What is up daddy gang? It is your founding father Alex Cooper with call her daddy.

Dr. Nicole Apero welcome to call her daddy.

Thank you so much for having me, Alex.

You are a clinical psychologist and you have a new book,

How to Meet Yourself.

So you talk about how getting to know yourself means a variety of

things including understanding why we react the way we do in certain situations,

why we're drawn to certain situations, why we get stuck in certain patterns,

and how all of these behaviors are rooted in our childhood and interactions we had with

our parents.

So from a psychologist perspective, let's start with what does it mean to be self-aware?

Yeah, I think this is a really, really great place to start and to speak to your point, the self that many of us are enacting in the world, reacting to in the world from, again, is what I call in the book, at least, our habit self.

It is all of our conditioned experiences, wired literally into our brain and our nervous

system, and it becomes our way of being so much so that many of us well into later in life

don't really know who we are and I remember me having many moments in my 20s

when I was coming to that realization that I actually don't know who I am.

I don't even know how I want to spend my time, even though, to speak to the point of

self-awareness, I did have the idea that I knew myself. I was studying to be a clinical psychologist.

I had been in and out of therapy on my own, but what I really came to realize is the self that I was most

familiar with that I imagine, many of you listeners are most familiar with is that condition self all of the habits and patterns again that were an adaptation to my earliest environment that's stored in my subconscious mind become how I am in the

world but not who I am in the world.

So for me self-awareness really means becoming conscious of first and foremost the impact of those earlier

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