The Secret to Success: How to Develop Self-Awareness with Dr. Shahana Alibhai
Have you ever set New Year's resolutions and failed to achieve them? It's okay, you're not alone. 80% of people give up on their goals by February and only 9% achieve them by the end of the year. In this episode, we'll talk about how to stick to your New Years' resolutions and achieve them. You'll learn more about establishing a personal timeline and understanding what motivates you so that you can be successful. We'll also cover what kind of obstacles you might encounter along the way and provide tips on how to overcome them with confidence and assurance.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
How Self-Awareness Leads to Success
Signs of self-awareness deficit
How to Develop Self-Awareness
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About our guest:
Dr Shahana Alibhai is a lead physician at one of British Columbia’s largest youth health centers, Dr. Alibahi works with organizations and individuals on applying the principles of the Pyramid of Optimal Health to improve mental health through healthy thinking. She is best known for her “Emotional Literacy for Better Mental Health” TEDx talk.
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Focusing on Mental Health
Research shows that building self-awareness can lead to higher levels of success in life, in terms of career goals, personal growth and more. What led you to hone in and focus on mental health?
In 2019, I stood before an audience getting my TEDx Talk shortly after the birth of my third son. On that stage I used the words, “I am a hypocrite,” because I was. I had led my life prior to that, as what I deemed as a successful physician advocating for others, helping others, coaching others. My passion seemed to be regarding mental health. But up until that point, I deep down, like many of us, believed I was too good for mental health. I believed that it was a “you” problem. It would never be a “me” problem, because in order to be a “me” problem, I had to be weak and I would never admit that to anybody. It wasn’t until the birth of my first son, now, seven years ago, that I felt myself living out that exact definition, when I was on the floor suffering from panic attacks. I used the words on that stage, postpartum depression, but truly, I also lied. It was postpartum anxiety and O C D, you see that when we say the words anxiety and depression.
Nowadays, thankfully, people will lean in, but when I start using the words suicidality, bipolar, O C D, schizophrenia, it becomes too much. We take a step back, which is why I hid myself behind the words postpartum depression. But I have to say it was that personal experience,it sounds cliché, but yes, hitting rock bottom and trying to figure out, how did everything go so wrong? How did I end up with my child at a reproductive psychiatrist office showing this stranger a diagram and grappling to her to please help me; because it wasn't about me anymore, it was about my child. So after that long road, I had to realize that medicine taught me how to take care of sick people. But it didn't teach me the premise that your brain's job isn't to keep you happy, it's to make you survive. I so wish someone had told me that on the first day of medical school or on the first day of life for that matter too. And once I realized that, then the question becomes, well, how do you train yourself? Because as a type A personality, like many other people, they say, “Okay, I understand all of that pedagogy, I understand all that, but give me this stuff. Give me the action items.” That's been my quest to try to figure out how do I train my brain to admit this chaos that we call life.
You and I had shared before we jumped on that we both had experienced postpartum anxiety and depression, and for two highly successful high achiever women, it can sometimes it could really throw you for a loop because you've spent so much time in that high achieving success, and then to all of a sudden feel like I barely wake up in the morning sometimes. I just remember a moment after having my twins, I remember falling into my husband's arms and looking at him and tears flowing down my cheeks and saying, I need help. There's something not right now. And as you said, it takes a lot of vulnerability and humility to come to a moment where you speak up and say you need help.
Struggles with Mental Health
What are some of the common signs that you see with people that are struggling with mental health? Let’s also talk about the self-awareness around mental health.
When I designed the optimal health pyramid that you alluded to in the intro there, the foundation of that pyramid, which you'll see on my website, is Think better. It's, think better and connect deeply. Because so much of my life had been spent in the middle part, the meat part of the pyramid, which was exercise, moving my body and trying to, what we all know now is the importance of sleep and all of that, don't get me wrong, is so incredibly important.
But I learned the hard way that you can't yoga your way to mental health. You can't drink copious amounts of fish oil and hope everything's going to be okay. It does start with getting up here (head/mind), correct? And equally as important, and at the top of the pyramid is this idea of exactly why you share your story so beautifully and honestly of why you left your corporate job to chase what you're doing right now. And those words are impact, purpose, contribution, feeling like you are giving more to others and you're giving to yourself and living for a purpose. Because you can train up here (head/mind) all you want, but the sustainability of healthy thinking comes through service to others. The sustainability of healthy thinking comes through the service of others.
So you asked me, what does mental health, you know, what can it look like amongst people? And I think all of us can recognize, or at least to another person, not necessarily ourselves, the cardinal symptoms of having very low motivation, low get up and go. Not having that sense of pleasure in doing things that we usually do. The medical word for that is anhedonia. That feeling of we either sleep too little or sleep too much, or feeling so keyed up or on edge. I always love when I get this question, like you said, I work mainly with youth, and the youth will always ask me, “I need the anti-anxiety pill. I'm not depressed. I need the anti-anxiety one.” And I look at them and I say, the pill is the same. It's an anti-anxiety and anti-depression pill, and the reason for that, it's two sides of the same. Rarely are you going to see a depression without anxiety or an anxiety without a depression, right? They often, not always, but they often go hand in hand. But then there's this other side, what I call the three amigos of mental health: numbness, loneliness, and boredom. These are often the unrecognizable signs that somebody is suffering. And remember, we don't need to diagnose or label everything. But maybe they're not okay, it is enough to say maybe they're suffering in their own way. Numbness, loneliness, and boredom.
I once had a 17-year-old who drank her so much alcohol. She ended up in the ICU with pancreatitis. And when she was out, I simply asked her and said, “Can you just help me understand? Are you drinking out of pain? Are you drinking? I just need to understand more so I can help you.” And she looked directly into my eyes and she said, “No, I'm just bored. I'm really bored.” And I thought, wow, here I am thinking that there's something deep there. But there probably is underneath that sheer vastness of boredom, but she identified it as boredom, so that's where we had to start.
Sometimes we mask these emotions with different outlets, and as you're saying, it could be an alcohol. Then there's some people that will almost over-exercise because they're trying to fill that void. I like how you really talked about, there's so much information out there of, you know, if you want to be happier, okay, we'll exercise and drink more and take care of your body, and yes, those are in sleep. Yes, those are all very important. I've done some specific episodes specifically on how to get and improve your sleep and boost your motivation and how to eat healthy.
Changing Our Thought Process
But you're right, I think one of the things that we have a shared passion for is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is shifting the thought and looking at different ways and, and identifying what is that root cause of what's causing that loneliness, boredom, frustration in our mind. And then what are the steps that we can take to change that thought process?
There's a lot of research around people that are happier, that are volunteers. There's a direct correlation between happiness and volunteering. I've said this in previous episodes, that when we don't ask for help, we strip somebody of the opportunity to experience joy and fulfillment. Because in reality, we are fulfilled and happy when we're helping others. So when we don't ask for help, imagine if we did what that could do for the other person.
I call it conscious compassion. There's a beautiful book called Compassion Omics. It really deals with compassion in the medical field, that's really the focus of the book. But for the longest time, most of us thought, when you see a doctor, “Get me the diagnosis and the treatment”, and if they're nice to me, well that's like the dessert on the side. That's the sweet part. But the main menu should be diagnose me, give me the right pills, surgery, everything else, come second. What they're finding is that compassion is not the dessert on the side. It is actually more important than the diagnosis in treatment itself, because it has the capacity to heal.
They did a beautiful study where they actually took three groups of people and they all gave them the same amount of time. One group could do whatever they felt like doing. The second group, just wait, I actually had a surplus of time. They gave them more time and the third group had to use their time to help somebody else. Then they asked each group, what was your perception of time? How much time do you think you have? It was only the group that helped somebody else that perceived that they had a longer amount of time. I share this story too because here we are, type A and all that we have in common is the 24 hours in the day. And so many of these podcasts are, how do you get more efficient, more productive, do more, do more, do more. Well, isn't that ironic that the only group that felt like they had more time had that service impact? Contribution in mind? And I want to make the point too that we live in this society where we feel like purpose has to be one thing. As if it's a secret treasure that you must uncover, and now I have my purpose, I'm done.
We need to live our life with purpose, not for a purpose, with purpose. Opening the door with somebody, smiling at somebody, giving them a hug if they need to. That is things with purpose. Those are, you've got hundreds of opportunities in one. It doesn't have to be for your specific purpose.
I love hearing that. I mean, it's just as you said, opening the door for somebody, you see a mom pushing a stroller, I mean like literally I will like jog, let me get that stroller for you because pushing around a double stroller, I know how hard that is. And so, but it's those little moments that you get to help somebody out throughout the day, that you get to see that reward of that smile and that gratitude and feeling like you have a purpose throughout the day. I love how you say that that purpose is not just one thing. It’s having a purpose throughout our entire life, every single day, and it can be anything. I remember a time I was going through Starbucks, and the car behind me, I can see this mom and her kid is screaming at the top of their lungs, and I'm going, okay, so clearly she's probably having a little bit of a rough day. And so you and you hear these stories, right? You pay for the coffee for the person behind you. But I'm like, and I never saw the person, I just kind of took off afterwards, but it's those moments that you remember, that just leaves that lasting impression. And it's because you know that in one way, shape, or form, you got to make that person stay just a little bit better. especially in a moment where she's got a screaming kid in the back of the car
And you know what? That probably led her to do something great. Like you probably started a chain, the buck didn't stop at her. She probably was, hopefully maybe her kid calmed down because she had a nice cup of coffee and things kind of just spiraled that way. But even in another study, they took participants, they could feed their own parking meter with money or they could top up somebody else's. And the people who topped up somebody else's actually reported greater levels of happiness, right? Like, this stuff isn't rocket science. We just don't put it into practice. And the pandemic only constricted our viewpoint. It only made us more internally focused. We've forgotten how to smile because so often, from the eyes down, everything was covered, but you can also smile with your eyes as well. So I think it's also trying to teach our kids this stuff. But in a world where you feel like you're trying to constantly grind things out or feel like you're pushing all the time, I feel like compassion allows a bit of grace in that and allows you to relax a little bit into that moment when things can feel so hard or out of your control.
Building Self-Awareness
You've talked a lot about how to identify the signs. We talked about there's a direct correlation between self-awareness and success, and you've talked about what are some of those signs and having self-awareness around maybe when we're in those kind of low moments in our life. What are some steps that people can take to build self-awareness so that we can make the changes to get in a better place.
Let me give you a very simple acronym that can help, because we all like things that are tangible and almost formulated that we can put into practice too. It's a good place to start by saying self-awareness is one of the components of EQ or emotional intelligence. And I think we all know to some degree now, that your IQ is fixed. Nothing bad about that, but your EQ is actually variable. You can actually change it and improve it. I always find it so hard to swallow when people refer to EQ as soft skills. There's nothing soft about it. In fact, you know, we often complain that the millennials or whatever you want to call it, the generation now, they're too soft. Well, it's interesting because you say that they're lacking soft skills, but yet they're too soft. This is the stuff that we need to be focusing our time on.
When it comes to self-awareness being a big component of EQ, the first step you need to realize is that you have this inner roommate, what I call the inner roommate or inner voice in your head, but many of us can go decades without even being attuned to it. A wonderful counselor once told me, she's like, “You know that voice in your head? That's a radio dial. You can turn it up and you can turn it down. It's never going to go away, but you are in control of the dial,” and I love that. I love that because it speaks to the fact that this is always going to be with you. The voice of comparison, the voice of critiquing, the voice of caution. Those three seeds: critiquing, comparison, and contract, or all the voice of your brain because once again, your brain has nothing to do with keeping you happy. It is always going to make you survive. And in order to survive it has to constantly be critiquing what you're doing or comparing you to somebody else or cautioning you. That's a really tough place to live. So the first N of this acronym is two N’s, two S’s, so N 2 S 2. And this is a formula that you can use right away to start to build self-awareness, not to build happiness, but to build self-awareness.
The first N is to try to notice. That's much easier said than done. You have to start noticing what it feels like when I get frustrated? What does it feel like when anger hits my body? Just yesterday, my eldest son was really upset at losing his hockey game and he's bashing his hockey stick, and I'm like, well, okay. What you were feeling is nothing wrong with anger, but that feels what it feels like right now. The problem with our society is we live in a world of self-abandonment. We do one of three things with our emotions. We suppress them, we deny them, or we blame you. It's your fault for having my emotion, that's what we do. We don't feel the feeling. And it doesn't have to be for long. I think people hate this, feel the feelings because they're imagining me sitting in a lotus pose feeling anger. That's not what this is about. This is about feeling, I call it my emotional bed. My emotion that I revert to and I find very comfortable is overwhelm. I live and overwhelm. That is a beautiful bed, very comfy for me. Maybe not for you, but for me. So I know what overwhelm feels in my body. My heart rate starts to go up. I start to feel a bit sweaty. I feel short of breath. I start to feel internally chaotic. That's the noticing piece, so you can notice the tempo of your heartbeat. You can notice the palpitations in yourself. Some people see colors, right? All of those types of things.
The second end is what I just did is to name it. There was a study done that showed that people only have three adjectives in terms of naming their emotions mad, sad, or glad. That's nothing. We need to increase our emotional bandwidth so we can actually label how we are feeling. Are you feeling anxious or are you feeling deflated? Are you feeling lonely or actually feeling guilty and resentful? Those are very different things, and that's what I try to teach my patients, the youth that I work with too. Are you actually feeling jealous or actually feeling scared? Scared of abandonment, right? Those are different things, so put the right label on it. So those were the first two ends: Noticing and naming.
You had really talked about what are those initial signs and understanding what the emotions are. We have episode 90, where we talk about the seven signs of emotional burnout. And we talk a lot about the emotions that you are talking about right now that overwhelm, that fear of that uncertainty. So if you want to really dive into understanding and noticing those physical and mental signs of, we talk about burnout specifically, but the mental health, I invite you all to tune in.
So, noticing it, giving it the appropriate name. The first s is the story. What dialogue are you telling yourself in your head? And I say, it's not the story you're telling yourself, it's the story you're selling yourself. It's a story you're selling yourself because you are the best salesperson there ever was on this planet, when it comes to your own head. Like for me, every morning I convince myself that I am the overworked mom who has to pack everyone's lunches and no one packs my lunch and no one makes my breakfast. And oh, I will hóffen puff, and I say the same dialogue. You can tell, like, I'm very convinced of this dialogue. Is it true? Perhaps, is it all true? No. Right. Nothing is all true. The number one, you alluded to the CBT or cognitive behavioral technique, number one thought distortion that we as a society have, our brain is really bad at thinking in spaces of gray. I'm either beautiful or ugly. I'm either smart or dumb. It's either day or night, black or white. Our life is lived in dualities opposites, but there's nothing in between. I do a lot for my family, but do they do nothing for me? And am I like the one who's all, no, they do a, you know, so it's trying to, I always call it, how do you poke holes? We've all done this before, right? If you played plato with your kids and poke little holes in the little creations that you've made, how do you poke holes in that theory and actually go, well, is it all true? And that's easier said than done. So that's the story part.
And the last piece is shifting and the thing I really like to emphasize is that you can stay in that emotion. No one is forcing you to leave because there is no such thing as a good or a bad emotion. Stay in anger, fine. Stay in frustration. No problem. Be resentful. Ask yourself, does this serve me? Maybe it does serve you for now. So ask yourself, do I want to shift? Is this serving? And what does this say about me? These are all key questions you can ask yourself. And when it does come time to shift, ask yourself with that story or the problem that is causing you this grief. Is it permanent? Is it pervasive? Is it going through every single aspect of my life, or is it only at accessing a part of my life and have I solved harder problems? Because each of those questions, my son is working on his camera right now, it allows you to zoom out. Our brain is really bad at gaining perspective, really bad. It's really hard for us. So imagine you're a camera taking a very wide shot. Can you zoom out? And by asking yourself those three questions, is it permanent, pervasive, and have I solved harder problems? You go, “Oh, so it's not that big of a deal. You know, my, my child didn't pack this for lunch, or like, I'm late for this meeting. I think I can get over that. Right?” So those are the, that's the acronym, notice, name, story, shift right there. How you build better self-awareness.
Acknowledging All Our Emotions
Easy to remember and easy to implement as well. And I liked how you said it's okay sometimes to sit in the emotion, even if it is one of those emotions that we have the perception of being a negative emotion. Because I think about what immediately came to my mind was anger. Now, a lot of us would say, wait a minute, she's telling us to sit in anger. But I think about, okay, well my husband's in the military and when he goes to war, I would imagine that anger is one that he wants to kind of sit in for a while because that's what's going to help him in fighting for justice. I know that there and kind of rescuing some of the Syrians when the refugees, and I would imagine that that anger in seeing how these Syrians were being treated was a good emotion to sit in and to utilize for that purpose.
Oh, beautiful! Because what your husband then will realize is that to him, the reason he has the emotion of anger is because he values justice. Emotions are our signpost or our sign, our marker, a beacon of significance. Why does this bother me? If he didn't value justice, he'd be like, whatever. I don't really care. But this is why he's in that role. That's why we're so blessed to have people like your husband and others who are so motivated by serving the underdog and carrying out justice and that anger is fueling him, and it's not even just that, it's actually a sign that this is what I really care about. Just like my eldest son, he gets really angry when things aren't fair and he's going to learn very soon, soon that not everything is fair, bud, but at the end of the day, it helps him understand his value system.
And he'll probably fight for those. Whenever he has experience where there is unfairness, whether it's in sports or career or somebody that's experiencing, I can imagine if it was in his career in the future, he could be someone that can help that person in how to address it, maybe with a manager or whether to stay in a job or not, because he's guiding them through that process. Sometimes I say, our core values are our motivators, our drivers, the situations that we experience in our life, and we've talked about this before we jumped on, our messiness can sometimes be our message. Our pain can be our purpose. So it's really, like you said, sitting in acknowledging the emotions and how can we really apply that into our life?
Just think about how many times you've “failed” and how much you've perseverated and thought about that. But we have a when, we have a high point and we just move on. It's just so ironic, right? If you can start to actually think about it, I even tell this to my kids too. Pay attention, like I want you to, we're, my three-year-old is learning to skate and the first thing his coach told him was, practice fall, practice falling. Why don't we practice failing? The first time, I made a huge error, I spent $50,000, moved halfway across the country and chose the wrong profession from when I was going to chiropractic school, and I soon learned that was not the right profession for me. That was a big lesson, and up until that time, I had walked on a straight and narrow path, never disturbing anything if only I had practiced, followed a little bit.
There’s so much to unpack and really you've talked about how to understand it if we're struggling with self-awareness, how to identify those signs of it and how to build self-awareness.
