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Transcript
- 00:00 About Diane Kazer
- 05:30 About Habits to Harbor Happiness
- 10:50 Statistics on Depression
- 18:41 The Power of Vulnerability
- 22:00 Stats on Happiness
- 27:27 Choosing Happiness
- 30:44 The Summit Interviews
- 35:55 The Happiness Formula
- 37:36 More about the Heart to Happiness Summit
- 42:31 Where to find the summit
Wendy Myers: Hello, everyone. My name is Wendy Myers. Thank you so much for joining the Live to 110 Podcast. You can find me and learn more about me at myersdetox.com.
Today, we have my friend Diane Kazer on the podcast. She’s going to be talking about finding the courage to be happy. It’s something a lot of us don’t allow ourselves, to be happy. We can be really hard on ourselves and have that critical inner voice and really put a lot of obstacles for ourselves to be happy. So we’re going to be talking about strategies that you can use to have more joy in your life.
But please keep in mind that for podcast is for informational purposes only. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging anything on the show. The Live to 110 Podcast is for entertainment purposes only.
Our guest, Diane Kazer, she’s the doctor’s nutritionist. She helps clients all around the world, but most specifically in Orange County in California where many doctors entrust their patients to her to teach them self-love through nutrition, meditation, fitness and fulfilling their dreams.
With a 7-year clinical background and lifelong experience, Diana is a passionate expert on reversing autoimmune disease, detoxification, natural fertility, digestion challenges and energy upgrades.
She’s written programs and ebook to teach her clients how to thrive such as the Sexy Belly Guide, Hashimoto’s Guide to Reversing Autoimmune Disease and The Warrior Cleanse. They were born through her health struggles which she reversed through the tenets that she teaches.
Her recent passion project is The Heart to Happiness Summit where she brings together 25 experts from around the world to enlighten us to a greater version of ourselves through the heart to find happiness and reconnect with each other and our purpose.
Her little tagline is that she helps conscious, successful women detox, divine draining toxins off their lives so they can reverse disease supercharge their potential and look and feel stunning, so they can focus on their dreams and follow their heart with reckless abandon.
Hey, wait a second. That’s my tagline.
Diane, thank you so much for coming on the show!
Diane Kazer: Oh, thanks for having me, Wendy. It’s always a pleasure […]
Wendy Myers: Yeah, why don’t you tell the listeners a little about yourself and about your story?
Diane Kazer: Yeah, that’s kind of open-ended, but easy, easy answer. A lot of people, they find it hard to talk about themselves. And I think as though it’s egotistical or that they’re bragging. But I chose a different approach. I think it’s important for us to celebrate our victories and for us to celebrate other people’s victories too.
I think a tiny percentage of the population really is able to celebrate with other people because they’re happy about themselves which is what we’ll talk about today.
But my past, I guess, what I identify with myself as a kid, I started playing soccer when I was four, I became obsessed with unicorns at that time which is my spirit animal. It helps me connect the playful side, the adolescent side of me, the innocent, young, loving girl, when I’m becoming more of a powerhouse woman. When I’m in my ego, I just pull up my little unicorn. It reminds me of the sweet and divine and gentleness of myself, so I can be more of a woman because we’re being asked to be more manly, be more on manly roles.
And that, for me, at the age of four, I started to play soccer. And then I became a pro soccer player and got scholarship to play soccer as well in my teenage years. I traveled to play soccer. In Germany, I played soccer. I played soccer in the United States.
And so playing that role and being the defender, I was momma bear protecting my team, so I became this warrior, but it was too much on the dominant, male side. The energy was so like holding tight, aggressive. So I kind of lost that feminine side of myself.
And then when I was 22, I became a financial planner. So at an early age, I didn’t really get to go out and do younger kid things. I became serious. I started my financial planning practice. Eight years later, I sold that and became a nutritionist. And now, I’m a functional diagnostic nutritionists like you and I help people get toxicity out of their life, be it their toxic thoughts or toxic chemicals or toxic foods, toxic people (which is so important too), toxic past-time things that aren’t serving me—just, really, in general, getting the crap out of our lives that plagues us and pulls us down and robs us off our happiness.
So, the story of me is how this project that we’re going to talk about came to be. So that’s kind of me in a nutshell. I’m 37 years old now. I guess you could say I’m living my dream.
Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk about your project. You have an upcoming project called Habits to Harbor Happiness. You chose to talk about depression. I think it’s really important because I suffered from depression for many, many years. And you always wonder, “Why? Why am I depressed?” especially when your life seems to be going really well which is at one point in my life. My life is amazing! And I thought, “Why am I not happy?” Let’s talk about some of the underlying causes of depression.
Diane Kazer: Yeah, absolutely! Okay, I’m actually at my parent’s house. I’m visiting my mom for mother’s day when we’re recording this. This is my little heart when I gave my mom when I was younger. “Mom, thank you for always believing in me. I love you.” I had a little heart with me every time I interview people—including yourself, which you air on June 4th, so everybody has got to tune in to yours. Yours is a very powerful interview as toxicity as a roadblock to happiness.
So, The Heart to Happiness Project is to remind ourselves that in order for us to achieve happiness, we need to use our hearts as a vessel. I forgot to incorporate one piece or two pieces of my story which is that I too was depressed like you—complete lost. On the outside, it would look like, “Oh, you’ve got everything going for you. You’ve got this. You’ve got money. You’ve got a BMW. You’ve got a horse. You’ve got the boys who want to date you.” It’s like, “How dare you? Oh, my God! Look at you.” No,
it’s not. It’s what’s going on inside of ourselves.
Ninety percent of our happines is not predicted by what’s happening in our external world but by the way that our brain processes the world, the way we experience the world, the interface through which we interact with others, the lenses through which we see life, the way that we respond to life. Are we grateful? Are we stressful? What is it? Childhood programming?
There’s always different reasons why people might be depressed today. And I like to be—I’m like you, I like to speak for the people. We’ve got a lot of people in our practice and you start to see trends. “Gosh! It’s not just me that’s depressed. It’s not just females that are depressed. It’s a lot of people. It’s kids! A lot of kids are on antidepressants too.”
And so, I started doing yoga when I was 20 because at that time, that’s when I noticed that I was depressed. I wasn’t happy with myself. That was right around the time that in college, when I got recruited to play soccer, I went from this all-star California state VIP MVP athlete to being bench on the soccer field in college. And that destroyed me. My heart hurt. I drank a lot of alcohol to try to numb that. I didn’t know how I was to deal with it. I wasn’t equipped, for whatever reason, to respond to that extrenal stressor of other people’s judgment of my value.
And so I gave my power away. And I see a lot of people doing this. We give our power away from the judgment of other people, what they think about us or say about us, but that’s really truly, at the bottom of it, based on their judgment of themselves. When we’re hard on ourselves, we’re hard on other people too.
And so, when I was 20, I started doing yoga because I thought, “Well, maybe this is a way for me to detox.” I really just wanted to detox back then. I wanted to just be a better soccer play. But 17 years later, I’m now a yoga teacher, and I’ve traveled the world several times alone, and it sounds really funny to say it, but to explore who I am, to become aware of who I am.
And I think that’s a big part, a huge part of why people are so unhappy today. It’s because we’ve lost sight of who we are and what we’re here to do and our purpose. And passion projects, consistently, across a lot of these people that I’ve interviewed is that we have to have a purpose. We have to have some sense of fulfillment, an authentic fulfilment.
There’s a study done recently. It says that only 13% of us are actually excited about what we do for our work—13%! And that’s what we do with a third of ourselves. So, it’s pretty sad that the other 87% are just kind of walking around going through the motions like zombies almost.
There are so many other things that go into, but that’s what started all of these, when I went through my own depression. And I had some suicidal thoughts too. I went, “Oh, boy! I need to do something about this. If I’m feeling this way and I’ve got a lot of things going for me, then the majority, the rest of us are feeling this way too. I can feel it and see it and I want to do something about it.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean finding your purpose is so key. I started doing pre-med classes. I wanted to be a doctor when I was younger. I wish I had pursued that route because that was my real purpose, medicine, health, helping people. I thought, “No, I’m not going to make money doing that.” So I started to pursue the almighty dollar and going to business. Chasing that dollar did not make me happy.
And finally, I came back at 37 to do what I really wanted to do and listen to my heart and find my purpose which was becoming a health practitioner, a doctor, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to help people and do it in health and medicine.
So I was able to find my purpose. But you do, you have to spend time finding yourself.
Wendy Myers: But let’s talk a little bit about depression and some scary statistics on depression.
Diane Kazer: Oh, yeah. Right now, depression, it’s not just something that adults are experiencing. It’s not just something that people in the workforce are experiencing. It is pretty much chronic.
And in fact, I did some research because I thought you look at Americans, and you’d think Americans are the most obese, we take the most prescription drug, we’re the most overworked. But then there are other parts of the world—like in China, they’re the most oveworked. They actually have—I can’t remember what it’s called, but they actually have something coined for it where they work so much that they are dropping dead at work. It’s like, “No big deal. It’s just we work a lot. That’s just the way it is”—or maybe it’s Japan. I can’t remember.
But it’s more common in other countries to overwork themselves to death. And it’s more accepted there actually. North Africa is another place where there’s more depression, and the Middle East as well.
But America, the statistics here—and they’re changing, they’re evolving. What’s really crazy, Wendy—and I’ll get into the statistics in a second—is that I have three assistants that have been working to help me on the summit. And one of them—I just hired her recently. And yesterday, she was supposed to be doing a lot of the work since we’re just launching and my other assistant who manages her said, “Oh, she can’t do anything today because she is being held up at gunpoint right now.” “What?” I went, “Please tell me it’s not someone who forgot to take their meds.” She’s like, “Yup!”
So, I went, “This is so ironic that some of my projects are getting pushed back because one of my assistants who’s working on a project for and with me for the very reason that I have a lot of passion around is that we are over-medicated and we’re going about it the wrong way by shoving antidepressants down these people’s throats instead of listening to them and maybe writing a prescription for yoga or getting an hour out in nature or making more love or hugging a friend or looking into the eyes of a dog for long periods and increasing oxytocin.”
What kind of work have we done other than dwell on the past of maybe their trauma and continue to re-ignite that wound? Maybe we can just get how healthy are you, how toxic, Wendy? With your patients and your clients, “How toxic are you? What are the things that are blocking you?”
So anyway, the statistics are currently, it’s hovering around 10% to 14% of people are taking antidepressants. And right now, one out of every four women in their 40’s and 50’s is on antidepressants. My mom was actually prescribed antidepressants for some migraine stuff that she had and some menopausal symptoms.
So they’re being prescribed for things outside of just depression and that is what they’re estimating because it’s decreasing inflammation. And inflammation is a big—what they’re purporting to be a big, huge reason for depression. If you look at the obesity and overweight crisis of America—a third of us are obese, a third of us are overweight—well, that’s inflammation.
And so, that inflammation is a lot of pressure on our joints and our nerves, and so things can’t get where they’re supposed to be. Toxins get trapped or malnourished or mal-absorbed or dehydrated. So it’s part of it.
We’re not exploring those first. They’re handing out these antidepressants like candy that have more long-term side-effects than help and more of it is being purported to be placebo now than anything.
And right now, I found this to be really, really daunting. In 2010, the average teen in the United States was taking 1.2 central nervous system drugs—1.2. So that means that the average teen is taking some kind of drug that’s altering their mood which then they’re getting behind the wheel and they’re drinking and they’re compounding that.
So when you look at these numbers, what percentage of them is actually working? When I interviewed Dr. Dan Kalish, I believe he was the one that said that there’s like 2% to 5% of us who, really, antidepressants really does help us, and the other 95% are experiencing long-term negative side-effects. So that being said, what can we do instead because then you’ve got these crazy people that are off their meds and they end up worse off than if they would’ve just taken care of themselves and the root cause issue to begin with?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree. I think meds should be last resort. I decided to go down that route many, many years ago, like 15 years ago. I tried Lexapro and did it for a year. I didn’t really notice much of a difference and got off of it. Wow! That was hell for three weeks, getting off. The anxiety was through the roof. I can see why people stay on it. They don’t want to get off. That was one of the most unpleasant three weeks of my life.
I needed to tend to my diet and take nutritional supplements and work on mindset and what perception you’re having about your health and your life. And there’s so many other things to it like you said. I agree meds should be last resort.
Also, on that note, I forgot to mention this too, Wendy. Sorry to interrupt—but not sorry because this is something that people need to hear. When they did studies on these antidepressants—and you’re going to find a whole bunch of different things on the Internet, one side versus the other. But it is that about 95% of the experimental medicines, that the pharmaceutical industry produces are found not to be safe and never approved. And then, of the remaining 5% that are approved, we often don’t find out that they’re deadly to us until decades later and we are experiencing symptoms like you are.
Another study just came out that showed that women who were in their third trimester of rearing a child and they’re on antidepressants, they’ve got an 87% chance that their baby would be born with autism. There’s a whole bunch of studies coming out. But the rates of autism are increasing. We have to question why.
And of course, autism is a central nervous system issue. And so what’s going on here? Is that inflammation too?
There’s so much. There’s so much to uncover here. But I don’t believe that leaning heavily on pharmaceuticals to get through the fast-paced demands of life is the best way of going about.
Wendy Myers: And you know what? A lot of people find it doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve helped many, many people that they go on an antidepressant, it doesn’t work, they doctors tells them, “Oh, let’s add another one,” the doctor writes the prescription for another one, “Oh, now, I can’t sleep,” then they get a prescription for Xanax or another benzodiazapine.
And then they get a prescription for an anti-psychotic and they’re on like five meds. It’s just insanity. And these people, they are train-wreck. They are emotionally bankrupt and in horrible mental condition. It makes me really angry.
Diane Kazer: And you know, sexually bankrupt too. I interviewed a sex expert too for The Heart to Happiness Summit. Oxytocin, that’s our love connection hormone. And that is most produced during orgasm and connection and sex and love-making—and of course, looking at the eyes of each other, and hugging, and those sorts of things. Bonding, bonding and vulnerable and in our creative space, that’s what produces oxytocin.
So it’s like you get these people on antidepressants and they can’t produce, so to speak. When it comes time to make love, they’re having a hard time getting sexually aroused. Then they are depressed because of that. Then they take another drug, then they’re on testosterone.
Not to get too far in that direction because it’s affecting multiple people and multiple ways. Children even are being prescribed antidepressants. But if we can’t love ourselves, it’s hard to make love or love other people. If we’re robbed of oxytocin, we sure as heck robbed of happiness.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Actually, I had that same side-effect too. It was really strange. It was a very odd side-effect.
Diane Kazer: It’s humiliating, isn’t it? It’s like, “What’s going on down here?”
Wendy Myers: And let’s talk about the power of vulnerability and the courage to show up as ourselves. I think a lot of people, they’re afraid to be themselves, and you really have to burst through that.
And Americans, we tend to be very individualistic, all about letting individuals shine and be themselves. But I think a lot of people still have a hard time allowing themselves to do that.
Diane Kazer: Yeah,t his is probably the heaviest hitter, courage, courage to be seen. And the work of Brene Brown I believe is revolutionizing humans, period. Her thing—and if you guys don’t know who she is, you can do a simple Google search, “Brene Brown TedTalk.” You could spell it wrong and you’ll find a whole bunch of videos to watch. They’re very humbling. They hit home. They hit straight to the heart. She and Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat, Pray, Love are two powerhouses in this topic.
I, myself, when I started listening to these videos found myself hearing me judge myself. And then, questioning, “Who is this voice? Who is it inside of me that’s judging myself?” And if you really think about it, there’s such a tiny percentage of our past that we may have been traumatized by—like that one bully. If we come across a thousand people in a month’s time period and there’s one bully that has made our life hell, that’s like 0.1%. And we’re letting that 0.1% incident govern 100% of our life—
Maybe not 100%, but it’s always that voice in the back of our head that’s, “Remember the last time you showed up as yourself? Remember the last time that you celebrated something and you were excited and they told you, ‘Oh, how dare you celebrate your own victory? Stop being so conceited. Why are you showing off?’”
Wait a second! That’s not showing off. It should be okay to celebrate the things that we create authentically. It’s like this little heart that I made for my mom here. It would be like you would be bullied. “Diane, that’s so stupid. Why would you have made that? Why didn’t you do something else?” The new me would be like, “Who are you judging inside? I’m so sorry that you feel that way about yourself? Who hurt you so bad that you feel as though what I’m doing is wrong because you’re too afraid to do it yourself?”
So, the new way of looking at things when other people are criticizing us for showing up as ourselves, the new way of looking at it is to spin it and think, “God! I feel so bad for that person. They are so hard on themselves” because the way they’re talking to me is not my problem. That’s how they talk to themselves.
That’s kind of like the evolved—when you get through this fear and paralysis of showing up as yourself, you get to this point where you realize, “This is going to happen for the rest of our lives. People are always going to be judging us. It’s everywhere. But where did it come from? I don’t have to entertain that voice. And what is my opportunity cost for not showing up as myself? In other words, “What am I not getting for being myself?”
Wendy Myers: Yeah! And I always think to myself no one can give me my happiness, and no one can take it away from me unless I let them.
Diane Kazer: Power.
Wendy Myers: That’s like a mantra I kind of tell myself.
Wendy Myers: But there are some alarming stats on how most people describe happiness today. And why is that a major issue?
Diane Kazer: Oh, God! This is another one that really—they’ve done studies on the younger generation. And so the big percentage of the younger generation—I’m looking for the statistics here. I’ve put them somewhere. But the younger generation really describes—I don’t know if you’ve heard this study, Wendy. Princeton did this one.
They’ve shown that you only find happiness with money and income to a certain point. And people think, “Oh, if I had a million dollars…”—there’s that line, “If I had a million dollars…”
I’m developing a happiness quiz for the seven key areas of wellness—be it physical, spiritual or emotional, whatever the aspect is that shapes our happiness. It is a formula and it’s different for each person. So I’m developing a quiz for that.
It’s okay to seek financial security. It’s okay to want money. But one of the questions is if we’ve got a million dollars, how would your life change? How would your life change? And if you’re like, “You know, I wouldn’t change too much?” then you’re a pretty content person. But if you’re out in a binge, if you’re thinking about cars, if you’re thinking about vacations, if you’re thinking about vacations, if you’re living in excess, it means that you’re currently thinking in lack. You’re operating out of a hardwired system that is lack. There’s not enough of something rather than abundance.
I already have everything I need. So if I get a million dollars, it’s not going to change anything because I’m already happy the way I am. Maybe I’ll buy something for my mom or whatever.
But the Princeton study showed that we can only find happiness with money up to a certain point. And that threshold is %70,000. Any more that we make marginally on top of that is not bringing us that much more happiness. In other words, a bell curve. It’s like happiness increases up to that point. And then, after that point, there’s not much more happiness that it brings us.
So, that’s the misconception that is driven by our corporate world, this “spend this… buy that… you need this skirt to look… to get… to be asked on a date by… to marry…”
We don’t need any of those things. To live a basic life is to live a very happy life now. And the youth, the millenials right now—this is a Harvard study done, the Harvard Happiness study. They found that 80% of them think that being rich, and 50% think being famous, is the answers to happiness. Imagine our future if 80% of millenials thinking that it’s about money and 50% thinking it’s about fame.
Wendy Myers: And I think children watching media, watching just all of our reality television and television shows, that’s the message they’re getting. And that’s why they think that way. I think children that grow up not watching media, like in the Waldorf school system or what-have-you, they tend to be much happier and much well-rounded when they don’t get those constant message of you have to wear the brands and you have to be rich and famous and what-not.
But I grew up 30 years ago, and I had that same thought instilled in my head—very I guess American cultural thing or ideation. But I thought I had to have money to be happy. And it definitely did not work out that way.
Diane Kazer: Yeah, what do you think for you when you outgrew that? You’re like, “It’s not the way society—it’s not all these lies outside of me. It’s in here. Was there one period? Was there a point where everything came crashing down and you just rose above?
I find that a lot of people have this point where everything crashes and then, on the other side, you’re like, “Whoa! I lived through that. And it’s not that bad.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, maybe when I was 35, I was selling real estate, I was selling homes, I was making $20,000 a month, I was making a ton of money, and I was suicidal. I had a few bad times there when I was just miserable. I had been just going out a lot and just trying to escape from myself and really making a lot of bad decisions. And finally, I got really, really sick of that, and I decided to make some changes. And it was just because I was pursuing money. I was doing something I hated to make money. I hated my identity.
And so then, I finally decided to go into health and start [inaudible 00:26:27] when my father got sick. That just parlayed me back on my original path on health.
And then, I’m very, very happy today.
Diane Kazer: Yeah, you know what? That’s sort of what I did too, Wendy. I became a financial planner. I was working for Merryl Lynch. I thought being a stockbroker, it was so sexy to make a lot of money and to write a $46,000 for my very first car when I was 22. “Ooh, look at me, I’m independent. Look at me, I don’t need you. I’ve got my big panties on. I have big girls panties on.” It’s like, “What am I trying to prove to who? Where did this even come from?”
And once you start to question that, “Who are these voices in my head? And why am I allowing them real estates,”—speaking to a former real estate person, “Why am I—they’re not even paying me for this real estate. But yet, they’re governing most of my decisions.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And so I guess that’s obviously why you decided to focus on happiness for your event.
Wendy Myers: You’ve got a huge online—you’ve got about anything like nutrition or whatever. You work with clients doing nutrition and detox as an FDN. So why did you chose happiness?
Diane Kazer: This was going against a lot of the trainers that I work with. I train people, people train me. They say, “Focus on what you’re most passionate about right now.” And focusing on happiness seems kind of elusive, and it’s sort of general. So it’s like, “Gosh!” One side of me was like, “I need to niche this deeper like happy women or happy children or happy…” and I went, “No! Everyone deserves to hear this.” I’ve never seen an approach that takes everything into consideration instead of just focusing on anti-depressants or like depression. This isn’t about depression. This is about being happier and what are the roadblocks to that.
So, while my role is not a happy nutritionist, I believe that like me—you and I work with people getting the crap out of their lives, so that they can be free and happy and clear and energetic.
But myself, I’m thinking, I’m plagued, I’m not happy. I went through a break-up, a really harsh break-up. My aunt died of cancer. Two of my very bestfriends went into rehab. I helped them into rehab—one of whom, I was living with—heroine, hard, hard things, not just weed, not even just escaping with alcohol. It became the people that were close to me in my life were using things outside of themselves to numb.
And then, a lot of my new friends are on anti-depressants. And like you said about “Let’s try this anti-depressant. Let’s try this one”—and I knew their story. When we heal people like you and I do, they kidn of unleash the things that are going on with them psychologically as well and I just heard the same story over and over again.
My aunt died of cancer, and she was a nurse. She first got diagnosed with breast cancer when she was a nurse and she was running the show. She was managing several other nurses. What really got to her when I asked her when she first was diagnosed with breast cancer, what bothered her the most in her life was that she couldn’t speak her truth. She felt claustrophobic. There are many things she couldn’t say.
She couldn’t show up as herself. And as such, there’s a lot of energy that goes into being someone who we’re not. There are a lot of masks. There are a lot of lies. There are a lot of contradictions. There’s a lot of confusion. There’s a lot of restlessness. We can’t connect with other people when we’re not connected to ourselves. So, I just kept seeing that over and over again.
And then, eventually, when everybody else is around you and they’re coming to you for support, you get depressed yourself. It hit me hard when my aunt died. That was the point where I went, “I’m doing this for her.” My parents also—I am now in the backyard. And Heart to Happiness just made sense because the pathto happiness is through our heart and it’s not through our checkbook.
Wendy Myers: So, you interviewed 20+ experts from all kinds of fields, ranging from psychotherapists and attorneys to passion, chasing authors to environmentalists and fit moms. Why that huge range? How did you come to hand-pick the experts that you did?
Diane Kazer: Yeah, because there is that formula, right? There’s a formula. There’s so many different things that go into our happiness equation. There’s social, there’s emotional, there’s spiritual, there’s financial, there’s occupational, there’s intellectual and then there’s physical.
And for someone, they might say—like I shared this earlier. Maybe I did, I can’t remember because I did so many interviews already. Oh, yeah. I think I did. Thirteen percent of us are genuinely happy with what we’re doing. And for the most part, those people are in the service of helping others like you and I. We’re in the service of helping other people.
So, the more we give, the more we get. That’s what a lot of the people who I’ve interviewed have said that. If I’m feeling deficient in happiness, I give to other people because I get that back.
So, there’s the occupational piece, and that’s Tama Kieves. She was an attorney and she was miserable. She was working many hours. People today are finding it so sexy to say, “Oh, I was working until 2 a.m., look at me!” Well, great. Well, you pretty much just lost about 20 years of testosterone. You’re not sleeping.
So, it’s not bragging rights. It’s not sexy anymore to overwork ourselves. Literally, we can’t even be here to brag about working ourselves that many hours if we’re not taking care of ourselves.
So, everybody’s formula is going to be led by something different. So, if somebody is a very emotional being—let’s just say, females, we’re more emotional. We connect deeper when we’re emotional. We’re able to express it and we’re able to interpret other people’s emotions without judgment. We’re able to hold space for each other and be there for one another—just free of judgment, free of ridicule, free of trying to label and pigeon-hole.
And so, for women, it might be more emotional wellness, that is their number one. And so we need to make sure that we’re healthy in that regard, that we’re able to express and receive and feel that we deserve receiving love as well. That’s a big problem today. We as women don’t know if we feel like we deserve love either. How do you accept a compliment? “Oh, you look beautiful!” “Oh, my hair looks crap. Are you kidding me?” Well, you just rejected love. And if you’re rejecting love from other people, you certainly are cutting yourself off from your own love. So what’s going on there?
And then, for, let’s just say, men, they’re going to pride themselves more so on occupational and financial. But the genders are kind of crossing now. More women are more manly and men are becoming more sensitive. We’re kind of lost in our genders anymore. But that’s okay because we have both sides. So, I’m kind of making some assumptions here, and maybe traditional ones.
But financial and occupational, maybe men, they pride themselves on being grounded and having a title and doing well and thriving in that.
And for a lot of men, now—I love this one—we’re shoulding all over ourselves, shoulding . “I should do this. I should do this. I should do that. Before I get into a relationship, I should do this. I should’ve done it that way.” And then, we have all these regret in the past. And so for a lot of guys, they won’t engage in relationships until they get into this space where they’re proud of themselves financially, occupationally, where they have this title. And so everybody is just coming to this until and when, “When I get to this point, then I…”
And so people, the guys especially, are shoulding all over themselves. “I get in a relationship when I don’t have a firm income.” And I see people commonly say, “I’m finally in a place where I am open to get into a relationship.” It’s like, “Why would we ever reject love?” That should be the number one driving force of or existence. That’s why we’re here, to connect.
And so then there’s the physical wellness. And of course, I’ve seen a lot of people who are doing really well emotionally, financially, creatively, occupationally, but then they’ve got like their spine is blocked or—I work with chiropractors, so maybe it’s twisted and they can’t get nutrients where they should be. And then, you and I work with people on toxicity and amino acids and vitamin deficiency and mineral imbalances and hormonal infrequencies and then heavy metal toxicities. That’s important.
And then, how are we treating the planet? If you’re someone flagging your cigarette butt out or throwing plastic water bottles everywhere, then you’re “shoulding” on the planet. But then if you’re treating the planet that way, then how are you treating yourself?
So, there’s so much that goes into happiness. And then, spirituality is a huge one too. Very few people are actually taking the time to just become still and quiet and aware of even just their breath. “Who am I? Who am I?” The purpose is so important.
So, I can keep going on and on. I have 24 people, we talked about it. But that’s probably the briefest summary that I can answer for that question.
Wendy Myers: Well, you came up with a formula about how someone can find their own personal happiness, their own personal formula for happiness. How did you come up with that?
Diane Kazer: Yeah, I actually came up with it because of amazing people like yourself, Wendy. When I did these interviews, I took a lot of notes. One of my assistants is taking arduous notes on what a lot of what people said. And what we found to be true across—and I’m not done with this research yet. But what we found to be true across all of these areas were very consistent answers.
And each person’s explanation of happiness with their specialty—like you are physical wellness because you talk about physical wellness and how toxicity can block us from us being physically healthy. And so I listen to that, and through my own experience, and doing research from other doctors—
My field is physical wellness too. And I’ve been involved in every one of these seven key areas whether it’s my own personal experience or working with other doctors. And so I’ve established that based on the studies, based on other types of quizzes that were done—
There’s been nothing that had been like this. But how would you define happiness? And gurus, because I traveled to India and Thailand and [inaudible 00:37:09] and listened to these people talk. So a lot of my yogic practice and tantric practices has gone into this as well. What is wellness? I’ve been trained for many, many hours in the spiritual sense.
So, I’m pretty well-versed in a lot of these things through experience and also because I’ve gotten a lot of certifications in them. So it’ sa very delicate formula, but it’s weighting the top things that I’ve heard people mention and what I see the most deficient in society as a whole.
Wendy Myers: Well, tell us about your project, the summit, The Heart to Happiness Summit. Tell us a little bit about that and how it’s transformed your life.
Diane Kazer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So there are things that I set out for others to grasp from this. And I really just wanted every speaker to have their own reign of “How do you define happiness? What do you see in your practice and your industry of what’s blocking people from happiness? And what steps?” I ask each speaker to give three takeaways, three exercises, three biggest impact, easiest to do things that people can see progress right now.
We’re Americans, we’re imaptient. I would just say that we’re earthlings because we all love this fast-paced life for the most part. But we like to see results now. And if we don’t, we give up and blame it on the system that didn’t work.
So, every person I interviewed, I asked for three heavy-hitters. What can they do right now?
So among 24 experts, you’ve got three takeaways. That’s like 75 different takeaways that you can pick at least one from and run with it.
And so I set forth to help people—whatever they needed to hear, they’re going to hear it. I’ve even interviewed a fourth grader in this. He’s a fourth grader entrepreneur and he’s relentless. He has more courage than the majority of adults that I know. So there’s something to learn from him too. He’s doing some amazing things, and so I brought him on—no matter what age.
The things I’ve learned for myself and my life, it’s so crazy, Wendy. I used to come home from working out. I used to work out later in the night. It was like six, seven o’clock at night. I’d come home from yoga. I’d come home from working out. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got work to do.”
And I literally wake up in the morning, and I work. And then, I take a break and workout. I come home from my workout and I’d work. And so I was working from like 8 a.m. to like midnight. And that was just my life.
I was listening to these speakers. The number one thing I heard them say is “You’ve got to block out time for you. You have to block out time to be creative.” And that’s what the work of Brene Brown says. The best way to exercise is being vulnerable, showing up as ourselves, and really finding happiness is to spend time alone. Spend time creating, doing the things that we really enjoy doing. People go, “Oh, I’m not creative. I can’t draw. I can’t paint. I can’t do any of that stuff. I’m not creative.”
We all have creative in us. We just may have been at a young age bullied or someone told us that our worked sucked and then we just stopped doing it. So that 0.1% that has prevented us from getting into our heart space and creating because we’re afraid of that 0.1% again.
And so, creating and taking time for ourselves, enjoying just being in nature, listen to the birds, to not feel the anxiety about the day ahead of us, to not wake up and obsessively check emails. I used to roll over in the morning and just look at all my emails, “Oh, what I do have to do today? What do I have to jump out of bed for?”
Instead, I wake up in the morning, I listen to the birds and I’m like, “This is my time. I’m just right here. I’m right here. I’m not shoulding on myself because ‘I should’ve done it this way’ and I’m not needing on myself like ‘I need to do this.’ I’m just right here. Here right now is good. It’s perfect. It is the only time that exists.”
And so the space to just be without being without is what’s really healed me. I’ve heard people say that, “Take time for yourself. Create. Do things you love.” So now, I’m scuba divine more regularly. I didn’t scuba dive for six months. I took a break. And now I’ve got my gear and I’m diving again. I’m salsa dancing. I’ve never done it before.
That’s one of the top 10 things that you can do to be unhappy is to not take risk, to live in your comfort zone. So, getting outside of your comfort zone is one of the paths to happiness. And so I’m taking risks. I’m doing things. I’m more afraid—I realized with salsa dancing—of judgment from other people than I am of diving in the open waters with sharks, which I’ve done. And so I went, “Why do I care so much what other people think?”And the more you exercise getting out in the public eye and doing things—
And you hear people go, “God! It’s just so fun to see you enjoy yourself” and in your head, you may be thinking, “But I felt like I look like crap doing that dance move. I almost rolled my ankle and fell on my face,” but the person that saw me in the opposite side of the room came to me and said, “It was so fun watching you enjoy yourself. What a contrast!”
Wendy Myers: That’s a great story. And I really enjoyed my interview with you. I just really love your energy. And I know you interviewed like a fourth grader. And there’s going to be so many interesting interviews on this summit.
Wendy Myers: So tell people when they can check out the summit. It’s coming up pretty quickly, isn’t it?
Diane Kazer: Yes, yes. It’s coming up May 16th. I think it was June 4th that you’re on. Yeah, you’re on June 4th. And you’re towards the end too. We saved the best for last.
June 8th is when it’s over. And so people can watch what it is. People know the summit model. You could watch the videos for free the whole time. I’m sending out emails every day to people so that they know which ones are up. Each person is up for 72 hours. So they can watch you from June 4th. You’ll be up 4th, 5th and 6th. And at the end, we may have a little encore, we can catch up.
And then, at the end of it, there’s going to be that quiz. So people can take notes throughout. They can try incorporating these things day-to-day. And of course, every speaker that I’ve intervieweed, there’s going to be a link to go to their website, so they can learn more about them. They can reach out to them. They can learn more about you in our interview.
But there’s so much to it. So I would encourage people to be as much involved as they can and check out the current website, the video, so they can see what speakers are part of it. I even have one of the top doctors who’s a psychiatrist who talks about addiction. So there’s addiction, there’s eating disorders, there’s sexual confusion, there’s everything. There’s everything that you can imagine there that would block us from our happiness.
So get in there! And the courage to come to this, I want to give you guys a pass, a VIP pass because this really is tough. It’s the hardest thing, to go inside of yourself and admit that maybe you’ve gone about it the wrong way maybe at one point. You’ve been living your life people-pleasing.
And instead of shaming yourself for that and shoulding all over yourself, accept that that’s been your journey. And where you are, you’re in that perfect moment, and you’re supposed to be here, watching me and Wendy today, you’re supposed to be watching me and Wendy on June 4th or any of the other speakers.
So, just be gentle on yourself when you’re watching these things because you may hear people talk and then you think, “Oh, dang it! I knew I should’ve done it that way. Why am I not…?” We start getting in our head, it’s like, “No, it’s supposed to be empowering.”
So, open yourself up to learn and realize that failure is the biggest and the best part of all of this.
Wendy Myers: And anyone who’s successful and happy, it was not an upward trajectory. It was all over the place.
Diane Kazer: Total zig-zag.
Wendy Myers: Lots of scars and scratches.
Well, Diane, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
And listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com and learn about my healing and detox program at MineralPower.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
Diane Kazer: Thank you, Wendy.
