Name: How to Actually Change Your Perspective For the Better (with Dr. Tara Swart)
Uploaded: 2025-08-08T15:30:22.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How to Actually Change Your Perspective For the Better (with Dr. Tara Swart)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How to Actually Change Your Perspective For the Better (with Dr. Tara Swart)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-08. Transcript available.

how do we adjust our perspective is it is it that possible that we can adjust
our perspective now
yeah so there's this amazing thing called neuroplasticity when i was still at
medical school
we didn't have sophisticated scanning techniques you know for brains or bodies
so we had kind of
like x-rays and um oh yeah and just asking people guessing yeah kind of you
know and in neurology
a lot of guessing because if someone had a brain tumor but but you knew where
it was roughly then
you would say oh now we know which part of the brain you use for like writing
or it was a lot of
guesswork in neurology particularly once we could scan brains we could um see
how healthy brains are
working so what's happening when you're experiencing an emotion or you're
recalling a memory or you're
making a decision um or you know being really funny um you know we can see what's
going on in the brain
which parts of the brain are interacting with each other you know which systems
are getting a lot of
blood flow and so we also then found out that because we used to think that by
the time you
stopped physically growing like age 18 that your brain became completely fixed
your personality your
iq etc we now know that the brain actively grows and changes till we're about
25.
so if you think of a newborn baby it's it can't do anything and within 18
months it's ridiculous really
if you look at me like this is ridiculous you know like you would never draft
one on your fantasy team
or whatever you know they just it's bad but anyway go on i mean i like what god
does but some of that is
the starting point is very far you know it's you're off you're far off the line
it feels like
but it's isn't it incredible what happens within 18 months yeah so you know
then they're like walking
they can control their own bladder and bowels they can speak up to five
languages if they've been
exposed to you know different languages in the first few years of their life um
so that's that's the biggest
example of neuroplasticity that changes is incredible as you've just said and
then in teenage there's quite
a lot of change you know the brain becomes a bit more sophisticated for
adulthood and then this
process is going on really actively till we're about 25 and then from 25 to
sort of 70-ish you have
to put in more effort to get your brain to change to get your brain to keep
learning and growing
but it's absolutely possible um and for some people it's okay to plateau you
know if you get a job that
you love and you want to do that for the rest of your life and you married your
high school sweetheart
and nothing really needs to change that's fine too but you know for a lot of us
this opportunity
to think that you can really change your personality your career your community
your resilience throughout
your life is is like a beacon of hope so yeah 100 yeah because you start to
think oh it's too late
you know and uh but you're saying it's not no wonderful so once you know about
and also i'm
doing that thing about saying so the whole time which i want to start doing do
people say it a lot
yeah who does americans i was well an american producer told me that everybody
does it says so
yeah i don't know if we do we might i don't know i don't know that much but
anyway yeah i'm hopeful
that you know what you're talking about because i don't you know um if you know
about neuroplasticity
that and that means you know that you have some options to change the way that
you behave in the
outside world or your thought patterns and your beliefs about yourself right so
you're saying there's
still a lot of hope there's still a lot of hope for people from 20 to 75 there's
still a it's yeah it
shouldn't be something anything you feel hopeless about your brain you can
still and that's the main
thing you got to change yeah and you might be able to identify what that is for
yourself but i think
this ericsson stages is a really helpful one because people can go and look up
the age that
they were when they first felt abandoned or neglected and then work out what
their particular issue is and
work on that is our perspective our brain so this is called the hard problem of
neuroscience and that
is the question of whether our brain is our mind or our mind is our brain and
basically if you if
we're being very scientific then our consciousness which is everything that we
think and feel arises from
neurons and chemicals that are physically part of our brain there's a big move
more recently and and this
has happened in in the past in ancient times we believed in seers and shamans
and mystics and um
you know things like clairvoyance and claircognizance and things like that we've
cut we've moved away
from that in modern times yeah we believe in like a lot more astrology the moon
that sort of thing as
well yeah yeah but science is now starting to look at some of this ancient
wisdom in a way that we may
have actually forgotten things that we knew before that are crucial to our
mental health in the modern
world um so i mentioned some of those things already like drumming and chanting
but what we believe now
is that our brain might actually be filtering our consciousness down so that we
can survive in this
material world but actually our minds are capable of a lot more than than what
we you know think now
so in terms of perspective that is all the filters that your childhood and your
upbringing have put on
how you see the world and you can absolutely challenge your perspective it's
not your brain
it's it's a version of reality that your brain's creating and i have some
really favorite exercises
that i have um that people can do at home so one is if i have a dilemma or
particularly if i'm really
struggling and just feeling like things aren't going to work out i i describe
myself sitting here
what i'm wearing at my age and i ask the question like what should i do or you
know what's going to
happen to me like you know when you're really kind of a bit desperate and then
i get up and i walk seven
steps and i turn around and i say i'm tara seven years older than you and i've
seen what happens in
your life and in the next seven years and i i answer the question i give advice
so that's kind of like
that's pretty cool thanks because you're kind of putting yourself in a place
and then you're
you're using your same self and my intuition and your intuition and who even
knows what
what powers the world grants you if you say okay now i'm going to put myself
seven years ahead and
speak back to myself yeah there's i it often feels like there's so many hidden
abilities that we have
that we just don't know about yet like even with like five senses it's like i
bet there's 30 senses we
just don't even know some of what they are there's up to 33 is there really i
went dude they told us
there's five did they tell you that dude well not at medical school at medical
school i obviously knew
there's more than five but i didn't know there's like 22 to 33. you don't trust
us with them dude
i think yeah you got it i guess if you go to school you get more senses you don't
get more you've got them
you've got chronoception you understand the passing of time you've got i got
five but they give you five
senses yeah right touch feel touch and feel are the same okay sorry my bad doc
touch taste taste smell
sight hearing and hearing yeah sorry um but there's more than that way more
unreal you've talked a lot
about like manifesting and stuff you really believe in it 100 yeah i've been
actively doing it myself
kind of personally for 15 or 16 years and then in 2019 my book the source came
out where i shared that
more professionally and the response to that was actually quite phenomenal in
in making me believe
in it even more wow it's a bestseller yeah yeah congratulations thank you so
cool thanks so cool to
write a book and like and have people want to absorb it yeah tell me a little
bit about that manifesting
because we forget about it we forget sometimes that we're the captain of this
ship sometimes we just
feel like the stream owns everything you know yeah and i think some versions of
manifestation can still
make people feel like that because it's about the universe and vibrations i
wanted to explain manifestation
through psychology and neuroscience in a way to say look it's your brain that's
doing it it's not some
outside force and i think that's way more empowering um and and that's what
people really liked about it
that i write a lot about vision boards but i call them action boards because i
say you can't just create
a fantasy and then sit at home and wait for it to come true like look at how
hard you've worked to
get to where you are it's very easy for people to say oh i'd love to have theo
von's life but you've really
struggled and worked really hard to get here um so i absolutely say that that
has to be part of it it can't just be
expecting like things to fall out of the sky and come into your life right but
if you know manifestation
is basically setting goals and desires knowing what you want finding images of
them to put on a board
that you can see at least twice a day um and if it's only once a day then
seeing it just before you
go to sleep because it imprints on your subconscious and it can be very literal
or it can be metaphorical
like something that you know you could have a horse on there and it could mean
one thing to you and
something else to me for example um and basically i ask people to make this
board look at it daily
visualize these things being true because your brain doesn't actually know the
difference between
something happening in real life and a strong visualization and then yeah and
you won't be
afraid of it if you've already visualized it you won't kind of meet that dream
girl and say
oh maybe i'm not ready right you'll have your you'll have told your brain that
you're ready to take a
healthy risk wow so your brain doesn't really know the difference between say
that again between
something that happened in real life or something that you strongly visualize
wow it's the same reason why when we watch a movie or something we're able to
get lost in it
we're able to believe in it because it wow so you could create enough of a
visualization for yourself
if you really were to powerfully start to focus on it and do that and build
that ability to visualize
something that your brain at one point would have to think it's so true that
the world would meet
you and put it into your life i love the way you put that wow dude that's crazy
and it feels that's
what feels like another sense that that to me feels like another sense that it's
like 200 years from
now they're gonna be like people just gonna manifest it's just everything you
know to me everything's
gonna be so over manifested but you know what it is that's one thing that i
feel like there's like
some elite people in the world and they really learned that sometimes when i
see some people who are
operating at a very elite level or um the deep state or whatever i start
thinking oh they that's what
they're using to the best of their ability wow yeah your brain and then the
world is like oh well it has to
have happened because they put it in there so much that's crazy and what kind
of things can you manifest
um off the example because people write to me all the time saying what they
manifested so it could be
a certain kind of home a relationship a family pregnancy um their own career a
lot of it's like quitting
their job and actually starting up the business that they've always wanted to
do travel is quite a big
one yeah you have so much potential in your brain your brain is amazing and if
you know how to use it
properly you can make your life so much better than you ever dreamed it could
be really yes wow how does
somebody who doesn't believe that start to believe it um i would make a set of
tweaks in some very basic
fundamental areas and i would make them micro tweaks so where i talk about
sleep diet hydration exercise and
stress management i always say change ten things by one percent not one thing
by ten percent so if you
went to bed half an hour earlier or you drank an extra glass of water every day
or you ate some more
vegetables and you you know walked a thousand steps more than you usually do
and spent some time in
nature and we haven't even talked about neuro aesthetics which is a whole other
topic yeah then
if you do a few things like that every day they're physical things that are
building the foundation for
your brain to be in a good environment where it can be better you will i
guarantee you feel so much better
within a matter of weeks that you'll think okay what else can i do yeah and
then you can build it up to
a point where physically you're in in really good condition and then you could
do a vision board or
you know whatever your goal is maybe for part two we could ask people to write
in and say
this is what i'd like to achieve how how could i do it hmm
you

How to Actually Change Your Perspective For the Better (with Dr. Tara Swart)

how do we adjust our perspective is it is it that possible that we can adjust
our perspective now
yeah so there's this amazing thing called neuroplasticity when i was still at
medical school
we didn't have sophisticated scanning techniques you know for brains or bodies
so we had kind of
like x-rays and um oh yeah and just asking people guessing yeah kind of you
know and in neurology
a lot of guessing because if someone had a brain tumor but but you knew where
it was roughly then
you would say oh now we know which part of the brain you use for like writing
or it was a lot of
guesswork in neurology particularly once we could scan brains we could um see
how healthy brains are
working so what's happening when you're experiencing an emotion or you're
recalling a memory or you're
making a decision um or you know being really funny um you know we can see what's
going on in the brain
which parts of the brain are interacting with each other you know which systems
are getting a lot of
blood flow and so we also then found out that because we used to think that by
the time you
stopped physically growing like age 18 that your brain became completely fixed
your personality your
iq etc we now know that the brain actively grows and changes till we're about
25.
so if you think of a newborn baby it's it can't do anything and within 18
months it's ridiculous really
if you look at me like this is ridiculous you know like you would never draft
one on your fantasy team
or whatever you know they just it's bad but anyway go on i mean i like what god
does but some of that is
the starting point is very far you know it's you're off you're far off the line
it feels like
but it's isn't it incredible what happens within 18 months yeah so you know
then they're like walking
they can control their own bladder and bowels they can speak up to five
languages if they've been
exposed to you know different languages in the first few years of their life um
so that's that's the biggest
example of neuroplasticity that changes is incredible as you've just said and
then in teenage there's quite
a lot of change you know the brain becomes a bit more sophisticated for
adulthood and then this
process is going on really actively till we're about 25 and then from 25 to
sort of 70-ish you have
to put in more effort to get your brain to change to get your brain to keep
learning and growing
but it's absolutely possible um and for some people it's okay to plateau you
know if you get a job that
you love and you want to do that for the rest of your life and you married your
high school sweetheart
and nothing really needs to change that's fine too but you know for a lot of us
this opportunity
to think that you can really change your personality your career your community
your resilience throughout
your life is is like a beacon of hope so yeah 100 yeah because you start to
think oh it's too late
you know and uh but you're saying it's not no wonderful so once you know about
and also i'm
doing that thing about saying so the whole time which i want to start doing do
people say it a lot
yeah who does americans i was well an american producer told me that everybody
does it says so
yeah i don't know if we do we might i don't know i don't know that much but
anyway yeah i'm hopeful
that you know what you're talking about because i don't you know um if you know
about neuroplasticity
that and that means you know that you have some options to change the way that
you behave in the
outside world or your thought patterns and your beliefs about yourself right so
you're saying there's
still a lot of hope there's still a lot of hope for people from 20 to 75 there's
still a it's yeah it
shouldn't be something anything you feel hopeless about your brain you can
still and that's the main
thing you got to change yeah and you might be able to identify what that is for
yourself but i think
this ericsson stages is a really helpful one because people can go and look up
the age that
they were when they first felt abandoned or neglected and then work out what
their particular issue is and
work on that is our perspective our brain so this is called the hard problem of
neuroscience and that
is the question of whether our brain is our mind or our mind is our brain and
basically if you if
we're being very scientific then our consciousness which is everything that we
think and feel arises from
neurons and chemicals that are physically part of our brain there's a big move
more recently and and this
has happened in in the past in ancient times we believed in seers and shamans
and mystics and um
you know things like clairvoyance and claircognizance and things like that we've
cut we've moved away
from that in modern times yeah we believe in like a lot more astrology the moon
that sort of thing as
well yeah yeah but science is now starting to look at some of this ancient
wisdom in a way that we may
have actually forgotten things that we knew before that are crucial to our
mental health in the modern
world um so i mentioned some of those things already like drumming and chanting
but what we believe now
is that our brain might actually be filtering our consciousness down so that we
can survive in this
material world but actually our minds are capable of a lot more than than what
we you know think now
so in terms of perspective that is all the filters that your childhood and your
upbringing have put on
how you see the world and you can absolutely challenge your perspective it's
not your brain
it's it's a version of reality that your brain's creating and i have some
really favorite exercises
that i have um that people can do at home so one is if i have a dilemma or
particularly if i'm really
struggling and just feeling like things aren't going to work out i i describe
myself sitting here
what i'm wearing at my age and i ask the question like what should i do or you
know what's going to
happen to me like you know when you're really kind of a bit desperate and then
i get up and i walk seven
steps and i turn around and i say i'm tara seven years older than you and i've
seen what happens in
your life and in the next seven years and i i answer the question i give advice
so that's kind of like
that's pretty cool thanks because you're kind of putting yourself in a place
and then you're
you're using your same self and my intuition and your intuition and who even
knows what
what powers the world grants you if you say okay now i'm going to put myself
seven years ahead and
speak back to myself yeah there's i it often feels like there's so many hidden
abilities that we have
that we just don't know about yet like even with like five senses it's like i
bet there's 30 senses we
just don't even know some of what they are there's up to 33 is there really i
went dude they told us
there's five did they tell you that dude well not at medical school at medical
school i obviously knew
there's more than five but i didn't know there's like 22 to 33. you don't trust
us with them dude
i think yeah you got it i guess if you go to school you get more senses you don't
get more you've got them
you've got chronoception you understand the passing of time you've got i got
five but they give you five
senses yeah right touch feel touch and feel are the same okay sorry my bad doc
touch taste taste smell
sight hearing and hearing yeah sorry um but there's more than that way more
unreal you've talked a lot
about like manifesting and stuff you really believe in it 100 yeah i've been
actively doing it myself
kind of personally for 15 or 16 years and then in 2019 my book the source came
out where i shared that
more professionally and the response to that was actually quite phenomenal in
in making me believe
in it even more wow it's a bestseller yeah yeah congratulations thank you so
cool thanks so cool to
write a book and like and have people want to absorb it yeah tell me a little
bit about that manifesting
because we forget about it we forget sometimes that we're the captain of this
ship sometimes we just
feel like the stream owns everything you know yeah and i think some versions of
manifestation can still
make people feel like that because it's about the universe and vibrations i
wanted to explain manifestation
through psychology and neuroscience in a way to say look it's your brain that's
doing it it's not some
outside force and i think that's way more empowering um and and that's what
people really liked about it
that i write a lot about vision boards but i call them action boards because i
say you can't just create
a fantasy and then sit at home and wait for it to come true like look at how
hard you've worked to
get to where you are it's very easy for people to say oh i'd love to have theo
von's life but you've really
struggled and worked really hard to get here um so i absolutely say that that
has to be part of it it can't just be
expecting like things to fall out of the sky and come into your life right but
if you know manifestation
is basically setting goals and desires knowing what you want finding images of
them to put on a board
that you can see at least twice a day um and if it's only once a day then
seeing it just before you
go to sleep because it imprints on your subconscious and it can be very literal
or it can be metaphorical
like something that you know you could have a horse on there and it could mean
one thing to you and
something else to me for example um and basically i ask people to make this
board look at it daily
visualize these things being true because your brain doesn't actually know the
difference between
something happening in real life and a strong visualization and then yeah and
you won't be
afraid of it if you've already visualized it you won't kind of meet that dream
girl and say
oh maybe i'm not ready right you'll have your you'll have told your brain that
you're ready to take a
healthy risk wow so your brain doesn't really know the difference between say
that again between
something that happened in real life or something that you strongly visualize
wow it's the same reason why when we watch a movie or something we're able to
get lost in it
we're able to believe in it because it wow so you could create enough of a
visualization for yourself
if you really were to powerfully start to focus on it and do that and build
that ability to visualize
something that your brain at one point would have to think it's so true that
the world would meet
you and put it into your life i love the way you put that wow dude that's crazy
and it feels that's
what feels like another sense that that to me feels like another sense that it's
like 200 years from
now they're gonna be like people just gonna manifest it's just everything you
know to me everything's
gonna be so over manifested but you know what it is that's one thing that i
feel like there's like
some elite people in the world and they really learned that sometimes when i
see some people who are
operating at a very elite level or um the deep state or whatever i start
thinking oh they that's what
they're using to the best of their ability wow yeah your brain and then the
world is like oh well it has to
have happened because they put it in there so much that's crazy and what kind
of things can you manifest
um off the example because people write to me all the time saying what they
manifested so it could be
a certain kind of home a relationship a family pregnancy um their own career a
lot of it's like quitting
their job and actually starting up the business that they've always wanted to
do travel is quite a big
one yeah you have so much potential in your brain your brain is amazing and if
you know how to use it
properly you can make your life so much better than you ever dreamed it could
be really yes wow how does
somebody who doesn't believe that start to believe it um i would make a set of
tweaks in some very basic
fundamental areas and i would make them micro tweaks so where i talk about
sleep diet hydration exercise and
stress manageme