Notable Moment: This Is The Real Reason You Can't Change Your Life: Doctor Alok Kanojia

Alok Kanojia (0:03)

No amount of fixing your life will make that kid go away. Right, so when I work with people who are, I see you smiling. So when I work with people who have been traumatized, they will build amazing lives, but they still carry that kid with them. And the kid will come out at times. There'll be particular times where if I'm a little bit, if I treat you in the wrong way, you'll notice that you feel like that kid again. When you're idle, you feel like that kid again. So that psychological, that neuronal wiring is there. So you can build all this wonderful stuff, and there's authenticity. It's not like you're faking it. This is a really common misconception, that are you faking? No, you're genuinely confident, you're genuinely authentic. You can't fake it and get to where you are. And at the same time, the wounds that we experience leave scars.

Steven Bartlett (0:54)

Yeah, 100%.

Alok Kanojia (0:55)

And the real way to heal is to go back to that moment and deal with that kid, right? You have to dismantle the world view that you have, which is how you heal trauma. Is when we get traumatized, we adapt. In order to come out of this situation, I need to learn this particular thing. So some kids that I've worked with adapt by becoming invisible. That's what I did. I got bullied a lot. So what do I do? I learn how to be invisible. Some people adapt by being successful. So if I'm successful, it's an antidote to my shame. I don't have to be ashamed anymore if I'm successful. But that old injury is still there.

Steven Bartlett (1:34)

Yeah. This is why it's so complex because what you've just said is so unbelievably true, but it's where the misconception happens because I don't go home and I'm not insecure or I'm not unconfident. When I'm on my own, I'm very, very okay with who I am, with myself. I'm very, very, I feel like the guy that you experience on camera is very close to who I am when I'm in the hotel room alone at night. However, it doesn't mean that I still don't have those childhood bruises, and that they can't be pressed by various things.

Because when we say these words like insecurity and shame, you'd think that I walk into the green room over there and I'm like, oh, that's not my life. But where I know that there's still something there, is I go, why are you still driving like this? Exactly. When you are so well aware that it will not lead to any more happiness in any context. I'm so logically aware that becoming more will not have any impact on the things that matter. Yet, here I am, still building businesses. And this is the constant thing I battle with. So I go, okay, well, there must be a force that you're consciously unaware of that's making you go, go on, go on.

Alok Kanojia (2:55)

Exactly. Yeah. So let's understand a couple of things. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, Steven, beautiful. So a couple of things to understand. We think about healing as one spectrum. So if I'm at negative 100, I can't also be a positive 100 Those two things cancel out. That's not how it works. So if I give you a glass of water and then I piss in it, and then I add sugar, it doesn't remove the piss. These are both independent things. This is what tends to happen. This is what we don't understand about trauma. Removing the piss requires removing the piss. No amount of sugar will take it out of the drink. Okay? So no amount of, this is mistake number one. No amount of building something good will remove something bad. Okay? So healing, and it's also like, you know, if I break a leg, no amount of bench press will heal my leg. Like, I can build as much as I want to, I can fix my hair, I can brush my teeth, but the leg is broken, the leg is broken. Same is true of the mind. Okay? Second thing is, what happens is we have, like our consciousness is divided, now we're gonna get kind of technical and off the rails. So we have all of these like dormant pieces of our consciousness that activate in certain situations. And all you have to do is pay attention to yourself in a five minute period and you'll see this.

So when I walk into a bathroom that I've never used before, then I start thinking about, okay, where's the flush, where's the toilet, how do I use this toilet? So like I'll activate dormant information all the time. So if someone asks me what's the quadratic equation, that information is there and dormant in my mind and it gets activated. So one of the biggest mistakes we make about healing is we look at what is active in our mind 90 percent of the time and we assume that the injury is no longer there. That's not the case. Does that make sense?