When your brain starts working like that, it's very helpful for you to be able to step out of the brain spinning and realize that you are not those thoughts. You are not your brain doing those things. You are the watcher of those thoughts.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I am your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I am a minimally invasive GYN surgeon. That's a board-certified OB-GYN who practices robotic surgery in San Antonio, Texas. I'm coming at you not live, but recorded at Ollywood Studios. Olly is my host, my co-host. He's asleep in the chair being a very good dog at the moment.

I'm so glad that you joined me today. I did a really cool episode last week, if you haven't seen it, episode 92 of the podcast. I can't remember what episode of the show, but it was a talk that I did for Women Leading Women at Northeast Methodist Hospital. We were talking about a book by Brené Brown. I like to say Brené and I go way back, like back to 2010 when she did her TED Talk on vulnerability. Just full disclosure, I don't actually know Brené. I've just read and followed everything she does. I think she's fabulous.

So, when the team asked me to talk regarding this book, which is the one they were reading, The Gifts of Imperfection, I was like oh hell yeah, I'm all in. We did that talk last week, and it's posted. We'll put the link below. If you haven't read this book and you're not familiar with Brené, go look her up. We'll put the link for the Amazon affiliate link in the show notes below for you too.

So, today what we're going to do is we're going to do the Q&A because after I did the talk, we had some really amazing Q&A, which y'all, that doesn't always happen. Y'all have been to events, right? Just kind of the speech ends and everybody's like yeah, it's time to get onto lunch or business. Or they all kind of are asking the same question in different ways.

Well, that didn't happen with this incredible group of leadership women. They had amazing questions, and I thought I would bring them to you for this episode. So that's what we're doing for this episode.

The other thing that you need to know about this episode before well, just go back and look at the first one. That'll really fill you all in. So you won't have to have FOMO, that fear of missing out because you'll know what we're talking about if you go back and look at last week's talk. But the thing that's important is we're going to be talking about some of the lyrics and the context around what we talked about. It had to do with life transformation.

I used an example of this amazing song called The Chicken by Bo Burnham, who's one of my son's favorite artists. We have this thing where it's our jam when he comes home from A&M that we sit by the YouTube channel, and we're like hey, have you heard this one? We play music for each other and have a really good time. Most of the time we sing, which I'm not going to do for you today. Although, Starley suggested I do. Let's not go there. I won't do that to you, Bo.

So anyway, the lyrics to that song are important because it's about a chicken crossing the road, and she gets right in the middle of it. I don't want to ruin what happens next. So go listen to the song. We'll put the YouTube link in the video. He's got a little video there on YouTube. I swear I'm like a thousand of the twenty six million hits on that YouTube channel song. It's pretty funny. I listen to it all the time.

So anyway, what we're doing is we're talking about what happens when you go from being at one level of being in your capacity or in life and then you do a big jump up or a life transformation up to the next step. We talked about some tools that we use and also we talked about what it's like being in the middle. At the end of the talk, I shared that I am right in the middle right now of this big jump from where I was with my practice to where my practice is building.

It's not just a little gradual sloping thing. It's like going from here to here and learning how to cope, being able to handle the larger capacity is part of what we learn to do as a life coach. So the insight of these questions that these women had was so amazing. So I'm going to get right into it with you.

I am going to do something a little bit different today. You're going to see me wear my glasses the whole time because I have really detailed notes. I could be reading them today. So let's start with the first question.

The first question was what keeps you focused on crossing the road? So I talked about how I'm like right in the middle. It feels like deer in the headlights kind of thing or chicken in the headlights because it's right when you put in all this effort. When you're moving, like we just moved my business and moving my house. So there are all of these expenses that come up that you're not used to having and all of that. So the question was, how do you stay focused on the road?

I said, you know what? That's a really good question because I was thinking about that at 3:00 in the morning. That 3:00 a.m. in the morning thing where your brain starts spinning, and you're lying there wide awake, and your brain is going well, what about this? Well what about that?

Did I talk with Melissa about that? Starley said, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have this talk to do tomorrow. Did I do my outline, and are they going to like it? Oh my gosh, I forgot this on the house. Then what about the kids and the dog and the yeah. You've been there, right? I know you have because y'all as my patients tell me that you get stuck in the 3:00 a.m. all the time. Sometimes I think that's just part of what we do as women.

So here's what I do is I'm able to watch my brain spinning. I'm able to now notice when my brain is doing that and go oh, thank you, brain. Like that's just brain subconscious doing what it's supposed to be doing, which is your flight or fight response. Your brain is just trying to protect you. So it's constantly looking out for danger, which is what it's supposed to do. It worked really well for us back in the caveman days, but now it rears its head like this. It's looking for the dangers so that we can avoid them.

When your brain starts working like that, it's very helpful for you to be able to step out of the brain spinning and realize that you are not those thoughts. You are not your brain doing those things. You are the watcher of those thoughts.

This is what we teach in life coaching is the ability to step back and watch your brain as if you're sitting in a movie theater, watching a movie instead of being immersed in it. You all know that experience. You've been in the big screen theaters, and you're watching the movie, and you forget that you're sitting in a seat with armchairs and popcorn and your friend next to you, and you're just immersed in the movie.

But then you need some popcorn. So all of a sudden you realize that you're in the chair, and you pull yourself back out of the movie and realize you're watching the movie. You're not actually in it, and you grab your handful of popcorn.

So you do that with your brain when your brain is spinning at 3:00 in the morning and go oh, that's the movie spinning. I can sit back on the couch and watch that brain spinning. That's really powerful. It's the first step in learning how to meditate, first of all.

But the other thing is once you can be aware of that, then you have the ability to change it. So I have the ability once I can see my thoughts spinning to calm my brain down. Kind of like I would talk to a toddler in the backseat of my car. I don't have toddlers anymore. They're all grown up.

But the idea is that brain spinning is like the two year old making a tantrum. I have the ability to say okay, I understand. I understand you're upset. It's going to be okay. Here's what we're going to do. You can do that with your thoughts too. So at 3:00 a.m. when my thoughts start spinning, I step back and I go I want to choose other thoughts.

Now here's the trick. What other thoughts are you going to choose? Are you going to go right back to spinning? Because sometimes I do that. It just because reflect. But here's the trick is when you're stuck in the middle of the road and you're caught with the deer in the headlights and you've got all those fear thoughts going through the brain, the most helpful thing is to look at the other side. The side that you're going to look at the dream, look at what you're creating and start thinking and focusing on where you're going instead of all the stuff that's spinning in your brain in the middle of the road.

Because when you start thinking about what you're creating and building and what you're going to be in that new level of being, that switches your brain, literally switches your brain from using one part of your brain to another. The creative part of your brain is a completely separate part of your brain, and they can't keep chattering at the same time. So the fear-based brain cannot operate when you're using your creative brain.

So you could use this in other ways. You could pick up any creative endeavor and start thinking about it in the middle of the night, what you're going to paint, what you're going to sing, what you're going to create in your home decor or in your next business plan or whatever your creative mode is.

But in this case, we're talking about the other side of the road, like where you're going in your transformation process. So focus on where you're going. That's my biggest tip there. Your fear cannot sit next to creativity. They can't exist in the same place. So switch into creative future thinking. Question number one. Wasn't that good? So good. These women are so smart. Okay.

The second one was, what do I do to take care of myself? Oh this is a loaded question. It was great. I did not load these questions for the Q&A. I promise you I didn't, but they are feeding so much into what we are planning for our curriculum for The Dr. Crockett Show.

So I actually, I think of myself as a work in progress. I have planned out an eight part series of protocols with two more parts. So it's a 10 show series that's coming up next after I finish prayer and attunement. So we've been going through the seven seeds on the show.

For those of you who are new and haven't joined us, the seven seeds are represented by the seven colors on our show. This is the curriculum that we teach about transforming ourselves to become virtuosa or best feminine versions of ourselves. We believe that as we transform ourselves, that's how we transform and care for the world around us and make it a better place.

So anyway, the seeds are be, which is self-care, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. So if you haven't listened to the first five, I recommend going back and listening to those now. We'll drop those in the show notes too, but I still have prayer and attunement to do. Those are coming in the next month.

After that, I'm starting this 10-piece protocols talk because I've been getting a lot of questions about self-care, and I've been giving a lot of thought to teaching on how we take care of ourselves. So basically I start with four basic, Dr. Miloy calls them the table of health, the legs of the table of health, which is how we eat, how we sleep, how we exercise, and how we manage our stress and emotional state.

So you start with the four table legs. You can go back and watch Dr. Miloy's interviews with me where we talk about the table of health. We'll pull that one out of the archives from almost a year ago, and we'll tag that one in the show notes as well.

What we do is we start looking at what are our habits and where do we want to go? So again, we're talking about transformation. So our habits are what we're doing now. We all have them. You have your own habit protocols, some of them good, some of them bad, but you have a habit for when you wake up.

You have a habit for how you take care of yourself as far as your food. Don't call it a diet, just what are you eating? That's your habit of your diet. Others of you have your habit for your exercise, et cetera, et cetera. So our protocols are what we want to transform into. So when we're changing habit, it's helpful to think about the habits that we want to form and then start bridging those gaps using our transformation tool to figure out how to go from the bad habits to the better protocols.

So a good example of this is I have a habit of coming into the hospital on Wednesdays and Fridays and going to the doctor's lounge and eating bacon and eggs for breakfast. Let me tell you, it's delicious, but you know what I'm supposed to be eating? Whole food plant-based. Yes, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. But my habit is I've been falling back into the habit of eating delicious bacon and eggs.

So my new protocol is going to be how I get my brain to think and wrap back around to not desiring the stuff that I don't want and desiring the things that I do. It's kind of like that. I don't want to get all preachy on you, but Paul in Romans, he talks about, “I'm doing the things that I don't want, and I hate, and I want to do the things that my body doesn't do.” He's linking it to all kinds of stuff.

But it's really funny. He's really talking about what we're talking about here where we're talking about our lower brain or our subconscious and our upper brain, our cortical thinking. So I just think that's kind of funny.

So a couple of other things that I'm going to talk about on the protocols, which are medical protocols. Like, how do you take care of yourself on an annual basis for your medical care? What is happening in the world that's helping us do a better job of that?

For instance, in our office, we're offering Galleri testing, which I talked about on one of my earlier episodes on how not to die. I think it was the original How Not to Die. Let's put that in the show notes too. Got a lot of references. It's almost like things are coming together. What do you think about that?

So early cancer prevention, the Galleri testing has the ability to do a single blood draw and detect 50 different types of bloodborne cancers at their earliest cell stage when they're still at stage zero, which is before you can detect them with imaging and often with chemical testing. It's picking up little small fragments of DNA that it throws off.

So this is going to be the mainstay that's coming for cancer detection for a lot of cancers that we have good screening for like breast, colon, and cervix. But the really exciting thing is the Galleri testing is also going to be instrumental in picking up a couple of cancers that we don't have good screening for and therefore are usually found pretty late. Those are ovarian, pancreatic, and liver cancer. So we're super excited about that.

The other thing that I do is I take hormone replacement therapy. It's good for my brain, my bones, my health, my skin, my moods. So we teach bioidentical or body natural hormone replacement therapy. That's part of what our medical protocols are. Then we also do supplements.

So we believe here on The Dr. Crockett Show in teaching whole food plant based diet, that you can get most of your nutrition through your food. But for what we can't get, we take supplements. So I'm always getting asked by patients what supplements do I need to take? How do I know that they're high quality?

We are answering that with our soon to launch vitamin shop Virtuosa Vitamins, which is carrying vitamins that are manufactured according to FDA manufacturing recommendations. It is just a small boutique curated vitamin shop that has my 12 most commonly recommended vitamins that I've been using forever for my patients. So stay tuned for that.

The last thing that we're going to talk about on the protocols talk and how I take care of myself is I measure. I have a Garmin. I track my sleep, I track the quality of my sleep, I track my stress, I track my blood pressure, I track my weight, my scale up there.

So I'm watching my body composition as I'm transforming into a menopausal woman. Also as I transform my weight to make sure I'm not losing muscle mass as I'm losing body fat and all kinds of stuff. So we are going to talk about how we measure and what our protocols are for that. You can decide for yourself what you really like for that.

Okay, question number three. There's only four, but they're really good. So here's number three. How do I disconnect from work to be at home with family? So I think this is super important. In fact, in my office, when I have nurse practitioners or people working for me that try to take their work home, I really try to dissuade it. I really want my patients, I really want myself and my staff to honor our time at work when we're at work and to honor our time with family and those connections and those relationships after work as faithfully as possible.

There's a couple reasons for that. One is our family is so important to us. Those relationships are just, those connections and those relationships do more for our well-being and our health than most of us realize. So don't take for granted a single second your family and those connections and how important they are.

One of the things I want to talk about is addictions. There was a study that was done in the 70s called Rat Park, and you can look it up on YouTube. It's an interesting study because he took rats and put them in a cage by themselves, and they had two bottles. One was a bottle of water, and the other one was a bottle of water that had either heroin or cocaine in it. The rats who were in isolation by themselves would just hit the cocaine or the heroin to the point of detriment and overdose, and all of them killed themselves. They just overdosed until they were done.

Then he had another cage of rats that socialized together. They were able to eat all they want, have all the sex they want, all the socialization they want. They had the same two bottles, and they would go hit the drugs occasionally for social reasons, but none of them overdosed.

The teaching that came out of that or the realization that came out of it is that the antidote to addictions is not a 12-step program, although I'm not knocking 12-step programs. They're very important, and figuring out how to end your addictions is super important. But the antidote to addictions is socialization and relationships, and that's the part I want you to take out of this.

Okay, question number four, y'all. Question four. How did I handle the challenges of being a mom and work-life balance? Super, super important question. I have to preface this by saying I was super lucky because I've always had help. I've always been blessed by having super great female friends around me. I've had help inside my home with housekeeping.

I know not everybody has that, but we all have the ability to cultivate relationships and friendships and to help each other, no matter what our financial situation is. So it doesn't mean that you have to hire help. It means I want to encourage you to be community for each other.

So in the chicken song that we referenced at the beginning of the show, there's a line that goes she loves her life as a mother and wife, but is that all there is? I want to tell you a little story about my first marriage.

So in my first marriage, I was married for 22 years, with him for 25 years. I have four amazing, incredible, talented, beautiful children from that marriage. That marriage ended in divorce in 2012, and he subsequently passed away of a heart attack in 2017.

That's not the point of the story. The point of the story is that was a very traditional Christian fundamentalism marriage. That's not how I was raised. I was raised Methodist. But he and his family came from a background of more fundamentalist denominations. I bought into that in the marriage. I bought into this whole idea of the submissive wife.

So when we talk about being the submissive wife, there are several different kinds of submission. One is the kind where you're in tandem, in a partnership that is kind and loving and where you are taking care of each other. The other is where one is dominating the other.

I found myself in a place in my marriage where I kind of lost myself. I did it. I agreed with every step of it. There was at one point at which my husband, my ex-husband, he came to me and he said my family and I think that you should not be practicing medicine right now while our children are young. We think you should be home taking care of them. We want you to stop practicing medicine.

I did for a year. I quit medicine for, it was 2004. I tried really hard to be a good stay-at-home mom. I sucked at it. I sucked at it as badly as I sucked at being a life coach. So, I sucked at being a life coach because I'm not that. I'm a surgeon. I want things fixed. My patience is not that of a counselor's. There are many amazing people that are, but I realized that about myself.

Then the thing about the mom is I think I'm an amazing mom. My kids love me, and we have amazing relationships, but I was not meant to stay at home. I was meant to be a doctor and help people and heal people. Without that, I didn't do very well. So out of that, I woke up one day, and I was like I'm like one of those women that I teach women how to identify when they've been cut off from their life. I said I need to go back to work.

So I ended up starting a clinic in Lavernia and worked part-time for there, and that failed. There I ended up in a very large group and robotics came out. So if I hadn't followed that pathway, I wouldn't have gotten to where I am with the robotics.

But I just think it's kind of interesting. Like some people look at me, and they think oh, you've got everything. Like you've got your practice and your kids and your life and you're successful. The thing is, I've been doing this for a long time, and it didn't all happen at once. I certainly didn't do it by myself. So quit being so hard on yourselves. Be gentle with you and take it one step at a time and look for opportunities to do things a little differently.

I had an academic job for a while that I loved at Christa Santa Rosa where I was working for a family practice residency program, directing their OBGYN services. I didn't have call, and I had my four babies during those years that I worked for that incredible team. There are different ways of being creative and finding what fits for you.

What I want you to hear is that I know moms who are just like meant to be stay-at-home moms, and they are incredible, amazing moms. I know homeschooling moms. I have very high-powered business mom friends. I've got other moms that volunteer at their schools. I mean, moms who do everything. We freaking run the world. We're moms. That's what we do.

So what's important for you to hear is that we're not going to criticize each other. We're going to support and love each other where we can. However you're doing it is the best that you're doing. I want you to be kind and compassionate and sweet to yourself.

The other thing I did, this is the last thing I'm going to mention, is I outsourced. I'm using this principle at my practice right now. I outsourced what wasn't absolutely necessary for me to do. Anything that I could outsource, like a cleaning lady, I outsourced. Driving kids around, I outsourced that.

What that did is it freed me up to do the things that only I could do with my kids. So the time I had with them when I came home from work was really that time where we were having quality time together and doing things as a family instead of me having to do the house cleaning and all of that stuff.

So I'm going to encourage you to use that as a tool also in your own life as well as your businesses. Figure out what only you can do and as much as you can outsource what is not necessary for you to do to other people.

So that's all I got for you today. Thank you for joining me for The Dr. Crockett Show and tuning into this question and answer from the life transformation speech that was done last week. Again, if you haven't watched that, go back and take a look at it. This will make a lot more sense to you. Until next week, be kind to yourself and be kind to others. Love you guys. See you next week. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.