1KHO 836: Why We Flip Our Lid | Dr. Dan Siegel, Mindsight

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And it is in honor of a lifetime that Dr. Dan Siegel is here. Welcome.

**Dr. Dan Siegel** (1:26)
Thank you, Ginny. Thank you for having me.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:28)
I am thrilled about this. I've been a fan for such a long time. I have five of your books right here. So the five that I have here are Mindsight, The New Science of Personal Transformation. I have Parenting from the Inside Out, How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. I have The Power of Showing Up. I have The Yes Brain, which is about cultivating courage, curiosity and resilience. And I also have Brainstorm, which is about adolescence. And I know people know you from The Whole Brain Child. You have so many books. This is just a smattering. People can find the whole list at drdansiegel.com and then also take courses there. You have the Mindsight Institute. You received your medical degree from Harvard, post-grad medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child adolescent and adult psychiatry, and also lectured for the King of Thailand.
So thank you and Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama and Google University and London's Royal Society of Arts. Huge congrats on all your life success.

**Dr. Dan Siegel** (2:31)
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you very much.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:34)
It's a lot. So could you give us a little bit of the backstory, because you talk in this book of Mindset about how you had dropped out for a little bit. And you were talking about at the very beginning that there was no room for emotion, that they would say things like there's no time for tears. You have to get over your feelings. Sometimes patients just die. Your job is to learn and you have to deal with the facts. Can you talk about the time when you stepped away from it but then came back?

**Dr. Dan Siegel** (3:01)
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm actually walking on a walking desk. The step away from it is a good analogy to my walking.
I loved science when I was a kid and when I went to college, I studied biochemistry to try to figure out the deepest structures of life forms and stuff. So when I went to medical school, I thought it would be a beautiful place to take my love of science and people and just understanding life, to try to promote more life.
And I enjoyed the basic science classes, but when I got into the clinical work, my teachers were so unempathetic with the patients that it really was painful to see. And these different experiences I had were just telling me I didn't want to become a physician if it meant being like my professors who were my role models.
So I decided that instead of becoming like them, I'd go on a journey to figure out who I was supposed to be, because I certainly didn't want to be becoming like those people. We're so robotic and so just into facts and not feelings, not honoring the inner reality of our lives. Anyway, so I went on a journey, which I certainly talked to you about, but I was going to be a basic, I was going to be either a salmon fisherman or a dancer. And when I got into a dance troupe and they told me my knees weren't straight enough, then I realized I probably should become a choreographer. But then when I started doing work related to choreography, I didn't really care how dance looked, I really cared about how it felt. Then I realized I starved to death as a choreographer. And then I just got the idea, because I was reading a lot about the mind and all these kinds of things, that maybe I could have a career looking at the reality of the mind that seemed to be absent in medicine. So I decided to go back to the school I started with, and it was a research institution, it is. And so I just sort of had this word I made up, Mindsight, that I would use this skill of seeing the mind of patience even if my professors didn't or of myself or my colleagues, even if the teachers weren't. And it was almost like being an anthropologist in a different culture, that you could just see the absence of empathy and its negative impact on how they taught or how they treated patients. So I kind of used it as an anti-role model and just thought, okay, I will get through this and I will do my best as a student. So I did fine. But at the same time, this other track was I was studying how not to be.