it's really really hard to be stressed out and full of wonder at the same time and I'll prove it to you in this video I sit down with a woman and we talk about how cultivating wonder reduces stress and we do a superficial experiment at first and then we do a deeper experiment later on in the video and I invite you to do the experiments with us because this gets it to be in your body not just in your mind and it can totally change your relationship with stress so take a moment close your eyes take a breath all right i want you to imagine that you are in a jungle and you hear something in the woods just like behind you you hear some rustling you look over and it is a tiger and it is a massive tiger it is huge it is coming at you it's You can smell it it's starting to run you can feel its feet land it's such a big tire you start running as hard as you can you are running as fast as you can but it's catching up to you it's going to get you you know that this is your time to die you're This is it it's coming for you you're about to feel it pounce and now I just want you to wonder how much it weighs it's a crazy thing that our brain has a really hard time holding fear and stress when we're in wonder when we are in awe of life or anything and it's what makes people really capable of seeing different points of view and coming up with great solutions to problems is to be in wonder to have an open mind and to be in awe of the world so this is how it works partially it's because you can't really be defensive if you're in wonder so somebody comes up to you and they say "You're an complete asshole." And if you're in wonder the answer is "Oh how is that how do you see that?" There's nothing to defend you're actually starting with a question which immediately makes the other person feel heard wait I just called you an you're supposed to fight with me and you're you're not taking this personally you're what you're asking me questions how is that possible this is I mean I I know you've learned some of this anyways in the connection course when we talk about wonder but the the thing is is that it just immediately takes the pressure the stress out of your system and it also takes the pressure and stress often not all the time but often out of the people around you so wow that's a lot less stressful the people around you are less stressful you're less stressed there's less for you to defend even def being defensive is quite a stressful act if you think about any time that you've been defensive it's not like I was just relaxing while being defensive with somebody you know just never happens so it's an incredibly useful thing but most importantly is that it's just really really hard for your brain to be in wonder and to be in fear wonder and stress at the same time and so often times when we're in a stressful situation and we're trying to solve a problem which is usually what our brain tells us we need to do when we're stressed how do I work out more to how do I solve this big how do I market the thing how do I get this thing done that I don't know how to do one of the best ways to figure that out is to be in wonder so it's not well the way to work out is to go to the gym every it's oh I wonder what exercise would be the most enjoyable exercise what would be the exercise that I could do that I would want to do so bad that I would get up off of Tik Tok to go do it how do I find out what that exercise that's all questions that come from wonder how do I have a marketing campaign that makes me feel more connected to the people we're selling to and then feel more connected to me those are all questions that are answered by wonder instead of oh I know I have got these six things to do that everybody tells me to do in the marketing campaign and I make my web page like this wonder is the thing that opens up the the aperture to life and it solves the problems that you think you need to resolve when you're under stress and it immediately neurologically in your brain right now changes your stress to how much does the tiger weigh in this experiment you're going to need a pen and a paper and it's really simple you're going to write down the thing that's stressing you out the most right now whether it's something at your work or something in a relationship or anything you can think of that is creating a lot of stress for you and I want you to write down 15 things 15 things that you don't know about it stuff that you have no idea about so if it is your relationship and you're fighting with your wife then what's the experience like for her is something you don't know anything about or what's the neurological causation of fights is another one or what's the thing that you're actually scared of happening what are you fighting for exactly what what does your ego have to do with fight so whatever it is that you have no idea about regarding the fight or about the business problem or about the problem with your boss or about your boss or whatever the stress is I want you to write down 15 things that you know nothing about regarding this issue and when you're done writing those 15 things then you're going to write one question that begins with how or what around each one of those things so if you don't know what your boss is really trying to get you to do what is my boss trying to get me to do or if you don't know how your wife feels about the marriage then you can say I wonder how my wife feels about our marriage and so just write those questions down and be in the wonder of those questions pause the video go ahead and do that okay now that you're playing the video again and you have that list of questions about things you don't know anything about notice what's happened to your stress notice the action items that you didn't have before that you have now notice what questions you can ask of different people to allow you to solve this problem this is how powerful wonder is in regards to stress [Music] when I was a kid my dad was you know in the teenage years not a great father to say the least right alcoholism abusive verbal abuse it was just horrible and there was this necessary step that I had to take to separate myself from my father i had to take some steps where he was the bad guy and I was oppressed by him so that I could create enough separation so I could find myself or start to find myself but at some point that anger at my father prevented my healing so separating myself and being angry at him was a very necessary step and also learning to forgive and love him was a necessary step for me to be able to actually be authentic and to be myself and when I was learning to forgive and love him the first opening the first thing was curiosity was wonder and that wonder was about what was happening with my father what what was his childhood like how did this all go down and then after that wonder started opening up then I started to try to find out what reality actually was what what's actually happening with my dad i had a whole bunch of preconceived notions he was trying to control me blah blah blah but I really wanted to get in touch with what was real and that was the second step and then the third step was to do experiments to say "Oh if I treat my dad like this what happens if I treat my dad like that what happens?" And that just naturally came into a welcoming and a loving there was also something in there with the experiments of boundaries that was really important what were the boundaries I was going to draw with my father and his alcoholism that would allow me to maintain myself enough to be able to stay in wonder and to stay in curiosity so this is the exact same steps that you would take for stress so first how do you create enough separation take a vacation get enough sleep whatever you can do to create enough separation where wonder can open up the wonder about stress can be on an intellectual level oh I notice when I have these thoughts stress increases or decreases or I notice that when I talk to myself in this way stress increases or decreases so it can be an intellectual wondering there's also a really important sematic wondering oh right here here stress is happening to me what happens in my body if I resist it what happens in my body if I tell it to off what happens in my body if I try to enjoy it or what is it exactly that's happening in my body where is it exactly in my body so that all that wonder sematically and intellectually really important and the the the first steps and then some like I said some boundaries are going to be necessary right and so those boundaries are going to be something my phone use right when I wake up creates stress so I'm not going to use my phone for the first 15 minutes of the day or eating crap food before bed makes me feel stressed in the morning so I'm not going to do that and you're looking for any of those things that can that you can actually activate on with with relative ease that can reduce that now you're wondering about what's actually true for the stress where it came from like I I could with my father and so how much is the stress trying to care for you how much of the stress is trying to hurt you what's the purpose of it how did it learn to come into existence what's its background you're tracing through your system how this whole thing came into existence and you can notice even right now in your body when you think about that there's a settling that happens of the stress just to oh what's what's going on here and so that's the next step in it and as you do these experiments what you'll start to notice is oh when I love stress it's really effective it's really wow this is really effect I love it and it changes and it's feels seen and and then with that happening more and more you'll just notice that the love naturally show shows up naturally you start loving the stress there's a couple eddies or backwaters that you can go into that are really important to know the first one is and almost everybody does it they realize oh if I can love and welcome stress then stress starts easing starts going way and so then they start loving and welcoming stress to make it go away and then it stops working because if you're loving something to go away you're not loving it anymore and so and so if you find yourself in that place recognize oh I'm doing this as a form of management and when I manage it it doesn't managing stress like that doesn't actually help stress be seen or feel fully felt in the body there's no wonder in it anymore and so it stops working and so the other backwater that you can go into is that you can try to jump to loving stress okay Joe I heard you say blah blah blah blah i'm just going to skip all this wonder and curiosity thing and I'm going to go whack i'm going to just go to love stress but love doesn't work like that you know it works like that with babies thank goodness you know you just immediately love a baby but if you feel oppressed by something you it's very very very difficult to love you can't just force yourself into loving it so you have to be mad at it for a while you have to resist it like I said a little while ago and then you have to allow that wonder to open up so it's really hard to just force the love especially if you feel oppressed so so that's those are the two backwaters but in general the the main component of loving something is to just let it unfold through wonder and exploration and experimentation and and just really try to understand what's happening and then that slowly turns into love through experimentation of oh how how does it react if I relate to it like this how does it react if I relate to it like this and that can happen either in your body or that can happen just experimenting out in the