Here’s a twist! In this episode, I’m the guest. In fact, this is a replay of an interview I did for radio personality, Joshua Berglan on his great show Morning Gratitude.

It was a lively show, and we covered some fascinating ground regarding mindset, neuroscience, and wisdom.

For leaders and aspiring leaders, this show will be of particular interest, and you can be sure it’ll entertain you, inspire you, and give you insight into how to operate your consciousness for inspiring leaders. 🙂

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Listen to the podcast here:

Wake Up with Dr. Steve Taubman

We have an amazing guest. I’ve had the privilege of not only getting to hang out with him a few times, but he is a friend. He’s somebody that I admire and look up to. He’s somebody who does this awesome work. Dr. Steve Taubman is a bestselling author and a world-class speaker who has dedicated his life to showing people how to thrive through their challenges. He’s written extensively on the application of contemplative practices in stressful situations and has spoken worldwide on mindset mastery for goal-oriented and helping professionals. Having endured a crippling anxiety and low self-esteem early in life, he had made it his mission to understand the nature of happiness and the remedy for an emotional turmoil. His search led him to neurology, holistic health, mindfulness, positive psychology and hypnosis. Each of these disciplines is represented by the doctor’s system for living a balanced life free of neurosis and rich in accomplishment.

Dr. Taubman’s works include his bestselling book, UnHypnosis, his sales mastery program, The Magic Of Inner Selling, his online productivity masterpiece, Procrastination Annihilation, and his latest book on thriving through stress on life’s battlefields, Buddha In The Trenches. He has also written hundreds of articles for major publications and has produced specialized hypnotic programs for business professionals to remove mental barriers to success. He continues to enrich his understanding of the science of happiness and impact on achievement. When not writing or speaking, he enjoys spending time with his dog, Woody, in and around his home on a beautiful Burlington, Vermont waterfront. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s bring the doctor on. I’m so blessed to have you on the show. What are you grateful for?

One is before we went on the air and as you started speaking about being able to get your show on a wide variety of platforms at the same time. I’m very grateful because now I know that you and I are going to have a conversation about that. I want to learn how to do that for my audience and I’m excited about that. The second thing I’m grateful for is this Lake Champlain behind me. It’s the largest lake in the United States, next to the Great Lakes. I happened to live on this lake. I’m loving the weather. I’m loving what it’s doing to me and to my energy. The third thing that I’m grateful for is the notion of rediscovering your mission and rediscovering your purpose. I’ve got a whole new set of goals, a new mission and the idea that at this point in my life, I can be like a kid in a candy store. That makes me feel good.

I last saw you in San Diego and I’ve never seen someone so excited to not be in San Diego, but it looks like it’s beautiful where you’re at.

I was excited about San Diego for sure. Then I got back here and I was ready to turn and come back again because it’s miserable. The whole month of April was winter here and I came back to San Diego because I was speaking to the National Environmental Balancing Bureau at Sheraton Marina. It was a great group and we had a good time. When I got home again for the second time, the weather was finally starting to break. It’s been fantastic.

There are so many different directions to go into, but I would like to start first for the audience who is not familiar with you and your work. I want to know where were you at in your life when you decided that you were going to go the direction of motivational speaking and starting to transform people’s lives?

It’s funny you ask that because I was thinking back on this and my first book was called UnHypnosis. This book hit number one on Amazon as a self-help. That was the bestseller back then. At that time, I was trying to figure out what was it that I was saying to other people to coach them to get them where they wanted to go and what was it that I was saying to myself when I was depressed, when I was invisible, and when I was anxious. This thing grew out of a need to create a system. Sometimes you and I, we shoot from the hip. We’ve got good things to say and we’ve got wisdom. We tend to be pretty good at meeting people where they are. If somebody said, “Joshua, what’s your philosophy of life?” You go, “I don’t know,” because you don’t write it down. I decided I wanted to codify it.

We all have something to strive for in our lives. Click To Tweet

The book itself has an interesting back story. As you know, I was a chiropractor, then I became a stage hypnotist. I was the official hypnotist for MTV Spring Break. There I was on the beach in Jamaica back in the early 2000s. I was hypnotizing a bunch of people. I had 2,500 semi inebriated college kids on the beach. They were doing all the things. I’ve got to hypnotize kids doing everything. They were milking a cow and all these funny things. In the middle of the show, I had one guy who think he was pregnant but the other guy thought he was the father too. In the middle of the show I decided to try something new. I took one of my subjects, this good-looking guy. He was standing there, I was sitting on stage. He was hypnotized. I’d put my hand on his shoulder. I said to the person I was touching, “When you wake up, three things are going to happen. Number one, you don’t believe you’re hypnotized even though you are. Number two, this is the worst show you’ve ever seen and you are pissed at me. Number three, there’s an invisible wall three feet in front of you.”

I’ve never done this before. This was a brand-new experiment but I was having a good show. I was in a good mood. I was feeling creative, so I went for it. I woke everybody up. I said, “How’s everybody doing?” Everybody was, “We’re great.” This one guy screamed, “You suck.” I looked and it was that guy. I said, “What’s going on?” “The show is terrible.” I said, “Then leave.” The guy got up and took three steps. Then he hit the wall and started to push and push. His face turned red and he couldn’t move any further. He finally sat down and crossed his arms. He started to cry. I said, “What’s the problem?” He says, “Nothing.” I said, “Are you having fun?” He goes, “No.” I said, “Why don’t you leave?” The guy thought for a minute and he goes, “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”

We all have a dream. We all have potential. We all have something we strive for in our lives. All the things that fuel our movement in that direction, our gratitude, our appreciation, everything that brings us in that, but then we also have our invisible walls. We’ve pushed against them and we can’t break through. It’s that experience of powerlessness when you can’t break through your walls that eventually leads us to depression, discouragement, fear, frustration. It makes us mean-spirited. It does so many things to our psyche. Often, what it does is what it did with him is it makes us point the finger outside of ourselves, “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.” We give up on ourselves.

I started thinking about how that applied to what I’ve been studying in terms of mindfulness meditation, personal development, human potential, humor, and all the things that I’ve been studying to help myself feel better. That’s where this all came from. This whole idea of UnHypnosis comes from the idea that we’re all hypnotized. We’ve all been programmed through our lives to believe in our own limitations, to believe in our own beliefs, to believe in our own sense of what’s true and what’s not true, what we’re capable of, and how much value we have in our world. It’s so real to us that we don’t take that next step early.

I’m going through that process right now. I’m doing a leadership emotional intelligence training. It’s been so profound because you’re being able to just dig. It’s like an exorcism in a way. Is that a lot of what you’re doing or is there an alternative way to have an exorcism of removing those limiting beliefs?

We don’t have anybody standing over here with a Bible and holy water, so it’s not exactly an exorcism. In all intents and purposes, it is. Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich. Years later, Sharon Lechter released his manuscript that he was unable to release back in the ‘30s because it was too controversial.

Outwitting the Devil?

The idea of the devil, you may think of it in a Judeo-Christian way, but you might also think of it that the devil is these voices in your head. Outwitting the Devil is that exorcism you’re talking about, that removal of those mind parasites. They’ve taken up residence inside of you and you have mistakenly believed you are. What we do is teach people how to wake up. We teach people how to shift their state of consciousness so they have power over this, they have perspectives, they have vision. All that stuff that used to seem so real suddenly becomes just something funny, something pointing, “There’s that crazy voice in my head again. There I go again.” It’s a very different mentality than when those voices start to act and we think they’re true, “I can never do that. I’m not good enough. You’re making me miserable.” All the things we do in our relationships they come directly out of our sense of futility, a lack of choice to live the way we want to live, to be who we want to be.

There is no failure, only feedback. Click To Tweet

It’s so amazing how easily, even when we get positive and we’re all about it, we get some momentum, and then all of a sudden, guilt falls through again. It’s like, “Here we are again. It’s happening to me again. It’s happening.” It’s this never-ending cycle. People give up and typically give up too soon. As I’m saying this, I’m also talking to myself. I have a big vision for my life that requires a ton of failure. I’m going to fail because those failures are failures for a reason, that they are not the things that are going to put me on my mission. They’re not the things that are going to keep me on that path. Even though it may feel like it, it’s not. That’s how I’ve come to appreciate failures and/or closed doors when I’m thinking they’re going to be bursting wide open for me. That’s how I’ve had to train my brain to believe. I know on the other side of this, it’s going to all happen. That takes a lot of perseverance and a lot of faith for sure.

What you said was meaningful. You said, “Even though it feels like it, I’ve learned to know that it’s not true.” What we learned to do over time as we learn to recognize that the voices in our head and the feelings we feel aren’t real, they feel real. Until we start to declare independence, until we learn some of these tools and techniques, what we teach in these programs and these books so that you can begin to extricate yourself from this absolute conviction that this is the way it is. It’s one thing that would stand failure after failure when you know that it feels like it but there is no failure, there’s only feedback. When you have that voice, it’s an entirely other thing when every time it happens, it’s like somebody shot you in the heart. That’s what you’re talking about is how do you develop that ability to be with it, embrace it and let yourself move through it so that you can take all the hits until you get to where you’re trying to go.

I’ve been given the gift of vision, so it’s easy for me to see people at their highest self or I can see ahead of time. Sometimes in the present I don’t do so well, but that forward-thinking vision is easy for me. It just comes to me. That’s my gift. Having vision and being a visionary are two different things. How would someone who doesn’t have the gift of vision discover their vision? What can they have envisioned for their life?

I would encourage anybody and everybody to learn some process by which they quiet their minds. For me, it’s mindfulness meditation. There’s plenty of research on the power of mindfulness meditation as a tool for quieting your mind. If you’re religious, prayer has some of the same qualities and the ability to get out of your head and out of your inner thought. The problem for most people isn’t that they don’t have a vision, it is that it’s crowded out by all the thoughts in their head. We’re too busy judging ourselves. We are having a hard time creating the blank canvas on, which we can paint the masterpiece of our life.

 

Dan McCluskey says, “As a feeling person, the dark side comes after my feelings.” I don’t know what that means. I’d like for you to explain. Even with having the forward-thinking vision that I have, I still get in my head. You’re right about prayer. The thing that people mistake about prayer is that it’s talking at God. It’s not. A lot of it is sitting and waiting. You can sit and ask a question or reflect, but a lot of it has you be still, you wait, you listen and you calm your mind. That’s when you can hear it because God’s voice isn’t always loud, at least in my experience.

Let me address that because you’ve hit a key point. It’s a point that not a lot of people address and it’s something that I would like to address. A lot of us know that there’s this thing called getting quiet, there’s this thing called being patient, there’s this thing called letting go of your mental baggage and churning, and there’s even a thing called just shutting up, stopping for a moment. While they know that, while you know that, while I know that, how often do we still say, “I’ve got to keep going.” The big question is this, and it’s a question nobody wants to ask, “What if you stopped?” “What if you stopped churning?” “What if you stopped thinking?” “What if you stopped trying to get the answers?” Let me tell you what would happen if you stop, you’d feel afraid. You’d feel panicked because most of us have never made peace with that experience of silence.

We’ve never let that be okay. There’s this dark looming monster hiding behind the curtains that we know it’s there called silence. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think about it. We keep on acting because, “As long as I’m busy, I never have to face the profound discomfort of an empty mind.” I teach people meditation in a way that they learn how to do it so they can benefit from it. What they can benefit from it is that for the period of time during which they’re starting to do it, “I just had a thought.” They start to get tense, weird and uncomfortable and then you talk to them and you say, “Have you ever tried meditating?” They say, “I tried it once, but it didn’t work.” “What do you mean it didn’t work?” “I kept having thoughts.” “That’s what your brain does, it’s going to keep having thoughts. You’re going to keep on practicing the art of removing your attention from those thoughts and bringing it into your breath or to wherever you’re meditating on.”

The real enemy is not your nasty boss, it’s not your obnoxious husband, it’s not your noisy kids. It’s none of those things. It’s your inability to get quiet. If you could get quiet, if you could make peace with that feeling of anxiety that comes when you start to try to get quiet, you can let that anxiety wash over you until it washed away. When all those voices start to lose their power over you, you would be free. You’ll be like, “There’s another voice. I don’t care. I know what it’s like to be quiet. I’ll be quiet and let it pass.” That’s not the way we operate. That’s the key. That’s the core.

It makes perfect sense and it is powerful. I battle with borderline personality disorder on top of being bipolar and we’ve discussed this. I don’t think we’ve discussed the borderline personality part. I’ve been avoiding that one. For some reason, that’s worse to me than bipolar disorder. I don’t like to talk about it and I don’t want to acknowledge it, but I deal with it every day. It is a daily thing for me. Previously, I was having a moment. Karen walked up to me and she goes, “Take your phone, turn it off, walk away from it, be away from it and be still.” I was fighting it. I swear to you. I went to lay down and sat there. I didn’t think about anything. I did everything possible to not think about a single thing, because everything I would have thought of was going to affect me negatively because I was in that self-hating space. I cleared my mind, I was able to do it, and I swear to you, ten minutes later, it popped up and I was like, “Let’s go.” I completely switched it on a dime. I went from telling myself, “You’re a failure. You’re not going to fulfill your purpose. This is a joke. You’ve been wasting your time, this whole time.”

The real enemy is not your nasty boss, obnoxious husband, or your noisy kids. It’s your inability to get quiet. Click To Tweet

This is what I’m telling myself and I’m starting to have those feelings of how can I hurt myself. That’s what I deal with. That is the freaking thing and it sucks. She told me that and I swear to you it rescued me. It was about going to be still so my mind could go, “This is your reality. This is what you get to create. These are the blessings that you have. This is what you get to be grateful for. These are your opportunities.” It completely shifted and it would just take ten minutes of silence. That’s it.

There was so much power and wisdom in what you said. I hope that your readers get that. That’s brilliant. If we slowed down and describe that there was a moment when Karen said to you, “Turn it off.” In that moment you were like, “No. I’ve got to do this.” Our ego is always trying to convince us that whatever we’re thinking and doing is vitally important. We’ve got to do it now. Once you’re on to that, even just a tiny piece of you that’s onto it or you have somebody else with you in your case who can help you and help you remain onto it, there’s that moment when you’re like, “I feel like I need to do this, but I know better.” I’ve learned not to believe that. The next part of that is when you want a new lay down. In that part, that takes courage because the beast wants to be fed. The discomfort, the anxiety, the pain that you were feeling, the physical pain that went along with the mental content was craving more mental content. It wanted you say more bad things about yourself so that they could keep feeling that feeling because we get addicted to our negative feelings. They seem so real.

The third part of the story is where you recognize that all you have to do is to stop feeding it for a little while. After a little while, it was like, “I guess it’s not real because here I am in the silence and I let the feelings wash through me.” I talk about having a blank slate. I would think you paint the masterpiece of your life. You couldn’t have done it before. You could have been like, “I’m on the phone right now. I’m happy.” You can’t put it on top of the bad stuff. You have to first release the bad stuff. You need to have the courage to go into the silence, let the other stuff wash away. That’s where the vision comes from. That’s why you had the vision. That’s why you were a visionary, too.

I’m so thankful for the work that I’ve been doing and the conversations that we’ve had. It always has a profound impact on me. That episode is the same thing, I was in that space of just trying to kill myself with drugs and that was the same message, the same way I was feeling, the same self-hating. It’s that thing where I would basically disappear for three days and be high trying to make my brain explode because of that thought.

Here I am in the middle. I’m a captain of my leadership team and I have these other responsibilities where I’m responsible for other people and still responsible for myself. Then my daughter’s coming to San Diego. I’m taking it and I’m like, “That was feeding into, you have no business being a leader. You have no business pursuing this purpose. This isn’t for you.” It was such a blessing for her to come up to me and say, “Put your phone away and go be still.” If that would not have happened, I’m not saying I would have flown off the deep end, but the dark thoughts, the self-hate thought could have lasted so much longer, but that “Be still,” just clicked in my brain and I go, “You’re right,” and I walked away.

Enemy comes at everyone. It attacks all of us differently, but it still comes at us. Those lies have labels, “You’ll always be stupid like your father.” Those things. Every time I’ve gone to be still, they’ve gone away. You’re so true about trying to stuff good on top of the bad. It doesn’t work that way because that’s what usually comes out, that’s when people start to drink or self-medicate. It’s a very fleeting emotion, like it’s a battle to become the tug of war. The simplest path to peace is silence in my experience.

 

You have to embrace that stuff. Otherwise, if you’re fighting it, you resist persists. Even when you’re resisting it, it’s coming at you even harder but when you surrender, you just let it be, embrace it, then it dissolves. You don’t change that awful, horrible thing. It’s the same horrible voice that used to send you off the deep end. It’s the same one. It doesn’t disappear unless you’re very lucky. It’s still floating around and it comes back. What changes is your relationship with it? That’s the difference. When it comes, it’s other than you, it’s like, “Here it comes again. I have choices here. I could try to fight it or I could try to run from it by medicating my way out of it. I’m getting high and then not having to face it.” That never works. When you try to push against it, that never works. You just get quiet and see the phantom that it is. It’s not going to feel great, not going to feel lovely but there’s a distinction for people to think to get. There’s a difference between pain and suffering.

When you sit with it and you’re like, “That really hurts.” That’s pain. When it’s like, “I can’t believe this is happening to me. It keeps happening.” You build a story around it and you keep on accentuating it through your actions, through your words, and through your resistance, that’s suffering. There are two different qualities. That’s why I say it takes courage because we’re suggesting that you accept the fact that it’s inevitable. There’s going to be pain, so be courageous and let it be because the alternative is suffering.

The other side of that too is what I’m starting to learn. It has not become a habit yet. I’m working on the habit of doing this. I felt so energized when I came out of it. When I stopped, I quit fighting against the nonsense going on in my head, I was still. When I did come out of it, it was like I had that shot of adrenaline that I needed, that I normally would have looked for to get me through it. By being still, I ended up getting it naturally and it ignited me. I came out of that and went straight into a flow for the rest of the night to the point where I couldn’t sleep. I was feeling so amazing. That was miraculous, and it gave me this feeling. I was like, “I can get used to this. I can make this a habit.” Just be still. I do the opposite of what I think.

That was too much neuroscience, but there are scientific reasons for what you just described. There are a number of interesting things that happen when you go into essentially what we might call a meditative state. You can call it meditation, you can just call it shutting up and letting it pass. Regardless, one of the things that happens is your brain will release it, the cortisol will dissipate. You might release dopamine, which makes you feel better and more energized. Those are neuro-hormonal shifts that happen in a meditative state. The next thing that happens is that with the repetitive meditative state, the more you do this, the more you build bridges between a part of your brain called the lingula and a part of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortex. This is a part of your brain that registers pain, whether it’s emotional pain or physical pain. You feel it.

The signal is going to go from that part of your brain to either the medial or the lateral prefrontal cortex if it goes primarily. If more of it goes to the medial cortex, it’s going to make you feel, “What’s wrong with me? I can’t believe this. These people did this bad stuff.” It’s going to be all about you. You are going to feel victimized, you’re going to feel hurt, you’re going to feel hopeless and powerless. That’s what is going to happen if most of the connections are going that route. As you meditate, you’re developing a relationship in the lateral cortex and that’s all about emotional intelligence. That’s all about assessment. You’re developing, you’re strengthening your assessment centers in the parts of your brain that will look at the pain and say, “Interesting. I noticed I felt pain right then. I wonder what thoughts caused me to feel that.” It’s a whole different quality and what you are doing is practicing building those bridges.

Be courageous and let it be because the alternative of that is suffering. Click To Tweet

You were talking about mindfulness meditation. A lot of what we’ve talked about is sitting in silence. What is your feeling about guided meditations?

They’re great, especially if you’re a beginner and you want to get comfortable in the meditative space where silence feels a little bit less picky. Sometimes having a voice guiding you through a process can be useful. We provide things like guided meditations, hypnosis and audios. Hypnosis and meditation are very similar beasts. It’s putting you in a state of consciousness and then providing guidance at the same time. For example, we’ve got a program for people who are entrepreneurs and network marketers that they listen to and it’s a guided meditation to help them gain confidence and remove the mental barriers and fear from what they do. That’s a useful tool. Let me give you a simple skill and something that everybody could do pretty much immediately. Mindfulness meditation is the practice of getting out of your head and into your body. If I say “Joshua, stop thinking,” you could probably do like, “What do you mean stop thinking?” Your brain would think even more because I said stop thinking. Especially you and me, we’re the kind of people who have got to think about what we’re thinking about. We’d go crazy. Everybody who’s ever tried to meditate and felt like they couldn’t stop themselves from thinking, that’s why. It’s because they were thinking about thinking, thinking about not thinking, or wondering if there were doing it right.

I learned mindfulness meditation when I went to a workshop and this was years ago. The teacher essentially said, “I don’t care what you’re thinking, think I don’t care. Forget about that. What I want you to do is I want you to concentrate on physical sensation.” Typically, you have to concentrate on your breath, feel the breath flowing in, feel the breath flowing out. They might say, “Concentrate on the feeling in your hands, the feeling of your feet, the feeling of your butt on the seat.” Very simple, very practical, nothing weird about it, it’s just you’re simply getting your attention away from your thoughts and putting it on the physical experience of the moment. It seems so simple. It seems like, “Why would something as simple as that make any difference in their life?” Here’s what happened for me, I did it for this workshop. It was about a three-hour workshop. We meditated for probably a solid hour to an hour and a half of that, on and off, in and out.

You and I both had anxiety. We’ve had pressure and various things that cause us to feel emotional feelings in our bodies. That stuff is part of what you’re feeling. That’s part of what we were embracing. That’s part of what you’ve been with and not fighting or running from while you’re sitting there. You might be sitting there and going like, “I feel my stomach is going into knots. I feel like this thing in my throat is trying to choke me.” Instead of fighting it, you’re just observing and watching. You’re just letting it be. That’s the practice. I did it for the first time. When the workshop was over, I decided to take a bike ride right down below this cliff there was a bike path that runs the length of the lake.

I used to always ride this bike path. I always had this practice of riding my bike up and down the bike path and about a couple hundred yards out from there was a house. There was a dog who lived at this house. The bike path sits up on a bluff so that the house was down lower and the yard was getting lower. This dog who lived there was a runner. The dog could run back and forth. It has a leash and went through to this cable that went back and forth across the yard. This dog was freaking ferocious. It was the scariest dog you’d imagine. It was growling and snarling. The dog had just enough leash that it can run up the side of the incline and get right back to the top of the incline right by the bike path as you were riding by. Just as you got there, this dog would come out of nowhere. It was like being attacked by a lion. It happened a few times where it was scary. This dog was scary. Thank God for that leash, he can’t get away, but he’ll kill me if he can.

Fast forward, I’ve been to this meditation workshop. I spent the last hour in change observing sensation in my body becoming very present, very much in the moment. Just being okay with what I was feeling. That’s what the process was. I get on my bike. I’m in this blissed out state and I get to that part of the bike path. I hear the same sound, I hear the dog, but I don’t see the dog. I’m like, “That’s odd.” I get off my bike and looked down the incline. The dog’s leash from the runner down to the dog has gotten tangled up. The dog was stuck right there. It couldn’t move. It couldn’t get pass this thing. It’s all wrapped up, all tangled up.

Fear and presence cannot co-exist. Click To Tweet

I got off my bike and I walked down the hill. I went right up to the dog and the dog’s face was right against my face. It looks like it’s going to take a chunk out of my face. I start unwrapping the dog from the lock. Then he starts to smile and starts to kiss me. I get back on my bike and I ride away. It took me 100 yards away before it occurred to me what just happened. I felt that was like a magical moment. I didn’t for a second have any sense of fear. I didn’t have any sense of holding or hesitancy. I felt I had to act out of compassion. It was 100% the compassionate thing to do. The dog resonated with that compassion and responding to that compassion as most animals will do.

How much of the negative energy that we’re getting thrown our way can be pierced if you approach it with love? What blew up in my head after I got 100 yards away was this, “Fear and presence cannot coexist.” You can’t be in a state of deep presence with all the compassion, love and all that and be in fear. You may feel the energy arising but you’ll feel like, “I love you too.” It was a mindblower. If you’re fully present, if you’re fully in the moment, there’s this sense of all’s well in the world. It’s not like you become an idiot. You’re not going to jump off bridges because you’re in a state of presence, but you make wise judgments and you act mostly out of compassion.

A great example of love conquering fear. I want to talk about Buddha In The Trenches. I haven’t read the whole thing, but it is amazing. Talk to us about that book, what it’s all about and how it applies to their lives?

I talked to two different populations of people. One is people who are goal-oriented or trying to achieve something. You usually get a job and are striving for some success. I talked to people who are in between things in their life. They’re trying to reinvent their lives. My first book, UnHypnosis, is designed for people to reinvent their lives. Use this technology to awaken division, to remove the barriers, to create the path toward their goals. Then you’ve got all these people who are living lives where they’re trying to accomplish something or they’ve got a very stressful job like the police, nurses, EMT, people like that. My friends in network marketing and my friends who have high pressure jobs, my friends who are C-level executives are going home and are always three breaths away from the next ulcer. Those people I figured need a little wisdom too.

I wrote Buddha in the Trenches and it’s interesting, I was so challenged by the title because I didn’t want to put people who are not Buddhist. I don’t want them to think this is a book about Buddhism. Buddha means being awake, being present. How can you be a Buddha in the trenches, meaning on the battlefields of life? How can you be at your best when things are worst? There are tools and there are skills and there are attitudes to do that.

I use a lot of metaphors in the book about being bulletproof. I talked a little bit about certain organisms that can thrive under high pressure, amphipods live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench four miles below the surface of the ocean. If we were down there, the pressure will crush us. It would kill us instantly. They live peacefully down there, so how do they live under the pressure? That metaphor applies to us. There were some people who can meet the same challenges with poise and can handle the pressure of life. Other people are crushed by it. It’s not how much pressure, it’s how you’re wired. This book is about rewiring yourself to be able to withstand pressure. It draws on positive psychology, mindfulness and neurology. Every chapter has a set of exercises where we’ve developed a community around it, so people can call in, write and share their experience. It’s been a fun journey to build a community around Buddha In The Trenches.

I feel there’s something to that analogy too and it reminds me of what it’s like when I’m out of my body. I have a big energy. Even for better or worse, there are times when I’m on stage or if I’m at an event, I just release all of this energy. It’s like I’m coming out of my body and then the problem is the next three days I’m depressed like I have no energy and I’m zapped. I’ve learned to keep it in which is great. That’s going to come in handy when I’m on stage. The other part that I noticed is I feel heavier in a good way when I’m in my body and it’s like we’re nothing can stop me. I’m grounded, I’m sturdy, I’m stable and I’m like a tree trunk but when I’m all over the place, out of my body, scattered, worried and anxiety, I am so susceptible to getting crushed by the weight of life. It’s like the difference of a papier-mâché tank and the real thing. That’s how I like to describe it.

That’s a great metaphor. That’s a good point. The idea of being grounded. You and I have that also. You can say the way I move and the way I talk. I get a little out of the area. Sometimes that’s just genuine enthusiasm and sometimes it’s my neurotic energy getting out of my body, something I’ve got to be aware of, too, when I pull my energy in. There are times when one is better than the other, one is more resourceful than the other. It’s not a bad thing, it could definitely rob you of energy and it could rob you of a sense of being that later you’re going to need to draw.

I’m in a process. It’s not the number one thing I’m working on right now, but I am learning about channeling energy because I’ve had a few experiences recently that have made me go, “I didn’t know I could do that.” I’m diving into that, not full bore yet because of other things that are more important for me to work on but learning to understand that and how to use energy in more powerful ways than just releasing it all at once, has been something that process has also been very eye opening and valuable for me.

That’s why people do martial arts. That’s part of what martial arts do, is it gives you a sense of your body and where your energy is in and how much to allocate and how much to keep.

I didn’t even think about that. They can buy it on your website, right?

There is a website for the book called BuddhaInTheTrenches.com. I thought I’d give your readers a little gift. I put up a discount code, a coupon code. It’s your initials, JTB. Go to BuddhaInTheTrenches.com. Buy the book and when you get to the shopping cart page where it will ask for a coupon code, put in JTB and you’ll get 20% off the book.

What are you working on now?

I have got a few things going on right now. I’m going to something called CEO Space. It’s in Florida and I’ll be meeting with mentors, investors and branding experts. I’ve got some ideas about a new book series. I want to put together a series of books. I haven’t decided yet on the meaning but it’ll be an umbrella. Chicken Soup for the Soul will be a branded book series and each of the books will address certain of the things that we’ve already talked about: mindfulness, positive psychology, laughter, overcoming discouragement. Each book will have one of those topics. I’m going to put up a stage show in Branson, Missouri. Hypnosis is great because it allows me again to change people but also the key thing in on some of these very cool ideas about how our minds work, how do you reprogram, rewire your brain. I have this vision of doing a variety show I want to have a resident state show with a variety of entertainers myself include but have the theme of the show be transformation.

What a cool outside-of-the-box idea. With all due respect to all of our friends in the industry, I’m sick of going to events just sitting there and listening to someone talk at me. I enjoy when they are interacting and there’s teaching and applying the message while you’re there. Many people leave these seminars and they’re like, “Now what? How do I apply this? How am I applying it to my life?” Also, just the same old. I love fresh ideas like this and anything I can do to support you in that, let me know because it’s a great idea.

At some point along the way, we’ll probably get investors to build the show and everything and all sorts of opportunities. Right now, my heart and my soul is in building out this dream. It’s an overarching hope. What I am saying at the very beginning on what I’m grateful for is this whole possibility of reinventing myself. I’ll be 62 years old. Just the idea that at that point in your life, you can say, “No, I’ve got somebody here to do when I grow up.” I feel powerful about this next chapter. I also started the radio show. I’ve got you as one of the guests and so far, we’ve done our first five episodes.

How can people find your radio show?

The name of the show is Executive Zen. It’s teaching people who are leaders and aspiring leaders how to calm their minds and be more precise, how to break through their barriers. The show itself will be on a wide variety of podcast outlets once it’s broadcast. If you want to hear it live, you can go to CPR Network. CPRNetwork.com on Mondays at 9:00 AM Pacific. If you want to listen to the replay, go to my website, SteveTaubman.com and there’s a button up top.

I’m excited for you. As far as your other platforms, we can discuss that. I’ll teach you.

I can’t believe how fun it was. I can’t believe it because I know it was fun talking to you.

I appreciate it and it’s good to connect again. I’m looking forward to you getting back here. It’s such a blessing for you to be here. I appreciate all of your valuable time. I’ll be reaching out to you and we’ll talk. God bless you. That’s top two if not the best. That was so insightful and so powerful. What a blessing. Thank you so much. If you know of somebody that their business is going to the next level, it seems like soaring but they don’t have the infrastructure set up, please reach out to me. I’ve got a new service. I’m working with an amazing company now.

They’ve been a great service where they’re able to come in and set the foundation for these companies to help them be sustainable in their growth. Companies that are just struggling and they’re on life support and they’re not meeting their expectations. I’m working with the best in the business right now. They are able to help transform companies and help them get to that number one status that they’re looking for.

If you know of somebody, tag them, you can contact me directly, please make that referral. I pay wonderful referral fees. When you read the testimonials of what this company does, you’ll be impressed. They are changing people’s lives. They literally are going in and setting the foundation and doing the work for you to be the successful company that you want to be yet you’re getting all the credit, it’s a win-win. God bless you.

Important Links:

• Dr. Steve Taubman
• UnHypnosis
• The Magic Of Inner Selling
• Procrastination Annihilation
• Buddha In The Trenches
• Think and Grow Rich
• Outwitting the Devil
• BuddhaInTheTrenches.com
• Executive Zen
• CPRNetwork.com
• SteveTaubman.com

About Dr. Steve Taubman

Dr. Steve’s early years were plagued by crippling anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Despite graduating valedictorian from one of the nation’s top chiropractic colleges and running a thriving practice, Dr. Steve found that his outer success did little to calm his inner turmoil.

Thus began a thirty year journey to understand the root of his suffering. His exploration of Western psychotherapy, Eastern teachings of mindfulness, hypnosis, and the science of neurology provided profound insight into the universal nature and cause of suffering; the subconscious mind… which ultimately led to the creation of his successful UnHypnosissystem and bestselling book.

Blending his teachings with a long time passion for comedy and magic, Dr. Steve developed a series of insightful, fun presentations about mastering the subconscious mind which were quickly embraced by organizations for their ability to get people in action.

Since then, Dr. Steve’s excitement, motivation and enthusiasm have earned him fans from every profession as he continues to enthrall audiences worldwide, helping them remove mental barriers to achieving their dreams.