The Worthy Physician Podcast
Reigniting your humanity and passion for medicine.
The Worthy Physician Podcast
Navigating the Shift from War to Love Consciousness in Leadership and Self-Discovery with Dr. Teri Badydar
Embark on an enlightening exploration with Dr. Teri Baydar and myself, Dr. Sapna Shah-Haque, as we chart the course from a competitive war consciousness to a unifying love consciousness within the spheres of leadership and self-discovery. Throughout our conversation, Dr. Baydar uncovers the transformative power of the "egg model," a concept that dissects the layers of ourselves into private, public, and personal personas. As we navigate these segments, we uncover the means to align with our true essence and achieve a harmonious equilibrium in all walks of life.
Stepping beyond the bounds of relentless productivity, we delve into love consciousness—a realm of gentle contentment that fosters personal happiness and growth. We challenge the notion that productivity is the measure of our worth, inviting you to cherish your inherent value and accept every part of your existence, including the vulnerable pieces. With resources from loveconscioushuman.com and whitelilycoaching.com at our fingertips, we share strategies for nurturing your evolution through love consciousness, emphasizing the shift from individual achievement to collective interconnectedness. Join us as we reveal how vulnerability can be a beacon of strength and a catalyst for a more authentic and satisfying life experience.
What you'll learn:
- What is war consciousness versus love consciousness?
- How do people naturally evolve psychologically?
- What is the egg comparison with consciousness?
- Discussion of the arrival fallacy.
Connect with Dr. Baydar:
Connect on LinkedIn
https://www.loveconscioushuman.com/about
https://whitelilycoaching.com/
Get the book!
Though I am a physician, this is not medical advice. This is only a tool that physicians can use to get ideas on how to deal with burnout and/or know they are not alone. If you are in need of medical assistance talk to your physician.
Learn more about female physicians' journey through burnout to thriving!
https://www.theworthyphysician.com/books
Let's connect for speaking opportunities!
https://www.theworthyphysician.com/dr-shahhaque-md-as-a-speaker
Check out the free resources from The Worthy Physician:
https://www.theworthyphysician.com/freebie-downloads
Battle of the Boxes
21 Day Self Focus Journal
Welcome to another episode of the Worthy Physician. I'm your host, dr Sapna Shah-Haque, reigniting your humanity and passion for medicine. And today I'm really excited about the guest we have. It is Dr Teri Baydar, and just thank you very much for taking the time and coming on to the podcast. So thank you very much.
Dr. Baydar:Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. I love how you're helping people.
Dr. Shah-Haque:It's like we were discussing before we got on the recording that it's all about connection and that we all are interconnected. I think humans, we think that, yes, we're connected, but not in the deeper sense. There's a lot of individuality and, while I appreciate that, we have to remember that we're one, Absolutely we are.
Dr. Baydar:We're all parts of the whole, and that's actually how it works?
Dr. Shah-Haque:Yes, it is. Tell us about yourself and about your area of study, and expertise, a leadership coach and business strategist.
Dr. Baydar:I help people transform from the inside out in their understanding of who they are and their behavioral patterns. My specialty is what I call shifting from war consciousness to love consciousness, being your state of perception, awareness and what you think of the world, not to make it too woo or confusing, very simple. And so war consciousness is this state of you and I are separate, somebody wins, somebody loses, somebody's up, somebody's down. It's a duality and I've got to get more than I give. And that tension and division and that state of duality is what I call war consciousness. And then it's inside of us. It's outside of us. It's a way of being.
Dr. Baydar:Then there's on the other end of the spectrum, which is love consciousness, and that's coming from a place of cooperation. I understand that I'm part of a whole. You and I are in this together. We're actually both coming together in a sort of constellation fashion to be a part of something, and this is a creative mindset. This is where we add value. Actually, this is where products are developed, this is where people are elevated, this is where healing happens, regeneration happens. All of this is over on this side.
Dr. Baydar:Now the main thing we're dealing with, because I deal with a lot of CEOs and executives is getting them to understand that this war-conscious duality state is coming from the petty self and it's not actually real. It's not fundamentally who we are or how life works. Works, love consciousness is fundamentally who we are and how life works, and so it doesn't matter how much you are in your left brain with your Excel sheets and your quantifiable data, et cetera, et cetera. That's not enough. It's not going to get you where you need to go. And that's for everything for personal life, relationships, job, trying to create a new product, run a company it doesn't matter, it's the same for everybody. That's my sweet spot.
Dr. Shah-Haque:I love what you're saying because it's all about going back to connectivity and cooperation and harmony and coming from a place of love. But how does one get there when a lot of these pathways like to the C-suite or through medical school? It really drives home the competitiveness and I'm very cutthroat.
Dr. Baydar:And that's always the big sort of question that everybody has coming into this. The first thing that now, obviously it's about the book, and I wrote the book in a way that you can incrementally shift, and the first part of the book so it's a user's manual, so it's flip your switch, a user's guide, to a whole new mind. And it's really a guide, because what we do in the first part is we dumb down a lot of basic principles and we take out a lot of the psychology, the understanding, and an understanding that nobody's broken, an understanding that nobody's broken and looking at how to build your self-awareness. See, one of the main hiccups is that we believe fundamentally, erroneously, that something that happens to us defines us, something that's out, there is what is making us, or something happened in the past oh, now, that's the way I am Whereas actually we're quite fluid, we're incredibly adaptable, and so the first part of the book is to help you notice how all of this is happening and help you be at choice. And I even created a little self-awareness tool, a mental model to use to develop an understanding of who you are as a person and how you're showing up.
Dr. Baydar:I call it the egg model, and I've divided the self into three parts, which is your private self. That's you with God. Maybe you're in meditation or something, or your sense of spirituality when you're alone, at peace and safe. That I call the yoke. On the other end is the shell. That's our public persona, our professional persona that's rule-based. You know how to show up, you know how to dress, you know how to talk, you know how to create your deliverables and deliver them. That's what we do. Then, in between, we have the white and that's your family, friends and loved ones, where it's rule-based. But you can also have some safety there to elaborate who you are and be who you are. Now, these three parts of self, these three personas, a persona being who you're being in a particular given environment and who you're choosing to be. That model helps you figure out what you're doing.
Dr. Baydar:So if I'm meditating and I'm thinking about work, I'm putting my shell in my yoke. No good. If I'm showing up with my family, friends and loved ones but I'm acting like a professional, only rule-based, and being really rigid, I'm not really being with my family, friends and loved ones. In that personal persona, I'm not being personable. So this gives you a three-part range to figure out and ask yourself how am I showing up? Who am I being?
Dr. Baydar:And it's a very simple model I'm at choice, I'm meditating. I'm at choice. I'm here, I'm safe. Thinking about work is not what I'm here to do. I'm here to meditate at work. If I'm being overly emotional and showing up and thinking that the people at work are my friends and that they're my family and I'm expecting them to behave in a certain way, that's inappropriate as well. So it's giving you this gauge and that helps people see this dividedness when it's showing up, how it's showing up in their patterns and their habits and their thoughts and their feelings. You get to have a moment to look at what you're doing. Then you get to choose. It's not about what the outside world is doing. We can't do a lot about that. We can do a lot about what's happening inside us and as we choose to shift, things around us will shift as well. Obviously does this help?
Dr. Shah-Haque:yes, yes, it does. It provides a model to and this is hard for a perfectionist, and I think a lot of perfectionists are in medicine and even in decision making positions yeah, it's hard to turn off that mind when you're trying to be in a meditative state, but it's going out in right field or left field, thinking about work or thinking about the next day, about the to-do list. So it's very difficult to train the mind, but it also gives you a goal to shoot for. So when you're in a meditative state because you choose to be there, which is honestly an excellent way to reset we have to be mindful and conscious about what we're doing and what we're thinking.
Dr. Baydar:Yeah, exactly Exactly so. In the first part of the book I talk a lot about the social constructs that regulate us. That's always a place to start understanding that. If there's a couple of social constructs that are devastating and holding us back so much, the number one is. The first one is what I call the happiness formula lie, and that's the lie that once I get the right house, the right spouse, I get my kids into the right school, or I get the right diploma, or I drive the right car, or I have the right dress size, or I just go on that one vacation, then I'll be happy. And that happiness formula lie is everywhere. It is so woven into everything we're doing all the time.
Dr. Baydar:Marketing has a heyday with that, getting us to buy stuff that we do not need. Literally, I have studied psychological marketing and creating demand, like how to expand the demand by telling people or convincing people they need something that they don't, because I have an MBA and I studied all that behavioral stuff, and so I think that's one of the social constructs which is devastating. There's a second one, which is what I call the sickness of more, where we completely lack gratitude for everything that is here now and we're constantly striving for something that's going to come later. The minute we get it, we throw it away and we're just constantly in this striving sort of treadmill place, and that sickness of more keeps us in a state of lack treadmill place and that sickness of more keeps us in a state of lack and we are not appreciating everything that we have. And that is like slamming the door shut on all personal evolution, relationship, happiness, professional success. Because if you can't be in a state of gratitude for what you have, nothing to build on, that is so beautifully said.
Dr. Shah-Haque:That is really beautifully said, because we have this arrival fallacy that I'll be, for example, with physicians. It's going to be. I'll be happy when I'm a resident, I'll be happy when I'm attending, I'll be happy when I have, for example, maybe for some it's when I have a million dollar house. And the truth is, I think happiness is a conscious choice, that I'm going to be happy and grateful for the good and the bad and the ugly that is happening right now.
Dr. Baydar:I'm going to put the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, how we have left that out in the same True. This is true.
Dr. Shah-Haque:I think this is the first time anybody's ever pointed that out to me.
Dr. Baydar:So the good and the bad. I get that right Because we're looking at the duality of something, the complementarity or the polarity that happens like night and day. That's okay, it's not necessarily good and bad, it's just polarity. But then in the saying we land on the ugly and we forget the beautiful. I'm like that is such a symptom of the group mind that we have around what it means to be human. Why did we cut out the beautiful? That is more consciousness.
Dr. Shah-Haque:Do you think it's because, by cutting out the beautiful, that we focus more on the negative and therefore driving more want?
Dr. Baydar:Yes, yes, the saying itself and the dropping of the beautiful is an outcome, a byproduct of more consciousness. The sickness of more and the happiness formula lie, because if we say it and the beautiful, we land on the beautiful. It leaves us in a state of gratitude and being like, yeah, it's all balanced, it's okay, there's ugly and there's beautiful, there's good and there's bad. Look at that. Yeah, it's polarity, it's complementarity, that's life, and you're left in a state of gratitude. But when you leave off the beautiful, it puts you in a different state of being. It's, oh, that's right, life is ugly when that's not really true.
Dr. Shah-Haque:Right.
Dr. Baydar:It's an imbalanced perspective.
Dr. Shah-Haque:How much time do you think the average person actually spends on how terrible or complicated life is versus the beauty? I know myself that I fall victim to that at times, but I try to remember gosh. Complicated life is versus the beauty. I know myself that I fall victim to that at times, but I try to remember gosh. Life is beautiful and I still have the power of choice.
Dr. Baydar:Yes, yes, that is the number one challenge. You really put your finger on it. It's the number one challenge. Is that opening up to the idea that you're okay, that it's okay to be okay, idea that you're okay, that it's okay to be okay. Okay, maybe you're not rich and famous, but you're not six feet under either. So it's finding that it's okay to be okay position is where you start to build an understanding of this love consciousness.
Dr. Baydar:Love consciousness is actually this soft feeling. It's not some like driving red hot thing force, it's actually quite. It resembles a lot contentment in a way, and a lot of people have a hard time with it in the beginning because it feels like they're giving up. But all they're giving up is their cognitive dissidence, their anger at themselves, their disappointment in the world. They give up their striving, they give up burnout. They give up identifying with abstract, unattainable outcomes. They stop identifying themselves as units of productivity and they start to recognize themselves as whole humans that are intrinsically valuable as they are. They start to understand that their weaknesses can be strengths. It's really this sort of gentle shift that happens.
Dr. Baydar:That's what I'm outlining in my book. That's what I teach my clients and I wrote the book because I can only do this with so many people. I didn't want to leave earth without leaving something behind that somebody could use after decades of understanding this, and this is uncommon knowledge, so I really wanted to put it out there, and it is in all the great traditions. As I said earlier, I'm an all-faith minister too, and I studied many spiritual traditions, but this is not a spiritual book. This is a book about how people evolve naturally, when they respond to their evolutionary drive, which is embedded within them, and take the time to prioritize their personal evolution and then the evolution of the people around them.
Dr. Shah-Haque:That is so counterintuitive as to what we're taught, because it's always about how much work can you produce, how many hours you can work, the type of vehicle you drive, your paycheck and the state of your house, whereas truly, we have to look at that doesn't necessarily make us happy. We have to sit with ourselves and the accomplishments, the challenges, and a lot of times with our demons, and that's very uncomfortable. But when you talk about you know understanding that you're a whole human that's loving every part of ourselves. Even you know, as you said, the beautiful and the dark, and I find that there's a a lot of that can be scary. That can be scary for somebody that they're basically shedding their ego. How do you what? What would you say to somebody that is listening and probably knows that they need to do this or keep working on it, but they're scared because they're going to go into something from the past that is difficult? What would you say to them?
Dr. Baydar:First off, I don't know that it's necessary always to go into the past. The past time will show up and you deal with it when it shows up, we don't have to go back there. So I think there's that part that is interesting in this work where it's not like psychology and the forensic accounting kind of thing that happens in psychology, where you go back and figure out how you got here. You can start where you are. So that's liberating to know. But there's also the part where I think that there's a lot of this what I would say judgment about the so-called dark parts of our lives or the mistakes that we made or things that were done to us, that were unfortunate or hurt us, and understanding again back to the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful is that we need this rebalancing to happen and that's where the war consciousness is dividing, that there's a good thing and there's a bad thing. This kind of judgment is skewing our perception away from an understanding of complementarity, meaning there's nighttime and there's daytime, which is bad, which is good. One without the other doesn't really work. And we sleep and we're awake, which is good, which is bad. They don't like. Have you ever gone three days without sleep Not good, right, and you can't sleep for three days either. That's not good. So it's really this understanding of balance, this kind of yin and yang, tai Chi kind of thing, where you've got this balance and there's a lot of I'm going to call it prejudice against what is a weakness, what is darkness, and I think Brene Brown does wonderful work on this.
Dr. Baydar:Yes, you have to be vulnerable, but that's where it happens. I work with, sometimes West Point hardheads okay, and I remember stuff when Brene Brown went to West Point and she did a talk on vulnerability and she challenged a room full of military heads, generals and I don't know what all, to find a moment in time when any progress was ever made on any project or any subject matter where you didn't have to go through a stage of not knowing being vulnerable. Getting to the other side, there's no way, but through. That's what I would say to somebody who's listening, who's maybe afraid. You cannot circumvent your own evolution. You have an evolutionary drive that's within you, that's pushing you to evolve, to do better, to be a better person, to know more, instead of perverting it over into making yourself a unit of productivity for the sake of somebody else's monetary gains or something. Pull it back and use your own evolutionary drive to be your best self, to have your best life, to be healthy, happy, professionally and personally successful.
Dr. Shah-Haque:Thank you for saying that, because I think a lot of times we need to hear that multiple times from multiple sources because of all the hoops that we have to jump through. There's this track we have to meet certain measures, and rightfully so, because of the line of work, and even in the c-suite, yeah. But we forget through that that the our accomplishments, our profession, our title does not define who we are. We define who we are once we truly know who we are, and that some sometimes it seems like that's the whole point of life yes, absolutely yes.
Dr. Baydar:Oftentimes I say to my clients who can be very like engineer training, whatever, ceo metrics, kpis, all that stuff, and they want what's going on, what? And I'm like it's not the what, it's not the what that's determining the outcome. The outcome is determined by who you're being while you're doing whatever you're doing. I give a very simple example for this A blade, someone wielding a blade. Surgeon saves a life, murderer takes a life. Those are. That's a person using a blade to cut another person's body. One is for the purpose of healing, One is for the purpose of hurting. It's who you're being surgeon or murderer of hurting. It's who you're being surgeon or murderer, why you're doing whatever you're doing.
Dr. Baydar:Now, that can sometimes lead us to over-perfectionist and wanting to be like the best. That's great. That is your evolutionary drive speaking. But you also have to balance it out with being a whole human, because the metrics aren't everything. You can still have great metrics, and this happens a lot in business, not so much in the medical field. You can have great metrics and be like why isn't anybody buying our stuff? Why are we getting ahead? It's who you're being. You have to have more depth and understanding about what you're doing. There's something else, because I'm thinking of audience, and there's a lot about compassion. That needs to be understood, because in love consciousness there is a lot of compassion, but you must have as much compassion for yourself and your own life as you do for any client or patient. Wow.
Dr. Shah-Haque:That's so true. That's so true. But I think in training, honestly and not just medicine, but many high-driven professions we lose track of that. We lose track of the self-care, the self-compassion again, because we're driving to obtain the credentials, the goals, the metrics. How do you advise your clients to change that and that self-compassion is not only necessary but okay?
Dr. Baydar:It's a slow process, like I said in the book. So the book first is like describing a new landscape mental, emotional landscape that is non-psychological. I never mentioned the ego, never, because that's a psychological construct that goes with the end and the superconscious. If you don't have the three of them, we shouldn't really be talking about it in daily life. So first part let's reconfigure, let's simplify. Second part of the book is all the little things that you can do for yourself, to elevate yourself, to understand yourself, to be a choice. Lots of little things. And the third part is what I call the emergence of the daemon, which is the higher self, and that's the ancient Greek terminology for it, for higher self, and that's the ancient Greek terminology for it for higher self.
Dr. Baydar:And I tell my clients this a lot is concentrate on doing less better, do less better meaning. Choose depth first, depth of connection. Have less connections but depth of connection. Have less activities but more enjoyment in the activity. So you start to let go of this accumulation mindset, which is more conscious, and you start to have this oh, depth and gratitude and connection to things, people, activities, even to yourself, in new and deeper ways. So do less better.
Dr. Baydar:Is that just that little pithy thing that I repeat a lot. And another thing I repeat a lot is act, evaluate, learn, adjust. So take little bites of whatever you're working on in your life, take a small action, evaluate, learn, adjust, act, evaluate, learn, adjust. It's just zigzag, bounce and learn all the way through. Instead of trying to make it a big achievement out there somewhere, it's better to have lots of little ones close to home, either in yourself, in your body, in your mind, in your heart, in your family, in your relationships, in your private practice. Bring it home, work on this, mind your own business, don't get sucked into wealth of life is.
Dr. Shah-Haque:It's not about material things, it's about the connection that we have with those around us that matter the most, and just changing that mindset is so necessary. So for the listeners, where can they find your book and where can they connect with you on social media?
Dr. Baydar:your book and where can they connect with you on social media. The book Flip your Switch A User's Guide to a Whole New Mind by Dr Terry Bader is on Amazon. You can also get it at Barnes and Noble and a lot of other bookstores. It's up in all those places now and let's see so. You can find me on LinkedIn, which is Dr Terry Bader. You can find me Dr Terry Bader1 on Instagram. I have two websites. I have loveconscioushumancom, work in progress, where I'm trying to put up a lot of material for people to self-serve, and for the most part, it's all free. And then I have my professional leadership coaching website, which is whitelilycoachingcom, and that's white lily. Like the flower, white lily.
Dr. Shah-Haque:Thank you for that, and those links will be in the show notes. And what is one last pearl of wisdom you have for our listeners?
Dr. Baydar:I think what I would say is really allow yourself to plug into your evolutionary drive. It's in all of us. We all have the desire to evolve as individuals, as humans, and recognizing and allowing that, so that you can step out of your what I call product like unit of productivity mindset, that war consciousness of, and that frustration and cognitive dissonance with self and other in the world, and understand that love consciousness is how planet earth works, that's how nature works. It's all a continued system, it's all interdependent, it's all interconnected and there's immense wealth there on all levels of life to be enjoyed. But you've got to get to the other side, like we talked about earlier, and getting to the other side means embracing the vulnerability and the unknown.
Dr. Baydar:Buy the book, give it a read. You can do it. I wrote it for 52 chapters, 52 weeks of the year, so you could just incrementally play with that and shift through it. Try some of the stuff out, because once you start to do some of the things that are in the book and you start to shift your mindset, life itself will kick in positive ways. That's where the beautiful comes in that we talked about earlier. It will happen. Synchronicity will come and get you and you'll start to have good experiences because you're shifting the world out there will recognize and send back to you, and that's awesome and I want everybody to experience that.
Dr. Shah-Haque:Thank you very much for that, and just thank you for all your insight and really framing all the beauty life has to offer that, unfortunately, we're programmed to miss out on, and so trying to rewire or flip that switch as the book says, flip that switch is such a very embracing and beautiful term. So, dr Badar, thank you so much for your time.
Dr. Baydar:Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Shah-Haque:Absolutely.