Pod Insights Passion Struck with John R. Miles How to Rewire Your Brain, Let Go of Old Wounds, and Become Who You Were Meant to Be | Nick Ortner - EP 790 About this episode What if you didn't have to remain who you've always been? In this conversation, Nick Ortner explains how tapping and the latest science on the brain can help you break free from anxiety, self-doubt, and the emotional patterns keeping you stuck.
Transcript 13,942 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 The holidays have a way of bringing out old habits. Saying yes to every invitation because you feel guilty saying no, or getting pulled into the same family arguments year after year. But what if this year, you gave yourself permission to do things differently? Maybe you skip an event you don't have the energy for, or take a breath instead of reacting to that comment that always gets under your skin. Those small moments can change how you feel and how you show up for the people you love. That's what growing feels like. Grow Therapy makes finding care easier. Find a licensed therapist who fits your needs, book your first session in minutes, and start in as little as two days. Prepare for holiday glimmers instead of holiday stress.
0:44 Speaker 00 Visit growtherapy.com/booknow. That's growtherapy.com/booknow. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.
0:52 John R. Miles? Coming up next on Passion Struck.
0:55 Speaker 02 We have something called the negativity bias. We all know it. If someone says, "John, I could say one mean thing to you today, and you will remember it for three years, and the next thousand people that talk to you could say nice things, and it'll be gone." It'll be like, "Well, Nick said that one thing." So our brain does latch on to these things. It's in order to keep us safe. I talk to a lot of authors, and I joke that you haven't made it as an author until you get a one-star review, because it means your book hasn't gone out far enough.
1:25 John R. Miles? Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.
2:13 John R. Miles? Hello friends and welcome back to episode 790 of Passion Struck. This month, we're exploring what it means to flourish, how humans become fully alive. Last week, we began with awakening. Whitney Otto helped us think differently about our relationships with our bodies and the stories we carry about ourselves. Suzanne Geissman reminded us that connection and presence matter most when life becomes difficult. And in Friday's episode, I talked about why flourishing begins with paying attention to the life we're living right now, instead of waiting for some future version of ourselves to arrive. This week, we're taking the next step. We're talking about rewiring, because most of us already know what we'd like to change. We know the habits that get in our way, the fears that keep showing up, and the experiences
2:56 John R. Miles? from years ago that still seem to have a vote in who we are today. The question isn't whether change is possible, it's understanding why some patterns stay with us for decades, and what it actually takes to create lasting change. My guest today is Nick Ortner. Nick is the founder of The Tapping Solution, a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world's leading voices on emotional freedom techniques, or EFT. For nearly 20 years, he's helped millions of people use tapping to reduce stress, process difficult experiences, and break patterns to keep them stuck. His new book is called Rewired, and today's conversation goes far beyond positive thinking or willpower. We talk about the science of neuroplasticity and memory reconsolidation, why the body often remembers experiences long after the mind believes it has moved on, and how tapping
3:41 John R. Miles? creates a practical way to work with old fears, anxieties, and limiting beliefs. Nick also leads me through a live tapping experience around one of the most difficult speaking experiences of my life, an experience that kept me off the stage for nearly 18 months. And we explore what it means to release the emotional change we've attached to moments that still shape us years later. If you've ever found yourself saying, I know what I should do. So why do I keep doing the opposite? I think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. Before we begin, if you're enjoying this flourishing series, please share this episode with someone who might need it. Make sure you're following Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you haven't left a rating or review, it really helps us reach more people. You can
4:26 John R. Miles? watch the full video version of this conversation along with additional clips on our YouTube channel. And if you'd like to go deeper, you'll find today's companion workbook and reflection guide at theunitedlife.net. Now let's dive in with Nick Ortner. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now let that journey begin.
4:52 John R. Miles? I'm absolutely thrilled today to welcome Nick Ortner to Passion Struck. Nick, how are you today?
4:58 Speaker 02 John, I am so excited to be here. I'm great. We started having fun conversations before we started recording and said, we gotta stop because we have stories to tell. And so let's save it for our actual chat.
5:08 John R. Miles? Today, we're here to talk about your brand new book, Rewired. And I want to start here. I get extremely nervous about asking people for endorsements for my books. How in the heck did you ask Tony Robbins to do the foreword and get him to agree?
5:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, how did I ask him and get him to agree? I know. All right. You ready for the story?
5:30 John R. Miles? I'm ready for the story.
5:32 Speaker 02 Tony is such a big part of my life and this arc. I first discovered Tony. Well, my mom bought his tapes off of QVC infomercials, probably infomercial, the ones that ran 24/7. And they were in the house. I could see them in a bookcase. And when I was in high school, I picked some up and I started listening. And I was probably one of the first door openings to like, oh, I don't have to believe everything I think. I don't have to think the same thoughts that I've thought before. Right? So it was just like opening the door. And then I went to college and worked after college and life was certainly, it was like, good, but I wasn't happy. Things were in the way. I was young and successful, but too many things were broken. And I saw
6:18 Speaker 02 I was walking down the streets of Manhattan and I, there was the Learning Center. These little booklets you could pull out and they had all these classes and right on the cover was Tony's face. And it was like UPW, New York, New Jersey, it was obviously in New Jersey, across the river. And come for this three day event. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna go. And I showed up, I went by myself and did that weekend UPW. Noticed so quickly the transformation it made in my life. The simple things, shoulders back and up, knowing that I can make decisions in my life, knowing that I could be empowered. So he just set off this trajectory of energy and change in my life. And I got super into him. I did the date with destiny and I went to Fiji for life mastery. I did all the things.
7:03 Speaker 02 And at one of his events, a leadership conference, he came up on stage and he did this little demonstration. He says, I've been doing this tapping thing. And he took us through the process. He handed out flyers, because this is 2002 for context. So it wasn't even go to this website or an app. And it was like, here's a flyer of the tapping process. And I tried the tapping and I had an experience. I go, wow, that really felt different. Something just shifted in my body. And I went home, I started researching it, bought books about it, went online, learned everything I could about this tapping thing. And spent the next five years just using it with friends and family.
7:43 Speaker 02 The running joke at the time was, don't say anything is wrong around Nick because he'll make you tap on it. If we were hanging out and you were like, my shoulder hurts, I'd say, oh, well, I just learned this tapping thing. Let's try it. Oh, I feel really stuck in my life. I keep procrastinating. Oh, let's try this tapping thing. Then in 2007, after five years of just doing it, I was inspired to make a documentary film about EFT. It was right around the time The Secret came out. So I'm sure you remember and many of our viewers and listeners remember The Secret. And I knew that a bunch of people who were in The Secret, like Jack Canfield and Bob Doyle and Mike Dooley were into tapping. So I said, okay, I was a 29 year old kid. I'll make The Secret Part Two, sort of thing. I'll make a documentary.
8:28 Speaker 02 And it'll be just like The Secret, we'll be on Oprah and then be rich forever. I enlisted my younger sister Jessica and one of my best friends from high school, Nick Pelisi, and the three of us with no filmmaking experience at all, bought $40,000 worth of camera equipment, unpacked boxes in my 500 square foot apartment and said, "This looks like a light stand. Is this a light stand or is this a camera stand?" Or we had no idea what we were doing. But we somehow pulled it off. And I'm getting to Tony. This is just a quick journey through how we got here. We somehow pulled it off. We released this DVD in 2008 and sold DVDs for $29.95 to try to make up the $130,000 in debt that I had taken on to make the movie.
9:13 Speaker 02 We did that. We did these online events, the Tapping World Summit, that did really well, built a company around it. I wrote my first book in 2013 called The Tapping Solution. That was a New York Times bestseller. And I was just doing my thing, following my passions, releasing what was in the way at every next step and doing the work. And remained a Tony fan throughout this whole period. And we were in Orbitz. Now I'm somewhat known. I have a New York Times bestselling book, but I didn't know him and wasn't introduced to him. And in 2013, right around the time the book came out, I had been working on the ground in my hometown of Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut. So this is the site of the Sandy Hook school shootings.
9:57 Speaker 02 A horrible day. It's 10 minutes from where I'm talking to you now. And it was devastating for our community, for me, for the world. And I was here. So I was like, okay, we have to do something here. I have this technique that works really well on trauma, on shock, on all these things. How do we share it with our community? So we started the Tapping Solution Foundation. At that time and spent the next several years training people in town, working with people in town. The following Tuesday after the shooting, I was in the house of a mother who had lost her son just five days earlier. The most powerful work we've ever done, what I'm proudest of in helping those people. And through that work, I got to know a lot of people. One of them was Scarlett Lewis, who lost her son Jesse.
10:42 Speaker 02 And she says to me, probably about a year after, got to know her and working with her and becoming friends, she said, hey, Tony Robbins is coming into town to meet with us, to meet with people who were involved in the shooting. And he's actually bringing in survivors from other shootings so they can get to know each other and fly them all in. He's doing this quietly, no PR, no media. He's just coming to help. And I know you're such a big fan, do you want to come with me to this thing? So I'm like, yeah, dream come true. I can't believe Tony's coming here. Go to this little Marriott and we're in a conference room, everyone's introducing each other and what they've gone through. And I say, I'm here at Scarlett's friend. I've just been helping on the ground and I've been doing this tapping thing. And Tony knew what it was and we connected from there, became fast friends.
11:27 Speaker 02 He wrote some endorsements for my previous books. He's actually the only outside investor in the Tapping Solution app and he has become a friend. All of this to say, I know you asked how I got Tony to endorse it, but it really is the arc of being passionate at a young age for something, doing the work, following my calling. And then really what I think is most meaningful for me about my relationship with Tony and is that I met him because I was just doing the work. It wasn't networking, trying to get to him. It wasn't asking him for something. Most people are just out there, oh, I wish I could get that and just grabbing and I want more. I was just doing the work that I thought was right to do in my heart, to help the people in this community and without fanfare.
12:11 Speaker 02 And then Tony noticed and we became friends and that's how he wrote the foreword. So like I said, long answer to a small question, but it's to me a big part of our story and why we do what we do today.
12:25 John R. Miles? I have the advanced readers copy of the book and I'm going to have to purchase the actual book because it does not have his forward in it. So I really want to read it.
12:34 Speaker 02 I'm happy to send you a copy.
12:35 John R. Miles? About, yeah, it's interesting how much Tony does that people don't even realize he's doing. I had a previous guest on the show, Jan Marie Chen, and she had started this company where they were making portable incubators for third world countries to help save children who couldn't afford the incubators like we have in much of the Western world. And they reached a funding deficit where the whole company was going to go out of business. And Tony came in underneath the covers with Mark Benioff and kind of rescued the company. And they've now given out something
13:15 John R. Miles? like 500,000 incubators around the world. So he's got his finger on a lot of things that people don't realize he's doing outside of the conferences and everything else that he's doing. It's really interesting when you start studying them.
13:29 Speaker 02 It's not just that public persona just on stage. I get these voice notes from him, which is just the best, right? Because it's Tony's distinct, clear voice. And to me, it's a dream come true every time one comes in. As part of our partnership with the tapping solution app, he has a 2%. We gifted him a 2% ownership of the company. And he donates that. It was to feeding America into other charities around food hunger. And then we matched that with 3%. So 5% of all profits from the tapping solution app go to help feed people. And I was doing this last payout. And I said, Hey, I've got this nice check to write to wherever you want from our partnership together. And at first, he was going to go one place. And then he sends me a voice. No, he goes, No, you know what? I wanted to go over
14:10 Speaker 02 here because there's an opportunity. I forget the numbers. He said something like 18 million potatoes are about to go to waste because they need trucks to go from here to here. And if we can do the trucks from here to here, like all this logistical stuff, then we're going to get meals at this. So it was like a business economics logistical thing that he had just gotten his hands in. And the reality is that's how impact is made. It's not just about giving a dollar away. Well, what is that dollar going to do? And how far is that dollar going to go? And he's just so in the weeds of it. It sounds like the incubator story, where he's just finding all these places where he can make amazing impact.
14:48 John R. Miles? I love it. Well, for listeners who are not familiar with tapping, what is tapping? And what is EFT?
14:58 Speaker 02 Great question. We call it tapping because we are literally physically tapping on these spots in our body. Now, they might be endpoints of meridians. So if you're familiar with acupuncture and acupressure, there's the meridian system in the body. There are also points where we have these mechanoreceptors. So some of the latest research is showing that we're actually creating, as simple and silly and sometimes ridiculous as this looks, like, why are we physically tapping on the side of our eye here, we're actually creating an electrical signal. So this is a mechanoreceptor, creates an electrical signal, travels through these afferent nerve pathways in our body to our brain. At the most basic level, what we're
15:40 Speaker 02 doing every time we're tapping, we have anxiety, we have pain, we have resistance to something, we have a craving, our brain is firing, and particularly, our amygdala is usually firing, the fight or flight or freeze response. And it can be a low-grade firing or full-on panic and trauma. When we do this tapping, we send this afferent, this signal through these afferent pathways, and it basically tells the amygdala to stand down. It's a calming signal to the brain. And we do that while we're either already activated, if we're feeling something, or we purposefully activate it. So we think about the thing that someone said to you two weeks ago, that is still just, ah, it's stuck in there. And you think about it, and you have all these emotions tied around it. You might be angry, you
16:25 Speaker 02 might be anxious, you might be looping. So what's happening in that moment? That memory is coming up. And when we think about something, a memory comes up, and we can edit it at that point. Now, most people think that thought, run all the same loops, feel all the same anger, sometimes make it even worse, and then they just move on to their life, they re-save that memory with all the stuff stuck on it. What we're doing here is we're bringing it up, we're thinking about it, we are sending that calming signal at the same time. So now we're adding a safety layer to this memory. And this process is called memory reconsolidation. Shows that we can actually re-save the memory without everything attached to it. Which is why someone who can have a phobia, a 20-year fear of flying.
17:09 Speaker 02 What's happening there? Every time they think about a plane, you bring up all the memories or the one time, like all the fears, everything that's attached to it. The body activates, the nervous system activates, oh my God, I get sweaty, I get this, I get that. All right, all these things come from just thinking that thought, from going up on stage, from having to do the difficult thing, from feeling stuck. We send that calming signal while it's all activated. It gets re-saved and now someone goes, oh, it's gone. Now you can be someone who doesn't have a fear of flying. Or, at the very least, which is also life-changing, you can go from an eight fear of flying to a four fear of flying. An eight, you can't get on the plane. A four, you're on the plane. Are you happy? You'd rather not be on the plane, but you got on the plane and you went and you did the thing you wanted to do.
17:54 Speaker 02 An eight of fear of public speaking or a 10, you're not going out on stage on a 10. You're saying, you know what, you're not signing up, I'm not doing this. I'm not getting up in front of my peers to speak. I have a 10 public speaking phobia. We get you to a six. Oh, okay, now I can open up to this. I'm not gonna love it, but I can have the experience. I can grow from there. I can learn, then I can hopefully make it even better. And these places, these moments in our lives, all these little spots where we feel stuck, where we procrastinate, where we say no to something, where we don't have that confidence. When we break them down, they are just one memory, belief system, idea after another that we learned at some point in our lives and we go, well, this is who I am.
18:39 Speaker 02 This is me. I'm someone who has a fear of flying. I'm someone who isn't a good public speaker. I'm someone who procrastinates. With having, we are getting right to the brain. It's not just a self-help tool, it's not a stress relief technique. It does lower stress and cortisol dramatically, but we are editing the files in our brain and re-saving it with new information, and that's where the transformation comes from.
19:03 John R. Miles? Before we continue, thank you for supporting Passion Struck and for helping us bring these conversations to people around the world. One of the things Nick talks about in this episode is that awareness by itself doesn't create change. Most of us know the habits we'd like to break and the patterns we'd like to leave behind. The challenge is building practices that help us respond differently when those moments show up. That's one of the reasons we created The United Life. It's a place where these conversations move beyond listening and into practice. Every week, we provide companion workbooks, reflection prompts, and tools that help you take what you're hearing on the podcast and apply it in your life. You can download today's free companion guide at theunitedlife.net. And if you're enjoying this flourishing series, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple
19:46 John R. Miles? or Spotify, leave a review, and check out the full video interviews on our YouTube channel. Thank you for supporting the show and for supporting the partners who make these conversations possible.
20:04 John R. Miles? You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my discussion with Nick Ortner.
20:11 John R. Miles? Nick, let's just take this a little bit deeper, if you don't mind. I'm someone who does a lot of public speaking. I actually own a speakers bureau, but it is something that, for me, I'm one of those 10 out of 10 who worry about it because when I was younger, I had a number of traumatic brain injuries, and it's caused me to have sensory processing disorders. So what ends up happening to me is my fear is sometimes my mouth and my brain work at two different speeds. And so what I'm thinking and what I say come out as two different things. And I also have a speech impediment that most of the time
20:52 John R. Miles? I've learned to overcome, but sometimes it comes out. So for those things, I'm always concerned that when I'm on stage, these things are going to happen. And they have. And I've gotten better at Just playing into it so the audience knows what is happening. But it's always something that before I go on stage, I have a lot of anxiety. Is tapping something I could use to help deal with that?
21:16 Speaker 02 A hundred percent. It will completely transform your life. I have no doubt about it. So there's a couple of ways to approach it. One is there's practitioners, there's therapists, there's psychiatrists and psychologists who will work in a one-on-one session and go deep into that. So that's one approach and that's great for especially the deeper traumas and things like that. In our tapping solution app, we have a fear of public speaking tapping meditation. And there's three versions of it. One is right before you go on there, right? So it's like, here's the short version. You didn't do all the deep work before. You realize that there's this tapping thing and now you're about to go on stage. Let me do a quick process to just calm my nervous system in that moment.
22:00 Speaker 02 The other one is a go deeper session where now we're going to take the time to do some of the things I mentioned about, I talked about. What are the experiences you had from the past that are running every single time? Oh, and I'm sure if I ask you to tune into this fear, there's a couple of moments that stand out more than others. Would you say that's true?
22:24 John R. Miles? Yes, yeah.
22:26 Speaker 02 Okay, so those moments, and you can just think about them right now. You're beginning to activate them. You're beginning to recall these memories. Can you give it a number on a scale of zero to 10 in terms of the intensity of that moment or the emotions that come with it?
22:41 John R. Miles? I would say a nine.
22:42 Speaker 02 A nine. So right now, think about what's happening. We're just, you're just thinking about something and you're at a nine. Any physical things that come with it?
22:52 John R. Miles? Sweating.
22:53 Speaker 02 Okay.
22:54 John R. Miles? Panic.
22:55 Speaker 02 Yeah. So now your nervous system is activated, right? Your body is fully in, which is crazy if you really stop to think about it. You had a thought, we're here doing a podcast and you have this thought about this thing. You're at a nine and you're sweating. Think about what's embedded in your nervous system. And then what are the thoughts that you think? So do you have an image that comes up? There's a one event in particular, or is there a couple that come together?
23:18 John R. Miles? For me, there's one event where I was hired by a software company to come in and do a keynote to their global sales team. And I had one of these moments during it and then lost my complete train of thought. And it turned into a complete train wreck. And I felt so bad because the head of sales was a personal friend of mine. I felt like I was letting him down. And man, that event caused me to stop speaking for about 18 months. Because I could not get it out of my head.
23:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. And when you talk about it right now, what are the emotions that you feel?
23:54 John R. Miles? Man, it was really, I, the emotions I feel are all the people who were just staring at me in that room and how I just wished I was anywhere else but that DC conference room that I was in. Cause it felt like I had 200 sets of eyes just going right into my soul.
24:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. And what if there was an emotion? Is it shame? Is it fear?
24:22 John R. Miles? I guess it was shame. Cause I had prepared for this for so long and I had this great speech I was delivering. And then the whole thing went sideways. And then I would anger at myself for, for letting it happen and not having a better recovery strategy.
24:38 Speaker 02 Yeah. Okay. So think about everything we did and we're going to work through this. And I took extra time to set it up because it just shows the breadth of these experiences. And look at what happened. You didn't speak for 18 months and then I'm sure you just powered your way through, right? Just like the grit inside you. And it probably was difficult and it's obviously still around. But for a lot of people, they'll just stop. They won't have that grit and they'll say, well, I'm never doing that again. So then just shut off this part of your life. What if you didn't have to sweat and grit and fight your way through? What if we could let it go? So let's have an experience. And for everyone watching at home, this might be triggering some things within you where you just go,
25:21 Speaker 02 "Okay, just because John's talking about this event, I'm thinking about that event." And if not, just think about something else that's going on in your life that you want to let go. We'll all just tap together and we'll have an experience. You'll get an experience at home and then we'll see if we can clear out some of the intensity for you, John, so you don't have to have it weighing down on you. How's that sound?
25:44 John R. Miles? Sounds great.
25:45 Speaker 02 Okay, you've already brought it up. We have a number that's a nine. We're going to start by tapping on the side of the hand. And if you're listening in the car, don't tap in the car, pull over. And you're just taking four fingers of one hand and you're doing it on the outside of the other hand. We call it the karate chop point if you're breaking boards. Show me, John, on the, so on the outside of the other hand, I know, sorry, yeah. So below your pinky. Other side.
26:11 John R. Miles? Below the pinky, okay.
26:11 Speaker 02 Below the pinky, yep. And now up a little bit higher. All right, there we go. You got it. So this is the side of the hand. Okay, we're just tapping gently and we want to think about the thing that we experienced. So sometimes we say things out loud, other times we just think about them. For now, John, either repeat after me, either in your mind or out loud. Even though this thing happened.
26:38 Speaker 02 You can just think it.
26:40 John R. Miles? Even though this thing happened.
26:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, perfect. I choose to relax now.
26:47 John R. Miles? I choose to relax.
26:49 Speaker 02 And then still on the side of the hand, even though everyone was looking at me.
26:56 John R. Miles? Even though everyone was looking at me.
26:58 Speaker 02 And I was so embarrassed.
27:01 John R. Miles? And I was so embarrassed.
27:03 Speaker 02 I choose to feel safe now.
27:07 John R. Miles? I choose to feel safe now.
27:09 Speaker 02 And one more time, we're still on the side of the hand, even though that was so overwhelming.
27:14 John R. Miles? Even though that was so overwhelming.
27:17 Speaker 02 And I've been carrying it in my body.
27:20 John R. Miles? And I've been carrying it in my body.
27:22 Speaker 02 I choose to let it go now.
27:25 John R. Miles? I choose to let it go now.
27:27 Speaker 02 Now we'll tap through the points. I'll take you through it the first time. It'll be nice and easy and then we'll go through it again inside of the eyebrow. So right where the hair ends and it meets the nose. So yeah, go, there we go. A little further in and you can tap with one hand or both hands. These meridians, these mechanoreceptors run down both sides of the body and just tapping gently.
27:49 Speaker 02 And just tune in to this thing that you're working on. So if you're at home, we're saying different words, but just tune into the thing that's bothering you, the pain, the stress, the overwhelm, whatever's going on. And John, I'm sure you can get there fast when you can see 200 people staring at you. Can you see that now?
28:08 John R. Miles? I can see it.
28:10 Speaker 02 Okay. And now moving to the side of the eye. It's not at the temple. It's next to the eye on the bone. Again, one side or both sides, whatever's comfortable for you. And just see those people staring at you and just notice how your body feels.
28:29 Speaker 02 Perfect. We're not doing this to make you suffer. We are bringing up this memory, this thing that is there already that's running underneath everything. And we're sending this calming signal to the brain under the eye, seeing if we can change the tone and tenor of this memory.
28:51 Speaker 02 And John, just move under the eye, tapping gently. Perfect. And you can do eyes opened or closed. And we're bringing up the stress, the anxiety, the overwhelm. And just tune into
29:07 Speaker 02 everyone looking at you.
29:10 Speaker 02 The shame that you felt.
29:14 Speaker 02 And we're just tapping gently and we're breathing gently.
29:19 Speaker 02 You're doing great. Under the nose, right under the nose, above the lip and that little crease there. Perfect.
29:32 Speaker 02 You're doing great. Tuning into that stressor, the thing that is in your way. Noticing your body.
29:40 Speaker 02 Noticing what you're feeling, what emotions are coming up. Noticing a tightness in your chest or your shoulders.
29:47 Speaker 02 Noticing, noticing everything that comes with just a thought. Just this thing that happened.
29:54 Speaker 02 Underneath the mouth, it's above the chin, below the lip, and that little crease there. There we go. Perfect.
30:02 Speaker 02 And John, keep tapping and tell me what's coming up for you right now.
30:10 John R. Miles? On the other side of the event.
30:12 Speaker 02 So see those people again. Looking at you.
30:17 Speaker 02 How does it feel when they look at you?
30:22 John R. Miles? It doesn't feel as penetrating anymore.
30:24 Speaker 02 Collarbone. And tell me more about. That event, so.
30:30 Speaker 02 They looked at you and didn't go, well, what else do you remember around it?
30:36 John R. Miles? I remember.
30:37 Speaker 02 Be clear for the collarbone, you feel for the two little bones of the collarbone and you can go right below it, all 10 fingers of both hands. Perfect. Just tapping gently.
30:45 John R. Miles? Yeah, I still remember afterwards, the embarrassment I felt talking to my friend who had hired me. And realizing that he had brought me in. To serve his people and to deliver a message that he wanted to. Build the whole conference that he had done. Whole offsite with the team around and I was supposed to drive that home and so that's what I felt worse about.
31:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:07 John R. Miles? Was letting him down.
31:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:11 Speaker 02 And what's the emotion around that?
31:13 John R. Miles? For me, it was shame like we talked about, but just a huge impact to my pride.
31:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:19 John R. Miles? Cause I knew I was. Exceptionally good at delivering these messages and I had failed to live up to my expectations of myself.
31:26 Speaker 02 Yeah. Say out loud, I let him down.
31:30 John R. Miles? I let him down.
31:31 Speaker 02 How's that feel when you say that?
31:36 John R. Miles? I said it to him. So yeah, I feels like release.
31:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:41 John R. Miles? Relief and release.
31:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. All right. Now let's move under the arm. It's three inches underneath the armpit, either side of the body, right on the bra line for women, just tapping gently, breathing gently. Now, right at the top of the head, right on the crown,
31:59 Speaker 02 tapping gently,
32:02 Speaker 02 breathing gently. Okay, we'll do one more round. Now you know the points. I want you to just move back to the eyebrow instead of the eyebrow.
32:11 Speaker 02 And John, let's run it again. So we're bringing up these memories. See yourself on stage.
32:19 Speaker 02 Notice when you notice that things are not going well.
32:26 Speaker 02 Notice the tension in your body. Notice the 200 people staring at you. And so many of these things, when that amygdala is firing, when you're noticing these things, when you're stressed out, it's easy for it to cascade. Now the blood is flowing away from your brain into your arms and legs. You're in fight or flight response. It's hard to come back from that. And just see that happening.
32:52 Speaker 02 Moving to the side of the eye.
32:56 Speaker 02 And just notice that in this moment now, you are safe.
33:01 Speaker 02 See that happening. The eyes looking at you.
33:08 Speaker 02 You realizing it's not going well.
33:12 Speaker 02 And just notice your body letting it go.
33:17 Speaker 02 Under the eye.
33:20 Speaker 02 Notice your body just releasing the charge of this memory. It's still happened. That doesn't change anything.
33:28 Speaker 02 But now you start to realize all the good that came from it.
33:33 Speaker 02 All the pride and how you got back on your feet. And how you powered through and how you didn't let this define you.
33:43 John R. Miles? Certainly wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now.
33:45 Speaker 02 Sure wouldn't. All right.
33:48 Speaker 02 So tune into that pride, that courage, and just let it build within you.
33:55 Speaker 02 Under the nose.
33:58 Speaker 02 See those 200 people staring at you and the reality is that's not
34:03 Speaker 02 a memory of failure. That's a turning point.
34:11 Speaker 02 Tune into that pride now. You see the 200 people and you feel pride about what you made of that moment.
34:22 Speaker 02 Feel that deeply now.
34:27 Speaker 02 Under the mouth.
34:31 Speaker 02 And feel that strength and courage and everything you learned and how many people you've been able to help from that pain.
34:39 Speaker 02 From that moment of pain, everything you've built from that.
34:44 Speaker 02 Feel that pride.
34:48 Speaker 02 Collarbone.
34:51 Speaker 02 And now maybe it's time to
34:54 Speaker 02 release the shame fully from your body.
35:01 Speaker 02 Just opening up to that possibility.
35:08 Speaker 02 Underneath the arm.
35:10 Speaker 02 Letting go even more. Feeling strong, grounded and safe.
35:19 Speaker 02 Top of the head. Feeling strong, grounded and safe.
35:26 Speaker 02 And you can gently stop tapping and take a breath in.
35:32 Speaker 02 And let it go.
35:35 Speaker 02 So we did a couple of tapping rounds there. Experimental, seeing where we are. Tell me, you had that nine before of intensity of the shame of what you felt. Think about that memory again and let's tune in and see if you can give it a new number.
35:52 John R. Miles? Yeah, it's reduced to a three or a four.
35:55 Speaker 02 Beautiful. So we did maybe five or 10 minutes and we took a core memory, a defining memory, a painful memory from a nine to a three or a four. And you'll often find that it'll continue to fade. We're checking in 30 seconds after we stopped tapping, or you might find, oh, there's some other things, something else came up. Tomorrow, you might remember that, oh, there's this part of this event that I hadn't thought about, and I'm still holding on to that. Maybe I can let it go. And then tell me how it felt when we tuned into the pride of what you made of this event. What feelings were you feeling then?
36:33 John R. Miles? You mean, fast forward to now?
36:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, just, no, in that last round of tapping, it felt like it, I felt that pride from you, that you were able to really feel proud of yourself for what you made of that experience.
36:47 John R. Miles? I think those experiences are training grounds for things you don't want to repeat. And I think it makes you
36:56 John R. Miles? be more intentional to make sure that those patterns don't happen again.
37:01 Speaker 02 Yeah. And what we're trying to do here, this isn't, these are our growth opportunities, and this isn't erase anything from the past or not learn from it. It's can we reduce the intensity? Can we, if we had happened to chat the day after this happened, could you reduce the 18 months down to a month of not speaking? Right? And then still learn and grow from it and not have it be so painful?
37:30 John R. Miles? I wish I would have done it a long time ago.
37:34 Speaker 02 Well, all in good time, you have it now, yeah.
37:38 John R. Miles? So Nick, I think this is a really good segue in the introduction of the book. You write, you don't have to be who you've always been. And when I think about that experience I went through, you don't have to.
37:52 John R. Miles? Have the experiences that have caused you to have the emotions that get pent up inside. Why do so many people, so many of my listeners unconsciously believe their emotional patterns like this experience for me are permanent parts of who they are?
38:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's such a great question. I think it's because they can be permanent parts if we don't have a way to change them, right? To get them out of our nervous system. Some people do it through exercise and some people do it through meditation and some people do it through reading self-help books and those are all paths. Now, I'm very biased here and I believe this is by far the fastest path and the research is bearing that out, that we can move not only states being like, I'm anxious now and I brought my anxiety down. I'm stressed now and I brought my stress down, but traits. I'm writing a paper right now with one of the top psychiatrists at Harvard that looks at one
38:53 Speaker 02 session that we have in our app and the session is called "You Are Enough." And I know you just had, I was just listening to your podcast this morning to prep and I know you had Blake from Tom's on. I don't know Blake. We have some mutual friends, but his thing is "You Are Enough," like being enough. So I thought that was pretty, pretty neat that he's focused on that idea. So I'm writing this paper because we have about 500,000 completed sessions of this "You Are Enough" session. It's a 16-minute tapping meditation that takes you back in time. The first thing you do, you rate out loud. You say, "How true does it feel? I am enough." And so you rate that, then you do the 16-minute thing and then you rate it again. And what we're showing, we have this
39:35 Speaker 02 eight-day challenge that over the eight-day period, we're starting to change not just the state of feeling better, of lower stress, but the trait that people are saying, "I am enough" and believing it. And that's the key because we can all go around saying, "I'm enough and you are enough" and all those things. But until it's embodied, until you believe it, until you say, "Yeah, this is true," then what's the point of it? Through this work, through experiences similar to what you and I just went through quickly as a demonstration, which is you could have decided from that experience that you're not enough, that you're not a good public speaker, that like those core experiences will create these things, these beliefs about ourselves, if we can release a charge from it, and if
40:20 Speaker 02 we can rewrite the pattern, and if we can learn from it and embody it, not have it be just a logical, well, no, I know I'm enough, like, it has to be embodied, you have to know it deeply, then we can create that change. And where people get stuck is that they don't have a tool to make those changes. Most people, like, your listeners, people who listen to podcasts like this, they are likely able to identify the places in their life where they don't feel like they're enough, or they procrastinate. They're doing the work. A lot of the general population isn't. They just think life happens to them, and that is what it is, and it's fair or unfair. So, people listening now know that, but most people are stuck on what to do about it. Okay, I know I have this fear of flying. I know I
41:04 Speaker 02 eat late at night and I can't stop these cravings. I know that I do this, that, the other. What do I do about it? We've got to get into our nervous system. The book is called Rewired, because we have to rewire our nervous system. Like, what we just did, that was 10 minutes of rewiring. Like, your brain, I'm not saying everything was fixed. We said it was a three or a four. It's something to revisit. Is there something left? But parts of your brain change that experience, and you've shared it in bits and pieces. Oh, when I see them now, their gaze isn't as penetrating, I think you said, right? So, like, that memory changed. And we know memory's pliable. We know memory's not reliable, right? Everyone has a different, oh, yeah, that happened 20 years ago. No, John said this.
41:47 Speaker 02 No, John said that. So, our memory's pliable. Might as well make it pliable for the good. Might as well have that memory for you of those 200 people looking at you, either have no charge or positive charge. And that's what we started to do towards the end, too. Oh, can you link those 200 people looking at you with pride? Because you're like, oh, yeah, that sucked. And I know it did, because I don't forget that suck, but look what I did with that suck. And that is rewiring our brain.
42:17 John R. Miles? Yes, neuroplasticity is a real thing.
42:19 Speaker 02 It's a real thing. And most people lean into it with just the positive, like let me think positive thoughts, which is great.
42:29 Speaker 02 But the positive thoughts need to be embodied, that you have to believe them to be true. It's really hard, like running around saying I'm rich is going to be unlikely to change your behavior. It's when you go, what's in the way? What's the resistance? And we don't live there. We're not like negative all the time. We go, what's the resistance? What's stopping me right now from doing this thing? I keep mentioning this research inside the app because I've been just diving into so deeply. We have 16 million, 16.6 million measured sessions. We have a motivate me to write session that shows a dramatic drop in this behavioral resistance. So someone wants to write, they know they do, they have this desire, I want to write a book.
43:12 Speaker 02 They have writer's block, everyone knows about writer's block. And we do this 10 minutes tapping thing and something unlocks. So all these different places in our life where we feel resistance. There's a past memory, there's a belief, there's a pattern in the nervous system that's getting in the way. What's exciting is we can change that pattern.
43:34 John R. Miles? I love it, Nick. One of the concepts and ideas in the book is a powerful one. You call it the great forgetting. And I want to bring this up because I have a book coming out in October. And I have a concept in there called the great erasure. And we're talking about the same thing from two different angles. You write that many people have forgotten what it feels like to wake up rested, move through life calmly and feel truly at home in their own skin. And my concept of it is I kind of go through the underlying research that I did on why it's happening, which is what I call it systematic unmattering.
44:13 John R. Miles? Being our feeling of mattering is being erased by the systems that we interact with every day. When you think of your concept, the great forgetting, why do you think humanity has forgotten how we were actually meant to live?
44:30 Speaker 02 That's such a good question. Well, I think you answered it because you're so right about the systems of things we interact with. So whether it be, you know,
44:39 Speaker 02 What we deal with daily, social media, the news, the things, the people around us, what we're interacting with, and also for a lot of us, what we grew up with. If you grew up in a house where Tony Robbins was playing through Alexa like 24/7, that'd be a little much. I think even Tony would agree. But let's just say it's on in the morning, right? Or you're in the car and if you're in that environment, that is going to give you a certain experience. Oh, I can change how I think. Oh, I have a choice to be happy today. Like, beginning to fill ourselves up with this information. If you're not in that environment, and for some people, it's the complete opposite. And thankfully, I had a great childhood. It wasn't my experience. But if you have an abusive childhood, if there was tremendous financial scarcity,
45:24 Speaker 02 if there was pressures on the family, that's going to completely change the systems that you're interacting with that are telling you the world is dangerous. Everything around you is dangerous. Your nervous system has to be on high alert all the time. And then what happens is, and I'm sure this research comes out in your book, that like, it becomes the new normal. And that's what's so hard about it for people, that they don't know any different. And even when we're in this space, how many times have I had the experience where like, oh wow, my shoulders were up by my ears. I ran around stressed today because I was interacting with all these different things that were stressful. And I had to remember that this isn't my baseline, that I don't have to feel this way,
46:09 Speaker 02 that I can change my state. So we're so disconnected from even that idea. Our body gets used to it. We get addicted to these chemicals. Like, we get addicted to cortisol. We get addicted to stress. We get addicted to running a certain way. Some people feel very uncomfortable relaxing, which is crazy when you think about it. If you tell someone who runs 24/7 and they have a crazy life, okay, just sit gently for 30 seconds. It's like the panic kicks in, right? Oh, this feels weird. With our phones now, I've heard from a couple of people recently who are... Trying social media diets and stopping the addiction, putting the phone away, this, that
46:52 Speaker 02 and the other, and they've described how uncomfortable they feel without the phone close to them. So, which is great insight and awareness and crazy that we've become this attached to this device that when it's not around us, we physically feel uncomfortable, that it's causing anxiety. Now, the good news is that when people power through that, or tap through ideally, would be to like, lower that resistance, then they go, oh, okay, this is what I was supposed to feel. This is the systems that we're interacting with that are telling us we don't matter.
47:27 John R. Miles? I love what you just brought up, and I'm going to share just a short story. A friend of ours, I was texting with him about a baseball game and asking him if he was going about a week and a half ago, and he didn't respond to me. He responded to my wife. Miles doesn't answer quick enough. And the truth of the matter is, I'm very difficult to get ahold of during the day because I purposely put my phone away from me because I don't want the distraction. And so I will check it a couple of times, but hours can go by. Because I found there was a period in my life where it had been attached to me and it was causing
48:09 John R. Miles? me too many interruptions. And I know for me, when I get interrupted, it takes me like 10, 15, 20 minutes to get back into my work process. So when I am in the peak moments of my day, which for me is my morning period, when I'm most vibrant, I tend to put it away so I can concentrate on and try to get into the flow zone so I can get done what I need to get done. But it has become an expectation that we need to be available all the time. We need to answer in split seconds. And my answer to that is, no, we don't.
48:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's, think about, it's almost like a negative character trait of yours, that you're not, yeah, he doesn't get back to me, as if you are doing something wrong. Because the expectation, like you said, is the immediate response. So yeah, these phones are difficult and a lot to work through. They have amazing superpowers and it's great and for so many ways, but something that we need to work through. I don't think we have these craving busters in the app. So we've got sugar and alcohol and all these things to help with cravings. The effect size on it, meaning just how well it works, is really strong. It's actually, for whatever reason, I have to try to figure it out. It's the highest effect size of anything we have in the app is actually for
49:25 Speaker 02 cravings. So there's something happening, meaning if someone's at a seven and maybe for pain relief, they drop to a four, for cravings, they'll drop to a three. So it's doing something with the brain to reduce cravings fast. And I think I need to get a bone craving up there ASAP because a lot of people are struggling with it and need something to calm the nervous system when it's feeling that itch.
49:53 John R. Miles? Nick, you have a line in the book, "We spend more time managing our fears than chasing our dreams." And I want to tell you a story about this and then have you respond. But one of my long-term mentors is a woman named Wendy Lawrence. And Wendy was my physics teacher at the Naval Academy and went on to become the first female astronaut from the Naval Academy in space. And she tells this message all the time that you're talking about here to kids today, is we let our fears all the time get in the way of us chasing our dreams. And she talks about how when she was growing up, there wasn't an opportunity
50:36 John R. Miles? for females to be astronauts because there weren't any examples of that. And as she was going down this path, there were so many times that she had to overcome her fears and obstacles to end up achieving the dream that she always wanted. But she said today, what she finds is so many people unwillingly, unknowingly, really build their lives around avoiding fear instead of pursuing the possibility. Why do you think that is happening? So much. And do you, do you think it's something that's changing? Or do you think it's always been there?
51:11 Speaker 02 It's probably always been there. I think it is a biological impulse for safety that we are scanning for danger. And that fight or flight mode gets activated. We have something called the negativity bias.
51:24 John R. Miles? Yeah.
51:25 Speaker 02 We all know it. If someone says, John, I could say one mean thing to you today and you will remember it for three years. And the next thousand people that talk to you could say nice things and they'll be right, it'll be gone. It'd be like, well, Nick said that one thing. So our brain does latch on to these things. It's in order to keep us safe. And I talked to a lot of authors and I joke that you haven't made it as an author until you get a one star review. Because it means your book hasn't gone out far enough. All right. You're guaranteed to get a one star review if you sell enough books. Someone's going to get mad at you for something. My favorite art, when the first one is Amazon shipped it in a bad box. And it's like, why are you reading my book? And Amazon had a bad shipping experience. My point being, we get stuck on these things. We get stuck on these one star reviews.
52:11 Speaker 02 We have this bias in our brain and we have to acknowledge that bias, go this, my brain is holding on to this. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken. Your brain is holding on to it for a reason, in order to keep you safe, in order to see the danger. Cause there's a saber tooth tiger around the corner. Once you see one, then every corner you look around, you're going to make sure there's not another saber tooth tiger. But we can change that. We're in control of that. And I think the key thing about the fears versus the dream. It's the word managing the fears. We do so much managing of how do I build my life in a way that I don't have to face these fears?
52:49 Speaker 02 We've been talking a lot about phobias today and fear of public speaking or flying because it's the most visceral showing of that. Right. Where it's if someone has a fear of public speaking, they will manage. So that's a fear. They will manage their life to make sure they don't have to public speak. If they. You have a fear of public speaking and you have a desire to have a successful career. Now you have to manage what having a successful business career is like without speaking in public or with speaking in the right situation. So then you might go, okay, well, I'm going to try to do it more by sending emails. I don't want to speak in front of groups. I'm okay one-on-one, so I'm going to really work. I'm going to manage these fears to try to have the career I want,
53:33 Speaker 02 but it's going to be limited by all these little rules and boxes. It's difficult, it's uncomfortable, it's not fun. And then it's often limiting. Okay, fine, you manage your way there, but if you had just been willing to talk to the eight people in the conference room and felt confident enough to share your ideas, then your career would have skyrocketed. So clearly, these are the places that we get stuck. Clearly, they're the places that stop us from living the lives that we want. And that's been my experience. When I first made the documentary film, I told you when we started, forty thousand dollars worth of camera equipment, no idea what we were doing. We must have filmed a hundred hours of footage that was just complete garbage. I don't know where it is now. It was terrible. We didn't know what we were doing. We couldn't use it.
54:18 Speaker 02 And then time and again through the process, I'm a couple of months in going, I've spent forty thousand dollars, fifty now, flying. What am I doing here? I could have so easily locked up in that moment that I'm a twenty-nine-year-old kid. I have no experience. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm giving up now. But during those moments, I would tap and I would say, even though I don't know what I'm doing, I choose to relax now. Even though, just speaking my fears out loud, even though this is going terribly and it's a disaster, I love and accept myself. It would calm my nervous system, move away from that fight-or-flight mode. The blood literally physically flows back into your brain. You can think clearly.
55:00 Speaker 02 And always it would be from fear, from I don't know what I'm doing, from wanting to give up, to, oh, you know what? Not only is that feeling gone, but I've got an idea. And that's the exciting part, that when we bring our resources back online, it's not about from fear to negative emotion or no, or flat emotion. It's from fear to, I've got an idea. I've got the passion. I've got the energy. I know what to do next. So it opens up vistas for us that aren't possible if we're in these stuck, resistant, negative states.
55:36 John R. Miles? Unfortunately, when I was a young boy, seven or eight years old, I physically watched enter a DC-10 crash right in front of me. And it created a huge fear of flying for me for many years that I was able to get over through therapy. But recently seeing that cargo plane crash last year sent the same thing, triggered me again because both of them had to deal with an engine falling off on takeoff. So these things are real. And what I realized as I was reading your book is, the book is really a lot more than tapping. It's a book about how so many of us become trapped in versions of ourselves that we never consciously choose.
56:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:22 John R. Miles? When did you first realize that your work wasn't about tapping, but it's so much more than stress relief?
56:31 Speaker 02 It's so much more than stress relief. I think I have to go back to Tony again with his influence of everything I learned from him on human psychology, on creating change, on how we define who we are in our lives. And then just working with, at this point, thousands or tens of thousands of people and seeing the patterns and seeing what they go through and seeing the places that they define themselves and they get stuck and they believe this is who I am and they don't have a way out. And this is the way out. Tapping is just the vehicle. It happens to shockingly be a vehicle that does, it's almost as if we could type on the computer and edit our brain. Well, we would do that.
57:13 Speaker 02 Great. Hey, delete that memory, change this, change that. Somehow, I don't know who decided, it came packaged in this physically tapping on ourselves. But yes, everything around it. The You Are Enough session, the tapping is the vehicle to implant that belief. The tapping is also the vehicle to bring up the old memories, to try to learn about ourselves, to understand why we are the way we are, to have insights and
57:41 Speaker 02 One of the other beautiful things about the process is that we don't go from fear to erasing something. We go from, I see it a lot with anger. Someone's really angry at someone. So they started anger. We do some tapping and then naturally on their own, they go to sadness. Every single time anger, just let's go and it goes to sadness. And then the sadness lets go and it goes to wisdom. So this isn't a erase everything. This is can we process the things that help us become stronger and heal and grow from, but does it not have to be 18 months that you don't get on stage? You probably went through various stages of emotional processing for it, right? Like along the way, can we condense
58:26 Speaker 02 that time period and get you back on stage 12 months, six months, a year? Can we learn from it? Can we take that anger and feel that sadness? And then from that sadness, build that wisdom? And now it's the base of wisdom. Yes, that thing happened. Yes, I was angry. Yes, I was sad. Now there's wisdom.
58:48 John R. Miles? Yeah, even to this day, when I know I'm going to go back into high gear into public speaking, I go back to Toastmasters or I'll do improv classes because I find the best way you've got to deal with it is to keep putting yourself in the situation. So you build back that confidence that it's not going to happen. But I'm definitely going to incorporate tapping as well going forward.
59:09 Speaker 02 And that's a great strategy. You're going back into Toastmasters. Oh, sorry. Think about what you're trying to do there. You're trying to have positive emotions, positive experiences that you can build up. So now when you go and do it, you have a better experience.
59:26 John R. Miles? Yeah, because one of the things you write about in the book that I think applies to what we did for 10 minutes, 10 minutes is It isn't about faking it till you make it.
59:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:37 John R. Miles? What, what was happening to me, cause I could feel it as we were doing it is I could sense a biologic, biological change in my nervous system.
59:48 Speaker 02 Yes.
59:48 John R. Miles? And to me, that is what triggers lasting emotional change. And the weird thing for people who might not have done this is I was actually feeling an emotional shift in my body as I was doing the exercise and talking about the feelings.
1:00:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:07 John R. Miles? And that shift honestly, was that nine going to a three or four because I felt the weight coming out of my body, the energy.
1:00:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:17 John R. Miles? Coming out of me, which it's crazy that it can do that. It reminds me going through EMDR.
1:00:23 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:00:23 John R. Miles? Therapy.
1:00:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's very similar.
1:00:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, people often ask about EMDR and tapping and I would say they're cousins that are in the same family of that emotional processing. The big difference is that tapping you can do on your own and read the book, use the app, have that experience and EMDR usually takes a therapist to do, but they both are just wonderful tools.
1:00:46 John R. Miles? One of the things, Nick, I want to make sure I talk about because it's one of the reasons I started this podcast. I had reached a period in my life where emotional numbness had become my reality. And you describe people living in what you call frosted glass. And I would say that is, is what it felt like to me. It's like I was developing cataracts and the world just kept getting more shaded and more shaded and I could not figure out what was going on, except that my vitality and aliveness and joy and connections were fading.
1:01:29 John R. Miles? And I didn't know how to describe it, but I've come to realize that it's this emotional numbness.
1:01:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:35 John R. Miles? Does that resonate with you as you have talked to many people and worked with them?
1:01:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I hear it all the time. It's almost. The more activated emotions like anxiety and anger, I don't want to say one thing is easier than the other, but it's easier to quantify because it is so physical and visceral. I'm really anxious or I'm really angry. The low mood, depression, frosted glass thing that you're talking about is more subtle. And maybe you had the experience of not really knowing what was happening, when it was happening, how you got there. For a lot of people, it's not an overnight thing. It's not that they wake up one morning and, oh my gosh, they're just depressed. Certainly can happen if you go through a traumatic experience. The loss of a loved one can put you in those states.
1:02:24 Speaker 02 But so many people just slowly, it's like you said about the cataracts building. Like you didn't wake up one morning with cataracts. It just, little particle after little particle built in and everything was closing down on you. What's, you know,
1:02:40 Speaker 02 oftentimes that is just the world being too stimulating, too many negative experiences, too many negative emotions, and the body just shuts down. Right? So the body, the brain, the nervous system just shuts down. It's overwhelmed, loss of energy that all goes together. Tapping is, can be quite, in the same way that it's relaxing and stress relieving, it can be activating in a positive way, right? You have this physical, and a lot of people will feel this physical surge of energy just by going through the points. It's if I want to get some energy, if it's two in the afternoon and, you know, too late to have my coffee and just feeling that brain fog and that slump, just one round, like activating. So it can be really powerful for people struggling with those states
1:03:25 Speaker 02 to activate slowly and safely. And in the same way that those cataracts close down and that frosted glass moved in on the life, we just started, just start cleaning the glass a little bit. It's not going to get clear overnight, but can we activate some energy? Can we do one round of tapping? Because that's what happens too, certainly with depression, low mood. If I said, okay, go see a therapist for an hour or go do this tapping thing for 20 minutes. It's like the, oh my gosh, the energy just isn't there. It's just too much. So start slow. Can you just do one round of tapping today? And find a little energy and take one step forward, just building that muscle back up to
1:04:06 Speaker 02 open up to life. And when we calm the nervous system that is in that shutdown state, there's natural positive consequences from it. Okay, the nervous system feels safe. We start igniting some energy around it and then we can take those steps forward.
1:04:23 John R. Miles? Yeah, I like how you describe that because to me what was happening is I was experiencing thousands of microbes over a long period of time. And the only way you can build it back is it's you don't get there in one fell swoop and you can't build it back in one fell swoop. And what I love about tapping is there are micro practices that you can use on a daily basis to restore those erasures and take your freedom back.
1:04:52 Speaker 02 Maybe it's a longer story, but how you did it then, what were the steps for you to come out of that?
1:04:58 John R. Miles? And I wrote my, my first book about it, Passion Struck. It was six mindset shifts and six behavior shifts that I implemented. And it took me about two, two years to do it. And I'm still working on it, but it started out with, I had to go back to, which is always difficult in therapy. They always want you to go to what is the most traumatic memory that you ever have. And unfortunately I have a lot of them, you know, seeing a plane crash isn't even come close to.
1:05:27 Speaker 02 That's not number one. There's other stuff in there.
1:05:29 John R. Miles? But to me, it was going through CBT and then prolonged exposure therapy and dealing with those. And when I started to deal with those and finding coping mechanisms for them, I realized if I would have done this decades ago, how much different my life would have been. So that's the advice I always give to people is don't delay, deal with the stuff earlier in your life. But once I dealt with that, that's what I try to tell people when I work with them is you've got to find a starting point. And from there, it starts opening up other areas of your life that you never expect. And I always describe it.
1:06:09 John R. Miles? That you have to think of your life as many different colors holding you up. And once you start working on the one that needs the help the most, you'll naturally start working on the others. And then it eventually allows you to rebuild the whole structure. And from there, you take back what you've lost. So that's what I ended up doing.
1:06:29 Speaker 02 That's beautiful. And you mentioned CBT, which is amazing. We have thousands of therapists now who are CBT trained, who just bring tapping in. It's not one or another. So they'll take all the framework from CBT and just add the tool, add the tool to, like you did some EMDR to process that trauma. Add the tool to, CBT is great until it's two in the morning and you're ruminating about a thought or you can't sleep and your cognitive brain is offline, right? What is CBT cognitive behavioral therapy, right? So your brain is offline. So that's why some of the leading CBT therapists in the world go, okay, well, we need something when the cognitive brain is offline. So this is where the physical tapping comes in, brings the cognitive brain back online.
1:07:13 Speaker 02 So you have those resources available.
1:07:16 John R. Miles? I love it. Nick, the last thing I wanted to ask you about, because I thought this section of the book was incredibly powerful, is you have seven freedoms of a rewired life. Things like self-trust, energy, authenticity, feeling at home in your body. I wanted to ask, out of the seven, what freedom do you think people are starving for most right now? Or does it depend on the person?
1:07:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's the thing about them. So I tried to write them to be all encompassing of what a well-lived life could look like. And then also aspirations, because we do a lot of work in tapping to just let go, right? Okay, I have this thing, I have this anger I want to let go. I have this anxiety I want to let go. And we can, it's easy to get stuck into all these traumas. So I have to clear out every trauma from my body before I can live a good life. That's not the case. There's an in-between thing where you're healing, when you're letting go, when you're reducing anxiety, and you're actually going towards something. You're having positive emotions. You're creating things in your life. So the seven freedoms was just trying to paint that picture
1:08:25 Speaker 02 of what it all could be. Probably on a daily basis, because I see so many people struggling with this. It's the freedom to. React from wisdom instead of old wounds, right? Like that reaction piece. The, someone says something and it's like, old wound is kicking up. Something happens in your life, old wound kicking up. And that goes to the rewire process of interrupting that thought, recognizing the thought, okay, old wound, interrupting it with tapping and then rewiring it. So when you do that enough times, now someone says something and it used to trigger you and send you down a spiral or whatever it was, and now you react with wisdom. So yeah, that's one of my favorites and I think something a lot of people struggle with.
1:09:11 John R. Miles? And then lastly, if a listener or a viewer understood that they didn't have to remain who they've always been, how would their lives change after they read Rewire?
1:09:23 Speaker 02 I can only point to the experience that I've had in doing this work for 20 years, certainly seen thousands and hundreds of thousands or millions of other people do this in our community and who we've worked with in the last 20 years. But for me, it's waking up happy. It's going to bed at peace. It's following work that I'm passionate about. It is not reacting from old wounds. It's recognizing when I do react from an old wound because I'm still doing the work every single day and I'm still get the triggers. But it's feeling in control of my destiny. And I think that positive control piece is something that just about everyone's missing. We just think, we have all these things that happen to us.
1:10:07 Speaker 02 We have all these stories. It's who I am. It's what life is. It's the hand that I've been dealt, right? How often do we say, well, that's the hand you've been dealt? Okay, well, maybe you can trade in a couple of cards here, right? Where maybe you were playing regular poker and you get to get a new hand and hopefully it's better. And actually not hopefully it's better. How about you actually get to look through the deck and pick the cards you want? You're cheating at the game, but this is what it is. It's a good cheat. You get to pick the cards you want. You get to be who you want to be. You get to make decisions about who you are and you get to know yourself. I know I've talked about Tony so much, but he really is so influential in, in my life and the work that we've done and something that.
1:10:52 Speaker 02 I learned about myself was in relationship to him. So when I first went to these events, when I was first 22, 23 years old, actually 25 was my first event. You get so excited, so passionate, the energy is great. He teaches you all these things and it's very easy to fall into, I want to be just like Tony, right? I, he's the leader, right? Oh my gosh, he's up there doing it. He's so charismatic. I want to be just like him. And then what happened for me time and again, would happen to any other human who tries to be someone else. I failed over and over again. Oh, I didn't do my RPM planning the way I said to, or I procrastinated. I bet you Tony doesn't procrastinate, you know?
1:11:33 Speaker 02 So there was this desire to be like this person who is on another planet to start with, but whatever. The point is you can't be like someone else. So I was trying to be like him and it wasn't until I let go of that, got enough clarity about myself, decided who I wanted to be. What are the things that I want to do? What do I enjoy doing and I can say yes to and then say no to other things? And again, full circle moment, I was at his house. Probably about 2014 and we were sitting out in this beautiful house overlooking the ocean and we're talking about things that we might do together with some charity work, with spreading tapping.
1:12:16 Speaker 02 And he's sitting there and he is, as we're talking, he is furiously taking notes. I just writing and I'm looking around and I'm going, I didn't even bring a notebook. This is embarrassing. He's writing like crazy. I'm just talking, I'm not taking notes. And then I had that moment and I thought to myself, I've never taken notes in my life. In class, I didn't take notes. I'm not a note taker. I'm a lefty, my handwriting, I can't read it half the time after I've written it. I am not a note taker. Tony is a note taker. We're each doing who we are. Be comfortable with it. Enjoy the moment. Who cares about, he's not thinking anything about you. Stop thinking about all these judgments over yourself. Be who you are.
1:13:01 Speaker 02 And that was a moment when I was able to say, okay, yeah, this work is paying off. I'm here with. My mentor, someone that I always admired, were working together on something. And that all happened, not because I was trying to be him or trying to be anyone else on the planet. It's because I cleared up all this crap from my past. I got centered, I got clear on my mission, I did the tapping, I let go of these things. And I could feel in the depth of my soul, comfortable with who I was in that moment.
1:13:29 John R. Miles? Thank you for sharing that. And I want to end here, the final note of the manuscript to me was deeply empowering and talks to what you were just referencing, you and your siblings, right? Your current wiring isn't your destiny. And what I want listeners to know is that the book really argues that lasting transformation is not only possible, it's far simpler, more embodied and more accessible than we have been taught to believe. And I think it's a perfect message and why I wanted to have you on the show. Nick, you talked a lot about your other books, your videos, the app. Where is the best place listeners can learn more about all those different things?
1:14:13 Speaker 02 Great, thank you, John. Yeah, the tapping solution.com is our main website. I've mentioned the app, it's free to download. If you just search the tapping solution on any app store, it'll pop up. And I think we have 50 plus free tapping meditations in there. And then there's a premium version that has a thousand more. But there's plenty to experience for free. The tapping solution.com app stores and then rewired is wherever books were sold. We were delighted to hit the New York Times bestseller list in the first week we were released. And the book was released and it's already touching lives around the world. I'm grateful to you for having me on and for everyone listening to this message. What you just said is true. You don't have to be who you've always been. We can change our wiring.
1:14:55 Speaker 02 I think just knowing that, just that as a possibility is so exciting and so empowering. Now you just have to walk through the door and actually create that change.
1:15:06 John R. Miles? Awesome. Nick, thank you so much for joining. It was such an honor to have you.
1:15:09 Speaker 02 Thank you, John.
1:15:11 John R. Miles? That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Nick Ortner. One thing that stayed with me is how quickly we turn experiences into identities. We have a painful moment, a setback, or a disappointment, and over time, the story shifts from that happened to me to that's just who I am. I'm not a good speaker. I'm always anxious. I procrastinate. I can't change. What I appreciated about Nick's work is that he reminds us that our brains and nervous systems are always learning. The patterns we've practiced for years are powerful, but they aren't permanent. And sometimes the work isn't about trying harder. It's about finding a different way to process what we've been carrying all along. As we continue our flourishing series, Thursday's conversation builds naturally on what Nick shared today.
1:15:52 John R. Miles? I'll be joined by John Gordon. Many of you know John from his books like The Energy Bus, The Carpenter, and The Power of Positive Leadership. He's one of the most influential leadership thinkers working today. And his newest book is called The Power of Positive Habits. In our conversation, we talk about why so many people settle for what's comfortable instead of pursuing what they truly want, how a single word can bring clarity and direction to an entire year, and why comparing yourself to someone else's path almost always leaves you discouraged. We also discuss purpose statements, reverse bucket lists, the habits that have shaped John's own life, and the lesson that ultimately changed everything for him.
1:16:33 John R. Miles? It's a conversation about becoming the person you're called to be, instead spending your life wishing you were someone else.
1:16:38 Speaker 03 So here's the thing, negative thoughts are always coming in. And when they come in, they will tell you things about yourself and your future that just aren't true. Negative thoughts are lies. And so many of us have them. Actually, we all have them. But are those negative thoughts coming from you? And I ask that, knowing the answer is no. Who would ever choose to have a negative thought? Would anyone ever choose a negative thought? You wouldn't, but it comes in. And so when it comes in, you don't have to listen to it. Instead, you have to speak truth to it. You don't have the power of the first thought, but you have the power of the second thought. And this is really key to understand. And you're not the thoughts you think, you're the thoughts you believe.
1:17:20 John R. Miles? If today's conversation resonated with you, share it with someone who's been trying to make a change, break an old pattern, or move beyond a story they've carried for too long. And don't forget to download today's companion workbook and reflection guide at theignitedlife.net. Until next time, keep asking yourself, what am I practicing every day that my future self will one day call a habit? I'm John Miles and you've been passion struck.
Previous Three Conversations That Changed How I Think About Being Alive | John R. Miles EP 789 Next The Power of Positive Habits: Simple Changes That Transform Your Life | Jon Gordon - EP 791 Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
