Hey, it's Kristina Driscoll, host of the She's Brave Podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me. When our son was five, my husband was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. For the next 12 years, I learned how to be brave, resilient, and live my best life. On the podcast, we're going to meet so many amazing, brave, authentic, and resilient women who share their own journeys of how they learned how to be brave, and are now living their best lives.
Step into your best brave life with me and let's go on this journey of how to be brave together.
Hey everyone, it's Kristina with the She's Brave Podcast. Today I have Ani Naqvi with me. She is an executive transformation expert and mentor committed to guiding CEOs, founders, and senior executives in boosting productivity while prioritizing self care and wellbeing to combat burnout. Her mission is rooted in inspiring, motivating, and empowering over 250,000 leaders globally, encouraging them to create a positive impact, live purposefully, and embrace joy. Yes. Having overcome the catastrophic 2004 tsunami and three near death experiences. Ani brings invaluable insights, including the ability to turn challenges into opportunities.
I love that so much. A profound appreciation for life's blessings and unyielding resilience. Ani has also been a guest on Oprah. Ani is working on an upcoming memoir. We're going to ask her a little bit about that. She's also an expert on shifting neuroplasticity, resilience, overcoming imposter syndrome and positive intelligence and how it can alter your perspective on life and your purpose.
Welcome. Welcome Ani. I'm so excited to have you like all these topics. They're so good. We need this. We need this information. How are you today? I'm very well. Thank you. How are you doing today? I am doing great. I'm ridiculously excited to talk to you. I'm going to dive right in today because you've had three near death experiences.
I have never met anyone that's had three near death experiences. Can you tell us about one of them? Yeah, so you mentioned, being on Oprah and that was because I survived the 2004 Asian tsunami off the east coast of Sri Lanka back in 2004. The east coast of Sri Lanka was the second worst hit after Banda Aceh, which was where the epicenter of the earthquake was.
There were a number of times that I thought I was going to die there, where I was caught up in the tsunami and drowning. And a couple of times, once in the hut, I thought that I was going to not make it. Then also one time when I got trapped underneath a falling building as well.
So Wow. Wow.
What was going through your head? What did you learn from that experience? So what I learned from surviving the tsunami in general, and this is also what I spoke to Oprah about, I believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience and that our souls are here to come and do stuff, whatever it is.
And of course, when I didn't die I immediately thought to myself, you still haven't done whatever it is that your soul is here to do. And I said to Oprah at the time, we need to make most of our lives. And make our lives mean something because we have been saved when so many others had died.
And of course, I had also some survivor guilt from surviving when so many people had died, almost a quarter of a million people died in the tsunami, families ripped apart, all sorts of horrendous things like that. So you do have this survivor guilt and this kind of feeling of. I had this feeling of needing to make my life mean something and to, I said, I know that I must have been saved for a purpose. I don't know what that purpose is now, but I know that it will become clear as time goes on. And sure enough it was actually the catalyst for one of the catalysts for me finding my purpose, which, you know, and my mission, which you've very eloquently told your listeners about already.
Yeah, it's incredibly beautiful, all the things that you're doing. And I just, I'm deeply honored to have you on my podcast. I know that you're an expert on shifting neuroplasticity. I'm really curious about this subject because when I was younger, I had really low self esteem and I was able to really work on myself and develop more confidence. I would say just even from the time I started taking a podcast class until today, my confidence levels have just greatly increased. Now I consider myself a confident person. I'm just deeply curious to talk more about this. A lot of people still think this is how I am. Like, this is who I am. I can't change. So what do you have to say about that statement and about neuroplasticity in general?
Absolutely. So everybody can change and everybody can change at whatever age they are. Okay. That's just a limiting belief that people have that they can't change. So what you have to do is, first of all, let's talk about the negativity bias. So that's why we all tend to err on the side of being a bit unhappy really, because we have this negativity bias whereby we tend to focus on the one negative thing that's happened or the one negative thing someone says to us. Over the positive things three times more. And that's part of how our survival brain has evolved. Our ancestors needed to know which was the poisonous snake much more than they needed to know, which was the pretty butterfly. So that's why our brain will latch onto the one negative thing that's happened in the week.
Or if I give somebody five bits of information about themselves, four of which are positive, one of which is neutral or negative, then that person will remember that neutral or negative one.
Wow. Yes. I did not know that. That's fascinating. Yeah, so that's why most of us struggle with finding peace and joy and happiness and fulfillment and contentment because of this negativity bias. That's why when you look on social media or you look on the news or you look at what's being aired on Netflix, it's all like thriller, murder. Real life murders, horrible news kind of things, people getting angry with each other on Twitter or all that kind of thing. So that's why it's because we're all pre-programmed for this negativity bias. So unless you work on your mental fitness, which is your ability to handle life's challenges with a positive mindset, rather than negative mindset. You're always going to veer into that direction. So most people I would say, not everybody, of course, but a lot of people I would say spend more than 50 percent of their time feeling unhappy, not satisfied, not being joyful, not feeling amazing.
That's all because of this fear based messaging that our survival brain gives us. Because obviously the survival brain has a function. Yeah. It's there to keep you alive. It's there to stop you from walking out into traffic and getting run over. So it has a purpose. It's to protect us. So the safest place for our survival brain is to be at home and to take as little risk as possible and to live a very kind of sheltered life in some respects. Yeah, but your survival brain doesn't care if you're happy, peaceful, married, got a nice family. It doesn't care about your quality of life. Okay. It only cares about, it doesn't care at all. It's function is to keep you alive. And the way it keeps you alive is by giving you all of these negative, fearful messages the whole time. We have something like up to a hundred thousand thoughts a day, which most thoughts are the same repetitive thoughts as we've had the day before. Most of these thoughts are in the unconscious brain, right? They're not in the conscious part of the brain. And, but those thoughts will drive your emotions and will make you feel a certain way.
Now, if your survival brain, which is all concerned with keeping you alive, it's going to be pumping out all the fear based messaging. Don't do this. Don't leave your job because what if don't set up a new business? Because what if you fail? What if this happens? What if that happens? We do this all the time, right?
Yeah, we do.
We are constantly thinking about the what ifs and we're worrying about what could go wrong and all those kinds of things. Mental fitness, you have to work on it on a daily basis. In the same way that the doctors tell us that we need to do 30 minutes of physical exercise a day to be fit and well.
We have to do 15 to 20 minutes of mental fitness exercise a day in order to be mentally and emotionally well. And if you don't do that, then you're going to onto that negativity bias. And you're going to only remember the negative things and you're going to be complaining about the weather and moaning about this and all of that kind of thing.
So in the UK, we love to moan about the weather, for example. It's either too hot or cold. I'm in Seattle. We, that's all we do is talk about the weather too. It rains here all the time. So it's never quite right though, is it? When I, it's so funny because when it's cold, it's too cold, it's too gray, it's too rainy, it's too wet.
And then when it's summer, it's too hot. It's too. Totally. We do the same thing. We complain about the heat in the summer. Exactly. But we don't have that much heat. We might get. We don't either. That's what's so funny. We might have a few days where it will be over like 30 degrees centigrade.
That's but my point is that's our kind of our default is to always be moaning, complaining, never be quite satisfied. So if you want to be happy and joyful and fulfilled and content, you need to be working on your mental fitness. And that is also going to be helping you with your resilience that you asked me about earlier as well.
So, mental fitness, it requires you to be. Where do most of our fears come from other than the survival brain? Are they, if you're, if I'm asking if they're in the past, present or future, where would you say they're coming from?
I think we worry a lot about the future.
Exactly. So we worry constantly about the future, but not, I don't want to scare your listeners here, but it's completely pointless to worry about the future because you could have a meteor that hits us and just wipes out the entire human race in seconds. And so what would be, have been the point of all of that worrying?
It's a lot of mental energy that we waste on being future focused worry. That is not necessarily going to come true, or it could come true. The thing is most of the time in the research that they've done, it doesn't come true. 85 percent of the thoughts that we have do not come true.
And we are not the thoughts, we are not a lot of people think that we are the thoughts. We're not the thoughts. We're not even the sensations in the body. That's one of the things that. From having had near death experiences, I know for a fact, because when I, the whole, that whole thing that they talk about, you're looking at your body and you see yourself there.
All of that kind of thing. I had relatives and, members of people come to visit me and they're all looking super happy and everything with the beautiful smiles and everything to welcome you to the next phase. And one of the things that I realized was nothing and no one can hurt you. In this life, because this isn't real.
This is an illusion, the body and the mind and all of that kind of thing. It's an illusion. We are spiritual beings. And when you do go to death, and this might be helpful for your listeners might give them some solace to know that when we are passing, we're not dying completely. There is something, whether it's a soul, whether it's consciousness, whatever you want to call it, it still exists after that moment.
All of the fears that we have, ultimately, our main fear as soon as we're born is the fear of death, okay, but until and unless we confront our fear of death, we're not truly going to live because until you are scared, While you're still scared of dying, you're not going to take the risks, set up your own business or go traveling to, I don't know, to Mongolia or do all the kinds of things, jump out of an airplane because you're going to be too scared to allow yourself to push yourself out of your comfort zone.
Growth doesn't lie in the comfort zone. Yeah, it lies in the stretch zone. So the, if all of the future focus worries is, creating, the worry part of us think about, people that are depressed, right. People that are depressed, they tend to be stuck in the past.
They're not able to let go of the stories that have happened to them either as a child or some other. Challenging events that have happened in their lives. And this was me many years ago. I was stuck in the past. I had my old script running of poor me and why do bad things happen to me and all sorts of things.
And I was depressed for many years of my life. And then I was anxious for many years of my life. But if you are in this moment and only in this moment. There is no fear, because if you ask anyone, how are you right now in this moment, 99. 9 percent of the time, they'll tell you that they're fine. They're okay.
Okay. Because all of the fears are just a product of the mind. They're not in, they're not here in reality right now in this moment, not unless you're actually in a tsunami in that moment. Does that make sense? 100%. The trick of neuroplasticity is really finding, it's either through moments of mind, I call them mental fitness repetitions.
Okay. And this is moments of focused attention on one sensation, right? So it can be tough. Okay. It can be sound, it can be visual, and it can also be the breath, it can also be taste. Yeah. So any one sensation and you focus intently on that one sensation. So I could do a little demo with you now, if you'd like.
Yeah, let's do it. So I'm going to invite you to just close your eyes for a minute. Okay. Bring your forefinger and your thumb together. Okay. Okay. And you're just going to start to gently rub your finger and thumb together and you're going to do it with such great attention and awareness that you notice all the ridges of your fingertips.
You're noticing the temperature of your skin and you're also noticing whether your fingers feel dry or moist, and now come to open your eyes again. How easy was that for you to do? Fairly easy, actually. And it felt really good because I was super, super present. I was just thinking about the ridges, trying to find ridges in my finger. And the rubbing and the temperature, I wasn't thinking about, there was no room to think about anything else.
Exactly. Because you're totally in the present moment. When you are fully in the present moment, you have no worries. You have no fear. True. You are living in this moment. And this is the easiest way to shift your neuroplasticity, meditation, mindfulness, mental fitness reps, whatever you want to call it.
But, doing them regularly through the day, why, because if you say, let's say some of your listeners do have a meditation practice, the thing about, and that's great, and I'm not saying don't do that. Please do carry on doing that. That's amazing. But what happens is that let's say you do 15 minutes or up to an hour's worth of meditation in the morning.
What happens is you charge up Into your thriving brain. So there's two different parts of the brain. One is the surviving part of the brain where the amygdala is. And it's in the left, some parts of the left brain, and then your thriving part of the brain is in a completely different part of the brain.
It's on some parts of the right brain, in the middle of the brain, stuff like that. What happens is you charge yourself up into your thriving brain if you do your 15 minutes in the morning. But as the day goes on, let's say you go to work, for example, and you've got kids and you're taking them to school and all the kind of normal things that people have in their lives.
What happens is that charge goes down as the day progresses. Okay. And eventually you go back into your surviving brain, unless you then continue to do one or two minutes of focused attention throughout the day on your mental fitness repetitions to help you to keep charging back up into that thriving part of the brain.
I love this so much because I do 10 minutes of meditation in the morning. I did it this morning and I find that my mornings are like my most. Productive time when my things are going great. And what you said as the day goes on that that, that boost that I got from my meditation kind of ebbs and it goes away and I'm like, what do we do about that?
And he just gave us a tool. I love it. Exactly. And this tool, like I said, you can use it with anything you can even, if people, I work with a lot of busy executives, right? So they don't have half an hour to go sit on the mat and do that. Practice and all that kind of thing, but you can integrate these tools within your day.
You can do some deep abdominal breathing while you're in a meeting, for example, that will help to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and help you feel calm again and activate your thriving brain. Any of these, the technique that I've just shared with you, and you only need to do it for a minute or two.
Okay and it can be anything, you can do it while you're loading the dishwasher, you can do it while you're with the kids, you can do it. My whole thing is I want people to be able to integrate these moments of mindfulness, these moments of mental fitness into their day, one or two minutes, so that they keep Charging up into their thriving brain so that they don't default into the surviving brain into the stress and all of that kind of thing.
And it's so simple and easy to do, and you don't have to be on your own. You don't have to go and sit in a quiet room. That's the thing with some meditation is that. A lot of people feel like they need to go and sit in a quiet room and go and meditate. But if you can be, if you can be mindful and cognizant while you are doing your daily activities, whether that's driving a car or getting on the train or whatever it is, you are then able to, to keep that kind of charge.
That charge meeting. Yeah. Yeah. Throughout the day. Yeah. And you get to the point where, which I would say, of course, nobody's perfect. You can't achieve it all of the time because we have saboteurs and the sabotaging kind of behaviors and thoughts, which come from the survival brain so that, and that's always going to be there, but you can achieve that sort of 80 to 90 percent of the time if you want to.
Yeah. It's just by being present. And every time you catch yourself in a thought that's going down in a loop, you just do your little mental fitness rep and you come back into the moment again. And you let those thoughts go because we are not the thoughts and those thoughts are not true just because you think it doesn't make it true.
Yep. Yep. So I'm upstairs in my bonus room and. My husband, I have a question about animals. We have a dog and our dog, if I'm recording and working, like the dog is basically downstairs and she's doing her thing. And my husband's down there and I just she is, she just turned three. Today's her birthday actually.
And she loves to play with me. And sometimes it's just like for, A few minutes and I do feel like when we're playing tug of war or we're just I'm like scratching her belly and she's rolling around and we're just fooling around together. Is that, is play, does play get you into that mental space too?
Do you think that animals are part of that as well? When you're playing with your dog, you're probably fully present when you're playing with your dog. Yeah. Oh yeah. I don't think about anything else. Yeah. No, we're just laughing. And I'm laughing. Usually I'm laughing. That is a moment of being present that you have with your dog.
So yes, absolutely, that, that is also, if you look at children, for example, they only live in the present moment, right? They do, yeah. One minute they're like, one minute they're playing, the next minute they're fighting with the sibling, the next minute they're crying, then the next minute they're going to get sweets from the pantry, they're just, they're constantly in the present moment, they're not doing what we do as adults, but yeah, absolutely, if you're playing with your dog for a few minutes, And you're completely present with playing with your dog, then absolutely that is.
I love that answer so much. Yeah. Wow. You don't have to be, people have this conception that, oh, they have to meditate and they don't like meditation. No, you can integrate it to whatever you do. Let's say you like listening to music, for example, and this is about zoning in, not zoning out. So we are zoning out in our lives, with the advance of social media and technology, we're.
If you see a lot of people that are watching TV and they're scrolling on their phones at the same time, and then they're trying to, so we're, and we're, our brain cannot process all of that. It's too much information for our brain. We're not made for that. And the advance of technology in the last hundred years or so has gone so quickly.
We haven't evolved to be able to process that. Totally agree. I think we I can't remember the numbers now, but our brain can only handle a certain amount of bits of information per second. And we're twice as much to do because we have all of these kind of like devices and things like that.
So it's just being a bit more simple about things and not trying to multitask. It doesn't really work. It doesn't exist. It also will make you feel anxious as well because your brain is like over here and it's trying to do something over there at the same time. And so that's why you feel fractious when you're doing that.
So if you just focus on one thing at one time. Let's say, for example, you are playing with your dog. Yeah. Then that you're doing that. And you're only doing that. And you're enjoying that time with your dog. But how many times parents with children and, they're all on devices and the parents are trying to do something and the kids are trying to get the attention, all part of the same thing.
So we can really change some of our habits by being more present with everything that we're doing. So loading the dishwasher, just really noticing how the plates feel in your hand, the heaviness of the plates the. Texture of the plates while you're putting it in the dishwasher let's say you're brushing your teeth. Just take those two minutes to really notice how your teeth feel when you're brushing your teeth, that kind of thing, rather than thinking, okay, what's my to do list. I've got to do this today. Then I've got to do that. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is what most of us do. Yeah. We like doing our planning of the day while we're doing other things.
But if you can focus your attention, like I said, On one to two minutes, every hour, or, regularly through the day, then you're going to help yourself not feel so anxious, not be depressed and experience more joy and more peace and more fulfillment and contentment than you can ever before. And this is how you shift your neuroplasticity.
There are a bunch of things that you can do to shift your neuroplasticity. This is one of them. Yeah. These. Yeah. Beautiful. Mindfulness, these type of activities are if you were to do, I do a course with my clients, for example, and if you did a brain MRI image at the beginning of doing that course, and then after eight weeks where they, it's like an app program that you go on to, you're doing exercises throughout the day and all that kind of thing. Then you are going and you did a brain MRI image at the end of eight weeks, you would notice that there was atrophy in parts of the left brain where the survival brain is okay, and there's new gray matter in parts of the thriving brain, and you've changed your neuroplasticity, you are creating a new neuro pathway.
Every time you interrupt a negative thought, and you do a moment of mindfulness or you do this mental fitness rep, for example, for a minute or two. Every time you do that you delete the pathway in the surviving brain and you create a new pathway in the thriving part of the brain. With and there's lots of practices that can help with that.
Hey everyone, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy life to listen to today's episode. I love learning about what makes you brave. I'm here with you, I see you, I hear you, and I want to hear from you. I want to know how you're showing up as being brave and authentic. Connect with me on Instagram at She's Brave Podcast or come join our community in the She's Brave Podcast Facebook group.
I'm sending you so much love. Until next time, keep being brave.