Part 1 Super Psyched: The Science of Meaningful Connections with Dr. Adam Dorsay

Exploring the Power of Connection with Dr. Adam Dorsay

In this episode of Peaceful Life Radio, hosts David Lowry and Don Drew interview Dr. Adam Dorsay, a licensed psychologist and executive coach from Silicon Valley. Dr. Dorsey discusses his new book, 'Super Psyched: Unleash the Power of the Four Types of Connection and Live the Life You Love,' elaborating on the concept of 'connection' and its importance in achieving happiness and meaning. The conversation touches on the notion of a 'connection formula,' the impact of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), the importance of mindfulness, and the significance of maintaining meaningful relationships. Dr. Dorsay offers insights into how individuals can cultivate and understand their own unique connection needs to lead a more fulfilling life.

00:00 Introduction to Peaceful Life Radio

00:22 Meet Dr. Adam Dorsay

00:54 The Concept of Connection

02:01 Defining Connection and Its Importance

02:54 The Four Types of Connection

03:31 Challenges in Finding Meaning

04:57 The Impact of Social Media and FOMO

07:40 Mindfulness and Being Present

09:20 Understanding the Connection Formula

13:38 The Role of Intentionality in Relationships

15:26 The Importance of Friendships

19:58 Conclusion and Parting Thoughts

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Transcript

David Lowry: 0:30

Peaceful life radio, your place on the internet for discovering how to live a more peaceful life. I'm David Lowry, and I'm here with my good cohost, Don Drew, and together we'll explore ideas and challenging opportunities for achieving a more peaceful life and society. So, please download and share our podcast with everyone you care about and contact us with your questions and ideas. Hey, Don, what's our topic this week?

Don Drew: 0:52

David, in this week's segment, we'll be talking with Dr. Adam Dorsay, a licensed psychologist and executive coach from Silicon Valley, where he serves high achieving adults, including executives, entrepreneurs, and professional athletes. He is also the host of Super Psyched Podcast and is joining us to talk about his new book, Super Psyched, Unleash the Power of the Four Types of Connection and Live the Life You Love. Adam, we welcome you to Peaceful Life Radio.

Adam Dorsay: 1:19

Don and David. So glad to be with you.

David Lowry: 1:22

We're glad you're with us too. Well, wow. Well, let's jump right into this and tell us why I made you decide to write Super Psyched.

Adam Dorsay: 1:29

I'm so glad you did. You know, Irv Yalom, who is one of the greatest psychology contributors, he said that every book he ever wrote and excuse my language, but he said every, this is a direct quote. Every book I ever wrote bit me in the ass. And this book bit me in the ass. There was no question. It was almost like it was, it took me and said, you've got to write me. And it was the byproduct of 20, 000 hours of being a therapist, hearing people talk about this nebulous term called connection that they were all seeking and reading lots of books, talking about connection, and of course, having a podcast talking to some of the smartest people in the world. Guess what they were talking about this nebulous thing called connection. You look it up in the dictionary. It's a pretty unremarkable word. It's like connecting to train cars. I don't think that's what the people have been talking about in terms of being a precursor to meaning and happiness. And then you look it up in the American psychological associations definition. Also. Really, really not even half baked. It's lackluster. So what I wanted to do was spend some time looking at this word that keeps showing up that everybody's talking about in his nebulous in terms of definition, but seems to be the thing that we're all chasing in life. Seems to be the precursor for meaning. It seems to be the precursor for happiness. And the first thing I did was I went about trying to define it and I just found it so joyful getting into it. I had 10 other licensed mental health professionals look at my definition, my working definition, uh, spoiler alert. It means vitality. It means what brings you alive. It's life force. These are some of the things I spent a whole page with a working and I want to emphasize working definition of it. And then I talked about maybe some ways that you can find it in the four areas. There are books about connecting with your spouse. There are books about connecting with your children or your clients. But what about the four ways we connect, whether it's with ourselves, others, the world and something greater? I've not seen that done. Not in this way. So I was stoked to spend 20 ish months writing this book because it mattered to me.

David Lowry: 3:40

As someone who thinks about this a lot myself, my definition is meaning making. And when you talk about connection, Don and I both find the same thing. People are wanting to have sort of relationship that has meaning in it. And then when we say, well, what would bring you meaning exactly? And then that's where it gets kind of tricky, isn't it? So, why don't you tell us what does that mean? And maybe. along the way, tell us some things that are keeping us from getting all of that wonderful meaning in our life.

Adam Dorsay: 4:10

David, those are great questions. So, first off, what meaning is for all 8 billion of us is different.

David Lowry: 4:18

Mm hmm.

Adam Dorsay: 4:19

Each of us has a different sense, a different form of a connection formula. I'm just gonna give the obvious answer. In my own life, my father absolutely could go through his life in several lifetimes, not touching a pet. I can barely make it through a day. Part of my connection formula is I gotta be around animals. I love 'em. I like a shortish opera like Carmen or something like that. He can go for like a six hour Wagnerian thing and be completely dialed in. I would call it a very expensive place to sleep. And so we all have different, very, we all have different ideas of what connection means. And it's so sad that many of us spend our day engaged in activities that are disconnecting that are not, if we actually saw what we were doing, if we were followed like they do on Parks and Recreation, and The Office, by camera and saw, how are we allocating this one non renewable resource that we have, it's the thing called time. You can lose your health and get it back. You can lose your money and get it back. You cannot lose your time and get it back. So. Here we are. If we were to look at a pie chart of how we're actually allocating our time and asking ourselves if we could see it. We would say to ourselves, Oh my God, this is not how I want to use my life I'm on social media comparing myself to other people. Do I feel better on the other side of that? Oh, how good for them. They just got themselves a new 80, 000 car. Boy, I have my old beater up. I'm not feeling so good about that. This guy's on a vacation. They're living their best life. Now, I'm not saying not to do that. There's some people I want to cheer for, and there's some people I love seeing that around, but I don't necessarily want to be a consumer. I want to be more of a creator. One of the things I know for sure is that most of us should consume less and create more. And there are so many opportunities for us to consume. There's Incredible amounts of streaming content on various channels. Just look at your Whatever TV you're using on my Roku. I can , go to Netflix. I can go to Hulu. I can go to HBO max I can go I'd have trouble calling it max. You can go to any of these places and boy they've got they've got a lifetime worth of awesome stuff! Back when we were kids, it was like we had three channels and a fourth one that sucked. There was not all that much to choose from, let alone this little thing that we carry on in our pocket, that's constantly saying, look at me, feed me. It's a phone, it's this blue light saying, , do this and everything becomes urgent rather than important. Dwight Eisenhower would talk about these two axes, urgent versus important. And we're dealing with urgent stuff all day because everything seems, Oh, my gosh, I gotta deal with this. I gotta deal with this. And then we go through our lives thinking we have endless time, but we're not dealing with what's Important. And what's important is really recognizing Memento Mori. Dudes, we're going to die one day. We only have so many Mondays left, to quote Jody Wellman. We only have so many Mondays. Let's get on it.

Don Drew: 7:09

Adam, you cite FOMO or fear of missing out as being a major disconnector. Okay. And we've all been, and actually David and I've done a show on this and make the claim that there's a danger in too much social comparison in the book, which you were just talking about. Have you seen this play out in your client's lives?

Adam Dorsay: 7:24

Oh, my gosh. And in my own, I actually interviewed the fella who came up with the term FOMO. His name is Patrick McGinnis. He wrote a book called FOMO Sapiens. It's embedded in who we are. We see somebody who has something better than what we've got. We engage in social comparison. We hear about a party and we don't really want to go, but we don't want to miss it either. And we actually would be better engaging in Jomo, the joy of missing out. Like what if we were to say, I'm going to double down on being at home with my wife and kids. And love every second of it.

David Lowry: 8:00

And the key is, giving your presence to them, actually being available.

Adam Dorsay: 8:06

Yeah, James Joyce wrote a really amazing line and I'm going to paraphrase it poorly. He said, Mr Duffy lived a short distance from his body and , mindfulness, you think about it, seems like this esoteric idea where you're sitting on cushions and in a silent meditation retreat for three weeks. Sure, that's great if you can do it. But mindfulness is just being aware of what's going on while it's going on. And you just called it being there. So many of us are not fully there for so much of our lives. So many of us are just thinking about the next thing rather than enjoying the thing that's in front of us. So many of us are eating dinner and we're on our phones and not looking at the person across from us. We see this all the time at restaurants. Ferris Bueller said it best, you know, life moves pretty fast and you got to be there for it. As you were saying, David, , being there for it. Ram Dass talks about it in Be Here Now. It's one of these eternal pings that we're getting from the greatest thinkers, except we're not paying attention and we need to do more of it. And I'm guilty.

David Lowry: 9:03

Me too!

Adam Dorsay: 9:03

I need to do more too!

David Lowry: 9:04

I'm really working on that. Sometimes person's talking to me and my mind wonders I say, Oh, can you repeat that again? It's really embarrassingg sometimes just to how quickly I can check out.

Adam Dorsay: 9:15

All of us can. It's really hard to be attentive to all the things all the time because you know that movie everything everywhere all at once. There's so much coming at us. And there are these oceans within us that are also beckoning us. And actually, quite frankly, probably there was something, you know that you needed a moment to just kind of dissociate. Sometimes we need to disconnect. So I'm not saying that we want to be connected all the time. I know that when I'm giving blood or having a shot, I don't want to be there for it. I try to dissociate temporarily. I think about something else. I look at a picture on the wall. I do whatever it can not to look at that needle going in my arm.

David Lowry: 9:48

That's a good point. I'm feeling better now.

Don Drew: 9:50

Adam, you write about something called a connection formula in Super Psych. What's that about?

Adam Dorsay: 9:55

So we all have different formulas. Like my father, part of his formula is opera. Opera is optional for me. I'll go with him. I might enjoy it on my own periodically, but I don't need that. My father does. I need to engage in thoughtful conversation in any way it transpires, having a cup of coffee with a friend, talking about things while I'm walking the dog with my wife. I'm so, so privileged to be a therapist because I get to have these meaningful conversations and it's my work and I'm helping people as they're conveying real stuff. And I love it because like, what could be more interesting to me? Some people say I could never do what you do and I could, I could never not do what I do. For me, it's part of my connection formula. So instead of coming home a wreck. I come home usually tired, I left it all in the field definitely. But I'm stoked. Because I got to do something amazing. That's part of my connection formula. I

David Lowry: 10:54

love the term connection formula. A question I had the notion of connection suggest relationship. Sometimes I find I really do feel a connection when I'm writing. Mm hmm. Alone with my thoughts. I usually get up every morning very early and spend close to an hour at contemplation, usually a guided type of thinking, and that sort of thing. Is that part of a connection formula or am I missing something here? It feels important to me. Well, because you're in Oklahoma, I'm going to say OKC just gave a slam dunk. That is connection at its core. You just, I mean, do you come alive when you're writing. Do you feel tired but challenged and stoked on the other side of doing the thing. Absolutely.

Adam Dorsay: 11:44

There you go. So that's part of your connection formula. I don't know what else is, but I'm guessing podcasting might also be one because you're doing it on your own accord. Self is at the very core and informs all connections. It's not selfish. Imagine you have the worst head cold ever. I'm talking about everything sucks in your upper respiratory, the whole thing. How available are you to really connect with another person? Not very. Similarly, if we're not authentic with who we are, let's say you go begrudgingly to a thing that you absolutely positively don't want to go to. You consent and resent to go to this thing. How really Much. Are you there? You're not. So we need to take care of ourselves. And we need to check in and say, Is this true for me? Is this something I want to do now? Sometimes you got to do things. Sometimes you got to go to a social event that you don't want to go to. It could be, you know, family related and you just got, you got to suck it up. But if you're doing that all the time, you begin to forget who you are and you begin to lose track of your feelings and you could be at risk for it. This is no joke, a condition called alexithymia. That means the inability to name one's feelings. That's one of the things I see in my office all the time. Guys come in, they're like, feelings? What? Oh, I don't know. I feel annoyed maybe. And that's about as deep as they can go sometimes, initially. They're unable to articulate their feelings. Now, if I was to say to that same guy, he shows up in a big truck and I say to him, listen, I need your car keys. I'm going to go out. I'm going to put electrical tape all over your dashboard. No, no worries. They look at me like I was crazy. But that's how we're driving through life when we can't articulate our own emotional states. We don't know what's going on on the dashboard. We don't know how much oil we need. We don't know how much gas we need. We don't know how fast we're going. Our emotions are data. And in order to be connected to ourselves, we need to be willing to take in that data, and that will inform how we connect to others, how we connect to the world, and how we connect to something greater.

David Lowry: 13:50

We can all do happy, sad, mad, glad, angry. Those are the easy ones. Learning how to connect the hundreds of thousands of gradations and combinations of those things can make us such a more emotionally intelligent human being. Don't you think? Ah, 100%.

Don Drew: 14:08

You know Adam, I think in my life, one of the words that comes to my mind when it comes to relationships and connections is intentionality. I've found here in the last year, especially since I retired full time from being a professor that I have to be more intentional about developing or maintaining relationships. That has been a challenge and it's something that I have to be thinking about. You have to be intentional about it. I have to pay attention to it. Brings us back to the mindfulness and so on. So all these things are really critical to, I believe you even use the term life force somewhere. to our life force.

Adam Dorsay: 14:42

Could not agree more. So, imagine this. Person's born in Ohio. They go to school in the East Coast. They get their first job in Texas. They work in the Bay Area where I am. This is not an atypical scenario for somebody I see. In each of these locations, they had friends, but they left those friends and each time they said we will definitely stay in touch. And they didn't a large percentage of the time, those friendships went by the wayside. They, you know, it's just like intention was there. The hope was there. But you and I know hope is not a strategy. Actually a strategy is a strategy and like how we're gonna stay in touch in spite of the fact that we're separate. And so life goes on. And then, as Esther Perel warns us, We used to live in villages where we had tons of people for different functions. We had somebody go fishing with somebody to build stuff with somebody to play cards with. And now we look at our spouse and say, fill all of the roles of all of the people in the village. And it is too much stress on that primary relationship. My wife is not going to go watching the golden state warriors with me and I wouldn't want her to because she doesn't like it. My kids, they can do it. My friends, they'll definitely do it. And there are things that she might want to do that. I'm not super down to do either. And thankfully, she's got friends as well for that. Of course, she's my best friend and she's my primary friend and she's the friend with whom I do a lot of things, but she doesn't do all the things we need friends for that. And we also need friends to act as advisory boards because sometimes we need to know it. I'm talking existentially, not realistically or literally. Sometimes we walk through life with a little bit of spinach on our teeth. And we need somebody to tell us, Hey, you know what? Deal with that? We've all got blind spots and of course I'm not talking about real spinach but we need somebody who's a friend who's both supportive and loving and challenging. So we need to have a good, all you need really is one or two, but more is better in certain ways. Not necessarily a ton of them. And each of them is like a superhero. Some of them are really good problem solvers. Some of them are really good people who to laugh with. Some people will help you move. You know, each friend, , and sometimes that friend really is. Not good at some of the other things. No friend is going to fill all the roles either. But I do ask people to invest in friendship and to try to reinvigorate old friendships. Even if they have to meet the way we're meeting right now, it's people say, Oh, I'm so tired of zoom. Well, guess what? If you're having a beer or a cup of coffee with a friend via zoom, it's not the same as work zoom.

Don Drew: 17:16

Yeah, during the COVID times that's how my wife and I stayed in with several of our friends and we would have virtual coffee meetings and it actually kept us feeling connected during a very difficult time.

Adam Dorsay: 17:28

Huge. Isn't it?

David Lowry: 17:29

When you think of friends from your, not only your work in researching super psyched and your multiple thousands of hours of working with people over the years, create your friendship perfect person, ideally speaking.

Adam Dorsay: 17:46

Well, first I'd like to just come up with kind of the space. Like I'd love it if people. Lived in closer proximity. That'd be amazing. I mean, when we, when you, when the three of us were kids, we'd knock on the next door and they were, Hey, I want to throw a ball. I want to go play with this toy, whatever it was that we were doing. Want to go fishing. It could be anything. And boy, would it be nice to have friends who are in close ish proximity? That would be amazing. But one of the things I mean, everybody has different needs as it relates to friends. Some people need to see friends all the time. My friend and colleague Brit Frank describes friendship as sometimes having a feeding schedule. Like some people are like hummingbirds. Hummingbirds feed all the time, multiple times a day. If you know Joey from friends, he was in almost every scene. He was like, he was like the hummingbird. He was always in. Whereas Ross was a little more distant. He wasn't in every frame. He was more like Brit as she describes herself. She says that scorpions. Irrespective of their poison, she's not talking about the poison talking about the feeding schedule. Apparently, scorpions don't need to eat all that often, very seldom. I'm not sure what they're, ah, that's right. But what I'm driving at is she said, she, she's perfectly full seeing her friends at a lesser frequency. So one of the things is Know your frequency. Some of us really, I love this idea of being able to share ourselves. I think one of the things that humans want is to be known and seen in this lifetime. And there are a lot of barriers to that. A lot of people are like, no, man,, that's, that's too touchy feely for me. And it's uncomfortable. Well, I'd say get, get a little courageous here and maybe try to grow that. Maybe grow the idea of I'm not the kind of person who does this thing and maybe try to recognize there are more oceans in you. You might be able to do it. I heard a great quote from apparently came from Donald Winnicott. I can't find it in writing, but it was conveyed to me by a colleague Dr. Hugh Grubb, and he said, apparently Winnicott, who was a great psychoanalyst in England, said true psychological health can be demonstrated by one's willingness to share themselves with another and to take in the experience of another. So, it's this upload and download. If you're able to do that. I think that's a really good thing. Of course, it has to be safe. It has to be a safe zone where people aren't judging or looking at you askance. And of course you're also reading the room and asking yourself, is this something I can share with this individual based on my knowing this person? I'm not saying, hey, show up at your first, , or second cup of beer with this person and just like dump it all. They're gonna, they're gonna run for the hills. But at some point, titrate it and see, is there a there there as you kind of bid up.

Don Drew: 20:28

Dr. Adam Dorset, it has been such a great pleasure having you with us on Peaceful Life Radio. Super Psyched is now available on Amazon and hopefully in your local bookstore. We also want to encourage you to check out Adam's podcast, Super Psyched. And that's this week's episode of Peaceful Life Radio.

David Lowry: 20:46

That concludes part one of our interview with Adam Dorsay, Don. And that was just an amazing, talk that we had with him about his book, Super Psyched. Can't wait to hear part two.

Don Drew: 20:58

Super Psyched is now available on Amazon and hopefully in your local bookstore. We also want to encourage you to check out Adam's podcast, Super Psyched. And that's this week's episode of Peaceful Life Radio.

David Lowry: 21:10

Okay. We'll see you then!