The Threat WITHIN | Psychological Cybersecurity

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Transcript

What if the biggest performance risk in your company isn’t burnout, AI disruption, or digital overload…
 but your subconscious operating system?

In this deep-dive conversation, we sit down with internationally recognized behavioral health expert and leadership strategist David Kingsbury, LPCC-S, LCADC, NCC, ICAADC to uncover the hidden identity-level code that quietly drives executive decisions, fulfillment, culture, and long-term success.

Chapters

00:00 The Hidden Risks of Leadership

02:08 The Abundance Approach: A New Perspective

05:27 Understanding the Leader's Operating System

07:56 The Neuroscience of Multitasking and Productivity

10:58 Identity and Leadership: The Core Connection

14:12 The Empty Success Cycle: A Common Trap

16:50 Mental Bandwidth: The Key to Effective Leadership

19:53 Cognitive Load and Decision Fatigue

22:40 The Role of Cognitive Bias in Leadership

25:18 Addressing Internal Misalignments

28:12 Cultural Implications of Psychological Cybersecurity

speaker-0 (00:02.344)
you

speaker-1 (00:14.978)
Welcome. What if I could ask you something that's going to make you uncomfortable right out of the gate. Let's go there. What if the biggest risk to your growing brand, your growing business, the thing you do for a living, what are the biggest risks to that? Isn't cybersecurity ransomware? It isn't AI. It's not some kid in a hoodie, you know, drinking Red Bull.

in hot pockets over in a basement somewhere outside Moscow. What if it's you? What if it's psychological risk, psychological cybersecurity? What if it's those issues? And look, I'm no shrink and I'm frankly more like your bartender that you can share ideas with. The reason I ask this is because while companies spend millions on firewalls, security operations centers, zero trust, they let leaders run on out.

dated mental code, written sometime around the dial up era and trauma that they never unpacked. Look, today's breaches don't always start with malware. They often start with distraction, distracted employees. They start with burnout. They start with fatigue with leaders that multitask and don't do it well. They multitask themselves into stupidity and they call it productivity. We're

Talking about mental malware, subconscious zero days, identity level exploits that no firewall can stop. My guest today is a professional who deals with this and has some great analogies on the topic. He works with executives who look wildly successful on paper, but are quietly crashing through own operating systems in production. This isn't therapy.

This isn't mindset fluff. This is a psychological security audit. If you've ever said, I'm just busy while everything feels off, congratulations. Your brain has been hacked. Let's talk about it. This is Cybercrime Junkies and now the show.

speaker-1 (02:46.516)
All right, well, welcome everybody. So we are joined today by David Kingsbury. He is an internationally recognized board certified behavioral health professional and leadership expert with unique experience and insight on the effects that technology has had on our lives and other components that we face with all of the information that we have to digest on a regular basis through the technology that we use. And he's been featured in psychology today and we are very honored to

have him join us. Dr. Kingsbury, Mr. Kingsbury, welcome, sir.

Well, thank you, Dave, for having me on. It's an honor. I admire the work that you're doing. I think it's important. And so it's great to be having this conversation with you today.

Well, it's I'm really looking forward to it. So you have developed this abundance approach and I really would like to hear how it came to be, you know, given your life experiences and what your your clinical practice had been throughout your life.

Well, I mean, I could talk for an hour just about that. The long and the short of it is, right? So I'm a clinician and a health care consultant and a performance enhancement coach. And out of all of that kind of flowed the abundance approach. So I started in the field really because, you know, I would like to say it's a rag to riches tale. I haven't seen the riches yet, but I've got the rags down. So I think that helps me to relate to people.

speaker-0 (04:18.122)
and so I went through some very difficult things in my childhood and you know a big turning point in my life was my faith in coming to Christ and then that was what you could consider like my first major identity shift and my life has really been a process of evolving identities. Now I didn't realize that was the pattern until later and so when I made that first shift I decided that I wanted to help other people to overcome things that I've dealt with such as I

went through some trauma and things like that as a child was diagnosed with PTSD later in life and struggled with substances, you know, as trying to cope with that. So I wanted to help other people who had experienced really difficult times. And that's why I became a clinician. So I started ground level, you know, just working in the clinics and helping people with mental illness kind of moved up through the ranks and to more management roles, leading intensive outpatients and became an executive at a treatment center launching and

scaling, creating new treatment centers. That was an identity evolution because I had to move from being a healer into being a leader. Out of all those experiences is where I launched my Business King. It has two focuses, primarily its performance enhancement, so helping other executives to reach the next level, to become the best version of themselves. I don't really like the term coach because what I do is

Much deeper than that, use psychological, neurological principles to help people to shift their identity and actually begin to flow not only with automated effectiveness using a lot of behavioral strategies, but also to have a deeper level of fulfillment and to align in terms of their identity. And the abundance approach flowed out of that. The other thing that King does is I provide healthcare consulting for treatment centers to launch, to scale, to add to their service array.

And really one way to think about the abundance approach is it's a framework that helps leaders to operate, to upgrade rather their human operating systems. So kind of to speak the language of your audience. So I work with executives who are successful on paper, but they're running outdated internal code and that leads to stress, difficult transitions or misalignment. So my focus is on optimizing the leader behind the system. So clarity, culture, performance, all of those things.

speaker-0 (06:39.063)
Elevate together.

Excellent. You talk about like the hidden operating system of leadership. Could you explain that a little bit?

Well, we live in a world where tech is increasingly seen as the driving force behind success. But in all that noise, I think that we're forgetting that the leader is the organization's operating system. When a leader's inner architecture, their values, their mindset, their focus becomes misaligned, the entire enterprise experiences performance lag, right? Just like corrupted code. And you can't optimize what you don't understand.

And so most leaders never examine the internal operating systems that drive their decisions. And we could go deep with this, but essentially we have neurologic, automation system. So it works kind of like this. when we're growing up and we learn something new, takes a lot of effort and concentration to some examples I use is like learning to tie your shoes. You you have to really focus. How do I make the loop? How do I, how do I do this?

And then later in life, right, you learn to do more complex things like driving a car or performing a task at your career. And once you do those things enough times, then it's automated. Like you don't have to think about tying your shoes. don't have to think about driving a car. You're driving, playing with your...

speaker-1 (08:06.176)
It's a synapses. Yeah, like connects the synapses in in the mind, right, where it becomes automatic. It's it's almost like the development of a habit.

Exactly. So there's two neurological systems there. So the first one is just behavioral and the challenge here is that the brain doesn't discriminate, right? So if we are doing something good for ourselves, we're Eating healthy we're exercising whatever the brain doesn't go. Okay, well that you're doing that that's good for you So I'm going to automate it But when you come home from work you veg out on the TV eat a bunch of junk food smoke a bunch of cigarettes That's bad. We're not going to automate that the brain says if you do it enough times

automated. And so that's one level is that we have all of these programs, these layers of programs that are just running and we're mostly on autopilot. Now the other layer to this is our subconscious. And these are things that we may not even be aware of, but they're beliefs and values that we hold. Some of those go back to childhood. Some of those are things we kind of pick up along the way, but they not only determine the actions that we take, but in fact, they become the filter through which we see life. So whether we see opportunities or whether we see something as

Scary and to be avoided a lot of that comes from places of which we're not even aware Ever seen a founder turn white as a ghost when dealing with the state worker. I have a perfect example of subconscious sabotage It comes from we'll just call him an energetic CEO that I worked with so he started a thousand things But rarely finished one and his go-to fix for chaos was throwing money at it so one day he was

juggling new deals, investors, marketing launches, and a state auditor showed up unannounced. So, Ever the Charmer, he tried to win the inspector over with jokes, and in the process, he was proudly showing off photos on his phone from a recent team building event, until he swiped to a picture of an employee that was bloodied and bandaged from an accidental injury that day. So the inspector, whose focus was workplace safety,

speaker-0 (10:12.494)
was not amused. so let's just say that was the day the CEO learned that multitasking and mindfulness aren't the same thing. So we focused there. And once he rewrote his neural automation to realize being busy isn't being productive, his business took off. No chaos, no burnout and no mangled limbs on display for safety inspectors. So that's kind of an example of how it works.

Well, that's a really good. that's a very practical, like practical example. And that, that, makes sense. You know, you, you bring up a good point about multitasking and being able to actually comprehend and how being busy is not necessarily being productive.

Like what is the what does the neuroscience say about that? Like people always feel like they're able to multitask. I hear it all the time. I'm just a multitasker. I'm able to do all these things. And I find that like they miss deadlines and they're not productive and they're more frazzled and more stressed. Right. Is it like we have.

In my assessment, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, right, we had our kinetic physical world and we had our technology world, right? And if the technology went down or whatever, overall, we were still okay. Like we could still, we still had processes and procedures and things to do. But today we've all gone through whatever they call it digital transformation, right? But it's really digital dependence. It's almost, you know, on average, we pick up the phone.

264 times a day. Like that's beyond transformation. That's addiction. That's a, that's a major dependence, right? We're giving faith into the, into the technology almost too much. And with that vast amounts of information. And I just am curious what you're finding about how we're able to multitask. If we actually are doing that, like what, what are your, what, what is your research? What are your, what is your experience?

speaker-1 (12:22.305)
Showing that.

Well, we only have so much mental bandwidth and that's one of the reasons why the brain automates things because if we had to use the same amount of concentrated focus and energy for learning every new thing or doing each task, all our bandwidth would be used up. We wouldn't be able to to grow or pick up new things. And so that's why the brain automates. And a lot of times when people are multitasking, they're actually operating off of

pre-existing programs, you and so they, feels like we're being productive, but actually we're dividing our bandwidth across multiple tasks. And when we do that, you lose the signal strength, so to speak. think about, you know, if your computer's running a thousand things at once, it's having a hard time doing any one thing well. And most organizations debug software and processes, but few debug leaders' mental and emotional code, right? So leaders are the core processors of

their organization, their beliefs, their emotions, their focus ripple outward through every system that they manage. And so we have to be very strategic about how we do that. Neurologically, every executive has built into them identity operating systems. And these are internal scripts that shape performance. They shape relationships. They shape the strategies that the executive executes.

And so the abundance approach focuses on identifying those unconscious groups and transforming performance lag into clarity, calm, and better culture. Most leadership problems that appear to be like strategic are really systemic misalignments in the leaders thinking or their priorities. And multitasking can be kind of an outworking of that. know, technology gives you leverage, but identity gives you direction.

speaker-0 (14:15.406)
And both of those have to be synchronized if you want to grow and grow sustainably.

How do leaders address when you talk about, you know, adjusting their identity? Like, I would think with a big ego, they would feel, hey, my, my identity is fine, leave it alone. Like, how do you how do you explain it to them so that it makes sense?

Well, that's one of the challenges in terms of talking about what we do because when someone reaches out for help, right, what they're focused on is something external, right? So there's some kind of problem that they're looking at. There's some kind of thing that needs to be addressed. And very seldom, this is just a human being thing. You know, we tend to not look inward and say, well, maybe it's me. But taking a step back is the key to

figuring out how do I solve these problems because if we can fix the identity issues, we can find the corrupted code, the subconscious programs that are causing us problems in relationships and our work and our whatever it is that we're doing, then the solutions become self-apparent, right? It becomes organic. You kind of outgrow your problems. But until we can get to that point, we're just constantly putting out fires, reaching for these things, the next performance hack or whatever.

and we're not dealing with the real problem, which is why people find themselves in these cycles that are repeating. I call it the empty success cycle where you're constantly, you know, over the next mountain, then, then that'll be happy. Then there'll be fulfillment. Then everything will click, but it's an illusion and those things don't happen. High performance.

speaker-1 (16:00.398)
Yeah, mean, we speak about this often. Happiness is fleeting. There are moments, right? But fulfillment overall is like a level of contentment. Right? And that's really what people are when when people feel happy. Overall, that's really where they where they reach better fulfillment. Does that make sense?

Yeah, well, our happiness, our sense of fulfillment flows from our perception and from our values. And so this is getting into the identity work.

Right.

You can put a new coat of paint on a car, but that doesn't mean that the engine's gonna run well. And I think a lot of executives do that. We add bells and whistles and we make our offerings more shiny and all these different things. But in the end, the performance isn't there because there's internal issues. High performers often burn out not from overwork, but from misaligned energy expenditure. Like in my experience, high performers don't burn out from.

from too much work, but from the wrong kind of work. That's putting all their effort into something that's misaligned with their purpose, which is where fulfillment and happiness flows from. And the goal is to approach, kind of reframe leadership from controlling outcomes to cultivating alignment. And what that does is it automatically produces higher innovation. It produces resilience. There's a client I was working with, so.

speaker-0 (17:30.592)
Sometimes the way to regain clarity and to be productive is learning to manage this mental bandwidth that we were talking about rather than managing time. So this professional came to me, they were wanting performance enhancement, right? They wanted tips and tricks and techniques for organization and communication and all these little things. And after talking with them for a little while, it became really apparent that the issue, the reason that they were having a hard time accomplishing everything that they wanted to accomplish,

was because they were shattered, for lack of a better word. They were pulled in so many different directions and they were doing so many different things that they never took time to re-energize themselves. And we all know the expression, you can't pour from an empty cup. And that's what they were trying to do. And so what I said to them is, I'm not gonna give you another thing to do. I'm not gonna give you a tip or a technique. What I'm gonna help you do is to create a sanctuary for yourself.

a place where you can go recharge and then from that place be more effective in everything that you do. It's kind of like you can chop a tree down faster if you stop periodically and sharpen your axe because that dull axe is only going to get you so far.

Yeah, that. No good, no, I didn't mean to interrupt you, please finish.

Yeah, so that to me sounds like they would be making better decisions then, right? Because when somebody is pulled in all these directions and they're shattered, right, they're they're more prone to like decision fatigue, right?

speaker-0 (19:10.414)
Well, you can't scale misalignment, right? So no amount of effort compensates for energy spent in the wrong direction. you know, we've seen a lot of that where you can literally drive your company and your efforts into the ground by not that it's a bad idea or that what you're trying to do isn't a positive thing, but you're going about it wrong and you're misaligned internally. in IT, uptime is the goal, right? For human systems, alignment is the uptime.

What makes that so critical right now is the sheer cognitive load that leaders face every day. And I think that this data overload is today's performance killer. Clarity is the ultimate competitive edge. We all know that. Those that rise to the top of the market, those that are killing it with their offer, with their product are those that

like single focused, they they eliminate the noise, right? They stay focused on what's mission critical and avoid false positives, they avoid the noise.

Well, mean, that's neurological. Modern leaders are drowning in inputs, like email, data, meetings, this constant overflow of information. But they're starved for reflection and synthesis. In neuroscience, shows that there's part of the brain called the executive control network, and it collapses under cognitive clutter, especially chronic.

cognitive clutter and what that does is it leads to being reactive, right? Impulsive indecisive behavior. So identity level clarity, it reduces that noise. It strengthens the brain's ECN and identity acts as a mental firewall, right? It filters information through purpose rather than panic. And so there's a simple technique that restores your brain's executive function. It's called the

speaker-0 (21:12.718)
three question mental reboot. what you do is you pause, is that can be the hardest part in the midst of 10,000 things that need to be done. The calendar stays packed, but pause, find a quiet space, even five minutes where you're alone, where you're not distracted, and then do like an antivirus scan across three areas. Like number one is what matters most right now? What's the priority?

What do I really want to accomplish here? And there's lots of ancillary things that we tend to chase rabbit holes, but what's important right now? The second is what story am I telling myself? Because we as human beings are creatures that are intimately connected to stories. Stories bring meaning and they bring direction. And sometimes we can be telling ourselves a story to be blunt, that's a lie, or that isn't the story that's going to get us where we need to go. Because to do something different, we have to be something different.

And then the third thing to watch for is what am I avoiding? Because these things that maybe it's painful, maybe it's uncomfortable, maybe like we were talking about looking inward, looking deep, maybe on the calls that my team is in disarray. What am I avoiding about this? Do I need to have a conversation? And those things will kind of help the brain to recenter and refocus and it will capture that energy back so that we can move forward with purpose and with vision. Just a little quick thing you can do.

Yeah, that's, that's helpful. Let me ask you about decision fatigue. mean, I've read a lot about it and I know that like Steve jobs, everybody knows he used to wear, you know, like the same black turtleneck all the time. And when asked in interviews, he said, that's because I can only make so many decisions each day. And some of my decisions can destroy somebody's career or make a career.

or be a hundred million dollar decision. He's like, I can only make so many a day. I don't want to have to worry about what shirt I'm wearing when I'm doing that. So it just kind of automates that. And then when I had spoken to Chris Voss, the FBI hostage negotiator about, his book is black Swan method and his book never split the difference. He talks about decision fatigue and how in the late mornings,

speaker-1 (23:34.57)
is one of the best times to actually ask people to make difficult decisions, not toward the end of the day when they've misfired and things are blowing up and and they're, you know, they're inundated with a bunch of information. How does that play into this? Because it seems related to me to all this.

Yeah, well, so you wouldn't do a big important download if your phone's battery was flashing, right? And, we do that in our businesses, in our lives. We make these huge decisions when we know that we're exhausted because it's important, you know, and I've got to get this done. But the same way that cybersecurity protects systems from malicious code, leaders have to protect their minds from mental malware. And that's, that's distraction, that's doubt and what we're discussing overload, but

Yeah, that's a good analogy.

speaker-0 (24:23.918)
Any antivirus is only as good as what it can detect. So how do we spot these leadership pitfalls? Well, mental malware looks like overthinking, overchecking, over committing. The best leaders aren't the busiest. They're the most bandwidth protected. That's what Steve Jobs was doing. that's not about, it's not just about decision quality. It's also about fulfillment, right?

Oftentimes, this is the fulfillment gap, why high achievement can often feel empty. And that's why we try to push for the next big thing. But success without alignment creates emotional debt. And leaders are paying interest daily on that. And many high achievers hit career milestones, but they feel this quiet sense of loss. It's the achievement illusion. Outward success can hide

internal depletion. And again, without the ability to

I've seen that often.

We try to reach for new things and do other things, but we're not addressing the core problem.

speaker-1 (25:36.12)
How do you go about addressing that? Is that through speaking with them, assessing all that they're, know, like helping them prioritize what's most important? Like what's the clinical step there that your industry does?

Well, so from a clinical perspective in terms of healthcare, and I see the entire range. So I'll work with clients who have mental health disorders where they're so depressed, they can't get out of bed or they're so anxious, they're having panic attacks. That's one end of the spectrum. And the focus there is just to help them to function. In terms of performance enhancement, that's the other end of the scale. These are founders, CEOs, executives. And the challenge there is being able to take a step back and go, how are you, okay, you're very successful.

How are you getting in your own way? And to do that, we have to go deeper. We have to evaluate. So there's a technique I developed called accelerated neural conversion. And it looks at all these different linkages of neurological pathways and systems that are created. And sometimes that automation is moving us in a negative direction or it's fighting against us. So an example would be, let's say that someone decides, okay, you know, I'm always on the go. I'm always stopping at, you know,

Fast-food restaurant and getting something and I you know, I don't want to do that anymore I want to be healthy. So they make this decision and they say I want to eat healthier well, that's one neural pathway, but there's many others that are connected to it maybe maybe when they go to Taco Bell, you know that is their reward that's their their comfort food. This is something that

that I deserve, that I need, that helps me to cope. Or maybe when they go, that's when they meet with other people and it's a social time, the time of connection. Well, that's the whole, each of those are different neural pathways, dealing with values, dealing with relationships. And so when you try to change just one thing, you might have multiple other neurological pathways that are fighting and resisting against that. You really have to, I call it a neural target, identify all the things that are connected and shift all of those things. Now that's at a behavioral conscious level.

speaker-0 (27:45.934)
And the techniques for that are no different than this comes out of education, the military, healthcare. There's a process that you can use to train the brain that is affected and using behavior modification techniques. And I put a little panache on that in terms of some of the things I add to it neurologically, but the deeper level is the subconscious piece. And that speaks to identity because

Doing the external stuff doesn't fix the internal misalignment. And the first part is doing a deep dive. And there are lots of different techniques that are used to neurologically identify what those subconscious things are. And then also to shift and change them. But it's a process. And so I use a combination of education, a combination of cognitive exercises to help people kind of tease that out, find out what's really going on here. Even with...

For example, you were somewhere to go to therapy and let's say they go to someone trained in psychoanalysis. So think Sigmund Freud, right? The goal there is to make the unconscious conscious. That's the focus of that therapy to develop insight. But often once that's done, then it shifts to conscious therapies, right? So doing things that your conscious mind cognitively you're trying to adjust, that does not affect the subconscious mind. You have to use a subconscious technique for subconscious.

problem and in all the doing that's got to get done, many executives see personal identity and ensuring that their work is something that ignites their passion as a nice to have, not a need to have, but that's a huge mistake. Fulfillment is a performance variable, maybe the most important one. It's not a luxury.

The work that I do, the abundance approach, really reframes fulfillment as a strategic asset. It helps leaders to supercharge the thing that counts most, their purpose. And that's ultimately what it's about.

speaker-1 (29:52.206)
tied so much to performance, right? It's, it's really tied to performance. When when you're talking to leaders and you're working on their performance, and you address the subject of identity, right? How are they forming their identity? Like there's things that people find comforting or inspiring or, you know, brings them energy brings them

moments of joy, but then there's also the identity of what the view that other people have of them, right? The external validation and things. How do you address that? Is there a... I guess I'm asking, how do you define somebody's identity and how are we getting it wrong oftentimes?

So identity is complex. One of the things that we're taught is that personality identity is fixed, right? And there's some truth to that, but identity also because it flows from our beliefs and from our values, some of which we're aware of, some of which we're not. And that's what creates internal friction and cognitive dissonance. Those things come from our parents, you know, how we grew up. They come from

culture, they come from experiences that we've had. But essentially, part of it is this automation. When we repeat something enough times, it becomes embedded in the subconscious. Bigger than what we do is what we tell ourselves. So I talked a moment ago about the stories that we tell where we're an entire branch of psychotherapy called narrative therapy, and it has to do with these stories. And those stories make up our identity. And if we don't

begin to evaluate the story and see, you know, if you're trying to be a successful executive or operate a successful business, but you have a story that goes something like, life is unfair. I always get the short end of the stick. Well, subconsciously that's framing the way you see the world and the way that you react to situations. We've all seen people who are quick to get defensive and aggressive, right? Because they feel like the world's out to get them, right? They have to.

speaker-0 (32:15.63)
The best defense is a good offense. And if I'm not always on guard, then I'm gonna get run over and taken advantage of. Well, those are deep things. Those are deep beliefs. And you can't think your way, cognitively think your way out of that because you're operating from a script. It's kind of like, let's say, you know, on your phone, you're adjusting the settings on the app and thinking that that's going to correct the operating system. It doesn't work. have to do.

If you have corrupted code in the operating system, then you have to correct, rewrite, upgrade the operating system. And that's really the key to all of this. I mean, you wouldn't run a high performance server, right, without cooling, but most leaders ignore this emotional heat. by the way, that's the, where there's smoke, there's fire, that's the sign that there's misalignment.

but they ignore this emotional heat until burnout crashes their system. Achievement fills your calendar, but fulfillment fills your life. And that's really the work that I do with clients because we are not a single thing. We're not just business people. We're biological or psychological.

It's not a Greek tragedy, right? Like one person isn't all this or all that, right? When you think of the old Greek tragedies in the plays, one person represented greed, one person represented jealousy, one person represented good, one person was always, always evil. It's like, it doesn't work like that. It's not binary like that.

Well, we have to address the whole person. You know, what's happening psychologically, what's happening with our bodies, what's happening in our relationships, what's spiritually in our beliefs. You know, there's a myth of this work-life balance. The goal isn't balance, it's integration. Balance implies two sides competing. And, well, it can feel like sometimes our mind and our body are competing, our relationships, but integration means one identity expressing itself everywhere.

speaker-0 (34:16.686)
And so what we're seeking is a balance internally that then flows outward into our business decisions, into our relationships. So there's a richness and a depth and a fulfillment in all of those areas. Otherwise, keep doing the same thing, you're gonna keep getting the same results. Like something deeper has to change.

Absolutely. So you talk about, you know, culturally, when we expand beyond the individual person, we and we think of what we see in society and stuff. And you talk about like psychological cyber cybersecurity, like protecting culture from cognitive bias, and burnout. Walk us through what you mean by that and how that relates because it does relate. It seems to what you're

discussing.

Well, it's like a telescope kind of like you can zoom all the way in to a person's

personal beliefs and personal experiences and how those things flow and affect them or you can zoom out, know to an organizational level and you can zoom farther out to a nation and to a culture and the principle remains the same though like you you cannot fix a deeper issue with a superficial strategy like it does not work and Failure to recognize this is what keeps professionals in a holding pattern right preventing them from reaching their next growth level and what I discovered

speaker-0 (35:47.458)
just throughout my career using psychological and neurological principles is a way for them to recalibrate their internal engine. And to do this, you have to go deep. So give me a moment to kind of unpack this. So I wonder how many members of your audience can relate to this. Like you launch a product or a service and it falls flat for no clear reason. You experience a big win, but something about it doesn't bring real or lasting fulfillment. Like you forge.

a new business or romantic relationship and it goes well for a while, but then becomes like riddled with conflict or disillusionment, right? Or you, maybe you outperform your colleagues in your competition, but you seem to always end up in the backseat. you do what

That gets to the narrative that we tell ourselves, right? Like, if only this event would happen or if only I could reach this achievement, then I will be happy. And then you reach it and you're like, is this all there is? You're like looking around, you're like, he's still, cause you haven't fixed the core issue. You haven't really addressed the right, you haven't aligned yourself to what really brings you fulfillment.

Absolutely. I define it as kind of two different identities that we operate from of course Everyone's individual identity is far more nuanced but this this empty success cycle is what I call the overworked achiever and It's a miserable existence. You can be successful on paper, but you're miserable Versus the fulfilled visionary and that's ultimately the goal that we want to get to and there's a lot of you know different things that are involved in getting there but

When these things happen, when we do these things and it doesn't work, we do what seems natural, right? You blame the market. You dump more money into your project, make it shinier. You line up a bigger win, right? A greater accomplishment and you throw yourself at it. You read a self-help book or meet with a therapist to learn some social skills and then you start a new relationship, right? Or maybe you polish your resume, take aim at a new position or

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profitable venture and then the cycle repeats. What's the reason for this treadmill of setback or heartache? It's your programming, right? So we live in the age of information, so it's easy to research strategies with AI, right? It's easy to hire consultants that have specialized expertise or to work with an executive coach, right? Polisher, communication skills. Chances are you've already tried all this, someone who's dealing with this cycle, but nothing works.

Right? Because these are all external solutions to internal problems. And the reason that the empty success cycle exists is because of deficits in underlying neurological programming. Right? These are often completely invisible outside of awareness, but they control your life and your outcomes. So your challenges are flowing from mental scripts that run on automation. And because of this, they're nearly impossible to change by willpower alone.

There are things that if confronted about you would deny and probably would never even say out loud because they're so deeply embedded in your subconscious that you don't even realize that they're there. Here's examples. There's scripts like, don't deserve to be successful. I have to hustle. So self-care is a luxury or I'll never be happy or no amount of achievement is enough. It's like having a spy or a saboteur in your organization. Only the saboteur is in your mind.

And the only way to bring to light and deal with those mental viruses is using precision neurological approaches that isolate, debug and override the corrupted code that operating system we were talking about. And it shouldn't be a surprise by now, but it's still amazing to me to watch the shift my clients have into peace and joy and success when the underlying issue is dealt with permanently. Like, so when this happens, you don't need a trainer, right? You won't have to build skills.

You won't have to hire an outside expert. Once your neurological upgrade takes hold, you intuitively know how to be so that you can do you outgrow your issues and you instinctively solve the problems you're facing because the self limitation, the psychological blockage is out of the way. I don't spend, know, I've done global business consulting, but I don't spend a lot of time talking with clients about what are solutions to their staffing issue or.

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or what's the best way to market this new product. Once they come into alignment, they know, they know how to do it. And it's not just solving the problem, right? Or reaching the next level. It's living to enjoy it. Embracing that deep fulfillment that comes with your identity upgrade. And that's what the abundance approach is all about.

Makes perfect sense. Tell me about cognitive bias. So first of all, define it for the audience. Like what is cognitive bias? And then how does that fit into what we're talking about?

Well, there's lots of forms of cognitive bias when we...

Part of this goes to something called the particular activating system. It's a part of the brain that is a filter. And this filter determines the things that we experience. So we become very biased to things, but it's not an intentional bias. Like you would say, I'm, say you're racist or you're prejudiced against something. This is something that happens automatically because you are unable to see a difference. And what that system does is it filters

your experience, your reality based upon those subconscious programming. And I'll give you an example. have you, you ever bought a car and yeah, nice car. You're driving it around and as you're driving around, you notice that you started to see that car, that model, that type of car everywhere on the road, although you didn't really notice that before.

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Yeah.

Right, so, or, you know, for women it's very common, you know.

If somebody says red car, like and they say don't look at the red car or whatever and then you start noticing all the red cars you're like, holy cow, I didn't know there was that many of them. Exactly. And then you always see it. It's the input that then it like aligns your focus. So it's not bias necessarily in a negative sense. It's how two different groups or two different people can see the same event. And they can look at it differently.

They come to different conclusions about what that event meant.

Well, I you see it in politics, right? So if someone

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Just say you see it in politics, somebody does something one side celebrates the other sides like, I can't believe they did that. But then, you know, four years earlier, whatever their candidate does that, they that's great. And then somebody else goes, Oh, I can't believe they did that. Like, it's the same act. Yeah, like, objectively, it's the same.

Well, that's how a program affects our filter, right? Because, whether, well, Democrats, Republicans, right? So if it's Democrats are all good, Democrats are all bad, know, Republicans are all good, Republicans are all bad, whatever that programming is, that's what you're going to filter for and that's what you're going to see. So there's something in psychology called the self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's where you get up in the morning, you stub your toe and you say, it's going to be a terrible day. Well, now the brain sets to

filter for all the bad things that happen. Like everything that goes wrong, you're paying attention to and it's confirming, see, today is a terrible day. But there's also good things that are happening, but you're filtering those things out and you're ignoring them. And so when we have this cognitive bias, when we begin to set our filter in such a way that we're following that story that we've told ourself or operating off of that deeper programming, then we can be running our business

and there'd be opportunities right in our face that are completely filtered out that we're blind to, or problems that maybe are inconsequential that to us get magnified and completely wreck our day. And so we have to be very careful.

And it blocks you from seeing the truth, right? The objective truth, good or bad. just, yeah, that's phenomenal. That's great. Well, hey, thank you so much. This is so interesting. So it's, it's, it's, you know, we encourage everybody to reach out to you and we'll have links to your website in the show notes. What's on the horizon for you? Are you doing?

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Public speaking, do you have things coming up?

Well, the thing that I'm working on now that I think is interesting is trying to turn two things really on is turning typically when I work with clients, it's on kind of a one to one basis. And there's an entire process with the abundance approach that helps them to dig down, to identify where there's maybe some programming that is causing friction or fighting against them to change and shift that. moving from a primarily one on one model to more of a group model.

I think will be a force multiplier so that we can kind of offer it at a more accessible price point and then also have multiple people go through it. So kind of building, you know, recording videos and the things that I teach and different things like that and workbooks.

scale it, right? Yeah, we'll really be able to scale it.

Right. the second part of that is whenever I do like a call, I've called a free consultation call or sales call, whatever you want to call it. I'm not big on sales calls. I think for a good fit, it's natural. taking whenever I do one of those, my goal is to always have someone walk away with something valuable, something that they can use. It's not going to solve all their problems, but maybe a little something that gives them insight.

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or opens up a door to new possibilities. And I'd like to create some type of event about the abundance approach that leaves people with a lot of little somethings that they can use. Just something for your charge to kind of introduce them to the concepts. And if they see that this is something you'll know, if this is speaking to you, if there's some things. One of the ways you'll know is like doing the same thing and expecting different results. You you notice a pattern in your life or you notice there's this point or you notice that

Everything seems to be going well, I just feel like something's missing. That's when it's probably time to do some deeper upgrades on your identity, on your core programming.

Yeah, that's phenomenal. Brilliant, brilliant discussion, man. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Wish. Yeah, wish you all the best. We'll definitely stay in touch. And we'll have links to your information shown. It's definitely encouraged people to check you out. Really, you have a very uncanny ability to get down to the root of the issue. And then really help people I could see how it helps people perform better. Yeah.

Yeah, it's been my flight.

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Well, my work is not clinical counseling, you can't take that part out of you. It's diving deep. It's just kind of...

Exactly. Right. That's great, man. Good job. Thanks so much.

Yeah, I appreciate it, David.