Dr. Jeff Karp on Helping Our Kids Energize Their Brain, Spark Ideas & Ignite Action

Debbie:

Hey Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Jeff Karp:

Hi there, so nice to meet you.

Debbie:

Nice to meet you too. And I’m looking forward to talking about your work and your life and your new book. And, you know, I’ve read your bio, but you’re so much more than your bio. I would love it if we could really start the conversation with you kind of telling us a bit about your story, being this young child identified with learning disabilities and ADHD. And I mean, that’s really where it all started, I think, for where you are today. So tell us a little bit about your story.

Jeff Karp:

Yeah, I mean, well, let’s go back to the second grade, which is really where things started to materialize in a really significant way and led to a transformative experience. Actually, that changed my life and led to a lot of processes and tools and strategies that I still use to this day. So when I was in the second grade, nothing was sinking in. Nothing was working. My mom tried flashcards. She tried cue cards, phonics, you know, everything. And I wasn’t able to keep up with anything that was being taught. I wasn’t socially connecting with anyone. I’d sit at the back of the class frustrated, kind of feeling demoralized and like I didn’t fit in like I was an alien. And at the end of the second grade, my teacher, Mr. Stedwell pulled my parents aside and said that he thought it would be a good idea for me to repeat the second grade. And my parents negotiated that if I spent the summer with tutors to catch up that I could go on to the third grade. So all my classmates went on vacation and here I am in summer school. And I would go in every day and they would ask me, the tutors would ask me questions and read passages and do all sorts of activities.

But there’s one day in particular that really stands out and a question that the tutor asked that literally changed my life. What happened is I went in and the tutor on this day read a passage, asked me questions as she usually did, and I gave my answers. But after I gave my answers, she paused and looked me in the eye and said, how did you think about that? And that question is one that no one had ever asked me before and it sent me into this kind of self reflection mode it Was like all of a sudden I had this awareness, you know to think about thinking and I started to Bring that awareness to everything in my life I started to observe patterns of behaviors of other children in the class and you know what they were saying what they were doing and you know, and sort of in a context dependent manner, trying to understand, I would notice thoughts in my mind and sort of realize that I could shape my thoughts before speaking. I started to tap into the fact that learning happened for me after I asked questions. And so anytime I asked a question, I was able to hyper focus for a few moments afterwards and anything that was being said would imprint in my mind, I could connect it to other things, I could think about it and focus my attention on it, and I could recall it later. And otherwise, just sitting in the class and being kind of lectured to, that just didn’t work for me. In fact, in college even, when I was at McGill University in engineering, I stopped going to some of my classes where I couldn’t ask questions because it would just bring me too much anxiety and frustration.

And so I found other ways ways to learn and you know all throughout high school I would be asking teachers constantly to meet with me after class I’d go in on weekends many weekends I remember, you know driving or walking over to the school to to get help and to ask questions and so Those were kind of the early days. I mean, I was a C and D student for much of elementary school But that changed in the seventh grade when my mom went up against the school board, so really, you know, like a warrior mom, because they didn’t want to recognize me as having a learning difference. You know, ADHD wasn’t really talked about too much back then. And my mom had created this massive file of everything that had ever been said about me or written about me. She went up against the school board and actually got me identified as having learning differences. And my grades went from Cs and Ds to straight As.

Debbie:

My gosh, there’s so much in that story that you just shared. First of all, what an incredible question and how fortuitous that teacher asked you that question and the way that you responded to it. How did you think about that? So you mentioned in seventh grade when your mom kind of really advocated and you got this identification and then I imagine you got accommodations that really allowed you to be in your strength zone. Could you just even going back a little bit after you had this aha moment and started thinking about your own thinking that summer after second grade, what did it look like? Like how did that actually translate in the next couple of years? I’m just curious.

Jeff Karp:

Yeah, so in the third grade, we moved out to the country and we were outside city limits. And so there was a farmer’s field in our backyard. There was a sheep farm beside us, a buffalo farm across the road. And we had a creek. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, there’d be a pack of wolves on the front lawn. And the reason I’m mentioning this is because that had a profound effect on me with this newly found awareness, because I would get off the bus and I would be just ruminating and exhausted, trying to fit in, trying to assimilate, trying to figure out how could I fit into this world that just seemed so foreign to me at school.

And so I would just be really tired and I’d walk home. But as I was walking, I noticed there were no, well, first of all, there were no phones or anything like that back then. You know, we’re going back to 1983, 84 kind of time frame. And I would just look into the trees like my driveway was literally carved through a forest. It was a thousand feet long. And I developed this connection with nature. I noticed how as I was walking home, this sort of frustration and tiredness, just looking at the trees and looking at sort of everything around me, all this life, it calmed me and I started to really develop a deep relationship with nature. So that was one thing that was really sort of helpful for me back then. I felt like I was being hugged by nature actually as I walked, you know, along this laneway or driveway home. And also one day I was walking and I noticed something I’d never seen before. And I got up closer and closer and closer because I couldn’t figure it out. And then I was like face to face and it was a bat. And I’d never seen a bat before. And what was really amazing to me was how all the thoughts in my mind, everything I was ruminating about, you know, about that day at school, whatever it was, it was like those thoughts got squeezed out and all I could think about was the bat. And I was first of all, amazed to see a bat. But I was also amazed at how, I was like, wait a moment. My brain is now laser focused on the bat and not all these other things that I was just thinking about a moment before. So I started to think, OK, are there ways that I might be able to use this as a tool? Like, could I use this as a way to focus my attention in class, beyond just asking questions and sort of paying attention to the answers or the first few moments of the answers. And I started experimenting with that and I was able to kind of cultivate my attention. And I kind of, you know, I think about this as, as, as, you know, pinching my brain as a way to focus — using my intention to focus my attention.

And it’s really helped me to, you know, when I was younger, I couldn’t like I had really a lot of trouble reading. And the only thing that I could read was really joke books and fact books, where there was like, you know, single sentence or two sentence kind of things. And, eventually, as I started to hone my attention more and more through kind of pinching my brain, I started to get into choose your own adventure books. But I needed something that was sort of, you know, like something really exciting for me to read. And I started to develop all these other strategies that I use to this day, which is when I’m reading and I’m starting from the beginning of something, usually my mind starts to wander really quickly. And then what I’ll do is I’ll jump to the end and start reading backwards. And what that does is it sort of prompts my mind to be challenged because I don’t really understand what’s happening. So I have to read from the beginning to figure out what I just, you know, to sort of connect all the dots. So to almost turn it into like a problem -based learning kind of strategy to heighten my, you know, kind of excite my brain in ways that will allow me to focus more.

Debbie:

I’m so fascinated by this conversation already. So I love how you were just describing the way that you got so curious and were always kind of questioning your own process. One of the tilts that I mentioned in my book, Differently Wired, is to help our kids embrace self -discovery, because I think that is just so critical. And it sounds like that’s just naturally who you were. You were always getting curious about, why do I think this way? How can I use this? How can I hack myself? From a very young age. And you mentioned your mom really stepping in to push for more supports at school when you were in middle school. But can you talk about your parents’ role, if any, what role they may have played in you being the kind of thinker that you are and how they may have fostered or supported or encouraged this type of thinking?

Jeff Karp:

Absolutely. So yeah, I’m thinking of both things with my mom and my dad. So just starting with my mom, one of the things that was transformational for me is when I was kind of early in elementary school, when I was a C and D student and not connecting with peers, I had very few things to sort of be confident about. And I was always the last picked for basketball or soccer or baseball, whatever people were doing. And that started to really take a toll on me. And a couple of things that my mom did made a massive difference. One is, well, I was getting a lot of labels from the teachers. So I was being told I was lazy, that I was never gonna amount to anything. At one point, I was helping another child, someone else in the class with something and the teacher came over and said, isn’t that like the blind leading the blind? And of course I had to go home and ask my mom what that meant and she wasn’t too happy. And people called me a lost cause and all kinds of things. So one thing that my mom did is she really sort of helped me to understand that these labels, that I didn’t need to believe them and that there was something deeper that I had this potential, almost like super powers. And she kind of told me that like over and over and over again to the point where I started to believe it. Like I literally remember times when I was in elementary school and being taught things and I’d be sitting there thinking like, I wonder if there’s something more to this or I wonder if there’s something deeper here. And you know, I would try to think beyond what I was being told. And not that anything really came to mind immediately. But it’s just that sort of sense that there might be some deeper level of understanding o a different way to think about things.

I think it was kind of a really interesting way to focus my attention because I started to develop tools to actually do that over time. And so it almost helped me to cultivate superpowers by being told that I had these superpowers. I mean, initially, I didn’t really believe it. But over time, I was like, hey, wait a moment. And then with my… and then the other thing with my mom is that this was huge is that there were these speech competitions, I think they started in the fourth grade. And initially they were like three minutes and maybe they went to five or eight or something like that. But my mom would write the speeches for me and then coach me in memorizing. And I always had a really hard time memorizing things, but you know, it was kind of like through that process of like, okay, I got like three words and then a sentence and then the next sentence and I started to sort of realize, wait a moment. It was almost like I was tapping into my neuroplasticity. I was tapping, I started to realize like, wait a moment, I’m starting to get this. This is really interesting. And I started to develop confidence around it. And she coached me and had to say the speeches and I started winning competitions. And I was the kid to beat in school. And, you know, there was a couple of times where I won the competition for the whole school and I went on to compete against other schools and so that one thing, like, it just seems to me like it just, that was so instrumental in my life to give me one thing to gain confidence in, to be able to tap into neuroplasticity, to be able to tap into sort of my potential and, and, and, and be able to track it myself and see that I actually had something deep within that was only surfacing because of this you know, process I was engaging with my mom. And I think, you know, for other kids and things, I think that can come from mentors or teachers or, you know, can be parents. 

But I feel, especially kids who are neurodiverse, you know, just sort of connecting to my own personal story. It seems to me that every kid needs that one thing to be able to gain, to develop a skill and gain, you know, confidence, even if it’s incremental, like to be able to hold, because that sort of gave me confidence, not just in that, but that wait a moment, maybe I could apply this to other things and expand. And so that was really the nucleating sort of, I think, experience in my life that I was able to then go on and do all these other things and just build off of it. That was, you know, cause it’s almost like when you have something like that, no one can take it away from you. And you can always in your mind, reflect back to it and say, you know, this is a new skill. Maybe it’s like the speech competition. I can just, maybe there’s a process. And I started to realize that whenever I wasn’t good at something, whenever I couldn’t do something. I started to realize, I was like, wait a moment, it’s not an absolute situation. I’m, it’s not, this isn’t something that will never change. I just need to find a process that works for me. And the process I engaged with my mom worked for me. And so I, that’s how I started to kind of venture on in life, and that’s how I was able to develop a lot of skills, by searching for processes that work for me. And then just one other thing to add is my dad.

So he was really, I would say, he’s really creative and he is, he loved nature. And so we would go for drives on the weekend, like just around farm country and we’d go to flea markets and he was into arts and crafts and always asking questions, lots and lots of questions about how things worked. And so I think that really sparked my curiosity and it really allowed me to start looking at things through the lens of curiosity, which I think is really like a life force that we all can tap into. I think kind of the current state of affairs with this digital world that we live in, I was just thinking about this this morning is that, you know, we tend to get our, this life force of curiosity gets hijacked constantly and leads to sort of things that are not sustainable or fulfilling, but through this experience with my dad, I realized it deepened my connection with nature.

Debbie:

So good, so good. So I have one more question that I have to ask because I think you shared the experience you had of being labeled as this kind of a lost cause as a student by teachers and just clearly not understood. And if we look at, listeners heard what I read in the introduction here, you have done a lot in your life. You’re very accomplished. And I just wonder, is there a little part of you that wants to go back to those elementary school teachers and be like, hello? Have you had that moment? Have you let it go? Was that influential in you being who you are today?

Jeff Karp:

Yeah, I know. I think that, you know, I’ve tried to apply this awareness that, you know, I sort of my newly found awareness in between the second and third grade to everything in my life. And I kind of look at everything almost as algorithms these days. In fact, I feel, you know, we might call them habits, but in some ways, I feel like it’s important to call them algorithms because because of just the way that the digital age is upon us and how it’s a way of thinking like these are not necessarily our algorithms, these are other people’s algorithms. But I know I’m kind of veering off a little bit here, but to get at your question, I mean, so I’ve been trying to break through those algorithms to be able to reflect on what were those teachers going through at that time, and what were their experiences. And I think being a teacher is a really difficult job. It’s really freaking hard, right? And, you know, to have 30 or whatever students in a class and to have, you know, kids who are neurodiverse and, you know, any one person, including the teacher only has a certain amount of attention and cognitive kind of capacity, you know, at any particular moment. And, and so I get it, you know, I get like, sort of how things are. But I think to me, I just, so I don’t feel like anything negative towards any of those teachers whatsoever. And I think that, in fact, I think some of the things that they said to me, and kind of reflecting on this awareness, I feel like it pushed me throughout my life and maybe even still to this day, it’s part of the fire beneath me. It’s like, I feel like I’m always trying to prove somebody wrong or I can do it, you know, or It’s sort of like, you know, I’ve been sort of trying to figure out like, where does my sort of deep motivation come from? And I think that might be part of it is that those sort of, you know, I think unfortunately, a lot of kids who are neurodiverse fall through the cracks, they don’t have the support that they need. And these labels can really take a major toll on them. Even if they have supportive parents, you know, everybody just the diversity of how we process emotional experiences and you know, one comment can negatively impact somebody for the rest of their lives and set up all these triggers, right? And so I think a lot about the other children who have been subjected to some of the things that I have been and just, you know, I think a lot of people who are neurodiverse can, you know, become addicts and, and, you know, fall through the cracks of life. And yet they have so much potential to contribute in so many positive ways and use neurodiversity as a superpower. And so I kind of think it’s more not necessarily the teachers, but it’s more the institutional kind of aspect, the foundation of how education is conducted. And I think there’s much better ways. And I feel like the education system is in the process of being disrupted just based on the number of conversations that I’m hearing about it.

Debbie:

Thank you. Thank you for going with me on that little tangent. Okay, so I want to pivot now. First of all, thank you for sharing so much of your story. It’s just so helpful for parents raising neurodivergent kids to hear about, you know, from neurodivergent adults, what made the difference for them, what their journey looked like, and have a sense of how that can inform the adult that they become. And so you have a new book out, it’s called Lit. LIT stands for Life Ignition Tools and the subtitle is Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action. So could we start by talking about what LIT is? Tell us a little bit about that concept.

Jeff Karp:

LIT is all about intercepting our routine patterns to actively think and decide versus just jumping in with habitual responses. And to me, it’s really about resensitizing our aliveness. When we’re children, we’re just so tapped into the life force, you know, curiosity and imagination and love and deep connections with everything around us. And I think that our culture really has atomized our attention, flattened our imagination, flattened our curiosity. And I think there are many ways to get it back. And so LIT is really a book with many, many on ramps to living more intentionally and thinking more deliberately and taking intentional actions and reawakening our senses so we can deepen our experiences with the world and really come into alignment with what’s really at our core.

Debbie:

Do you see it as the book that is kind of your, what you’ve discovered throughout your life of how you’ve kind of thought about thinking and how you have really learned to, again, I’m using this term hack yourself, but really identify the things that have allowed you to create and be the person you are in the world. Is this kind of your playbook in that way?

Jeff Karp:

Yeah, yeah, and it’s an interesting way to think about it. The tools in the book didn’t come out of my laboratory at Harvard Medical School. They actually came out of my laboratory for life and through my experiences. So, you know, exactly as you put it and just kind of tinkering along the way. Initially, I was struggling a lot in school and I needed to develop tools to survive. And eventually as I started to develop these tools and then was identified with having learning differences and got some accommodations, a little extra time and space, I was able to then apply these tools in a really significant way and evolve the tools. And in fact, I would say my laboratory you know, it’s a biomedical engineering laboratory. We develop all kinds of different medical technologies and then bring those technologies to clinical trials and to patients. And my lab, I say, is focused on the process of medical problem solving. There’s no specific disease focus or specific technology focus. It’s really an ever evolving iterative process, which mimics the process that I have sort of been on this adventure in the world to iterate and evolve and learn and with all these perturbations that we’re constantly, you know, having in our lives, kind of like what happens in nature. And for me, maybe just one other thing to add is that I almost as I look back, I almost feel like if I go way back, it was like, you know, an analogy to a computer like where I had this hardware and I knew I had this hardware, but I didn’t have software that worked for me. And what I needed to do was figure out how to program that software. And so I would observe very intensely. And I think this is why I was so exhausted every day when I came home. I would just be observing how people behaved in various situations. And then I would try that on. I would hear people’s opinions and I wouldn’t have an opinion, but I would take on that opinion. And then when the conversation came up, I would state the opinion and see what the reaction was. And then I would update it based on what reactions I got. And I sort of started to do that. And I would learn sort of how other people behave in the world. And I would mimic those behaviors in a very intentional way. And then I would see, how people respond when I behave that way. And through that iterative process, I was able to develop all of these tools and strategies that worked for me and gave me ways of kind of intercept. Because I think people tend to just do what they know or what they experience, and then they just do that for the rest of their lives. I noticed that intensely in my lab, like if someone trains in a research lab and then they come to my lab, they tend to think like what the thinking, the process of thinking in that previous lab. They tend to conduct their presentations the same way as everybody in that lab did or write papers in the same way. And I, through my whole life, have really been about almost like testing out algorithms that I see around me in the world and then constantly updating and iterating them. And I think through that, I’ve been able to kind of discover that there’s many things that we can do that can bring in fresh energy into our lives, that can deepen connections with the world around us and with other people, that can really set us on a path of, you know, positive mental health and well -being. And so that’s what the book is really about, is giving people strategies and tools and approaches to intercept their patterns, to live more fulfilling lives and be more connected with each other and with nature.

Debbie:

Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s not just for listeners, this is not a parenting book. But it is a book that first of all, on a personal level, I found super fascinating because these are all things that I’m super interested in. It is just better understanding and disrupting processes and always looking for ways to maximize my own creativity and output and all of those things. And because you’re writing it through the lens of who you are as a neurodivergent adult and the life experiences you’ve had and what shaped your thinking, it’s also, I think, such a useful resource for parents to understand how to kind of help their kids have this curiosity about who they are and tap into their own strengths in that way. Is that, like, I’m curious to know kind of when you were writing it, who were you thinking would be the ideal reader for your book.

Jeff Karp:

Well, you know, that’s always like a tough question to answer because an editor, Heather Jackson, reached out to me to write a book. She had read something about some of the work we do in bio inspiration in my laboratory. So turning to nature to be inspired, to bring in fresh ideas, to solve medical problems. And I thought about it and I was like, you know, I’d like to write about that but I want to write about my struggles with learning differences and all the tools and strategies that I developed because I just want to share them with the world and that was really at the core. I’ve just always had this desire. Like I feel like throughout my life I’ve been able to tap into these insights and that can be really helpful to me but helpful to others and I just have this wiring where I constantly felt a need, an urgent need to share it with others. And so when I give scientific presentations, for example, actually, I just have never really shown much data. I tell stories and I try to illuminate the insights of what we learned along the way that can help other people in their journeys. And so I never really sort of thought of a particular target audience. It was more just, you know, sharing and hoping that it would resonate with as many people as possible.

Debbie:

There’s so many great little concepts in here that felt very sticky to me, one of them is you talk about the LEB dimmer switch. Could you explain what that is?

Jeff Karp:

Yeah, absolutely. So LEB refers to low energy brain state. And I think, to me, I like to think about what I’m up against, right. And there’s two major things that I feel like I’m up against, and potentially everybody’s kind of up against. So one is that for 10s of 1000s of years, up until about 10 to 15 ,000 years ago, we were all hunter gatherers, we were outside working hard. And we needed to gravitate to the state where our brains were conserving energy, our bodies were conserving energy. You never knew when we were going to run out of resources and have to move or run away from something or punt or whatever it was. And that wiring is still with us today. We haven’t evolved away from it. So we’re at this snapshot in evolution where we still have that primitive wiring.

So our brains gravitate to a low energy state and people can recognize it. For example, if you drive your car from point A to point B, sometimes you forget the route you took. You can’t even recall it. Because your brain was gravitating to this low energy state. Or you might be eating and you finish a meal, you’re shocked, it’s done, you can’t remember a flavor. You lose your keys, but later find out it’s in your pocket. You walk into a room, you forget why you walked into that room. You have trouble getting yourself up off the couch or wherever you are to go exercise like all of these things don’t wouldn’t have you know, like it’s like Exercising doesn’t make sense if you’re working to survive in life because you’re already outside kind of doing the hard work So so so we gravitate to this low energy brain state and actually low energy body state as well the other thing we’re up against which makes it like way worse is that there’s $900 billion with a B spent every year on marketing and advertising to hijack our attention. And so when our brains, we have this wiring to gravitate to the low energy brain and body state. And now we’re subjected to this massive force, almost a trillion dollars of marketing and advertising every year and all these algorithms. And whoever’s behind the algorithms actually is exerting control over us, kind of serving us what, you know, we’re sort of led to believe what’s important is really, you know, what’s behind it is other people’s definition of importance, but not our own. And it creates this fog. It creates, it’s hard for us to tap into our internal cues and the core wisdom that we all have. And so that makes us susceptible, this low energy brain and body state to these, this massive advertising and marketing force. And it’s hard then to be intentional because we’re living others intentions, right? And so to me, we need tools, we need strategies, we need practices, we need rituals in our daily lives to intercept and develop an awareness to be able to tap into the cues from our brains. Our bodies are very intelligent, our interactions from other people. We need to create space to press pause and to reflect on our experiences and what we’re learning and to catch up, you know, to sync, our brain needs to sync up. And so that’s a big part of WIT is to provide those on -ramps, those strategies to intercept and help us to sort of peel away the layers and really connect with our core values and help us to create rituals and practices that can lead to more intention in our thinking and our actions.

Debbie:

Yeah, I love that so much. One of the quotes I pulled from the book, you said, metaphorically, lit is a swift kick that breaks through inertia and gets the ball rolling. In my experience, whether the inertia is due to outside resistance, habit, apathy, or just a law that’s lingered too long through the years into this day, and to this day when I’m in this brain state, nothing can stop me. I am lit. So that seems like it really kind of sums up. You’re really helping people learn how to activate to do the things that they know that they want to do. 

Jeff Karp:

Yes. 100%. Yep.

Debbie:

Another concept that I love if you could talk to us about is this idea of bothered awareness. Can you explain what that is? I thought it was really fascinating.

Jeff Karp:

Yeah, to me, bothered awareness is, it’s really at the core of what can motivate us to do the work that we really want to do, to tap into our deep intention. And I think in our lives, as we go on, and we have certain thoughts, we, you know, have certain actions, certain interactions with other people, we start to experience pain points, there might be things that we said, do we say to somebody or in a certain tone and we might see their facial expressions and we might sort of realize that there may be another way of saying it, there might be another way of connecting with somebody. And that will create a pain point within us that can serve as a spark to ignite us to be bothered and then to start to think about potential solutions or ways that we might change things in our lives. And Bryan Stevenson, the social justice activist says, be proximate, which means that you want to be close to the problems that you’re trying to solve. And so, you know, if you’re trying to for example, if you’re interested in sustainability and the environment, you might want to go to regions where people are deeply suffering from what’s happening. For me, I’m in the hospital. I moved, actually, my laboratory from Cambridge to Boston and actually in the Longwood area to actually being inside the hospital because get bothered to me is by seeing patients every day as I’m going into my office, that’s a motivator that we need to keep going, we need to be persistent, there’s a sense of urgency. And so I think that to me, Get Bothered is really all about tapping into the pain points that are around us and sort of using them, almost kind of doing judo on them in a way to use them as a motivator to help us to keep moving forward and to act with a sense of urgency.

Debbie:

Yeah, as you’re answering that question, I’m thinking of Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Switch, and their concept of shaping the path. So in some ways, you’re shaping the path to ensure that you stay kind of focused and committed on the things you, again, know that you want to be doing. So you’re kind of creating an ecosystem or an environment where these things are front of mind and keep you going.

Jeff Karp:

Absolutely, yeah, because it’s so easy to be sidetracked today. And we were talking about all this marketing and advertising and all these forces that we’re up against. And I think in some ways, we’re just inundated with information and with data. And it’s like the cues that we get from our minds and our bodies, our interactions from other people, they kind of get lost in the fog and the clouds that are around us. And those cues can turn into pain points that can motivate us to act. And so what can happen is, if we don’t sort of have strategies in our lives to connect with those cues, we can miss picking up on these pain points and we can go down paths that lead us in directions where we don’t feel fulfilled or we’re not fully aligned with our values.

And I think that, you know, unfortunately it’s become very easy to go down those paths these days just because of all the information and, you know, sort of like this digital age that we exist within. And so I think having strategies, like even just pausing in our day in between meetings I found can be really critical. I used to do the back -to -back meetings all through the day and I get to the end of the day and be like, wow, I just did like two marathons worth of work today. And.it felt great, but I realized I was missing all these higher value opportunities and that it was just taking a big toll on me. And I realized if I pause in between my meetings, for example, like just 10 minutes and not do email or not do text messaging, just go for a walk or close my eyes, that all of a sudden it’s like, what the person just spoke to me about, it’s connecting with things someone spoke to, like I had a conversation the week before, or the month before, or the year before, and I’m sort of making these connections that I wouldn’t have otherwise, or I’m tuning into cues that I got when I’m interacting with this person that I want to think more about, I want to focus my attention on, I want to change something in how I interact with other people, and if I don’t pause, I am not open to these cues and these opportunities to evolve.

Debbie:

And you also write about your life as a husband and as a parent of two children, two children, right? Yeah. And as a parent of two children and that also this, what you’re just talking about, taking a pause and realizing that you were, you were kind of missing out on being available and present for those experiences with your kids as well. So you’ve applied this to all areas of your life, right?

Jeff Karp:

Yes. That has been huge. There’s so many things I could say. But I did get to the point where I had become a workaholic at one point. And that had gone on, actually, for many years. I was just addicted to the dopamine. And I think that I needed to find a new way of being, new approaches, new things to experiment with. And I started to, meditation had never worked for me before, but my wife was getting into various realms of spirituality and I started to think, okay, I need to learn about this. This is something that I really need, that had this pain point. And I was bothered. And so I asked my wife to introduce me to the people she was interacting with. I started experimenting with various forms of meditation and I found one – TM or Transcendental Meditation. There’s this one word this mantra we say it over and over and by the way I did it for a few months I find I don’t with any practice sometimes the practice can get in the way of What you’re trying to actually do and but the doing it for a few months, you know 20 minutes in the morning in the evening It gave me this awareness of the thoughts and the emotions associated with the thoughts are fleeting. They don’t last forever. In fact, a lot of them will go away relatively quickly within tens of seconds or a minute or two. And I started to realize that as I’m interacting with people that I love and want to really connect deeply with that there’s an energy of the conversation that if I’m having a conversation with my son or my daughter, for example, and I feel the urge to say something, I mean, it happens all the time and you know, or pull out my phone and be like, Hey, take a look at this. I realized the attention shifts from them to me and then they stop speaking. And that’s not my intention. My intention is to support them to find their voice and to express themselves. And so I’ve been able to use, you know, the concepts in and the tools in lit to be able to develop emotional regulation so that I can press pause in conversations and not intercept or interject conversations and be able to let things kind of pass. And whenever that happens now, I kind of have this little check mark in my mind because I’m like, that’s a win. That’s a win. And that makes me feel good that I was able to sort of stop myself from saying something and continue to be intentional and sort of, you know, with the conversations with my family.

Debbie:

Yeah, I mean, that’s the goal. That is not easy to do, but it’s great that you’ve been able to do that. There’s one more question I want to ask. I know I’m really mindful of the time right now, but it occurs to me when reading your book about these life ignition tools that a lot of neurodivergent kids kind of naturally do the things that you’re recommending, but that these are things that aren’t necessarily, I think, encouraged or celebrated in traditional learning environments. Yeah, I’m thinking about being relentlessly curious, being a deep diver into areas of interest. So just as a way to kind of sum up or wrap up our conversation, do you have any thoughts about ways that we listeners of this show can try to encourage this paradigm shift in some of these institutions or even in our families so that we can be more excited about embracing these concepts?

Jeff Karp:

Yeah, absolutely. I love that question. I think one thing that we can do is to have more conversations about our self evolution and our personal development. I think in our current sort of society, we’re not, it doesn’t seem like we’re having enough conversations around that and the vulnerabilities and the challenges that we’re facing and what we’re doing to address those challenges. Sort of like to have more transparency, I think it is really important for a child to see a parent being vulnerable and going through a challenging time and then seeing them experiment with various strategies, some not working, some working, and sort of seeing them go through that I think can be really positive experience for everybody. And I think that as we start to embrace that more and sort of use this unbelievable brain that we all have. I mean, we have this incredible machinery and we’re using such a small fraction of it. I think as we start to tap into that, like, you know, the prefrontal cortex in our brain is just massive and, and, you know, it’s where we do our emotional regulation and our planning and problem solving. We have this amazing ability for neuroplasticity to rewire our brains. It’s constantly rewiring, but we can choose to do intentional things in our lives and rewire our brains in intentional ways.

And so I think using that consciousness and talking about it can really maximize the ripple effect. And I think that when we do that, it starts filtering into our work. And I think that’s what’s going to help in a major way to sort of change the institutions and the powers to be and focus the development of new technology around that. But I think, you know, we talk about a ripple effect kind of for everything, but to me, the ripple effect needs to be amplified. And that happens when we have conversations, when we really sort of set an intention to not just work on things and evolve ourselves, but discuss it with other people and talk about what works and what doesn’t work and start really making that the focus of our conversations with other people.

Debbie:

That’s great. Thank you. And this is one such conversation, I’m just going to say. So listeners, you’re all part of this conversation as well. You can share this conversation and have more conversations about this. So thank you so much. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you would really want my listeners to know or think about?

Jeff Karp:

I think one thing is, to me, there’s so many simple things that we can do in our day to just change things up a little bit and bring in fresh energy and help us look at the world through different lenses. And one of the things that I think all listeners potentially could do is try if they’re not already doing it is something that I do every day that’s really changed my life, which is I cycle through my senses when I walk outside. And so I’ll say sight. And as I walk in my neighborhood, I’ll look at the trees and the texture of the bark. And I’ll look at the shape of the trunk and all to the tops of the trees and the clouds. And then I’ll say hearing. And I’ll listen for the birds. And I’ll listen for the wind rustling in the leaves and then I’ll say touch and I’ll feel the clothes against my skin. I’ll slow down. I’ll feel my heel hit the ground, the wind against my face. And what I’m doing is so many things are actually happening in a really positive way. I’m connecting more deeply with the world around me. I’m actually practicing focusing my attention. I’m actually I’m re -sensitizing my senses, my aliveness. It’s how we interact with the world. And kind of one by one. And then even when I eat, I’ll close my eyes for a few bites and I’ll notice the shift in the experience, the flavors and the different flavors. And to me, this is something we can all practice or experiment with. And it’s literally changed my life because now when I walk outside, I’m more likely to look at a tree for a long, you know, kind of connected with it. Like I’ll walk and my eyes will be kind of stuck on the tree because I’m now thinking about it. And whereas previously my eyes would be just jumping all around, almost like looking at a screen and, you know, kind of looking at all the crazy things going on on our devices. And yeah, so I feel like, yeah, it’s just, it’s a way to connect more deeply with the world to resensitize our aliveness, to help us focus our attention, and it helps us also tap into our very powerful biology that nobody can take away from us.

Debbie:

That’s great. Thank you for sharing that practice. It’s inspiring for me to think about doing that as well. So again, listeners, the book is called LIT, which stands for Life Ignition Tools. The subtitles use nature’s playbook to energize your brain, spark ideas and ignite action. And it is a book that will definitely get you thinking for sure and excited about thinking. So thank you so much listeners. I will have links in the show notes pages for where you can connect with Jeff and learn more about his work. And Yeah, I just want to thank you for this wonderful conversation today.

Jeff Karp:

Thank you so much. Yeah, I’ve enjoyed it a lot.