So Be It: Science-backed self-mastery for success so you can prosper with purpose

The Biology of Success: What 90% of People Were Never Taught & Why It Changes Everything

• Dr Amen Kaur

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🧠 Discover what 90% were never taught - and why it changes everything.
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What if the secret to sustainable success isn’t more effort - but more safety in your own body?

In this episode, Dr Amen Kaur reveals The Biology of Success: how emotional regulation rewires your brain and body for clarity, creativity, and calm achievement that doesn’t cost your health. From amygdala hijacks and burnout to vagal tone and oxytocin, we translate neuroscience and spirituality into practical steps you can use today.

We start by naming the hidden gap 90% of people experience: we were taught to perform, not to feel. That oversight trains the nervous system to chase safety through perfectionism and pressure. You’ll learn how subtle triggers like comparison and self-criticism quietly hijack your thinking brain and how breath, presence, and compassion can return your body to safety and make “flow” your new normal.

Amen also unpacks why shame is the quiet driver behind overwork, people-pleasing, and burnout and how childhood conditioning wires approval to survival. You’ll hear how co-regulation turns good managers into great leaders, and how mastering your emotions creates calm influence that elevates everyone around you.

She shares her signature R.U.L.E.R. Map for emotional mastery:
→ Recognize sensations in your body
→ Understand them without judgment
→ Label with precision
→ Express without indulgence
→ Regulate to rewire beliefs and behaviour.

The result? Self-trust, better decisions, authentic confidence, and leadership that stabilizes teams while multiplying results. Success stops demanding proof and starts compounding through presence.

If this conversation resonates, join Amen’s free Biology of Success Masterclass-a neuroscience-meets-soul training to calm your nervous system, release shame, and create success through peace, not pressure.

🎧 Listen, subscribe, and share this with someone who’s ready to trade burnout for brilliance.
 Because your most productive state isn’t hustle.
 It’s peace.

🌿 Free Gift for My Listeners:
If you’ve been feeling stuck, overthinking, or ready for a calmer, more confident way to grow — I have a free masterclass for you.

It’s called “How to Reset Your Biology for Calm, Confident Success — Even If You’ve Faced Setbacks.”

You’ll learn how to release survival stress, regulate your nervous system, and grow from safety, not struggle.

🎁 Watch it free here → www.amenkaur.com/masterclass

Because you can only grow as far as your body feels safe to go — and it’s time to start again from calm, clarity, and connection. 🌸

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🧠 Best For: Empowerment, self-help, confidence, mindset, healing, manifestation, entrepreneurship, psychology-based growth, neurobiology, success without burnout.

⚖️ Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not replace professional advice.

If engaging in guided practices, ensure you’re in a safe, grounded space.
By listening, you accept full responsibility for how you use this information.

SPEAKER_00:

Sometimes we can feel like we're just chasing success, like we're chasing the horizon. You get there only to find that the horizon has moved again. And the more you push, the further away peace seems to go. Most of us were never taught that there's a biology behind that feeling, a rhythm, our success. Most of us were never taught that there's a biology behind success, that our body has been trying to teach us all along. Today I want to explore what happens when success and safety finally meet inside of you, and what happens when you learn to regulate the emotions that seem so uncontrollable and so overwhelming, and sometimes they feel like they're ruling you and your decisions. We were taught how to perform, but we weren't taught how to feel. I want you to pause and really let that land because this is a truth. At school we learnt maths, reading, grades, achievements, but no one really taught us or showed us how to understand the language of our own emotions. Because there is so much to be said about the language of your emotions. It can be the thing that helps you get to success or hold you back. That's why there's so many studies that show us that emotional intelligence is correlated to success. Not always though, and we'll look into that. The truth is your nervous system doesn't care how smart you are. You could learn everything, you could read everything, but even though you are talking about and analysing and reading and exploring, you still have the same kind of patterns as you used to have. You see, your nervous system only cares about whether it's safe. And if it's been wired in that a certain thing isn't safe, it doesn't matter what you do. It would quietly just keep shutting you down. And this is the thing with your nervous system. It can shut your creativity down, your clarity, your ability to connect with other people. And at the end of the day, we are all connected. All of us. There is in spiritual text that we are all one, we are united, we are all one. So if you look at it on a practical level, we can't exist on this earth without other people. For instance, we go to the shops, someone else has brought those vegetables and the meat and everything you're buying to the shops for you. Everything around you right now has been created by somebody else to help you live your life. So actually, we are connected and we need to stay connected to people to be able to create success so that you can provide something for others. Today we're gonna decode what I call the biology of success, how mastering emotional regulation actually rewires your brain, your body, and results. This is what helps you reinvent yourself is through really truly transforming within yourself rather than chasing for goals outside of you where you end up repeating the same cycles no matter how much you try. The missing education is around emotional regulation. About 90% of people say they had no emotional education. We've got our desires, but not our feelings. No one's taught us how to sit with anxiety before an exam or the shame we feel after a mistake. We learned to hide our tears at home, maybe by yourself. You had to handle all these big emotions by yourself. So how would you know how to read them? It's like learning a language without someone telling you or helping you or supporting you to learn how to read. You see, that gap between what we know and what we feel is sometimes a modern-day paradox. Yeah. We can be surrounded by people, lots of people, have lots of friends, but yet feel completely unseen because we're not able to connect fully on a vulnerable level with anybody. So they don't really know what you're going through. We can collect all this information endlessly and be really smart if you like, but actually feel really disconnected and lonely. And the truth is, information will never save you. And now we've got AI that can give us information on the tip of our fingers, but your nervous system is what can help you move forward and create something, or it keeps you in flight or fight or freeze. So let's really do a check-in with science. When the amygdala, I call her Amy for short, the brain's alarm is a system, it senses threats, even the tiniest little threats like comparing yourself to someone, you see something and you have this thought, oh, I don't have as many likes as them, or I'm not doing as well as them. What it does, it steals blood flow from your prefrontal cortex. What that means is that it stops you from actually being able to think clearly. It's the part of the brain that plans, creates, solves problems, and you don't have access to it. That's why you can't think clearly when you're anxious. It's not a flaw, it's biology. Fear literally makes you less intelligent in that moment. And that's why lots of people say the flow state, the genius zone, etc., that only comes from actually when your nervous system is calm enough and you're not getting triggered over and over again. Most of us were taught or shown one single road to success. And that's the fear route. Be perfect, compare yourself, be better, prove yourself, push harder, hold it together, don't show your emotions. And it can work for a little while. It really can. You can have this positive mental attitude and push through. And then fear floods the body with adrenaline and you become productive, you become driven, you become resilient, you become a fighter. But sustained adrenaline turns to cortisol. And then cortisol turns to burnout. So if you're in a situation where you're tired, you're exhausted, and you're losing that motivation, that spark, it's all gone. You don't know why. It could be this, because eventually your body will say no. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just that you need another path. Maybe you start crying more easily, you feel purposeless, you don't know what your meaning is, you've lost your passion. And that's normally when you get a high achiever or someone that's really meant to do something with their life, they know it. But because they can't, because they're going round and round in circles and they don't understand why they just can't move forward, that's when shame comes along and starts knocking on the door, which is really annoying. Shame and guilt are one of the most difficult emotions vibrationally and as a frequency. It's like it really does drive behavior, and it's sometimes so unconscious we don't even know what's really holding us back. So we go into things like shutdown, but we can't connect to the actual emotion. Shame is like that quiet force beneath so much striving, really forcing and not sleeping and not eating, and it's whispering, you can be stronger, everybody else is handling it. Shame convinces you that feeling means failure or a weakness. Feeling shame can sometimes be so difficult for someone that doesn't know how to emotionally regulate because they weren't taught it, that they will just fill their day up being busy, busy, busy and driving themselves into exhaustion where they shut down. In the brain, shame lights up the same neural pathways as physical pain. It hurts, it feels painful. When someone rejects you or you feel that shame or that feeling of not feeling good enough. You freeze or fawn, you apologize, you overwork, you try and please, you do anything apart from wanting to or being able to feel that shame. Because you don't have the tools to do it. It's not that you should be carrying shame for it, it's just that you don't know how to regulate it. Shame doesn't just live in thoughts, it actually lives in your whole being, your posture, your breath, your what you do, what you don't do. If you believe you can't do something, you can't. If you believe you can, you can. That's by Henry Ford, and he was right. If we feel shame, we are stopped in our tracks, we can't move forward, we will do anything but avoid feeling it. Emotionally, it often begins in childhood. When we have big feelings that weren't welcomed, when love felt conditional, and a lot of us, love is conditional, we learned that approval equals safety, and that being too much or having too big emotions or not being enough for someone, a parent, equals danger. So as adults, we chase success as a way to stay safe. We try and outrun the shame that says, I'm not good enough, but you can't outrun shame. You can only bring it home every day, every moment. You heal it though, you can heal it by meeting it with the one thing it never had. Love, compassion, understanding, being seen, being heard, being understood. That's where the calm route begins. The point where the biology of fear meets the biology of love. When you start to regulate, something really remarkable happens. You start feeling more presence in your body. Your breath feels better, your heart rate evens, your digestion comes back online, you sleep better, you feel better, you feel more joy, you actually enjoy life more, and you feel the spark of life again flowing through your whole body. That's the vagus nerve, the long wandering nerve wave running from your brainstem through the heart and down to your gut, begins to send a message upwards saying, Yeah, we're safe now. We can come back online. And that one signal can change everything for you. Your body stops preparing to fight, being reactive, and starts preparing to live, to really expand, to bring all the good things into your life. This isn't abstract, this is neurobiology. When the vagal tone improves, oxytocin rises. And oxytocin is the chemistry of connection, the one that lets you trust, bond, collaborate. And remember, you're not in this world alone. You need that if you want to succeed, if you want to build a business, if you want to get to your next level of success, you need that chemistry of connection, of creativity, because when you feel safe, ideas can move again. And from a spiritual lens, regulation is about remembering the truth of who you I am that I am. I am safe to create, I'm allowed to love, I'm allowed to rest, I'm allowed to be in my genius zone. It's returning to the simple statement, I am. If regulation feels unfamiliar, it's not because you're broken, it's because you never modeled. You were it's because it was never modeled for you. You had no one to co-regulate with. You can't practice or know what to do if you were never shown. But you can learn it now. Each calm breath is you becoming the adult you once needed. The one who says, you're safe, you can feel this now, I'm right here. It's what self-regulation really is: reparenting your own nervous system back to safety. But it's not just about the nervous system. It's also about stopping the core reason why your nervous system gets triggered in the first place. And that's emotional regulation. Now, when you regulate your emotions, you don't just change yourself, you change the space, the rooms, other people around you. Because when you're calm and you're able to regulate, you send out a rhythm that other bodies recognize. Science causes co-regulation. It's the process where our hearts and breaths subtly synchronize with whoever feels safest in the room. Think of people who instantly make you feel better. It's not charisma, it's actually coherence. Great leaders aren't the loudest. They are the ones that are so loved, they're the ones that are regulated. They don't control other people, they stabilize. Look, you'll always have bullies in as some leaders, but they're the ones that dysregulate, and they're the ones that rely on creating fear that drives you to create, to perform for them. But when you get a great leader, they don't control you, they help you regulate so that you can be the best version of yourself. Most people think, oh, I haven't got time for this whole emotional regulation and nervous system regulation. But the truth is, the more dysregulated you are, the more time you're wasting. Because dysregulation is actually stealing your time through tension. You're not actually accessing the whole of your brain. Healing doesn't slow you down, it stops the leaks so that you don't have to work as hard. So if you're like, imagine it like a bucket, and there's holes in the bottom of the bucket, the more dysregulated you get, the more you have to keep filling up. But if you can actually allow yourself to hold more, then you don't have to keep filling up, doing as much. So that's the difference between a leader who's really present and then allows you to regulate and brings out the best in you, as opposed to a dysregulated leader who you're just is chaos around them. Look, if you've been in a toxic relationship, you'll really understand this that they dysregulate all the time. So you're running on fear all the time, but there's only a certain amount of time before you totally lose yourself. And that's not the way to success. So look, emotional mastery, let's imagine you're holding a ruler. A ruler helps you draw straight lines, right? It stabilizes. This ruler map does the same for your emotions, so it's not so up and down. First and foremost, we need to recognize, pause and notice what's happening in our body, name the sensations before it becomes a story and starts becoming a rumination, and we keep going round and round in circles. And I've been there, honestly. Then what that does is it engages a certain part of the brain that helps you become self-aware. And this is the most important thing that you really do need to train because the more self-aware we become, the less egoic or less ego we have. And the thing is, we're all moving into a new era of life. For this, lots of people saying we're moving into a new earth, we're moving from 3D world to 5D world. There's all these things going on. If we really want to create a world or our life where we are living in love, harmony, happiness, joy, all these things like higher-level frequencies, then we have to move away from the ego as much as possible, which is based on fear, comparison, judgment, all those kinds of things, separation. And the way to do it when you when we look at it in the brain is to become self-aware. There's a part of the brain that allows us to connect to our emotions. And it's through self-awareness we're able to do that. Not through analysis, not through knowledge, but actually through really connecting with our emotions. And the second thing we need to do is really understand. This is why compassion is such a powerful emotion. Understanding is so powerful. It's understanding like what's causing this feeling without judgment. Non-judgment is one of the most important things that you can be for a child. We don't want to be judging ourselves, and we certainly don't want to be judging the future generation. You can be curious. You don't have to be critical. We can be curious and be understanding. So you start understanding, oh, I've got all these ranges of feelings. And then you want to see, okay, like it probably stems from like the fear bucket, if you like, which is like disappointing, tired, lonely. And then there's also the love bucket, I call it the higher level frequencies, like hopeful, things like that. So specific labels helps us shrink the intensity because we're now becoming more aware. We're more using more of that awareness piece. And then we can move from that emotion, from limbic chaos, if you like, into language where you're a different part of the brain is working. Then we want to experience, okay. We want to let it move. We want to be able to experience it in a way that allows you to experience it without indulgence. This is really important, okay. Indulgence is different to actually regulation. There's lots of different groups and things like that where people are maybe indulging in emotions. If we get, if we start to indulge, and we've all experienced this where we I have, I don't know if I'm experiencing, I'm sure that we all feel sorry for ourselves sometimes. It's okay. But what we don't want to do is indulge in it so long that it becomes our norm, where our nervous system and our brain are trained to feel that emotion. So indulgence is important that we stay away from. What we're looking for is release. You're allowing the energy to complete its cycle, basically, through you. And then we want to regulate. We want to use tools that can bring you back into alignment, emotional regulation tools, tools that help you really get to the core and understand what was the belief system that was programmed into you, so that you can then start to release those triggers that trigger the nervous system to react, to go into fight, flight, freeze fawn. So that each time you move through these steps, you retrain your system, your emotional system, your belief systems, and your nervous system. So you're literally changing your whole body, your biology for success. And that helps you create self-trust and open clarity, and clarity opens flow. And remember, every difficult emotion is a messenger, it's never punishment, it's actually information. And each one is saying, something here needs love. There's a part of you that needs love. And when you can listen with compassion, instead of judgment and saying, Oh, you shouldn't be feeling like this, oh, what would the people think if they knew you were feeling like this? I should be ashamed, and then the shame comes and then you push it down. Instead of that, if we have compassion, the emotion softens. And that's what healing looks like in real time is we can release. We're allowed, we've been given permission to feel. So we need to redefine what success means to us. Success isn't performing while being anxious and holding fear and allowing someone to control us through fear. It's allowing you to create, to be, while feeling at peace, while feeling at joy, while feeling able to express who you are and being rewarded for it. Being prosperous because you're brilliant. It's being able to create, to lead, to love without leaving your body behind. Fear-driven success will always ask for more. It needs more proof, you need to keep proving proving your worth and it's driving you into breakdown. Calm success multiplies. You're compounding, you're building, it feeds on presence. It's that higher level of consciousness, like Christ consciousness or Buddha consciousness. In biology, systems that adapt survive. In spirituality, beings that surrender surrender their ego, expand. Regulation is both adaptation and surrender. Science and spirit, shaking hands and saying, Yeah, we're talking the same language in a different way. When you master your emotions and your belief systems, you release those that trigger emotions, you're no longer chasing safety. You're carrying it, you're being it. And then everyone around you feels it and wants to be around you, wants to have more of this. Your biology is not your barrier, it's your blueprint for expansion, it's your blueprint for connection, it's your blueprint for success. The body you have right now already knows how to heal, to learn, to love. It knows what it's good at. All it needs is a signal of safety and to release and know how to release those emotions. It needs the tools of emotional regulation without judgment. You should know this already. So please, take a slow breath in right now. You are in the right place and you're gonna do this. Just feel how even now your body knows its way home, and that you're safe and you're brilliant. If something in this conversation helped you, just breathe a little deeper and you feel like you've understood yourself a bit more. That's what we explore in the Biology of Success Masterclass. It's free, and so you can click the link and it's available for you now, where I will walk you through the science and the spiritual practices that calm your nervous system, help you rewire and regulate your emotions, and um peace into creativity to really get into your genius zone. This is not a lecture, by the way. It's an experience of safety and clarity and creative flow. And it'll be lovely to spend some more time with you. You can start at any time. Just visit the show notes and you can see the link in there, and you can begin your own route to success and join some of the other people that have been through this as well. Success through calm isn't slower, by the way, it's actually smarter because you regulate your emotions, you rewire your reality, you actually get the full resources of your brain and your body. So it's actually a lot, lot smarter. So much love. And remember, peace is your most productive state, and you can be anything you want to be. Remember, you can be it.