Dancing in the Discomfort Zone with Anne Bonney

Stop Trying to Solve Your Life (Start Discovering It) | Dr. Kelsey Miles

• Anne Bonney • Season 18 • Episode 400

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0:00 | 49:55

Have you ever worked your butt off to build the life you thought you wanted...only to get there and think,  "...Wait. Is this it?"

Dr. Kelsey Miles (https://www.drkelseymiles.com)  knows that feeling firsthand.

WATCH THIS EPISODE ON YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/K83AKk4gm7k

After earning a PhD in chemistry, she walked away from the career she'd spent years building to become a touring blues musician. Today, she's somehow both and she's discovered that science and creativity aren't opposites at all.

In this fascinating conversation, we explore why so many of us treat life like a problem to solve instead of an experiment to run, how curiosity beats certainty, and why the scientific method might be one of the best tools for navigating change, uncertainty, and personal growth.

If you've ever felt stuck, questioned your path, or wondered whether you're becoming the person you actually want to be, this episode is for you.

Chapters

00:00 Dancing in the Discomfort Zone

03:10 From Chemistry to Music: A Journey of Self-Discovery

05:48 The Power of Music in Healing

08:57 Finding Common Ground Through Music

11:54 The Intersection of Science and Art

15:04 Embracing Change and New Opportunities

23:10 Redefining Success and Personal Discovery

30:09 Embracing Change and Continuous Growth

37:04 Navigating Discomfort and Life's Challenges

44:59 The Science of Experimentation in Life

Want more from Dr Kelsey?

 Dr. Kelsey Miles invites audiences to stop treating life like a problem to solve and start approaching it as something to discover. Through live science and live music, she shows people how to read the signal, cut through the noise, and make decisions that feel more aligned with who they are becoming. She is the 2026 Professor of the Year at Avila University in Kansas City.


Anne Bonney is a keynote speaker and emcee who helps organizations lead through change by building resilience, emotional intelligence, and courageous communication.



SPEAKER_03

Hello, hello, hello, and thank you for dancing in the discomfort zone with me. My name is Anne Bonnie. I am your host, as always, and I'm thrilled today to welcome Dr. Kelsey Miles. She invites audiences to stop treating life like a problem to solve and start approaching it as something to discover. And as we hear her story of science to music, you're gonna start to see this theme weaving in. One of the things I really wanted to talk to Dr. Kelsey about was this different types of intelligence that come into play in our lives as humans as we build our emotional intelligence and empathy for other people and for ourselves. This is what I was looking forward to talking to about her about. And through her live science and live music experiences, she shows people how to read the signal, cut through the noise, and make decisions that feel more aligned with who they are becoming. In the intake form, she put, it's easy to get caught up in the race to success, only to realize you've built a life that no longer feels like yours. That one went straight to my heart, y'all. Y'all have heard my story before, where I suddenly woke up and then had everything that I had been working for and then suddenly was like, wait a minute. So I'm super excited. Um chemistry to music today, here to dance in the discomfort zone with us. Welcome, Dr. Kelsey. How are you?

SPEAKER_00

I'm great, and thank you for having me on your podcast. I love the topic of dancing in the discomfort. I that is something we all need to do.

SPEAKER_03

Well, and it's so funny because people keep saying to me, Well, you're marketing, you want to give people what they want. People don't want discomfort. Yeah, but we need it.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I'd argue that you can't have life without it. It will happen.

SPEAKER_03

You know, whether or not you want it. Totally. A friend of mine, Brett Eaton, wrote a book called Uncomfortable Anyway. Like either way, I think it was uncomfortable either way. You're gonna be uncomfortable either way. So you want to pick it and like have that control? Or do you want to just let it happen to you and really suck a lot?

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. And that's part of the thing that makes life so complicated is because you can't control some things that just smack you. And it's, you know, if you just don't look at it, that's one way to deal with it. And you can also look at it and then decide, I'm gonna dance with that weird tune that's happening. And I love, I love that idea. It's really important that we recognize the agency that we have in those moments.

SPEAKER_03

I love that word agency. And as we talk about resilience and trying to thrive in life, that agency is so important. Self-efficacy, confidence, being able to take that control of your own life and experience, which is what you did. And and this, I'm so excited to talk to you about this because it illustrates one of the concepts that I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is when two seemingly conflicting things come together. Recently interviewed my friend Amy Vetter, who was a CPA and Parker and like super successful, and then went to yogi. And all our friends were like, You're not gonna tell people you hear yogi. So tell me your story, tell us your story, around taking, you know, going from science to music.

SPEAKER_00

Ugh, I gotta tell you, I never set out to be a musician. I did not grow up in a musical family. We had maybe the Dixie Chick CD and a boombox, and we listened to a Jim Croce cassette tape and the radio. And uh I spent most of my career becoming a chemist. Chemistry, I loved chemistry, made sense for my wacko brain. And I, so I had my master's and then I got my doctorate, and it was during my doctoral program that was when music came into my life. I was 25 when I first picked up the guitar. And the reason that that happened was because chemistry, chemistry was so wonderful for me at that time in my life. What I learned with chemistry is that I could understand all the mechanisms of what were happening and I could set up an experiment and learn something. In some ways, now that I'm looking back at it, it's because I had some control over what was going on. And at that time in my life, I had no control. So I was in a very controlling abusive relationship in my early 20s. And um, I had been groomed since high school. It was really bad. And chemistry was this way that life made sense for me. And so I would work tons of hours, and you might have done this too. I know many people who have done this, where we are experiencing discomfort in our life and we pour it into something. And what I poured it into was work, you know, and a lot of us will do that. And so we start getting our, I started getting my identity from work, and it was something I could be successful. And I'm putting this in air quotes if you are not watching a video, because that's what we do. We want to feel agency over something and feel successful. So I did that and I worked nonstop. When I moved to, so I was in Ohio, got my master's, and then I moved to Wisconsin to finish my doctorate, and I was studying organic chemistry. I moved into organocatalysis. I promise I won't, I won't do a chemistry lesson on today's show. I promise. But if you want, I can. Um, I uh so I was um working like 80 hours a week, and what would happen is all my colleagues would go leave around six o'clock, five or six o'clock, like normal people. And I would stay there until 10 o'clock. And what I would do is I would be working on my reactions and whatever experiment I was running, and I would turn on Pandora Radio and I would belt at the top of my lungs to the greats Aretha Franklin, Edda James, Bonnie Waite, Cheryl Crow, um, uh, Stevie Nicks. And one night um I got I wanted to jump out of my skin. I got so scared, I heard someone say, Oh, you're a great singer. And I was so embarrassed because I thought no one was in the lab. And so I said, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, I'll stop. And he said, No, no, keep going. You're a great singer. And I had never heard that. I had done choir in high school, and I have a big blue soul vocal. This is not this is my speaking vocal, but my my vocal when I sing is sweet. We are we are similar, Anne. We'll have to sing.

SPEAKER_03

Sisters in the torch, baby! Put me a piano, let me lay on it in a red dress.

SPEAKER_00

I love it. I love it. And those our voices don't always blend well in a choir. So I was told in high school that I needed to be quiet, so I had just, you know, grabbed onto that identity that I'm a bad singer, and I just did it for myself. And when someone told me I was a good singer, I thought, well, maybe I need to re-look at this. You know, I had drawn a conclusion before that I was a bad singer, but maybe that's the maybe I have more data now. So that night I actually stopped at a karaoke bar. I just like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do it because I knew something was wrong. I was working so much, I knew that I needed to do something different uh to heal from that from that controlling relationship. So I did. I stopped at a karaoke bar, I was nervous, I sang a song, I met some people, and this woman I met said, you need to borrow my guitar because you're a great singer. Well, I had never played guitar. I'm 25, I'd never played an instrument except for the plastic recorder and you know, middle school. And so I learned how to play guitar, and I went to the most prestigious school for this, YouTube Academy. Yes. Right, and I I woke up every day working on this, and the the interesting thing for me was that music gave me a way for me to understand what was happening inside in a way that none of my my my you know critical thinking skills that I had, like I had very good critical thinking skills for chemistry, but I hadn't honed the skill of really feeling what was going on and really understanding what was on the inside. So music gave that to me, and I started to write music, and I I really learned something interesting about songwriting. It's not that I'm writing a song, it's more like I'm uncovering something that exists. And so what I did after I graduated, I got my doctorate, I disappointed everyone in my life. I um became a musician, a full-time musician. I lived in the basement of a friend's place. I was playing shows for like 50 bucks. I was started to travel, so I started to build up my network, my booking agents, the venues I was playing. And um yeah, my parents were disappointed, but really what it was was they were scared. They were worried about their daughter.

unknown

Yep.

SPEAKER_00

And my, you know, no one understood because there I am with a master's and a doctorate in chemistry. I had always planned to be a chemistry professor, and there I am playing for drunk people at bars.

SPEAKER_03

And I for 50 bucks a night.

SPEAKER_00

50 bucks a night. And I loved it because I got to I got to learn a new topic. I learned chemistry. I mastered chemistry to a level that was just there's always more to learn, but when you really master a subject, it it makes you kind of allow you to zoom out more. And I realized what I was most interested in learning next was way more complicated, and it was people. I realized how complicated I was and how I kept changing. I kept changing my what I liked, what I didn't like, and the people around me kept changing. And and there's people that that maybe aren't as nice to you, and then then they start being nice to you. It's confusing being a human is kind of how I would always say science is easy, people are hard. And and so I just traveled around meeting people. My favorite things with the shows was I would set up and I would talk to people, I would they would tell me about their life, I would start learning all of these things, and I realized we have way, way more in common than we have different.

SPEAKER_03

And so say it louder for those in the back. This is, and I want to pause here because I think this is such an important fact, completely off topic with everything we're talking about, everything I want this episode to be. And that statement right there is just so cool. It's such an incredible realization that to have it at that moment in your life is pretty, pretty great.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely, Anne. Like, you know, and we and I think part of it is we walk around thinking we're so different, which actually keeps us from understanding ourselves more. Separate. Yep. You know, it's it's yeah, it's it's pretty, it's pretty interesting when you when you start to when you start to get there. Um, and we're still gonna have to get there because I can, you know, every time you take a step in life, you start to realize you've changed a little bit. So you have to relearn, you know. So yeah, so then I I was traveling the nation playing shows. I have um booking agents in different states, and I love it. I I I'm a songwriter, um, I'm finishing my next full album. And um Pause you for a sec.

SPEAKER_03

Sure. You are finishing your next album. I'm sorry, uh, we'll start at the where you just were like, this is what I'm doing. But I you're it's getting even more buzzy. Is it? Yeah, it's so weird. And I and I was like trying to like listen to when it was doing it. Sometimes if your video is just trying to because I know this because I move a lot when I talk, if your video is just trying to process movement and it gets like um but then it just kept it got worse and worse, so I wanted to pause and do it just to uh mess with it a little more. I'm so sorry. You're on a great role. So we want to get right back to where we were.

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Do you want me to is there anything?

SPEAKER_03

I don't know if I can change anything, like any settings or is there a vol like a volume on your computer and your microphone? You can adjust them both so you can still like get it, but it's changing the settings or something. Am I buzzy at all?

SPEAKER_00

Very, but um it it's like delayed and buzzy from you, but that is so weird. I know. Um I volume like my gain all the way down on my mic.

SPEAKER_01

I just um let's see. My internet's good. I just ran a little test.

SPEAKER_03

Wouldn't it be funny if it's my internet?

SPEAKER_01

Well, but no, I thought it would be funny. I've got 800 MVP and P Q R SWs. Now the other thing we also do is just go to Zoom. And I I could just slip of them together.

SPEAKER_00

Could. And I also wonder too, if it's like collecting it fine. Cause I think with Riverside, I think it uploads each one separately. So maybe we're like witnessing this, but maybe it's like I don't know. Maybe it's cleaning.

SPEAKER_03

I thought of that a little while ago and I was like, am I okay taking the chance? Um, and I guess I alright.

SPEAKER_00

Let's keep it. I mean, if you want, we could also pause. You can maybe see what this sounds like on Riverside, or maybe it has to be a process.

SPEAKER_03

It takes a few minutes to kind of prompt or short time to I understood everything.

SPEAKER_00

I really did what you just said.

SPEAKER_03

I'm just thinking about the listener, and somebody might be like, Yeah, I can't listen to this anymore.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. That's my only concern too.

SPEAKER_03

Um Yeah, it's moving it now, and you're not even moving. So, like it's not doing it for a minute.

SPEAKER_01

And then like I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00

And just and and just so you know, um, because I think it's like delayed when you come in. So um I apologize if I'm anyway, because it's delayed for me when I receive your like uh, you know, you saying something. Um anyway, it takes me just a second then to stop talking. So so yeah, anyway. Yeah, no, I don't think it's weird.

SPEAKER_03

So weird. Yeah, and freaking technology, whatever. It's AI. They don't want to talk. They blamed one on AI? It was a human thing, like somebody messed something up and they were like, oh, that was AI, or like somebody farted it or something, and then like something stupid. And then they were like, that was AI.

SPEAKER_00

Like, I'm gonna use that. I'm gonna totally use that in my classrooms. Oh my gosh. When I make them because I use the whiteboard, and so when I make a mistake on the white, I'm my kids are gonna love that. I'm like, sorry, that wasn't, you know, AI messed it up.

SPEAKER_03

Or you know, AI.

SPEAKER_00

It was totally AI.

SPEAKER_03

All right, so you're gonna start at I was booking, I was touring, I was doing all that stuff. That's what we're picking up at that when you're ready.

SPEAKER_00

So yeah, I was traveling around the nation. I had booking agents in different states, and uh, I just I really fell in love with really understanding other people. And then while I was writing songs, my last album was called I Am. And it was really the journey of self-discovery for myself. And every time I played any of those songs, I'd have people come up to me and say, I've experienced that too, and we'd have the best conversations. And so uh I from that I wrote a guided lyrical experience that goes through the journey of how to really uncover all of those things inside, looking at your inner critic, the shadowy part of yourself, imposter syndrome, listening to your intuition, all those things. We all are working on that. And so after I've been traveling for a few years, I uh was gonna move to a bigger city. I was up in Madison, Wisconsin, and I'm a harmonica player, and I really and I play blues and soul.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I know. Before I let you keep going, I you're gonna is there a link online where people can go and listen to your music? Yeah, yeah. I'm on Spotify and I'll get that from you and we'll put that in the show notes too. Oh, that's great. Now I'm like, okay, and I want to go listen. So I bet our listeners want to go listen to you right now because Hanukkah and music and guitar and hello, that sounds really cool. Okay, keep going. I'm sorry, I got excited.

SPEAKER_00

No, that's fine. Yeah, well, now I have to tell you I have a nine-piece band. So I have a yeah, a horn section. We're finishing my next album. They're up in Wisconsin, so I go back and I record my album there with my my band. And now I'm in Kansas City, and I I moved here because the I really wanted a bigger, um, bigger music scene, especially with blues. And so I was on tour, I was playing in St. Louis, and I I fell in love with Kansas City. All to say, this is I'm gonna tell you something in my story that I did not expect to happen, which is part of dancing in discomfort, right? Like we don't, we don't really plan some of the things that fall into our laps. I was moving here uh for music, and a colleague of mine said, Kelsey, we need your specialty, organic chemistry, at the university I teach at. And I told her, No, I don't, I, I don't want to be a professor. I'm a me I'm a musician, I'm an artist. And uh eventually she had me meet her colleagues, and it I it was actually an interview, uh, found that out on the call.

SPEAKER_03

She snuck that in on you.

SPEAKER_00

She did, she did, and uh, I met these educators who were really, really there for the students, and I fell in love with that university. So I work at Avala University in Kansas City, and I'm very impressed by how they support these young adults. And and so I said yes, and I've been a chemistry professor at Avala University for three years, and it's been just such a joy. So, since moving to Kansas City, 2025, I represented Kansas City in the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, made it to semifinals, which is super cool, and then uh last this past year I was professor of the year. The students voted me as professor of the year. It's been it's been awesome. And and I'm really excited to talk with you about this idea of like science, this analytical, logic side of your brain, and also the creative aspect of art. And I I for me they are one and the same. And and I hear so many people go, oh, how are you left and right brained? And they're both the same for me. And I am excited for us to dive into this conversation because I'm hoping that by the end of our conversation, everyone who hears this will start to have a different perspective of the way they can think about challenges or decisions in their life. Because it's not so much the decision you make, it's your perspective of the decision. And if you know your perspective of the decision that impacts the decision and also your next one.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Well, and you know, it's so funny that you're bringing this up right now. We're almost exactly episode 400 right now. The very first episode, I think, of this podcast, my first or second, was with Michelle De Molin, who is now Michelle Lee, because she got married since then. It's been a long time. Um, but she was talking about how her dad had said there are no good decisions, there are no bad decisions, they're just decisions, and there are consequences to each decision. But what you're saying is that framework around the decision is also part of that aspect. And the challenge with human interaction, why it's so ugly and messy and you know, exciting and fun at the same time, is that everybody has a different perspective on things. And it's when I try to put my perspective on your decisions that suddenly we're in trouble. A, your parents saying, Holy shit, you're a PhD in chemistry, or you're gonna go be a musician. Wait, what?

SPEAKER_00

What are you doing? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Right. So put your perspective on this. I love it.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I love that you just shared that. And this is something I always tell my students, and I have to remind myself every day. You know, that's another thing. Thing. Once we learn something, it doesn't mean we still don't need to remind ourselves this. This this statement is something that I always remind them. Only you will know what's right for you. You it's it's your life. And so as a mentor, as a professor, I mean, I can offer them advice as much as I I can, and I always remind them, you know, this is this is yours to figure out. And as scary as that sounds, because here's the thing, and and you and I both have had lives where we've witnessed this and experiences ourselves that every listener has to. We are told what to do to become successful, what ladder to climb, and how to climb it, what to wear, what to say, what to do. And I did that. I climbed the ladder, I went all the way to the top of the building called I'm Gonna Be a Chemistry Professor, and I looked around and I thought, what the I don't want this right now. I want to go play my guitar for drunk people. Now, it's not quite what I said, but pretty dang close, let me tell you what.

SPEAKER_03

I'm sure that's what Trace thought you were saying.

SPEAKER_00

I'm sure that's what they thought. Now, when I didn't call home for money for, you know, the first year, they they lightened up a little bit, you know. And and I I think the reason that that really hit me was because I I had done everything that was supposed to make me feel okay. So why don't I feel okay?

SPEAKER_03

Why did I feel successful?

SPEAKER_00

Right. I was successful. And I and I worked right, and and so then you know, you hear people say, well, you determine your success. And I always that never really, that never really helped me because I I wasn't quite sure what I thought was success. And it would change sometimes. And so then I this is what I found for me that I've been that I really think has helped me and has helped a lot of my students. And it's this idea that that there is something in our brain that tells us, and whether it's culturally or socially, we we get fed this all the time that life is something to solve. That that it's a puzzle, and then if we just find the right job, the relationship, the thing that will oh, you know what? If I could just m live over, you know, in in a nicer apartment, I would feel better. Like all these things, right? If I just make the right decisions. If I just, yes, and it's something to solve. And look, I have solved thousands of problems in my career as a chemist and also as a musician, and I am here to say that life is not something to solve, life is something to discover.

SPEAKER_03

Again and again and again, every day. And again, every minute, every second.

SPEAKER_00

And though, and the the reason that this works is because I learned science, chemistry, there are rules. Mother nature does certain things. Carbon is an atom that makes four bonds, that's what it does. And humans are not that way. The next day we, you know, when we wake up tomorrow, we will have learned something new and something will have adjusted. And so it's important for us to consider continually discovering what works best for us. I'm not talking major changes, but every day, you know, you might notice you like something a little different, or you know, and and I that's what I think for me, that's what really helps me uh label success because it's in the moment. You know, what what's working for me right now? Because what worked for me a few years ago isn't working anymore. I don't want to play, and I don't, I don't play dive bars anymore, even though I'm very good at good at it. It stopped working for me. Yeah, you know, I just I don't drink alcohol.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this reminds two sayings are coming in my head. One of them is you never put your foot in the same river twice. Because everything keeps moving, everything keeps changing. Every day it's different. Every day you wake up and you're a different person, the world is different, the people around you are different. Like everything keeps changing. And I mean, my specialty is change, and and I the one of the concepts that I think is really interesting is that people always expect things to be the same, and they're all like, what when it changes? But change is the only thing that we can actually count on.

SPEAKER_00

I'm so invited. Yes, one thousand percent, Ann. Keep going, keep going. You're on a roll.

SPEAKER_03

Gives you permission for it to be different and to reinvent it as we can go. It's not easy, it's not tidy and clean, and like a lot of us like it to be organized and everything, but that's just how it is.

SPEAKER_00

Totally. I say all the time, I say change is the only constant in life. You know, and and as a scientist, that means a lot with like mathematical terms and constants and such. But again, I'm not teaching chemistry on this podcast, but I I teach my students this. It's it's I totally agree with you. When you step back in the river, the river, the the water had moved, you know. So when I went from wanting to be a chemistry professor to then throwing that dream dream away, I really, you know, and we all do this, we when we pivot, we we close the door on something, and life decided to open that door back up, but it's not the same door. I'm not the same person. And so part of why I think I my students voted me in for professor of the year is because I refuse to only be that chemistry professor. I showed up as myself. And uh boy, did we have fun, you know. I play harmonica on the first day, and I I I I really help them understand that that it's it's there's more to life than just this class, you know, and there's more to life than just the next step. It's really, really getting okay with with taking it all in, knowing you're not gonna always know the right answer. But if you learn how to approach problems, if you really learn how to do that and check in with yourself to see if you like the decision you made and not judge yourself, you're gonna learn and and have fun. It's gonna be fulfilling. I stopped trying to go after success and I'm starting to go after fulfilling, like a fulfilling life, which is why now I'm a speaker and I combine music, original music and stories, and also chemistry in my in my workshops and my keynotes because that's fun for me. That's fulfilling. And I'm also aware. Go ahead, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I'm also aware maybe one day that will change.

SPEAKER_03

Right. To the point. Well, and I think this is part of the reason people have problems with change and with closing that door because they feel like, oh, I just close it and let it go forever. Well, no, not necessarily. You're closing the door, so you can go in a different door, but you're not locking the door. That door may become available again. And I think this is part of why people have such trouble letting go of the old future they envisioned because they think they'll never have it or that, you know, and yet so often we arrive at that door again when we're different, when the when what's behind the door is different enough that we're now ready for it. You needed to get that 360. My assumption is, you needed to get that 360 view of life to be able to bring a full human to that classroom and teach chemistry from that perspective. I've been in a new relationship right now, and he and I are discovering the same thing of we weren't ready for each other when we first met. Now it's a completely different picture because so much has happened and we've evolved so much.

SPEAKER_00

Um I love that for you. And I love the this idea that you use the word dis, you just to discover, you know, and when you approach it that way, when you approach, I call it thinking like a scientist and creating like an artist. So you need the critical thinking skills of like I I analytically can look at this critically think about what didn't work when we first met and what why it was off. And also I am open to the possibility of what we can create. That's an artist. And that's that's bringing both.

SPEAKER_03

Totally. And this goes back to the second saying that I that came up for me a few minutes ago, which was don't freeze people. So don't when we say don't freeze the don't freeze them, don't freeze them in who you think they are, because they're never gonna be the same next time you meet them, whether it's tomorrow or next year or in continuous, right? You're not the chemistry girl, you're different than you were back when you were working 80 hours a week and doing the chemistry all the time. You're a different person. And so if I walk into every interaction with you thinking you were who you were back then, I'm not I'm gonna be like, oh wait, this is a different person. Or you're not gonna feel like you're being understood or heard in that moment either. So as we're trying to be emotionally intelligent in interactions, not freezing people is a huge piece of this, too.

SPEAKER_00

I love I love that. And when I hear that, then I immediately think of how scary it can be to be open to the new possibilities. So this is what I this is part of what I I teach. When I think about thinking like a scientist, when a scientist runs an experiment, the entire point of the experiment is that I don't know what will happen. And and the the reason this is so hard as a human is because we are doing this in our lives. Whether or not you're a scientist, if you're listening to this episode, you have experimented in your life. Every decision and choice is an experiment. Now, we put judgment on ourselves if it doesn't go as planned. We are the ones that that um make assumptions or really want a certain outcome. But if you're truly a scientist, you run an experiment and you let the data be the data. So then, as the next step, then once you collect the data, you draw a conclusion from that. And it's that step that gets really messy for us. And that's that's really where the artistry kind of comes in. And so when you think about making a conclusion from the data that you've collected, you want to relate it back to yourself. And this is the hardest part, judging, right? It's like it's so easy to judge a conclusion that we have, right? And and we cut ourselves off from learning when we, like you said, when we freeze people or freeze ourselves, we cut ourselves off from learning. And if you're open to letting the data just be the data, learn, you know, observe what's going on, and then sit down with that data, draw the conclusion. But here's the most important part being open to drawing a new conclusion. And here's the easiest way I can explain this. So when we were looking at the stars years and years and years ago, the first um, you're talking about our forefathers, right? Our forefathers, the first astrologers, they were collecting data about the sky. And the data suggested the conclusion they drew from this data was that the sun revolved around the earth. Now we know that that's not true. However, the data gave them that conclusion. Now, with time and more data, now they have a different conclusion. The earth revolves around the sun. And we go, well, yeah, yeah, that of course, we know that. Well, the truth was that the earth revolved around the sun. The data they had absolutely suggested the sun revolved around the earth. It required more data, more experiments needed to be run. And so yes, and so the idea is that when you draw a conclusion in your life, at your job, in your team, working with people, you know, that conclusion is absolutely correct for that data. But what happens if you collect more data that gives you a different conclusion? And I think that's the part that I'm I'm hoping more people can can can lean into because when you do that, you're more open to receiving new data, you see new possibilities, you make better decisions because you're collecting more data.

SPEAKER_03

When you're dealing with messy humans who change and evolve everything, you are more able to connect, more able to find common ground, and more able to realize to your point earlier that we are actually a heck of a lot more separate than we are different, which is so important these days.

SPEAKER_00

Exactly. Exactly. And I say that because so many of us, we have some challenge in our life and we feel alone through that challenge. And it's that that loneliness that can keep you from being open to new data and to to experiment because certainty doesn't come from from like, well, you you don't you don't try and find certainty before you take action. You need to take action and and then you'll learn things. That's why I say life isn't something to solve, it's something to discover. You know, I never met, I never meant to become a chemistry professor again. And here I am, and I love it. I love, I have both music and chemistry. I've got a blues residency twice a month. It's great. I love my life right now, and I'm speaking using both music and science. I never set out to do any of this. It came, it just came.

SPEAKER_03

And pause you there because I bet it didn't just come. I this is where the dance in the discomfort comes. You had to be willing to dance in a little discomfort to make those things happen. It wasn't just like, here's the red carpet, dance to that galaxy, dance, you know. It was in the that sounds really, really fun. I like the cartoon of you doing that, by the way. And you're a mouse in that cartoon too. But anyway, um talk to me a little bit about some of the uncomfortable moments that you had to slip into, you know, the comfort zones you had to leave in order to find this amazing fulfillment and genuine joy and happiness and satisfaction. And everything's not probably perfect. You get hand-made nails, you get gas, you know, you have you worry about money, you I don't know if you're actually flashing, but I just figured I'd you know, you're human, everything's not perfect, and what you just said, which is so like easy. I love my life. Um tell me about some of the uncomfortable moments and what you have to do to get here to this.

SPEAKER_00

I love that question. I'm gonna tell you a story, and the way I'll start the story, and we we've already talked a little bit about how I was uh, you know, got my PhD and then I disappointed everyone to become a musician. That was a door I had to close, right? And then I had to really like own this new idea that I had. I loved it. I I there was something there for me. Now that is a hard step, okay, for people to take. And that's not the part of the story I want to talk about. I want to talk about when I realized that playing shows like that were no longer something I could keep doing. So I remember I was I was doing a tour up in Wisconsin. The summers are beautiful up there, and uh I was playing a lot of shows. Um, and I was near the end of the tour and I was playing a show at a very loud, very loud bar. And I remember um now I know it was a panic attack. And I I wanted to jump out of the wind, I wanted to rip my skin off and jump out of the window. I was so overstimulated. I'm very neurospicy. I learned this afterwards. Um, and I I um I should tell you more context, I stopped drinking alcohol. I had been, you know, for a few months I had no alcohol anymore, and I I just liked the way that I felt, but what I didn't realize was that was numbing a lot of like sensory input for me. So there I am playing a show. Now I I can do this like I knew the song like the back of my hand. So I stepped in front of my speaker so I could only hear myself and not the loud bar. And during the set break, I went to my car, breathed a little bit, and I had this moment of holy crap, I have shut the door on this other career of being a chemist. And now I don't know if I can continue as a musician. What am I doing? Like, like, why? Like, why is this happening? You know, like I felt completely lost. And it was that what's interesting about that is it made me really think about what role music had in my life, and it really made me really go go deep to understand what was going on. I learned how neurospicy my brain really is. I learned some skills uh with that. But what I want to focus on is like there are two, I think there are two ways you make change. So either one, life gets so hard, it smacks you so hard that you can't help but listen. And the other way you can make a change is if you pay attention and start to see the momentum of your life going in uncomfortable ways. Now, I could have noticed this earlier. It's not like this was the panic attack, it was the first time I recognized that playing bar shows is not something I want to do, but we don't listen to it the first time because we don't want it to be true. We we we made a decision and we are so focused on continuing. And so what I really wanted to figure out in my life is how can I figure this out sooner so I don't have to life doesn't have to kick me in the head and then make me make a decision. And I and we've all experienced this. We've all been smacked by life and then had to make a pivot. And there are ways on Go ahead, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Somebody on this exact podcast said it that the universal whisper, you'll kind of start getting little hints, and then it'll kind of say it out loud, and then it'll put it on a billboard, and then they hit in the head with a two by four. I know, and it's like, how do I hear the whisper before I get in the head with a two by four?

SPEAKER_00

Exactly. And there is kind of I I find comfort in it knowing that if I don't hear the whisper, I will be notified.

SPEAKER_01

I just don't you can't miss it eventually.

SPEAKER_00

Eventually. And and I think that's that's really that's really why I'm doing the work that I'm doing. And I I I really I realize that how much I use the scientific method in my own life. I mean, to become a musician, I didn't know how to set up sound or how to do at like I can do all of that. I, you know, bought the sound gear, I booked, I um have a band, I fired many people from the band, I've figured, you know, I've got a cohort of people that are awesome, and I I had to learn all of those things, but all it was was the same thing I was doing in science, which is I have a hypothesis, I ask a I ask a question, I have a hypothesis, I design an experiment. So I I I boiled it down into three steps. Can I share these three steps with you that might be helpful? Okay, this is these three steps I use daily. I use them every lecture class, every time I'm doing anything. The first, it's called the CEO framework. CEO framework. So some people are like, oh, be the CEO of your life. Actually, that was a friend of mine who called me out on this. I told her about my framework, and my neurospicy brain missed that it was the CEO CEO framework. Uh so the first step is to calibrate. Any experiment you ever do, you have to calibrate the instrument. You have to read the signal of being zero. So you read the signal and you cut out the noise, so you calibrate. And this is including questions like what am you know, what's actually going on, what state am I in, what you know, what's the problem, right? Just calibrate, pause, you know. And the next step is to experiment. So so once you pause, you kind of get the lay of the land, you know where you're at, you know where you want to go, maybe, and you design an experiment. What's one small thing that I can change to, and here's the key to give me more information. That's all you're doing. So you're not changing it because you know the answer, you're literally running an experiment to find out.

SPEAKER_03

And I'm gonna stop you right there because that's such an important piece. We want to solve, we want to like get to the answer, boom. And that's not how it works. So I love that that second step is to experiment. How do I get more information? This is what I call dancing in the discomfort zone. We dance over here and then we learn, oh, next step's over here. And then the next step is not just walking through and we have the whole thing planned out. So I love that. Exactly. Calibrate.

SPEAKER_00

And then the way that you know Yeah, calibrate, experiment, and then what you do is then you optimize. So that's the last step. Oh, optimize. And when you optimize, um, what you're doing is you are adjusting, figuring out. What you want to adjust because right now you've learned something new, and it could be that you keep going the way you're doing it, it could be that now you learn something and now you have another question and you have something else you can learn. And if you go about it this way, I call it experimenting in the dark. That's what most of us are doing. We change something and we forget to calibrate. We just keep, we just keep changing things and we go, why am I not happy? Right? I'm still feeling off. Well, you're feeling off because you haven't calibrated, and then you didn't check back in with yourself after the experiment. And you also didn't give yourself the space to run an experiment, collect data, and go, nope of the optimized, right?

SPEAKER_03

What do I do with what I just I just got a little more data? Okay, now what do I do now to recalibrate and start process all over again? We just go experiment, experiment, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, and we don't do anything with it.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, how often have we been in like I've worked, I mean, there's this happens all the time in organizations and companies where we make a change without even calibrating, and then people are like, why are we changing this? And then no one takes time to optimize it. I mean, it's just what we do, and this happens in, yeah, like I said, organizations, companies, universities in our own lives. We notice something is off and we change it without actually calibrating to go, what what specifically can I change so I'll learn something about what didn't work or what could work. We just automatically change something. And I and I think that that's really that's really the theme of things in my life where, for example, when I sh when I talked about my panic attack at this show, I could have at that moment called all my booking agents and said, I'm done. I'm never playing again. And I didn't because I there was still something with music I loved. And so now I use music in my my speeches and my keynotes, and that's that's how I wanted to use music. So if I had just experimented in the dark and not, you know, done one small experiment, if I had just shut the door because I wasn't quote unquote working anymore. I could have, you know, you you you know, you what is it, you cut your nose off in spite of your face.

SPEAKER_03

Throw the baby out with the bathwater.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And it's so easy to do that because we feel uncomfortable. And so I guess that's why we want to solve it.

SPEAKER_03

We want to get beyond it, we want to get comfortable again. That's the that's the biggest challenge, right? What we're trying to do is get to that comfort zone, but we need to get have that time dancing in the discomfort zone, being in that messy middle where it feels like crap because you're like, God, I'm all up in hair and I'm a mess and I'm panicky and I don't know what's going on. I don't know if what I'm doing's right. But that's such an important piece of getting to that place where you genuinely feel absolutely.

SPEAKER_00

You gotta pause, you gotta calibrate, you gotta actively design your experiment and think like a scientist because a scientist doesn't care what the data that the scientist lets the conclusion come after data collection. They don't force the experiment to do something, because I'm telling you right now, if you try to force carbon to make four bonds, eventually, or five bonds, it'll eventually try to make four. Like it just it's you know, science, it it does its thing, it's based on physics, there are rules, and so you just design the experiment and observe. And I think that's that's the hardest thing for us because that's where our judgment, our imposter syndrome, those things they come in. And and it's really hard then to, and when you have judgment and imposter syndrome, you can't create like an artist, you can't observe new possibilities. And when I write songs, you know, I don't come into the studio going, okay, all right, guys, we're gonna play this song. It's gonna be three minutes long and it's gonna be exactly in this key. This is exactly what we're going to do. No, I you have to discover the song through the process of writing. I don't sit down knowing, I have an idea, I hum a little note, and then I start playing, and then I let the song kind of guide me where it needs to go. And I explain songwriting as a way I I kind of feel like an archaeologist. I'm I'm uncovering like a dinosaur bone, but it's my song. And I I find that when I start songwriting, it already existed within me, or you know, we can we can get real woo-woo, but it's you know, it's in flow when you're an artist discovering a new possibility.

SPEAKER_03

That scientific part is still there because you know, major chords feel more yummy, my chords feel more sad or more scary. We know this chord to this chord sounds a certain way. So we've got that scientific carbon four bonds piece to music, and then putting it all together into the actual composition of this beautiful filled life is the artist part of it. Kelsey, I love this so much. This conversation, and I can go on and on. I've got 17 other questions in my head, but we're out of time. And if people are interested in the work you're doing, where do they go and find well?

SPEAKER_00

They can find my music on uh on Spotify or Google Play, wherever you listen to music. My next album's coming out soon. And you can find out more about what I talked about today through my website, drkelsymiles.com. And I'll put all those links in the show notes.

SPEAKER_03

You can go just click and find more Kelsey. This has been a very awesome conversation. Thank you so much for your time and all your insights and all your dance in the discomfort zone, so you can come and share it with us.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you, Anne. This was a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed it.