Episode #156:  Featuring Dr. Stefanie Kleine!  From Human Doing to Human Being: A New Approach to Wellness

The Dylan Gemelli Podcast

In Episode #156 of The Dylan Gemelli Podcast, host Dylan Gemelli welcomes Dr. Stefanie Kleine, a psychologist and psycho-spiritual coach, to discu

Key takeaways

• True wellness and high performance stem not from doing more, but from understanding who you are as you do.
• Burnout often arises when wellness practices become another project driven by a need to prove oneself, leading to exhaustion and dissatisfaction.

Main topics

• The shift from human doing to human being
• Grasping vs. generative drive in high performers

Notable quotes

"The transformation happens on the being level, not the doing level."

Conclusion

The episode underscores that sustainable success and wellness come not from relentless doing, but from

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:17) Your biology may not be the same in your 40s as it was in your 20s, but your standards and goals can be even bigger. We're at a time where we have more tools and methods to not just live longer, but also healthier with better results as we age. Aging is no longer viewed as a Speaker 1 (0:32) decline. It's about optimization and time efficiency. Training Speaker 2 (0:36) smarter and more efficient is a new standard, and we now know how to get more from the workouts we are already doing. Now, chances are your supplement stack is missing a much healthier foundation. So enhance with Mitopyr, a targeted supplement that revitalizes your mitochondria, the powerhouse of your cells. Mitochondria are crucial to overall health, not just energy production. Protein builds muscle. Creatine supports power. Mitopyr helps support the cellular engines that power both. When your cells thrive, everything follows. So claim your free aging muscle protocol guide. and free sample of might appear gummies from timeline at timeline.com slash Dylan. It's the science back breakdown of exactly what's happening to your muscles as you age and how to fight Speaker 1 (1:19) back. All right, everybody, welcome back to Speaker 2 (1:22) the Dylan Gemelli podcast. My guest today and I have had some tremendous conversations. She's blessed me with her book early and just different. words of encouragement when needed. And she is just a gem. And I can't wait to talk to you about her today, about her book, about everything she's got going on. She and I relate quite well, and we'll get into that. But she is a doctor of psychology. She's a psycho-spiritual coach. She's got 23 long years of experience, and she's the author of three books, but one we're going to talk about today, which is her newest release, which is the one I've been looking into. And it's called The Beat. the work, and that is the shift from human doing to human being. She's been featured in Time Magazine, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, and she works with executives, physicians, athletes, and high performers on the pattern underneath the drive. And she's the co-founder of the Sacred House of Eden, which is one of the top-rated psychedelic retreat centers in America. My friends, I don't have enough accolades to give her, but I can't wait to talk to you today about her. And that is Dr. Stephanie Klein. Speaker 1 (2:28) Wow. Thank you, Dylan. That was beautiful. And I felt every every word of that. And it's been. It's been such a beautiful surprise to connect with you in the ways that we have. There's so much overlap and I can also feel like your pure intention in the work that you're doing. And as a person who has pure intention, I really recognize it and respect it in you. And thank you for having me. Speaker 2 (2:54) Absolutely. I love your work. I love the things you talk about. And they really, like I said, it resonates with me because I find that. So many of the things that you're trying to address and help people on all fall into my bucket of struggles. And, you know, I think that likewise with you that you've had to overcome. So I'd really like to get into that first because there's a lot of what you do. But I think this book, from what I've gathered so far talking to you, really ties into you like it's your baby and who you are. So let's talk about the premise first before we dig into the. I don't know, psychoanalyzation of things that we're going to get into a little bit. Speaker 1 (3:31) Yeah. The premise, the premise of the book. Speaker 2 (3:33) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:34) So you can see from here that I took do the work and crossed it out. Right. Because do the work is the most common phraseology that we hear in the wellness space. Right. Do the work, do the work. And I can tell you after over two decades of working with people. mostly high performers, that the transformation happens on the being level, not the doing level. And that's not to say that we stop doing, but the work where I live and where I help people is understanding who are you being as you do any of it. Because we can do the same protocols, we can do the same breath work, the same cold plunges, the same supplements, the same workouts, the same optimization. but we can do it from very different places. And so what I have found, because I've worked with, like you said, when you introduced me, like I've worked with C-suite execs, founders, top like pro athletes and people who have, you know, optimized the heck out of their life, right? Out of everything from like their calendar, their sleep, their nutrition, their wellness protocols, their productivity in work. And a lot of the times, not always. A lot of the times underneath that drive, there is a wound. And that wound oftentimes sounds something like I'm not enough as I am. And which is tethered to like a self-worth thing. And so my work is to help people. The book is about helping people understand the being underneath they're doing. And if we can work on, I work on, people say I work on like the underneath the underneath. So we can get to. Who are you being underneath all that you're doing? And if you are being driven by a wound, like I am not enough or I need this specific result, this specific outcome, I need to execute exactly this way. Otherwise I have failed or otherwise I am not worthy. Then I help people on that level heal that so that we, not so that we stop doing the practices, right? I'm a big fan. I was an Olympically trained athlete. I'm a big fan of like discipline. And, you know, showing up and doing what is yours to do. But there's a different way to do it that actually lets it be fulfilling. And so my work helps people not stop doing the things necessarily, but to lose the desperation that's often underneath the doing. Do Speaker 2 (6:04) you find, and I will correlate this to some of the things that I found within myself, that sometimes we... get so caught up in doing that we forget to take the time to rest and recover and that there's a lot of either burnout or regression in what we're trying to do because we forget that the all like all gas, no brakes mentality sounds great. And it sounds cool when you tell people. But in reality, it really lowers productivity and honestly, not just physical health, but mental health. A Speaker 1 (6:36) thousand percent that a lot of the people that I work with. usually end up coming to me because they've reached burnout, right? Or they're on the brink of it. I'm not usually people's first stop, right? I usually work with people who have done some sort of inner work, some sort of like have some sort of wellness vocabulary or fluency. And oftentimes their burnout is not just at work, but it's around their wellness practices, right? Because we have like, we have taken this whole over performing, overdoing, over optimizing that we might often think of only happening in the workplace, but we've now installed that internally. And a lot of people are doing that. They turn their wellness into another project, right? And so I actually, one of the core distinctions in my book is that I look at two different engines that can drive high performance and they can look identical from the outside. So one is grasping and the other is generative. Grasping is chasing the next thing in order to prove you are enough. Grasping is desperate. It's exhausting. And it's never satisfied because no external accomplishment can fill an internal absence, right? That's why when you can achieve the thing and you feel good, there's a high from that that's very temporary and fleeting. And then that internal absence comes back and then you go chase the next one. And that's what we call grasping. Okay. Alternatively, there's generative drive, which is where you are creating, you're generating from a place of already knowing you inherently are enough. Speaker 2 (8:23) So Speaker 1 (8:24) you still build, you still lead, you still optimize. But the... Energy is different. It's clean fuel and it's sustainable. It doesn't deplete you. So that is one of the ways. What are the key ways to stave off things like burnout? Do Speaker 2 (8:43) you think that when people go so hard because I try to figure out for so many years, what is it? And it was like, I have to prove this. Like, I always have to prove this point to somebody else. And then it became, I don't care about what anybody else is thinking, but why am I still going hard? And it's like, well, I have to prove it to myself. And it's like this prove it, prove it, prove it, prove it. How do you overcome that? And is that a reality or is that just me? That's prove it mode. My Speaker 1 (9:10) whole book is prove it mode, Dylan. I am like. I, my, the chapter one of my book is called Exhibit A, where I use my, I think you know this, I use my own life as the example of being like a world-class doer who neglected her being for decades because I was running on that. Like I had to prove, I had to prove, I had to prove. And at some point it can transition from proving to other people to proving to ourself, but it's still coming from that same place, right? And you are not alone in that at all. Speaker 2 (9:46) Okay. And Speaker 1 (9:46) I think your question at all, at all, like, like I, and I'm not alone in that. I mean, I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of high performers at this point who have largely been optimizing from grasping. Speaker 2 (10:00) And Speaker 1 (10:01) the tricky thing, right? And I think you'll really relate to this is that we can think that we're being disciplined, right? And, and, and, and, and that might be true, but there's. often something underneath that that is quietly asking to be met. But what happens is we hover above that and we stay in the optimizing, in the doing, in the achieving. And so the reason that that never actually gets us to the arrival that we think we're chasing is because we're hovering above the very thing that actually needs to be tended to. And I know that because I did it for most of my life. Speaker 2 (10:43) But Speaker 1 (10:44) here's one that I do want to say also because I know for your listeners in particular, right? So, and it really matters for anybody that's like investing in like optimization protocols. A nervous system that is chronically grasping in that grasping state does not receive any of the biohacking protocols as fully as a nervous system in a generative state. So when you shift into generative, your nervous system actually opens to receive everything that you're already doing. Speaker 2 (11:16) One of the things that I have learned recently, which I'm not upset, but I was seriously lacking the neuro side and the nervous system side. Most of my life and study and understanding was always, I have to figure this out how I can eat better and how I can train better. And that's going to fix everything. And in reality, I can do all of that. And it's not going to matter if the nervous system is off, if the nervous system is stuck in fight or flight, or you have these different problems mentally. And when I say mental problems, I mean, you lose focus because you're so worried about everybody else or being on the go and never stopping and thinking if you take a break that you're going to fail. That's when you see inflammation. That's when you see like a lower immunity, gut problems, everything. It all correlates. How do you get somebody to shut that down or to realize that they're actually degrading themselves and they're lowering their quality of life? What, from your perspective, what are some of the ways that you talk to somebody like me that gets them to chill, chill out and like start to realize, man, you're, you're going to. too hard and it's overdrive. It doesn't work forever. Speaker 1 (12:27) Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of different ways to approach that. And I appreciate the question because it's that, because I work with people exactly like that's the exact population I work with. Right. Speaker 2 (12:36) And Speaker 1 (12:36) so there's a lot of different ways, as you mentioned, like I, I do. I'm the co-founder of like one of the top rated psychedelic retreats in America. And so some people come to me wanting to work with plant medicine and the other people come purely for coaching without medicine. And what I work, how I work, works on both of those levels. Okay. Largely, like I'll end up combining the two, but even the people that don't work with psychedelics, like there's deep transformation that happens. But your question is like, how do you get someone who's like that to kind of stop, right? Stop. Just even just stop because. I can tell you that I ran, I like outran myself for years until I finally, like, I call it hitting the wall. Speaker 2 (13:18) You can't Speaker 1 (13:18) do it anymore. It's Speaker 2 (13:20) like, Speaker 1 (13:20) okay, so hopefully people can get, you know, arrive at a place where they work with someone, you know, doing the kind of work that I do before they hit the wall. But a lot of times it ends up being, you know, where people hit the wall. But how do I help people do that? First thing is you have to have some... degree of desire and awareness that this is happening. Okay. And your body knows that. And if you're a person who's tracking things like, you know, if you're, if you're tracking your, your nervous system, right. Like with different tools and apparatus and stuff, there's ways to tell, right. Like, like, for example, if you track your HRV. This, the grasping energy I'm talking about, will show up in the data over time because chronic grasping keeps your baseline HRV suppressed even on rest days because your sympathetic system never fully powers down. Speaker 2 (14:12) Right? Speaker 1 (14:13) Because you're running a low-grade threat state even when you think you're calm. So that shift in degenerative shows up as... better HRV recovery between activities or higher morning readiness scores, right? And a deeper parasympathetic dip during sleep. So same protocols, same lifestyle, but different underlying nervous system state. And the data like tells a completely different story in as short as a few weeks. So that's one way that people can tell, right? Like scientifically, like, you know, objectively with numbers, right? Measurements, but also people can feel like one of the early chapters of my book talks about, you know, I could, I ticked off all the boxes, I've done all the things and I've built this life, but it doesn't feel that I, the way that I thought it would, right? They're like, is this it? That to me is a person who's arrived at this place where it's like, okay, there's got to be more to this than what I've been doing. And so how I help people is just the recognition of that and the permission that it is okay to stop, not forever, not irresponsibly. but just long enough to stop abandoning yourself, right? Just to take a couple seconds to come back into your own body, into your own being. We have to create some pause. Like one of the primary things I teach in the book, the framework I call the being pause. And it's based off of Viktor Frankl's quote of between every stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is where you can choose your response. And that is what gives you your freedom. So I help people realize, okay, I can take the pause. I'm going to be okay. And notice what comes up there. And most of the time, what comes up in that pause is the very thing they've been optimizing