Skot Waldron:
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Welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of people in order to unlock the potential of our businesses, our organizations, and just humanity in general. I am here today with Dr. Imran Khawaja, and he is a psychiatrist that is going to drop some self empowering knowledge on us today. We're going to talk a little bit about COVID and what that reaction has done to our minds, and how we can get past that, how we can structure or give ourselves a little bit of grace and structure, and how we can change this stuff up here to help us have better output and better relationships in the future. So, I'm super, super stoked for this. Get your pen out. There's some awesome quotes that we have throughout the episode here that you're going to want to write down. And if you're driving, then either pull over and do it, which I know you're not going to do or just wait and listen to it later. All right, you ready? Let's do it.
All right. Welcome, Imran. We are excited to have you and I love brain stuff. I love everything that has to do with the way people think, and why they think what they think, and why they operate the way they do. So, let's just dive right in and talk about that, our thought process, the way we think. Your book, Cycle of Fulfillment, goes a lot into this, and so let's talk about that. Talk about Cycle of Fulfillment, talk about what that means and why you named the book that and what the premise is.
Imran Khawaja:
Sure, sure. So, I mean, my brother and I, Rizwan and myself, we are really avid readers. We have been into looking at how we can help people. So, as a psychiatrist, I've been doing it, but now we try to do it at a different level that we can reach more and more people. This book, Cycle of Fulfillment, is more like a combination of reading a lot of material, going to so many seminars. As I said, as a trained psychiatrist, I have some knowledge about human mind, but then learning from other authors, things like people from Tony Robbins, or Jack Canfield, and authors like those. So, we look at what are things which people want to do to improve their lives, the quality of their life? So, what should we do so that one could improve their quality of life?
So we looked at how people go after goals, like financial goals, for example, career goals, relationship goals, and that is all, all very good. We want to have all those goals, physically fit, have lots of money but one thing which is very important is having mental and emotional fulfillment. Now, it's a bit different, a lot of times people confuse pleasure with fulfillment but pleasure is short-lived versus fulfillment is long-lived. So, if you look at us, just we were talking before, if somebody has got lots of money and they led a miserable life fighting with people, not really feeling happy in every moment and they are at their death bed, what quality of life is that? I mean, it is the moments which we cherish, the moments where we feel good about ourselves, about relationships. So, it's in the moments where everything is there, the fulfillment is there in the moment.
So, if a person cannot have feelings of happiness, comfort, peace, and they're miserable no matter what they do, it's not going to be a fulfilled life. So, we think that in the Cycle of Fulfillment, if we have five goals to have a good, complete life, which is fulfilled, we should have goal number one as mental and emotional fulfillment, which means that most of the time you are able to be in a good emotional state where you're not harboring any negative emotions like hatred, jealousy, negative competition, but you are in a good emotional state, positive emotional state.
And there are a lot of ways one could get there, because if you have a good emotional state and you practice, just like you practice build a muscle, you develop a muscle of being in a good emotional state. The other goals, which is goal number two, which is your physical health. Goal number three, which is relationship with yourself, God and others. Number four, as career and business and number five is financial wealth. You can attain all of those goals and then you will be fully fulfilled rather than just going after money and not working and focusing on being in a good emotional state, mental and emotional fulfilled state.
SKOT WALDRON:
So let me list those again. So number one is mental and emotional. Number two, physical. Number three is relationship with myself, with others, with God or whoever my belief system is. Fourth is business-
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
And career, yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
... And career and fifth is financial.
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
Financial, because financial is extremely important because people say, "Oh, we should not run after money," but that's a negative way of looking at money. Money is not good or bad, money will enhance whoever you are. If you are a good person and you have a lot of money, it will enhance all of those qualities. If somebody's bad, money may enhance those qualities. So money is something if somebody tells me money doesn't buy happiness. Well, I tell them, "Listen, if you have a lot of money, you give it to somebody who needs, you are going to buy happiness because you're going to be happy helping other people."
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. That's a good point, I can go along with that. You talk about these things. When you see people, your patients, are they coming to you more because of depression issues or more for anxiety type issues, like I see the two different buckets, right? What do most people come to you for?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
As a psychiatrist, I see a lot of patients, especially nowadays with COVID. Our practice has grown. I mean, I just started my own practice a couple of years ago, but I've been in academic medicine for all my life as a professor at UT Southwestern at University of Minnesota. But right now with the COVID, everybody is under stress, people are feeling that stress, the uncertainty, not knowing what's going to happen to them. Physically with the health wise, financially, what's going to happen to the whole world. So when we talk about depression and anxiety there are kind of... They go hand in hand. There are patients who can just be depressed and anxious, but they go hand in hand. But so we are seeing a lot of people who are depressed, they feel down, they have lost their job or lost a loved one because if you look at depression, depression is a sense of loss, people get depressed.
Psychodynamically, what happens is when people lose something, there's a sense of loss, they get depressed. It could be loss of self-esteem, relationships, money, career, but anxiety is different in the sense that it is more looking at dynamically a separation, you people worry about losing things or getting separated from others. So anxiety is a little bit different in that way, but usually we see them all together in a sense that there is so much of comorbidity. People who are depressed, it is very natural for them to be worried about things and to have panic attacks, for example. So I just saw a patient who has had a lot of losses, and now she is being sued for something and then she's having panic attacks and she's depressed as well so there's a lot of co-morbidity.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay, that makes sense. So during the pandemic, how can people work through this? How do we stay calm? How do we just kind of get through this process together?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
You know what I mean, as I said, in my book with my brother, Rizwan and I, we talk about the goal number one, remember goal number one is to become a master of being in a good, positive mental and emotional state, to be a mentally and emotionally fulfilled. It's easier said than done but look at that. I mean, if somebody is really stressed out, we're not saying that people should not have negative thoughts or they can totally get rid of that, that's not possible. But then there are ways you can be aware of your own negative emotions, negative thoughts. I mean, the awareness is key number one, because once you make yourself aware that you are getting into a negative thought pattern, you want to break that pattern right away. So for example, if you're asking about COVID, somebody is feeling stressed, what's going to happen to my job? What's going to happen to finance it? If they keep on thinking in that pattern, it is going to become a pattern in their mind that they're going to have all of these worrying type of thoughts.
Now, you can give different meanings to different events. Can you tell me if there are people who have done better in COVID? So for example, I have patients who are not doing well, and then I help them with that. But there are patients who come to me and I asked them, listen, has COVID in affected you? They say, "Yes, absolutely. I'm having so much fun because I'm spending time with my family. I never had that time." I have a friend of mine, who's a surgeon and I asked him, "How have you been buddy?" But he said, "Listen man, hadn't had this much fun ever in my life because I've cut back on my work. I'm spending time with my family. I'm going on jobs. We are going on camping trips and things with my family whereas before I could never do that."
So it's the meaning which you are going to give to a particular event is going to determine how you're going to feel about it. So remember when we talk about emotional, mental fulfillment, there are a lot of techniques which a person can use to develop and master, which can help them be in that state. So for example, changing the meaning of things to something which is more empowering. So same thing can happen to two different people. One might say, "Well, this is the end of my life," the other person might think, "Oh well, this is a new beginning for me." So I bet both of those two people, same thing is happening, their outcomes are going to be different.
So if you are in a good emotional state, you train yourself to stay like that. You program yourself to give positive meanings to some sort of events which may be negative. You are in a state where you always in a good emotional state. You may have a crisis, but you train yourself to bring back yourself into that home emotional state, we call it as home emotional. So what is your home emotional state? Is it feeling at peace, happy, wanting to others versus feeling worried, pissed off or angry at others? So you want to cultivate developing that habit that every time we get into a negative emotional state, you bring it. With COVID times, yes, obviously there's stress going on but you tell me if a person is in a negative emotional state versus a positive emotional state which one is going to do better with crisis. Obviously the guy who is or the person who is in a positive emotional state.
SKOT WALDRON:
So you're talking about empowering ourselves, empowering our thoughts and avoiding a... I coach a lot of people through this principle of inhibition versus prohibition. Prohibition being situations that we can't control, things that are put upon us. COVID, we couldn't control COVID, it was put upon us. We didn't have control over it but how do we make sure that we're not turning a prohibition into an inhibition, taking a prohibition like COVID and turning it into something that is now it's me holding myself back because of my thought process, because of the things that I feel like I can't do because of COVID. But the thing is what can I do? Yes, COVID is a reality. What can I do now to empower my thoughts, empower myself, to make progress and I see you're talking about that, right?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
Absolutely. So it comes back to the same, where you're absolutely right about this concept. Because there are things which you could do, giving a meaning, you know what I mean? Same thing is happening, COVID is happening, even if a person has lost a job or their business have gone down, the asking one sells empowering questions is one of the keys, which I think the idea comes from Tony Robbins, where you want to make sure that you're asking yourself questions because questions bring out the best or the worst in you. So if you're asking a question, why did this happen to me? Why did this COVID had to happen and the business had to go down versus you ask yourself, what can I do in this situation? Who should I ask to? Can I take some courses? Can I get some coaching? Can I read which would help me understand myself better and change the meaning of it.
Now, obviously there are businesses right now which are thriving. I was just talking to a friend of mine who's a real estate guru and he is from Houston. He's got a lot of properties and he was telling me that, "Listen Imran, COVID has affected so many people's lives, but listen, how many people have done so well?". Look at the businesses which have done well I mean, look at the vaccine industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the masks industry. So there are always opportunities but the key thing is you've got to have to train yourself to manage your emotional and mental state where if negative things are going on, it's not...
So the concept from Stephen Covey, for example, is about reacting versus responding. Same thing with Wayne Dyer used to talk about being responsible and acting with responsibility versus acting with the response disability. So we want people to act with the responsibility, being able to choose a response rather than react. So when you are reacting, you're reacting on a knee jerk reaction, something bad happens, person gets freaked out versus responding to it, increasing the time between a stimulus and a response, that's what I'm talking about. That's what my brother Rizwan, we talk about developing skills to learn where you can manage your emotional state. Because if you are in a positive, emotional state, it's going to be much easier for you to respond versus to react. You train yourself with meditations, with being mindfulness, with asking yourself right questions, but also learning how to change the meaning of things.
Like as a psychiatrist, as a psychotherapist, this is a lot of times what I do with my patients. What is the meaning you're giving it to this event in your life, could it be something different which you have not looked at because as humans, we have a subconscious mind, we have a huge reservoir of energy. Rizwan has written out the book, which was the power of your dream self image, like what you see yourself in your dreams. So subconscious mind has a lot of resources and we don't tap into it. We can only tap into it if we work with a subconscious mind and we are in a positive, emotional state, we learn our techniques, skills, build that muscle to be in that emotional state where we can manage crisis.
I give a lot of talks about crisis. Now, I've got several friends in China, and then we've got some businesses over there where in Chinese, there's no word for crisis. Did you know that?
SKOT WALDRON:
No. What do they say?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
So there's no word for crisis. They use two words for crisis. One of them is danger, the other is opportunity. So this is actually from president Kennedy's speeches as well. He used to talk about that. That crisis is danger and opportunity. So when people go through crisis... Now just imagine we are going through this pandemic a human being, as organizations, as countries, states, people. Now we are going through this crisis. Now, if we deal with it in a positive frame of mind, we learn from this crisis. Don't you think we would be better off if we manage this crisis well as human being, as a nation, for example.
We may have made admit mistakes in terms of managing it, but we're going to learn from it and the crisis can make a stronger, if something bad happens in the future, we are going to be in a better position to manage and deploy things and get vaccines. Just look at what crisis did to us. I mean, we have never had vaccines created in such a short period of time. So this is all crisis. Crisis is danger, but this is an opportunity we were able to do that. So the crisis is danger plus opportunity. So this is a huge crisis we are going through I mean, I think Tony Robbins to say that crisis creates breakthroughs.
SKOT WALDRON:
I love that concept. Crisis being defined as danger plus opportunity. And that's so important to remember because as we go into and I'm going to tie this into the workforce. I'm going to tie this into workplace culture. I deal a lot with businesses and, but I think all this is very pertinent, very interesting and important for people in the workplace, leaders in the workplace and employees in the workplace to understand that bad things are going to happen. Bad relationships in a way we communicate. How can you take that and not use it as a way to shut down, but as a way to reframe the event and restructure the event. So how would you do that with somebody that had a really bad interaction with their boss? Their boss came down on them. There's lack of alignment, there's no real strong communication. What do I do with that?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
So remember like when we talk about Cycle of Fulfillment, goal number three is his relationships with others. It includes everybody else, including your boss. So that, it starts with having a good relationship with yourself, meaning that you feel comfortable. Again, I mean, sometimes bosses can be jerks, I'm not saying it's not possible, but the key concept is that you, you want to be comfortable with the relationship that you have with yourself and your self-esteem, you're developing that muscle of being in a positive, emotional state, putting right meaning. So if the question is where, well how do you manage that? You want to manage your own emotional state first because if a boss is upset with you, when for whatever reason you want to give him some benefit of doubt, if you know him or her well, that's a different situation, then you know what the boss is going.
But if you don't know the boss very well, you do want to give him or her some benefit of doubt, but managing your own emotional state. But then there's a concept of, you may have heard about it in business of crucial conversations. There was a New York times best selling book. I forgot, there were several authors and it's been out there, crucial conversations, developing this techniques where you can have conversations where your stakes are high, the opinions differ and then there's a lot of risk involved. So if you're able to develop that skill where you can have crucial conversations with your boss, meaning that you are providing some psychological safety, you're not just attacking, you're not in the mode of either becoming violent, like attacking him or becoming silent where you're saying, "Okay, that's it, I'm not going to deal with it."
That is not crucial conversations. Crucial conversation is where you're able to provide some psychological safety around that person or group, or if it's the boss versus and obviously you're not going to talk to him when he's having some crisis going on but at some point you want to arrange a meeting, but you want to create some psychological safety, but you want to get to a point where you're engaging it. You're not either making him get angry or he's not closing down, or he's still engaged so keeping that person engaged is the key skill. So when we talk about relationship in the chapter of relationships, we talked about crucial conversations as well. How important it is.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay, I like that a lot. What's one exercise the audience can... A simple exercise the audience can grab onto out of this about managing our thoughts, about reshaping events? What something we could do, whether it's a phrase, whether it's an exercise, what's something we do?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
So here's the thing, well, one of the thing is that people don't understand our subconscious mind is so powerful. Now, if you talk about like any author, any big public speaker, motivational speaker, coaches, all of them talk about the subconscious mind. Now it is so crucial to kind of prime your subconscious mind on a daily basis, you know what I mean? You cannot just say, "Okay, I'm going to do one exercise or meditation once a day and I'm done." Can somebody go to the gym for one day and say, "I'm done for a year?" I mean, that never happens. So same thing, you want to prime your mind, you want to prime your subconscious mind every day when you wake up. You want to... So we have some exercises which we do and a lot of offices do it like Tony Robbins does it, Jack Canfield but getting up in the morning, just spending 10 minutes in a state of gratitude, meaning that you get into the habit where you are writing things down but emotionally feeling things which have happened to you, which you're grateful about.
It could be big things like people have kids, they're happy about it. Things which you're happy about, you're grateful about because when you in a state of gratitude, the fear factor goes down. You cannot be grateful and be fearful at the same time. Plus doing some priming exercises, some meditations, which we have included in our book as well. But one of them is like visualization, because remember you are priming your subconscious mind, and I can give you one example. I think this was quoted by some of the other authors as well. Some people did some research just recently what they did was they wanted to get an idea... So the group of researchers would go say New York city, Grand Central Station and they would have a cup of coffee with them and say, "Listen buddy, can please hold this cup of coffee for me."
And the person would say, "Yeah, I will hold it," and then hold it for two minutes and they'll do something and then they go away. So after they did it 100 or 200 peoples, what they did was that with some of the people, the coffee cup was warm, a bit hot. And with some of them, it was a cold coffee cup, it was cold so the cup was cold. So later on, they had tracked those people, they went back to those people and said, "Listen, we are going to give you 20 bucks. We're going to give you 20 bucks, we're going to have you just read a two or three minute story line about a person, you can call that as a hero or a villain, whatever the character is. And you tell us what your perception is about that person." Same word, same story.
So say 50 people who had cold cup of coffee, 50 who had warm cup of coffee, the story is the same, the character is the same, no changes in word. So the people, all of them read the story and they were asked, "What's your perception of that character?" So the people who were holding a warm cup of coffee, 90% of them said the guy was really warm, he was giving, he was like able to help and he may have gone through some crisis. Whereas 90% of the people who were given cold cup of coffee, they said, "Yeah, he was a little bit callous. He was cold, he was not very warm?" So just imagine the power of priming your subconscious mind, you get my point?
SKOT WALDRON:
I love it. This is why I love summer so much, Imran. This is why I love summer so much so thanks for explaining that.
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
Priming your subconscious, the subconscious, especially when we sleep, we can go to sleep talking about or having good visualization exercise, what we want because subconscious responds to emotions and symbols and pictures. So if you wake up in the morning, you do five minutes of gratitude, five minutes of visualization, imagining what you want in your life. Your subconscious mind is going to look at those, it's going to give you a positive meaning of events rather than a negative meaning. So you have to prime, you have to train your subconscious. That's a must. I mean, we do exercises with our practice, practice is growing. So we have meetings and we do visualization exercises for all of us in a group setting where we think about and imagine how things going well in life. So you're priming ourselves.
SKOT WALDRON:
So do you have a preference whether people do that in the morning or in the evening, is there a reason why?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
I think it's before going to sleep can be very powerful. Remember, most authors believe in the power of subconscious mind. They believe in the fact that when we sleep, our subconscious mind is active, which is we believe in that dreams come out in a subconscious mind, but I think once you do it in the morning, for sure, because it sets the tone for the whole day but then giving you stuff two or three minutes before you drift into your sleep is nothing bad. I'm talking about 10, 15 minutes tops, 10 minutes in the morning, maybe five minutes at night before you go to sleep, but do it in a way where it is rituals. You know, rituals set us free, habits set us free. So if you make it as a habit, it is going to work for you. If you don't do it, it's not going to work. You and I, as coaches, we can help people do things, but they have to do their own pushups.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's right. We can give them the tools, but it doesn't always lead to the... I say information transfer doesn't lead to transformation, correct?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
Absolutely, I'm going to write it down.
SKOT WALDRON:
Write it down. I've been writing down all the things you've been saying this whole time, got my whole page is like full of quotes from you but this is fantastic. I'm so grateful for this insight and I'm going to share this with my wife because she loves this stuff as well and I hope my audience got a lot out of this. How can people get in touch with you, if they want to find out more about your book, if they want to find out more about you, maybe book you to speak at an event or come work with them in some way, how did they get in touch with you?
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
So, I mean like my website is mdtrucare.com, that's my practice website. Our book website is Cycle of Fulfillment. I can give you... Those have my email as well. Our phone number. I can give you my phone number, office phone number, which is 817-722-6078, 817-722-6078. On our website mdtrucare.com there's an email and you can also contact us at Cycle of Fulfillment website.
SKOT WALDRON:
Beautiful mdtrucare.com. And it's...
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
Mdtrucare, T R U C A R E
SKOT WALDRON:
T R U. Yeah. T R U C A R E. And then cycleoffulfillment.com. This is awesome. Thank you so much, Imran. I really appreciate you being here and sharing your insights with us and your knowledge. It's deep and I love that. That's what I love. It's all this stuff is what makes us tick and makes us successful in life and empowered. And that's. That's wonderful. So thank you.
IMRAN KHAWAJA:
Thank you so much for having me, really appreciate it.
SKOT WALDRON:
There are so many things, I had to write them all. I can't even remember them all. Let's just go through. So rituals set us free, start rituals, healthy rituals that set us free. You can't be grateful and fearful at the same time, they can't occupy the same space. We say light and darkness cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Crisis, how the Chinese only have a word for crisis. It's danger or opportunity, but they say it's danger plus opportunity. What are we going to do with this that helps us not react, but respond with power. If you can change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Think about that. Give meaning to events, give a different meaning to it, shape your thoughts, your mind. And instead of being a victim of your circumstance, empower yourself, change the way you think about that specific event, reframe it to create opportunity and growth opportunities in the future.
I'm so grateful for Imran and his insights. If you want to find out more or hear more of these episodes, you can go to my website at skotwaldron.com. You can also visit my YouTube channel, like, subscribe, share, do all those things. I would love it if you would share this episode with anybody you care about, anybody you love that needs to hear something about reframing the conversation of COVID. So thank you everybody. I will see you next time.
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