Balance & Beyond Podcast

You, my friends, are in for a treat. This episode, I am joined by Dara Simkin, who is co-author with Tane Hunter of an amazing new book just released called 'Full Stack Human'. Her messaging aligns so much with what we talk about here on Balance and Beyond, but she's going to give you a completely different perspective on how our brains aren't broken. We're just running Stone Age software in a God-Tech World. Be prepared to have your mind blown and be amazed at how much you can say the same thing in different ways. Let's dive in. So tell us, Dara, what is a full stack human?

Dara Simkin (Guest)

So, full stack human comes from a tech metaphor, which is about being a full stack developer, which is essentially someone who can create a program from end to end. Then we apply that to the idea of being human.

How do we understand our back-end programming? How do we understand our relationship to change, our relationship to success and achievement? How do we understand our biases and evolutionary hangovers?

And with that sort of consciousness and awareness, how does that then enable us to sort of think about what we need from a mental health perspective, a leadership perspective, from a culture perspective? The kind of core central part of the book is really about this tech stack that we talk about are these integrated layers, the upgrade that we really need in this day and age, like reclamation and relief that we are not broken.

Our brains were not just, they weren't designed for this rapid pace of change. And, you know, our brains are basically ready for hanging out in the savannah, not for endless emails and Slack notifications and a million things on our to-do list.

So for us, a lot of the readers that we've come in contact with recently have said, oh my gosh, like this has just been such a relief to know that it's not me. And I think that that's something that we really wanted to share is that being a full-stack human is about recognizing we need an upgrade in order for us to navigate this.

And it's not an upgrade to be more productive, it's not an optimization by any means. It's a coming back to what it means to be a human being and how that is our advantage and how that's going to allow us to live more sustainable lives because we are addicted to achievement.

We are addicted to success. We've been fed from every system possible that we need to go, go, go, do, do, do, perform. We are connected, you know, our identity is connected to our output. And so being a full-stack human is going, actually, like we don't want to sacrifice our humanity for success anymore, reach this tipping point where it's like technology is putting so much pressure on us that it's almost like the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.

And so, how do we kind of use that as fuel to not be more, you know, not optimize or have productivity hacks, but actually go, wait a minute, what do I need to come back to myself to be more human?

Jo Stone (Host)

And very much aligned with everything that we share here, where, as you said, technology is going crazy fast and the pressure to now even do more thanks to AI is just exponential. What is this tech stack? What do we need put in our operating system?

Dara Simkin (Guest)

Across the last kind of decade of our research, my co-author and I, Tāne, have both kind of had our feet in different camps. I'm very much in the last 10 years been exploring the benefits of play in adult lives, specifically as it relates to work.

And he's very much been in the space of adaptability. And we kind of created this cross-section between, you know, how does play kind of be the precursor to all of this? And how does that enable us to then be an adaptable human? And what we kind of found in the middle of those markers is this idea of curiosity.

Play and curiosity are very much an evolutionary mechanism that we've used as human beings to survive and thrive in every environment. It's how we adapt, how we make sense of the world, how we build empathy, how we build community.

Then that really leads into this idea of having more hope. We talk about Charles Snyder's work, which is really about having agency and realizing that I've done something like this before. I have agency and choice in the matter, and then having a pathway forward of like, what am I actually going to do about it?

This other piece of the puzzle is around intelligent optimism. So, again, not this woo-woo optimism that like everything's fine and great. Yeah, woo-hoo. Like we can all agree that things are mental right now. However, intelligent optimism is really seeking out fact-based evidence and solutions that a better future can be built because they're out there and it's it's accessible.

It's just, you know, doom and gloom and fear, it's clickbait. It's, you know, how our negativity bias works. Again, going back to that text, you know, I'm sorry, back to the understanding our biases.

Once we realize we are programmed to seek out the negative, as if we were on the savannah and there was a Russell, all the people who are running these social media algorithms know that fear sells. And keeping people in that shocked space means they're gonna follow whatever the algorithm tells them to do.

So it's really that idea of play, serious play, really looking at it as a fundamental part of our existence. Dr. Stuart Brown, who's a mentor of mine, talks about how we're built to play and built through play. So this idea of how that breeds radical curiosity, because a lot of times, especially in the systems that we live in, curiosity is don't ask questions, especially as a woman.

And so, how do we look at being radically curious and going, I'm gonna ask questions because I think there are better solutions out there, which Jo, I know in your work, you talk a lot about how high-achieving women live in their heads.

So, embodied adaptability is really recognizing that in order to be an adaptable human, our body needs to be involved. Our nervous system needs to be involved, not just our mind and our thinking and our brain, right?

So, how do we create a holistic experience for ourselves and being able to adapt in real time by having a connection to our nervous system, having a connection to the way our body reacts?

And so many of us are so disconnected from our bodies, unfortunately, that we're just listening to the mind, which is often driven by ego. So, how do we find that connection between body and mind?

Jo Stone (Host)

Let's talk about play because I know that's an area that you love talking about. And when we look at women, we will play when we've earned it. But how is that doing us a disservice?

Dara Simkin (Guest)

Yeah, I mean, I think we absolutely have it asked backwards, to be honest, especially with being a high achieving woman, being a mother, you know, when when is the kitchen bench clean and when is the to-do list done?

And so we kind of create this vicious cycle where we're anticipating play as the reward, but the end goal is never in plain sight, then how does the play actually happen? And so this idea of like work hard to play hard, I think play hard to work hard, because again, from neurological perspective, when we play, our body releases dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.

So almost literally every feel-good hormone that our body creates is produced when we play. And so, from a performance perspective, when we're trying to be a high performer, those chemicals that our body produces is gonna make us arrive in that place with a clearer head, with more capacity, with the ability to be more sustainable in the way that we perform.

We have been given all of these tiny micro-corrections across our lives about, you know, play is something that we do after we work, or, you know, play is a frivolity, or play is you being too self-indulgent.

We have to realize that play is not the reward. It is rewarding, but really it's the thing that we need to be doing, not on Saturday, Sunday, but Monday morning. What's something that we can incorporate into our lives as a ritual, whether it's singing a song or dancing around our room or finding our body and our lightness before the week starts, so that we can start with a sense of calm and clear openness and things like that.

So we've kind of created a culture that we're suspicious of play because we become serious and we have this connection between seriousness equals success. Like there's nothing, there's no data. I make a joke that I'm like an oxymoron, I'm serious about play, like jumbo shrimp.

If you scour the internet to try and find data that says the more serious you are, the more successful you are. There's nothing. But there's plenty of data that talks about joy and happiness and all of these things that contribute to better performance.

But for whatever reason, we're still on this industrial revolution trajectory that we've got to go, go, go and do, do, do, and we're just on this hamster wheel and we have gotta get off.

Jo Stone (Host)

Question for you. Most women in my world, when you say the word play, they go, no idea how to do that. If you say have fun, like, well, I can have fun with my kids, they don't know how to do it on their own. What do you, how do you define play? And and for someone who's there going, no clue, what would you say to them?

Dara Simkin (Guest)

Well, play is interesting because, and again, my my mentor, Dr. Stuart Brown, talks about play is like love. It's hard to define. We know what it is, and we've all experienced it, but it's very subjective depending on the person, right? What I think is playful is likely not what you think is playful.

However, one of the best things that we can do, and we talk about this in the book, is connecting to your play personality. So when you were a kid, did you like to collect things? Did you like to be, were you a director and you wanted to like create parties or situations?

Or were you a storyteller and you like telling stories, or were you a kinesthet where you like to move your body? So a lot of times, you know, 99.9% of us were playful children, unless we had some sort of traumatic extenuating circumstance.

Just going back and almost doing a bit of a play audit of thinking, okay, what did I like to do as a kid? And then getting creative and figuring out how you can adapt that to your adult life. And sometimes the thing that you did as a kid is very relevant to what you want to do as an adult, or you can just sort of workshop it in a way to go, actually, I'm gonna do this.

So for me, when I was a kid, I was the joker, I liked dressing up and performing. And so for me, I do an improv class and I do an improv course a couple of times a year. And that for me is playful and joyful, and I love it so much.

And I use improv in the work that I do with organizations. And so it's just kind of figuring out what did you like doing as a kid? And how is that relevant now to being an adult? And I think one thing to note is, you know, when we become an adult, we become this kind of passive consumer of play.

Another amazing thinker, Cas Holman, she wrote a book called Playful, and we were chatting not too long ago. And I love her idea of this like passive consumption. So we like go to a show and it's like entertain me, or we sit in front of the TV or go to a movie and look, that's all well and good.

But how do we become an active participant in our lives? And look, if you have kids and you enjoy playing with them, amazing. Like a lot of parents are like, "Oh, I hate playing with my kid." Like, "Imaginative play, it's so stupid, blah, blah, blah." Fine, don't do it.

But if you genuinely enjoy playing with your kids because there's a sense of presence involved, because there's a sense of delight that you get in seeing how they respond, then that's fine. That can be the way that you play.

So yeah, I think it's just, you know, doing a bit of a play history, a play audit on yourself and using that as a thread to then figure it out. Or think about something that you're curious about or a novel thing that you've never done before.

I've always wanted to try pottery, or I always wanted to do singing. Like think about things that you were maybe not brave enough to do and just do it. Creates new neural pathways in your brain.

Jo Stone (Host)

We won't make time for it. We think it's frivolous, and yet we stick on this badge of type A high achiever and want to wear that all the way to the bank or all the way to the C-suite or whatever it is.

And then when we look at this text act, talk to me about what's your view of embodied adaptability in terms of how do we become flexible? Because as you said, the pace of change is accelerating.

You don't need to be a numpty to see what's going on. And it can be really hard. A lot of women want to control everything. They want to hold on their white knuckle, they try to micromanage everything. How do we put that down and actually flow more with whatever's going on around us?

Dara Simkin (Guest)

Well, I don't think you could just arrive at being adaptable, right? And I think, you know, when we we talk about this being a layered stack because it's integrated and it all feeds into each other. And we kind of make this joke, you know, stacks are amazing because they build off of each other.

So it's like, who doesn't love tiramisu or who doesn't love lasagna or who doesn't love a burger? You can't have a burger without the patty. So when you think about trying to like arrive at adaptability as like a destination, you can't do that. You have to think about these other integrated parts.

Like you can't actually be adaptable without being playful, because I always talk about how adaptability is just play in a fancy suit. You know, when I go into organizations, I talk about adaptability.

And it's a bit of a Trojan horse that I come in and I'm like, all right, let's actually we're talking about play. Because again, from an evolutionary perspective, play is how we explore low-stakes environments.

And I think when we talk about being adaptable, when we live in a constant and perpetual state of high stakes, there's no chance to explore, experiment, test, try, fail. And those are all the fundamental building blocks of being more adaptable.

You cannot adapt to a high-stakes situation until you've gained the kind of competence, consciousness, and confidence in a low-stakes environment. And, you know, you can liken it to if you're a pilot, you know, you do simulations and you have all this aviation training.

They don't just like shove you in a plane and say, Hope you can adapt. Fingers crossed. Woo! You know, here's your life jacket or whatever in your parachute. You know, how do we use our imagination and create mental simulations and situations where we're ready to take on something big because we've tried something small. And that's how we gain confidence.

When you throw yourself into the deep end and you haven't trained for it, chances are you're gonna fuck up. You're gonna feel like shit about it and not want to do it again.

So it's like we need to build confidence in order to build our adaptability and embodiment practice. It's like you gotta understand your nervous system. I've it's taken me a very long time.

Like I am 100% a high achieving female. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a single mom. I've got a five-year-old with trying to do 50-50 with his dad. I don't have any family here. I'm from the US. So as far as like dropping the kid off with the grandma, nope, you know?

So it's taken me a really long time to be able to feel when I feel a little bit fried and allowing myself to go, ooh, like it's this felt sense of like I'm feeling like frayed at my edges, right?

And actually being able to name that and recognize it and then recover, whether that's having a nap, going for a walk, going to yoga, just something that allows me to get my nervous system back online.

But previously, before I wrote this book, before I did all this research, I would just keep going. Think we talk about in the book Achievement Syndrome, which is a concept that I just happened to come across in a newsletter that I subscribe to from a guy called Michael Simmons, who's a researcher in the States.

It's this like slow, steady kind of burn before burnout. So nobody is really talking about the cultural programming that exists around achievement. Everyone's talking about burnout, which is like the product. Burnout is a huge topic. I don't know about you. I'm kind of burnt out about talking about burnout because you know it's it's too late.

Jo Stone (Host)

You know, when we talk about burnout, it's too late. You're already there, you're already fucked. Because burnout now has become I'm hospitalized for burnout. Okay, well, what about the last five years that you've actually just been miserable and a shell of yourself? But yay, you got the promotion. Like, congratulations, at what cost?

Dara Simkin (Guest)

Totally. And that, again, is going back to our cultural programming, which we don't often look at. If we go back to the time of being in kinder or even grade one, we get trophies and ribbons and badges, and we start to real we start to get validated.

And if you happen to come from a household, especially if you're sort of a millennial and you had a very authoritarian way of being brought up in this world, chances are you were not validated. And so then you you learn very quickly how to get validated elsewhere through your peers, through your teachers, through accolades and achievement. And it starts to feel good because you feel seen.

But then you start to attach that feel-good thing of being seen to your identity. And then you kind of double down on it, right? Like when you go into work and there's promotions and raises and all the things that go along with that. And so you kind of optimize even harder around validation and your identity gets totally attached to your output.

And then eventually you kind of start to get this diminishing return where you know it felt amazing when you were younger and you were kicking goals and you were just like, yeah, on top of the world, making all the cash or whatever.

But then you had more responsibility, you had children, you have a mortgage, and that weight of the world starts to weigh heavy on you. You're not like flying high in your 30s, you know, going on holiday and doing whatever you want. You have so much more responsibility.

And so there's this diminishing return of all of this programming that's happened, where getting that promotion is like okay, cool, or you know, getting that new fancy car, it doesn't actually feel as good as what you thought it was gonna feel like, but then but you're just kind of stuck anyway, so you keep going.

And then that's sort of like this this point where it's like, do you keep going that way and end up hospitalized as you know, as as burnt out as you possibly can be?

Or do you go, wait a minute, I need to just pause and reassess my relationship to achievement, success, and validation. And I'd like to, if I could, read a quick little excerpt from the book that we wrote about this way forward. And again, this is this is from Michael Simmons. I want to pay pay credit where credit is due.

He talks about "infinite devotion". It says "Infinite devotion isn't about letting go of ambition, it's about letting go of the version that's been killing us softly. It's what happens when we trade striving for sensing by tuning into what actually energizes us rather than what we think it should". Performance for presence and showing up fully to our lives rather than performing it. Pressure for play by rediscovering the joy of doing things for their own sake.

So when we talk, we go back to this idea of play, you know, play can sometimes feel frivolous because there's no outcome, because it's like purposeless. But I, for the last 10 years of my work, really see play as deeply purposeful because it is the mechanism for change for us to stop being productivity machines and connect to our mind and our body in a way that we just haven't in so long.

Jo Stone (Host)

And the irony is we've almost become more like robots, and now the robots are coming. So we've got to backtrack. And as you said, what does it take to be intimately human, to do something to have meaning, to have purpose, to be present in our lives instead of just chasing the next gold star? Because as you said, there's only so many you can chase before you realize that one more gold star is not gonna make me feel what I'm chasing.

Dara Simkin (Guest)

And I think something to be really clear about is - as a high achiever - how do I change? What do I have to do? Tell me all the things. I'm ready, I'm ready to be the best new version of myself. Let's go.

And it's just like take a breath. Let's try something small, something easy, something repeatable, something that you can actually build into your life.

Like for me, I've got ADHD, and so I can be here, there, and everywhere. I have one non-negotiable, which is I need to move my body. And I go to Pilates two times a week as my bare minimum. And that's my one non-negotiable.

And so I feel like I've achieved if I can go to my Pilates class two times a week. If I get there three times, wicked, you know, if I can throw a yoga class in there, even better, or walks or whatever.

But, it's like, we have to allow ourselves an entry point to get the feedback that we need to know that we can do it. Because if we try and we want to do the thing and jump in and we're like so excited, which is great.

But if you go too big, too hard, too fast, because that's just your natural state as a high achieving woman, chances are you're not gonna be able to sustain it. So just find tiny little micro practices. That's that's literally what the book is about.

Because the last thing we want to do is overwhelm an already overwhelmed person, right? It's like that is not what we're here for, people. So if you can just find a tiny micro practice that works for you that you can do and it's repeatable, amazing.

And maybe that is sitting quietly with a cup of tea with no distraction, no music, no nothing for five minutes on your couch and just sitting with yourself. It doesn't have to be monumental, it just has to be doable, right?

I think one of the things that we kind of leave readers with at the end of the book is at the end of the day, when you're laying in bed and you're about to go to sleep, you can say to yourself, How was I a human today?

The more that we use that as a benchmark or as a bit of a litmus test, we might have not spent any time. As a human that day, how can we start to use that as a bit of a benchmark and be that little bit more human every single day?

Jo Stone (Host)

I love that. A great question for us to end on, Dara. And if people want to learn how to be more human and to become a full stack human, where can they get a copy of your amazing book?

Dara Simkin (Guest)

Well, if you want to check out our book kind of in general, you can go to fullstackhumanbook.com. There's actually a really cool uh little assessment tool that we created. So you can actually figure out where your stretch zone is around those five kind of layers.

Again, a way to not overwhelm. But you can also get on Amazon, Booktopia, if you like a brick and mortar. You can go to Readings, Demix. If you're going on a work trip because you're a high achieving woman, you can find us in all the most of the airport bookshops and you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'm always sharing tips about the book or about play, whatever it is. And I'm always happy for people to DM me and say, I've got a question or some help or whatever it is. I'm always wanting to be a resource.

Jo Host (Host)

Well, thank you, Dara. Fantastic reminder. And I love that you're saying exactly what I am, just in a different way. So the more ways we can say this, the more we can yell it out to women and eventually we'll shake them and yell at them and encourage them and until they wake up. Thanks for joining me!

Dara Simkin (Guest)

Thanks, Jo!