The Inner Matrix: Leveraging the Art and Science of Personal Mastery to Create Real Life Results is a remarkable new book by Joey Klein that addresses questions such as:
- Are you plagued by stress or anxiety?
- Are you searching for greater meaning and purpose?
- Do you feel as if you’ve professionally or personally plateaued?
- Do you want to have more control over your life?
For more than 20 years, author and Inner Matrix Systems founder Joey Klein has sought answers to these questions through a wide range of disciplines, from psychology and neuroscience to martial arts and mediation. Over time he synthesized effective elements from multiple disciplines into a single approach that he says can help others:
- Train their thoughts and feelings to discontinue destructive patterns
- Engage their internal resources
- Achieve powerful visions for their lives
- And much more.
“Each of us has our own Inner Matrix, which consists of our emotions, thought strategies and nervous system, that drives our actions, behavior, and ultimately creates our experience of life,” Klein said.
He shares his techniques and practical exercises in his new book, The Inner Matrix: Leveraging the Art & Science of Personal Mastery to Create Real Life Results. The book contains insights of value to anyone looking to make positive changes in their lives, including:
- A simple, practical approach to managing your emotions, thought strategies and nervous system to channel success
- Ways to develop fulfillment, peace and inspiration
- How to create the neurological alignment needed for best results
- Methods for designing a rich and meaningful life
- Case studies, scientific references, expert insights
“Ultimately, The Inner Matrix is a comprehensive guide for realigning your emotional, mental and physical states to support the achievement of your most important personal and professional goals,” Klein explained. “When you master your internal state, you master your world. It is just that simple.”
In an exclusive interview with LifeGide editor Buck Lawrimore (BL), Joey Klein (JK) explained in detail how the Inner Matrix works and how it can benefit anyone.
The purpose in writing the Inner Matrix book
BL: What was your purpose in writing this book?
JK: Really it was it was never my intention to write a book. I actually started out in Los Angeles, California, about 20 years ago. And I had a psychologist – very good friend of mine, her name was Lu – and she became a bit of a mentor of mine, and I had studied internal training methods like meditation, mindfulness, things like this. And she found my methods were very helpful for her clients back then, and this was before mindfulness or meditation was accepted the way it is today.
And so, she started referring me a lot of her high-profile clients, a lot of famous actors, actresses, movie producers, CEOs etc., because I could get results with them in a particular way that she couldn’t get, for many, many years. And long story short, I ended up with a full private practice. I was working with about 80 to 90 people a month. I had a waitlist of about 200 people.
And they asked me like, hey, “I want my colleague or my friend or my business partner to work with you – how do we make that happen?” I ran out of hours in the day, so at the urging of my clients I started doing in-person programs, and that worked up to about 40 programs a year., I was teaching throughout Japan, Europe and the United States, and basically ran out of weekends. The only thing left was holidays, and so people were coming up to me, at my programs for years, and said, hey, would you write a book?
And so it was on the urging of my participants and my clients that that I ended up writing the book, and it was about a five-year process to get it to where I wanted it, because I really wanted it to do three things:
- Number one, I wanted people to read it, and just have different access to reality, like hey, “I can look at my outside world and see it a little bit differently just by reading the book.”
- The second thing was I wanted it to give people permission to be able to dream of a life better than what they know, like “There might be a way to evolve these challenges that I have,” and that’s why I incorporated the stories in the book, some of the case studies, and the science behind it was to really give support and credibility.
- And then the third component was I wanted it to be a training manual for those that could never come to a weekend, that if they really wanted to just use the book and execute the techniques and the strategies – just using the book and never having to meet me, never having to come to a program, they could train it, they could do some of the stuff explained in the book.
And it seems like it’s proven out. We’ve gotten a lot of emails, a lot of letters from people who I’ve never met, who just read the book and said, “I did these things, here’s the difference it made in my life,” so the book has been doing a pretty good job so far. And after I got a lot of feedback from thousands of people, I incorporated that feedback in terms of what they understood, what missed the mark, what hit the mark…. I incorporated the new science and that’s why we did the new second edition. So that’s kind of how the book came to be.
How emotions are made – constructed or unconscious?
BL: Some scientists like Lisa Feldman Barrett [author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain] say the brain is a “prediction machine,” and she has developed constructivist theory, in which she says the brain is sort of constructing emotions on the fly. So why do you think emotions are unconscious instead of constructed on the fly?
JK: There’s a lot of science and evidence in the field of epigenetics showing that, number one, we inherit emotional patterns to basically prepare us for our environment. Like if our grandparents learned how to survive and then passed that on to our parents, our parents passed a certain amount of that information on through their genes to us. Scientists have done studies with individuals who were in concentration camps or mothers who were afflicted by the World Trade Centers going down when they were pregnant in New York City, and they studied a number of those individuals, and the children that were born had a variety of different stress markers. They were more sensitive to stressors in their outside environment and were predisposed to things like anxiety, stress, panic, etc., not because their environment necessarily dictated it, but when they looked at their parents’ environment and their grandparents’ environment, there’s a lot of indication that a lot of this stuff was inherited.
Then with live MRIs, they’re starting to really understand more and more that emotions are conditioned through repetitive response, and so those get anchored in our unconscious self. So when we’re a small child, our entire communication system is emotional because we don’t have language, we don’t have communication. And then the conscious mind develops, and basically it’s looking for ways to respond to these scenarios. And so what happens is, the conscious mind is pulling upon different emotional patterns that have gotten trained in the unconscious self or the nervous system to respond to different stressors or different stimuli in the environment.
So that’s why in the book, we really go into these emotional patterns that are unconscious. And we’re kind of determining among, say, 20 different patterns, which one’s going to fit best based on the stimulus that’s occurring in the environment at that time. This might include whether I’ve got a stressful meeting that I have to attend with my boss, or my kids are misbehaving in the back, you know, not everybody reacts to those situations in the same way. We’re going to react depending on what emotional training we’ve had in the past. Now, if we understand how the Inner Matrix works, we can retrain those emotional patterns and create different responses to stimuli in our environments. It just takes a little bit of the right training and sufficient practice.
Emotions on a spectrum from love to fear
BL: Okay, that makes perfect sense to me. So that relates to my next question: In your book, you talk about, a spectrum of emotions that goes from love to fear. And yet you’ve also talked about many different emotions, so it’s confusing to me to say, all positive emotions are related to love, all negative emotions are related to fear. Is that what you think, or can you help me understand that a little better?
JK: When I train people – and in the book – we really try to stay away from the idea of positive or negative emotions, because when we were talking about love and fear, again I take a more science-based approach than an etheric-based approach. So when we’re talking about love-based state, we’re really talking about the parasympatheticnervous system being active, whereas fear-based emotions or states is when the sympathetic nervous system is active, so fight-or-flight response [sympathetic] versus rest-and-digest [parasympathetic] response.
And so, we go back to the prefrontal cortex which is very active in a parasympathetic response, and that’s responsible for emotions like love, peace, joy, happiness, fulfillment, etc., whereas the fear-based [sympathetic] mechanisms in the brain are responsible for anxiety, panic, sadness, shame, guilt, etc. So when we’re looking at that spectrum, it’s helpful to know from a neurological perspective, is my brain operating in a fight-or-flight response, or is my brain operating in that rest-and-digest response?
And I find instead of giving people those technical terms, they can kind of go, “Oh, I’m in this love-based expansive experience of myself,” or “I’m in this fear-based contracted experience in myself.” It’s an easier way for people to know where they are from a nervous-system perspective. And why that’s important in terms of performance, whether you’re a stay-at-home mom or dad, or a pro athlete or CEO, when we’re in that fight-or-flight response, the functions of the brain responsible for creative thinking and critical thinking and intuition literally shut down.
A lot of people think that if I’m a little anxious, I might have limited access to critical thinking, but that’s not actually how the brain works. You actually have no access to critical thinking and creative thinking. So until you get the brain into a more parasympathetic response, you literally can’t – even if we are a very intelligent person – we’re not able to access that critical thinking, creative thinking, unless we understand where we are on the spectrum of nervous system response and being able to note when we’re in that parasympathetic response as opposed to sympathetic response.
The reason I say emotions are not positive-negative is because there’s always a pain-pleasure negotiation going on as it relates to the brain. So let’s say I want to make more money, and that’s an idea that I have. Well, I might have fear-based emotions tied to the idea of making more money that got trained as I was growing up. You know we hear phrases like “Money is the root of all evil” as an example. And so I might have this idea that I don’t even realize I have, and I might have this fear-based idea about making more money, or I’m going to have to work harder to make more money. And so, in that case a fear-based emotion is actually keeping us away from the wealth we want to build.
Whereas, on the other side, I’ve worked with clients who were able to make millions of dollars. And they remember feeling very embarrassed because they went to school and their jeans were torn, and they had to wear the same clothes every day, and because they didn’t have money to buy clothes, then they said, “I have to get out of this reality.” And so that same fear-based emotion idea of shame and guilt is what drove them to create wealth. And so it’s not necessarily that fear-based emotions are bad or love-based emotions are good – we’re going to experience all emotions as human beings. What’s important is to know what we’re feeling and how they’re driving us based on the life that we’re looking to create based on the outcomes that we want to produce. So fear-based emotions could be aligned with that or not aligned with that. Love-based emotions can be aligned with that or not aligned with that, depending on how our relationship is to the things we’re looking to create.
How can someone identify the programming in their inner matrix?
BL: Very, very helpful. Now one of the things you say in your book is that once you identify the programming in your inner matrix, you can identify the “lens” that you’re looking through and see how it is coloring your world. How can someone identify the programming in their matrix?
JK: I think we touched on this in the book, but what we did is we really, to support people was to break this down into simple terms. So it’s like a the emotional feeling is X. It might be I’m feeling anger. Then, if we look at, and you can write that down on a piece of paper, “I’m feeling anger.” So that’s a lens, right? I’m perceiving my current reality through this lens of anger. And then the thought might be, “They just don’t care about me” and so we could write that down as well – “They don’t care about me.”
And then, certain actions start to occur to me to take as a result of this [lens of anger]: “I’m going to distance myself from this person, I’m going to pull back, I’m going to do a variety of things as a result of that being there.”
Now let’s say this is a marriage, let’s say this is my significant other. And then, all of a sudden, that’s what I’m thinking all day long, that’s a lens that I’m looking through as it pertains to my significant other, my marriage. And then let’s say, they come up to us, and they give us a little hug, and they say, “You know I love you and I appreciate you.”
And then immediately, boom, our emotion changes, and we feel grateful, and so we could write down gratitude [as our feeling] and our lens changes – “Wow, I’m so lucky to have this person –they care for me so much.” And now all of a sudden my choice, my decisions, my actions, radically alter. Now I want to be closer to them, I think about the nice things I can do for them, I want to be around them, etc. So through a typical day, for the average person – their lens changes from one reality to another pretty drastically, and for a lot of us it’s an unconscious act. We don’t even notice that that lens changed.
So when we start to take note of “How am I perceiving this moment right now?” and we start to develop the ability to name how we’re going to perceive it again, based on the outcome we want to create, that’s a really powerful tool in terms of creating the things that we really want and getting ourselves to be more accurate regarding the things that are actually happening in our reality, in our lives. So we make better choices and decisions. If I feel angry, I’m assessing a situation or a dynamic that’s going to be skewed in a particular way. If I can get out of that anger and get to a place of calm within myself, a little bit more centered or feeling a bit accepting, and I review that exact same situation, I’m much more likely to assess those facts much, much better and much more accurately, if I understand that there’s a lens and how to manage that.
How does someone shift their emotional state?
BL: In your book you encourage people to allow an emotion such as fear or anger to “fully express itself without resistance.” How does someone shift their emotional state to a more positive one, when they’re feeling that negative emotion? How do you shift your emotional state?
JK: So you know, obviously we can get very intricate here, but if we break down the process, we make it as simple as possible. The first step is really making a distinction between expression and sensation, meaning if we cry when we’re sad, the tears are a sensation – that’s something the body’s doing. Not everybody cries when they’re sad. But if we notice the experience of sadness as itself, we can allow that experience of sadness to really process through the nervous system of the body, let that express. And then, with a little bit of practice, we can do our best to not think with the mind, but really just focus on the experience of that sadness. From a nervous system perspective, the neurological lifespan of a fear-based emotion is 90 seconds or less because our nervous system isn’t really designed to be in a sympathetic response in a constant state.
Now a lot of us have gotten sort of hijacked, if you will, and we are in that sort of low-stress response a majority of the time for a variety of environmental reasons – TV, cell phone, yada yada yada, email, we’re driving and so on. But with a little bit of practice, we can really let ourselves experience an emotion by just letting it well up and quickly dissolve in 90 seconds or less. The brain can’t sustain it without some kind of outside influence. Now the mind thinking about some terrible thing that might happen is an outside influence that’s going to tell the nervous system that it’s in danger, and it needs to stay “on.” So if we can get a little bit practiced in experiencing emotion without thinking and without like clenching our fists if we’re angry, as another example of sensation of body, but really kind of sit like we are [relaxed] in a pretty neutral position, we can let the emotion express. It’ll dissolve very quickly.
Now what’s helpful for people to add as kind of a follow-on with that – using breath, and so touching with your tongue the roof or palate of the mouth, taking a deep breath in through the nose, because that helps stimulate the vagus nerve in the back of the throat, which again tells the nervous system, “I’m safe, I’m okay.” [The vagus nerve is the main nerve of your parasympathetic nervous system.] It sends a signal to the brain and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, as you inhale a deep full breath, all the way to the top. And then pause, hold exhaling gently, then exhale, hold at the bottom, repeating that breath cycle, maybe four to six times, will help to again toward that emotional shift or change.
Then, once we feel a little bit centered, a little bit calm, the third step that’s so important that often gets missed is we’ve got our redirect. Gratitude practices are one of the easiest ways to do that. “I’m grateful, like everything’s okay in my life, here are the things that I have,” so we have to refocus to something to keep the mind’s attention, otherwise it’s just going to go back to the habit of thinking and feeling that we’re trying to shift and change. So if we break that down, number one, it’s let the emotion express itself away.
Number two, add that deep breathing technique, activate that vagus nerve, and then step three is, let’s refocus the mind to a destination that’s going to more effectively generate a feeling of well-being, whether that’s joy, peace, compassion, love, whatever it might be, and have that same place that we redirect to every time so that my mind learns as a reflex, “I’m going to go here and instead of over there.”
What is the most important message of The Inner Matrix book?
BL: Okay, great – so final question, what would you say, in brief, is the most important message of the book that you would like your readers to understand and appreciate, boil it all it down to a few sentences.
JK: I would boil it down to two key things:
- Number one, training emotion is the single most important thing a human being can do to experience the fulfillment in life that’s possible and also achieve the results that they want. Because emotions tend to be the things that are getting in our way. And so that kind of leads to:
- The second component that’s so essential, which is, if we understand that we really do create our life and our existence from the inside out, meaning creation really does start as an emotional process, that then we think this stuff through, it leads to every choice, decision, action we take. If we learn to train our inner reality, then it is the most important thing we could do in terms of shifting, changing, or creating our outer reality in the way that we want to design it, from the relationships that we have in our life to how our family is to the level of income that we make to where we live in the world, and so on.
About the Author
Joey Klein is the founder and CEO of Inner Matrix Systems, a personal mastery training system for high achievers. He has been interviewed by Self Magazine, INC.com, Yahoo Finance and NBC. Klein has coached leaders from some of the world’s top companies, including IBM, Coca Cola and the World Health Organization.
For more information, please visit https://innermatrixsystems.com, or connect with Klein on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joeykleinfreedom/photos.
The Inner Matrix: Leveraging The Art & Science of Personal Mastery to Create Real Life Results
ISBN-10: 1737215705
ISBN-13: 978-1737215707
Available from Amazon.com
