Latest / Glovisor Podcast / She Had Harvard Success—But Still Felt Empty. What Changed Her Life? | Bracha Goetz [Ep 73]
Transcript
- Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Maybe joy isn't something that you find, but something that you learn to create. Welcome to the Glovisor Podcast, where we explore business growth, communication, and personal development through real conversations with people who make an impact. Our guest is a Harvard-educated, positive mindset expert and prolific author with an extraordinary body of work, 47 children's books, and candid memoir for adults. Her work focuses on helping people discover greater joy. meaning and possibility in everyday life. Drawing from her own deeply personal journey and transformation. Glovisor welcomes Bracha Goetz. Bracha Goetz: Thank you so much for having me. I like to mention that I'm a Harvard grad because it helps for people to take seriously. My picture books, they're for really young children, but they're explaining very deep concepts about life because I believe that the earlier we can teach people happiness skills. than they have them for the rest of their lives. And and because of neuroplasticity, at any point that we gain these happiness skills, we can use them to have a more joyful life. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: so that's great. number one is I was totally impressed when I first met you, thinking of how did she have time to write forty-seven different books? That's wild to me. And then number two is I wanna know what what was that defining moment that that pushed you into this positivity and how to change the world? Bracha Goetz: I suffered from food addictions. I would say from my teenage years through my early twenties. And what I realized is that it was it was symptomatic of what I was actually experiencing. When a person suffers from addictions, it's usually because They are trying desperately to fill the emptiness inside. They are trying to fill it with externalities, but it never works. It gives you a very temporary pleasure, like food does or other addictions, gives you a temporary high of some type, and it gives you comfort, but it doesn't last. And that's the thing. When you feel a scarcity of pleasure in your life. And you don't know how to, and you don't understand that there's really an abundance of pleasure available, then you desperately are trying to fill that hole with pleasure, and it doesn't work. The hole gets deeper and deeper. Like the hole gets more empty than the bag of potato chips that you finish. Once you've finished it, you feel even emptier. Because it doesn't help because it's not a physical hole. It's a spiritual hole And what I finally learned is that all that fills it is gratitude. When you really recognize when you when you experience genuine gratitude in life, then suddenly there's no longer a scarcity of pleasure. That's when you begin to recognize that there's an abundance of blessings in your life. This very moment, each person has them. It's just a question of. Training your brain to actually see it. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: you experienced that growing up, some of these challenges. And and by the way, the whole potato chip example is fantastic as it applies to me Bracha Goetz: Hehehe Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: nearly every day. But so what was that moment where where you said, okay, this is where I am right now and I need to make a change? Bracha Goetz: it sounds hard to believe, but here I was looking very successful on the outside. I graduated from Harvard, I was in medical school, and I was five beta kappa, nominated five beta kappa, doing really well, and yet inside I was suffering more and more. I was becoming more and more miserable, and with all that outside success. I didn't even understand what was the point of life. What's life all about? That's what I was desperately searching to understand. What are we here for? What am I here to do? Are we just here to wake up every day to eat breakfast, to go to work, to make money, to buy more food, to eat, to live, wait, and for the next day to go to work. What's it all about? What are we here for? This this is what I was wondering about. And Really desperately searching for it in so many ways. I tried many different things to try to figure out what life was about. Finally, I got to I really studied very ancient wisdom and began practicing mindful gratitude from morning until night. Throughout my day now, there are gratitude practices, and that's what I do, and it's It's completely changed my life from not even wanting to continue to live and when the world seemed gray and I had basically no morals left, nothing mattered, to a life where the colors came back. Everything has a vibrancy again, and then I could begin to share it with other people and help other people to to gain what I gained. So really I find that there's a huge lack of joy in the world. And and what what I'm offering is so simple. And I tell people, if you don't believe it's this simple, just test it. Test it out. Add a little more gratitude to your life and see what just a few more moments of gratitude brings you. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: would you be able to share one small example of an exercise of how we can bring gratitude into our lives? Bracha Goetz: Sure. I my one of my favorites is the orange. I don't know. I just but I don't have an orange here today, so I have this fake one. It's a fake orange, but I don't know if you could tell. But anyway, this orange, Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Yeah. Bracha Goetz: it's the tr all almost every fruit is green. It's protected by the leaves. It's camouflaged with the in the leaves so that it can grow until it's Ready for you when it becomes the most vivid color, it's a pleasure to look at, it's a pleasure to smell, and then we take off the individual wrapping. Each one is individually packaged, and the sweet juiciness is kept in for months. So the orange that you're holding in your hand was designed for you to give you so much wisdom. And so much love is packed into this one little orange. When you finish eating it, you find the seeds. These seeds are like eternal seeds. With they're designed to go back into the earth to become infinite more orange trees and then more oranges. It's an unbelievable thing. The genius in this one orange, the intelligence packed inside of it, the intelligence in a seed. And all the love, all the loving kindness is designed for you. If you hold this orange, it was made for you to experience. So this is just one tiny gift if you have an orange in your life. And and we have so many gifts, you know. I I learned about something called the pleasure ladder. And this is not my, I didn't create this, this is from ancient mystical wisdom. It's it's the pleasure ladder has five five rungs on it, and you can think about it like our five fingers, because we have within our hands the power to bring joy into our lives at every any moment. It's it totally empowering. The lowest level on the pleasure ladder are all these natural physical pleasures in the world that were designed to bring us joy. And When we experience them with gratitude, that's how we climb up to the first level of pleasure. It could be exercising when we move our bodies that were designed to move, to dance, to do yoga, to garden, to swim, to run. We we see these these chemicals flow begin to flow in our body and bring us joy. Same thing when we eat these natural foods. When we spend time in nature, when we listen to music, these are natural ways that we come to a level of joy. And when we feel gratitude for them, then we c it brings us lasting pleasure and added connection. When when we're in addiction, we don't we feel disconnected, estranged, we're completely self-centered, and we're just like we keep stuffing our faces because it's bringing us temporary pleasure. But what we're really looking for is lasting pleasure. We we we stuff our faces from a sense of scarcity. And when we recognize that there's an abundance of ways to bring pleasure into our lives at any moment, that completely changes the picture. Then we are freed from that. It's almost an enslavement that we have to the addiction. We our our brains expand actually. the amygdala, the frightened part of our brain is the part that gets us t into addictions. And and when we that moment of pause to reach for gratitude, it brings us to the prefrontal cortex where where our brain can begin to process gratitude. And the more we practice gratitude, we create more neural pathways and our brains can practice gratitude much more easily the next time. We create actual grooves in the brain. And it's an amazing thing I learned recently. Our brains actually get heavier. They become more dense the more we practice gratitude because these neural pathways are developed. We are training our brains to scan for positive patterns. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: every single step, every single thing that you do, you you take intentional steps to really value what you're doing. And I can see where the gratitude would come in from that. but if if you don't mind, could we go back? So you here you are, you're in medical school, you are questioning everything, which is great, because this is really with the catalyst, right? That changed everything for you. but once you started to read these books and you started to earn learn about the ancient wisdom, what happened next? What did you do that made that switch in your life? Bracha Goetz: I I gradually integrated it into my life. I one of my books, yeah, it's it's c it the only book I wrote for adults is called Nourish the Soul, Filling the Emptiness Within. And it's it's my diary. I found my old diaries, and when I saw it, I saw the thread of my life. Then I finally understood what all the addictions were about. I was I was genuinely hungry. And We are genuinely hungry. Without the nourishment of gratitude, we remain hungry. It's gratitude that fills us up and brings us fulfillment. So this book is kind of like a documentary. I I my it's my my highlights of my diaries and then my journals, and I filled in the missing pieces. So you watch me from age 12 to 32. Of developing the addictions and then healing. And the recovery wasn't immediate, but as I integrated it into my life, I noticed that the binges were happening less and less frequently. And why? That's when I wrote the book. What did one thing have to do with the other? And then I saw the pattern. And once I saw the pattern, that's when I began to share it with children, with adults, with everybody, because It really is simple and that's our purpose here on life in life is to enjoy this world in gratitude. We were put in this amazing garden, but we've complicated things so much. We've gone far away from it, and we can come back to it and appreciate it again. It's all about recognizing, opening our eyes to see all the beauty, to to appreciate it. What when we go up the ladder Then we begin appreciating other people and then finding meaning in life, having gratitude that we can give back and do good things in the world. And this is the second highest level, is surprising. It's creativity. When we do something creative, we get on a high that that that we feel like. We don't even notice time passing when we're in that creative zone. It's such a special high that we we don't feel like eating or sleeping. We just it's almost beyond time. The highest level of all is called transcendence, and we spend very little time there. It's rare moments like looking up at a starry, starry night when you know you're a part of a much greater universe. These are these are moments like It stayed with me from childhood. I can still remember doing that. Like it it it fills your soul when you go back to these places. And when we experience transcendence, it's the recognition that we're all connected. And we're all connected to all the trees, all the vegetation. They give us oxygen. We give them carbon dioxide. It's a symbiotic relationship. We from the place of complete self-centeredness. As we connect with lasting pleasure, we move up the pleasure ladder, and there's only one price to pay to climb this ladder. What is that? Gratitude. That's all that's what takes us higher and higher in life. Because when we're being creative with gratitude, it takes the ego out of it. We're not afraid of failing. I'm not afraid of like messing up on a podcast, for instance, because I'm just doing it with gratitude. It's like flowing through me. So I could do this endlessly. It makes me so happy to share this joy. Yep. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: these messages are being shared in those children's books. Did you find it difficult to try to get the message across to children at their levels? Because, you know, as an ad for adults, it's extremely difficult sometimes to understand this if you're not ready to receive this. I can imagine that sometimes children may be a little bit more difficult to explain it. They may be more open to it because they're young, but was that difficult for you? Bracha Goetz: Right. I saw two things I want to say about that. It's a great question. When you understand something really deeply, you can explain it in the simplest way possible. That was Einstein. That's what Einstein did. E equals MC squared. Really, what Einstein is saying is this there everything is energy. Everything comes From one source of energy. It's all connected in every mass, in everything on Earth, it's all connected to energy. Like this look, this orange looks like it's standing still, but really the electrons are zooming around. There's energy in everything, a vibrant energy everywhere. So When we understand that when you understand a concept deeply, you can explain it in the simplest of equation. That's how my mind works. So I don't I don't love writing big long treatises. I love putting things in the simplest way possible so that even the youngest child can understand it. And that's what I've done. I one of my newest books is The Happiness Box. This is a boy, he's never happy with anything he gets. And when his parents get a washing machine, he's like, Yeah, right, you get everything, I don't get anything. And then his father gets this great idea. The box that the washing machine came in, it's a happiness box. You can only think happy thoughts inside this box. He's like, What? He goes inside. What am I gonna do? I gotta think of something I'm happy about. Okay, he thinks of something, and he thinks of something else, and he goes on and on and he gets used to it and he starts getting really happy. He he he goes back in that box whenever he's miserable. But one day he's far away from his box. What is he gonna do? Where is my box? Can you guess where? Above my eyes, but below my hair. There's a happiness box in your head, you see. It's a happiness box if you let it be. But if it's hard to use your head, just get a cardboard box instead. So that's what children are doing. They're getting cardboard boxes outside of appliance stores. And in the back of the book, it it explains how to make your happiness box. You go inside, you practice it, and you get used to it. So Happiness boxes are all over the place. A appliance boxes are disappearing. They don't know where they're going. Everyone is making happiness boxes. And and it it it's it's really successful. It's it it help it has helped so many children and it's continuing to. So these are simple ways that we can explain this to children. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: This sounds like so much fun, Now, what are you working on currently? Bracha Goetz: I just came out with another safety book. I have written very popular safety books for children because also my background is in public health, as I explained, and I love that. And that's part of being happy. If you can keep your body healthy and happy, that's a huge part of it. That's it's it's back to level one: appreciating our bodies and And connecting with the joy of that. So many of my books are bad then and I just came out with a new book protecting children from abuse. the books that I have already are picture books, and now this is a board book because parents were asking for these books for even younger children. So the board book is from ages two to five, and the picture books are like five to eight, so that we are saving many lives through these books. I'm very grateful about that. And another new book is The Mother Who Always Said Yes. This is also really popular. It's selling out of every store it goes into because it's helping it's helping to enjoyably eliminate the entitlement epidemic. it's explaining children get to see what would it be like If their fantasy came true and their mother always said yes to everything they wanted, it gets played out, and you get to see how crazy your life would be. You can have every pet, every toy you want, you can eat junk all day, you could stay out all night, you could all fight with each other and everyone gets hurt. You actually get to see this happen, and then the last page goes back to a normal life. why? I think I want that one. I think I understand why limits are good. Children get the message. Then the message is never told. The pictures just get crazier and crazier. And by the end of the book, children understand the purpose of boundaries in life and that they're helpful to them. So this is what I enjoy doing in a really positive way, because that is the easiest way to change your habits. Research has found that it takes 400 repetitions to form a new habit, to create new synapses in the brain. That's really difficult. If done joyfully, if done playfully, 10 to 20 repetitions, and you've got the new habit down. So that's the way to go. Teach children joyfully, teach parents joy. When that's the secret to picture books. Children are reading the books, but parents or teachers are reading the books to the children. So they're getting the messages as well and grandparents are reading it. Picture books are the only book that reach every single age. Because even teenagers they put up they pick up these books when no one's looking and they get the message too. So it it it's it's it's a way to change the world. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Yeah, it really is. It transcends all ages. That's great. Now, Bracha what is the single most important takeaway you want listeners to remember from today's conversation? Bracha Goetz: I want to say any moment that you spend being grateful is a moment you're not spending being miserable. So don't feel bad about not feeling grateful. Just say this moment I'm grateful. I'm grateful for that. Because there's also a voice inside your head all day trying to get you to be miserable. It's trying to get you to focus on what you're missing, what you're lacking. One of my books, it's called Don't Read This Book. I don't have it right here. It it it teaches young children that they have that voice in their heads. We all have it. We think we're the only ones. But that voice is trying to get you to focus on what you don't have. The minute you realize that, you take back your power and you say, no, I'm not gonna focus on what I'm missing. I'm gonna focus on what I already have, and then I can climb the pleasure ladder. Experience gratitude and have a more joyful life. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: where can people connect with you and find out more about your work? Bracha Goetz: my website is called Growing Impact Publications. It's run by my children. My children beginning with my fortieth book, I no longer sent my book out to the traditional publishers, and my children start publishing my books. They said, We'll we'll be your publishers now. Don't give your manuscripts anymore to other publishers. So it's our family business now, and they do the business and I just have a blast. Teaching about gratitude and giving presentations and going around experiencing children reading my books, adult reading the adults reading the books. We just had a book tour a few through several states. We had a t amazing time. And yeah, so visit the website and that's where you'll find my books and see presentations. And I could also give you in the show notes if you want. a link to download the pleasure ladder with information about each step because it's not on the website. People were downloading like constant copies, so I only give it out now as a private link. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: we'll put it right into the description Bracha Goetz: Yeah. Great, thank you. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Bracha, thank you for joining us and we really appreciate your time and the value you share today. Bracha Goetz: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: You're welcome. Thanks everyone for listening. If this episode inspired you, make sure you share it with someone who needs it. And don't forget to follow the Globalizer Podcast for more conversations that make an impact. Till the next time.