any sensory acuity. That is one thing I see all the time, where people are like, “Meditation doesn’t work for me.” I’m like, I mean, okay. [laughs] We can all do it, but a lot of times people have been given it in a package that’s not congruent with them, so they think they’re the one that’s wrong when there’s so many right ways to do it. So yeah, that’s how it shows up in my work.
Chris Sandel: With those modules and the person then listening to that, are they listening just as they’re about to fall off to sleep?
Amy Green Smith: Yeah. I always give them two options. I’ll give them one track that fades to music so that they can listen just as they’re going to sleep – which your subconscious mind can still hear even if you’re asleep, but it just doesn’t feel as effective to you because your conscious mind isn’t looped in. So we do like a little bit of some consciousness there.
But what I do in the tracks, typically, is I will put binaural beats into the track that are designed to mimic the theta waves, so it helps get you into that trance state no matter what time of the day it is. So it honestly doesn’t matter. In fact, I’ll tell people as long as you’re not lifting heavy machinery or driving, you can listen to it on low while you’re cooking, while you’re putting your makeup on, while you’re doing laundry, whatever, because the subconscious mind can hear it. Consciously, again, that 5% to 12% is just going to be focussed on the dishes or focussed on the task at hand or whatever, and the subconscious is like, “I hear what’s happening back here.”
So it can actually be more advantageous to have the conscious mind distracted. There’s a lot of right answers with that.
Chris Sandel: That’s good to know, because as you were talking about that, I was thinking about my own experience. When I am listening to something, I am so focussed on listening to that thing that I become fully conscious of it. The thought of putting something on and then falling asleep to it – five hours later, I will still be listening to that thing. It feels like I have an inability to fall asleep while listening to something. So I think maybe having something that is distracting me within the present, whether that is I’m trying to drive a car – or not trying to drive a car, I am driving a car [laughs] – something that is keeping my conscious mind more active.
Amy Green Smith: Well, that’s the only caveat I would say. Do almost anything except drive a car. [laughs] Drive a car or heavy machinery. I would say really anything else. But there’s also such thing as a flow state. You can be doing full-on aerobic activity and be completely in a hypnotic trance. It’s pretty fascinating.
But my first question with you when you said that is, ooh, is there a hypervigilance for you around “I can’t miss something” or “It’s not safe if I miss something”? I would just be really curious of your history with that.
Chris Sandel: At least on the surface, it doesn’t feel like that’s the thing. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just so auditory that when I have – and this is especially the case if I have something plugged into my ears. If it’s coming out of speakers, it’s different to if I’m wearing ear pods. But if I’m wearing something in my ear, I am so attuned to what I’m listening to.
But it doesn’t feel like it comes from a place of fear or worrying I’m going to miss something; that feels like it is the most engaging way for me to consume content. I’m hugely into music. I spend so much of my time listening to music, so maybe there is some connection there. But interestingly, I can have music on all the time and work to the music, and that can go into the background quite well. But there’s something about talking specifically that messes with me and just doesn’t allow that to happen.
Amy Green Smith: Based off of that, I would say you probably just have a very, very strong sensory preference of auditory stuff. You would probably really, really benefit from subliminal messaging that actually for the most part just sounds like music, but there’s voices layered beneath it. We do that in my programme as well. The week where – well, I guess it’s more like the month that we focus on belief systems, my students will craft new beliefs and then we have them made into a subliminal track. So they’re able to listen to that all the time. It just sounds like music, but beneath that consciousness are all of the new belief systems that they want to attach to.
But I would also argue that you probably are very much in hypnosis. Everybody experiences it differently, and the students in my class do get some one-on-one sessions, so sometimes we’ll do hypnosis live on a specific issue or something that they want to do. But yeah, I think you could really, really benefit from that subconscious piece of it and having it be subliminal.
Chris Sandel: Okay. I didn’t know of that, so that’s super interesting and something I’ll look into. Even just as I’m thinking about this, my ability to recall information that I’ve listened to is really high, and I can even place where I listened to it. I can think of a particular podcast episode and I can know where I was when I listened to that episode, if I’m walking somewhere or whatever. So there is something about auditory that really gets imprinted on me.
Amy Green Smith: Yeah, I would think that would be the auditory equivalent of having a photographic memory. I was just trying to think – I was like, maybe that’s ‘audiophonic’. What would that be called? But yeah, I would think that’s the exact same sort of thing. People say, “I can see exactly what that statement was on a page”, and you’re doing the exact same thing, just with a different sense. It’s fascinating.
Chris Sandel: It’s not 100% perfect, but it is pretty amazing. It’s like, I listened to that podcast four years ago, and I know I walked over that bridge when I was listening to that podcast.
Amy Green Smith: Yeah. Of course we all have access to all of our senses, but there usually is one that’s more prevalent and that we tend to favour. In our culture, we tend to assume that most people are visual.
A little test that you can do for yourself is if you hold up your hand directly in front of your face, maybe about a foot in front of your face, directly at eye level, and you close your eyes, see if you can see a picture of your hand. Can you still see what that looks like?
Chris Sandel: Not particularly well. [laughs]
Amy Green Smith: Right. That’s always my clue really quickly that somebody is probably not heavy on the visual. But as I mentioned, people will experience hypnosis completely differently, and one of the ways people experience it is hyper, hyper awareness, where you could hear a pin drop, you can hear any little sound that’s happening in the room. My guess is that would be the case with you. It just means that’s how you theta, babe. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: [laughs] Yeah. Or even just thinking about it, if the auditory is paired with visual, then that works. My recall for movies is pretty good in a similar way. I can remember where I watched particular movies or remember a lot about films, even if I’ve only seen them once 20 years ago.
Amy Green Smith: Yes. That’s so cool. It’s so fascinating to me. I am not that way, and I’m also increasingly not that way as I’ve aged. [laughs] I used to have such better recall and memory, and I’m like, well, all right, this is just part of how it shifts.
Chris Sandel: It’s hilarious; my wife knows the lyrics to so many songs, but when I ask her what is the song, she’s like, “I don’t know what the song is. I’m just singing it.” And she has terrible recall of movies. She’ll get halfway through something and she’s like, “I think I’ve seen this.” I’m like, “Yeah, we watched this three years ago.” [laughs]
Amy Green Smith: Yes. I’m a bit like your wife in that way, but I do have a superpower in knowing and recognising certain characters and being like, “Oh my gosh, they were in that one show in the ’90s.” I’m pretty good with the names. And then my husband does that thing where he will constantly mess up names, kind of like what we think a middle-aged mom would do, like pop culture references. My husband does that. He’ll be like, “Oh, that’s Chris Stapleton.” I’m like, “Babe, that’s Chris Pine.” Or something like that. He just messes it up all the time. It’s the best. I always tell him, “I love that you came with this feature. It’s so fun.” [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Amy, this has been a really lovely conversation. Where can people go if they want to find out more about you?
Amy Green Smith: My corner of the internet is over at www.amygreensmith.com. All of those names are spelled the basic bitch way. [laughs] Green with no ‘e’ at the end. And like any self-respecting Gen Xer, I hang out the most on Instagram. You can find me under the handle @heyamygreensmith, and under that handle pretty much on all social platforms.
But over on my website, as Chris mentioned, I’ve got tons of freebies. I’ve got some hypnosis tracks over there. I’ve been doing my own podcast for almost 10 years. Tons of stuff there. A free workbook for you. So just come over and hang out and grab yourself some loot.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put all those links in the show notes, and thank you once again for coming on the show.
Amy Green Smith: Oh, absolutely. It was a pleasure.
Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Amy Green Smith. I really love what she has to say, so if you enjoyed this conversation, then please check out her podcast and get the free guide from her site, because there’s lots of useful exercises in there that we didn’t get to cover.
01:40:24
I have a recommendation that I want to make of something to check out. It is a British film called Brian and Charles. A friend sent me the trailer for this a couple of months ago, and I’ve been looking forward to watching it for a while now and finally got the chance to. The film is about Brian, who is a single guy in his mid-forties or late forties; he lives in rural Wales, and to fill his time he makes lots of different inventions, and none of them are particularly useful.
Then one day he invents a robot that comes to life and is called Charles. This could sound very futuristic, but it is not. The robot is made out of an old washing machine, and it looks like something out of a bad ’70s sci-fi show, but it’s actually this kind of budget-ness that makes the whole film really endearing, and it fits with the feel of how this lonely guy has little money and is just scraping by. But while the robot feels very budget, the film is actually beautifully shot. It is really well-acted. There’s this real heartwarming story of love and friendship. It’s super quirky, with this offbeat style of comedy, and it kind of reminds me of other British films or even Australian films from when I was growing up. But it is a great watch, and it’s called Brian and Charles.
So that is it for the show. I will be back next week with another episode. Until then, take care, and I’ll catch you soon.
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