Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the speaking and communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve yourself, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast for you today. I am joined by Dr. Victor Manzo Jr. Who is a former chiropractor and now a business mindset coach. He's here to help us talk about our nervous system where everything sits.
00:24
and how we can reprogram that for our benefit so that we can achieve the things we want to of course think about it. How many times have you been to seminars and came back and do the exact same things and wonder why things don't change? And before I go any further, please help me welcome Dr. Victor. Hi. Roberta, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate being here.
00:43
Please tell us again what you do. So, yeah, I'm a former certified pediatric chiropractor. I love working with kiddos. Those I'm very passionate about, but I made the transition to be a business mindset coach and I've been coaching for about three, four years, went full time into it about six months ago. And, you know, I have a very, very diverse background being a chiropractor, understanding neurology and neuroscience with brain functions and how it works and all that good stuff, but I used to be an energy medicine practitioner. So.
01:08
There's understanding like the deeper, you know, the micro world of how things shift from energy and all that good stuff, emotions and emotional healing and all that. And then there's also, you know, I always had an interest in the mind since I was a young kid. And it's something that has inspired me since then, because I wanted to understand what made athletes who were good versus who was great. And that's what piqued my interest into the mind.
01:33
It's been a long journey and it's been something that I've cultivated to put together and to share the laws because I got tired of hearing so much information out there is what kind of inspired me to be a go into business mindset coaching because I got tired of the information that was out there that was just not, I don't want to say it wasn't accurate. It's good stuff. It's against the laws of nature. It's against the laws of the universe and it's against the laws of our body and our neurology. And that's what bothered me. And every time I kept hearing something like
01:59
You got to grind, you have to hustle. You got to outwork Arnold Schwarzenegger. You got to sleep less or sleep faster. That is against all the laws of neurology for peak performance. The constantly just keep work, work, work, work, work, work, right? Some other motivational speakers say you got to outwork your competition. So sleep less and work harder and you can outwork your competition and you'll be number one and you'll be the best and that's success. But really what that is is saying, I'm going to sacrifice everything of my life that matters to gain success. And it doesn't have to be that way. You can have your cake and you can eat it too.
02:28
Very new concepts for most of us. It's interesting for me, you were in the medical field and then you transitioned to coaching. We hardly see that, especially because, you know, we all love our doctors. Everybody just thinks once you have your license, that's it. That's gonna be the rest of your life because that's the ultimate profession. What made you look outside of that, outside of your training? So in chiropractic, you know, there's something that we do. So when you go to a chiropractic, you get an adjustment, but what's that adjustment doing?
02:58
There is a thing, it's another nice fancy long word that we're searching and trying to clear, which is called a subluxation, okay? It's a fancy word. When I teach it in my office, I tell my patients that you don't need to know that word. You're gonna hear me say it a lot, but you don't need to know it. Just think of the word miscommunication, because that's really what this is. And what we're looking for is a miscommunication between the brain and the body. And when we have that miscommunication, it makes it harder for the body to adapt to one's environment. Because that's really what chiropractors do. We change how the brain's wired.
03:27
and we help the body adapt better to one's environment. And it's like Darwin said, he gets quoted as, you know, survival of the fittest. Darwin never said that. And I don't know who like conditioned that into our thinking in our world. What he said was, it's not the strongest or the fastest that survive, the one who can adapt is the one that will survive. And that's the premise of what chiropractors do. We're very spiritual based. And I only like to say the word spiritual because then people will think that's religion. So I would go into like more universal principles.
03:56
There's a book by Dr. Stevenson. It's called the 33 chiropractic principles. It has nothing to do with chiropractic from adjusting perspective or the science of like what we do to change physiology, none of that. It is purely universal principles of how a force is applied or the law of cause and effect. These are the principles that are what is built into the chiropractic philosophy. And so when we look at that subluxation or that miscommunication, a lot of times I would have to teach my patients they go, why does that happen?
04:25
80% of the time, this is some really cool research. It came out in 1895 and it's still true today. 80% of the time are mental, emotional stressors in life. What that means is that when we take on too much mental, emotional stress, more than what our nervous system can handle, that causes a miscommunication. And so in my practice, when I was adjusting patients, I had technology that looked at different things and one of them was heart rate variability. This looks at how well, where are you spending more of your time? So when you're resting for three minutes,
04:53
Your nervous system should calm and it should get back into a balanced state. That's clinically because we control the whole entire room. It's quiet. They can't look on their phone. They can't do anything. And they just sit there and I just say, just breathe nice and easy. Like you normally would. We'll see you in three minutes. What ends up happening is, is like through adjustments and everything, we build up the part of the nervous system that helps you slow down. But what was happening is again, knowing, understanding that 80% of the time it's mental, emotional. I started to see in my office while there was people who were stuck. I couldn't get them to change.
05:22
I had some other techniques I learned from like releasing emotions or finding, you know, different stuff on the energy medicine side. Let's look at emotional stuff. Look, look at mindset. Where are you putting your focus to? Oh, you know, I have this. And I just started doing this with my clients and to teach them how to manage your stress, how to build up their reserves, how to do these kinds of things. When I looked at coaching, I was like, I'm already doing this. I'm already teaching my patients as much as I can. The only problem was is patients were coming to me thinking me as a chiropractor. And so if I'm talking to them about mindset,
05:49
and talking about how to manage their stress from look, how they look at things and how to shift their perspective and all the things that I coach on. They're like, ah, I'm not into that. I'm here to get adjusted. Just want to get adjusted. Are you sure you're a real doctor? So I get that too. I was like, I'm just going to get more focused on the chiropractic side and educating about how to help them be more adaptability and to build their reserves and be more resilient so that they can adapt better to their environment so they can be healthier. And I'm just going to make my focus mainly that.
06:15
And if I have patients who are interested in the other side, I will share that with them. And that's when I was like, I had such a passion to want to help. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to start going into coaching. And that's kind of where my transition started. I started about three years ago. I had a patient one time it was like, she's a coach and she works with a ton of coaches and she overheard me talking about coaching and she was like, you're a coach. I'm like, I do a little bit of coaching. She's like, why haven't you told me I've been here for like six months. You never mentioned this. And then all of a sudden that's where it started and it was going from there.
06:42
When you talk about the three minutes, is that similar to meditation, calming your nervous system down? No, this test from a clinical standpoint, so there's a lot of HRV stuff out there. I wear something called an Oro ring. It measures my HRV. I would have patients tell me like, oh, HRV, I have that in my ring. And I'd be going, that's not accurate. No, like, what do you mean? I go, too many things out there that can mess with the results. From a clinical standpoint, we need to test the heart for three minutes. And what we're doing is, is we're checking the different beats. You know how you've never seen a heart beat in a pulses, right?
07:12
What they're measuring is the top wave of that. And they're measuring the, I'm sorry, over here. And they're measuring the time difference between it. Like if your heart beats 60 beats in a minute, we think it's beating one beat per second, but that's just the average per second. That's not actually what's happening. Sometimes it might be a little slower, it might sometimes be a little faster. This is called heart rate variability. And so what we wanna do is we control the room with no stimulation, no stimulus, nothing in the inner fear. And then...
07:36
we record the heart rate for three minutes. Now, technically if there's no threats or there's nothing going on within the first, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, the nervous system should come down pretty quick and get back into a calm state. If it doesn't, that tells them you're stuck in that state. And that could tell me then, you're not adapting well to your environment because your nervous system's staying in this fight or flight mode. There's things that we have to do. One is chiropractic. It's the biggest thing we can do to help change that.
08:00
Once we go through a certain period of time with that, if we're still not making those changes, that's when I start looking holistically at other things to help in that process. When it comes to the nervous system, take us through how we make it stack. Is it past experiences, is it trauma? Like you said, fight or flight responses. What is it that we do to get to that point? And then we'll talk later about what we can do to calm it down, as you said. Love this. So yeah, your brain, when you're from the age of zero to seven,
08:27
This is the most critical time because your brain is the most impressive. There's certain different brain waves that we have at different states throughout the day. Like right now, I'm probably pushing a beta wave right now. You're probably pushing a beta wave right now. This is when we're in our work active mode. We're doing things. Alpha is more relaxing or calmer, a little more focused, but theta is the state we're in most of the time between zero to seven theta is also the we're in a meditative state, you know, more in a calmer state. It's also right before we were slowing down as we go to sleep.
08:56
But the reason with theta though is it's at zero to seven, your brain's like a sponge, it just soaks up things. And a lot of times when we look at our life and condition, there's so many layers to this. When we look at our life and wonder like, well, why can't I have this? Or why do I struggle with this? Or whatever that question may be, we all said it before, why God or why me or anything like that. You have to understand there is some sort of conditioning back at zero to seven that happened. And it's not something that someone told you, it can be.
09:22
Most of the time, the way the brain works, and this is where people would get messed up when it looks at how to change behaviors and all that is, because you saw a reaction to something. Let's say your parents were really struggling financially, you would see them argue about money, and if they had a bill come, you saw the reactions of that. Without even knowing this, you are seeing finances, this is what that means. You pick up on all the energy. You may not know what scarcity means, but you're picking up on the energy of it.
09:48
You may not know money is, you know, whatever XYZ and put a limiting belief on it, but you're picking up on that and absorbing that. And so we absorb these things. And if it's a trauma or something like that, it's not the event of the trauma, it's how the emotional response came from that. What emotions came up that you felt at that time of that trauma. It could be emotional, it can be physical, sexual. If there was like a sexual trauma, the biggest thing they felt was being powerless or helpless during a period of time. It's that emotion.
10:16
And then their self-worth, I will look what happened to me, my power was taken away. And now all of a sudden they feel like they're helpless. They may go into victim mentality. This is the negative side of it. Just as much as there is that side, there's the other side that exists too, which is true power. Understanding that no one can take your power away. This is called the law of duality or the law of polarity, right? That's why you can have two people with the exact same experience, but they look at it differently. Now the question is why do they look at it differently? That's the key. You can line up 10 people and you can have an event that happens.
10:43
Now the events, the event, it doesn't matter what shows up. But if you ask the 10 people, you're gonna get 10 different responses. You're gonna get 10 different, maybe almost, some similarities, but emotional responses. And now the question is, why do we see that? Again, it comes back down to our beliefs of what we were conditioned, how the brain was conditioned, what you value, you're going to see with your eyes. Now there's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system. We'll keep it short, called RAS.
11:08
It does a lot of different things. But one of the things it does is it filters out information. It only filters out information that you don't deem valuable. What's not important to you. So when you see an event, you have a filter on that you don't even know what's happening. So the only thing you're going to pay attention to remember, because memory is also associated with what you value. It's hard to remember things that you don't value. And you can think about this in your life when you have a hard time remembering something. Most of the time, it's just not really that important to you or you haven't made it important to you.
11:38
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. And so the people are gonna have this projection and see it just like with COVID or 2008, 2009 with the recession, they're gonna see what the world is going through with their filter and what's important to them. So if they have a fear of money or scarcity or things like that, they're gonna see more of it, they're gonna hear more of it, they're gonna be aware of more of it. And it's not like the other side isn't there also because it is. The problem is, is their filter is filtering out all that so you don't see it, you don't become aware of it. And all you focus on and what you become aware
12:08
is that what programs people to be conditioned in certain ways. And you can look at this as money. You can look at this in any aspect of life. The neurology is the neurology. This is how the brain works. This is what it does. And so then once you know that, well, there's other things you can get into. Like, how do you reprogram? How do you do that? How do you shift all that? But it's being aware that you have a filter. I have a filter. I'm constantly working on trying to shift my values.
12:31
to get to a point where it's more fulfillment in my life, leading a more soul-filled life and all that good stuff. But it's work and it never ends because there's always higher, higher levels we can go and deep or higher, or you want to look at it as deeper that we can go with that. So the belief system is that based on the things that you remember because they're important to you, that is influenced by your belief system to begin with. Your beliefs are something I call them codes. There's two ways you can create a belief. One is you see something and you just take it as true.
13:00
Let's say your parents got a divorce at a certain age. Well, all marriages will end up in divorce. And you just think that there's no point in getting married. That's a belief that you experienced. You saw it, you took it as truth. And now you believe that to be what it is. Another belief, I call it an acquired belief, which means you saw things show up in your life consistently over a period of time that you started to go, that's how life has to be. It just has to be. I've seen it so many times, people talk about it. Once you believe that to be true,
13:27
Now you've given it energy, you have attached emotions to it. It becomes hardwired in neurology. It just takes a moment. And the nervous system, the brain starts to build the circuitry to all the stuff that has to attach to to say, yep, that's true. And then the brain has to show you that make you be aware that's where RAS comes in now to support and prove that. You see it because you've already, your brain is there to show you that, ah, you already believe it anyway. So here it is. Here's the evidence. You already thought that. You know, seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.
13:57
You have to believe and then you see. We only say, Oh yeah, I knew it. It's almost like gotcha. Living on gotcha mode. Now let's talk about the nervous system, that exercise of calming it down. Oh, there are so many things you can do to calm your nervous system down. There's breath work, which is one of the things I love sharing when I used to share with my patients a lot. So if their HRV wasn't doing well, or I can tell they've been stressed a lot, just being around them often, I could tell. Breath work is great. Breath work is using your breath to re-center yourself.
14:26
I'll share some science with us to show this to be true. Americans love to get into things like, it's a cool thing now, so let's all do this, right? And they just do it. They don't have no reason why they're doing it. It's what everybody's doing. It's just a trend. So, oh, this is a cool thing to do. So everybody's doing it. And I'm always like, you know why you're doing it? Oh, I don't know. I just think it's cool. Do you want to understand like why that may work for you or may not work for you? Which one to do? I mean, there's science behind all this. But when it comes to the breath, I mean, if you look at a lot of different cultures, in India, the Hindus, they talk about breath being the prana.
14:54
And there's so many other cultures, they'll talk about how, you know, your breath is one of the easiest tools to get you back in the present. You take 60 breaths, just from some studies, 60 breaths, very deep. That's all it takes to get you to re-center, right? But the breath work is very important to reset the nervous system because there is a part of your brain. It's called the breath pacemaker. It's just a cluster of neurons above the midbrain. Scientists have studied it and they're like, what it does is it actually is always paying attention to what your breath rate is. And then it creates the response to the body.
15:23
So there's a lot of people who've done breath work, who've created their own techniques. They found out about this and they're like, oh my goodness, we can change how our nervous system is firing, especially the autonomic nervous system, the one that we can't control, but we can influence it. And so through the breath pacemaker, when you're taking deep breaths, you're actually changing your physiology because it's picking up and saying, wow, they're taking deeper breaths. That means we should calm. As you keep taking the breaths, you calm, calm, calm, calm, and you get back to center. And so the breath can do that massively.
15:50
And it's one of the things that I love and I share and I practice daily is because it also builds your reserves to be more resilient to handling stress. It breaks away your patterns. It creates a pattern interrupt in your neurology of what you're usually used to firing all the time. Some people could be stuck in what I call the gas pedal, which is known as the sympathetic nervous system or that fight or flight mechanism. When you can do the breath work, it'll literally pull you right back into a more balanced state. And so you'll feel the calmness. You'll feel the peace come over you. And that's just being in the present moment.
16:20
There's so many techniques out there and I could share a gazillion of them, but the thing is understanding the science behind it and knowing that it's going to help you slow down. It's going to help cut off that firing of that gas pedal or that stuff that revs everything up and it's going to allow you just to pull back and be right here in the present moment. They do talk about the present moment a lot. Are you familiar with Dr. Joe Dispenza? I love Dr. Joe Dispenza. I listen to him all the time as well. He talks about brain and heart coherence.
16:48
And then how the nervous system, if you comment, like you were saying, that's exactly what he says. You keep it calm, because what happens is we always think about the past, and then we use that to basically ruin our future. We are always in past, future, past, future, cause it the gift of the present moment. Because you worry about what's gonna happen in the future and emotions you had in the past when an experience happened, so we are always doing that.
17:12
Yeah, I call it people are carrying their baggage. The terms use a lot for relationships, but I'm like, no, you're doing that every day of your life because you're going into the past of what your experiences were. This is how the ego mind works. And it looks in the past and says, hey, this was painful. I'm going to try to avoid it all costs for you not to go there. And you carry that in every aspect. That could be money, relationships, business, career, you name it. So now you're taking your baggage from like you're saying the baggage from the past, putting into the future.
17:38
Brain heart coherence, that's heart reverability. That's literally what heart reverability looks at is the coherence aspect of the body and how is it connected and how is it looking at it, things overall. I would teach this to my patients is like, if you're stuck in that sympathetic dominant mode, you're not gonna be clear headed. You're not gonna be in a creative mode. You're not gonna be in a state where you're gonna be showing up as your best version of you. It's harder to get into a flow state and your thinking is gonna be more negative than positive. And my patients are like, how's that possible? And I'm like, well, think about it, if you're stressed.
18:07
Are you thinking about bliss and calm and wanting to be in the present moment? Or are you like, I'm in survival mode. I need to focus on X, Y, Z, and you're all over the place. And most of them like, yeah, no, I would be the second part. Exactly. So I'm like, until we can build and hardwire this nervous system to shift more into a balanced state, create more coherence, then obviously you can access higher levels of thinking, more creativity. There is some science behind this too. Part of your brain right behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex. This is your executive center of your brain. This is what really chiropractors work on.
18:36
This is literally what chiropractors do because we're creating pathways to be stronger, to connect to that area, because this is the part that helps you with impulse control, it helps you focus, it allows you to make decisions of future planning. So you can make a choice now and you can actually sit there and look at that choice and go, how is this going to play out for me? And there's so much other things that it does. It's the one part of the brain that makes us different than every other species in the world, besides dolphins. Dolphins have one. I think that's my favorite.
19:04
Yeah, I know. And it's a reason why we're very connected with dolphins. You know, thinking of like they're humans, best friends in the ocean. And so it's looking at understanding those principles to get to that state of the present, because the present moment, what it really does is there's a power there. It's a feeling. I could explain what it means to me, but that might not mean nothing to you. Right. You may be like, OK, that sounds cool. But I always tell people, like, I call it my bliss state, because when I meditate or when I try to get hyper focused and get into the state.
19:29
When you're truly in the present moment, there are feelings that will come up. Sometimes it's blissful or joy, peace, calm. Sometimes it's all of those, just depends on the individual. That's our true power state of when we're truly centered and truly in place. When you get into these kinds of states, this is called hemispheric synchronization, big word. But what it means is that both sides of your brain are in sync with one another.
19:50
They're not designed to be that way all the time, but you can get there in certain moments. So like athletes know this, cause they call that the flow state. People who play instruments know this, cause they like just get into a mood and like everything is just flowing. They're just like playing the drums. And you look and you can tell they're just like in a state. And you're like, what are they? That is the present moment. Or it's like walking through the forest and just looking at trees and all these other things, and you can feel the life of them. You're in the moment appreciating them, not just going, oh, that's a tree, because that's left brain thinking, which takes you out of the moment.
20:19
or those are the leaves or this type of tree is this. And it's not like it's a bad thing to label things because it helps us to learn more about them and so forth. But the present moment is a feeling steak. It's not a thinking. So you internalize the experience. If you see the tree. Take it in. Yes. It's just like when you're in the present moment, I used to teach this with eating. If you just go and eat and you're like, oh, steak, I know what a steak tastes like. I know what I like about it. I know what the flavors are. Great, perfect, let me eat it. Oh, yeah, perfect, there it is. That's great. You intellectually enjoyed your steak, but you didn't really immerse yourself.
20:48
But when you take it, put it in your mouth and just chew and don't think of anything. Put the fork down. Just sit there and just focus. All you're focusing on is just chewing and you're tasting, you're feeling, you're getting into the experience. There's no thinking. You're just what's showing up, right? There's no like, oh, this should be here or that should be there. It's like what's showing up and you just enjoy the moment. All of a sudden there's flavors you never knew that was in that steak or you just weren't aware of. Then it's like the whole experience becomes better. And just from a health perspective, you're actually going to
21:16
digest it better and you're going to enjoy your body's going to utilize it better because you were very present. There's so much power to just being in the present moment. And breath work is one of the main ways in which we can do that. It's the easiest. Yes, because I like meditation better. But the problem with meditation is you've never meditated before. It's going to drive you nuts. I'm not saying not to do it, but I always told my clients, you're going to take 90 days if you want to do meditation and you got to do the same meditation over and over for 90 days. And they just look at me like, why do I have to do it over and over?
21:44
because you're so conditioned to just bounce around to other things. You're very conditioned to be like, well, I think this will be better for me. I'm trying to get you out of your mind. And I just want you to sit, get into the moment, but not expect anything. It takes about 90 days. And I said, once you get to that point, now we can have fun with meditation. Now we can look at and say, you know, what do you want to do with music? You want to do guided? Do you want to do this? And until then just focus on this one and just do it for 90 days. Interrupt your pattern. Yes. This has been so wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Victor.
22:14
There's so much to follow up on and we can refine juice. I appreciate that. My website, empower your reality has a ton of stuff there. I have some free resources on there. I have a new book that's just coming out. You can get access to it there. Do you want to catch me on my socials? If you scroll down to the bottom of my website, bottom left corner, you'll see I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok and LinkedIn. You can connect with me there. I can DM me. I do love getting messages and hearing from people and I do respond to them. That's the primary ways to get ahold of me.
22:43
Thank you so much for being here today. One last word of wisdom. Ooh, I love this question. One thing I share often is that, understand that life, you know, we look at life and we think that you can look at the world as something hostile or you can look at it as something loving. And whichever way you look at that, that's the experience you're gonna have. And your brain may fight you on this. Cause it'll be like, no, look what's going on with the war and Ukraine and Russia, or look at what happened with this and this and this. But the only way you can see that and really put your energy into it is if you think the world's like that. The truth is that,
23:11
The universe, God, Allah, whatever you want to call it, is always here to support you for your growth and what matters most to you. And if you really want it to exponentially grow in your life, know that everything that comes in your life, no matter what, it's a gift for you to grow and expand. And if you can shift your mindset to that and make that a code and a belief, your life will be so much less stressful and so much more enjoyable.