Episode 446: Free To Perform with Ruth Chiles

In this episode, the brilliant Ruth Chiles joins us to discuss the importance of addressing deep-seated performance blocks and how to rewire our brain to its natural state of confidence and flow. Throughout this episode, you’ll hear about Ruth’s experience with performance blocks, from playing music since she was 3 to being unable to play a single note when she was 18. Ruth also explains why performance blocks affect all of us, shares her four-step framework to deal with them, and much more.

Rob Shallenberger: Welcome back to our Becoming Your Best podcast listeners. This is your host, Rob Shallenberger. Thanks for being here today. We have an awesome guest—her name is Ruth Chiles. She just finished a new book called Free to Perform, and she’s going to talk a little bit about that book and how it applies to every one of us. She was originally raised in the UK and now lives in Spain. She can talk about that, but we’re excited to have her here. So Ruth, thank you for being here today. 

Ruth Chiles: Thank you, Rob. It’s an absolute pleasure, and I’m really delighted that you’ve invited me for us to chat today.  

Rob Shallenberger: We’re looking forward to this, and I know that this is going to be valuable for everyone listening today. So, first of all, I always love to have context. Tell our listeners a little bit about your background, Ruth—how you came to this point. 

Ruth Chiles: This is kind of quite a long and involved story, so I’ll try and keep it short. As a child, I had two passions, which were, firstly, music, and also writing. I started playing music when I was three years old, and it was clear to me that that was my future. By 18, I couldn’t even play a note. I had begun to suffer from panic attacks and performance anxiety, and I didn’t know these were connected. Eventually, I just could not control the corners of my lips. I’m a wind instrument player, so I couldn’t direct the air through the instrument, and it was game over. I was actually preparing for my A-levels— my dream was to study music—but it was game over. I ended up doing a science degree, a degree in life sciences, which is a part of biology. Out of that, I was then employed by a UK retail bank in their executive program. I mean, that’s such a long way away from what I had dreamed about as a child. I will say that I carried a lot of grief with me around that—around losing my ability to play music. I think that installed this idea in my mind of “What happened?” I was a child who could play anything by ear. You’d put me on stage—I absolutely loved being on stage. Anything you could put on, and I’d play along. Music was just like a ball for me. How could I go from that to not even being able to look at a musical instrument, with my whole body just going into a shudder? I think I started to become really interested in performance and in what performance is. Who performs? When are we performing? And where does that kind of flow—when we’re at our best—come from? How can it get shut down? 

Ruth Chiles: So, as part of that, when I was working with the bank—I’m talking about a long time ago. We’re talking about this being nearly 35 years ago. This was before coaching even had a label. I started to talk to the bank about coaching—although it wasn’t called that—about this way of working with senior managers, finding out what was happening with their performance, and I proposed a project that they went with. As a result of that, I was really lucky because they sent me to study accelerated learning programs. I studied directly with Tony Buzan and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). I also studied directly with the founders of NLP and other neuroscientists. They sent me to all sorts of things where I could start to gather information, and we put together a senior executive coaching program. Then, out of that, there were these series of coincidences that happened. I started to get involved with athletics because one of my colleagues was working with athletics teams, so I began working with performance in a broader sense as well. What I did come across, though, was that I just felt that there was something much deeper going on. This wasn’t something where we could just do some neuro-linguistic programming, trick the brain, and get back into things going. For some people, that’s enough, but for some of us, there was something much deeper going on. 

Ruth Chiles: Through that realization, I started to study much broader fields. I studied Sufism and spent many years practicing and studying Buddhist meditation. I also began to study a type of yoga called Kundalini yoga and actually ended up training as a teacher for that. That was a really big breakthrough for me around understanding all sorts of things happening within the whole body-brain network and coordination. I then studied something that might seem quite far out, called Family Constellations, which brings in a transgenerational—I’m not just me; I’m actually carrying my whole family history with me. That was also a breakthrough moment for me. But then I found the jewel in the crown, something called Brainspotting. I initially trained in Brainspotting, became a Brainspotting practitioner, and am now a consultant in it. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a while, but that’s really the big key that opens the door to being at access to what’s stuck and being able to release it. So, that’s a kind of a part of the history of the varied journey I’ve had, which has brought me to where I am today.  

Rob Shallenberger: Yeah, what an awesome journey. I can easily tell we could spend two hours just on the journey alone.

Ruth Chiles: And there are lots of overlaps with everything—all the amazing work that you’re doing as well, Rob.

Rob Shallenberger: I can tell that you’ve had a pretty amazing past there. So let’s talk about your book. You just released Free to Perform. You had another book focused on focal dystonia—that’s how I came across you; I was reading that book. So, first of all, tell us about Free to Perform. What an incredible background you just shared! Tell us about the new book, why you wrote it, and then we can focus on how it applies to our listeners.

Ruth Chiles: Let me take a step back into the first book, Focal Dystonia, because that’s part of the story about why I wrote Free to Perform. As part of my work with athletes, I came across several who had motor coordination issues that came out of the blue. There’s a technical name for it within sports called “the Yips,” but we weren’t even working within that concept at the time. So, I worked with these athletes, and their performance improved as a result of the work we did because the motor issue that had come up had been hanging around for quite a while, and it was just like putting a bit of a ceiling on their performance. Then it spilled over into this motor coordination issue. I was then asked to speak at one of the superior conservatoires of music here in Spain about what I was doing. One of the tuba teachers, who was a basketball fan and I had been working with basketball players with these problems. He asked me to talk about it. At the end of which, one of the trombone teachers came up to me and said, “You know, what you’re talking about with these athletes, I have the same thing as a musician, in my embouchure.” The embouchure is the formation of the mouth to direct the music. And it was just like—boom—light bulb! That’s what had happened to me. That’s what stopped me from playing music. I stopped playing music at 18, and I was in my mid-40s when I had this conversation with this guy. He said me, “Can you work with me? Can you heal this for me?” And I thought, “Well, let’s give it a go! I reckon. If it’s the same as I’d been doing with the athletes, we’ll do the same thing.” So, I worked with him, and very successful, he was back up and playing again. He then said to me, “This is called focal dystonia. Please put yourself out into the world, because everybody says this is incurable. And you’ve not only cured these athletes, but you’ve cured me as well. Please get out there, tell people about it, and keep doing what you’re doing, but do it much more visibly.” And so, I did.

Ruth Chiles: So, I ended up becoming known as the “focal dystonia woman,” the woman who worked with focal dystonia. A lot of my general performance work sort of dropped into the background as a result. I wrote a book about focal dystonia—where it comes from. For me, focal dystonia is like the body making an absolute statement stand on performance blocks, but all performance blocks are there as well. This is just an extreme version of it. I believe that part of what I have been working with focal dystonia is actually what’s going on in your embouchure or neck. Focal dystonia can [10:14 inaudible] motor movement where muscles start to spasm, tense, hyper-contract, or hyper-extend uncontrollably. That’s not the issue. It’s all the performance stuff going on underneath which is leading to the body doing that. That was the way I started work, and I wanted to put that into a book, which became my first book. Over time, as I continued with this, I realized that there’s a whole aspect of how our personalities become adapted within these performance issues that really was worth a whole book writing on that. Because there is so much of it and it’s so deep that it really needed a whole book on it, and that’s what led to Free to Perform. So, anybody who is struggling with focal dystonia, the first book gives them a real foundation for healing. The second book actually gives them much more depth around other things that is going on for them. But I also wanted to come back into this overall idea of performance. This isn’t just about being a musician on stage and being at my best or an athlete on the pitch and being at your best. We are all performing, all the time. Whenever I’m in a conversation with someone, in a social situation, there’s an aspect of performance there. In day-to-day life—the way I organize my time, my energy levels, where I direct my attention—what I do with that with the day-to-day is the way my life is going to unfold.

Rob Shallenberger: It sounds to me like the first book was really focused on focal dystonia, while the second book, Free to Perform, is really expansive of everyone to some degree. To your point, everybody is performing at some level, whether it’s in sports, social interactions, whatever it might be. Is that correct?

Ruth Chiles: Yeah, that’s correct. When I’m a mom raising my kids, I’m performing. It’s not that performance means something that’s being false. It’s not like you are putting on a show for people. My kids playing out, for instance, pushing boundaries or are upset, I need to know how to stay in flow—how to stay centered in myself and keep calm in order to be able to workout what it happening to my child and how to help them. If I need to be putting limits and boundaries, then I need to do that in a way that’s supportive of them in their development and growth as human beings. Maybe that’s not what I need to be doing; I just need to listen and understand them. I’m so worked up that I can’t get into that place where they’d go, “Oh, I’ve been understood, now I can relax.” Then, their emotions calm down and the child is able to be more functional again. That’s a performance.

Rob Shallenberger: Okay, so let’s build on that. You just used an example of the child relationship. In your research and years of experience, what are some things that commonly hold people back? You have the focal dystonia side of it. Now, just in general, what are some things that held people back that they weren’t even aware of or some of the challenges that people faced that have held them back? Does that make sense?

Ruth Chiles: Yes, absolutely. I think that’s a brilliant question. The first thing is that our natural state as human beings is one of openness. It’s a state of confidence, love, kindness, flow, joy, playfulness, flexibility, spontaneity, confidence—that’s our natural state. So, if we’ve lost that state, it’s because something has happened to create that loss. What happens is our early experiences. Depending on those experiences, we might learn that it’s not safe to be all of those things. It’s not safe to be me. I’m not receiving conditional love, so I have to become conditioned in order to receive love. What we start to do is we start to adapt. We adapt our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world.

Rob Shallenberger: That’s interesting because it’s so subtle. One thing I’ve observed, to build on your comment—and this is just my opinion, I haven’t done any formal research—but I’m guessing that almost anyone in their 40s or 50s has accumulated enough life experiences, losses, challenges, or setbacks, the majority of people in our society have moved out of that state. There’s just the centerpiece contentment; there’s just a lot of stuff going on in most people’s minds and bodies.

Ruth Chiles: Right. So, we get this accumulation of self-doubt, negativity toward the self, negativity toward others, negativity toward the world, and a lack of trust in ourselves, others, and the world. Basically, we step out of flow. And as you say, by the time we’ve reached our 40s or beyond, we’ve taken step by step, and we end up being such a long way from home. 

Rob Shallenberger: That’s really interesting. I think for a lot of people, the wheels are probably starting to spin in their minds. They’re thinking about their own lives and can probably relate to this. One of the places my mind always goes—and maybe it’s just the way my brain is wired being a former fighter pilot—is acknowledging that, yeah, maybe we’re out of that state, things aren’t right. I think a lot of us think, “Well, how do we fix it?” or “What do we do to get back to that state?” That’s where you have a ton of experience, and that’s why you’ve written your books. So, what are some things people can do to get back to that state, to overcome those challenges, and really move forward in their life?

Ruth Chiles: We need two things. The first is a model or framework within which we can move forward. I know that in your work, you have some great frameworks—like six steps, seven steps, or these different steps. That’s a modern framework, and that’s really important. The Free to Perform book has a framework with four phases that I take people through. Each phase has specific exercises, and I guide them step by step through each of those exercises. The book lays out the framework, gives a lot of background information about where it all comes from, and then it goes into very practical exercises. But we also need a tool. For me, the most accurate, precise, and powerful tool that I’ve found to work with all of this, as I mentioned, is brainspotting. The exercises are literal brainspotting exercises, and I teach people how to use brainspotting for themselves in order to change their brain. We’re not talking about psychology in the way we’ve conceived it in the past. We need to remember that all our experiences are hardwired into the brain. The experiences that cause us to adapt get hardwired into the developing brain, which continues to develop until we’re about 25 to 30 years old. During that time, we hardwire all our experiences, and that creates our personality. We often think, “Oh, I’m just this way,” or “The world is just that way.” But that’s not true—it’s our perception based on what’s been hardwired into our brain, and we can’t always see it. In our 40s and beyond, we may start to see it, but before that, it’s like a metaphor: a fish doesn’t realize it’s swimming in water. So, we need a way to get in and rewire that. The good news is the brain is enormously plastic, so we can rewire it. Brainspotting is the best tool I’ve come across to do this. We also need to recognize a couple of things which are not even in our common knowledge—one of which is the the part of the brain that’s wired into the brain is the subcortex, or the deep brain, which is working at about 11 million bits of sensory information per second. Our thinking brain only working at 60. So, 60 versus 11 million—that’s why we can’t think our way out of this. CBT and similar psychological processes can be helpful, but there is a point at which they can’t get to where we need to get to. As much as I try to control my behavioral responses, there’s this thing happening at 11 million bits per second that’s going to drive through and override it all.

Ruth Chiles: And then the other part that’s really important is the body—particularly the fascia of the body, which is the membrane that runs through the body. It runs around the muscles and through the muscles. It also has a type of muscle within it, which is like smooth muscle, which is instinctive. It’s not under our control—it’s autonomic. The fascia holds a direct map of our brain and our neural connections. So, when Bessel van der Kolk, who’s written a brilliant book called The Body Keeps the Score—if anybody would like to read that—he describes this process. What’s in your brain is literally in your body. So, what does that mean? It means that if we can come back to the body, we can actually find out what’s going on in the brain, and we can rewire it. What brainspotting does—it finds that our eyes are actually scanning the deep brain when we sleep in REM sleep, and it’s a filing system or a storing system. So what that means is, if I can come to the body and where my body is holding my adaptations, I can find where my eyes go to connect into that holding, and then I’m right onto that neural network that got miswired. The brain starts to go, “Oh, that’s a bit weird; it shouldn’t be doing that,” and it will wire it back into peace. So, the four stages that we want to go through: the first stage is actually coming back to the body and becoming aware of what’s going on. In most of us, our relationship with the body is like the relationship we have with the chair when we’ve been sitting for a long time. You forget the chair’s there; you can’t feel it any longer. But if you bring your attention consciously back to that, then you can feel it again. So we need to start doing this kind of conscious attention back to the body. And that can take time. Some of us are very, very disconnected from the body. We have something that’s called the “sensory gate”—this way of filtering out information—and that’s really high, and it just takes us time to bring that down. So, the first exercise in the book is how to do that. It guides you through how to do that.

Ruth Chiles: The second stage is, we then need to start coming back to ourselves, back to flow, back to what’s real in ourselves—back to well-being again. The next two exercises are to enable you to do that, and then we start to do some brainspotting with that. Now we’ve got the perfect place to work from. I’m aware of my adaptations and how I’m holding them in my body, and I’m also aware of what not being adapted is like. I can compare the two. And then we get into this third stage of the process, which is where we get really deeply into the brainspotting, to unwind all of that. So, the whole body comes back into peace. The mind comes back into peace. So what happens is, it’s almost like we literally come home to ourselves. The emotions and the body come into flow with that, the mind becomes crystal clear, and we are able to just be ourselves and take action on that in this really beautiful way and in an authentic way in our day-to-day. There is a fourth part in the book, which is specifically for musicians, which is then about, “How do you bring that onto your musical instrument? How do you bring that into your performance?” But I think anybody can use that—you just take the word “musical instrument” out, and you put in whatever your theme is there.

Rob Shallenberger: Well, that was a fabulous overview of the book. One thing that’s interesting, Ruth—my wife laughingly said a couple of weeks ago, “You should have been a researcher.” My wife and I, on our own health journey, have been very healthy, but we’ve had a couple of things in the last year that we never expected. So, I’ve just gone down all kinds of different paths. And while I appreciate Western medicine for what it can do—it treats broken bones, if there’s a torn ACL, it can address those kinds of things—I also realize how many limitations Western medicine has. There are so many things that Western medicine can’t treat. The default for the majority of doctors is, “Well, if there’s something I can prescribe to help, great. Here’s a pill. Good luck.” And that, really, I think very easily and observably, does not address the root cause, as you’ve articulated so well here, that things are so much deeper than that. In many cases, in Western medicine—minus the torn ACLs—we’re just putting on band-aids. We’re just covering up what’s there. What I’m so excited about for people who are listening to this, Ruth, is that I hope they’re going to, number one, read your book, and number two, discover and realize that there are a lot of things happening in the brain that we can do something about. But most people aren’t even aware of it. They don’t even know where to look to find this kind of stuff because Western medicine would never point them toward something like this in most cases. So, this is why I’m so happy that you’re here because people can start to become familiar with the fact that there are options. There are ways forward to address a lot of things that are weighing heavy on people. So I can’t believe that we’ve almost been going for 27 minutes already. So, as we get ready to wrap up, one final question here: You’ve done all of these amazing things—what’s one or two of your biggest lessons learned through all of these experiences you’ve had and observations and research? What’s one or two of your biggest lessons learned along the way that you’ve had?

Ruth Chiles: I think for me personally, one of my biggest lessons was to have a different relationship with constancy and resilience. I think they’re so necessary. Often, we say, “Oh, that’s too hard,” or “We need to be more fluid.” “How could I be that consistent or disciplined?” Or we have this really hard idea of discipline. For me, I developed a whole different relationship with being resilient, and that’s one of the things I personally most needed to work on. My story was either not driving myself enough or going to the other extreme where I didn’t want to do anything. So that’s my personal story. But I think my biggest, more general lesson is that the more we give away, the more we serve others, the kinder we are to the world, and the more we want to see everyone happy and well—the happier and well we are. I think maybe that’s been a lot of my motivation behind writing and doing the work that I do. I’ve realized that life has meaning, and it becomes beautiful when we help other people. If anybody goes onto my YouTube channels or other platforms, I’m constantly creating material—learning resources and people’s experiences. I put a lot of my own time into that because I just think the more we give, the happier we are.

Rob Shallenberger: Well, amen to that. I totally believe that, and that’s a lesson I’m still learning at 49. What a great insight. I hope that’s something we can all reflect on as we wrap this up, Ruth, again, my hope is that everyone’s going to read your book. First of all, where can people find you? What’s your website so they can look you up and get a bit more background? There’s going to be a wide variety of people listening to this podcast. So, where can people find you?

Ruth Chiles: My website is ruthslchiles.com. You already get some free resources there. If you pop your email address in, the first set of exercises from the book will come to you by email, and I guide you through them. Some are on YouTube, others are on audio, so you can actually get going with it and start working with it right from there. And if you like it and think it’s really interesting, the book is available on Amazon.

Rob Shallenberger: And will there be an audio version down the road?

Ruth Chiles: There isn’t an audio version available yet; I would love there to be. I spend so much time keeping things moving forward that I need to take a moment to stop and get the audio version out. There is an ebook version, the Kindle version, and I’m working toward there being an audio version. I think it would work really well in audio as well.

Rob Shallenberger: That’s in the future, coming to us soon. So in the meantime, ruthslchiles.com—that’s the website where people can find you. The first book is focused on focal dystonia, easy to find. The book we’ve been talking about today is Free to Perform, which anybody can find on Amazon, the Kindle version, and PDF is all available there. So, people can find you that way. Ruth, it’s been an honor to have you here. I know you’ve helped people start thinking a little bit differently, just realizing that the brain is an incredibly powerful tool. We accumulate all these life experiences, and things happen along the way that we didn’t plan for, and that results in changes we didn’t expect. I think, for me, one of the phrases that really caught my attention today was when you said, “Many of us, later in life, have found ourselves a long way from home,” from that state. It would be our natural state. What you’ve done a good job of presenting is, I hope, a desire to read your book so that we can walk that path back. I’m a huge believer in templates and having a process or structure because most of us need that. It’s like, “Just show me how to do it, and then we can do it.” So, thank you for doing that today. There’s a lot to think about, and I’m certainly going to read your book, Free to Perform, here in the next couple of weeks. I’ve already read your other one and loved it. Any final comments before we wrap up?

Ruth Chiles: It’s been an absolute pleasure, Rob. I’m so grateful to you for inviting me today to talk with you and to talk with all the wonderful people that you’re connected with. If what I do and what I say is of service, then I am a happy person.

Rob Shallenberger: Well, thank you, Ruth, and thank you to all our listeners. Her book is Free to Perform. We hope you have a great rest of your day and a wonderful week.