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Initiation Incubation Illumination Verification F

Initiation
Incubation
Illumination
Verification

From Jacques Hadamard (mathematician).. also discussed in Stanislas Dehaene’s book, Consciousness and the Brain

Initiation: the prep work, the deliberate, conscious exploration of a problem launches the unconscious mind on a quest.

Incubation: the invisible brewing period. The mind is vaguely preoccupied with the problem but shows no sign of working on it.

Illumination: suddenly a solution, insight, epiphany emerges (often after a good night’s sleep or relaxing well)

Verification: slow, effortful process of consciously testing, staying responsive to feedback and adjusting as needed.

Part of my process for creating content.

New video next week related to regulating stressful emotions using delayed gratification techniques.

#mindset #resilience #emotionregulation #process

“Connecting cues such as touch, proximity, eye c

“Connecting cues such as touch, proximity, eye contact, and tone of voice can create a sense of closeness more effectively than words. Underneath our issues of the day, our arguments about kids, money, cleanliness, schedules, or sex, are the brain’s priorities: Do you love me? Do you care? Do I matter to you? We often use the issues of the day as placeholders for our sense of connection, because it can be difficult to identify those underlying feelings or awkward to talk about not feeling cared for, prioritized, or loved.”

[...] Understanding how to speak in terms of attachment to the nervous system gives you relationship superpowers. You can harness the 90 percent that is outside of conscious awareness and speak directly to the parts of the brain and body that measure connection. I call ]these tools the Language of the Nervous System [...] “

Excerpts from the book More than Words by John Howard, with a foreword by interpersonal neurobiology expert @drstantatkin , cofounder of the PACT institute

Excited to have John Howard on Season 3 of the Mindset Neuroscience Podcast

Also check out these beautiful book cover designs @simonschusterartworks

#attachmenttheory #anxiousattachment #avoidantattachment #secureattachment #coregulation #growthmindset #selfregulation #resilience #mindset #embodiedhealing #interpersonalneurobiology
#booknerd #bookcover #morethanwords

Grateful for the nature I get to see on my daily w

Grateful for the nature I get to see on my daily walks.

I’ve always had a soft spot for ducks for some reason… could watch them for hours! This little guy started walking next to me 😊

#nature #walkingmeditation

The Neuroscience of Attachment : How we navigate

The Neuroscience of Attachment :

How we navigate the power matrix of independence and intimacy.

I didn’t realize that the previous post is only 10 seconds long lol.. i’m clearly still a learner in all of this!

#attachmenttheory #attachmenttrauma #attachmentstyles #secureattachment #anxiousattachment #avoidantattachment #selfregulation #neuroscience #growthmindset #coregulation #intimacy #resilience

Resistance will come up when you are pursuing work

Resistance will come up when you are pursuing work that matters.

It's the force that gets you to doubt yourself, distract yourself and do things that matter less in the long run.

When resistance creeps up, think about someone who could use your art, your work, your voice, your hands, your care. When you tune into your GENEROSITY, you weaken the force of self-consciousness and self-doubt.

p.s. - releasing my next video on attachment wounds at 3 PM PST today on youtube.com/c/StefanieFaye

@steven_pressfield writes about Resistance in his book the War of Art.
Quotes on these pictures are from Seth Godin's book, The Practice

Grateful for the adventurous people who have cross

Grateful for the adventurous people who have crossed my path.

@johnapesos ... thank you for your worldly spirit and joy of life!

pics are from Rocky Mountains, Colombia, Ecuador - Amazon Rainforest.

More videos coming up… -patterns, power & trig

More videos coming up…

-patterns, power & triggers
-intimacy & independence
-compassion & purpose inside wounded behaviors
-anticipation & agility
-setbacks & preparatory mindsets

(A few themes emerging as I create these)

#neuroplasticity #resilience #mindset #workinprogress #nevergiveup #attachmenttheory

The behavior and resilience of a system is based o

The behavior and resilience of a system is based on its performance over TIME... its growth, stagnation, declines, failures, setbacks and evolution.

The longer we make that timeline, the better we can get at understanding our behaviors and our goals.

If you can put your current behavior into historical context - you'll see that there are reasons why you might be acting or reacting the way you do. Without expanding that time horizon, you'll have a harder time trying a new behavior because you have no idea why you're feeling or reacting that way.

If you add long-term projections into the future, you'll get a chance to see that the resilience you seek INCLUDES ups and downs, setbacks and stagnation. It's those challenges and ruptures that actually give you the most faith in the system... they let you know that the system can not only withstand setbacks and stagnation, it can actually evolve and grow, becoming stronger and more resilient with each challenge.

It can be helpful to remember this when you are feeling like you might be stuck, or repeating reactions or behaviors you want to improve... expand the time horizon. Know that with each setback you are getting more knowledge about the strength of you as a system.

Remember also that all of the relationships you have in your life are systems. Focus on long-term goals, historical context and future projections that acknolwdge that setbacks are a part of long-term resilience and that they can actually STRENGTHEN the system.

That is the true nature of a growth mindset. When it comes to humans (and most systems), growth isn't linear, and it can surprise us when we look at it from the highest vantage point.

#growthmindset #resilience #gohumans
#systemsthinking #donellameadows #attachmenttheory

Highly recommend the book Attached by Dr. Amir Lev

Highly recommend the book Attached by Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. They integrate neuroscience and offer ideas of building a Working Model for secure attachment.

I think this is one of the most important theories of our time.

The more we understand attachment, the better we will get at co-regulating and offering the next generation a chance at building healthy connections that allow all of us to explore our highest potential.

I also recommend the @theschooloflifelondon channel.. they offer concise overviews of Attachment Theory. This is the link to the video clip I attached to this post:
https://youtu.be/2s9ACDMcpjA

Attachment theory is a beautiful space where we try to see others through their eyes, and their history, while also being compassionate about ours.

#attachmenttheory #attachmentstyles #amirlevine #neuroscience

Lower Stress by Understanding Your Attachment Woun

Lower Stress by Understanding Your Attachment Wounds & Patterns

Because of how brains mature over time, as children, we need to outsource our self-regulating abilities to our caregivers. This is especially important when we are distressed.

If, during childhood, we experience a lack of responsiveness, emotional availability or attunement to our emotions, this can lead to insecure attachment patterns in our adult relationships.

When you overreact, or respond in ways where your emotions may be disproportionate to the event, there is a chance that your reaction is tied to some attachment wounds and injuries you experienced when you were young.

In this video, I cover:
-How our emotional reactions may be tied to attachment wounds
-Different types of attachment behaviors that can help us create the connections we want in our adult relationships, as well as which ones take us further away from connection
-How to regulate our attachment system by increasing our range and repertoire of attachment behaviors

#attachmenttheory #selfregulation #attachmentwounds #emotionregulation

Is it possible to take a painful and negative even

Is it possible to take a painful and negative event from our past, and 're-purpose' it to become an empowering feature of our story, of our identity?

The process of re-organizing neural circuits to integrate a negative past event into a more complex and mature perspective is tied to cognitive flexibility.

I have had a few incredible sessions with clients recently where they were able to view aspects of themselves in completely new ways - ways that allow them to feel free from self-loathing and pent up rage or resentment.

It IS possible to dissipate and transform old emotions, old structures into something that does not ERASE the past... it integrates it into a higher level of unconditional self-love and love for others.

It's about a meeting of old circuits and neural activations with the mature ones that are created through life experiences and more time on earth - gaining perspectives.

Attempting to put this all into words as I write my book and create new videos. Not easy.. but it is my mission on this planet to dive deep into dark emotions so many people experience, explore the mechanisms that create them and feed into them, and then find ways to use the extraordinary super power of HUMAN LEARNING to make our life experiences into bouncing off points for growth and a sense of purpose and meaning.

I love not being afraid to go into the dark depths with others - into their rage and sorrow and self-loathing. It's a frontier I am willing to enter with others again and again - emerging with new insights.

One video tomorrow, more to come!

#mindset #gohumans #resilience

Come back into your body. Gaze at the world aroun

Come back into your body.

Gaze at the world around you. Stop and look at a plant, see its design. Watch the ant, the spider, the bee do its incredible work, pursue its mission without hesitation. Pause and feel the temperature of the air. Notice the movements of your body.

Disconnect from the trance of your thinking and let your awareness sink back into noticing life around you.

Engage with life and then watch how life engages with you.

#embodied #stevestonvillage

Beautiful Mama So many adventures Thank you for

Beautiful Mama

So many adventures

Thank you for your love

Happy Mother’s Day

Space and autonomy within relationships helps us d

Space and autonomy within relationships helps us diversify our resources for support, co-regulation and self-regulation.

A key factor for a resilient system: redundancy.

What this means is if one mechanism fails there are other mechanisms that can come into play to keep the system in its ideal state and range of functioning.

Independence and autonomy within relationships help all the people involved increase their range of experiences, and repertoires of behaviors.

It helps distribute the burden of co-regulation to come from multiple sources, instead of from only one source exclusively.

It creates redundancies, which means a more resilient system.

#systemsthinking
#resiliencecoach #resilience

We met at a job that I can’t talk about… too m

We met at a job that I can’t talk about… too many years ago to mention. After many years of not seeing each other in person, I’m headed out to Vancouver this weekend to spend time with my longest and bestest friend Yoko.

We bonded over our love of Germany (I’m German. She loves Germans)… and dogs (I grew up with German Shepherds, she’s obsessed with them).. and most importantly our desire for personal growth and a passion to be of service to something greater than ourselves (see @activelykindco & check out her adorable Etsy shop)

Grateful to have you in my life

See you soon!!! On my way… can’t wait!

#friendship #grateful

“Nature is not simply a collection of objects, b

“Nature is not simply a collection of objects, but rather a dynamic, ever-flowing river of creation inseparable from our own perceptions. Nature is the creative center from which we and everything else have come and into which we always return.

The modern obsession of being in control and the dream of eliminating uncertainty […] must give way to the reality of moving creatively with the flow of events, which is the true reality of the universe.”

-Dr. Gregory Cajete, Native Science

You’ll see this book tucked away on my bookshelf in videos I’ve posted. Its like a book of poetry to me. You’ll also see the name Leroy Little Bear on this book. An incredible wise and scientific mind. My dad was a German automobile expert and sold him his first Porsche decades ago!

#systemsthinking
#natureswisdom

Thank you for the love ❤️ I have a few thous

Thank you for the love ❤️

I have a few thousand email subscribers who allow me to come into their inbox once a month to share some thoughts. Around 7K-10K people download my podcast each month. These may not seem like big numbers to a lot of people, but I take it very seriously.

I put a lot of intention into making sure I’m giving my best and that my words will find their way to someone and help them feel like they can manage life a little better.

thank you to all of those who take time out of their day and choose to use their hands to send me messages of appreciation. I don’t always know how my content is received and it touches me deeply when I know someone has found value in it.

Grateful to be in an era where we can connect to anyone in any corner of the world.

THANK YOU FOR THE LOVE

.. and I just double checked… Over 3K downloads on my podcast over the past few days so maybe it’s a little more than that! 😁

#grateful #podcast #subscribers

Managing Emotions and Stress : it’s about Range

Managing Emotions and Stress : it’s about Range and Repertoire

If you always express and communicate, it could be helpful to sometimes quiet down, distract and zone out.

If you always zone out and distract, It could be helpful to express and communicate.

Is your tendency towards a short fuse and anger? There may be some thing you’re grieving or sad about.

Are you usually more melancholic, sorrowful and feeling like a victim? You may be suppressing anger or rage.

None of these suppressions or expressions are good or bad necessarily. They all serve a purpose.

It’s just that a wider range and repertoire of strategies to up-regulate or down-regulate emotions is generally associated with resilience, adjustment and overall health.

Just recorded a video. posting either tomorrow or next week!

#MentalHealth #EmotionRegulation #stressrelief #Neuroscience #selfregulation

I just received a beautiful email from someone who

I just received a beautiful email from someone who reminded me of the joy of being part of the Design Thinking community. A vibrant, innovative, energizing community of like-minded souls.

I am so incredibly grateful to @hpi_de for the experience of presenting at their #dconfestival years ago.

Looking forward to renewed connections.

..es erinnerte mich auch daran dass ich gerne Fremdsprachen spreche.

perhaps I’ll make a video in German, French and Spanish for my international friends sometime in the near future! 😊

#designthinking #stanforddschool #innovation #lifedesign

The pain we are attempting to avoid with many of o

The pain we are attempting to avoid with many of our behaviors, costumes, words and over-thinking is a pain we believe we will not be able to bear. It is the pain of being alone. Truly alone.

At the same time, we also fear losing our freedom. We fear being completely enmeshed and entrapped by another.

Some of us have that fear stronger than others. Some people fear being consumed by another. That another person will take over their life. Because of that, their nervous system activates any time closeness occurs. This leads them to want to space and can lead them to find negative features about the people around them. This helps soothe the fear of entrapment that occurs within them.

Others feel that they can never get enough of a person. That they are shut out and kept at arms length. When this happens, they attempt to reconnect however they can. Sometimes it’s by threatening to leave or by over sharing and over communicating. Some of us are a mix of both.

In all of these cases, the behaviors are coming from a state of distress. Generally speaking, our distress-based behaviors are not the ones that lead to our desired long-term outcomes.

By not understanding the deeper roots of our wounds, we can get stuck in behaviors that prevent us from feeling the sense of connection we ache for.

The more we understand these roots, the more we can find ways to disentangle from them.

I’m working on some videos to share with all of you.

#attachmentstyles #attachmenttheory
#neuroscience #neurovisceralintegration

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YouTube Videos

Stefanie Faye

By not understanding the deeper roots of our wounds, we can get stuck in behaviors that prevent us from feeling the sense of connection we ache for, and the fulfillment and autonomy we also seek in our lives.

The more we understand these roots, the more we can find ways to disentangle from them.

In this video, I cover:
- How attachment wounds relate to our power to have independence when we want it and intimacy when we want it
- How feeling trapped or abandoned affects your negativity bias towards yourself and others
- How to activate new circuits to balance out attachment-wound behavior

*please note that the suggestions and exercises offered in this video are not offered as a substitute for professional mental health care or medical care and are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any mental health or medical conditions.

Neuroscience of attachment: how to have more intimacy and independence in adult relationships

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_UB3VSIZxJm4

When you overreact, or respond in ways where your emotions may be disproportionate to the event, there is a chance that your reaction is tied to some attachment wounds and injuries you experienced when you were young.

In this video, I cover:

-How our emotional reactions relate to attachment wounds
-9 different attachment behaviors we may notice in ourselves and in others
-How these 9 attachment behaviors can create the connections we want in our adult relationships, or take us further away from connection
-How to regulate our attachment system by increasing our range and repertoire of attachment-related behaviors

Learn more at stefaniefaye.com

(A full-length article on this is will be posted on May 17th at stefaniefaye.com/blog )

How to lower your stress by understanding your attachment wounds

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_yMGGM6HNho0

A preview of an exploration into the beauty and intelligence of the machinery of the human body - and how we use it to communicate, create, comfort, heal, adapt and complexify.

Mind-Body Intelligence: Mindset Neuroscience Podcast Season 3 Preview

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_Y61V0b14IHc

Anxious thinking is associated with fast brainwaves. The more relaxed you are, the slower your brainwave activity.

In this video I show you how to slow your brainwaves so you can access a more relaxed state.
I also go into:
-what technology does to your brainwaves
-the power of stillness and
-how meditation influences brain activity

(This is the IG version of a video I posted last year on anxiety)

How to slow down anxious thinking using neuroscience

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_XgKlfKr5c8g

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
-Khalil Gibran

Is it possible to take a painful and negative event from our past, and 're-purpose' it to become an empowering feature of our story, of our identity?

The process of re-organizing neural circuits to integrate a negative past event into a more complex and mature perspective is tied to cognitive flexibility. This flexibility is a major aspect of the healing process for moral injury.

What is Moral Injury?
A definition by Jonathan Shay is that moral injury occurs when there is a:
"a betrayal of ‘what’s right’, either by a person in authority, or oneself, and in a high stakes situation."

Exploring Moral injury gives us a chance to understand what really matters to us. It helps us clarify our values as a socially connected species. the healing process for moral injury shows us how to take negative painful events and emotions and turn them into a force for good.

I go in depth into this in today’s podcast episode, including how:
- forgiveness and flexibility help us activate highly sophisticated and evolved neural mechanisms
-The mechanism of morality improves energy efficiency and resilience of a system
-The human species is an interconnected network of nodes that requires social signaling for trust and cooperation
-brain activations are different in trauma compared with moral injury

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, blubrry and other platforms

#mindset #moralinjury #mental-health #neuroscience #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthmatters

Moral Injury, Forgiveness and Cognitive Flexibility - Mindset Neuroscience Podcast Season 2 Ep 12:

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_BYNBIsM7zrI

Knowing what makes you rare and valuable increases your sense of self-worth, psychological safety and confidence. This state allows you to access your higher order features of neural circuitry involved in the luxurious tasks of creativity, complex problem solving and empathic, systems level thinking.

This video was inspired by Cal Newport's book So Good They Can't Ignore You... highly recommend you check it out!

What makes you rare and valuable?

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_9rIB21LGiW0

To react is to act again and again in a similar way.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, you are not having different relationships all the time, you’re having the same relationship with different people over and over again.

You’re playing the same things out, but with different ‘actors on the stage’. You play out a new scene, but the beliefs and mental models are there in each scene.

The other part of the word reaction is ‘action’.

Action can be broken down into a mechanical process. The more we can see the mechanics of what we are doing in each scene of our life, we have a better chance of learning how to make new adjustments that allow us to be more flexible and adaptive in our relationships with ourselves and others.

When we bring more awareness to our reactions we have more choice points for future situations.

Find out three concrete steps on how to do this in this video

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*please note that the suggestions and exercises offered in these videos are not offered as a substitute for professional mental health care or medical care and are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any mental health or medical conditions.

Relationship patterns and over-reactions Part 2 of 2

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw__xk71wlW6tk

Have you had an argument recently, or an interaction with someone that didn’t go as you hoped it would?

What was your reaction in this situation? Was it anger, defensiveness, or shutting down?

Did you say what you truly wanted to say?
Did you hold back?
Or did you say something hurtful?

Is there something you feel about this situation that you can’t put your finger on why it bothers you so much? Or do you think you know why, but you don’t know how to express it to that person?

In this video, I go into:
-brain-body mechanisms that lead to overreactions
-connecting the dots between your childhood and anxiety, stress, depression and other challenges you may be facing

In part 2 of this video (which will be up next week), I share an overview of a process I have used in my own life and that I share with coaching clients to help them achieve more of what they desire in their interactions with others, and how to release limiting beliefs that come from our past.

*please note that the suggestions and exercises offered in these videos are not offered as a substitute for professional mental health care or medical care and are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any mental health or medical conditions.

Relationship patterns and over-reactions part 1 of 2

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_faaKyr9bUpw

Many of our patterns - whether we want to admit it or not - come from our childhood. It’s hard to get around this fact. This is because when we are young, our brain is specializing its algorithms and predictive models according to what is happening in its environment. And until very consistently new and competing networks are fired... the old ones - from our first environments - don’t just dissipate by themselves. Many of the old habits we have from a long time ago don’t spontaneously change.. We have to actively recruit something differently in order for changes to happen. The challenge is that many of us are not aware enough of our patterns for us to even do that.

Find out why you might be repeating habits and behaviors in your relationships and how to build awareness that can help get you out of that repetitive loop.

The science of self-fulfilling prophecies: why we repeat relationship habits

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_aDYMVdpdCNw

In this podcast episode, I talk about something called ‘shifting the burden’. It’s about the topic of what we depend on ourselves for, and what we look to others to help us with. The balance of our dependence on ourselves and others - whether in adaptive or maladaptive ways - is based on our first experiences with depending on someone else.

Many of us simply don’t know how deeply emotional of a subject this is. It is one of our most primitive, primal CORE-to-the-CORE experiences of being human… a battle between wanting to be independent and self-sufficient, and yet also knowing that one of our deepest desires is to connect in authentic ways with others.

My reflection questions at the end of the episode are about your doubts, desires and dependencies - how they interplay on each other and how they’ve been formed over time - through your experiences with others.. and what they’ve doubted, desired and depended on in their own lives.

I hope you find something in this episode helpful.

it's also Spotify and iTunes - Mindset Neuroscience Podcast.

Please subscribe and leave a review if you enjoy it!

Mindset Neuroscience Podcast Season 2 Ep 8 Shifting the Burden

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_161IdG1lAxY

Something i see happen quite a bit in the mental health field is that a lot of people are seeking a quick fix and a way to alleviate their symptoms. This is completely understandable, and might be needed in the short term. The problems i see arise, however, is that we are often doing this to detriment of looking at the deeper root causes as to why people are having these symptoms in the first place.

This is something that is called shifting the burden to the intervenor. This is related to disguising symptoms and alleviating or reducing them but not getting to the root problem.
Many of these root issues are tied to events that have happened in our past.

Trauma-informed education is a field of thought that shifts the question from 'what's wrong with you' to 'what happened to you'. A book that came out recently addresses this shift in questioning - I recommend it: 'What happened to you?' by Bruce Perry. He also wrote The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, which is one of the most powerful books I've ever read!

I also discuss this topic in depth in Episode 8 (not 9 like I mention in this video) of the Mindset Neuroscience Podcast. available also on spotify and itunes

#whathappenedtoyou #traumainformed #bruceperry #donellameadows #systemsthinking
#growthmindset #mindset #growthmindsetneuroscience #mentalhealth #mentalhealthmatters

How quick-fix mindsets hurt your brain

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_6eVh7b6Ozdw

Mindset is important. Our belief in our ability to change our brain is a powerful leverage point for change. But if we don’t set the stage for certain aspects of our life, it can make that change really difficult.

I often get asked ‘how long will it take to change my brain.. When i will notice a difference?’ but if we’re not complementing the meta-cognitive work we’re doing in terms of mindset with different conditions, it robs the brain-body system of essential resources it needs to create change and function at its highest levels.

If we don’t create these conditions, it’s not that change is impossible - but we’re really making change a lot more difficult for our brain-body system to implement.

These are 3 ways we can amplify and accelerate the changes we want to make in our brain-body system, particularly as it relates to brain fog and mental clarity.

#mindset #neuroplasticity #brainfog #mentalfog #mentalclarity

3 ways to get rid of brain fog and increase mental clarity

YouTube Video UCYE7wxblnjWg_fJ3Odq-AIw_54vWldUjbuU

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