From Comfort Food to Comfort Emotions: A Culinary Approach to Feelings

From Comfort Food to Comfort Emotions: A Culinary Approach to Feelings

Jeffrey Besecker: This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Biesecker. Our worlds, they're constructed of sensations, perceptions, and memories. Our brains are constantly interpreting and categorizing the world around us. We form impressions based on our experiences, and those impressions are then stored in our memories. These memories then shape our perception of reality.

Despite the convenience of considering them to exist objectively, their existence alone is not what manifests our view of them. Nothing colors our perceptions like the stew of our emotions. Nevertheless, understanding our emotions has been a point of endless speculation. Do they naturally occur or are we able to shape their color, much like a masterful painter would?

Today, we'll give you a new way to create a connection to your emotions by using something familiar to you, like food in the recipes we use for cooking. Yucky, yummy, savory or sweet, we look at a new perspective on emotions, leaving a better taste in your mouth. Tune in to find out how, when we return to The Light Inside.

Contrary to what we may have been traditionally led to believe, what if we aren't born with built-in emotional responses for every event in life? And instead, we're born to feel emotions, and the emotions we feel are up to us. left to our choosing guided by the context and strength of granularity within our perceptions. New research has given us the ability to create an emotional recipe that gives us a much broader palette by fine-tuning our emotional predictions based on our perceptions. For many, the struggle to assess and understand our emotions has left us feeling challenged. seeing everything through a smaller lens and yet to have found a way out of that perspective. Much like comfort food, what if instead of relying on comfort emotions to get us through the day, we become a 5-star Michelin chef of our experiences? This is what Kim Cordy guides us to do in her book, Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet, Understanding the Flavors of Emotions. Her unique approach to emotional awareness and emotional intelligence offers an innovative way to create a connection to our emotions by using something familiar, like food. She explores how we experience our emotions from a combination of senses, including what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Just like the developed palate of a chef can distinguish the different flavors in food, we can increase our ability to capture the flavors of our emotions by enhancing our awareness of the sense of how we feel inside our bodies. Kim, I look forward to exploring how our tools of perception play a part in predicting our emotions and why emotional granularity enables us to use a wider variety of emotional ingredients, allowing us to form stronger perceptual skills. I want to thank you for joining us again today.
Jeffrey Besecker: I appreciate the invitation. It's such a pleasure to talk to you.

Kim Korte: Likewise. As we look at how we form emotions and where we've had this longstanding history with what we deemed our natural emotions, we're now starting to see some new emergent perspective on how we start to form those predictions. Many factors influence the context of our perceptions, shaping the level of emotional granularity that we're able to process. Kim, in this regard, how do we begin to define perception and what role or function does it serve in building emotional context?

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, perception is what we perceive through the senses. There's, what, 11 million bits of data that is received through the senses that the brain has to figure out and do something with, but we can only be consciously aware of about 124 bits. So what perception is is what we take in and what we use from that data. So there may be data we're missing, but it's really what we're using from that sensory data.

Kim Korte: Key subconscious factors influence perception, including neural imprinting, which involves the brain's tendency to form neural pathways based on past experiences, shaping how we perceive and interpret new information. Our emotional responses and perceptions of the world are strongly influenced by a process known as introspection and also a process known as neuroception. Would you share with us how these two factors combine to shape our internal perceptions and our bodily sensations?

Jeffrey Besecker: I'll be honest with you. I am not as familiar with the polyvagal theory, but I know I can talk about interoception and interoception is a sensory system that we have that tells us how we feel inside. So extra reception is everything that's going on in the outside world. So this is intro or internal communication that takes place between the brain and the body that gives us that sense of how we feel inside of our bodies. And we feel it based on what the brain wants us to be aware of. Our heart beats every second it's going. We don't notice it until it's beating really fast. Our stomach is doing all kinds of activities. We don't notice we're hungry until the brain tells us. Thirst, all these types of things. And the same is true of emotions. the emotions that we're more familiar with, the affective emotions. These are the feelings that we have of sadness, of love, but they share the same body parts. And so that's why when we talk about the importance of having emotional granularity, it's key to your interoceptive awareness.

Kim Korte: As we look at this new emerging data information from Lisa Feldman Barrett on interception, there, from my perspective, tends to be a little divide where we're starting now to maybe divest some of that idea of neuroception and where there might be a little dissonance between the two theories.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, I'm pretty much the same way. I'm not even a huge fan of, even though I've been to therapy, I see the limitations of therapy and most of all, it keeps you in the past. And the past is responsible in some ways. Yes, in many ways, because we learn who we are, our perceptions are based on our experiences. But to change them, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to go backwards. You just need to look at what am I experiencing today that I don't want to experience tomorrow that helped to change those perceptions for the future. Does that make sense?

Kim Korte: Moving into that kind of fourth person perspective of even our concept of self, where you have the ability to look at that as just a concept, just a story. It's just a view and a perspective going back to framing perspective. It's all being built. It's all adaptable. It all is fluid. Yet we often get so hung up on that concept of it being so cemented and who and what I am.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes, I like to refer to it as like we have built that external world through our experiences, right? Like from the moment we're born, we can distinguish our mother's voice from our father's voice and we start to develop. We learn objects and it's explained to us, this is a cube or this is a teddy bear. And so we're kind of born with a blank slate that we build our concept of what the world is and it all lives inside of us. Our perceptions are unique to us and we have our own view and we have our own perspective of what the world is based on what's inside of us because we don't see, we don't hear, we just have a brain that tells us what that is and feeds it back to us. And so when we understand the flexibility of our internal world to design it to be what we want it to be more like, that we're not stuck in sadness. Sadness doesn't need to mean what it does. We can make it something else. It's our world to construct, and it's ours alone, and it's not your world, it's not my world, it's just ours. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Kim Korte: A more granular, I noticed you used the word emotional granularity, that same granularity is applied throughout all of our full range of consciousness from the perspective I frequently consider. you know with that regard how much of that consciousness this is going deeper beyond our normal materialized spiritual self how much of that is ingraniated in soul imprinting and things like that we look at consciousness simply arising and start to form some of those constructs of self in there that will It's all original of me. It's all da, da, da. Yet what comes preconditioned in that soul? What comes preconditioned in consciousness itself? Where do we form those divides? Even back before that, our DNA even is kind of limited and we call into play epigenetics there. We're a mixture of everybody else in that material form. Everybody that come before us. So Where we form those divides with that idea of authenticity and originality. We're all unique. Well, are we really truly that unique? Because there's a part of all of that being already within us materialistically. And looking back at that idea of spirituality, where that all starts to bleed and become a little bit gray.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, I understand what you're saying. And I do believe that consciousness is an energy. we are all a part of an energy, you know they talk about source consciousness, but we're all a part of that energy and yet I still think that we each have our unique energetic pattern and we have our own unique frequency that makes us who we are. And that these experiences, if you want to say they come from family lineage, or if they come from a past life, it's still that kind of mixture that makes us who we are. Because I still believe that ultimately, even though we're all connected and we all are from the same energy, we're still unique in who we are. That's just my perspective.

Kim Korte: I know those are big, heady, curious topics to consider, but we've strayed a little bit. Going back to interception and neuroception, would you share with us how these two factors combine to shape our internal perceptions and our body sensations?

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, perceptions to me is really one of the most important things, especially as it relates to mental health and mental well-being. We are limited by our perceptions in the physical aspect, in that we have this certain range that we can hear, a certain range that we can see, and we're limited by that. And then we're limited by what we can consciously experience because the brain is receiving so much information of that range, it's receiving so much information and we consciously get a small percentage of it. And then what that small percentage is, is based on our focus and what we prioritize. And it even has to do with our physical state. If we are in a physical state of dis-ease, I don't care if it's sick or if you're tired, or if you're angry, your nervous system will help that focus to be more directed. And so you miss out on this range of this small percentage, you get an even tinier percentage. And so to me, this is why perception management is so important to try and understand our power to either zoom in or zoom out.

Kim Korte: I love that idea of starting off with our perception and how we're engaging. Also like looking at that idea, that natural progression to me is where and what is taking place when that happens and looking at interception specifically. Do you also approach from the angle of neuroception when you assess things or in that methodology?

Jeffrey Besecker: So interoception is a sensory system, just like hearing and all of these others. It's extraoception and interoception. Neuroception, I'm assuming that you're talking about just the conversations that take place from the neurons to the body.

Kim Korte: Yes. Looking at the neuronal approach of it, you mentioned neuronal connections down a little bit lower in your outline. So those two from the perspective and angle we've built over the years is a combination of your mind-body connection. We're a somatic being when we're materialized and all of those responses are interacting together. All those perceptions and sensations become our materialization and becomes our material body.

Jeffrey Besecker: It also becomes our communication to understand or interpret what is going on in our outside and inside world is what it means to us. So our heart beats 24-7. We don't notice it until it's beating fast. We don't notice our stomach and its activities until we're hungry. And so interoception is the communication. But how we interpret that communication, it's really like developing active listening for the body. is interoceptive awareness is really just active listening for what's going on and to me the granularity comes in is when we can distinguish the difference between those signals to understand and hear better what our body's telling us instead of a sensation always being angry to getting that differential between being less upset or more upset or love versus a crush to help define our feelings more succinctly or greater definition to give our brain more to work with.

Kim Korte: So looking at those two processes, do you see it as a hierarchy or do you see that as a cohesive interaction?

Jeffrey Besecker: Definitely a cohesive interaction.

Kim Korte: My defining goal is to outline how that's a cohesive interaction. Our differentiation there might be that interception is our conscious awareness of those processes.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes, definitely.

Kim Korte: Well, neuroception being the inherently and infinitely automatic and subconscious part of the processes, we can go down that path with a lot of granularity. Well, do you feel we can go or need to go?

Jeffrey Besecker: the neuronal activity that takes place, there is the peptide and the neuropeptide. So the peptide that gets released from a neuron that contains the quote-unquote wiring, which I refer to as recipes, it creates a little container that when the neuron is ready, releases these peptides and they can be neuropeptides that create a chemical reaction, like a nervous system reaction. Then there's the peptides that Dr. Candice Peirce calls the molecules of emotion that go to the body, which produce the sensation. We're looking at a cohesive relationship between the response to the body via chemicals from the neurons, the neurochemicals, and the peptides that get released to the body. Really, it happens all at once and it's very amazing how it happens, but those receptors on the body that are specific to that peptide get released. That's why I'm saying I don't think it's really a divergence. I think there's a lot of cohesiveness there.

Kim Korte: So do you feel there might be ingredients missing in that recipe that we don't often take in consideration? Say, for instance, we may not notice our subconscious behavior patterns are involved in processes such as triggering the gut-brain axis during stress or sensing when cortisol is released during these times. How do you think unconscious factors like these affect the way we formulate emotional recipes, especially when we are unable to incorporate this data into our thinking and logic?

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, that's a whole nother communication because we have brains in the heart and we have a brain in the gut and there's peptides released from other places in the body. So when I'm looking at this in a communication standpoint, I even say this in the book, like it's way more complex than this is. But just for a basic start into how we can be more productive of understanding our perceptions and how they impact us emotionally, we've got such complexity that it's fascinating to me. But yes, the gut produces peptides that the brain responds to and has a direct relationship with the brain. So does the heart. The heart has a direct connection to the brain and there's a complexity there that is another layer and people like HeartMath and other organizations get into that. But my goal with the book was just to get people to understand that their perceptions matter and being able to connect to the feelings that are produced by these ingredients to be more in control of it. or better at understanding the limitations that they have. We need to have a little bit more compassion because we're all limited by our perceptions and we just don't know when our perceptions are going to be limited because that's just how we are.

Kim Korte: How often do you feel we go to that's just how we are is kind of that default avoidance from seeking greater information or additional data, whether we can see that being more complex or more intellectually challenging or more emotionally challenging.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, like I said, if you're sick or if you haven't gotten any sleep, your perceptions are going to be much different than if you were in a state of wellness and well rested. And it's our ability to have conscious awareness to reflect on those moments that gives us greater awareness. So if we chose not to reflect, then that's the issue, right? So we can always reflect back on it and say, oh, this happened because of, X, Y, and Z, and create, if you want to call it, a recipe or more consciousness around, like, I should do this or I should do that, because there's factors that play into how we perceive in any given moment.

Kim Korte: Subconscious patterns like the introspection illusion acknowledge that we have these inherent limitations in our ability to access this kind of data. We can see this as a form of shortcoming or limitation in our perspective-taking abilities. It's interesting to me to note that in this regard we interact with the task of forming emotions rather than controlling them. At that level of granularity. Considering further, how do you feel a pattern like alexithymia might influence that response?

Jeffrey Besecker: Alexithymia is the ability to not recognize, to not feel. So they're actually doing work to help them have greater interoceptive awareness. There's research being done. So for instance, my niece has autism she's on the spectrum and she has a couple other things and one of the chapters in my book i talk about her not putting on socks because her feet are cold and she doesn't feel her cold feet part of it is she's distracted but also her interoceptive capabilities to feel her cold feet aren't there Because interception works for two kinds of emotions, the homeostatic ones and also the affective ones. So if you can't push down those interceptive signals, which we have the capability of doing, we can impact ourselves physically and emotionally, right? Like effectively. So there's a woman, her name is Kelly Maylor, and she is working with neurodiverse kids and she's teaching a fabulous program about developing interoceptive awareness and teaching children the difference so that they can distinguish between hunger and anger. And they're also doing this with people who have PTSD. They're doing this with people with alexithymia because it's this pushing down. Either, I don't know if people were born pushing down or they learned how to push it down. I know I learned how to push it down as a young girl. I pushed it all down. And so that is that reconnecting. to those sensations and teaching you to slowly reconnect to those sensations that allows you to develop that reconnection. If you do some searches on lexithymia and interoceptive development, you'll see some research around it.

Kim Korte: Yeah, we've done some of that both through our previous experience and then also I've been working with the team to gather some additional. How familiar are you with the process of neural imprinting and critical period development?

Jeffrey Besecker: You're talking about neuronal wiring, the basic hops? Yes. That's what a recipe is in my book, so I don't call it neural imprinting. I just say these are the recipes that we develop over time. I understand neurons that wire together, fire together.

Kim Korte: Let me fire something at you. Neural imprinting is a key factor from our perspective in forming and shaping a lot of those responses before you even start to receive social cues or start to move into some of those early childhood development phases of consciousness. Is that something you feel comfortable addressing?

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, I think I kind of referred to that earlier when I said that we're born and we're taught what things mean and make sense of our homeostatic emotions that we receive. And then we start to cry. In fact, I just watched this video of this man watching his daughter cry. So he's just filming her cry. And he goes, why are you sad? He labeled it for her. He said, why are you sad? And it turned out she wasn't sad. She was hungry. And he still referred to it as sad. And so she looked at eating to relieve her sadness. So we're talking about such importance of labeling them and letting the child understand the difference between being sad and hungry. And that to me is a wiring process. right there, who's an example of wiring for not success, because so many people see someone cry and say, oh, you're sad. And that's where this, going back to this example of granularity of emotions is so important, because how we label those sensations is how we're going to use them in the future. And she might, I'm not gonna say she will, but she might always label sadness with eating, and then you get an eating disorder.

Kim Korte: My perception, you know, we're going more toward the mind-based predictive element in relationship or co-relationship to neuroception, which is looking at Stephen Porridge's theory on automatic default network responses of the nervous system. Unconscious processes through which our nervous system evaluates safety, threat, and other environmental cues outside of that brain interaction, affecting our perception without conscious awareness. Now, that may just be my take or perception on the two, but reading through how emotions are made with Lisa Feldman Barrett in the new book is now focusing more on predicting, now focusing on choosing emotions, now focused on what we've been conditioned to know as emotion and looking at how there are differences in cultural emotional programming where looking specifically at facial expression, How we've been conditioned to believe one thing about what a smile means, what facial emotions are actually being conveyed varies from person to person, varies from experience to experience, varies even from culture to culture.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes and I don't think that it's very far apart because 95 and some would say 99% of everything that we say and do is non-consciously driven. It's an energetic efficiency of the brain and this is true of all of our perceptive signals. Everything that we get in the way of sensory signals coming into the brain it's having to do something with it. And I think there was a book, Thinking Fast and Slow, where they talk about, he calls it system one and system two, where we've, you know, conscious thought just takes up a lot more energy. You literally have to stop and think sometimes. So the brain is always just predicting. And what does it have to use for prediction? But you call it neural imprinting. You know, I call them emotion recipes. Someone else would call them neuronal wiring. But it's all the same. It's the storage of learning that we have. So our response to, I give the example in my book, that the monk who walks down the street, or is walking down a country pathway, and he sees something that's you know, long and thin and coiled and thinks, oh, a snake. And so goes into panic, can't move forward. And it wasn't until, you know, he finally took a torch and got closer. He saw it was a rope and goes, oh, okay. Well, he now has that experience of it being a rope. But if he had been raised as a snake handler, let's just say a family of snake owners, he probably would have been able to make that distinction and would have predicted more clearly, had a better predictive outcome. And it all has to do with learning. So prediction and learning go hand in hand. And we, you know, I guess I'll stop there. And you can tell me if I'm off when it comes to neuroception.

Kim Korte: Again, rather than debating whether it's off, we're looking at bringing together our varying perspectives. I think therein lies the nuance of that context. The way you perceive it and verbalize it or even process it sometimes can be vastly different than how I might perceive it or process it or how others might perceive or process it. That's an area where I'm trying to challenge myself lately to even find my own blind spots or allow them to be pointed out to me where sometimes we discount those things and others. How people learn varies differently from time to time.

Jeffrey Besecker: Isn't it kind of just the label that we use? The process is still the same. It's just a label.

Kim Korte: It might not even be the same. It might be completely different at times from a certain perspective. Visual learner versus an auditory learner are very different processes. A visual learner learns by seeing those pictures and steps, those experiences, Whereas the auditory learns by tell me the instruction and I'll repeat what you've said. You know, there's two different ways of learning there and that's in and of itself lacking a lot of context and nuance.

Jeffrey Besecker: No, I'm not referring to that. I was talking about going back to what we had originally talked about, like whether it's neural imprinting or wiring. It's just a different label for the same process. That's what I was referring to. I wasn't talking about how we learn because that has a huge impact on what we perceive and how we process. So that's something different.

Kim Korte: And we can look at the context there again. In research, where that research can differ based on which scientist you're speaking to, based on which field of context we're looking at. Some people are still saying that there's more of that function of processing that's reinforced by the brain, and there's another camp that's still saying that some of it's reinforced by the body. Rather than diving into that today, let's look at in the function of processing emotions. Several subconscious and unconscious processes frequently interfere with effective assessments of internal signals. It's an area that most of us tend to have a view on, acting as missing ingredients in our emotional responses. From that perspective, Kim, what are some of the perceptual drivers or filters that often affect our ability to effectively process emotional data? And why does this sometimes lead to perceptual inaccuracies?

Jeffrey Besecker: I just talked about our energy management and our state of physicality. If we're sick, if we're tired, if we just had a bad experience, our mood. They've done studies where they know that the time of day can make a big difference. if they're hungry or their blood sugar is low. So our perceptions can definitely be impacted by physical factors and emotional factors because mood is just a pervasive feeling that we might have during the day that could be changed with thought or with action or with going out and getting a break and enjoying the sunshine or doing something that we enjoy to change our mood. But all of these things will impact our focus. If we are in a state of fear, we're going to be more driven and more focused on what we're afraid of versus when we're not in a state of fear. Our scope is a little bit wider. So that's, I believe, a factor. And I also believe one of the biggest factors is how we feel about ourselves, our feeling of self-worth, how we think other people view us. So this is why self-awareness is so important because when we know ourselves and when we have Confidence in what our strength is where weaknesses are and we're okay with that we really know ourselves this gives us more confidence and and hopefully the ability to. Which i was trying courage in this book to be wrong because we have prediction error. We experience it all of the time. And this is not just an emotional state. This is just in visual, in hearing, in all of these things. But our emotions do impact that. So this is why I really, really like to stress how we feel about ourselves is a huge component of how we perceive.

Kim Korte: Self-constructs can often have that impact on our associations, the way we label things, the way we form context. Yet, through research, we've exposed the practice or process known as the introspection illusion that hinders our decision making and problem solving by creating a false sense of insight into our own thoughts and biases. Things like contextual frameworks or incomplete, irrelevant, or missing data being one of the key factors that plays into that. How well we think we know ourselves very often is limited merely by the experiences we have. We've only limited our experience to this set of things. Therefore, those are the only experiences and conditions we're calling into play, being one example of that.

Jeffrey Besecker: Oh, that's absolutely true. And unless you have a curious nature and you're willing to try and go outside of it but what keeps people from being curious, a lot of the time is fear. And so, if you can go from fear to caution. to curiosity, then you are able to be more open. So I totally agree with you. If you live in a town and this is your only experience, you have to have that desire or that curiosity to get outside of that town. And I mean, you don't even have to leave the town. There's plenty of TV shows. There's plenty of exposure that you can get that is contrary to how you think and believe. which gives you that opportunity for introspection. And this is just one of the great things about being human. I never, ever expect to fully know myself. I never expect to fully know the world, but I can take in as much as I can and use that for my experience because I don't expect to have any other experience than the one that I cultivate and I curate and that's what I think is important is that if we can have that drive to curate our curiosity and to who we are and to develop that and and take an active stance in or position of creating it rather than let the world create it for us.

Kim Korte: A healthy window of tolerance establishes an optimal range of emotional processing, allowing us to navigate experiences with greater granularity and adaptive responses, while fostering emotional resilience and well-being. Kim, from your perspective, why is a healthy window of tolerance such an essential component for our everyday emotional well-being?

Jeffrey Besecker: So I hadn't heard of the window of tolerance until I read this document that you gave me and I took it as to be our state of coherence. It's where we have that balance in our nervous system and we have that ease of flow so that we're meant to go in and out. That's just how we're designed, but that we've got this the flow, coherence flow. And so when we are in that flow and we're not in a more excited state, which goes back to the nervous system's impact on our focus, we're able to be a little bit more able to self-examine. And this goes into, like you were saying, because I do the same thing. When I read something that's contrary to how I believe, I get kind of like, oh, like I'm having the same kind of dissonance. And then I just talk to myself, why? But I have to take myself off of the emotional ledge that I'm on, because I know that emotionally, it's not coinciding, and I'm finding myself protective of my own beliefs. So I believe when we are in this state of coherence, or I believe healthy window of tolerance, this allows us to examine, self-examine, once again becoming more self-aware of why are we feeling this way? What is it that, could this be true? And then seeing if it's true, where that truth is and how it fits into what you believe in, maybe you have to change your beliefs.

Kim Korte: So relating that then from my perspective, a window of tolerance allows us for the course of our quote unquote natural emotional cycles to align according to the situation, allowing the vulnerable space for them to arise, be processed and subside. Sometimes that ideal vulnerable space can become conflicting for individuals.

Jeffrey Besecker: Vulnerability is tough for some people. And you know, what is that? I hate to say it. It's, you know, it's, it's an emotion. It's that fear. So much of our life is run by fear. And so it's that fear of If people know this, if I share this, if I change my belief, what can happen? And, you know, apart, there's two kinds of predictions. There's the predictions that we use for our lives. Like, we are always predicting, oh, if I believe this, this, it's going to be awful. Or if I do this, it's going to have a horrible outcome. We're always trying to predict the future. And the majority of the time, we get it wrong. Anxiety, people who've got severe anxiety, they've done studies where they say, write down your anxieties, put it down on paper and track to see how many of them come true. And the majority of them, I think less than 10%, it was around 8% actually came true. So this tells you that our brain is leading us in a direction that's not always the right place. So getting comfortable with that, I think helps you to be vulnerable because it allows you to say, I don't know. that this is going to be, but if I do this, it will feel better to release this for people to know. That's just the first thought that came to my head.

Kim Korte: I'm playing on that and riffing on that a little bit. And that fear, I'm going to beat the drum again of that fear known as neuophobia. Neu meaning new. So that fear of new experiences that's driven by that anticipatory anxiety. Again, we're starting to anticipate things, make predictions and guesses, and sometimes turns into that cycle of rumination or repetitive thinking. I tend to divest from the idea of overthinking. That's my own perspective and view.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, you know what, rumination, that's the old cow chewing the cud and they have these multiple stomachs and they chew the same piece of food over and over and over again because that's what they need to digest. So we have to do what we need to do to digest it. But at some point, either we spit it out, because it's not going to ever be digested, or we just swallow and leave it there. Because overrumination is just going to spin us into nowhere. And that's my humble opinion. But sometimes we need to chew on things a little bit. And other times, we don't. We just go with our instincts, or we Do we have more confidence in our decisions? But I think it's a little bit circumstantial.

Kim Korte: Yeah, there again, going back to that process of introspection, as we use that ability or our believed ability sometimes to access our inner worlds and assess our emotional and mental states. However, we can observe as a result of subconscious and unconscious patterns, large chunks of that internal data are often missing from our assessments. They're again going back to that state known as the introspection illusion.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, sure. But I mean, given our limited capability and given we can't take in. So I don't know if you've ever seen the illusion monkey. It's on my website. I have a page underneath my book that is the sensory videos. And as much as you know what happened in that video and you can watch it knowing what is going to happen, there's still things that you miss because we are only consciously capable of taking in so much. So yes, we're going to have an illusion, but I think that's, once again, that's just like part of the human experience. And I don't think we can ever get everything, but we can do more to try and take in more of what's going on to get a bigger picture. And yes, we can only go off of our past experiences because that's what we use. When my mother-in-law, she just passed this last December, but she had dementia and she forgot that she didn't like certain foods and she forgot that she liked foods. She forgot everything because her likes, what she liked, what she didn't like, what she wanted, what she didn't want to experience got lost with her memory.

Kim Korte: In that regard, the context in which we perceive data influences our emotional outcomes in a significant way. Would you explain why we reach our emotional conclusions based on the context of the data we perceive from your perspective?

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, I think it goes back to what I was talking about earlier, our physical state and our emotional state and our perception of ourself. What are we trying to protect? Who are we trying to protect? Ourselves. These are all things that play into our perceptive capabilities.

Kim Korte: In that regard, contextualization is crucial both in our perceptual and emotional granularity as it allows for deeper understanding of the sensory input and our emotional experiences as we consider the surrounding circumstances or environmental factors we're interplaying with.

Jeffrey Besecker: I mean, these are true statements. I'm not going to argue on that. I wasn't arguing with you anyway, but yes, that's correct.

Kim Korte: It can be, at times it cannot be, and that's where that difference is. Are we willing to surrender that concept of ego, which is nothing more than a series of processes or filters we utilize to form an idea of a self? How willing are we able to surrender that idea of a self to step back from that fourth person perspective that isn't filtering through that view of my identity?

Jeffrey Besecker: Once again, I mean, like, why, what keeps us back? I'm going to ask you, what do you think that keeps people back from, you know, stuck in the ego?

Kim Korte: That is varied and nuanced with such contextual granularity and complexity.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes, so when you're talking about granularity and complexity, and I'm talking about emotional granularity, we're talking about two different things. That may be true. Yes, no, it is true, because I'm talking about being able to identify your emotions with greater distinction and being able to label them in such a way. I use the idea of spaghetti or pasta even. There's different kinds of pasta and there's different kinds of spaghettis. If life is just pasta, if all of our emotions are just pasta, we don't have that ability to define it more granular. This is why food is such a great use of it because we can take the idea of of a bagel, how many different bagels are, or a pepper, you know, you have mild, you have, you know, the green, you have the spicy ghost peppers, and they are all peppers, but they give you a different physical sensation. And it's the same thing that can happen with our emotions is that we, if we can better identify the emotion at that time, It's going to give us ability to recognize it with more distinction and to recover from, I don't even say recover, but pivot from it if we need to.

Kim Korte: I might look at things in life in general with a broader or finer degree of granularity.

Jeffrey Besecker: I don't know because I don't live in your head. I don't live in my head either, really.

Kim Korte: To be honest, I don't live in my head. I live through an embodied state and even that's kind of subjective to a level of granularity again. There's a perfect illustration of that. Am I living even in consciousness? That is another level of granularity to me. Am I living in spirit or is that something other? I go to those different levels of consideration.

Jeffrey Besecker: So that topic is a whole nother topic. It's a whole nother conversation. So I am talking about emotional granularity, interception, all of that, that and how it ties into it. And so that I think is very interesting what you're talking about, because this goes into you know, who we are, what we are. We are a bunch of atoms and what are atoms? Atoms are waves. If you look at quantum field theory, we're just a bunch of fields and everything that we are looking at and seeing is really just fields and that we are all connected. because all of these fields interact with each other, and we depend on each other, and we know that to be true. And so that, to me, is a spiritual, physical, physics type of conversation that goes way, way, way beyond just the emotional, but our inner connectedness. And I am way, way, way on board on that. My goal with what I have produced in my book and what I talk about and what I teach is solely that until we can connect to ourselves, into the communication that's happening inside of our bodies, it makes it very difficult. It makes it a lot harder to move out from there. And we can see that with people who don't have that internal connection. You're very connected, and you're very introspective, and you've got that, but there are so many people who can't connect to those internal feelings. And this leaves them stuck. And I would imagine extremely frustrated. And in our initial conversation, you and I talked about willful blindness. And that's another area where we get ourselves stuck and refuse to listen to that internal conversation. So, in the spiritual aspect of things, that is also our connection if you believe, and this is a belief system that you may not aspire or connect with, but it's that connection to our higher self or to God or to whomever is blocked also because your communication starts inside of you.

Kim Korte: So in that regard, from your perspective, let's look at that willful blindness. Let's revisit that again. Share with us that process of willful blindness and how that plays out in our emotional granularity.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's a type of dissonance. You want an outcome and you want it to be a certain way. And there's facts in your face that tell you differently. I suffered from it in my marriage. Deep inside, I knew he was sleeping with our friend and I could not physically come to terms with it. It was physically impossible. And if you've ever suffered from this, malady, this condition, you know it and how it feels that you are just pushing it away. You're not listening to what's being said. And there's a great book by Margaret Heffernan where she talks about willful blindness and cases of deaths that have happened because people whose either their ego or something was in the way that was creating this emotional dissonance between truths. There was a study that was done where they people who lived underneath a dam, the further away you were from the dam, the more concerned you were. But when you got closest to the dam, those people were just not concerned. Why? Because they were in the most danger. And you would think they would be the most concerned. But to have that concern, it's that dissonance that creates the blindness and creates a lot of problems, quite frankly.

Kim Korte: From that perception, from that perspective, would you share with us the underlying factors that ultimately shape those predictions and sometimes inform that willful blindness?

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, it's how we feel about the situation. And once again, I think this totally goes back to ego and what are we trying to protect and how we feel about ourselves and how comfortable we are with being wrong. And I feel that that is such an enormous lack in our human being makeup that we can't it's hard for us to be wrong. It's hard for us to be, as you put it, vulnerable. And it's hard to face situations. And so I think that that's a huge factor. And as I'm going to keep going back to our physical state, I've already just talked about our emotional state, our cumulative state at the time as to what we desire as an outcome will play an enormous factor in our perceptions.

Kim Korte: So what role might things like biological factors or cultural and social factors play in shaping?

Jeffrey Besecker: there's expectations there, right? If you're in a culture where you're expected to be a certain way, I was raised in a religion where there was a lot of expectation, a lot of rules, and in cultures where you marry and you only marry within this group, and if you go outside of it, heartache, and sometimes you get excommunicated from the family. So those are huge factors in it. It's part of your makeup. From the time we're born, we start creating these imprints, these neuron wiring. We create our world so just when you think about back a thousand years ago they used to believe that light emanated from our eyes and that's how we saw and it was a gentleman I can't pronounce his name but he was this muslim philosopher and he said oh no it's like coming in the eyes and this was a big deal and so because you are a prediction of my brain and because everything I'm hearing is a prediction of the brain our world is really what has been created inside of us, our head. And so those cultural teachings, those imprints that we have from the time that we're born as to how things should be, they play a gigantic factor.

Kim Korte: So here's a big one I ponder quite frequently. That idea of conditionality, those influences from the external, whether it be social influence, whether it be parental influence, whether it be some of those subconscious and unconscious programmings we store, and we simply aren't aware of it, and we inextricably remove ourselves from conditionality, and might or might that not be beneficial?

Jeffrey Besecker: Um, I have definitely my self from the conditioning that I received. So I think it's possible. Can we remove ourselves from all of our conditioning? I think that is impossible because we're, we're conditioned in so many ways. Like if you think about, um, the things that we do as social norms, just so that we can interact and communicate language is conditioning. So we have to accept that some conditioning exists. But where I find, and I've done this with other people and I've had it done for me, is finding that understanding of the emotions that you want to have more of and the emotions you want to experience less of. To understand, even just at this point in time, what needs to happen for you to feel those feelings. It reveals some conditionings that you might not know existed. It's an exercise I have in my book. like I said, I can do with people. And it takes you through almost like a barrage of what needs to happen to fill this. It's that pursuing what will come up from the subconscious to reveal that. And it's typically only revealed what you can handle. And I've also seen that it changes sometimes over time, but it's certainly a revolutionary thing. Not revolutionary, it's probably not the right word, but it's such an empowering exercise because then that gives you that conscious awareness of it so that you're able to spot it and you're able to, as I call it, create new recipes and catch yourself doing that and say, no, that's not what I want. this is not what I want to feel, I want to feel this when this happens. And that to me is a great way to do it, but social conditioning is hard to completely undo.

Kim Korte: Reflecting on that, in some regards, we experience what we expect, reflecting on the stories you share in your book in chapter one. In that regard, what role might processes like emotional inference, transference, and counter-transference play in creating stereotypically programmed emotional responses that resemble projected expectation and emotional reactivity?

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, talk to me a little bit about what you're meaning by those terms. I just want to make sure that I understand you correctly.

Kim Korte: Inferences are instances where we start to form those assumptions, we start to project, we start to predict sometimes what someone else's emotions might be, what their internal state might be. How does that come into play as we're starting to just assume sometimes, sometimes that turns into emotional control dramas where we think this person must be judging me, this person must think badly of me, this person must think I'm da, da, da, da, da. All the labels of self-concept we start to load on there start to become an ego filter. We're filtering it through our identity in our sense of association.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, I think you were referring to the wine snob, the two-buck Chuck, Opus One, two-buck Chuck and the wine snob. That's a great story to reflect to that, yes. Yes, yes. So that story, for those listening, is a true story, where I went to a pre-New Year's Eve party with my friend, and the host is a very generous host. It was very lovely wines and some beautiful food. And his friend was very late. He, as a joke, took an empty bottle of Opus One because that went pretty quickly. And that's a fancy-schmancy wine brand out of Napa. You don't buy it, you acquire it. And then he filled it partly with a wine called, we affectionately call it Two Buck Chuck, but it's the Charles Shaw wine brand out of Trader Joe's. $2 was what it cost. And his friend walked in, saw the Opus One bottle, said, I'm going to drink that, poured a glass. And I was literally sitting in a chair next to him as he stood to my left. And he took the glass, drank it. It's like, oh, he was just, I thought he was going to purr. He was so happy. And we all started laughing. And he's like, what? And he took another sip. And he was consciously now taking this sip. And he said, this isn't Opus One. And then we really held. And he eventually found something else he wanted to drink. But this was the example I was trying to lay out of the predictive nature of the brain and how it can predict poorly. And it's using our past experience, his experience with the Opus One brand to predict the taste. Now, if he had been a little bit more consciously drinking that, like if he was a sommelier who really, really examines every glass that they take in, he may have made a better guess. And so the idea is that if we're more consciously aware of situations, if we're, you know, a sommelier will look at the wine, they will do all kinds of things to, my husband's a sommelier so that's why I can say this, they'll do all types of examination to the wine and look for the different flavors, for the different things that they get, the aromatics, and trying to be a little bit more like that in life. And that's that story. So do we practice that on a regular basis? No, I don't think we do. But we're still using our prediction of what someone thinks about us. what we think that they're saying. We know for hands down that people hear but don't hear. Their internal voice gets a little bit louder at times because they're not actively listening. And that's the point is that we need to be active listeners internally and externally.

Kim Korte: That's a powerful instance where we could take that story and witness where that transference starts to come in. We start to transfer those beliefs. We start to transfer those past emotional conditions and responses. We start to form associations based on what we believe to be in that bottle, based on what we experienced with that previous contact, if we had it with that wine, to the point where we subconsciously start to believe it's the same wine. We can see where we slap those labels on our self concept sometimes and start to form those filters and perceptions.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, if, just like with the story with the snake, and the, the monk if if that monk had not gone forward and saw that it was a rope. If he had turned around, he might have told a bunch of people, look, there's snakes in this area. Be really careful. All these people would be fearful. He may not go that way again, and it may be extra difficult for him to get back to the village. That gentleman could have had that wine and drank the whole glass and not have known differently. I think he should have known. Eventually, he would have figured it out. You know, when you think about when we lay down these experiences with people, with situations, with food, with whatever it is, our state of mind, all of these conditions that can filter our perceptions is what makes up that memory. And that's what we're going to be using for the future. So this is why I really, really stress try and be proactive in that learning, in that memory making, because it's what you're going to use for the future and try and figure out and undo what you can that isn't working for you. Because if you're not feeling the emotions that you want to feel, let's get to it. Let's figure it out.

Kim Korte: Might we also adapt that skill where rather than reading people in situations When we release our need for that bias certainty and we surrender insecurity and simply meet others where they're at.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes, absolutely.

Kim Korte: And we develop greater emotional granularity, empathy, emotional intelligence, all of these other areas we're looking at developing that ability to perceive.

Jeffrey Besecker: Absolutely, because you you are allowing yourself a new learning experience, instead of just placing the old experience on top of it, putting lipstick on the pig, so to speak. And because you might have had a good experience, and that person was horrible. And if you if you kept going on with that perception of them, you could be open to some harm. So if you take people for where they're at at this moment in time and are inquisitive, this is going back to curiosity, this takes curiosity, then you're opening yourself up to more experience and to refining. Because, you know, memories, you're not replaying a memory. There's so much work on memories and they know that you're recreating that memory every time you have it. And so there's a little bit of frailty with that. And so that's an important thing, I think, also to remember.

Kim Korte: Implicit and explicit memories are two types of memory that impact perception differently. Would you share with us what the difference is between explicit and implicit memory and how does each influence our emotional responses differently?

Jeffrey Besecker: So like just with the caveat of what a memory is. So unconscious memories are the ones that we are, right, the ones that are the 95% that we don't know are happening. And I've even heard someone say 99. It's an interesting one.

Kim Korte: Let's look at that for a second, if you indulge me here. That itself is a good example of a conditioned belief that we've socially bought into. Would you not agree?

Jeffrey Besecker: Tell me why you feel that way, before I agree or not agree.

Kim Korte: So, being granular and curious, I don't always necessarily buy a concept on its first sell, just like that $2 bottle of two-buck Chuck not being the Opus One that it's claimed to be. When you do your research and go back, where did that belief come from?

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, it got started with Freud. As far as I know, I could just say that much. As far as I know, it came from Freud. And then there's been a lot of work, like the book I referred to, Thinking Fast and Slow. and other research which talks about the energy efficiency of the brain. In fact, I was just watching a show on perceptions. It's called The Perception Deception, and it's fantastic. It's also available on my website because I've just got all these videos. They were talking about how big our brains would have to be if we If we were able to capture all of our perceptions, and if we were to consciously thinking all the time, like it was a. It was a difference in our brain size, because we would we would. require actually, too, a lot more energy. I believe it just because of the energy efficiency factor. That's why it makes sense to me. I didn't just take it blank and I just didn't listen to one person. I looked into that.

Kim Korte: Large portions of that, we can agree, are happening unconsciously, subconsciously. If they're unconscious or subconscious, Can we accurately measure with granularity becomes the next question for me going back to the condition part of that, why 90 percent where that really stuck, where it become the cultural phenomena was drawn from a suggestive interview with a marketing professor. I don't have the guy's name in front of me before Freud. after Freud. There again, did Freud conduct accurate study on that? It becomes kind of a debatable gray area. Or was Freud himself making assumptions? Did Freud generalize? Did Freud bring in a lot of ambiguity? becomes granularity. That's going to a whole other area, but it exposes perhaps or brings us to the idea of where sometimes we lack that data, where we base that certainty on a condition belief again. going back to that 90% now that most people will not even stop to question because it's so prevalent in our culture that that's the go-to number. The actual number that was mentioned was probably 90% in the interview that was referenced. They were studying marketing trends and how often people based on loose studies, don't engage that conscious interaction when buying. The phrase come out of an interview from Harvard Law Review or Harvard Review discussing marketing plans in the interview said, how often does this happen? And the reframe was, well, if I were to guess, probably 90%. That's where we draw a lot of that cultural relevance from. That's where most of the research, when you go back to and somebody then will often try to validate that, goes back to that very professor, that very interview, those very studies, which were blind studies, going back to that selective blindness again. We're just selectively reinforcing somebody's assumption on what was true 90% of the time, yet we're not certain. It just illustrates to me sometimes how that granularity starts to blur a little bit, how our choices are influenced.

Jeffrey Besecker: I got that from looking at neuroscience articles and literature. I didn't pay attention to any marking.

Kim Korte: It's interesting. Even in that regard, how much of that is just adopted and adapted back to those same kinds of studies?

Jeffrey Besecker: Even if it's 80%, even if it's 50%, we live in percentage neutral. We live in a predictive model of the brain. That's just how it works.

Kim Korte: Now, my point being with this is not to get overly granular about disproving that theory itself. It's to illustrate how implicit memory and unconscious biases in memory start to come in play, not only in our emotional responses, but throughout our behavioral responses as human beings. We start to find those answers, inform those predictions, yet sometimes we miss large chunks of data or just simply reflect what's been programmed before.

Jeffrey Besecker: Exactly what I talk about in the book. I mean, this is why I'm saying we need to open up the view. Zoom in when we need to pay more close attention, like when it requires it, and try and zoom out. And a lot of this has to do with managing our nervous system, managing our emotions, and, you know, self-reflection, you know, looking back so that we can create a better response in the future. And so if We haven't even talked about the things that are not even in our view. We don't know what we've inherited in our DNA. There's all what I call the secret sauce. I mean, there's so much that we don't know that we can't control. But I'm working with what we do know. We do know that the brain is predictive. We do know that we use… To make those predictions, we use the past, and our past could be flawed because of circumstances, like going back to the monk on the road. That wasn't a truth, it was his experience. That rope was not a snake, but his experience could have, he walked away with, it could have been a snake when it wasn't. So that awareness, that ability to say, oh, like maybe what I remember wasn't complete. That is what I'm striving to get out there, is that we're very flawed just by nature. Our brain is our friend and our foe. And so when we get on friendly terms with what it can do and it can't do, it provides us with a lot of humility and it allows us, I believe, to be more proactive and understand I can take a part in crafting, like I said before, curating my emotions rather than letting societal, letting what we've been taught previously, letting experiences that we maybe had once with someone rule our next experience.

Kim Korte: That reflects me back to looking at how inference comes into play, how we start to project some of that, looking at just that idea of secret sauce. Why subconsciously do we sometimes wish to keep that a secret? Do we wish to hide it?

Jeffrey Besecker: We don't know what it is, our DNA. I'm just saying, we don't know, our DNA. I don't know. I don't know what my chemical component is. I mean, hormones play a factor in it. We don't know if we've got an underlying disease. There's so many things that can factor into what I call the secret sauce because we just don't know. you know, when you think about the things that you inherit, my sister is the emotional makeup of my mother and the physical makeup of my father. She's like the perfect little combo. And my brother, his emotional makeup is just so much like my dad. And so some of it, yes, is, you know, because we were reared by him. And then some of it is, you know, our chemical makeup. And it's just so much we just don't know. And so that's why I say we try and play with what we do know, what we can control. Noticing when we're sick, noticing when we are having problems with connecting with someone. It's like, is it me? Like, you know, trying to uncover, be your own Sherlock Holmes, as I put it in the book, and do a little bit more investigation.

Kim Korte: So in that regard, active recall is our ability to consciously recall those implicit and explicit memories. It's our active ability to be aware of introspection. Two instances, not the totality, perhaps, of active recall, but those are two instances that serve as an example of what active recall is. In that regard, what role might selective inference play in that active recall and how are they reinforced by natural imprinting or neural imprinting? I'm slipping there. How are they reinforced by neural imprinting during our early stages of development?

Jeffrey Besecker: So I'm just going to go back to the house, the internal model of the world that we build and it, it, um, how we create that memory. And this is what I was just on a podcast with, uh, uh, it was a podcast for moms and how we create our experiences and how we guide our children in creating their experiences really is laying out their future, right? So those memories and how they get created, parents have a huge, huge role in that and teaching them to help them be more active in creating and choosing their experience rather than just being told what their experience should be or examining and having some self-reflection. I'm not sure if that's the direction of the answer to the question you were looking for, but that was just what came to mind.

Kim Korte: Kim, I want to thank you for sharing your unique wisdom with us today. You have given us such an opportunity to look at how we form our emotions with such depth and granularity. Finally today, if you were to share three tips with us on how we can draw improved perceptions from our emotional responses, what insights would you leave us with today?

Jeffrey Besecker: Definitely one is question your fears and develop curiosity. Try and move the needle so that you're not experiencing as much fear and more curiosity. It will help your focus. And so think of that lens as curiosity as widening what you can take in versus fear, which narrows it. And then self-awareness, developing, learning about yourself. You know, the little personality quizzes, just the journaling after an experience. I personally really, really love to write about like when I'm stuck in a feeling, I write about it. and i'll just do a not like a writing like i would do for a book but this is just getting it out and just writing writing writing whatever comes out of my mind and there's this wonderful relationship between the hand and the head and so when you write you tend to memorize more things, but you also tend to have things come more to mind that you might not have thought of that were bothering you over a situation. So I'm saying learning what needs to happen for you to feel certain emotions and paying attention to your feelings. So this is that whole self-awareness, that interoceptive awareness, and then actively creating the emotions that you want to feel. We talked about emotional granularity. This is having more defined experiences, not just getting angry as your go-to, but learning how to develop emotional granularity by having more words and more descriptions. It's like a chef. If a chef takes a taste of a dish that it's been prepared for them, or let's say someone in their kitchen, they're going to notice all of the ingredients. They're not going to say, oh, this tastes good. They're going to taste it for all of the different components and say you need more of this a little bit too much of this needs to cook a little longer so that that comes naturally to them because they've developed this skill and that's what interceptive awareness is it's a skill just like like a chef can taste and. taste or flavors and is a combination of multiple sensory systems. It's not just one, just like our emotions. So it's a good way to relate our emotions is by using taste, or not taste, sorry, flavor.

Kim Korte: I want to thank you again for sharing this with us today. I truly enjoy our conversations every time we talk. It's such a great opportunity for me to see things through another's perspective. So thank you for sharing that with us. Namaste. The light in me acknowledges the light in you.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you so much. It was, as always, like our last conversation. It is very enlightening, and it's broadened my outlooks. It's given me more to look at, and I really appreciate you for that.

Kim Korte: Thank you. I appreciate you two so much. Thanks. Thank you. That was fun. Yeah, it was good. I'm working on trying to find the ways to meet others where they're at, you know, sometimes it's just allowing that light to shine through. So thank you for truly sharing.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, you called it the light inside.

Kim Korte: There was a lot of loaded intentions with that name. I could see that now. The light shines in, the light shines out, the light shines down, the light is everywhere. And sometimes the light and the dark coexist. So that's where I'm at with it.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, the more light you have, it shows what's been hidden in the dark.

Kim Korte: Yeah. You can tell when I'm lit up because I turn this bright beet red. What do you mean by lit up? Emotionally, engaged, energetically. Hmm. So something I know of myself. I turn a bright beet red.

Jeffrey Besecker: Some people would say, oh, he's he's angry. Look at him. Or he's embarrassed.

Kim Korte: Well, you would know if it was anger and it was unchecked for me, you would know that's a battle I used to have. I used to have the battle with it. I've learned to reframe that. I've learned, you know, that I don't have that all encompassing kind of detracting anger that I once had. And I'm able to sit with that emotion now and also identify that most of the time it's a secondary emotion. Most of the time it's in response to something else underneath it. The pattern I used to have was driven largely by guilt and shame. It took me up until about four years ago to really identify that. to go through some neuro reprogramming. I did a online workshop with Marissa Peer that finally allowed me to go back and get in touch with that childhood programming that made it surface as guilt and fear and shame for me. Now I'm able to acknowledge those things and rather than run away from those emotions, they're allowed the space to exist. I'm allowed to form different context. I'm allowed to have an increased granularity with those experiences and rather than trying to label them as a negative emotion and realizing that sometimes they're recalcitrant or uncomfortable. Allows me to simply acknowledge it and move through and process it differently.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, no, I mean, it's Susan David talks about, you know, giving that space between you and the emotion that allows for for that. And ultimately, that's, that's really what my goal is with the book, but in a, in a little bit more. So It's so funny. You're the exact opposite of the woman. And I think you're the exact opposite of a lot of people in that she was like, I don't want sciency. I don't want a lot of science. Like, I don't want to hear it. Not a lot of people want to get too deep.

Kim Korte: A lot of that's programming. I can identify it as conditioned programming in our upbringing. Sometimes that itself can become a blind spot for me. because we did grow up in an environment that was reinforced if things are challenging. Question. That was the underlying message. You know, the motto was, I don't know is not an answer. And some of that might not even be an accurate recollection of my memory of it. It might be projected on the more I think about. But that belief that when things are challenging, stop and question rather than. Turning in fear rather than engaging completely with anxiety, just question and work your way through slowly, right? Find that granularity.

Jeffrey Besecker: And when we're in that coherent state, it makes it easier for us to do that. It's when we're under stress or when we're not in coherence and we're living on cortisol, that's when that all becomes a lot more challenging. And unfortunately, we live in a society that stresses cortisol production and, you know, and does everything that it can to amp that up. Here, news, fearful, here, work, pound it. It's just too bad.

Kim Korte: And there's, again, a lot of granularity and context nuance that goes into that. Our learning systems, when we look at our schooling systems, we're not, to some degree, taught deductive reasoning, we're taught to simply fall in line and choose the right answer. And that's a very generalized overview of it. Therefore, when we meet that need or that space where we can contextualize, we've not been taught that skill by and large throughout our social environment.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, if you think it goes way back to religious times, when the religions dominated the world, and they've lost a lot of their power, but when they dominated the world, that's what would happen. You can't question us. You can't learn anything. You can't question us. This is just how it is. Quite frankly, that's how I was brought up. We can break free. It's not always easy to do, but the freedom that comes with curiosity for me is tremendous. I don't ever want to stop. Now that I've got my curiosity muscle really strong, I'm going to keep it up.

Kim Korte: Please do. Please do. You're shining that light on the world and I am so grateful for that. I truly enjoy our conversations, Kim. I look forward to chatting with you again.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes. Let's do that. Let's do that. Awesome. You stay in touch and let me know what you're up to. Likewise. I'm in Ohio. Ohio. Yeah. How is your weather?

Kim Korte: If you don't like it, it's going to change in five minutes. That's where we're at this time of year.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, because we've been having really strange weather.

Kim Korte: Yeah. I think it's increasing. It's erratic, unpredictable nature. We had 65 degree sunny weather yesterday afternoon. We were supposed to have thunderstorms later or earlier in the evening, but about 2.30 last night we had just intense thunderstorms, downpour, torrential rain, and several tornadoes in our immediate area. Not right here locally for us, but within about a half hour of here. And then now it's snowing today.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, we've had some gorgeous 70 degree weather. It's been stunning. And now I don't know what the temps are outside. It's going to be a high of 63, but we're heading into our biggest storm of the year. Wow. So I'm not too thrilled about that.

Kim Korte: Yeah, I'm ready for the warmer. We're on the downslide all day today. We started off at about 51. Around 7 a.m. and then we're down to 34. Now we're supposed to drop the 21 overnight and then slowly climb back into the sixties throughout the rest of the weeks. Typical February, March rollercoaster.

Jeffrey Besecker: Oh, is it that's typical?

Kim Korte: It's it's gotten worse. It's it's been a lot more, like I said, erratic over the last. Probably six, eight years. If I were to nail it down in there again, that's a large prediction.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, it's just going to keep, I think it's just, Guy is rebalancing us. And so I'm sorry, I have to go. All right, dear.

Kim Korte: Thank you so much. Lovely to chat with you. We'll touch base via email and give you update on the release next Friday.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes. And then as soon as you have the file to send me, I will. Will do. I will promote. Thank you.

Kim Korte: Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Jeffrey Besecker: I appreciate you. Have a great day. I appreciate you.

Kim Korte: Bye. Talk soon.