94. Whole Brain Living
I’ve recently become obsessed with a book by Harvard-trained Neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor called Whole Brain Living.
Most people are familiar with the idea that our brain has two hemispheres (left and right).
And they associate the left brain with being super rational, and the right with being more creative.
It turns out each hemisphere also has a thinking part and a feeling part.
That makes four main parts, not just the rational vs the creative.
And Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains how to use each part - and more importantly how to integrate them together - in order to create a successful, satisfying life.
Make sure to catch the podcast this week to learn all about it and how to apply this book’s lessons to your own beautiful brain.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What I’ve learned from reading Whole Brain Living by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.
Why the idea of a left-brain hemisphere and a right-brain hemisphere is oversimplified.
The power of getting to know the different parts of your brain and integrating them together.
Four characters we all have in our brain, how they interact, and how they inhibit each other.
Where to look to see which of these four parts are prominent in your life right now.
How to start accepting and integrating the different parts of your brain to start creating the outcomes you want in your life and career.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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Whole Brain Living by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about whole brain living.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all. Happy Wednesday. I hope this podcast finds you very well. I'm having a great day. I went out and had a nice long walk earlier and it was a little bit cooler than it has been so that was really satisfying because it's been very hot here in Sacramento. So I enjoyed having a little bit of a cooler temperature.
And I've been listening to this great audio book on my walks lately and that's what we're going to talk about today. The book is called Whole Brain Living by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I originally heard about it from a Martha Beck podcast, and I was familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor already because she wrote another book called My Stroke of Insight, which is about her experience having a stroke.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard trained neuroscientist, so her work around her stroke is really cool because she was already a Harvard trained neuroscientist when she had the stroke. And so she's able to talk about her experience from this point of view of understanding things and through the lens of science. And I read part of that book, too.
But that's not what we're going to talk about today. Although that book is where I got the information from that a feeling that's not interrupted, or antagonized, or sort of magnified through language, and storytelling, venting, those kind of things. only lasts about 90 seconds.
So we talk on the podcast a lot about feelings and about how a thought that you're having can kick off a feeling, right? So if you think, “What an asshole,” you may feel angry, and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is the one who taught me indirectly, because I think I also learned this from Martha Beck who credited Jill Bolte Taylor.
Anyways, it's her experience in the stroke was that if she didn't get stuck in the language loop, or get stuck in the story, or get stuck in replaying the thing that had happened, the feeling itself would only last about 90 seconds. And I find that to be very helpful when a big feeling comes up that is maybe it's difficult for me to feel, knowing that if I let it be there, the physiological experience of the feeling will pass in 90 seconds.
I know that may not be your experience. For most of us, our feelings don't pass in 90 seconds, again, because we are either engaging with the feeling or we're continuing the story around the feeling. When we continue the story around it, we continue that feeling around it.
So for many of us, our feelings seem to last for minutes, hours, days of our lives, months, years of our lives. But what Dr. Joe Bolte Taylor is saying is that that's not the feeling itself. When we interact with the feeling or when we interact with the story about the feeling, that kind of longer effect can happen.
And for a lot of us that's our habit. Our habit is to re-tell our story, it is to kind of get stuck there and live inside the feeling, and there's a lot of different tools, coaching, therapy, and other things that can help you learn to not do that if that's something you're interested in. For me it is because I want to be able to feel my feelings without getting stuck in them. I want to be to feel my grief without like building a house and like living there for the rest of my life.
Okay, so that's a mini lesson from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor from her other book that can be really useful in the coaching you're doing about your career and your life and anything else you're using these tools on.
But today what I want to talk about is this other book of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's that I've just been reading, and spoiler alert, I'm not even quite done yet. But you know how excited I get when I'm learning about something, I want to talk to you all about it immediately. And so sometimes I get too excited to even finish the book. I'm almost done, I'm just not quite there.
So something I think and talk a lot about is understanding that our brain, even when it's saying unhelpful shit, our brain is not an asshole. It doesn't want us to feel bad on the whole. It's just that our brain sometimes gets confused about how to help us and how to keep us safe. So that's something I've been saying for a long time. And in reading this book, what I learned was Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's ideas can help me understand and kind of bolster my ideas around that.
So in Whole Brain Living she's talking about how we have two hemispheres of the brain, which most people know about, right? You have your right hemisphere, and you have your left hemisphere. A lot of people associate the left hemisphere with being super rational and stuff like that. A lot of people associate the right hemisphere with being creative and stuff like that. But what I learned from this book is that's a major oversimplification.
What I also learned is there are these parts of your brain that you actually have in both hemispheres. So I think it's the amygdala is actually in both hemispheres, and then there are a few other parts. And I'm familiar with the amygdala because that's something that can get sort of activated, I think, when we're having like a fight or flight response.
And don't quote me on the science part because that's not the part I understand super well. The part I understand is more about like how to use this in terms of having a fun and happy career and satisfying career, and a fun and happy life and integrating those things together.
And actually, what I want to talk about with you today in reference to this book is really about like acceptance and integration of these different parts of your brain. So you can read the whole book if you want the full download and all the science stuff because, again, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist and she's got that shit on lock. That's not what I'm the most excited about.
What I'm the most excited about is this idea of getting to know these different parts of your brain and integrating them together to create kind of one team that is a team made up of these different parts of you.
So I've also done a kind of therapy called internal family systems therapy, which is sometimes colloquially referred to as parts therapy. And it's about like understanding these different parts of you and what their motivations are, and what they're trying to get for you, and what they're trying to protect. And I personally really liked that kind of therapy.
And if that sounds cool to you, you may want to look into that kind of therapy. But what I like about whole brain living is Jill Bolte Taylor is talking about four, and instead of calling them parts she calls them characters. So these four characters, but one of the cool things is everyone has these four characters because they're based on parts of your brain. Everyone with a normally functioning brain, and I'm using that pretty loosely, normal functioning brain, has these four characters.
She does talk in the book about people who, there was some kind of science where back in the day someone was like separating the hemispheres. So they would have a different experience because normally for most of us these parts of our brain are sort of like working together and talking to each other and like inhibiting each other and stuff like that.
And when people's hemispheres get separated, they don't have that capability anymore. And like people's like right hands on left hands would be trying to do different things and like smacking the other hand because they like didn't agree. It's really interesting. Anyways, read the whole book.
But basically, for all of us with all these brain parts we have a character one, a character two, a character three, and a character four. And character one is the left hemisphere thinking brain. Character two is the left hemisphere feeling brain. Character three is the right hemisphere feeling brain. And character four is the right hemisphere thinking brain. And they have different concerns, different identities, different motivations, different desires.
And for me and a lot of my clients, I think we would identify pretty heavily with type one, or character one because character one is all about getting shit done. Character one is very achievement oriented, it likes a list, it likes to accomplish things. It's a go, go, go energy. And a lot of my people have spent a lot of time sort of in that mode of being in that identity and that headspace.
But if all we're ever doing is living our lives in that space, it can get very taxing because that part of us, like it's not as good at resting, it's not as good at relaxing. Sometimes it's not even as good at connecting with other people. Okay, so that's just something to keep in mind.
And then we have character two. Character two she talks about as kind of like a child. And this makes so much sense to me because I have this part of me that gets her feelings hurt and is like angry at everybody and just needs to be loved and cherished. And when I was earlier in my coaching journey, and even before my coaching journey, I would get so frustrated with this part of me.
Well either I would be like completely in that part of me and like feeling super sorry for myself and thinking life wasn't fair and the world wasn't fair, or I would be super judgmental of that part of me. It would be like, “God, she’s such a baby,” right? Or back then I probably would have said it in the first person, “I'm such a baby.”
And what's interesting to know about this character is it's true, but not in a bad way. She is such a baby because she's literally sort of like a child, right? So character two is also where a lot of us get stuck when we feel like the world has done us wrong.
And listen, y'all know I do think there are a lot of problematic things going on in the world, like lots of systems of oppression, lots of bullshit, lots of harmful -isms, but character to is very much in the headspace of like being a victim of that.
And that makes sense on one level to feel that way, but what character two doesn't have is the capacity to be like, okay, what am I going to do about it? How am I going to go out and change these systems? How am I going to create a better world?. Not because I should have to but just because like what are we got to do, stay with the world we have or create something else? I mean, I'm personally a big fan of trying to create something else.
But character two isn't where we're going to accomplish that because character two is kind of more focused on the struggle, right? Which isn't bad, it's just something to be aware of, something to be managed. And I would say, ultimately, this character is someone who needs to be loved and cared for. And loving and caring for this character is how we integrate them.
Versus what I see a lot of people do, which is try to get rid of that character or divorce that character, or get mad at that character. When people come to coaching and they come to thought work and I talk to them about like, hey, your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings create your actions, your actions create your results. So if you want to have different results, we need different thoughts.
Sometimes they'll get really angry and frustrated at their brains for the thoughts that they have. Versus realizing that your brain wants to keep you alive and functioning. So sometimes it is trying to help you do that, but using these negative ways of thinking, and instead of rejecting that negativity we need to understand how to manage it, how to love that character and how to bring them in and integrate them. Because this is a meaningful part of our brain that adds value to our life.
And there's like no way to just get rid of that part. Like it's part of your brain, it's not just part of what you have learned and absorbed from culture and from the -isms. That's like we have negativity bias, that's part of our brain. And there are benefits to having that too. It's something to be understood and managed, not something that we're going to destroy, or get rid of, or fire, or punish, or put into like mental prison. That's not what we're doing here and it's not effective anyways.
Okay, those are parts one and two, that's the thinking and feeling part of the left brain. Now the right brain has a thinking and feeling part too. The feeling part in the right brain is very in the moment, whereas that character two, character two can get very in the past about what happened and how it was painful or wasn't painful.
Character three is totally in the moment. Character three is where our joy lives. Character three is kind of wild and fun and rambunctious and energetic. And I think for a lot of us, we know about this part, and we crave it, we like it, we want it. But we're not always sure how to tap into it, or how to get to it, or how to integrate it.
What I also learned from the book is character three is sort of also a child part. So it's very fun loving and also sometimes it has ideas that we need to sort of fact check or keep an eye on with our thinking parts. Because sometimes character three can do reckless things that put us in danger that we may not want to do.
Okay, and then we have character four. Character four is the thinking right hemisphere of the brain. And this part is sort of like connected to oneness connected to all beings. It's loving wisdom kind of part. And it's the thinking part, but it thinks really differently than the character one who's very driven and results oriented.
I would say character four is very love oriented and very big picture oriented and inclusive. And that sounds really yummy, and I think it is really yummy. But again, in coaching I see so much of like people are like why want to figure out what the best thing is, and then spend all of my time over there. And what I love about this book and Dr. Joe Bolte Taylor's framing is that she's like, no, you need all these four parts.
You may decide, okay, I want to be primarily spending time in this character. Like this character may be the one that I want to be my primary personality. But the book is called Whole Brain Living and it's about embracing all of these parts, understanding them, and integrating them as a team. Because these parts can be kind of antagonizing to each other, right?
You can just imagine like character one is like making fun of character two, and like telling character three it like never has any follow through, and telling character four it's like a total Pollyanna, right? So the characters can have conflict among each other, and you've probably experienced this too when you're feeling stuck, or you're feeling confused, or you're feeling like, we even say in English like, oh, I'm of two minds, right?
And I feel like I'm often of more than two minds. And yeah, it turns out probably I am of four minds and the four characters all have different ideas. So what a lot of people are doing, I mean, they're totally unaware of this, and they have one character that's probably habitually running their lives that they didn't choose.
And again, a lot of my clients are going to be, their lives are going to be run by that character one, that accomplishment character. But then after a certain amount of time they're like, I feel burnt out, I'm tired. I'm looking around at my life, this isn't what I want. And then they come to coaching to kind of learn a different way of being and a different way of orienting their lives.
And I think that's something coaching has been helping me offer people even though I didn't have this particular framework and this particular lens before. But something I've been talking about for a long time that I feel has now been bolstered by this book is the idea of loving and integrating our parts and like kind of helping them get along with each other.
And I remember on so many client calls, actually, I've talked about like, hey, that part of you that feels really sorry for itself or is having a big emotion, what if you could like be the warm adult and let that little part of you kind of like climb in your lap and tell you all about it? And you don't believe everything that that part's saying, right?
Just like an adult doesn't necessarily believe a child's nightmare, but they have respect, you know, maybe not all adults. But this ideal adult in my head scenario here, they have respect for what the child is saying, they have love for what the child is saying, they have curiosity about what the child is saying. And they're like letting the child work through it on their own while providing a safe and cozy space.
Well after reading this book I'm like, oh, that's my character four making space and witnessing and acknowledging and being with my character two. And I've talked a lot with my clients, and maybe here, about the idea of re-parenting and how we were all parented by imperfect beings, right? And sometimes things come up that we want to re-parent ourselves about.
And I think character for is a wonderful place from which to re-parent. But a lot of us, our internal parent is more of that character one, very driven, very directed, very like sort of controlling, like why would you do that? That doesn't make sense, right?
So I wanted to share all of this with you so that this could be an additional framework you can use to think about creating a career that's satisfying as fuck to you, and creating a life that satisfying as fuck to you, and creating relationships that are satisfying as fuck to you, whatever that means. And understanding that if you have a whole brain, you're going to have these four characters showing up.
And how do you want to integrate them together and bring them kind of all into the fold to help you design, and execute, and live that life? Design and execute and work in that career. Design and execute and connect in those relationships.
I think it'll be useful too for thinking about like, you know, that character one is really good at follow through. That's a great person to have on your team. If that's the only person you ever get to inhabit, though, that can get quite tiring, right? So if you primarily are spending a lot of your time and energy in character one, is there another character that it might be fun to really instill into your life?
Like maybe that character three, that fun loving, in the moment, spontaneous, goofy energy and where can you create space for that in your life? Or maybe you're like, you know what? I really want some of that character four, that peacefulness, that love, that connectedness, where can I instill some of that in my life?
And then if we find ourselves, our character two is cropping up a lot, it's like how do we love that character? How do we create space for them? How do we comfort them and like re-parent them? Because if we let character two run the show, sometimes they run it off the rails a little bit.
Again, it helps me a lot to think about this as like a child energy. And that children need love and guidance. And they need help understanding how to get their needs met and what ways it's appropriate to act. And how can I re-parent that character two, who lashes out but really just wants so badly to be protected, loved, and included?
So what I would invite you to do is pick an area of your life, or pick a few areas. Again, the big three I've already mentioned on this podcast are career, life in general, and relationships. But you could pick anything, right?
Like if you're working on an art project, you could pick that. If you are working on a side hustle, you can pick that. If you are planning some travel, you can pick like the part of you that's planning or the part of you it's going on the trip. Those might be the same part, who knows?
And you could think about which character is primarily showing up? Which character do I want to be showing up? How do I want to experience this? And how can I integrate all these parts? If something's going on and your character two is having a lot of worry about it, how can you comfort that? And then which other characters can you bring in to help create more of what you want, versus just creating more of what you already have created?
So many of us are living our lives habitually. We're doing things we've always done, we're thinking thoughts we've always thought, we're getting results we've already always gotten whether we like them or not.
And this framework of the four characters, it's not better or worse than anything else I've ever taught you, it's just another tool that you can use to think about, like, who am I being? Do I like, who am being here? Is it working for me? Would I like to be something else? While also wrapping in the 50/50, right?
I think some of us are like, yeah, I'd like to not have that character too. That worry, and the guilt, and the shame, and the struggle, and that attachment to the past. But Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor actually didn't have that part of her brain on line for a while. The stroke that she had was in the left hemisphere of her brain and so she actually had to spend, I think it's like eight years, rebuilding some of her left brain functionality.
And she talks about how those feelings, while they often aren't pleasant, add a depth and richness to our lives. So can we even learn to appreciate them? They may be the 50/50, they may not be that fun part. But when we don't think they're bad or mean that anything has gone wrong, maybe they can be part of a wonderful career, life, relationship as well.
I also think something that's really fun about this is realizing that all of these four characters are your birthright as a human with a brain. If you've lived your whole life primarily in character two and you want some of that character one drive and follow through, you can have that. That is in you, you can build that and create that and move forward with that.
And if you've been hardcore character one and you want that character three fun and delight, you can have that. You have that capacity in you. You can learn to become that character and tap into that too.
And if you want some character four energy, you want to feel that peacefulness, that oneness, that connection to the whole of existence, that's available to you.
I think so often we have these very restricting definitions of ourselves and who we are, what kind of person we can be in the world and what's available to us. And I think there's so much more available to you, and so much more you're capable of. And it's like maybe at your fingertips more than you ever thought it was.
So that's what I want you all to think about today. How can I use these ideas of the four characters to create more of what I crave and have a better experience of this human life I'm having?
And listen, if you want some guided support and one on one coaching on how to implement all of these ideas I talk about on the podcast, come sign up for a consult with me. We will have a great conversation that will get you a good start in any direction you want to go in. And if you want more ongoing support, I can tell you about the ways I'm working with clients currently.
All right, that's what I got for y'all. Have a lovely day, bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all. Happy Wednesday. I hope this podcast finds you very well. I'm having a great day. I went out and had a nice long walk earlier and it was a little bit cooler than it has been so that was really satisfying because it's been very hot here in Sacramento. So I enjoyed having a little bit of a cooler temperature.
And I've been listening to this great audio book on my walks lately and that's what we're going to talk about today. The book is called Whole Brain Living by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I originally heard about it from a Martha Beck podcast, and I was familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor already because she wrote another book called My Stroke of Insight, which is about her experience having a stroke.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard trained neuroscientist, so her work around her stroke is really cool because she was already a Harvard trained neuroscientist when she had the stroke. And so she's able to talk about her experience from this point of view of understanding things and through the lens of science. And I read part of that book, too.
But that's not what we're going to talk about today. Although that book is where I got the information from that a feeling that's not interrupted, or antagonized, or sort of magnified through language, and storytelling, venting, those kind of things. only lasts about 90 seconds.
So we talk on the podcast a lot about feelings and about how a thought that you're having can kick off a feeling, right? So if you think, “What an asshole,” you may feel angry, and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is the one who taught me indirectly, because I think I also learned this from Martha Beck who credited Jill Bolte Taylor.
Anyways, it's her experience in the stroke was that if she didn't get stuck in the language loop, or get stuck in the story, or get stuck in replaying the thing that had happened, the feeling itself would only last about 90 seconds. And I find that to be very helpful when a big feeling comes up that is maybe it's difficult for me to feel, knowing that if I let it be there, the physiological experience of the feeling will pass in 90 seconds.
I know that may not be your experience. For most of us, our feelings don't pass in 90 seconds, again, because we are either engaging with the feeling or we're continuing the story around the feeling. When we continue the story around it, we continue that feeling around it.
So for many of us, our feelings seem to last for minutes, hours, days of our lives, months, years of our lives. But what Dr. Joe Bolte Taylor is saying is that that's not the feeling itself. When we interact with the feeling or when we interact with the story about the feeling, that kind of longer effect can happen.
And for a lot of us that's our habit. Our habit is to re-tell our story, it is to kind of get stuck there and live inside the feeling, and there's a lot of different tools, coaching, therapy, and other things that can help you learn to not do that if that's something you're interested in. For me it is because I want to be able to feel my feelings without getting stuck in them. I want to be to feel my grief without like building a house and like living there for the rest of my life.
Okay, so that's a mini lesson from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor from her other book that can be really useful in the coaching you're doing about your career and your life and anything else you're using these tools on.
But today what I want to talk about is this other book of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's that I've just been reading, and spoiler alert, I'm not even quite done yet. But you know how excited I get when I'm learning about something, I want to talk to you all about it immediately. And so sometimes I get too excited to even finish the book. I'm almost done, I'm just not quite there.
So something I think and talk a lot about is understanding that our brain, even when it's saying unhelpful shit, our brain is not an asshole. It doesn't want us to feel bad on the whole. It's just that our brain sometimes gets confused about how to help us and how to keep us safe. So that's something I've been saying for a long time. And in reading this book, what I learned was Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's ideas can help me understand and kind of bolster my ideas around that.
So in Whole Brain Living she's talking about how we have two hemispheres of the brain, which most people know about, right? You have your right hemisphere, and you have your left hemisphere. A lot of people associate the left hemisphere with being super rational and stuff like that. A lot of people associate the right hemisphere with being creative and stuff like that. But what I learned from this book is that's a major oversimplification.
What I also learned is there are these parts of your brain that you actually have in both hemispheres. So I think it's the amygdala is actually in both hemispheres, and then there are a few other parts. And I'm familiar with the amygdala because that's something that can get sort of activated, I think, when we're having like a fight or flight response.
And don't quote me on the science part because that's not the part I understand super well. The part I understand is more about like how to use this in terms of having a fun and happy career and satisfying career, and a fun and happy life and integrating those things together.
And actually, what I want to talk about with you today in reference to this book is really about like acceptance and integration of these different parts of your brain. So you can read the whole book if you want the full download and all the science stuff because, again, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist and she's got that shit on lock. That's not what I'm the most excited about.
What I'm the most excited about is this idea of getting to know these different parts of your brain and integrating them together to create kind of one team that is a team made up of these different parts of you.
So I've also done a kind of therapy called internal family systems therapy, which is sometimes colloquially referred to as parts therapy. And it's about like understanding these different parts of you and what their motivations are, and what they're trying to get for you, and what they're trying to protect. And I personally really liked that kind of therapy.
And if that sounds cool to you, you may want to look into that kind of therapy. But what I like about whole brain living is Jill Bolte Taylor is talking about four, and instead of calling them parts she calls them characters. So these four characters, but one of the cool things is everyone has these four characters because they're based on parts of your brain. Everyone with a normally functioning brain, and I'm using that pretty loosely, normal functioning brain, has these four characters.
She does talk in the book about people who, there was some kind of science where back in the day someone was like separating the hemispheres. So they would have a different experience because normally for most of us these parts of our brain are sort of like working together and talking to each other and like inhibiting each other and stuff like that.
And when people's hemispheres get separated, they don't have that capability anymore. And like people's like right hands on left hands would be trying to do different things and like smacking the other hand because they like didn't agree. It's really interesting. Anyways, read the whole book.
But basically, for all of us with all these brain parts we have a character one, a character two, a character three, and a character four. And character one is the left hemisphere thinking brain. Character two is the left hemisphere feeling brain. Character three is the right hemisphere feeling brain. And character four is the right hemisphere thinking brain. And they have different concerns, different identities, different motivations, different desires.
And for me and a lot of my clients, I think we would identify pretty heavily with type one, or character one because character one is all about getting shit done. Character one is very achievement oriented, it likes a list, it likes to accomplish things. It's a go, go, go energy. And a lot of my people have spent a lot of time sort of in that mode of being in that identity and that headspace.
But if all we're ever doing is living our lives in that space, it can get very taxing because that part of us, like it's not as good at resting, it's not as good at relaxing. Sometimes it's not even as good at connecting with other people. Okay, so that's just something to keep in mind.
And then we have character two. Character two she talks about as kind of like a child. And this makes so much sense to me because I have this part of me that gets her feelings hurt and is like angry at everybody and just needs to be loved and cherished. And when I was earlier in my coaching journey, and even before my coaching journey, I would get so frustrated with this part of me.
Well either I would be like completely in that part of me and like feeling super sorry for myself and thinking life wasn't fair and the world wasn't fair, or I would be super judgmental of that part of me. It would be like, “God, she’s such a baby,” right? Or back then I probably would have said it in the first person, “I'm such a baby.”
And what's interesting to know about this character is it's true, but not in a bad way. She is such a baby because she's literally sort of like a child, right? So character two is also where a lot of us get stuck when we feel like the world has done us wrong.
And listen, y'all know I do think there are a lot of problematic things going on in the world, like lots of systems of oppression, lots of bullshit, lots of harmful -isms, but character to is very much in the headspace of like being a victim of that.
And that makes sense on one level to feel that way, but what character two doesn't have is the capacity to be like, okay, what am I going to do about it? How am I going to go out and change these systems? How am I going to create a better world?. Not because I should have to but just because like what are we got to do, stay with the world we have or create something else? I mean, I'm personally a big fan of trying to create something else.
But character two isn't where we're going to accomplish that because character two is kind of more focused on the struggle, right? Which isn't bad, it's just something to be aware of, something to be managed. And I would say, ultimately, this character is someone who needs to be loved and cared for. And loving and caring for this character is how we integrate them.
Versus what I see a lot of people do, which is try to get rid of that character or divorce that character, or get mad at that character. When people come to coaching and they come to thought work and I talk to them about like, hey, your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings create your actions, your actions create your results. So if you want to have different results, we need different thoughts.
Sometimes they'll get really angry and frustrated at their brains for the thoughts that they have. Versus realizing that your brain wants to keep you alive and functioning. So sometimes it is trying to help you do that, but using these negative ways of thinking, and instead of rejecting that negativity we need to understand how to manage it, how to love that character and how to bring them in and integrate them. Because this is a meaningful part of our brain that adds value to our life.
And there's like no way to just get rid of that part. Like it's part of your brain, it's not just part of what you have learned and absorbed from culture and from the -isms. That's like we have negativity bias, that's part of our brain. And there are benefits to having that too. It's something to be understood and managed, not something that we're going to destroy, or get rid of, or fire, or punish, or put into like mental prison. That's not what we're doing here and it's not effective anyways.
Okay, those are parts one and two, that's the thinking and feeling part of the left brain. Now the right brain has a thinking and feeling part too. The feeling part in the right brain is very in the moment, whereas that character two, character two can get very in the past about what happened and how it was painful or wasn't painful.
Character three is totally in the moment. Character three is where our joy lives. Character three is kind of wild and fun and rambunctious and energetic. And I think for a lot of us, we know about this part, and we crave it, we like it, we want it. But we're not always sure how to tap into it, or how to get to it, or how to integrate it.
What I also learned from the book is character three is sort of also a child part. So it's very fun loving and also sometimes it has ideas that we need to sort of fact check or keep an eye on with our thinking parts. Because sometimes character three can do reckless things that put us in danger that we may not want to do.
Okay, and then we have character four. Character four is the thinking right hemisphere of the brain. And this part is sort of like connected to oneness connected to all beings. It's loving wisdom kind of part. And it's the thinking part, but it thinks really differently than the character one who's very driven and results oriented.
I would say character four is very love oriented and very big picture oriented and inclusive. And that sounds really yummy, and I think it is really yummy. But again, in coaching I see so much of like people are like why want to figure out what the best thing is, and then spend all of my time over there. And what I love about this book and Dr. Joe Bolte Taylor's framing is that she's like, no, you need all these four parts.
You may decide, okay, I want to be primarily spending time in this character. Like this character may be the one that I want to be my primary personality. But the book is called Whole Brain Living and it's about embracing all of these parts, understanding them, and integrating them as a team. Because these parts can be kind of antagonizing to each other, right?
You can just imagine like character one is like making fun of character two, and like telling character three it like never has any follow through, and telling character four it's like a total Pollyanna, right? So the characters can have conflict among each other, and you've probably experienced this too when you're feeling stuck, or you're feeling confused, or you're feeling like, we even say in English like, oh, I'm of two minds, right?
And I feel like I'm often of more than two minds. And yeah, it turns out probably I am of four minds and the four characters all have different ideas. So what a lot of people are doing, I mean, they're totally unaware of this, and they have one character that's probably habitually running their lives that they didn't choose.
And again, a lot of my clients are going to be, their lives are going to be run by that character one, that accomplishment character. But then after a certain amount of time they're like, I feel burnt out, I'm tired. I'm looking around at my life, this isn't what I want. And then they come to coaching to kind of learn a different way of being and a different way of orienting their lives.
And I think that's something coaching has been helping me offer people even though I didn't have this particular framework and this particular lens before. But something I've been talking about for a long time that I feel has now been bolstered by this book is the idea of loving and integrating our parts and like kind of helping them get along with each other.
And I remember on so many client calls, actually, I've talked about like, hey, that part of you that feels really sorry for itself or is having a big emotion, what if you could like be the warm adult and let that little part of you kind of like climb in your lap and tell you all about it? And you don't believe everything that that part's saying, right?
Just like an adult doesn't necessarily believe a child's nightmare, but they have respect, you know, maybe not all adults. But this ideal adult in my head scenario here, they have respect for what the child is saying, they have love for what the child is saying, they have curiosity about what the child is saying. And they're like letting the child work through it on their own while providing a safe and cozy space.
Well after reading this book I'm like, oh, that's my character four making space and witnessing and acknowledging and being with my character two. And I've talked a lot with my clients, and maybe here, about the idea of re-parenting and how we were all parented by imperfect beings, right? And sometimes things come up that we want to re-parent ourselves about.
And I think character for is a wonderful place from which to re-parent. But a lot of us, our internal parent is more of that character one, very driven, very directed, very like sort of controlling, like why would you do that? That doesn't make sense, right?
So I wanted to share all of this with you so that this could be an additional framework you can use to think about creating a career that's satisfying as fuck to you, and creating a life that satisfying as fuck to you, and creating relationships that are satisfying as fuck to you, whatever that means. And understanding that if you have a whole brain, you're going to have these four characters showing up.
And how do you want to integrate them together and bring them kind of all into the fold to help you design, and execute, and live that life? Design and execute and work in that career. Design and execute and connect in those relationships.
I think it'll be useful too for thinking about like, you know, that character one is really good at follow through. That's a great person to have on your team. If that's the only person you ever get to inhabit, though, that can get quite tiring, right? So if you primarily are spending a lot of your time and energy in character one, is there another character that it might be fun to really instill into your life?
Like maybe that character three, that fun loving, in the moment, spontaneous, goofy energy and where can you create space for that in your life? Or maybe you're like, you know what? I really want some of that character four, that peacefulness, that love, that connectedness, where can I instill some of that in my life?
And then if we find ourselves, our character two is cropping up a lot, it's like how do we love that character? How do we create space for them? How do we comfort them and like re-parent them? Because if we let character two run the show, sometimes they run it off the rails a little bit.
Again, it helps me a lot to think about this as like a child energy. And that children need love and guidance. And they need help understanding how to get their needs met and what ways it's appropriate to act. And how can I re-parent that character two, who lashes out but really just wants so badly to be protected, loved, and included?
So what I would invite you to do is pick an area of your life, or pick a few areas. Again, the big three I've already mentioned on this podcast are career, life in general, and relationships. But you could pick anything, right?
Like if you're working on an art project, you could pick that. If you are working on a side hustle, you can pick that. If you are planning some travel, you can pick like the part of you that's planning or the part of you it's going on the trip. Those might be the same part, who knows?
And you could think about which character is primarily showing up? Which character do I want to be showing up? How do I want to experience this? And how can I integrate all these parts? If something's going on and your character two is having a lot of worry about it, how can you comfort that? And then which other characters can you bring in to help create more of what you want, versus just creating more of what you already have created?
So many of us are living our lives habitually. We're doing things we've always done, we're thinking thoughts we've always thought, we're getting results we've already always gotten whether we like them or not.
And this framework of the four characters, it's not better or worse than anything else I've ever taught you, it's just another tool that you can use to think about, like, who am I being? Do I like, who am being here? Is it working for me? Would I like to be something else? While also wrapping in the 50/50, right?
I think some of us are like, yeah, I'd like to not have that character too. That worry, and the guilt, and the shame, and the struggle, and that attachment to the past. But Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor actually didn't have that part of her brain on line for a while. The stroke that she had was in the left hemisphere of her brain and so she actually had to spend, I think it's like eight years, rebuilding some of her left brain functionality.
And she talks about how those feelings, while they often aren't pleasant, add a depth and richness to our lives. So can we even learn to appreciate them? They may be the 50/50, they may not be that fun part. But when we don't think they're bad or mean that anything has gone wrong, maybe they can be part of a wonderful career, life, relationship as well.
I also think something that's really fun about this is realizing that all of these four characters are your birthright as a human with a brain. If you've lived your whole life primarily in character two and you want some of that character one drive and follow through, you can have that. That is in you, you can build that and create that and move forward with that.
And if you've been hardcore character one and you want that character three fun and delight, you can have that. You have that capacity in you. You can learn to become that character and tap into that too.
And if you want some character four energy, you want to feel that peacefulness, that oneness, that connection to the whole of existence, that's available to you.
I think so often we have these very restricting definitions of ourselves and who we are, what kind of person we can be in the world and what's available to us. And I think there's so much more available to you, and so much more you're capable of. And it's like maybe at your fingertips more than you ever thought it was.
So that's what I want you all to think about today. How can I use these ideas of the four characters to create more of what I crave and have a better experience of this human life I'm having?
And listen, if you want some guided support and one on one coaching on how to implement all of these ideas I talk about on the podcast, come sign up for a consult with me. We will have a great conversation that will get you a good start in any direction you want to go in. And if you want more ongoing support, I can tell you about the ways I'm working with clients currently.
All right, that's what I got for y'all. Have a lovely day, bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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