Avsnitt
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G. Cole, founder of Pathwaves. Pathwaves is a realization of over a decade spent mapping studying and balancing brainwave activity with more than 16,000 sessions. And over a million minutes of brainwave recordings to his credit, G is among the world's foremost brainwave experts. He's also the creator of Neuroempowerment, a pioneering science that balances the mind and body empowering people to take control of each day and live consciously in the present. G earned a certification in neurotechnology in 2008, he's trained as a psychological counselor under the direction of Dr. Francis Flynn, Doctor of Psychology, and provided lifestyle and healthy living coaching since 1997. G founded Neuroempowerment through the Pathwaves protocol. He helps you create intentional outcomes and take control by forming new empowered patterns to transform your life at Pathwaves, they spent over a decade fine-tuning, how to use your own synopsis to improve performance. It ends suffering from depression, anxiety, sleep issues, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and more.
G's website is https://pathwaveslife.com/
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I am very excited to welcome my guest, Dr. Bill Crawford. In addition to being named TEC Canada Speaker of the Year in 2016 and Vistage Speaker of the Year for 2019, Dr. Crawford holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Houston. He is also a licensed psychologist, author of 8 books, and organizational consultant. Over the past 30 years he has created over 3500 presentations for organizations such as Sprint, Shell, The American Medical Association, and many others both nationally and internationally. His two PBS specials on stress and communication have been seen by over 15 million people, and he has been quoted as an expert in publications such as The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Investor’s Business Daily, The Chicago Tribune, and Working Mother just to name a few.
Website - www.BillCrawfordPhD.com
Welcome to another episode of Brain Hacks 4 leadership, really excited to have Dr. Bill with us today. And thank you first off for taking the time to spend time with myself and my listeners on Brain Hacks for leadership.
My pleasure. I'm really looking forward to this. I love the title of your podcast - Brain Hacks 4 leadership. I work with a lot with CEOs, and they really seem to like when we talk about that neuroscience and how to actually understand how the brain works in order to really bring those decisions to life. So the neuroscience of effective decision making seemed like a pretty good idea to use as a framework for what we're going to be talking about.
Yeah, I think you're spot on. It's often called soft stuff, and then we have science behind it. We can help them, it's got a little more validity, right? Well, great. Thank you so much. And I'm excited about the topic that you're going to discuss. You want to tell us a little bit more about the topic and some of the science behind it?
Sure. So when I was getting my PhD, I really wanted to understand the science behind why we think and feel what we think and feel. So I was learning a lot about the psychological theory, but I wanted to know the science. So I actually left the college of psychology and went to the college of biology and took a course called the biological basis of behavior. And in it, I learned that everything we think and feel and do, and say how we react to others, how others react to us all has to do with how the brain processes information. So I've spent the last 30 years of my life creating a system of philosophy, a framework that I call "life from the top of the mind" that basically teaches people how to access their best by accessing a specific part of the brain and how to avoid the stress, frustration, anxiety, the stuff that gets in the way of our ability to make effective decisions by avoiding a specific part of the brain.
Yeah. I love that. Well, tell me what is some of the brain science behind the decisions? Where is that, in the brain that, that helps us make good decisions that maybe sometimes stops us from making the best decisions.
Sure. And the brains, of course, very complicated, people spend their lives, studying the brain. So what I try to do just to make it as simple as possible, but also to make it understandable by dividing the brain into three parts, I call it top, middle and lower brain. So our lower brains is the brain stem, everybody's heard of that, that's the fight or flight part of the brain. The middle brain is the limbic system. And this is actually what I've learned is the gatekeeper or in today's terminology, this middle brain limbic system serves as the scanner, the processor and the router. So it scans incoming data, processes it, or interpret it, and then either routes it down to lower brain or up to the upper 80% of the brain, the neocortex, what I call the top of the mind, because this is actually where we have access to our interpersonal skills, problem, solving skills, confidence, creativity, et cetera.
Some people called these frontal lobes of the neocortex. The executive function part of the brain because, this is where we make those executive decisions and those purposeful decisions. And so what I like to do is help people understand how and why this middle brain and the lower brain gets triggered. And then I give them a model that actually spells brain that shows them when they get triggered, when they're experiencing stress or frustration or annoyance or anything that gets in the way of their clarity, how to actually shift from the lower brain up into the upper 80% of the brain. So they can access those qualities and skills and decision making abilities that help them be most effective.
I love that this is great because like you said, the leaders, executives, you're working with one of the critical roles that they play is making decisions and the types of decisions they make, how quickly they make them, how they're thinking through decisions, not only impacted them, but impacts hundreds, thousands of people that are working for them as well. So, yeah. So I'd love to hear how you have applied this in the executives that you coach, how they really, taken these concepts and put them in place.
I do a lot of work with Vistage. Vistage is an organization of CEOs and they bring in a speaker on a regular basis and I'm one of the speakers. And so when I'm talking to these leaders, number one, they don't have a lot of people to bounce things off of. So they're kind of, if you know, the whole lonely at the top thing is, is important. And this is really one of the reasons why this just works so well because it gives them an opportunity. Not only to learn things from speakers like myself, but to have a group of people that they trust and can bounce things off of. So I will start by making sure I understand what gets in the way of their effective decision making. So I'll ask them a question, what are the things that trigger? What kind of situations or people have kind of stressed you out or got under your skin?
And they'll say things like man, you know, difficult people and not enough business and angry customers and people who don't listen and traffic and, you know, there's all kinds of stuff I'll say. Okay, great. So when we're dealing with all of that stuff, how have we found ourselves reacting in the past? And they say, Oh man, I get stressed and I get frustrated and I get annoyed and I get angry. And I say, okay, so now we understand what I call - "the what" I like to talk about the what the why and the how so the what is the fact that this situation has triggered this response, but it's not just that it triggered a response. It's just, it's when it triggers this response, we try to use the response to deal with the trigger. So when we get stressed or frustrated or annoyed, we try to use that to deal with a difficult person or a difficult situation.
And we can't because that actually is a lower brain response. So the stress, the frustration, the anger is a wonderful response in a fight or flight, dangerous situation, but it's a terrible response or an ineffective response, in real life because it actually keeps us from being effective. We don't know that and therefore we try to use that stress to deal with the trigger and we can't, and that makes the trigger seem worse, which triggers another reaction. And that makes it seem worse. And we get caught in a cycle. So in terms of the what, the why, and the how the, what is the cycle, it's not just that we get triggered it's that we get caught in the cycle. The why is the brain. So I teach them the three parts of the brain and I show them how these lower brain responses of stress, frustration, or anger, or just this middle brain interpreting some negative situation is dangerous and throwing us into that part of the brain.
So once we now know what that is, we now know that in order to be effective in life and make effective decisions, we got to get to this clear, confident, creative part of the brain. So I teach them a model that spells brain that's about breathing, relaxing, asking questions, like how would I rather be feeling, what would I teach to someone? I love imagining being that way, because in the image we hold in our mind triggers a corresponding chemical effect in our body and then noticing a change. So it's B R A I N Breathe, Relax, Ask, Imagine, Notice. So that gets people to the top of the mind. Once they do the brain model, they are now in the top of the mind. Then I talk about, okay, now that we are there, let's talk about how to stay there. Let's talk about how to live there.
Let's talk about how to rewire the brain. So we talk about neuropathways, we've got some old neuropathways that are going from my middle brain down to the lower brain. And what we want to do is create new neuropathways going from the middle of the brain, to the neocortex, the upper 80% of the brain. And then, and so what I do is I show them how to begin to rewire the brain and give them something to practice that if they'll practice every day, they will have rewired their brain within two to four months. So that's the second part of the model. Then the third part of the model is okay, when you're dealing with a person who is stuck in their lower brain, how do you actually get them to shift from their resistant brain to their receptive brain? Because one of the jobs of leaders is to deal with people around them, inspire people around them and to deal with people who disagree with them and to get them into what's called a solution focused conversation. So the CEOs really love that because they're always dealing with people who aren't listening to them. And so the idea that they can actually get someone to shift from that resistant brain to the receptive brain is pretty exciting to these folks.
Oh, I love that. I love that, that whole methodology around how you're getting them to really think about their reactions and then the things that they can do and put in place, and then getting them to shift from resistance to receptive, right. Creating that influence. So could you dig a little further and tell us what are some of the practices? What's the practice that you have them put in place? Great. Sure.
So once they've learned the brain model, which actually spells brain, so it's, you know, it's pretty easy to do you , there's some four by four breathing. Some people call it the box, breathing saying the word, relax on the exhale. So you're kind of having this upper 80% of the brain literally take over breathing and relaxing, which are normally controlled by the lower brain. So those two steps have this upper 80% of the brain regain control, but then not stopping with the breathing. A lot of people tell me they really like breathing, but then when they stop breathing here comes the anxiety again. So breathing just kind of puts you in a position to then say, okay, if I don't want to feel stressed, angry, frustrated, how do I want to feel? And beginning to create a certain image in mind, who am I, when I am clear and confident and creative, that actually triggers certain chemicals, serotonin and endorphins versus adrenaline, noradrenalin and cortisol, and then notice the change.
So once they're in the top of the mind using the brain, I say, okay, so what we want to do is to recognize that our perspective on life will trigger either that lower brain or the upper brain. This is where I bring in cognitive psychology and help them change their perspective from "this makes me this way" to "Wait a minute. My middle brain is interpreting some negative situation as dangerous and throwing me into the part of the brain that's designed to deal with danger". So it's important they get past "the difficult people drive me crazy" or "hard decisions really worry me" or "lack of business really frustrates me". We don't want the trigger to have the power to throw us into the lower brain. So we changed the perspective from "this makes me feel this way" to my middle brain is interpreting some negative situation as dangerous, throwing me into the lower brain.
Then once we have decided, here are the qualities and characteristics I want to bring to life, here is what I tell them to do to rewire the brain. We can't wait until we're dealing with a difficult person or a difficult situation. Because by that time we're triggered, we have to practice going into life already in this clear, confident, creative part of the brain. So I tell them to wake up and before they do anything, before they look at their phone, before they turn on the TV, before they talk to anybody, ask a question, what's my highest purpose this morning, which means what are the qualities and characteristics I want to bring in to the morning? So let's say it's clear, confident, and compassionate. All right. So I want to, how do I want to be when I'm with my family, clear, confident, compassionate, what does it look like?
How do I want to be when I'm driving to work? So when, when somebody cuts me off, I still want to be clear, confident, and compassionate. When I'm dealing with something at work, I want to be, you know, there's, in other words, they create an image of how they want to be in the morning, but just the morning, because I want them to limit the time that they're practicing this stuff. Then around lunchtime, I tell them to reboot and reboot means, do the brain model or say a prayer, or take a walk outside to do some deep breathing or do something that creates a moment of clarity. Moment of serenity, Stephen Covey calls it the pause button, Viktor Frankl in his book, Man's Search for Meaning calls it the space between the stimulus and the response. So you create a space 15, 20 seconds. Doesn't need to take very long and you stop and you breathe.
And then you ask yourself a top of the mind question. What's my highest purpose this afternoon, just the afternoon. And you choose qualities or characteristics you want to bring into the afternoon. And you imagine going into the afternoon, practicing being this way. And then that is your practice for the afternoon. Then on the drive home, or sometime between the afternoon, the evening you reboot. And you ask that question, what's my highest purpose this evening. So you're bringing these qualities into the evening. So you're rebooting in the very beginning, you're bringing certain qualities into the morning. You're rebooting around lunchtime, bringing qualities into the afternoon, rebooting around dinnertime or the drive home, bringing qualities into the evening. And that has you practicing, going into life already in the upper 80% of the brain. And I tell people, if you will do this every day for two to four months, that will rewire your brain because every time you're practicing it, you are creating and reinforcing new neural pathways that go from the limbic system to the neocortex.
I love that. I love that. Yeah, you're creating those habits because we're just a combination of habits.
People get that habits are really just neuropathways. And the reason old habits have been ruling us because we have these old neuropathways, which by the way, don't go away just because we decide we don't like them. They're still there. So if we don't start practicing the new stuff, we will be by definition, practicing the old stuff, because it's just there and it is habitual. So that's where I really encourage them to practice this because it will take some practice in order to rewire the brain. But when they get that they're rewiring the brain and it's going to help them access this intelligent part of who they are. That's where they feel more willing to do the work.
I love that. I love that practice, that exercise. I'm sure you've seen a lot of great results with some of the leaders that you've coached as you've gone through this. Do you have any specific examples of how it's really helped them make better decisions?
Yeah. I was doing a leadership retreat for an organization outside of Cincinnati. They're called JBM packaging. They make envelopes and things, and it's like a 24 hour plant that makes this stuff. And we were on a leadership retreat. We were in this cabin in the woods. It was really great. And the leadership team was there. So I took them through the model and they just went nuts like, Oh man, this is so cool. And because they were the leadership team and the CEO was there as well, they started thinking, okay, wait a minute. How could this become part of our culture? Because they were really big on bringing a perspective to the culture. They said, Hey bill, would you be willing to teach this to everybody? Our organization? I went - sure. And so I went and I did three shifts. You know, this is a 24 hour plant.
So one of them was 4:30 in the morning and other one is 11:30. And another one was like 6:30 in the evening. But I taught this model to everybody and they created as part of their culture. And so they now call it a "top of the mind culture" and it infuses how they hire people and how they deal with disciplinary things. And the CEO went home and talked to his family. He said, you know, family given that I'm the leader of this family, I think, and this is something I tell leaders that they really ought to be willing to interact with people as if it is kind of being videotaped. And this videotape could be used as a training film for everyone in their organization and their family. So the CEO, his name was Dan. He went home and told his family, said, you know, I just learned that I have a responsibility to you guys.
I should be interacting with you in a way that could be used as a training film. So I tell you what, if you see me interacting with you and he was telling his kids, his teenage kids, this, if you see me interacting with you in a way that you don't feel should be used as a training film, would you please let me know? And of course the kid says, sure will dad, but it was his commitment to this process that I found so valuable that he was willing to do this. And of course it changed his relationship with his teenage kids. Cause he was no longer going from arguing. He knew that if this were being recorded as a training film, how would he want his kids to emulate what he was doing as a leader and as a parent.
Wow, that is really powerful because that's not just an example of how leaders can help themselves. But it's impacting organizations, cultures and their personal lives.
Exactly. Because as leaders see, we are the powerful people in people's lives. People are looking at us as a model for how powerful people get things done and they will emulate what they see, which is great when we're choosing qualities and characteristics that we want them to emulate. Not so great when we're coming from that lower brain.
Next question for you is how would you apply this to yourself personally? How has it impacted you, your relationships and how you make decisions?
Yeah. Well, I like to make sure that I'm practicing what I'm preaching. So what I do is whenever I'm dealing with a quote unquote stressful situation, I just imagine that all of the people in my seminars are watching me going, let's see how the hot shot psychologist deals with this. So this whole idea of living life as if you're being recorded to be used as a training film, whenever I encounter a negative situation, I just say, okay, what if this were a training film? So not too long ago when I was flying, flying now because nobody is, but when I'm flying, I went to the airport and they said, yeah, we've canceled your flight and I could start to feel the cortisol go down the back of my neck, but I knew what was going on. And I went, okay, so what are we going to do?
They said, well, don't worry, we've rerouted you through Orlando. And you're going to arrive in Long Island about 12 o'clock tonight. And I went, Nope, not gonna work that's way past my bedtime. So I said, you know, is there a place, you know, I don't mind driving. Is there a place I can fly to? And then I can drive to long Island. And I said, what about LaGuardia? And they went, Oh, look at that. Well, yeah, there's a direct flight to LaGuardia. I tell you what, here's your ticket? The flight is boarding right now. Now I'm at the ticket counter. Right? I haven't gone through security. Here came the cortisol, but I went, okay, all right. What if this were a training film? All right. So I was optimistic and I've got TSA precheck. So I went through TSA precheck and they went, you know, when you go through the little thing, you have been chosen as a random person to be selected and here came the cortisol. But every time I see the, because I know what's happening. And because I was seeing it as a training film, I was able to keep it from going all the way down there. I could feel myself start to be triggered, but then I shifted back up to the top of the mind. So that's what I try to do whenever I'm dealing with a challenging situation is to recognize, okay, Bill, you teach people how to do this. This is your opportunity to practice what you preach.
I love that. I love that concept of living life, as if it were a training, film, I would have to think about some of the things I'm doing personally. Maybe apply that myself because it is important. We should be applying what we're talking about all the time. And it does really change our health and our relationships.
Oh, speaking of health, by the way, when we get triggered down into this lower brain, it triggers adrenaline noradrenaline and cortisol, cortisol rushes throughout our body shutting down what it believes are non-essential systems so that we can go into fight or flight. And one of those non-essential systems it shuts down is our immune system. So man, what we need right now is a really healthy immune system. We don't want this cortisol shutting it down, thinking we're in a fight or flight situation. When we're coming from the upper 80% of the brain, we're not only making better decisions, we're triggering serotonin and endorphins, which actually strengthens our immune system. In addition to helping us think clear, that's what the serotonin does, helps us think clearer and make better decisions.
Yeah. And just understanding that once we understand the science behind it and how we're wired and those small things that we can do really catching ourselves and, you know, using the practices that you talked about before. So as our leaders are listening to this and thinking about how they may apply this themselves. And sometimes it can be overwhelming thinking about everything, right?
What's one small thing that you would recommend that someone can put in place right now, after listening to this?
What I would encourage them to do now that they know that their stress and their frustration, their anger, their resentment and all those negative emotions, which are understandable. They don't have to feel bad about them. But if they'll start to recognize, these are brainstem reactions, lower brain reactions that are wonderful. When I'm in a physically dangerous situation, wherever fight or running away is what I need to do. But it actually gets in the way of my effective decision making. So one of the things they can ask themselves whenever they find themselves thinking or feeling anything is, Hey, am I coming from my lower brain? Or am I coming from the top of the mind? And if I'm coming from the lower brain, what you don't want to do is trust that as a energy for making a decision. At the very least wait, you know, give yourself an hour or sleep on it or something until you can really know you're coming from the top of the mind, if just, they stop trying to make decisions when they're in that lower brain, that will be a huge factor in terms of their better decision making, going forward.
I love that. I love your brain acronym as well. And so, you know, what you told us is that we have three parts of your mind, right? We've got that lower mind, that fight or flight that middle mind that's our Limbic. You talked about scanner processor, router gateway, right? And then the top that neocortex, which is really their executive thinking skills, the part of the brain that we want to access the most.
And also the top of the mind is not just where we are intellectual. Certainly our intellect comes from there, but this is where our ability to be compassionate and our ability to understand another person, our ability to love people comes from this. The in love stuff is the lower brain, which is a good stuff. But the ability to really be compassionate with someone that's a, that's an upper brain perspective. And as a leader, if compassion is what we want in our organization, that's something, we gotta model.
Absolutely. One of my mentors, John Maxwell says, one of the things that employees want to know about you is that you care about them. Absolutely. And, so you have to be able to access it.
I have to show that compassion and people don't know care how much, you know, until they know how much you care, you know?
Absolutely. That's great. And then you talked about your brain acronym, which is that, why, what, what triggers us the why - BRAIN is breathe, relax, asking questions, imagine and notice. And then really having a practice where we start putting in place awareness strategies and stating intentions three times a day, which is so powerful. I do that personally in the morning, but I've never stopped to do it in the afternoon and evening. So I can't wait to start applying this personally as well. It's so valuable. I'd be really curious to know what else you're working on right now. Anything?
Yeah. Well, given that right now is me stuck at home because I'm in this vulnerable demographic, you can tell, I've got this gray hair. I just turned 70, not too long ago. And so well, thank you. You made it to 70. And so traveling isn't an option. So what I've done is I've tried to create a virtual environment where I can do my trainings and I've done like 40 of these ever since this whole thing started. I used my life from the top of the mind books. I have a book that is called Life from the Top of the Mind that lays out the system and the philosophy. So going to an organization, teaching this to the leadership team, teaching this to the organization themselves, I mean, what leaders tell me is when they can get everybody in the organization coming from the top of the mind that makes their leadership part of the process so much easier.
Because now they're dealing with people who are making decisions. And just recently I started working with families and family businesses because in a family or a family business, when someone says something, it goes way deeper than just an ordinary conversation, both good and bad. And so a lot of people who are in families or having a family business find themselves kind of in conflict with these people that they love more than life itself. But the intensity of the relationship sometimes almost gets in the way of making good decisions. So I teach them the model and I go and do a workshop with them and then kind of support their families in coming together. So that's, that's what I've just started to roll out. Plus the book The Top of the Mind is just recently on audible. I've just now put it on audible. It is now an audio book. So for those folks who like to listen, it's there.
I love that. I love audible personally. I like to go for walks and work in my garden. I noticed that on your website, you said it's not only on audible, but isn't it you on it as well?
It's me reading the book because I write in the first person. So I didn't want somebody else to read it. Cause you know, when they said I, it wouldn't be my voice and it would be weird, but boy, was it really hard to read your own work. Well, goodness gracious. It took me about a year to do it cause I would, I would read and then I'd mess up and I'd have to go back and going to jump in. So, but it's, it's there and I'm happy with the product.
I love that. I'm definitely going to get that myself too. I love that you put it in your own words and you're really, you know, you're not just helping leaders, but you're changing lives and helping families and really making a difference. And I really appreciate you spending the time with us today to share some key things we could do right away. They're going to help us not only at work but at home.
Ah, yeah, that's what people tell me. They love the fact that the material they're learning in a, in a seminar or a workshop, they're able to apply pretty much everywhere in their life because you know, sometimes people say, you know, Bill, I'm pretty good at work. It's when I get home, that's when I really get triggered. And so the ability to bring these top of the mind perspective there, uh, people tell me it's really valuable.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. And I hope to bring you back again. Are you writing another book or thinking of another book right now?
I have a book called, it's my eighth book, My Life from the Top of the Mind, what's called my flagship book and it has my seminar in it. I've got a book called College from the Top of the Mind where I take it and apply it to people in college. I've got another book called What to Say. So this third part of the model that teaches people how to shift from the lower brain to the upper brain. People really need to see examples of that. Cause that's the hardest part of the system. And so I've written another book called What to Say, where I really go into depth. Okay. When you're talking to your teenager, when you're talking to your spouse or when you're talking to your direct report or when you're talking to your boss or something like that, how do you frame this conversation so that it moves to a solution focused conversation?
Wow, such great resources. I'm definitely going to get those to use with myself and my clients. Cause there's this very common needs and common challenges that we have. Well, thank you so much. I look forward to having you back again.
I would love to, and thanks for the invitation, when I saw the title of your podcast and went, Oh cool. This is gonna, this is going to fit right in there with it.
It does. It does. Thank you.
To reach out to Dr. Crawford, his website is www.BillCrawfordPhD.com
If you would like to reach out to me for Executive Coaching or Organization Consulting, you can reach me at [email protected] and my website is www.TalentSpecialists.net.
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My guest today is Dr. Tamsin Astor. Tamsin helps busy executives and corporations organize their habits and their mindset so they have time for what they want and need and time for fun.
Welcome to my new podcast, Brain Hacks 4 Leadership. I am Jill Windelspecht and I have spent over 20 years working with leaders around the world, helping them to apply neuroscience and social science to help them advance towards their goals. I want to bring extraordinary value to you as a leader by brining the latest thinking about the science, but more importantly I want to provide you with practical ways that you can apply this to yourself, those you lead and your organization.
My guest today is Dr. Tamsin Astor. Tamsin helps busy executives and corporations organize their habits and their mindset so they have time for what they want and need and time for fun. Women are the self-driven nurturers who rarely make their needs a priority. All the other voices demand immediate attention and leave little time for personal care. We make 35,000 decisions every day leading to Decision fatigue. Dr. Tamsin Astor, your Chief Habit Scientist, helps women to create the necessary connections between their daily habits and routines in order to clear the path for more personal time & energy. Tamsin Astor holds a PhD in neuroscience and psychology and a post-doctorate in education. Also, certifications in yoga (RYT500, Yoga Ed.), Ayurveda (Living Ayurveda, Yoga Health Coach), Mindset & Executive Coaching.
Dr Astor is a published author of Force of Habit: Unleash Your Power by Developing Great Habits. She is a mother of three, an immigrant and a lover of dark chocolate, coffee and travel!
Well, Tamsin, we are so happy that you're here with us today and I've had a lot of opportunity to get to see you speak and spend time with you and I've just always grown. Every time I hear you talk about how you have impacted your own life and impacted others lives by applying the neuroscience in what it is that you do in your coaching and consulting and speaking and so really happy that you're going to share that our listeners here today. So Tamsin tell us the neuroscience and what you're going to be sharing with us today.
Well, hi Jill, thank you so much for interviewing me today. I get very excited about talking about the brain and neuroscience and how we can, you know, hack this amazing brain. You know, what I call the goal achieving machine between our ears. What I want to talk about today was vision and I'm very interested in how we can harness our brain's ability to create the life and business that we want, the home we want, the relationships we want, the engagement habits that we want in our business. The employee commitment was recently, I was reading a Gallup poll that said that only 34% of employees are engaged, which costing the U S economy somewhere between like $200 and $450 billion a year, which is a real issue. And I think part of that is connecting to the vision of what a company is looking for and whether that matches to the vision of the individual employee.
I mean, I think this is a real issue that we struggle with is connecting our visions. And one of the things that we now know with the brain is that it's plastic, which means that we can change it. You know, we used to think, you know, 40 50 60 years ago that the brain would, you know, stop devolving at a certain point. But we now know that the brain can continue to evolve as we move forward and understand the connections in between the neurons. And one way, if you can think of this is like neurosculpting. Like when you see those great shows of people cultivating a bonsai tree, right? Or pruning a beautiful Rose Bush, you know, you have to cut and prune the connections or the growths that are not serving the overall whole. And that's the way that I like to think of what's going on in our brains.
That we are creating the connections that are positive, right, that are nurturing the full goal. And when we've never done something before, we don't have the neurological connections. We don't have the Synaptic connections to get us there. So part of the way that we have to work to create the vision that we want, the life we want, the business, we want the engagement habits, all of these parts in business, right, is to start talking about it, writing it, seeing it, and you know, looking in the direction we want to go. I love that.
What do you think gets in the way for people to do that?
So I think often we get stuck with our goals. We have these goal deadlines. We have to meet tasks, we have to complete things that we have to check off. And the problem with goals is that it's very energetically exhausting, right?
You know, we, you know, we make 35,000 decisions every day. And when we're sitting there and looking at these to do lists and trying to get stuff done, we just need it. It can be really exhausting and particularly if we are not bought into the vision, if we are feeling like we're just having to do stuff and get stuff done rather than really believing in it and buying into it. And one of the great ways to shift that is to cultivate the energy of creativity. And when you crawl, cultivate the energy of creativity, you release dopamine, right? So when you start to shift out of the fight flight, sort of overwhelmed, burned out stress situation that so many people, so many employees are in, so many entrepreneurs are stuck in the sort of the hamster wheel, right? You cultivate dopamine, which is boost your energy and boost your creativity.
And one of the best ways to do that is by shifting into offering questions.
Okay, Tell me more about that. And especially, I would love to know, I know that you coach leaders around this as well. And so how have you seen leaders apply this?
Well, I'll give you a concrete example of a client of mine who when I first started working with her, she was in a state of, you know, massive, overwhelm. She was working for an organization working really long hours, feeling like she wasn't able to be present for her clients who wasn't able to present for her husband and their children and the way that she wanted to. She just felt torn in all these places. And one of the things that she really started to dive into as we work together, we were looking at what was she doing on a daily basis, what I call the microscope, what was she looking at every day and how was she connecting it to the telescope, to the life she wanted?
Right. So she had in mind, but she hadn't really allowed herself to articulate it of this vision of the kind of life she wanted, the, the direction she wanted to go and terms of how she showed up for her clients, how she showed up for her husband, how she showed up for her children. And then she wasn't able to initially connect that to what was she doing on the daily basis to tie those two together. And so as we work together, she really started to think about what kind of relationship she wanted with her clients, what kind of relationship she wanted with her children and her husband. And she realized that she really wanted to take her children to go and live in a different country for a little bit of time and to experience different way of, of being and living. So she and her husband and the children went and lived in Africa for six months and she was able to massively shift how she showed up and what she did by creating a new vision of her life and looking at the daily habits and connecting those in a way that shifted her brain.
Right. So she used her mind to change her brain.
Wow, that's quite, quite a big shift moving across the world into another country to really change your mindset. How did that change when she came back? How did, how did she stop from going back to those old habits and old thoughts and stress and anxiety?
Well, what she realized is it's possible. It was possible to create a life which tied the vision that you want, feel like to your daily habits. So keeping that front of mind and thinking about, okay, so you know what's really important, right? So often one of the things that people find when they do something is they realize that they don't need as many belongings, for example. And you know, we spend a lot of time caring and managing for things in our personal space, right? So she realized that that was one thing that she could create a big change around. She realized that the things that she and her family did when they lived in Africa was very nourishing to her. You know, family dinners, regular yoga classes, things that really shifted the day to day interactions that produce, you know, a happier feeling and more productive life. A feeling like she was living the life that she wanted to live. Right? Keeping that front of mind on a regular basis and committing to the vision. This is the vision that's important to me and what am I doing on a daily basis? What daily habits am I doing to keep that vision going?
Yeah, I love that. And I work with clients quite a bit as well to really help them first get clear on their purpose and, and get clear on that vision. Tell me what is it about the brain that, that makes this so critical that really it, that makes it important for people to say, okay, you know, get beyond those tasks and those goals. How are we naturally wired that when we align them with our vision, it makes us more effective and have more energy?
So what's really fascinating about the brain is that it doesn't distinguish between reality and imagination. So there was a really interesting study done at Harvard looking at piano players and they looked at what was going on in their brain when they played a piece of music and then what they found when they imagined the same piece of music. Imagine playing the same piece of music, was that the same parts of the brain were active, that implies that the brain does not distinguish between reality and imagination. So what that tells us is that if we want to create this amazing life for ourselves, we have to start creating the vision around it. And when we do that, what happens is that the entity around it starts to shift and we get coincidences. People start to show up in our lives. You can help them support us because we all creating a move in that direction.
I love that. And like you said, we call it coincidence, right? That these things start to show up. But we know a little bit better that once we've been intentional about what it is we're looking for, we just see it more clearly.
Absolutely. And that's partly the reticular activating system, which is the part of the brain where it draws our attention. And you might've noticed that, you know, when your buying a car you suddenly see that car everywhere and you're like, why is everybody buying the same car as me, because, you know, you've redirected your attention. And that's the same thing with creating the vision for the life that you want. When you really dial down and get super specific about your vision and about the kind of life you want to lead, things will start popping up.
Well Tamsin tell us, how do you help leaders create this vision? How do you typically work with people to get them to set this if they don't have it already or maybe shape one that's a little bit fuzzy?
So what I do with my clients is I work on this three point model that I created of vision, mindset and habits, right? So the vision is that future direction, the habits are the day to day things that you're doing and the mindset is, you know, your relationship with yourself, your, your limiting beliefs, your negative self-talk and how you navigate your relationships with others and set boundaries with others. And I use a yoga framework, which is, it's called the souls aim, which really helps people dive into creating the kind of vision that they want for their lives. And when they look at that and dive into that and explore that, we can then go a little bit more deeply into creating actionable steps to get there. And one of the key parts of that, which a lot of people tend not to include, which, is always interesting to me. How people react to that is pleasure. You know, we often have this kind of feeling that pleasure is a, you know, is a reward or is as a result of some actions that we take or we, you know, we push it to the side because we've got stuff to do and we can't make pleasure a priority, you know? And when we prioritize pleasure, everything flows.
I love that. Prioritizing pleasure. So tell me, how does, how will this help leaders who, cause a lot of people that are listening are either in a leadership role or aspire to be in a leadership role, how is getting really clear around that, that vision help them become better leaders of themselves and better leaders of others?
So clarifying your vision is really helpful because what it does is it helps you create a focal point for you and helps you create a focal point for your employees. And when you have a clear direction that you want to go, when you have a focus, you know that weaves together what you stand for, what you value, what's important to you, then you can organize people and inspire people and create energy around that. If there's a very dispersed energy around what the mission of the company is, what they're trying to do for their customers and clients, what somebody's role is, it's hard to show up and be productive and feel valued. If you're not clear, it's not clearly defined, right? So having a very specific direction in which going helps you keep on track. And it also is very important when you are feeling kind of discouraged and low energy and sort of politics of the world or events in the world are making you feel lethargic or sad or uninspired. When you can orient towards a positive vision that can help inspire and create positive that towards that right direction.
Yeah, that's a great point cause we, we feed off others emotions and energy and as you said, if you have the vision, you've got good energy and that's going to help you lead and people want to work with you and we'd like to have leaders who seem to have more clarity of where they're going so exactly know who they are and what they're thinking.
Part of that as well is you notice that they all walking the talk too. You know that they are showing up and doing what it is that they say that, that you know their company and their organization values, are they available to have conversations with their employees about it. Are they authentic, authenticity, empathy, all things that we now know are incredibly important in terms of leadership. But often leaders will think that they're being empathetic and authentic or fear it's going to make me look weak. But you know, we now know from all the studies and math that actually it breeds connection and when you connect with people and you articulate how you can be supported, what you need and your showing up and being real right, people connect with you in a way that's much deeper and results in a more effective leadership.
Yeah, I think that's really important, especially today when there's so many people that have stress and anxiety to, to circle back, like you said, what's really important, cause maybe I'm bending wheels in the wrong way.
So Tamsin, how do you see this applied from an organization perspective as well? Cause you always hear vision, we think of vision, mission, goals, we talk about it, but how does this apply to maybe a leader who's responsible for setting the vision for an organization?
One of the things I think that is really key here is to constantly articulate that. So you are a leader of a large organization. If you have a vision that is clearly articulated what you want is your employees to understand it in their own terms. So what's interesting when you look at organizations that are incredibly successful, they encourage their employees to articulate that vision, the organization's vision in a regular way, in public, in a way that cultivates energy around that. So for example, organizations that have a weekly 10 minute meeting and everybody in the organization can week to week share a one minute story for example, on a story because we know that narrative is very bonding and people love and remember by narrative about the company mission. So Chevron, you know, safety, getting everybody to articulate a one minute story and a weekly meeting relating to safety, right. Would be an example of that.
Yeah, that's great. I worked in an organization as well where we did something similar around safety and whatever meeting. There was always a one minute safety story. And just to remind people. And at first it felt kind of routine, but then it got really powerful and really made it real for people. So yeah. So how have you applied this to yourself? That's a good question.
It is the moment I had a sort of a come to Jesus moment about this as it were when my ex-husband walked out for the fourth time and I realized that I had to let go of the vision of having a marriage and having children being raised in a, you know, in a home with two parents because staying in the marriage was not going to be sustainable for me anymore. And I was incredibly unhappy when in that sort of situation when somebody walks out on you four times to realize that there are issues there, so for me, I had to step back and recreate what the vision of my life was going to look like. And what that did for me was that it allowed me to really see a life for myself that I wasn't able to see in my unhappy marriage. I was not able to see myself doing what I'm doing now in the back of my head.
And deep down inside I wanted to get out there and write and speak and coach and work with people. But I couldn't figure out how to do it in my marriage because I wasn't feeling supported. And so when I stepped back, I recreated the vision of what it would look like for, you know, me to parent and co-parent with my children's father in a way that was loving and, communicative and sharing and kind and on the same page as much as two different people can do and create a vision of my personal life, you know, and my professional life. And I've done that. And over the last five years, which is how long it has been, I've created a thriving coaching business. I have a three book deal, you know, I travel all over the world with my children and my ex-husband and I co-parent very peacefully and our children at 15, 13 and 9 and they are good in their life.
Yeah, that's incredible that, that's a great story. That you articulate it very well. And your, your latest book, Force of Habit, which I'm loving as I'm diving into that. So Tamsin tell me, how do you keep that going? You said you've got a vision for your personal life and professional life and some of us listening has gone through and maybe created that vision and then maybe filed it away and it doesn't really drive us and inform us anymore. What is the way that we can make sure we keep this in front of ourselves? And, and how have you done that?
That's a great question Jill. So one of the things that is really vital is that you revisit your vision every day. So we all know now the power of the morning ritual. You know, when you look at all of the research and books and blogs and you know, all of the successful people in the world, they all talk about how important it is to have a morning ritual. And I've been doing a morning ritual for about seven years where I nourish my mental body and I nourish my physical body. And that involves movement and involves, you know, meditation and journaling. And part of that process involves me taking a few minutes and it doesn't need to be more than a few moments just to sit there and picture the vision I have for my life. So I see myself standing on the stage, I see myself on that beach, I see myself working with clients. I really harness the power of my brain to create and start to feel what my life is going to look like.
Oh, that is powerful. I agree. The morning routines, that is more and more on what we're hearing to really keep reinforcing that. And I just want to pick up on a word you said it's not just see but feel. So tell me a little bit about why it's important to feel while we're doing that vision.
Right. Well, you know, we're very sensual beings. You know, where people that, you know, live, live in the real world. So getting our vision really embedded and clear, you know, moving, talking about it, singing it, feeling it, smelling it, touch it, you know, all of that. Really cultivating that and embedding it in a really deep way. It's so important. And you know, another way to think about it, another way to cultivate that energy is gratitude. Really taking time every day to, you know, again we know this, but the research is becoming more and more compelling about the power of gratitude to boost energy and keep you on track and keep you directed towards your vision. But when we move and don't sing and touch and feel and really embody our vision in as many different ways as we can, that's when it's more likely to happen. That's when it is going to happen.
Yeah. So it's the visualizing it, the feeling it, the keeping it in front of you every day, which makes it a habit, right?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what, you know, you can do vision boards and you can journal about it. You know, my friends always laugh at me cause I'm incredibly verbal and in every kind of way of quantifying my things always come up as like you should read dictionaries for fun you should you know, Like, you know, your a projector, your a talker and my vision boards tend to be words that I cut out of magazines, not pictures. So yeah, you know, and other friends of mine, you know they paint pictures. So it's about really embodying your energy and then they're getting that clarity behind that. I love that. I love that example that you shared with us. Well what else is important for us to know about this topic and how we can make sure we're applying this effectively?
So I think one of the things that I think is really, really important is giving yourself time to step back and dream and vision and like design the business that you want. Design the life that you want. Because I think we often get stuck in this world of it's going to keep hustling cause yeah, cause more, more, more and we don't, we get stuck in the doing right. It's really important for us to go, Hey, you know, if I step back and give myself a chunk of time every day, every week, every month, twice a year, three, you know, to really look at the bigger picture, it's going to all work out much, much better in the long run. So tricks on journaling, I've always known that journaling is a useful thing and that I bought, I had this thing of like, well, am I being productive? Is this a good use of my time?
Because I'm like hustling as a single mom of three kids and because I've gotta be visionary, I've gotta get things done and you know, I just, I took journaling training and during that I discovered that when you start the day with 10 or 15 minutes of journaling, you are way more productive. I think it's something that you'll see two to four times more productive in your day because you have sort of dumped the negativity, dumped the stuff that was kind of cementing and you've created a vision and a goal and the direction for the day. So giving yourself the space to do it, the time to do it, the permission to do it, I think is really, really key.
That's great. Is it, is it journaling, just writing down whatever thoughts you're capturing? Or are you talking about journaling to say, here's my intentions for today, or is it both?
Well you can do it all. I mean the great thing about journaling is that there is a multitude of different approaches. So sometimes for me it's about, there's a particular issue that I'm chewing over and if I journal about this issue I can release it and get on with the rest of my life. So I might journal conversation between, lets say I've had a negative interaction with somebody and it's bothering me. I might journal and have a conversation in my journal between me and this person to kind of create some resolution or create some sort of resolution around my feelings about what happened in the interaction. And then that then clears the space for me to be productive in the day. Other times it might be that I would like to just write down what happened in a particularly inspiring workshop or an event I went to, or a person that I met as a way of channeling the things about this person or what I learned from this person or this, this book or something that I can then distill and use in my own life. So it can be specific or it can just be sort of, you know, stream of consciousness. I'm just going to set the timer for three minutes or five minutes and just write everything that’s in my head and get it out.
Great. That's, that's great. Thank you for clarifying that too. Cause it's, it doesn't have to be one specific way or one thing every morning. It's really just making that space and time and then knowing what you need.
Right. And one of the, exactly. And one of the things that I learned when I did the journaling training was when you've done that is to read over what you've written, which is a lot of the time we have a tendency not to. And what's very helpful about that is you can see what you were thinking or what you were talking. There's something about the translation between your head on to the pain that you know, sometimes you look at your look at it and you'll think, wow, like I'm feeling really negative about the situation or about this person or I'm feeling really happy about this. Or wow, I didn't know that I had made this connection between these two things.
Thank you for sharing that too. That's another powerful tip, don't just journal it and forget it. Take that time, read it and see what additional insights that you get from that. We've talked about quite a bit so far around visioning and creating your own vision and the energy that you can get and the importance around that. The ways that you can use it for yourself, how it impacts those that you lead. And even from an organization perspective around that. So for someone listening right now, what is one thing that they could do right away to get them moving towards the direction that say they don't have a vision or their vision is not really clear? What's one thing, small thing that you, you recommend that they do so they can start taking action.
So one thing that I think is really important is to sort of clarify your purpose in life. You know, what is it that you're here to do and can you really dial into what your life purpose is? So that just would require you just to grab a journal, grab a notebook and sit quietly for a minute or two, bring your mind into your body through the action of breath. And then I'll ask yourself, what am I here to do? What's my legacy? What lights my fire when I'm gone? What do I want to be remembered for, what I want to be remembered for doing? Who do I like to work with? What do my friends come to me with? What do I really enjoy doing so that we're trying to move out of the Ought self. You know as a white woman who's 43 I ought to do this kind of work, want to like these people, blah blah blah and really moving into your ideal self, moving into what really turns on, getting clear on that can then provide an amazing direction for your life because it can then inspire you to do volunteer work which makes you happy and connected.
It can be charitable work. It can inspire the work you do, it can inspire the kind of relationships you cultivate. It can inspire so many different areas of your life when you get clear on your purpose. Yeah. I love that. I love the transition you make from the Ought Self. What I ought to do to the Ideal Self, and I know one of the things you shared in and you share it in your book too is not to should upon yourself. Exactly. I was going to say it's absolutely key, particularly for us women, you know you get very caught up in feeling like we need to be living a particular way based on our gender, based on our look, based on her age, based on all the legend, based on our relationship, based on where we live in the world. Yeah, no shoulding on yourself or other people or other people.
Don't should on them either. So your book that just came out, Force of Habit. Anything you want to specifically share around that or tell us about what you've got coming up next? I'm just in the process of creating a virtual program to go with my book. So my book dials in on the key habits to unleash your power. And I'm creating digital program, which slide into particular sections of this book. And I'm loading them into this amazing software that allows me to have an app on your phone that can text and email you to remind you to do your habits and then encourages you to journal and report on how you feel about having done these habits and how you feel when you follow through on these habits so that you can look and create that sustain change. Because often what happens is that we create a habit shift and after a day, 10 days a week, three weeks, three months, we fall off, we get sick, we have a family member in town, we're traveling.
Let me think. Oh screw it. And we stopped going to the gym. Or we stop meditating and we stop, you know, doing a daily connection commitment and reaching out to potential clients or whatever it is that we've committed to as a habit. And when we have this track software, we can go back in and look and see, Oh my goodness, look at what I did for three months. I did this action every day and look at how great it made me feel. I can gently let go be kind to myself for falling off the wagon and get back on and start again. I love that. I love that. Reinforcing that accountability and the book too just has amazing examples and there's ways that you can apply at the end of every chapter as well. I love that and I'm looking forward to seeing that app when that comes out as well. Cause I know that we're all a culmination of habits.
I coach around it, but I try to apply and practice what I preach and we can always improve. So I'm really looking forward to diving in here and seeing how I can apply it. And then everything, all my experiences with you have been really great and I've been able to learn and grow as a result of it. So I really appreciate you spending the time here with all of us and hope to have you back again soon. I would love that. Thank you so much Jill. Thank you.
To summarize Dr. Tamsin Astor’s discussion today, she talked about how we can harness our brain's ability to create the life and business that we want
She shared that when we create a clear and positive vision, we can leverage that goal achieving machine between our ears. We do this through talking about it writing it, visualizing and focusing on it everyday. Paying attention to the things we are doing every day and being intentional to connect it to our vision. Tying the vision of your life into your daily habits.
we make 35,000 decisions every day. And when we're sitting there and looking at these to do lists and trying to get stuff done, it can be really exhausting
In her new book, Force of Habit: Unleash Your Power by Developing Great Habits she shares how you can use your mind to change your brain.
And one thing that is really fascinating about the brain is that it doesn't distinguish between reality and imagination.
If we want to create this amazing life for ourselves, we have to start creating the vision around it. She uses a three point model that she created of vision, mindset and habits.
So clarifying your vision is really helpful because what it does is it helps you create a focal point for you and helps you create a focal point for your employees.
So it's the visualizing it, the feeling it, the keeping it in front of you every day, which makes it a habit.
What can you do immediately? one of the things that is really important is giving yourself time to step back and dream and vision and design the business and life that you want.
Creating your personal vision is one of the first things that I do with my coaching clients. If you would like to learn how to work with me, you can reach out to me at [email protected].
Don’t forget to pick up Dr. Tamsin Astor’s new book – Force of Habit.
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Roddy Galbraith is a Professional Speaker, Coach and Master Speaker Trainer, having worked 1-to-1 with around 10,000 different speakers from all over the world over the last 13 years.
John C. Maxwell (#1 New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker) describes him as the "best speaker trainer he has ever seen, anywhere in the world". Roddy believes that we are all speakers, whether we realize it and accept it or not, because we all interact with other people, all the time. He firmly believes that the best thing any of us can do for our business success, our career success and our life success is to become a better communicator, because it will do more for us than any other skill we can develop. He has spoken around the globe and worked with, shared the stage with and developed programs with some of the very best speakers in the world including Les Brown, Robert Cialdini, Bruce Lipton, Bob Proctor, Wayne Dyer, Bonnie St John, Seth Godin, Nick Vujicic and John C. Maxwell. He has a genuine passion for helping people find their voice so they can stand up and speak out in every different area of their lives. As you’ll tell from his accent, he’s English but now lives in Jupiter Island, Florida with his wife Susan, and their 4 beautiful children. You can connect with Roddy on Instagram @roddygalbraith and find out more at www.SpeakerPro.com.
So Roddy, thank you so much for being with us. You've really made a big impact on me over the last several years and working with you I've been able to apply your teaching not only to myself but to others that I'm coaching as well. So I'm really excited to hear what you're going to share with us today.
I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to you Jill and share a message with you and your listeners. So very excited. I thought today what I'd speak on, I have been thinking about this, I think the key to success and happiness really is growth. I think growth is important to one of those things. I think it's particularly true for leadership or anything really, but one of the problems with this is fear often stops us from engaging in the growth promoting activities that we need to do in order to get in the growth.
And so if we want to be successful, we have to find ways really. We have to find ways to face the fears or any emotions that might hold us back and get in the way of that. So that's why I wanted to share with you today. Simple process for facing fear, stepping forward into growth in spite of the fairs. I love that. I hear that so many times that what stops people, I'm afraid to fail. I'm afraid that something might go wrong. I'm going to look bad and it perfectly right, which means why. Right? And it stops and it's with everything. So it's not just at work, but it happens at home. So I'm really excited to learn a little bit more. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Well, let me start with the words of the German philosopher Johann von Goethe, I'm sure you have heard of many of your readers will have heard of. He said that “if you treat a man as he appears to be, then you make him worse. But if you treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, then you make him what he should be.”
You know, as a leader, I think our job is to our team, isn't it, amongst other things? So this quote is particularly true for other people, but I think is never more truer than for ourselves. We need to think about this for ourselves and I think it's far easier to put a 10 on the head of everyone in our team or everyone we meet or everyone, everyone else. We can treat them as if they have already fulfilled their potential. But it's much more difficult to do it for ourselves, isn't it? It's so true, isn't it?
I think very often we believe in the potential of other people more than we do for ourselves more than you know, we see our own potential and I think if we think about this Jill, well, I use you as an example. If you imagine someone else taking the actions that they need to take to move forward into growth and to ultimately, that will lead them to being successful. It doesn't really change the way you feel when you do that, does it? You just kind of consider it intellectually. Maybe you think about it for a moment and that's it. But if you imagine yourself taking the actions that you need to take, you know, to grow in order to lead to being successful. When it's you, then it's very different because that forces you to come up against yourself and all your baggage. And so it's a very different situation, isn't it:
I fully agree with you that it is so true in the work we do, helping other leaders do this and grow and see themselves in that different light.
I don't get the butterflies in my stomach when I'm helping them visualize themselves much further but when I do it for myself, I get those butterflies. Exactly that you've hit on it.
Exactly. I think that's it. So we use speaking as an example now I know you, you enjoy speaking, but the lots of people that don't know, and as a leader, I think this is one of the best ways, the fastest ways that you can define your leadership with within an organization. If you can stand up and speak convincingly and appear comfortable and look very natural and at home, even if it's only for a minute or two, people will see you as a leader and you maybe you only need one or two moments like that a month, a few times a year to really define yourself as a leader within that organization, in the minds of other people because they'll see you as a leader if you can do that. But if speaking is a growth area for you, even though it's a great skill to develop, I think probably the most important skill for a leader or anyone really to develop no matter what you do.
But if speaking is a growth area for you and you just think about speaking, then you're probably going to experience some doubt, or the butterflies that you were just talking about maybe you're going to experience strong emotions of fear and anxiety and unworthiness and you don't get those feelings when you imagine someone else doing it. But you do get them in it yourself. And, and actually we, you know, we can look at other people and we think, yeah, you should do it. I know you can do it. And if you do it and you keep going, you keep doing it - I know you're going to get better and better and better. So you should do it. But it's very different when it's us. It's very different with us. And then when we experienced the fear, so the fear is a problem. And I think probably the biggest problem with the fear is not the experiencing it in itself - is because it tends to lead to avoidance tends to lead to us kind of running away, doesn't it?
Well, I mean, what do you do when you experienced those butterflies often you kind of think of ways that you can avoid doing whatever it is. Is there any way any kind of outlet, any way to escape? So now avoidance, it's really worth thinking about because it's avoiding the thing, like let's say speaking in this case, but actually it's really the feeling that is the issue. It's the feeling you want to avoid. We think it's the thing, but it's not. It's how we feel about it. And so we want to avoid anything that means that the feeling will stop. And I think most people miss this Jill, the importance of it. The feeling is not the facts that we fear. It's not the information that we fear, its the feeling. And this does take a little bit of thinking about, but what's something that you fear like flying or dogs or spiders or snakes or is there anything that you fear?
Oh, spiders! I will scream! Spiders is a great example. Would spiders for you be worse than speaking? Oh yes, yes. Isn’t that interesting.
Now commercial flight I think is, uh, is a great example. So spiders, I'll come back to in just a moment, but I've got an interesting statistic for you. I suppose commercial flying is the safest way to travel on a commercial flight because it's so regulated is very, very safe. If you look at the U S census data, then it puts the odds of a dying as a plane passenger about one in over 200,000. There's some, depending on the statistics and how it's interpreted, they come out slightly differently. But for these purposes, one in 200,000 the chances of dying as a cyclist, they say about one in 4,000 so I look at the difference between those two. Cycling is like 50 times the risk, but people aren’t scared of bicycles are they?
People are scared of a bomb going off five miles up in the air and being hurled into the screaming darkness to their death because it's much more emotive. The fear of drowning is one in a thousand, chances of dying in a car crash are around one in a hundred according to this, one in 24 for stroke, one in five for heart disease. But we're scared of the emotive things. We're scared of the scary things, irrespective of the logic - we're scared of speaking and what the chances of dying when you're speaking? Very slim, very slim. We're scared of bears. We're scared of alligators. We're scared of sharks. About one person a year in American dies from sharks, about one person dies in America. It's about one person that dies from bears. About 58 people die from hornets. More people are scared of hornets, admittedly, more than bees and wasps.
But the biggest number of deaths from animals is deer in America. 120 people die from deer in America, whereas one from sharks. But people are scared of deer, they are scared of sharks. So we're scared of spiders and its about 0.24 I think in America people die a year. But your scared of them. Terrified, terrified! I run out of the room screaming, I can't take it. Yeah. This lesson is for you then actually by the time we get to the end!
So it doesn't matter what the fear is, it's not logical, the fear is not logical, but that doesn't matter. The body isn't reasonable like that. Emotions aren't reasonable, its kind of learned programs and so they're lying to us. Basically, what I'm saying is we can't trust those emotions. They lying to us. It's easy to say that they're wrong, but still we put total faith in them.
We trust them anyway. And every time we turn away and allow them to control the behavior, we're reinforcing their validity. So then they become a self fulfilling prophecy and then they create our reality. So we start number one, let's say we're usually speaking of spiders, spiders, I'm scared of spiders and I'm scared that it's going to be dangerous so I don't go anywhere near them. And so I can't go anywhere near them and so I am right all along. It just kind of repeats the same kind of process over and over. Same with speaking, I'm scared I might not be able to speak in front of other people, so I avoid it. I don't do it, so I can't do it. So see, I was right all along. So it creates, the reality - its not based on logic or reason or facts or anything actually that holds up to reason. It's just that learned process.
So I think really what I want to share today, Jill, is that the answer to all of this is pretty straight forward. How do we do what we know we need to do, even though we really, really, really don't feel like it? And then also linked to that, how do we not do what we know we shouldn't do? Because it's the same thing, isn't it? Even though we really, really, really do feel like doing it. So it's acting in defiance of the emotions that stop us from growing. And so I got a simple process for that. But why I'd probably like to do, first of all, if it's okay with you, is just give them a little bit of the science and background into emotions because then it makes it easier to follow the three steps.
So I think the first step or the foundation is you've gotta be convinced of the fallibility of emotions because the mistake people make is they assume it's the reflection of reality and then it really isn't.
And so this comes from Dr. Albert Ellis’s work, who for those of you who don't know, he was a towering figure of psychology for many years. He, um, he was working, I think he'd died 94 when he died. And he was working into his nineties 16 hours a day, really, really very well respected doctor and his work was REBT - Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy work and he came up with this model called the ABC model that makes emotions very simple to understand. So imagine I'm your boss Jill, and I tell you that you have to speak to the shareholders at the AGM next week. Okay? So this is something that you're going to do and I know you enjoy speaking, but let's imagine you don’t, you're filling in for somebody and kind of like sprung on you. You're going to experience fear because it's like, Oh my goodness, you weren't experiencing fear before we had this meeting and I told you you're speaking, but now you very definitely are.
So you think to yourself, I made you scared because you weren't scared before I told you you needed to speak at the AGM. And so now you're scared. You're experiencing the fear. And so the “A” at the beginning, and you might want to write this across the page, if you're the sort of person that takes notes as you listen to this, the “A” is the activating event. So the activating event is you've been told you got to speak. Now the “C” on the other side of the page on the right, that’s the consequence. This is the feeling that you experience. So you, the activating event, you need to speak at the AGM and then the consequences is the fear. So the consequences can be an emotion. It can also be thoughts, it can be actions, it can even be symptoms if the feelings are repressed and then come out in your body and symptoms.
So here we're saying fear. So there's an emotion, the consequence is fear. The activating event is, I told you you need to speak - so it appears that A causes C so we can draw an arrow across the top from A to C, A causes C. You know when people's like ‘he made me so angry, she made me so cross’. It's the same kind of thing. They did something. We're experiencing emotion and so it appears that they are causing the emotion, but they're really not. They're really not. So a simple way to dig into this, into the fallibility of emotions to, to reveal itself and say, well, I know you're feeling fearful in this situation, Jill, but imagine a number of people in the same situation. Would they all feel the same way as you? And you say, ”well, I don’t know. What did you mean?”
I say, well, is it possible that some of them might be even more terrified than you? And when you ask that, most people will agree. Yeah, I think, yeah, they probably, you know, not that bad. I'm a little bit apprehensive. I'm fearful, but I'm not terrified. I'm sure some people could be terrified in this situation. Okay, well, could some people be looking forward to it? Well, I suppose, you know, if you're like that, then maybe yes, some people could, could enjoy it. Some people could be angry that they're forced into this situation. Some people could be apathetic, you know, whatever. It's pretty easy for us to agree that there's a whole range of different emotions that are possible in this situation. Most people will agree to that. Would you agree with that? That sounds useful to you? That does. Yeah.
So if that's the case and you agree that a range of consequences as possible, it can't be the event that's creating the consequence.
If, because if it was, it would always be the same. So something else, it's not the activating event that's causing the emotion – it is something else. It must be something that is specific to each particular individual. That's how we get these different emotions, these different consequences. And that's the B in the middle. It's the beliefs that these people hold that are responsible for the emotions. So its not the A that causes the C. It's not the activating event that causes the emotion. It's what you believe about the activating event and yourself and you know, whatever, whatever is relevant to this situation. It is what you believe about the activating event, which causes the emotion. So it's the B about the A that causes the C, that's the way to remember it. So we can see now that beliefs and emotions and really counterparts, they work together. What we've learned about the world is the meaning that we apply and creates the emotions that we then experience.
And the important thing to realize here as we've kind of seen with emotions already, but now will apply directly to beliefs. Beliefs are the result of a learning process, not a reflection of reality. I'm sure you've heard that many times, but it's really worth thinking about with regard to fears. Beliefs are the result of the learning process, not the reflection of reality. Same with the emotions because we can use them interchangeably.
And so you mentioned spiders. I had some experience with our children growing up with dog. Do you have kids Jill? I do, yeah. Are they scared of spiders? No, not too bad. Now he'll take care of it for me when I scream sometimes. Yes.
Well we um, growing up we had dogs when our kids were growing up. We had dogs from right from the very beginning. You know, we've got four kids and they've all grown up around dogs all the time. And what they know about dogs is that dogs are fun. In fact, dogs are great fun. They've all been kind of crawling in the dog basket with them their whole lives. Now let's imagine somebody, let's pick two kind of fictitious people. Mary, who's similar to my kids, grew up around dogs all their lives. So she believes dogs are fun, all dogs are fun. But then hundreds of miles away, Mike grow up in a home where he never met any dogs until he was about six years old. He's walking down the road, turned a corner, disturbed a stray German shepherd dog spooked it, jumped up and uh, and attacked him and bit him and uh, mauled his face and he had a scar on his cheek because of this kind of experience with the dog.
Unfortunate, horrible experience. So Mike understandably is now terrified of dogs. I think we could all understand that, we feel like it is a reasonable response. So Mike believes that all dogs are dangerous. Mary believes all dogs are fun. Now, years later in their twenties Mike and Mary get together and then now we're kind of walking down the road together and here they are. They just started dating together. They're walking down the road together, holding hands, and then they meet a dog unexpectedly. They are both going to have completely different emotional responses in their body, aren't they? To the same activating event, but totally different responses in their body. Mary’s instinct is just to go and play with the dog and Mike's instinct is get away from him as quickly as we can because all dogs are dangerous and this is a dog and this is potentially gonna, gonna be a threatening situation for us.
So what's Mike thinking? He's thinking escape. And what is Mary thinking - oh, how cute. Let's go play with and pat the dog. Who's right, which one is right? Which one is a reflection of reality. It's interesting, isn't it, when you're thinking about it like that, but obviously we don't know. We don't know because it depends on this particular dog, doesn't it? We don't know anything about this dog.
So looking on, we can see that you've got these two scenarios, but we can't say because we don't know anything about this dog. What each of them really needs to know is what is this dog actually like? But the response in their body is based on dogs that they met years ago, dogs that died years ago, and that's driving their experiences with this particular dog. Neither of them is thinking about this. They're just experiencing the emotion of course, and that emotion as a result of a previous learning process, not a reflection of the reality that they're now facing.
So the ABC model is, I think it's really powerful to expose beliefs for what they are - expose emotions for what they are. Because the consequences can be emotion of course, as we've just said, but it can be thinking, it can be behavior, it can be acting as well. So if the beliefs are a result of a learning process our thinking or feeling or acting is also the result of a learning process. Mike isn't thinking objectively he's thinking emotionally. He's thinking scared. He's thinking, how do I get out of here? How do I escape? He's not thinking objectively. So am I articulating the fallibility of beliefs here Jill? Exposing the weakness or the potential weakness?
You are spot on. I loved the way you explained that as well because I'll tell you as you were telling that story, I just met with an executive earlier today and we were doing some coaching and one of the things he said is, I hate speaking public speaking. I don't understand the value in it. Um, I don't want to deal with it at all! And so that example really came up to me and we had some other conversations about -here's some actual facts and this is how it is. And um, I started to share the beliefs a little bit with him, but I love this model because we all know that we are beliefs and you've taught me definitely that we're all combination of things that we've had experience to us and we don't really recognize that or realize that. And it stops us. And I wonder if you could share, one of the fears that tends to come up a lot is the fear of having a conflicting discussion, managing conflict. Giving feedback to an employee, a feedback that the employee might not like. How did that show up here?
Okay, so it's the same thing. Really any fear, any emotion is based on our interpretation or meaning. What have we learned about this? What we anticipate. So the activating event, it could be it's actually seeing a dog, but it could be real or imagined. It could be just you imagining what's going to happen. So the same process is at work. I think the thing with beliefs is they kind of lurk in the subconscious.
So if you draw a circle and draw a horizontal line across the middle, then put a like a B underneath for what you believe about dogs, what you believe about your ability to interact with other people, your worthiness, you name it. I mean it's endless. We've got all of these different beliefs here, but they're silent until they're activated. The belief isn't shouting at Mike saying, be careful of dogs around this corner. There might be a dog, there's dogs here that doesn't happen. It takes the activating event for it to be tripped for, for then it to influence our feelings and our actions and our thinking. So if there's a fear of giving, well fear of anything really, it's kind of how we're thinking about it based on what we've learned, previous experiences. So the approach is still the same.
And I think if you take that particular interaction, so let's say your, you're giving a performance review, you're interacting with some people on your team, you need to challenge some inappropriate behavior or you know, whatever it may be that you're a little apprehensive about. The key is the same that I'm going to come onto - the steps. What you want to do is dilute that fear through repetition and exposure and think about the different steps that you're going to go through.
And I would recommend, you know, speaking, is a good example of this, but so is appraisals. Practice going through what you're gonna do. Same with job interviews. They're all performances and so you can treat them all in the same way. So if you think about being assertive or challenging inappropriate behavior or something that you feel the other person is not going to take, well practice it. Role playing is another great example that, that helps with this because you're moving through the process and you end up systematically desensitizing the triggers to the emotions, the more you do it. So a seasoned manager that's used to speaking to people, a great deal is going to have moved on from those kinds of feelings. They gained skills, knowledge and experience over the years. But initially they probably felt apprehensive. So you either wait for the experience or you fabricate the experience kind of laboratory side of your life.
So you create that experience. Speaking is such a great example of this because if you and I went on a, no, I won't use you, I will use one of your listeners. I'm sure there's someone called Mike listening. If me and Mike went on a speaking tour and he was gonna speak at the beginning every day, five days a week for 10 weeks, he would be a significantly better speaker at the end than he was in the beginning. And we all can laugh and say, yeah, that's true. But if he just had one or two speaking events coming up and he still was starting out with the same kind of feelings, we could manufacture a lot of the lessons from that 10 week speaking tour with a video camera and training program and the confidence would build in the same way and the anxiety would dissipate in the same way.
So it's the same process. We need to understand that the feelings are something that we've learned. They may or may not be helpful. They may or may not be realistic. They may or may not be logical. They may or may not be something that we need to challenge and that is holding us back from what we want to get. Then, um, we probably do want to challenge them. But just because it's uncomfortable, it doesn't mean that they're necessarily wrong. It might just be that it's something that we've not done before and is trying to stop us maybe from appearing foolish or, or making mistakes or maybe just stop us from making effort to prepare or effort to do something. So the process I would recommend is the same.
First of all, understanding and really buying into the fallibility of the emotions we've just been talking about. And then taking responsibility for the change.
It's a funny thing. I don't know. Are you scared of heights or, or anything Jill? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not great with highs and so this is another, you know, personal experience example for me. If you take someone who's scared of heights and put them in a position where they would not be at all comfortable, you know, i.e. up high somewhere, but they say because it's not logical, the emotion, so it doesn't mean they need to be safe so that you could, you'd do it. But if you do that, you're still going to feel the emotional response, but it doesn't last forever. It's kind of brutal. But if you're immersed in that situation, you'll be fearful and panicking and Oh my goodness, Oh my goodness, and the fear kind of runs itself out.
And you're still concerned that you're not experiencing the fear to the same degree. If you went back up there the next day, same thing. And so exposure to whatever it is, we're forced to acknowledge and to recognize the belief you saying, you know, “we're gonna die, we're gonna die.” And the body is responding appropriately for that as if we're going about to being by a lion or whatever. But if you stay there and you don't, you're forced to acknowledge that actually you can do it. You have to because it's happening. That that's the evidence. And so as I say, it's a brutal way to desensitize yourself to the triggers, but it works. A much more gentle approach is systematic desensitization, first of all in your mind and then in real life, but still baby steps, which, um, you know, is a, is a great, great way to deal with facing the fears and learning what you're really capable of.
So it's challenging, but it's not too much. And I've been using this process for years with speakers and it works fantastically well. And if it works with speaking, it will work with anything because so many people are fearful of speaking. Well I'll, I'll run through the three steps now and really quickly if, if that suits you.
That would be great. Yeah. We all have this fear and what can we get better here to help us and then help us help the people that we lead? Exactly. Yeah.
So the first of all is that, you know, agreeing that the emotions are fallible and they're not a good gauge. We shouldn't be looking to our, in fact, emotions are terrible guide to our potential, terrible. They try and keep us where they are, try and convince us to stay where we are. So that's the foundations that we have to accept that and the responsibility for change. No one's going to change it for us and we have to do that.
But then when you've done that, lets use speaking as an example, who do you need to become to do what it is that is going to help you grow? Think about that. And here it's useful to think about role models may be people you admire, people you see who are doing what you need to do or know that you should be doing, but you're kind of shying away from. If you can get like real people, that's very helpful so you can see what it is that done what you want to do. So step one, who do you need to become to do the things that you need to do?
And then step two, this is like, you know, the first kind of baby steps towards the desensitization. Visualize yourself being the person that you need to be. So visualize yourself living that way. I'm sure you probably had people talking about visualization already. If you haven't, I'm sure you found them coming up so I won't go into too much. But it's interesting that the unconscious doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's imagined. So the body responds to the images we accept on the screen of our mind in the same way. A simple example going back to Mike, which makes it kind of self evident in Mike's walking down the road with Mary and he sees a dog and his body responds with the fight or flight response. Mike's body will respond that way whether he actually sees the dog or whether he just thinks he sees the dog. Remember the activating event can be imagined. In fact, he might just sit down, close his eyes and imagine this dogs, and he is going to have that same response, isn't he? So this is a great way for us to get experience in a safe way. So step two, imagine yourself, visualize yourself being that person.
And then step three, now we're out of the mind and into the real world. Take action steps in increasing ambitiousness. Baby steps, start small, but going up escalating in the direction that we need to go. So actually do those things. If it's speaking, start just saying your talk out loud or your ideas for a talk unattached to doing it perfectly. In fact unattached to the outcome completely. The only thing you're attached to is that you're engaging in the activity. It doesn't matter what comes out. So just start speaking out loud and use notes if you want. And then when you're ready, audio record yourself and then maybe do it in the mirror and then maybe video yourself and then watch it back.
And then when you're ready, maybe get a couple of your friends together and say, I'd love your feedback on something that me. Let me share this with you. And then onto real audiences, always videoing yourself and always reviewing, cause this is the evidence you need to see what you're really capable of achieving. And so each time you're watching unattached to the outcome, you know you'd like to do a good job, but don't get hung up on that - and don’t let perfectionism stop you from even starting this.
Many people that are scared of speaking. Do you know what they're actually, I'm convinced of this, I've asked so many people discussed it with so many people, I'm convinced of this. Do you know what they're actually afraid of? They're not afraid of making a terrible mess of it. They're afraid of not doing it perfectly.
When you think about it, but we don't think about it. That's the beliefs that are kind of lurking and creating this thinking. So you know you gain the insight, your beliefs change as you proved yourself what you can do. You have to, you're, you're faced with the evidence, your confidence builds, the anxiety dissipates, the emotions will change. But you have to start with the emotions you have. You have to start with the anxiety and then eventually the confidence will come.
So powerful Jill, honestly it really is. If it works for speaking, as I said, it will work for anything. I've seen so many people who they would never believe, would able to develop their speaking and being in front of people and then going on to, you know, to speak in front of thousands of people. And actually I know I've spoken way too much, but just one kind of final point here.
If you follow this process of something like speaking, which I recommend all leaders though because it's a great, great skill to develop. Yes. Once you prove to yourself what you can do, you know the process works and then you can help the people in your team to develop this particular skill or any other growth area where they're being held back. You can help them with the process of you like going through this process yourself and facing fears and overcoming fears. Then you're able to help everyone else in your team and help them grow as well.
Yeah, you gave us so much great stuff. I just, one thing was really sticking out for me, and I know you hit it a couple of times, but I think it's just important to reiterate that you said don't get attached to the outcome. Just the activity.
Yeah, that's it. We're responsible for the effort and not the result. That is one of the spiritual groups say that all the time and I think that's a great way of putting it. You just got to do it. You're responsible for the effort. Not the result.
Yeah, and that is, that's really powerful to think of, especially when your experienced, your a leader, you don't want to fail at anything and it's just trying it, just trying to stick to learning and trying it and I think that really stuck out for me that I think is important.
Can I make one more point on the leader because I think people, when they're in charge of people, they put this pressure on top of themselves that they're supposed to be good at everything. They're supposed to be better than everyone else in the team at everything including speaking or leading or whatever. And so you don't want to risk speaking, using that as an example, because you don't want your team to maybe say you're weak or you can't do it or, and I think there's a danger in that thinking because when we shy away from something that we feel we ought to do or when we know actually we're scared and we don't do it, our self-esteem takes a hit.
Our self-esteem is impacted. Even if you think you're saving yourself from the possibility of making a mistake, the self-esteem suffers. But when you take an action and you do it, even if it doesn't work out as you wanted, your self-esteem goes up. And so that kind of resilience comes from taking action. And in fact, many people don't like speaking and so they respect you for having a go as well. So I think that that's a very healthy way of looking at it as a new leader or an existing leader, that people are going to respect you for stepping forward into growth much more than they are from hiding away and trying to pretend you're perfect.
Yeah, I love that. That's so true. We feel like we're supposed to be the perfect model when we actually embrace it when we see some, some people actually not doing everything perfectly, it makes us feel like they're human.
Yeah, humanness is a great way to connect with your team isn’t it? You're gonna end up being connected because you have this humanness about you and pretending you're perfect is a great way to kind of create a gap between you and your team. So everything to be gained from being just stepping forward into growth.
Well, Roddy, I'm curious, how have you applied this to yourself? Yeah, I mean I've used this, I used to struggle with panic attacks years ago or so, I kind of fell into speaking as like an antidote to that. So I've, I've studied this in great detail, great detail and applied it to myself and gone from being terrified to speak in front of people, to speaking in front of, you know, thousands and thousands of people and completely changing my life as a consequence. I've also, as my kind of key role with the John Maxwell team, worked one on one with about 10,000 different speakers over the last 10 plus years and I've seen many of them bloom and go from like terrified into like, Oh my goodness, I've tasted blood now and I, I can't go back. I just love this. I just love it.
And sometimes it's just little things. I remember working with one lady and it was as simple as getting her feet right, and her stance right and her hands right. She saw herself on video. She was terrified. She still has her cell phone video, cause I always video everyone when I'm working with them, so you know, so you can see (A) what we're working on and (B) you can see you can do it. And she said, yeah, you're right. I do look kind of graceful. And she still felt uncomfortable but she was, basically, she came to me cause she had to give a presentation at work. But she still felt uncomfortable. But she looked like a speaker because her hands were, yeah, she he good neutral hand position and feet. She was standing up straight and feet close together. She looked very elegant and that changed everything for her.
Somebody else I was working with who um, there was like a merger of departments and she had this opportunity to stand up. She had a small team and she needed to talk to the people of the combined team. And so all of the managers were going to do this and she was really worried about it. I worked with her for about an hour and a half, that was it, on this like five minute presentation and I used her phone and videoed her from the beginning and she was cringing. Like I said, right, if you have to do it now, what would you do? And she was like, I don't know, we haven't, then we videoed. And she's like, Oh, that was awful. But she like, she got over the fact that I was going to be videoing her and making her doing it quite quickly. Two or three times of doing this kind of two or three minute videos, watching it back. Okay. This time, what do you think you would change? Okay. Yeah, that's great. Right? So we went and we did this for 90 minutes, pretty much constantly. We would talk about it, we'd have some ideas. She said, I need to introduce my team. We'd do it. We'd watch it back. And I'd say, you know that, that that's a little dull, the way you're doing that, is there any stories that you have or anything you could, you know about each of them? And we talked about it and she came up with a couple of little anecdotes that she could use, have another go, watch it back and by the time we'd done this for 90 minutes and she went home to practice afterwards and the next morning I got a call after the thing and she said, you will not believe how well it went. She said everyone else like stood at the lectern and was gripping the lectern and talking down into their notes and I stood up and I didn't need notes, I was walking around, I knew it inside out and I was making them laugh and they were clapping and people came up to me afterwards and said, Oh, you are such a natural leader. You look so comfortable in front of the audience. And it was just because we spent 90 minutes working on a five minute presentation that she was going to give.
I've worked in organizations for a big global organizations in the finance industry for many years, and I've seen the difference it makes when people stand up and they can, even if it's just a one minute like leaving speech or a, you know, a new joiner. If you take those opportunities, you can, you can stand out as a leader if you, if you do it and you don't if you don't. So I think speaking is a great way to define your leadership. It's something I've worked hard at and made significant progress from where I was and I've seen much, much greater progress in, in other people that I've worked with.
I love that story. Yes, it works with everything, not just speaking. Yeah, thank you. And you made another great point where they come up and say, Oh, you must be a natural. You're so good at this. Yeah. Assume that you were born with this gift.
It's so true. We don't think about the process. Even if we know they've been through the process, we don't think about it. You just kind of see the end result and think, Oh, well you're lucky you're that. I mean, and it's not, I think the natural comes from when we, when we're doing something habitually and it looks like we're doing it without thinking about it. People assume, oh well they're not thinking about it, therefore they must be born this way. You know, different genes. We might as well use it to our advantage. Exactly. I love it.
So fear, fear is really getting in the way of us growing to our full potential. And yeah, you said two things. (1) We need to understand fallibility of emotions and (2) take ownership of the change. Yeah.
And then you gave us three steps that we need to take.
You said (1), identify who we need to become and look around us and see who's around us that maybe mentors or models. So we can do the thing we know we need to do. Step (2), you said visualize ourselves being that person that we need to be doing that. You know, actually seeing ourselves doing it, visualization because we can do this in a safe way and step (3) was take actions but take those small steps, small and slow steps towards where we want to go. Did I get that right?
You go that right, but I'll give you the super hack for those people who have got no patience for the process. The super hack is go straight to step three but be prepared to be uncomfortable. Be prepared to be uncomfortable. Just start doing it and videoing yourself and watching it back or you know, video is great not just for speaking actually cause the video is great for everything cause you can see yourself as other people see you – posture, everything, interviews, Q and A. Anything, anything that you're involved in - golf, swimming. If you can see yourself, it gives you a different perspective. It really helps you learn and grow martial arts, dance, everything. But yeah, if you want the super hack, just do it. Jump straight into step three and as long as you, you know, you don't get overwhelmed and give up, then you'll make rapid progress that way.
I love this. I love this. I got to think about how I'm gonna apply this to spiders, but maybe later. Yeah. Its something that it's been proven time and same as snakes, systematic desensitization is a very, very popular approach with phobias like that. Well I better get used to it. I just moved to a big farm so yeah. That's okay. Increased exposure. Yeah, I'm getting, I'm getting increased exposure right now. Yep.
Well Roddy, is there anything else you wanted to share or anything that you're working on right now that you want to share with us?
So we have, uh, my business partner, Paul Martinelli, who maybe some of your listeners will know. We have a business called Living Empowered and so we have free content that we give out in different formats. Every week we do a show on Saturdays, we have a lesson in the week and it's all free. Some of it goes off to become paid at some point in the future, but every week there's free stuff that you can dive into. So if you're interested in finding out more from me and my business partner and other people within the community, then you can go to www.Yourempoweredlife.com
www.Yourempoweredlife.com and see how you can jump into those. We have a free program coming out starting on the 16th called the science and getting rich, which is based on an old book. It's got lots of great stuff in it with Paul and I discussing that for about 15 hours, all in all, we just finished the filming and you can find out more about that SGR2019.com if that interests you.
If you're interested in developing your speaking, I'd highly recommend the John Maxwell team. If you want some more hands on help, then you can email me [email protected] and if I can help you then I'd love to.
I love it. I can't advocate for that enough either. I met you through the John Maxwell team. I've really engaged in the Empowerment Mentoring. I'm bringing more friends through the book study Science of Getting Rich, we already did your other study around As A Man Thinketh. Hmm, I love that. I will continue to share everything that you do because you just help people grow and I really appreciate what you shared with us today as well. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Bye everybody. It's great to chat with you. You're welcome. It's great to chat with you too. Thank you so much.
Yeah, you're welcome. Bye. Bye. God Bless.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
You can reach Roddy at [email protected] and check out his free content at www.Yourempoweredlife.com
You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht at [email protected] and my website is www.TalentSpecialists.net. I work with leaders and help them through coaching, organization consulting and leadership development.
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Do you want to accelerate your leadership development? It starts with gaining self-awareness and leveraging a coaching relationship that adds value and magnifies your results.
My guest, Dr. Ellen B. Van Oosten will share critical elements that you need to have in your coaching engagements to amplify your impact and growth. She will also share the data and science that demonstrates the ROI of coaching as part of your Leadership Development Strategy. Learn how move across the continuum of telling to inspiring as a leader through coaching.
Podcast Transcript:
Hi, this is Jill Windelspecht. Welcome back to another episode of Brain Hacks 4 leadership. I'm really excited about today's episode. ([email protected])
Directs the Coaching Research Lab, which she co-founded in 2014 with Professors Richard Boyatzis and Melvin Smith Co-Author of Helping People Change: Coaching with Compassion for Lifelong Learning and Growth (available through Harvard Business Review Press in September 2019) 24 years experience as an executive coach
I'd love to welcome my guest Ellen B. Van Oosten, PhD, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Faculty Director of Executive Education at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Van Oosten is also Director of the Coaching Research Lab. Her research interests include coaching, leadership development, emotional intelligence, and positive relationships at work.Well, Ellen, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Really looking forward to your topic. It's something that's near and dear to my heart, so why don't you introduce the topic.
Sure. Thanks so much, Jill. I really am delighted to be with you and your listeners today. The topic that I thought might be of interest to a lot of individuals and organizations is coaching for leadership development and I know you've done a lot of work around that, so tell us what is some of the science that you've applied?
Sure. We've known each other for a lot of years and even going back to the early days when we were doing some work together. A lot of my experience over the past 25 years has been in helping organizations develop their leadership talent and that space has been one that I've not only spent time with organizations designing and delivering programs, but served as the bridge to pull together different faculty and instructors to create customized leadership development experiences. Most recently in the last seven years, I've added to that some focus in the space of research and that's what I'm excited to share with you and your listeners. Some of what we're understanding and learning in terms of how coaching can really help.
That's great. What I love about what you're doing with yourself and your partners is not just saying coaching works, but measuring it in a very systematic way to demonstrate the benefit.
Yeah. That's something we feel really passionate about and are very committed to do at the Weatherhead School of Management. One of the activities that helps us organize ourselves around that and make it a priority is called the Coaching Research Lab. It is a collaborative between industry practitioners and faculty at the Weatherhead School and Organization Behavior and so through the Coaching Research Lab we conduct a number of different studies - including one that I'd be happy to share with you that supports or is interesting to our overall topic of coaching for leadership development. So this study that I'd like to share with you, it started a number of years ago where we had an opportunity to conduct a leadership development program for a financial services firm in the Midwest and this particular organization was interested to break down some silos between various areas of the business and were challenging their senior leaders, the top 300 or so leaders in the organization to collaborate in new and different ways.
The way they thought to go about it was to equip the leaders with some new knowledge and some new skills. And through that experience worked with us at the University to design a leadership development program. And as part of it, we included 360 feedback and coaching. So that's the backdrop. So the study looked at two things, primarily does emotional and social intelligence of leaders have any bearing on desired outcomes, and those desired outcomes at the organization level were job performance, which is kind of the gold standard. Very difficult to get that data. But if you can do it, it's really compelling. And then also we looked at some more subjective outcomes including work, engagement, career satisfaction. And then also the extent to which the leader could create a personal vision. So here's what we found through this study. Emotional and social intelligence had a positive direct effect on job performance and also we found that when you add a coaching relationship to the mix, it has an amplification effect on other outcomes including work, engagement and career satisfaction as well as personal vision.
So let me unpack those a little bit more. A lot of organizations always want to look at the return on investment for leadership development and that is especially true when we consider what a lot of folks in organizations consider to be soft skills such as emotional and social intelligence. It's just really hard to measure it in a lot of cases. In this program, individuals received 360 feedback on their emotional and social intelligence and the organization was able to provide me access to annual job performance ratings. Those sets of data along with surveys that the individual leaders answered allowed me to triangulate the data so that we could look at the interrelationships between emotional and social intelligence and those competencies and outcomes such as job performance and others. The fact that we're able to show through our analysis that definitely emotional and social competencies led to increased job performance was really important for this particular organization and I think a lot of organizations, but then also what was interesting is when you added a coaching relationship that the individual perceived to be high quality to the mix. It had this incredible effect of amplifying what the leader reported around working engagement, career satisfaction and personal vision. So that's really compelling when you think about the decisions and investments that organizations make to develop their leaders and it was definitely something that this particular organization found very gratifying and helpful to their leadership development.
That's great. You said it wasn't just the self awareness around their own emotional and social competency, it was the coaching on top of that, when they saw the coaching is adding value, that amplified their job performance and engagement. Did you find anything specific around the coaching relationship? One or two things that when they were present people saw it as a more beneficial to them.
The main thing is that a coaching relationship is really important and has a lot of benefits to the individual and to the organization. So that is really kind of one of the big takeaways from this particular study and the implications of that extend at a number of different levels. For individuals working with a coach that's important to know that the relationship and the connection that they have together in the work that they do together is as important and often a big catalyst for their particular work. So taking some time to think about and maybe get to know your coach to make sure you're working with somebody who for you is a good fit and somebody feel really comfortable with is important. Another would be for professional coaches, but also for internal managers who are seeking to develop their own coaching capabilities, so they can develop their individuals and teams in the organization in expanded ways. This really points to the importance of developing a relationship and being able to have relational skills. And then for organizations who have coaching, either provided through internal coaches or who are hiring external coaches to understand the importance of coaching relationships in the mix.
Yeah, that's an important piece. I agree. As a coach myself, I often have chemistry meetings first just to make sure that I'm a good fit for them. They're a good fit for me. And I think that's a really important piece because coaching is really personal, but the outcomes can really be tremendous.
Yes, exactly. Yes. And I know, right?
Yeah. So Ellen, how have you applied this to yourself?
So for me, I'm, since I've been in this space of leadership development work for almost 25 years now, it's really personal and it's personal in a couple of ways, it is validating to the work that so many of us are doing with organizations that we see so many intangible incredible outcomes. Right? Just like you said, so many amazing benefits are often part of the experience and it's hard to measure it. So we see it, we know it, we can speak to stories and stories are definitely powerful. But when an organization needs to commit a couple hundred thousand dollars for a leadership development program, or even just five or $10,000 for coaching for a leader or whatever, the amount that becomes a business decision. And so being able to provide some evidence about the benefits and the value to the organization, but also to the individuals is something that I feel really excited by. And then for me as a coach, as I also been coaching and still do a lot of executive coaching, it's a great reminder for me of the importance of establishing a good open relationship with the people that I'm working with. So being able to come to that fully present, fully able to engage in an effective way as a coach is something that is important to me and what I take away from it.
Yeah, that's powerful. So Ellen, what are other ways that leaders can apply this themselves or their team and organization so they can get this benefit?
Well, I think if we stepped back from this particular study and just think about coaching overall, I think such a great reminder of how valuable coaching can be. And so, you know, if we think about what that even means, coaching is basically, or the way I think about it and the way we do it at the Weatherhead School is partnering with another individual or a group or a team to help them discover and achieve whatever their ideal self is. And so we do a lot of work with people and individuals, helping them to imagine what they really want to do and who they really want to be in the future. And the future we've pushed pretty far out and then work backwards from that and fill in the blanks around how one can take some step to move towards that. Not in a transactional way, but more in a transformational way. So for me, it's really a knowing and having some more collective understanding around what's really happening in coaching. What's the potential that's there? And you need to be able to then consider what some of the benefits, real time financial benefits could be for organizations.
Yeah, I love that. And thank you for defining coaching and the coaching approach that you're using as well. And so just to level set so people understand, what is the typical length that you've seen is needed from a coaching relationship to make an impact. So I know it's not one or two sessions, that's just the tip of the iceberg, but what have you seen that is a minimum expectation for people to expect to get some real results from us?
That's a great question, Jill. And at this point we don't really know from the science or from studies. I can offer some experience though and I would say it's somewhere between four and six meetings or sessions. They don't have to be in person meetings, but in sessions where you're interacting with the individual or the coachee. It seems to be that the sweet spot somewhere around there and the longer you can work together, often the more change you're able to affect or to see at a minimum we would suggest three sessions so you can get pretty far in three but you know, and in all fairness or to be fully transparent around that, what you can get to is laying a good solid foundation. And then the individual does a lot of the work around implementing the plans on their own. If you're able to have a coaching engagement that has four or five, six or more session, then the coaches able to walk side by side with the individual or again the group of teams and help them as an accountability partner to be able to implement a lot of the steps. So really goes back to what the overall objective is for the coaching engagement from the beginning. But in general, a good rule of thumb I'd say would be somewhere around four to six sessions.
And how long is a session?
Again, I can speak from just experience. We don't have good data or science on that yet, but at least an hour seems to work at the beginning of getting to know a client and working with them. We find that 75 to 90 minute sessions are not uncommon. So we often plan for about 75 minutes and allow 90 minutes for the first two sessions or more. And then as you move into having a plan established and the coachee is kind of working their plan towards their desired change, sometimes your sessions could be shorter, more around an hour or so. There's also something that , I know a lot of coaches embed within coaching engagements, sometimes it's referred to as spot coaching or intermittent coaching. What that refers to is when our clients and coaches are able to connect with us as coaches at a moment's notice, so as needs arise or you know they're going into an important meeting, they might benefit from talking to their coach. So those types of coaching conversations range, that could be as short as 15-20 minutes and it's very discreet. It could be 30 minutes, 45 minutes. But in terms of scheduled, planned deliberate coaching sessions, I'd say on average is at least an hour.
Yeah, that makes sense. So the spot coaching is in between the sessions to just keep the momentum, maybe help with something they're experiencing right there that they know they're working on. What other examples have you seen, and maybe you go to the book that's coming out, "Helping people change, coaching with compassion for lifelong learning and growth". What's one or two things that you learned and doing the work around this book that you could share with us?Sure. Jill, thank you so much for allowing me to share a little bit about the book that we have that's coming out soon because we've been working on that for a long time and it's been really an exciting and um, just rewarding project to work with my coauthors, Richard Boyatzis and Melvin Smith around them. There's so many nuggets of, of information for me that it's hard to pick one or two. There's a couple of stories that really stand out for me in a couple of times that have been reaffirmed for me so I can share a couple of those. One of the stories that is in the book is a coaching client that I had the chance to work with years ago, and he was a senior leader in a large multinational US corporation and he was CFO at the time and had received some 360 feedback as part of a leadership development program that surprised him.
He thought he was doing pretty well and had pretty good relationships with his seven direct reports, who they themselves were senior leaders as well. However, the feedback he received from his direct reports and others indicated that they really didn't feel like he was approachable, that he knew them, that they had good relationships with him or vice versa, and ultimately that he was listening to them. So this was really a shock to him. And I find that sometimes working with leaders and executives where in the absence of feedback, they think everything is fine until they have a chance to learn a little bit more about how people are experiencing interactions with them. And so working with this individual, we started to break down that feedback and that was an interesting process in and of itself of just self awareness for him. And so we unpacked it and what he decided to work on was pretty discreet and it was how to become a better listener because what was happening on a daily, weekly basis was that he operated with an assumption that he didn't want to micromanage.
He had very talented people on his team, so he wanted to get out of their way, which he translated to be not interacting with them really at all. And when they did come to him, it was usually around a specific problem that they wanted to either update him on or just bounce off of him. So the nature of the discussions and conversations the senior leader in the C-Suite was having with other senior leaders that reported to him were these short, 20-30 minute transactional conversations, he really didn't know anything about them. He trusted, they were running their particular business issues, their business competently and they were, but at the end of the day they weren't feeling connected to him. And as a result they were less engaged. What we set out to do together was to really unpack a typical day or week for him and to have him consider different ways to engage with his direct report, which really meant getting out from behind his desk and being able to concentrate on listening to what individuals had to say, which means he had to learn how to ask questions and learn the art of developmental conversation and even just the art of a conversation period.
But one that engaged the other individual and demonstrated he cared and demonstrated that he was listening. So we worked on that for a number of months, very discrete steps, and through that process and him really working on being a different kind of leader, he was able to create a different type of relationship with the people who reported to him. A positive one, one where 18 months later when he took it another 360 degree feedback, he received much more positive and much different input from his direct reports. So that's one story that is just a great reminder for me of how simple some of these steps are, but how crucial they are for us to be able to engage with one another in meaningful, authentic, and caring ways.
I love that example because in working with a lot of executives myself as well, I know that they may avoid trying to be that micro-manager so much that they're removing themselves too much. And you said that these are senior leaders he's working with, they knew how to do their job, but they wanted to feel connected. Yes. Yeah, to them. Yeah. It's very mindful.
A lot of managers and certainly leaders and executives, this is absolutely true. We have jobs to do, tasks that have to get done, but those tasks get done through people and the higher up one goes in the organizational hierarchy - there's more people that we need to work through. And so the approaches and the styles that we use to engage people then becomes even more crucial for our ability to be effective in that. And it becomes much more about inspiring others, motivating others, and less about telling. So the transition from task to relationship requires us to move from telling to inspiring and that those are continuums for people. They're not absolute states, but I find a lot working with Directors on up to those in the C-Suite that some people have never really thought about that continuum. It might still be managing others in a way that is just not resonant or effective for the individuals as well as the span of control that they have.
Yeah. The continuum you pointed out from Telling to Inspiring.
Yes. Jill another take away from the experience of writing the book that I would share. That's top of mind for me is the importance of renewal for all of us. Renewal for all of us as coaches, renewal for all us as leaders renewal for all of us in all of the roles that we serve in our work and in our life. And so we know more and more from the neuroscience that's being conducted at our University and elsewhere about the role of stress and the importance of renewal. And part of it is that as human beings, stress is inevitable. It's just that stress, that chronic and stress, that extreme, which is often associated with increasing levels of responsibility in organizations and elsewhere is something that we need to be aware of and be able to not so much manage, but be able to address.
And so one of the important ways to address the inevitable stresses in our lives is to be intentional about renewal. And so that starts with being aware of how we respond to stress and what some of the sources are. It also requires us then to make it a priority to be intentional about renewal. Now, the good news is there's lots of different ways for us to do that. And for any given person, what might be renewing for one individual, you know, could look different and often is for another. So we get to customize that, be authentic to ourselves, which is really important. And also just a lot of fun. For some people it might be meditation. For others it might be exercise. For others it's prayer. For others it's walks in nature and usually it's not just one of these things. It's a combination. And so we're learning so much more about how different resources like meditation for instance, really can help us stay centered and help us with that renewal. There's also renewal for longer periods of time that we need, such as like taking a vacation and taking a vacation where we're actually able to disconnect. Not a vacation where you bring your computer and you're on your computer the entire time. That's just virtual work that's not really renewing.
So how much time, I don't know if you've, you've measured this, you can say we haven't measured it yet or you could tell me what your greatest guesses, how much renewal time the leaders need. Is that, are you talking take a week off a day? Is it, can you renew in a half an hour?
Well, there's different timeframes for renewal right, so in any given day, if you think of 24 hours, one way to just make sure we're staying healthy is to look at how many hours we're dedicating to good quality sleep. There's a lot of studies that are emerging have been in our continuing to emerge about the importance of sleep. We are a sleep deprived nation and it starting at younger and younger ages. I certainly see that with my high schooler and the kind of stress and the hours that a lot of high schoolers are keeping and then that continues often through college. We see that in the students on campus. The issue is that for many individuals as they move into their thirties forties fifties we are in a sleep crisis or sleep deficits are very real. So it's not uncommon for people to get five hours of sleep or less a night. Yet we need a minimum of seven hours of sleep to function minimum.
And so in any given day, starting there and really working on getting better quality, sleep is a good place to begin. Meditation throughout the day is important. So being able to take 10 or 15 even 20 minutes throughout the day where you can pause and use meditation and Meditative techniques to be able to center yourself. So it's really about managing the mind on a daily, weekly basis. However, longer periods of time are needed for true deeper renewal. There's no science we're aware of currently that says, you know, it should be 8.5 days or anything like that, but here's what we know. Taking a weekend allows you to break set from the hecticness. So if you take a weekend away, maybe you can, you know, catch up on your sleep and just relax for a day or so, but you're not really away. If you take a week, it takes most people a couple of days to wind down from just the stress of getting out of town.
I'm making sure the dog got to the Kennel, making sure that they mail is stopped, to making sure that the bills were paid, making sure that you know the water tank is turned off in the house or whatever the list is for each person. By the time you actually get to a point where you're really just connecting, that's assuming you don't bring your computer or you're not on your phone. Answering emails is often two or three days in. If you only have a week, you have a couple of days before, then the same thing's happening on the other end and you're starting to crank things back up. You've got to figure out how to make sure your travel plans are in good shape and you're going to be packing up to leave and head home and so you really want to only get a limited amount of renewal. Ideally, a lot of our friends around the world who are able to take two, three, four weeks off and often have that as part of the norms in their organizations or countries have figured this out a long time ago, that really two weeks or more allows us to truly renew. And yet for a lot of people, I know that sounds like that's unrealistic or out of reach, but that's one of my dreams. To be able to affect that for people or to give them permission to be able to take it.
Yeah, I need to, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so important. Yeah.
Yeah. The timing is right. It's so crucial on so many levels and it's just so reinvigorating if you're able to do it. I know for a lot of your listeners having something practical that they can do to even get started around this is helpful. So I wanted to offer an exercise. That's a great way to begin. It's in our book as well. We call it mind, body, spirit, heart as shorthand. I can walk you through it briefly here. If you just draw four circles, and in those four circles, have them be connecting and write the words, mind, body, Spirit, and heart. In each one of those four circles, and ask yourself, what are you doing currently that supports the health of your mind, body, your spirit, and your heart? And then take those four circles, draw them again and ask yourself the question, what would you ideally like to be doing that would support your renewal in each one of those areas? So you're examining what you're doing now and then you're dreaming and imagining in a perfect world, you know, what would you love to do? And that exercise help you to take some personal inventory and also be able to then consider where might you begin to incorporate more intentional renewal into your life.
I love that. That's a great exercise, a great place to just get started, Mind, Body, Spirit, and Heart. What are you doing today? And then what you would like to do. Then obviously next step would be what do you want to put in action that you want to do but aren't doing today?
Absolutely. In fact, there is another story is a powerful one that is in our book and it's one of my favorite ones and it's the story of a gentleman named Bob Schaffer and Bob went through that exercise that I just shared with you and your listeners in a leadership development program. And for him it was just a moment where he thought to himself, I'm not the kind of person that I really want to be in terms of my physical health. And he had formerly been really active in college, played college football, and his wife, who he met in college, was also quite athletic. Due to work and the pressures of raising kids and traveling for work and just life, he had not been very committed to a regular program of physical exercise for a lot of years and found himself, as he talks about, it a hundred pounds overweight. And through this exercise, he made a commitment in that moment that he really needed to change and wanted to change.
It's really the wanting, Jill. That's the key that he wants to change. Nobody was telling him he had to lose a hundred pounds because we know that doesn't work. This is where inspiring versus telling comes into play. Right. So it was important for him and he talks about his dream, which is be able to walk his three daughters down the aisle so it'd be healthy enough and to be around for that. He also talked about another element of his dream, which is to run a race with his wife because she was a runner and he would take the girls to see their mom run, but he was always on the sidelines with his kids. And so part of what he wanted to do is to run a race with his wife. And so he walked out of that leadership development program and this exercise and called one of his buddies who had been seeing a personal trainer for years and said, I need the name of your trainer.
And he called the trainer that day, told them the story that I'm telling you, and the guy said, I'll work with you, but I only have like 5:30 AM that's left as a possible slot and he said, I'll take it. So the next morning he began a journey of meeting with this personal trainer five days a week at 5:30 in the morning. And I fast forward the story over several months. He began to just transform his life physically and as a result, many other things began to be transformed for him personally. He ended up losing 96 of the 100 pounds. His trainers said I think you're, based on body mass, I think this is your equivalent of a hundred pounds. And he had galvanized this energy in the organization and his department and everywhere, because his transformation was so visible, he was in a senior leadership role.
And so he became a role model for others and gave them permission to go out for a walk at lunch or to work out, even if it meant they didn't get there until 8:30 in the morning versus being in their seats at eight, even though that company official hours were 8:30 but in some organizations, it's important to be there and to be seen even earlier. So he gave them permission to go workout and take care of themselves just by his own actions. And then he just talks about many other things that happened for him, including being able to run the race with his wife that he had dreamed about. And to this day he heads up as a chairman for one of the local race organizations because it's near and dear to his heart. So, you know, on so many levels, this exercise for him created the initial spark and inspiration. And so we know it's powerful as it was for Bob.
I love that story. So that's a real simple thing while, just because it sounds, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy to implement, but something that anyone listening right now could really take the time, draw those circles, mind, body, spirit and heart, and really do the work of thinking about where they are today and where they really want and need to be, and then take action for that towards that. I love it. Yeah.
And then bringing it back to one of our topics, if you're able to do that with a coach, whether that's somebody you're working with through a workshop, professional coach, or a leadership coach, that's even better because again, somebody else will be there as a partner to help you think things through maybe a little more deeply or maybe a little more differently. But for those of us who maybe don't have a coach or aren't working with one currently, seeking a peer coach is equally as helpful and important. So maybe that's there's somebody who you share a desire to be more effective or to develop your capabilities at work. And so maybe it's something you do together and you could help one another in that way. Or maybe you do this with somebody in your family, maybe it's a spouse or significant other, or maybe even it's a child or maybe it's somebody in your extended family.
So that's how we can adopt coaching and use coaching relationships and to be coaches for others outside of even just formal executive coaching roles. So I think the opportunities are endless and this is just one way that we can help each other be even more centered. And, and I'd like to think of it as even kind of returning us to ourselves a bit so that we can be grounded and authentic and be able to be the best version of ourselves. So part of the gift in coaching is whether we're peer coaches or we're working with executive coaches, or we are coaches ourselves in a professional sense, is that we have the opportunity through the conversations that we hold in the experiences we have together to help one another return to the best of who we are. And from that place is where we can lead authentically. We can be in relationships that are meaningful and where compassion for one another becomes what really holds us together.
I love it. Well thank you so much and I can't wait to read the book, Helping People Change, Coaching with Compassion for Lifelong Learning and Growth, and I look forward to having you back as well to share a little bit more of some of the details and your experiences as you build your coaching lab and continue to work with executives and focusing on improving performance and engagement. Is there else you'd like to close with today?
Well at first I want to, thank you so much Jill for the honor of being invited to be on your podcast series, so I've thoroughly enjoyed it, but also just really fun since I've known you for so many years in some of our previous roles. So I just am inspired by you and what you're doing here today. So thank you so much. Yes, I I'd like to close with something that for me, I tried to keep front and center as a coach, but also just as I walked through my day interacting with a lot of different people, and it's something that I learned from a short article that was in the Houston Business Journal years ago. It was back in 2007 and the reporter had shared a story. It was written about Andrew Carnegie, although some people mention it, it's about perhaps another Carnegie, but the essence of the story is that he was interviewed because he had 43 millionaires working for him at the time, and he was asked how is it that the people that worked for him were paid so much money?
And he said, the way that people are developed is the same way that gold is mined. You go into the mine looking for gold. You don't go into the mine looking for dirt yet you need to move a lot of dirt to find the gold. And the takeaway from me is that there's gold in every single one of us. So there's gold in our kids. There's gold in our direct reports. There's gold in our managers. There's gold in our coaches, and our role is really to help one another, discover the gold and discover the gifts within, and to kind of polish them up for the world to see. So that's something that I'll like to just close with something that I just, like I said, I tried to remember on a daily basis, but it's inspiring for me. I've got a ways to go to be able to put it into effect. But yeah, it centers me anyway.
I love that. I love that story. We have to go through a lot of dirt to get to that gold. Just remind yourselves of that. Yes. The journey will be worth it. Yes, no doubt. That's right. There's riches at the end, right? Yes, there is. There is. Do the work. Do the work. All right. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and look forward to having you back. I'd love that. Thanks so much, Jill, all the best. Thank you.
Well, thank you everyone for listening into today's podcast, brain hacks for leadership and I hope that you were able to take a few nuggets away, some things that you can put in place right away. I love the exercise that Ellen shared with us. So there's a very simple thing that you could put in place right away. Draw your four circles. In those four circles, you write the words, Mind, Body, Spirit, and Heart. And in each one of those circles, ask yourself, what are you doing currently that supports the health of your mind, your body, your spirit, and your heart? Then take those four circles, draw them again, and ask yourself, what would you really like to be doing that would support your renewal in each of those areas? Examine where the gap is and start putting an action in place that's going to make a difference for you.
And most importantly, everyone around you. And she also talked about the importance of coaching as part of a leadership development strategy. It magnifies the impact on overall performance and engagement inside an organization. So if you're looking at getting started with improving your leadership or the leadership of your team or your organization, feel free to reach out to me@ [email protected]. I love coaching executives and leaders at all levels inside the organization. And I know as Ellen said, that everyone has gold inside. Sometimes we have to dig through that dirt to get to the gold, but everyone has value. Everyone has potential, and a coach can exponentially help you reach your potential. Thank you. And I hope you have a wonderful day. -
Do you feel overwhelmed and think that if there were just more hours in the day you could get it all done? Instead of managing your calendar, manage your energy.
Learn how one minute can save hours with my guest Josh Davis, PhD and author of the international best-seller, Two Awesome Hours.
He is Sr. Director of Research and Faculty at the Institute for Personal Leadership. He is a trainer at the NLP Center of NY, and teaches The Art of Public Speaking. He received his doctorate from Columbia University, then joined the psychology department at Barnard College of Columbia University, prior to working in leadership development. His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, Fast Company, Huffington Post, strategy+business, Training + Development, People & Strategy, Psychology Today, and others. He or his work has been mentioned in the Times of London, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other major media sources.
Well. Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. I really look forward to what you're going to be sharing with us on the podcast.
My pleasure. It's really nice to be back with you.
Well, Josh, why don't you tell us - what is the science that you're going to share with us today? I'm looking forward to sharing something about how the brain works that we can leverage in order to get ourselves out of that state of overwhelm when we're stuck at it being like, oh my God, it's just so much to do, right? That kind of a state and instead be able to get us to a place where we're putting our efforts into the things that really matter.
I love it. That's something I hear all the time with the executives I work with. They're overwhelmed. There's not enough time in the day and this is definitely something that is going to resonate with a lot of people.
Excellent. It just seems to be getting worse. Actually. There's more and more on everybody's plate is no longer a nice to have and I think it's becoming clear to many people that it's not going to be possible to solve this problem by trying to cram everything into the calendar. I don't know. Some of your listeners may have already come to that conclusion, but if they haven't, that's also something that I'm going to suggest.
That's great. Why don't you share some of the hacks that you have around how we can become less overwhelmed and really be more effective with our time?
Okay, so first of all, I think it's helpful to draw a contrast between what many of us do and you don't have to admit publicly that you do this, so you may recognize this behavior in yourself from time to time that you know when we get overwhelmed, what we tend to do is to just think like, well look, there's so much work to do. I just have to keep myself working constantly. I've got to work every minute. I've got to work more hours. How else am I going to do it? And logically, it makes a lot of sense. It's simple math, right? Do you have a team? You get them to do more work as well and have no downtime as much as you can. That would be a fantastic solution if what you were talking about a factory where you get the exact same output every time you run the machines and then you should just keep that thing running.
But human beings are not anything like a factory. Yeah. When it comes to this, we are different in a really important way, which is that we can be phenomenally creative, productive. We can make clearheaded decisions, we can map out plans, we can think about how to influence others, all of the things that are so key to knowledge work. We can do these things just exceptionally well at times and very quickly. You could have a morning where you're just hitting it out of the park. You're taking care of everything that was on your list, and then at other times, if you're anything like me, you can spend three days where you're, you're practically worthless. So the solution is not going to be that what would seem obvious if we were thinking about something where you get the same output every time you run it. Instead, what we need to do is to work with the way that human brains and bodies work now because we can be so quiet, impressively productive and creative at certain times and not at others.
It means there are certain conditions that helped to set that up and when you turn to the research you can learn what some of those conditions are. Some of them have to do with things like rather than trying to manage your calendar, you can be trying to manage your mental energy. You can be trying to manage your attention. There are times in the day where if you've just been through a really tough meeting, you might be highly emotional. It's actually harder to think clearly in those contexts that in those moments you actually are not as capable and you may not realize it of making good clear decisions or making them as quickly or even taking into account the same information you would under different circumstances. If it's later in the day and you've been making a lot of decisions, it has been shown with judges, for example, that they tend to make worse decisions as the day goes on and now these are decisions that have major implications for people.
Parole decisions for example, that are made later on in the Judge's day, or this side or that side of lunch, they tend to be either better or worse for the people seeking parole - that what happens is when the judges are more fresh, they are capable of and motivated to take into account more information. Now the judges are not aware of doing it differently. They still think they're doing the best they can and being very fair. Right, right. This is all happening often outside of their awareness, the brain is simply operating differently. Once you have accumulated a certain amount of mental fatigue, it is just simply harder to make those kinds of decisions. The thing is, we can take this stuff into account. Now, you can take it into account when you're about to start an important task. You could take it into account when you're planning ahead, you can say, look, this is going to come late in the day.
Then the really important negotiation, I'm going to create a space for myself to be able to refresh before that. Get a little exercise, take a nap, something like that. But Carl Icahn, famous billionaire, he is said to have scheduled frequently his really challenging negotiations in the afternoon because he knew that the other lawyer he'd be interacting with would be fatigued and then he would schedule a nap beforehand. I mean, the thing is, it's evidence. So simple. You might say, well yeah, of course I'm fresher. Of course I'm better, but yet you know what the science says you are so much fresher than you realize, the difference is extraordinary in terms of making that an incredibly productive and effective time period or not. Now you can also in the moment, when you're about to sit down to do something, say, is this the right time for it? And now you might say, well look, I'm tired all the time.
As time goes on. If you're focused on setting up these periods of time when you can be at your best and the most important work, you will find that you started doing things that enable you to not just be tired all the time, that it actually starts to lead to greater work life balance and what happens is not that you're doing everything on your list, but you're getting to that elusive goal of saying no to the things that are not as important because you're able to think more clearly about it. So I'll pause here for a moment. I've been weaving together a few different pieces.
Yeah, I really liked the fact that you talked about not managing your calendar but managing your attention and managing that calendar is something that I struggle with and other leaders struggle with. What are the things from a leadership perspective that you would recommend be on the calendar earlier in the day when you're fresher to really be more effective leading yourself and leading others?
Yes, I do have an answer for that. That I think is really an essential piece. We have to step back for a moment and think about what's really important to do day-to-day. And if you're a successful person, you could probably, you know, if we're having a conversation over beers and we were just on the weekend, at some point you could tell me, well look, these are the things that are important for me to do. You know, there's certain relationships I want to build. There's this new marketing platform I want to invest in. These articles I want to write, whatever it is, the important stuff. You could tell me that and then I could ask, how do you spend your time? How long have you been saying to yourself - that's the important stuff, right? So you know what the important stuff is usually from time to time, sure it may not be clear, but you know what the important stuff is usually.
And then we find ourselves saying, how did I just spend three hours on that, on these forms or these things that I should have outsourced that to somebody else? Or you know what? I didn't even need to do some of those , to respond to some of those emails. What, you know, what's wrong with me? Right? Right. And so we, we look at it and say like, my calendar is so packed but back to back. Right? And you know, these kinds of ways of talking to ourselves and yet at the same time we can have these experiences of wasting time feeling like we actually wasted the afternoon. We didn't get to the important stuff.
So what I'm going to suggest is that the issue is not a calendar issue. The issue is that we're not finding a way to connect with what's important. Now it's not that you don't know what's important and it's, and you've probably have read Covey and you know that you should be putting x percentage of your time into the stuff that's important and not urgent, right? You know those things. But for some reason you're not doing it well. Here is what's going on. Once you get started on a task, you get into this reactive mode. You're kind of on autopilot. You're leveraging parts of the brain that are relatively less conscious, where you're going to be relying on parts of the brain that has to do with habits, behavioral habits, habits of thought. And the thing is as we go through life, we accumulate more and more habits. And the whole point of that is that we don't have to expend as much mental energy conscious. Deliberate focus is very energy intensive and so we avoid it whenever we can. So whenever there's some kind of way of being on autopilot, we do it well. What happens is that let's say you flip open your email and you started checking it, you get on autopilot, right?
That takes over and you become reactive. As soon as, that is another way of talking about it, this reactive mode, as soon as you, you're in that reactive place, all of a sudden it's just much harder to be in touch with what's important. It's that it's hard to even recognize that you need to take a moment and step back and think about what's important and whatever you're doing in the moment. Yeah, there's some importance to it. So it's going to feel important in that moment. And so this is why we have to create opportunities and we have to start practicing doing this. To make it a habit, you have to create opportunities to break out of autopilot, to step out of that reactive mode, bring back online this conscious, deliberate attention and focus that attention on the question - "What's really important today?" You know, by the end of the day, which thing am I going to be happy that I spent some time on at the end of the week, by the end of the month, even by the end of my life, which are those things and leverage that conscious, deliberate focus that we can have when we break out of autopilot.
The thing is to break out of autopilot, you can't just willfully do it in the moment. It's so strong, it's very hard to willfully break out of it. So you've got to plan ahead. And one of the things you started out by asking me "What can you do first thing in the morning?". First thing in the morning, and I would actually recommend doing this a couple of different points in the day, like first thing in the morning and then right before you actually started your first task in case things have shifted or just to help you refocus is to how, it can even just be one minute. It could be 10 minutes, but it could even just be one minute where you have freed yourself out from being reactive. The computer is not open so you couldn't be responding. Your phone is not in your hand, so you can't be responding to it.
When there are not other people in front of you, so you can't just be reacting to them, but you create a space where you can actually step back, often physically, I encourage you to physically step back from the desk if you can and just pause until you can connect with and remember, okay, what is that important stuff? Once you have that in mind, then if you're a competent person, you're going to be able to find ways to think about - okay, you know, what? Could I afford to spend some time on that right now? If not, when can I do that today and how can I make it so that I'm going to be mentally fresh when I get to that point? Does it mean that I want to do it after lunch, before lunch? Create a little bit of a break, do some exercise right before to reset. That, if that's the important stuff, then it's the important stuff. And what happened is that it also becomes much easier to say, look, here are some of the things that I'm, I'm going to save for when I'm fatigued or I'm just not going to get to, right? Because it's not the important stuff. But the thing is you've got to leverage those moments that you build into the day to do that because you're not going to be able to catch yourself and think about it as you're going through the day. Once you are in reactive mode, you're in reactive mode. So that's something that I think is absolutely critical to do at the beginning of the day. And of course you can do it multiple times a day and should, you know, put it on your calendar or the beginning of any new task or the end of the meeting. Have one of those moments where you step back and you'd do that. I call them decision points. So I think that's perhaps the most important thing that I can offer actually in terms of reclaiming your day and doing the stuff that matters and doing it well.
Yeah, I love that. I got that from your recent book, Two Awesome Hours, where it talks about those key decision points and knowing when you have to make those decisions on either, like you said, going forward with the work you're doing or stopping and saying, is this really where I need to spend my time? That's really powerful.
In those decision points you can also, after you've connected with what's really important, you can also just quickly check in and think about how, how mentally energize or fatigued to am I right now? Because I don't know about you, but I can sometimes, if I'm sitting at the computer and I am in reactive mode and I'm doing stuff, I can think like, you know what, I feel fine. I could keep going for another couple of hours, but once I step away and I go get that coffee or something and I'm standing there, I realized how clouded my thinking is. Yeah. And I realized this is not the time to tackle those challenging issues that I'm going to do it in half the time if I wait till the morning, you know, or if I wait till a little bit later and I'm going to do it better and this is the time for me to do something else. So, so you can also check in on your mental energy in those moments you can make a big difference.
Yeah, I think that's a great point. Especially the standing up, moving around, catching yourself, even if you took a minute, right, you said, this isn't a, you're not talking 15 to 20 minutes meditation, you're talking one minute, get up and really move yourself away and, and check with what's going on. I think that's a really powerful tip and something that I know I need to do more myself and I know it makes a big difference when I get up and walk around throughout the day, keeping me fresh.
One minute to save hours.
Right. Especially if you got in that rut, that rut of maybe checking email or focusing on something that's more of a tactical task in the morning. So Josh, how have you applied this to yourself?
Oh, you know, that was one of the wonderful things about writing this book. You know, I already had some ideas. There were some things I had experimented with, but when I did the research, I started to, you know what? I started to believe it a lot more to be honest. Yeah. And so I would actually go and experiment. I mean, I was like, oh wow. You know, these things do make a difference. So, for example, , and this was something that you shared this with me earlier, that you went ahead and and redesigned your office. Right? That's so me. Even now that I know that essentially my attention systems are designed to pick up on things that are sitting around precisely, you know, that's what it is for. My attention systems are not designed to stay focused, they are designed to pick up on whats changing, what needs attention, what is threatening, things like that and all the things that are sitting on my desk are things that I owe to somebody or I forgot to do, or it was important or it seemed hard.
They're exactly the things that are going to take my attention. It is simply not fair to myself to sit down at a desk littered with these things. It's so much extra mental work. I'm fatiguing myself unnecessarily. Every time I get distracted, my mind's gonna wander to one of those things instead of wander to creative solutions on whatever I'm doing, right? And so I've just gone ahead, you know, I was not somebody who cleaned up my desk and cleared things away all the time. And now you walk into my office and there's nothing on the desk. You know, even like people see it and they sort of, they comment on it. They're like, oh wow. You know, and, and whenever there is a shared space that I'm using, you know, people come in, they always want to sit down on my desk because it's the cleanest one, because they're drawn to that too.
They know it's going to be easier for them, right? And it's easier physically to sit down, but also mentally it's easier. So I mean those are some of the things. And there's another one was like learning about how exercise, you know, we think of exercise as this thing that it's like, well if I exercise I'll probably be healthier long term. And of course that'll help my work. Cause if I'm healthier I won't miss work and blah, blah, blah, Right? That's motivating to some degree. You know, it's like I don't want to die young. Yeah. Right. There is some motivation. But what that motivates me to do is a few times a week go and try to work out for an hour, an hour and a half, really hard, right? And it could happen anytime. I could do it right before going to sleep, but now I've seen that exercise is one of the most reliable ways to reduce anxiety in the short term. Meaning like in the next few hours. So if I want to reduce my anxiety and have an easy time paying attention, easy time staying present, essentially letting go of the things that don't matter, exercise is a virtual guarantee, and it doesn't have to be for an hour or two hours. Moderate exercise, 20 minutes on the treadmill, working up a little bit of a sweat breathing heavily, that's going to give me those psychological benefits actually better than if I'm really pushing hard and then I don't want to waste those on sleeping. I mean, sure it will help me sleep. It's nice, not a waste. These are the things I want to strategically use for the immediate benefit. All of a sudden I can just switch into a state where I'm less anxious and more present and have an easier time focusing. Anytime I'm doing important work, that's where I want to be.
So now all of a sudden exercise become something that I'm using strategically. I was able to exercise every day. You know, I really, I exercise every day, sometimes a couple of times a day, just briefly if it's going to be key for work, I use it as a strategic tool. So actually thinking of exercise as this strategic work tool has gotten me to exercise more regularly then when I was exercising for its own sake. So as a result of having the health benefits too. That was a big shift for me, was that exercise is a strategic tool to be used for that day or your work capability that day and it's a reset button. You can do it anytime if you need to reset, there's an important thing later in the day, you're having a tough morning, you can build it in. Those were a couple things I think were really unexpected that were kind of real pleasures of doing this research. Changed how I function.
That's great. What's the exercise? Can it be 10 minutes walking? Maybe brisk walk outside if you don't have a treadmill or something available for you throughout the day?
So there's a slightly more nuanced answer to that. Short answer is yes, but the longer answer is that some of the psychological benefits will occur from something like just 10 minutes of something that you do have to get your heart rate up. You do have to, you know, you want to be breathing heavily. Maybe getting to the point of almost breaking a sweat, but it should not be more than moderate. So if you want all of the benefits then moderate exercise is key. If it's a brisk walk, often it doesn't need to be longer. Like if it's a brisk walk and you're not actually breaking a sweat, then what would get to that level of moderate exercise from, in terms of the physiological factors that are changing, it would probably be more like a 40 minute walk. You know, like going for a brisk walk at lunch kind of thing or a brisk walk while you're having a meeting or something like that. You know, a walk and talk kind of thing could be done if you've got somebody else's really on onboard with that. Something really brief. 10 minutes, you know, going up and down the stairs, doing a few jumping jacks, that kind of thing. But you know this also depends on the person, what's going to count as something that requires exertion.
Great point to mention how in shape you are, how far you can walk in and what it will take to do that. I know people who might be in less good shape might have an advantage here because there's a little bit less time they could put it into it and still get some of that. I haven't experimented with that. I just had that thought in the moment.
One of my favorite executives that I worked for, every morning he made sure that there were not meeting scheduled before eight o'clock. It was a rare exception because it was so important for him to make sure that he did get exercise and work out that morning because it just made a difference in his day.
Yeah. That's great that you have that have that reference experience. Nelson Mandela made it a part of his daily routine in jail. He would actually run in place for 45 minutes cause he knew that it made him so much mentally sharper, is how he described it.
Yeah. Well Josh, have you worked with any other leaders or organizations to implement some of these techniques to help them with overwhelm or just be more effective?
So I have had a number of opportunities to go in to companies, share these ideas and the different ways that people apply it are just to me, kind of extraordinary. Ways that I wouldn't have expected, you know? So you've got some people, let's say salesforce, that might be in cars all the time, right? And so you think like, oh, well how are they going to apply some of these things, right? They have these very restricted physical locations. And here I've got people talking about how they're able to take exceptional advantage of the idea of these decision points because they have this forced time when they can't be writing, they can't be staring at something else. And so rather than just putting on something to listen to, they're deliberately taking some elements of that time to do some of these decision points and as well as some elements of the time to do something else I talk about in the book, which is really great for fostering creativity and then ending up working less. And I have had, now this will sound like bragging a little bit. I've had people come back to me and say, I have a new problem. Some of my colleagues are getting frustrated with me because they feel like I'm not essentially overworking myself. I'm not, you know, it used to be a badge of honor for everyone to talk about how hard they're working, how many hours they're putting in, how exhausted they are. And to be honest, I'm getting what I need to get done. In fact, I'm getting more of it done and I'm not as exhausted and I'm not staying late all the time. And I've had a couple of people who were sort of frustrated with that, what do I do about that? And I, you know, so there's a famous psychotherapist who once said "progress is moving from the same damn thing over and over again to one damn thing after another." So that's where we want to get. It's like, let's get to that point, let's change that culture.
Let's start deciding, well what is it for me, that counts as success and look, some people have been very clever, right? You know, there are some situations, and I've been in these from time to time who I've learned to not let people see that I have work life balance because I know they're not ready for it. So, I don't know if that's where you're going with the question, but those are some of the things that I have heard and worked with people in financial institutions and the big names places and then worked with people in pharmaceutical companies and various different types of industries and different types of levels as well. There's one group that made it a big part of their onboarding program based on this book. You know, there's been different ways that people have implemented this, but those are some of the kinds of things that I'm, I'm very happy to say do really seem to make a big difference. And I also kind of want to let people know it is possible.
That's a great problem to have that you know, people look at you and you are so put together, you know, don't seem to be stressing as much as they are. But tell me a little bit more about some examples of decision points that they were making - the salesforce.
So I did not in this specific example I was offering, I didn't actually probe and get a whole list of the specific decisions. There's a couple of things that I did get that I can share it so I don't have a whole lot of examples in this case. But one example would be there are certain key accounts and look, everybody knows they need to be putting in, every salesperson knows they need to be putting in more into their key accounts, right? Because these are going to have an outsized impact, right? And therefore need outsized attention and yet it doesn't always work out that way because of the amount of time, the amount of effort that can just go into these other leads. And I'm like you don't know exactly where they're going, right? It can draw your attention and can really like, you don't want to leave any stone unturned. And so it's actually a very disciplined, conscious decision to actually come back and be able to say, "All right, let me step back and look at the big picture here and be very strategic about where my attention is going and about which relationships I want to nurture so that these key accounts, they are getting the love from me that they need on a regular basis." So some days where it could have been days that would go by without them getting the attention because you're attending to these other things, but ultimately you actually don't think need as much attention - its that kind of a shift.
Actually intentionally looking and saying, where am I spending my time? And there's a lot of mental offered on client that's not as high a return as others. And it's about being intentional. And the thing is, nothing I'm going to say here, is going to be rocket science, you know? And that's, but that's the point, these are things that we can know ...we're just not doing them. So what I want to suggest is that if we want to learn to do them, we can take advantage of understanding how the brain works and how, where we get into these pitfalls, how we get stuck and when we have the opportunities to think differently, what we would have to do to be, to step back and connect to what matters.
That's great. I love that. So as leaders listening to this podcast and thinking about, Gosh, I am at the overwhelmed stage, or I'd love to have that work life balance problem where it, you know, I've got it pretty much under control. What's one thing that they could do right away after listening to this? One small thing that could make a big difference?
So there's also a phrase from psychotherapy that "You're looking for the difference that makes the difference". So I will suggest that the thing that makes the difference may be different for different people. But if this is something you're not already doing, then I would say see what happens this week. If you give yourself one minute when you get to your office, when you sit down, before you look at any media, before you look at email, before you open your computer, where you pause and you think about "what's the really important stuff that matters to me today and when during the day am I going to do that?" If you just give yourself that one minute, once a day, each day this week, just try it and notice what happens. Now if that is something that you're already doing, then what I would invite you to do is to go to the next step and during that one minute to ask yourself, "what's my mental energy like right now and as a result, do I want to reorder how I'm doing things?"
If there is a really important presentation coming up in an hour and I don't want to be fatigued for it, maybe now is not the time for me to go and make a whole lot of meaningless decisions about emails that are just going to get me kind of frustrated. Maybe now is the time for me to go and do something creative. That's going to get me energized for this and you might end up coming to a different decision if you're thinking about what's the mental energy I want to show up to that meeting for. So that's the second thing you might do during that minute.
I love that. Yeah, just that short reflection time, if they're not doing, can make a big difference. And sometimes it's right after you wake up because that's when people check their media.
Yes, yes. Most of us have our phones as our clock right by the bedside and pull it up and you know, you're curious and sometimes it's exciting, sometimes even want to see what there is. And regardless if you pull that up, just realize you'd get into reactive mode and look, you can recover from that, but you'll need to have some planned time to step back. But at some point that morning before you really get into things, I recommend if you're open to it, to experiment with not even looking at it until some specified time of the day, like 10:00 AM or even later, you know, just to discover what happens for one week. Just discover, do I actually survive the week? Am I still alive at the end? Do I still have a job, right? Did I end up making different decisions as a result of giving myself that mental freedom in the morning? Yeah. So if you're willing to try that, I encourage you.
That's great. I think that's a great tip to start and you have so many great tips in here too in your book Two Awesome Hours. Like I told you, I did read it and I have been applying it and I like that you've got tips in here, not just for yourself but from almost an organization perspective and environment and a space perspective. So I'd really recommend everyone get a copy of Two Awesome Hours and read that. Its a really easy read as well and it's very practical and it's not sciencey. So you did a great job with that too.
Thank you. Thank you. I, you know, I worked hard on all of those things. I'm glad to know that you had that reaction. And you know, you remind me of one thing also is that when everybody else in your environment knows the same thing, you can support one another in it. Right? You know, you can know, you can leave one another alone when you're thinking, for example.
From a culture perspective, what you uncovered I think has a lot of implications that leaders and HR leaders too can really be thinking about, to set the right environment for their teams. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today and I just wanted to check in with you and say, was there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything you've, maybe you're working on next?
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes, for those people who do find public speaking to be a challenge, I'll just put this out there as a teaser that, it is possible to actually learn to not just get through it, but to enjoy it. And so if you're curious about that, then you know, look me up on Linkedin and you'll see the next time I'm offering the course. I've been teaching it for many years and it's a very different approach to public speaking. It's about how to learn how to enjoy it. And it is also science based, research based, drawing on tools from the behavioral sciences and psychotherapy as well. Oh, that's excellent. And so they should just look up Josh Davis on Linkedin. Josh Davis, Phd, there's a ton of Josh Davis's, everybody had the same idea to name their kids that at the same time, but, but Josh Davis Phd will take you there and that way you'll see the next time I'm doing it, I do them in LA and sometimes in New York. Great, and I'll put your information on the transcripts as well.
Well Josh, I really appreciate you spending time with us. I look forward to having you back to share more of your work. Maybe your next book. I'm sure you're working on your next book at this point, right? Yeah, just beginning it. Oh, okay. Yeah, just beginning the process right now, so yes, I would love to come back. All right, well thank you and I hope you have a great day. All right, thanks. Take care.
So to recap, to get ourselves out of that state of overwhelm when we're stuck thinking we have so much to do, we can utilize decision points to get us to a place where we're putting our efforts into things that really matter. The issue is not a calendar issue. The issue is that we're not finding a way to connect with what's important. Avoid getting into that reactive mode or autopilot. Create decision points and put them on your calendar because you're not going to be able to catch yourself and think about it as you're going through the day without being intentional. You have too many habits that you've built.
Josh also reminded us of the psychological benefits of exercise, even 30 to 40 minutes of moderate exercise to keep your mind fresh.
Here's one thing to try over the next week. Give yourself one minute when you get to your office, when you sit down, before you look at any media, look at any email and before you open your computer. Pause and think about what's the really important stuff that matters to me today and when during the day am I going to do that? If you just gave yourself that one minute once a day, each day this week, just try it and notice what happens.
As Josh shared one minute to save hours, I really recommend reading his book Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done, it has some great tips in there. I hope that this was helpful to you and I would love to hear how you're implementing these tips yourself. I use these myself and share them with the leaders that I coach.
Want to know more about what Josh is doing - www.twoawesomehours.com is the place to go. Linkedin is also a way to connect with Josh.
If you're interested in coaching or leadership development for yourself or your organization, please reach out to me directly by email at [email protected]
Have an amazing day.
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Worklife balance is a fallacy, you can’t always balance but you CAN learn to become more RESILIENT. Becoming more resilient will help you Respond versus React, lead in the right way and build better relationships at work and at home.
My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Savitski, Chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Cleveland Clinic Akron General and the Medical Director of the PATH Center, a Forensic Nursing Program providing care for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.
Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for being with us today on the podcast. Tell us what topic you're going to share with us and the science behind it?
All right, so I'm going to be talking about resiliency and why being a resilient person is so important, not only in our day to day lives, but also as a leader. It's important and how we approach things. But you know, talking a little bit about resiliency.
So what is the science behind resiliency?
Thinking back within the past one or two decades, you know, the concept of work life balance really was being highlighted by major organizations. How could organizations help individuals find this work life balance and how can individuals find this balance to make themselves not only more productive at work, but also happier at home and through those decades? I think what most people found was worklife balance really is a fallacy that you anyways, yeah, you can't balance.
You can't have a life where both of those things are completely in sync. There's always something that is the priority or taking up most of our time or our attention at any given time, and that it really is important to give that topic, give that individual, give that situation the attention that it needs for us to deal with it. I found that the concept of resiliency really started to come to the forefront.
Now the reality is when you look at psychiatry and psychology, literature and science, they've been talking about resiliency for decades. This is not new by any stretch of the imagination, but as it relates to leadership and specifically what I do in medicine as it relates to the practice of medicine, resiliency is essential. Of course we know that being resilient is the ability to adapt to changes or adapt to adversity and being able to have those skills that show resiliency really help us to better manage the things in our lives that are challenges or adversity or just those issues that are developing that work life balance or inequity by being resilient and having a resilient characteristic is enabling us to do that in a more productive and satisfying manner.
Yeah, definitely. Worklife balance, adversity, challenges, opportunities are all over in the workplace today. I work with a lot of executives who really struggle with this for either themselves or their teams. Why is it so important that we are resilient? What will happen if leaders and teams don't focus on resiliency?
So we know that people who are resilient tend to be more productive in a positive way. Their outcomes tend to be better. Their ability to manage and lead teams tends to be more effective, especially because you know as you're leading teams there's always going to be challenges. Whether that, you know, issues within the team, external forces that are affecting the team or affecting the project and the more productively you're able to manage those changes and adversities, the better off the output of the team is going to be. So we know just from a productivity standpoint that people who are resilient are more productive and are better leaders of teams.
We also know that even from a physical standpoint, individuals who are more resilient tend to have less chronic illnesses. They tend to manage their stress and emotional status in a much more productive manner, and so that does not adversely affect their relationships. We know that people who are under chronic stress and don't deal with that stress well, that that leads to a whole host of medical conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, other chronic illnesses. And some people also feel that that leads to things like cancers. My specialty is OBGYN. We know that chronic stress also increases the risk of preterm labor and preterm delivery, and so by being more resilient, you're actually dealing with those stressors in a more productive manner, and that actually not only gives you better outcomes, but it also physically is better for you as well.
Yeah, I think that's a really important concept that it's not just harmony at work, it's not making people happier. This is your life. This is health that is for you and your team. Right?
Right. Absolutely. I don't want to say that stress isn't a good thing and we know that stress is really important and stress actually does help us to be productive. I am a procrastinator. I will totally admit that, but I love deadlines because I know as I get closer to the deadline, that stress really motivates me to become more productive, but there comes a point in all of our lives where that stress, you kind of go over that hump of stress and now it starts to become detrimental to your productivity and detrimental to your health. And what resiliency does is it really helps you to manage that stress in a way that is productive so that you're not under that constant and unrelenting stress. You're able to find mechanisms or tools that you can use to control that stress and to face that stress, which really is exhibiting those resilient behaviors.
Right. What are the tips that you have around becoming more resilient at work?
Yes, so I think that resiliency can really be, you know, this definitely is an oversimplification, but I think for those very high yield tips that I can give you, probably the most important thing is to consider your reaction versus your response. So we know that our reactions to whatever the situation, a person, you know, a stressor, whatever it is, our reactions are based on several things. They're based on a defense mechanism. You know, that concept of fight or flight, something happens to us and we have a knee-jerk reaction because we go into survival mode. We also know that our reactions are based on our past experiences. That theory of what happened yesterday or happened the day before or the month before might happen again in a certain situation. Certainly in our relationships with people. If we have someone who always is a complainer and they always are a downer then our reaction to them is going to be based on that experience.
To be Resilient rather than to React is to Respond.
So we have an opportunity to respond to situations rather than just letting our gut instincts or our emotions taking control. The key aspects of responding is taking in the situations, taking in all of the information and the data and making a conscious choice and intentional choice of how we're going to behave based on the stimulus or the situation. There's some concepts of what we call behavioral awareness. So we're very much aware of how we're responding to the situation, we are aware of how our response is going to impact that situation and impact the people involved in that situation. And a lot of times our choice to respond really is based on our principles or our values. And I think in the workplace it should be based on what is the mission, what is the vision, what is the goal of the project, the organization, whatever it is.
So its that concept of making an intentional response, which really is tied into the theory of emotional resilience. Along with that, really developing that sense that the only thing that we can control is ourselves. We can only control our behaviors. We can only control our responses. We cannot control what other people or other situations are doing to us or are happening around us. And that concept of emotional resilience is really tied into understanding that the control that we have is really over ourselves. And how we choose to act or how we choose to respond really is going to have a big impact on the outcome of the situation.
So what is a way that leaders can learn how to respond versus react there? What have you applied personally as a leader to get better at responding versus reacting? Because reacting is, it's so easy, right? Yeah. So you have a stressful job.
Yes, there's kind of one quote that I absolutely love and I don't even know who it's attributed to. Basically it's that "logic is easier said than done", right? It's so logical that we should respond rather than react. But really emotions are easier done than said, right? It's just so much easier to react with our emotions.
So I think the first, it has to start with our physical states. And I think that a lot of us ignore our physical state. We go through our day to day activities, just kind of doing. And it's really our emotions that cause us to react. So I think that the first thing that leaders should do when they're faced with a situation, you know, it could be very complex or very simple, is to consider your physical state. And what I mean by that is like really like all those things, you know, if you do yoga or if you try to do meditation or relaxation, it's those types of things.
So I tell people, you know, first and foremost, soften your face. As soon as somebody hits you with that news or that situation, immediately soften your face. Pay attention to what your facial muscles are doing and just try to relax them. Try to relax your neck, try to relax your shoulder. And then my personal favorite is relax your tongue. I find myself, the more stressed I am, the harder I'm pushing my tongue against either my teeth or the roof of my mouth. And it's amazing that one little thing. If I can, you know, I can feel myself getting stressed out and then I just relax my face. I relax my tongue and it's amazing what a difference it makes for my entire body. And not only that, but the person who's presenting this situation to you or the stimulus to you, they see your response and they can see you relaxing.
And that really does tend to bring the whole situation down a little bit. So considering your physical state, soften your face, relax your tongue and drop your shoulders and take a deep breath. We know that when we're faced with a stressful situation, chemicals in our bodies called catecholamines start to increase and it increases our heart rate. It increases our blood pressure. It's getting us ready for that fight or flight. If we take a very deep breath, it actually stimulates what's called the parasympathetic nervous system and that causes our heart rate to decrease it causes our blood pressure to decrease, so it really starts to bring our body down into a more grounded and stable date of mind so that we can really take in all of the information and then respond appropriately. So I think just taking 10 15 seconds to really just relax your physical state as you're taking in this information is really going to put you in a better place to deal with what you're being faced with.
The second thing is something called self-regulation and there are so many different self-regulation hacks that are out there. You could just Google it and find a bunch of different ones. One that I really like, especially if I'm looking at emails or I'm working on a project and I'm not necessarily around anybody. I'll use this one which really engages our peripheral vision. This technique is used a lot in psychotherapy and counseling, especially for individuals who have post-traumatic stress disorder. Because for those individuals, they experience a trigger that all of a sudden floods these catecholamines. It reminds them of this terribly traumatic experience and they have a difficult time then functioning after that. So this technique, what it does is again, it really engages the parasympathetic nervous system, helps to make the body in a calm and relaxed state, decreases that blood pressure, decreases the heart rate, and it really helps to clear the mind and enable you to then respond appropriately.
So essentially what happens is you sit somewhere comfortably or getting in tune with your physical state, relax your face, relax your shoulders or your neck, relax your tongue. And then what you do is you just pick a point in front of you that is stationary and you just really focus in on that point in front of you with your eyes. And then you start to pay attention to what's out in your peripheral vision. And sometimes I'll have people take their hands and put them up to their sides just so they can see their fingers wiggle or something just to really queue into that peripheral vision. And you really want to keep your focus straight ahead, but about what you're seeing, you know, focusing on the colors that you're seeing, the textures that you're seeing. And by really stimulating that peripheral vision, you know, really tuning into your parasympathetic nervous system and really helping your body to achieve that calm, that stable state that is then going to allow you to respond with more intention and less emotion and the less stress.
That's great. Is an exercise like this, like building a muscle? If you do practice doing this, is it something that's going to come a little bit easier when you're in the situation?
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Because initially we don't think about our peripheral vision at all. We know it's there, it helps us, it protects us in a lot of ways. But absolutely the more you're in tune with it, the easier it's going to be to engage that as time and time again. So absolutely. So how you use this. Personally, I deal with a lot of stress on many, many levels. So I'm the chair of the Department here and obstetrics and gynecology and so I affectionately call my office like the complaint office, right? If anybody has a complaint or an issue or problem, they basically come to me. And before really delving into these concepts and learning these tools, I used to want to fix everybody's problems.
They come to me, they're upset, they're wearing their emotions on their sleeves and I want to make sure that they see that I'm responding to them appropriately, if my emotions get heightened. But what I found was it was really very toxic for me. It was very toxic to feel like all I did was manage complaints. So what I started doing was really, again, watching my physical state and making sure that I was responding in a grounded and emotionally neutral position basically so that I was better able to absorb the information they were giving me and trying to figure out what do we need to do next. And it really just like you said, it was kind of like a muscle. Now when I'm faced with somebody who has, you know, they're a little bit emotionally charged, I find myself almost immediately digging deep into my physical state to try to really bring myself down and make sure I'm grounded.
And a lot of times what I'm seeing is that just by me doing that, I'm causing the person who's talking to me to decrease the speed of their speech, to decrease the tone of their voice and they're really coming down as well. And I can have a conversation with them that's not so emotionally charged. The other piece of it is being outcomes focused. That's huge in trying to build resiliency is focusing on outcomes. And so what I do now, when I have someone coming to me about a complaint, rather than me just trying to figure out how am I going to solve this, I engage that person to try to find out what is the outcome that they're trying to achieve and how can I help them to achieve that outcome rather than me trying to achieve the outcome for them.
And I think that that really is an important tool for me in developing my own resiliency - making sure that I'm outcomes focused rather than focus just on the problem.
I love that because I think leaders a lot of times try to solve the problem because oftentimes that's, that's why you're in the role you're at. You've got really solving problems and doing things well, but step back and make sure you're solving the right problem or checking in. I love that you talked about how it calms them down too. Yeah, definitely.
I think as a leader, I think I previously thought being a leader meant that I was solving the problems and I was maintaining the harmony and in doing all those things, but what I've found is not only to be a resilient leader, but also to be an effective leader - I have to coach my team. I think that probably more important than anything else is me being a coach as a leader, rather than taking all of their problems and solving them. Our team is so much more effective if I'm able to help them take care of the issues and achieve the outcomes that we need to achieve as a group rather than taking on that responsibility myself and I think that that's most definitely led to me being a much more resilient leader as well and modeling that behavior for my team members.
I couldn't agree more with that statement and coaching is definitely when leadership comes into play and so you not only improve your resiliency, but now you're growing and developing that team. Right?
Right. What is one thing that leaders could do or listening to this to say, all right, I understand I need to be resilient and work life balance. There's so much going on. What one small thing they could start putting in practice right away that you would recommend?
I really think it at least identifying, you know, when they're faced with a situation, identifying when they're reacting and when they're responding. Certainly learning to intentionally respond is something that's going to take practice, but I think at least acknowledging, wow, you know what? I'm really reacting to this rather than being very mindful of the situation. I think that that's probably a really good place to start and then really the next thing is just to consider your physical state as you're interfacing with people as you're interfacing with situations.
A lot of these things that we talked about, I use actually on my family as well. I have three teenage daughters and so I need a lot of resiliency when I'm communicating with them and I find especially the concept of being in tune with my physical state is very important with them because they certainly are very sensitive. I think just being aware of when am I reacting versus when I am responding and what are the things that I can do to get more of the response rather than the reaction. Yeah, that's great. Even if it's just taking the time. Maybe journaling daily and saying " was I reacting or responding today in this situation". This gets some awareness going. That's extremely powerful. Is there anything else that you think is important to share around the work you're doing around resiliency and how you're applying it?
I think it's really important for people to reflect upon what are their needs, what are their needs not only at work or at home or whatever it is. I think that many times we get so caught up and just getting through the day that we really sacrifice a lot of what can be fulfilling for me as an individual, and I think that a lot of us, especially in leadership, we're in these roles because it is fulfilling for us. But I think it's also at the same time really easy to drowned in it basically, especially in medicine. We hear a lot about physician burnout and I think it's because we've worked so hard for so long and we haven't really paid attention to our caregivers. I think that it's a good example for us to be very mindful of ourselves, but I think it's true for everyone.
I think people do need to be selfish a little bit and think about their own needs, but I think it's important for us to reflect on what do we need and what are the things that we can do to make the situations conducive to our happiness. And our sense of fulfillment, and I think that that goes a long way to becoming resilient as well.
Yeah, that's powerful because if we're not as leaders acting in the way that we want our employees to act, they don't have the right moral model, and to work for a leader that's not resilient and burned out is not a lot of fun.
No, it's not. Definitely not helping themselves and they're not helping the people around them.
All right. Well thank you so much, Jennifer. I really appreciate you sharing this with us. I love how you're applying this and spreading the word to help others really focus on the importance of resiliency
Yes, thank you as well. I appreciate the opportunity.
Summary of Key Tips:
Reaction versus Response…..you can’t control what is happening to you but you can control how you respond to it. How?
Take in what is happening and making a conscious intentional choice of how you want to behave. This is called Behavioral Awareness & tied to Emotional Resilience. Be aware of your physical state. When you need to be calm: Soften your face, Relax your neck, drop your shoulders, relax your tongue and take a deep breath Self-Regulation Tip: when you are alone, focusing on one point in the room and pay attention to peripheral vision to get more calmness.About our Host: Jill Windelspecht, owner of Talent Specialists Consulting, has spent over 20 years working with leaders at all levels, across multiple industries and countries helping them lead change, make better decisions, implement and create strategic plans that work, become better leaders, develop and motivate talent, and create environments where people and organizations thrive. Leveraging her Masters in NeuroLeadership and Organization Effectiveness she applies science to the workplace in a way that makes it easy to connect, influence and grow your business.
For a FREE Consultation, schedule a time here: Book Time on my Calendar
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Hack your Creativity to become more Innovative and Agile, E:10
When CEOs were asked, “What is the skill you most value in your people?”, they said creativity, the ability to solve problems, come up with new solutions, and use brainpower to figure things out. (source) Learn how to tap into your creativity and run a brainstorming session the RIGHT WAY!
My guest today is Dagný Valgeirsdóttir (email is Dagný@neurocreativity.dk). Dagný has a PhD in enhancing creativity. Currently she is working at the Technical University of Denmark as a postdoctoral creativity researcher and facilitator who specializes in ways to enhance individual creativity through metacognitive creativity training.
Well, thank you so much for being with us today. Really excited about your topic. It's one that's very top of mind today as we are a society that is moving so quickly and so rapidly that we need to be innovative as much as possible. So tell us about the topic that you're going to share with us today.
Thanks for having me first of all. I am going to talk about a topic that I have been very enthusiastic about four years now and looking into in great depth, which is ways to enhance creativity and I see creativity as the raw material of innovation and of course, we know innovation is very important and that led me to think that will help. Can we actually enhance creativity?
Great. I like the way you talked about creativity being the raw material of innovation. So, what is the science behind that that helps you to understand how to be more creative?
Through my studies of individuals working in creative processes, I started to notice this tendency of especially experienced designers and engineers, that the more aware of their own processes, so their creative processes, and the more knowledgeable they were of the things that could actually influence their processes, the better they were at facilitating both their own process as well as their teams process. So, the main findings were this concept that I developed called process awareness, meaning that you actually have to know about the things / stuff that can cognitively influence you and your work, and the better you are at actually monitoring yourself and being aware and conscious of your work, the better you become at facilitating it.
Yeah, that's powerful. I work with leaders in coaching and focusing on self-awareness is so important. So, what are the things that you do to help these engineers and leaders to really become more aware of their process as it relates to creativity.
I actually developed a training program, so it's a one-and-a-half-day program. It's very condensed because, of course, I'm working with practitioners and they don't have a lot of time to spare, so it's a one and a half day training program where I educate them about the things that can affect them, like how they can manage constraints through their work and how they should be aware of how priming affects them and when they need a break and all these practical things that when you're educated about it, you kind of have an Aha moment. Like, Oh yeah, of course I should have known that, but if you don't have the word for those concepts, it's difficult for you to facilitate them. So first and foremost, it's about educating them and then I take them through specifically designed exercises where they actually applied those concepts.
They try them out firsthand so that they can recognize them when they are doing their work. So, they see, okay, so is how fixation feels for instance, and this is how it feels when I really need a break. And then finally after having educated them I let them try it out. I give them some advice on how to subsequently react to those situations, so that's the core of my program. It is called the Know-Recognize-React model.
So, it has these three layers know, recognize, and react. You educate them, put them through the experiences, give the Aha moment, and then help them with ways that they can help improve their creativity based on that.
Exactly. Great. So, what is the tip or the hack that you want to share with us today based on your experience, what you've seen maybe something that's worked the most effectively with the people within your workshop or organizations that you work with?
The one thing that has been a huge eye opener for majority of the participants in my training program is the fact that you should not jump to a solution because there are actually these two concepts called problem space and solution space. People in the modern society today, we've become very narrow minded. We've gone through educational systems that don't really allow for a lot of creativity. We are always in demand of the right answer right now and also when we entered the job market. Then of course, it becomes even more intense because you have a lot of time constraints and so on, so you don't really allow yourself to actually explore the problem. Am I really working with the right problem? Of course. I know that this can be challenging in the real world, but just knowing about the fact that sometimes it's okay to challenge the problem that you're working with and say, okay, maybe I should spend 30 minutes just exploring is this actually the problem that I want to be solving or is it something else? This has been a huge eyeopener for my participants to stuff just jumping to solutions because we're so focused on producing results, but rather explore a little bit before you then start working on the solution and that's my hope. You end up with a much more creative solution then.
That's a great point. The conversation reminds me of an executive that I used to work with and this phrase he brought up always stuck with me. He'd say, “What is the problem we're trying to solve?” Because you would see people quickly trying to throw solutions and this really helped us step back and get clarity around that. So, what are the things that you've seen people do or worked with organizations where it's helped them step back into that problem space before they go into the solution space? What is a tip around that?
Well, I think first and foremost just to bring it up to people's attention because sometimes people aren't even aware of the fact that they maybe can or should explore the problem. So just for instance, in one of the sessions that I have with innovation practitioners was that they kind of felt that they were equipped with knowledge now that they could bring to their executives.
And then that's a conversation opener because a lot of the times there is kind of a misalignment between what the project level wants and what the executive level wants. So this misalignment sometimes ends up in an environment that's maybe not very supportive to creativity, but having this knowledge they felt a bit empowered and then they can at least start the conversation and figure out ways to use this knowledge to their advantage and to advocate for the fact that maybe it would be actually beneficial to explore a little bit before we start solving the problem.
And I think you hit on a very common area that I hear and work with executives with all the time as well in organizations where there is a misalignment between what different people believe the problem is or the communication between that. So, in your experience working with these organizations, do you have an experience of when some of these people that you've trained or worked with have helped to step back into that problem space?
Yeah, there was actually one very concrete example that I was given after I had done a training program with one of my participants and she actually wrote me afterwards telling me that she was mainly had two responsibilities towards clients. And the clients might have some design requirements or some requirements for a project that they wanted to have solved and that just bringing this up and actually asking the client, well, would you mind if we actually explored and then having the right arguments for why that is important and that actually helped her to facilitate this discussion which ended up in them actually exploring the problem further. So again, it all comes down to having the right type of knowledge and being aware of how things can influence your process and then you can subsequently manage it a bit better.
Yeah, I think that's a great tip. If we jumped too quickly to solve the problem, we might not be solving the right problem and taking the time to step back. And like you said, with fast paced organizations, it's really difficult to be able to do that at times or we feel like it's difficult to do that. Yeah. So how have you used this personally?
Obviously, I, since I'm preaching this all the time, I'm very well aware of all of these things that can influence me, and one of the things that I find most helpful to me personally is the knowledge about priming. That's how you are influenced by stimuli in your environment without even knowing it. And if we become too primed and you're kind of stuck in a rut, then knowing that I might actually be fixated right now and then I know that I actually should take a break or I should switch tasks because that will lead to incubation, which is the, the academic term for taking a break so that your brain can relieve the fixation. And that is something that I use on a daily basis to kind of self-manage and being aware of the fact that I'm not getting anywhere right now - I know that it's because of this and then I can do something about it. And the most interesting thing, I think about incubation or taking a break, is that I often get this skeptical response to that as well. I can't take a break whenever I want to. I'm at work, I have to be productive. But there have been so many studies into incubation and how to take breaks. And one of those studies actually found out that the most effective way to take a break or the most effective way to incubate in terms of becoming more creative, at to work was to switch tasks. So, you should not literally take a break, but you should just go and do something else. So, if you're working on something and you have a huge deadline, It's actually better to take a break for 20 minutes, go answer some emails or make some phone calls, and then return to your work - rather than sitting in front of your computer for two, three, four, five hours, and being more and more frustrated and literally just wasting time because you're fixated, and that's a cognitive thing. It's in your brain and you can’t relieve the fixation without actually giving your brain a break so you can get your brain to focus on something else.
Tell me. Yeah. You talked about the knowledge of priming. Can you simply explain what you mean by priming?
Priming is a phenomenon that, in simple terms, means stimuli in your environment that unknowingly or knowingly affect you and how you think. So it's inspiration, it's something that you might, of course, also seek out. For instance, if you're starting a new project and you want to talk to people around you, you want to go out to nature. A lot of people find that nature or sightseeing helps them to get inspired, so that is literally priming, which is inspiration. But the tricky thing about priming is that sometimes you want to seek it out, you want to get inspired, but a lot of the times you are primed by things in your environment without knowing about it and sometimes that can lead to fixation. So, you would want to avoid priming or avoid too much inspiration. Priming, it's sometimes used, for instance, by magicians and you know, Derren Brown, who plays mind tricks with subliminal priming. It is actually quite powerful and it influences you without knowing about it, but as I said, it's mainly inspiration and it's something that you can try to have some control over, but you of course cannot ever rule out every stimuli in your environment.
So, tell me, for example, what do you do with priming? So, you talked about one of your knowledge or priming, you've used it. If I want to create a new program or get ready to write an article about having difficult conversations or creating an environment that is more conducive for high engagement within your team. What could I do to prime myself?
Well, of course the biggest priming mechanism is seeking out more knowledge. So, reading up on things, I think is the most obvious answer, but then again it's all about awareness and being conscious because sometimes if you realize that priming is this double sided coin, you also sometimes don't want to be primed by. For instance, if you're making a new program, you would maybe want to avoid seeing the existing program because otherwise your brain will automatically just go to that known stimuli and you will end up with something very similar, and this actually goes back to the very basics of brainstorming for instance. And I very frequently talk about the priming in terms of brainstorming because brainstorming is, of course, a highly used technique within workshops and meetings and office environments. But in my opinion, it's the most misused method as well because people always want to do group brainstorming - everybody should brainstorm together. But it has been shown numerous times that it does not lead to the best ideas or the most number of ideas because everybody becomes primed by each other.
So, it usually tends, with the most extrovert person, the one that talks the most, that is what you will end up having at the end of the workshop. So, my advice in terms of that and keeping this priming phenomena in mind is to always start a brainstorming session with individual brainstorming. So, do two minutes where you only have the problem statement or the task at hand in front of you and everybody should just sit in silence and produce as many ideas or solutions as they can within two minutes. Then at the end of that, you just go around and you ask everybody to read aloud what is on their post-its and just place them in the middle of the table, so then you are actually giving out the information and then you do another individual round of brainstorming before then everybody introducing and starting to discuss the solutions and really define what they're working on.
But in that sense, so in the first individual round, you're actually avoiding priming because you want everybody's output on the table. You want also the quiet people. You want everybody to be able to contribute without actually writing something that's just similar to what the talkative person produced. And then in the second individual round, you're actually using priming because seeing what everybody else has come up with after you have actually dumped all of your ideas out, might spark some new ones. So that's a very simple way to actually use priming strategically within a work session.
That's a great example. I see brainstorming sessions all the time and I think this technique would be really valuable for organizations to let people, you know, you're getting the best ideas but they're not being influenced right away. And so thanks for sharing that about priming and the importance of that.
So what's one thing that someone could do right now, leaders who are listening to this, maybe those in roles that require them to be more creative, something that they can do that's going to help them tap into this process of awareness and self-awareness?
That's a good question. Of course, my training and all of my work is based on this awareness. You can't really be aware unless you have the knowledge. But in terms of simple advice, I think would be to try to observe your own self when you are working in a process. You can also, for instance, take a riddle or a brain teaser. You can just find that online and try to look at the brain teaser and look at the mechanisms of it and question it, because a lot of brain teasers actually use these mechanisms of priming and fixation to prime you in the wrong direction of an answer, but as soon as you actually realize, “Hey, this is probably an anchor where I'm supposed to go this route - whereas the answer likely that route.”
So actually maybe just trying that out and see if you become better at solving riddles and that can then help you also be more aware in your work processes. Once you've gotten the hang of actually questioning and being more aware of, “Hey, I shouldn't be thinking in this sense, there's nothing that has indicated that, but I'm probably just being primed in that way.”
So I think that is a simple way and usually also a fun way. I actually used brain teasers as a warmup and my training program and people enjoy it. They find it fun to actually analyze brain teasers and at the same time actually analyzing their ways of thinking.
I love that tip because that's something that you could do individually yourself if you're stuck or to help a team get focused and primed in the right way or maybe getting rid of some of the notions that they have coming in that might get in the way of helping them really be creative.
It all comes down to this kind of just questioning things and getting rid of your assumptions or questioning your assumptions, like is literally the right problem? is this the right way to think about it? do I need something else?
So, this awareness and questioning of assumptions and habits and routines and just being more conscious in your work.
That's great. I love that tip. So, tell me what's next? What are you working on now?
So currently I am looking into all of these creativity mechanisms and how they correlate with other fields. So currently I'm starting up a project about agile within product development and typically agile has been used within software industries and there are some troubles in how to actually align those when you're working with hardware. And what I learned when I started looking into all of these agile methods is that they actually use a lot of these underlying mechanisms in their framework.
For instance, scrum have all of these retrospective meetings and the team alliance in the daily stand up every day, and that is very much conducted through consciousness and reflection and being aware. And so, I thought that was a very interesting venue to see whether process awareness and just awareness of this cognitive processes that can affect your work methods, aligned with these more specific methods within product development.
That makes a lot of sense. I know a lot of organizations are looking at agile and trying to be more effective at either creating products quicker or not having to have things perfected before they're done. And I think that organizations are starting to use scrum, so that's great. Is it just the fact that we're continuing to bring up a specific problem or is it just that we're getting together to talk about potential challenges that you're seeing is most important?
Yeah, I think that's one big issue and I think that goes for not just hardware companies or manufacturing companies. It is this misalignment between the project level and the executive level, whereas you have the product developers working very hard on developing things and working in a specific way, whereas the executive level maybe has different goals and just wants things to speed up. So, this misalignment between the aims of each level is something that I think is an important thing to look at and keep in mind and try to figure out ways to improve that - to get both levels on the same page.
Yeah, that's such a common challenge and problem that I see with organizations as well. Executives not necessarily aligned with the product leaders and really looking forward to what some of your work will come up with to just help bridge that gap in communication to become more effective at creating the right things that we need within the organization and getting alignment.
I really look forward to starting to work in depth on that and looking into those aspects.
So overall you talked about the main tip is thinking about the two spaces is you should be in - the problem space and the solution space, but not jumping too quickly into that solution space until you really take time and reflect on what the problem is. You gave us some great tips around how we can step back. You also talked about priming and the importance of that either individually or if we're trying to do brainstorming within a group and a technique of sitting back and letting people think silently first, then group, then silent again, then group to really get a better problem statement and solution. Anything else that you wanted to share with us?
I'm always working on ways to improve all of my work so everybody is free to get in touch with me if they have specific cases or problems that they think align with my work, that's would be great (email is Dagný@neurocreativity.dk).
And, of course, I'm also very passionate about the creativity training, so that is my passion as well and has been for years. So, if anybody wants to know more about that they are welcome to get in touch.
Great. So, if an organization is trying to tap into more creativity within their engineers, product designers, people who are responsible for being creative, you're helping solve some of those problems. Sounds like you're helping to solve some problems between even the communication gap between the executive and the people that are responsible for being creative and design. How do they get in touch with you?
They can get in touch with me through my email (email is Dagný@neurocreativity.dk), I don't have a website.
I think this is good. You helped us understand how we could use this for ourselves, can use this for their organizations and then some really quick tips that we can take and start being more creative ourselves and within our organization. So, I really appreciate it and look forward to hearing more of your work around agile as well.
Thanks. I look forward to it. Yeah, thank you.
If you are interested in learning more about how coaching can help you improve your productivity, your communication and your leadership skills, for your team or your organization, please reach out to me, Jill Windelspecht and schedule a free consultation here: https://bookme.name/TalentSpecialistsConsulting. You can find me at www.TalentSpecialists.net, email: [email protected].
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If you want to have a more confident leadership presence, improve your ability to handle conflict, make better decisions, be a more confident speaker and become a better listener – start focusing on your breathing.
About my Guest: Jim Smith, PCC, The Executive Happiness Coach®, is a global executive coach, author, speaker, and change strategist. Jim’s passion is to create a Happier world and workplace, one Leader at a time.
Jim has coached leaders from 30 countries and six continents to build greater leadership effectiveness and presence. He is a co-founder and past president of ICF Cleveland, and serves as a Mentor coach for two coaching schools in the US and Singapore.
Jim lives in a multi-generational compound and dances a little every day; he worships Dark Coffee, Dark Beer, and Dark Chocolate... and deeply believes that Happiness is a Decision, not an Event!
Podcast Transcript:
Jim, thank you so much for joining us today and really looking forward to hearing more about your topic. So tell me a little bit about the brain science behind the hack that we're going to share with us.
The brain science is about creating neural patterns in your brain, which I'm sure you're hearing from a lot of folks when you talk about brain hacks. Your brain is your body and your body is your brain. A lot of people think of them as being separate items, but try having your brain do anything while having no access to any of the sensory input from the rest of your body. Touch, taste, smell, sight, sound, right? I mean they're all one in the same. They're very connected. What you think shows up in things that happen in your body and what you do with your body flows back and affects what happens with your brain.
So that is the neuroscience part of what I'm going to be sharing with your listeners. It's about recognizing that you can actually affect your brain by first working with your body and what you do in there then can affect the way your brain approaches a situation or how your brain is feeling, so to speak.
Okay. Well tell me a little bit more about that. What is the hack that we can use behind this brain science that the brain is the body and the body is the brain.
They're all interconnected. The hack that I had mentioned to you was breath. The use of breath on purpose. We're always breathing. How often do you think about how you're breathing? One of the things that I predict is that anyone who's listening to this, as soon as I mentioned breathing probably turned their attention for just a moment to their own breath, and in that moment something shifted.
For many people, it might be just that their breasts got a little bit deeper or they slowed it down just a little bit simply because in that moment they were paying attention to it, and anything that’s watched gets changed.
How can focusing on breathing help us become better leaders or leading ourselves better? First, let me offer some context for why breath is important. Every emotion that you experience shows up in the body in multiple ways. It might be energetically, our emotions affect our perspiration, our heart rate, they affect how our body moves. You know, some emotions make us smaller, some causes us to contract and pull away. Some emotions move us to go forward and emotions also affect our respiration or our breath. When you are feeling anxious, for instance, your breast tends to get very high in your throat and you breathe more rapidly.
When you're excited, the same kind of thing happens when you're very relaxed. Your breath flow, when you are sad, when you are happy, you have different breath patterns. Sometimes it's shallow, sometimes it's deep. All right, so that's what happens when you feel an emotion. The reason I called breathing on purpose, a great leadership hack is because if you want to really focus on having a more valid confident leadership presence, you need to be able to manage your emotions. You need to look ahead and determine how do I need to show up in this space? How do I need to be on stage or what emotion do I need to be in or what emotion do I need to infect the room with for this meeting I'm about to be in? Having control over your breathing can help you shift into that emotion and just on a very high level.
The simplest example I can give is to notice your breath right now and allow your breath to just drop deeper in your body breathing until you can feel your breath reaching your deep belly and notice how when you breathe deeply, your voice dropped so you come across as more authority. Your center of gravity shifts to the middle of your body so that you actually appeared in front of other people as being more centered. You create the emotion of calm or confidence. You tend to slow down. You're speaking when you're paying attention to your breath and breathing deeply and that lends more credibility to your speaking as well, and the very fact that your calm puts you in a place where you are more capable of making a better decision or at least a more calculated decision where you will be a better listener when you are more grounded, so there's a connection to leadership, so with noticing our breath as leaders, obviously we're in situations where we have to be able to handle conflict or maybe surprises and so when we do notice that our breathing.
Let's say when we get excited and we can feel that breath high up, what can we do from a breathing perspective to get ourselves into that state that you just talked about where we're more centered and focused?
Yeah, that's a great question and that really is what the hack is about. In most cases, we are not walking around feeling very calm and then suddenly wanting to be in anxiety or stress. It's usually the opposite, right? We find ourselves worried about something that's coming up. We want to slow down and really be present for a difficult conversation or we're going on stage to do a talk. Our heart is racing and racing and our palms are sweating in most situations. What we're trying to do, what we really want to do with breath is to slow ourselves down and bring ourselves to be more present and more calm, so it's all about simply slowing down the breath and breathing more deeply into the body while also grounding our feet, which is something else that will support a more grounded leadership presence. Does that make sense?
It does. So just tactical question here. If I'm wanting to slow down my breathing, is it breathing through the nose? Is it breathing through the mouth? Does it matter at all?
Any attention to the breath usually slows it down. At least in the moment. A lot of data tell us that breathing through the nose is going to have a more powerful effect. Anyone who is familiar with yoga or the yoga breath, which are you breathing, are, knows that it is a powerful breathing in and out through the nose. That very much calms the body and brings the energy down. What we know from brain science is that we've also got some physicality going on here. When you breathe in through your nose, you are pulling in outside air, which is generally cooler than your body temperature. You're pulling in outside air, across the Amygdala, your emotional center in your brain, which is located just above your sinus cavities.
In the center of your brain. The amygdala swells with blood and engorges itself as emotions become more intense and as emotions decrease in intensity, where calm is the center of your emotional place the amygdala cools down and discourses that blood, so when you breathe in cool air through your nose, very much on purpose, you add to the physical cooling of the Amygdala and so that also contributes to your feeling – and there is the brain science.
Thank you. I know that you work with a lot of executives in coaching - can you share an example of an executive who has used this hack and how they've used it?
I guess I can give you many examples, so let's just focus on a couple. I was working with a client who came into coaching because the board of his company wanted him to create for himself and his office, much more of an outside presence.
You have an introvert, very much active and beloved inside the organization, but the board wanted him to be more of the face of the organization, so they came to them and the feedback they gave him was, you need to be more presidential. He sought me out. He says, what's that? Use My language, right? He uses different language. What the hell does that mean be more presidential and you know, when we dug in, what we found out was he was going to be expected to be doing on camera interviews to be the first person who talked to the organization onstage at public events and this is a guy who absolutely freaked out at the thought that he might have to be on stage somewhere, let alone when he actually got on stage and he would fumble over his words. People wrote him scripts and he would hang onto the script like a life raft and just deliver it in a very wooden fashion because his heart was literally in his throat.
Same thing happened on camera. He was just a horrible interview, so he was an extreme example in one of our very first sessions. I watched him just telling me what was coming up and I could see him getting all uptight just at the thought of just telling me the story of what he had to do and I asked him to stand up and I said, where are you breathing? Like when you breathe, where's that breath going? I could see what was happening. I was trying to help him notice it. He says, I don't know. He literally had no awareness of himself below his chin. So long story short, by the end of that session, I actually had him laying on the floor of his office with his hands on his tummy, working with trying to raise and lower his stomach. Using his breath to pull that breath down into his body.
He actually started that – he would lay in bed as he was falling asleep and he would practice breathing, he would be breathing on purpose. Now, just learning how to breathe, didn't suddenly make a great speaker. There were many, many other skills we had to build here, but that was the most fundamental because that became his go-to practice. When he was about to go on stage or when he was in the green room ready to go on for an interview, he always came back to that piece which was slow down my breathing, put my hands on my stomach, you know, just slow myself down, slow my brain down, slow my blood racing through my head down, and it took him a couple of years, but he has become quite a spokesmodel for his company and he continually credits that original coaching with helping him learn how to master himself as a tool.
Right. The body is a tool. Wow. That's a great example. In public speaking, I think that's the number one fear people have. Right? Like they say, people would rather be in the casket than delivering a eulogy.
Yeah, exactly. Wow. I hadn't heard that one. That's pretty good. So how about personally yourself? How do you use this hack? Breathing on purpose yourself? Can you give us some examples of how you've used it, how it's helped you?
I find that breathing really calms my mind. One of the unique features of a breath is that it only exists right now. You can't accumulate future breaths and you can't save up past breaths, but when you focus on this breath, you are present. You are right now and most stress that we experience is manufactured by obsessing over things we've done in the past or worrying about things in the future that don't exist yet.
So being in the moment is one of the most powerful ways to destress. And as a coach it's where I need to be in order to do really good coaching. So breathing on purpose for at least a minute or two is something that I do prior to any coaching I have. Even if I'm running a little late, I would rather show up on a video chat 30 seconds late than show up on time, but out of oxygen. I use this a lot for myself as a calming element before going on stage. A few years ago I was speaking at a Disrupt HR conference and Disrupt HR is a movement. It's kind of a Ted Talk format, where you have 20 slides and they automatically advance every 15 seconds. So it's a five minute talk. You have to have it down pat, like you have to be rehearsed to the second because the slides will advance no matter what you do.
I remember I was about halfway through the program and it got closer and closer to my set and I could see how people were struggling with this format, you know, I found myself going, oh my God, this can be a disaster. I can't do this. I haven’t rehearsed enough. I should have more material. And literally the guy before me was talking, I took my own pulse and I think my ten second pulse, who was like 28, I mean I was, I was like at 90 percent of my maximum heart rate and I was doing this all with obsessing in my head. I'm like, God, I can't go on stage like this. I'm going to explode. So I just shut my eyes and just started breathing. And at first I'm telling you I could not breathe below my throat. My heart was pounding so hard, I couldn't even get in there.
And I kept doing it and I kept doing it and it took me several minutes. But because I've practiced this, I was able to slow down and slow it down, and I went onstage and I was so calm. I watched the video afterwards and I was like, oh, I nailed it, Jill. And I know that if I hadn't been conscious of myself and I had gone on in that overexcited obsessive stressed out state, I would have totally bombed that talk. But as it was, I nailed it. I mean like literally the last slide clicked off and I said my last word and I give a lot of the credit to the fact that I was able to find my center before I went onstage.
That is a great example. Great Story. So how long does it take and did it take to do this because it sounds like you can change fairly quickly using breath.
You can teach your body and your brain to do that, to get to that place is not something you can do overnight. Remember I told you that story just a few minutes ago about a client who literally worked on it. He claims nearly every night during those two years that became his habit for how he went to bed, was to focus on his breath and he would do it at other times of day and so on, and it takes deliberate practice over an extended time to change any habit and certainly something as fundamental as how you're breathing. I've been practicing breathing on purpose as a way to center now for probably a decade. Really doing it with great attention on a regular basis to the point where I can literally control my emotional state and thus my thinking through half a dozen breaths and I can get there. Boom, I'm there.
For someone who hasn't practiced yet - when you're in a place of stress and you don't know how to get to calm - that's not the time to start the practice. As with any habit, what you have to do is you have to find ways to practice this new thing regularly over time, and I'm sure you're hearing this from other people in your series, when you talk about hacking the brain, if you want to change a pattern in your brain, you have to do that new thing a thousand times before your brain goes, oh yeah, I know where I'm going. This is familiar. No problem, but up until you hit a couple hundred or a thousand repetitions of whatever that new thing is, your body wants to go back to the old way it did it, which is the pattern you have now.
So it takes practice - Practice with a capital p, so for those that are listening would like to give one thing that they can do immediately afterwards- so it's not just great information, but something that they can put into practice right away - to start really getting better at using breath and breathing and purpose. What would you recommend that they do right away?
Well, because we're breathing anyway, a new breathing habit is fairly easy to integrate because it's not like you have to clear time on your schedule for breathing today like you do yoga or something like that. From my experience watching other people, I've found that one of the best ways for people to build expertise in Breathing on Purpose very quickly is to attach to something that they do multiple times every day anyway and then simply add this. So here's a couple of examples of things that I have seen clients do that has really helped them accelerate this.
I had a client who made this her practice. Every time she went through a door, she would take a Breath on Purpose. So wish you would come into the building in the morning, coming into the office, anytime she was going into a meeting, as she put her hand on the door handle, she would pause, take a breath, feel her shoulders drop, feel her breath drop into her belly, and then she would just proceed.
I've had other clients who've attached to things like answering their phone every time the phone rings. I mean you've got two seconds between rings. Yeah. And if. And if it rings a third time, no one's going to die, right? Right. So the phone starts ringing, that's time to take a breath, drop into their body, sit back and then answer the phone. So they don't have to create anything new, they just have to make it a habit that's attached to a phone call.
And what they're doing is they're very under the radar, retraining their body to find calm and center very quickly. So those are two recommendations that I make. Just attach it to something you do everyday. It could be when you're washing the dishes, it could be when you're brushing your teeth. So twice a day you ground your feet, focus on your breath for just that moment. Whatever works for you.
Thank you Jim so much. This is really helpful. I think Breathing on Purpose is important. I've used this type of approach with some of those that I work with as well and personally have used breathing to get myself in the right state, so I appreciate you sharing the brain science behind that and how we can start putting that into practice right away.
You're welcome my friend.
We look forward to hearing from you for another podcast as well because I know that you do a lot of work around this, so anything else you wanted to share?
Just a reminder that being in a calm, centered place is also an awesome energy from which to be a better listener, a not just a speaker, so there's a, a bonus that when you are more centered yourself, you give more space to other people - and that's what leadership should be doing. Listening. Okay.
Thank you Jim. Very much.
You're welcome.
So, to recap, if you want to have a more confident leadership presence, improve your ability to handle conflict, make better decisions, be a more confident speaker and become a better listener – start focusing on your breathing. Breathing on Purpose is a simple hack that you can use to center yourself. It takes practice but focus on attaching it to something you do already, like before you enter a meeting, before you answer the phone or when your doing any routine tasks will help to make this a powerful habit. Over time, you will be able to quickly get yourself in the best state to handle whatever situation you are going to face. We are breathing all the time anyway, we might as well Breathe on Purpose.
If you interested in learning more about how coaching can help you improve your productivity, your communication and your leadership skills, please reach out to me, Jill Windelspecht and schedule a free consultation here https://bookme.name/TalentSpecialistsConsulting. You can find me at www.TalentSpecialists.net
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Are you implementing a change in your business? Do you want to know how to get your team aligned and focused on executing instead of worrying about what it means for them? Do you want to minimize stress and anxiety for you or your team so you can focus on being creative and innovative? If so, this is the podcast for you.
My guest, Dianne Lowther, Founder of Brilliant Minds, is going to share the SCARF model and help you understand how to apply it to yourself and your team.
Dianne has 29 years experience in learning and development. She is a psychology graduate and licensed user of MBTI, a certified Master Trainer of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), certified ‘Words that Change Minds’ LAB Profile Master Consultant / Trainer and she works mostly with senior executives, leadership teams, HR and technical professionals.
Dianne, thank you so much for being with us today. Tell us what the brain science is that you're going to be sharing.
I'm going to be talking about the SCARF model, which is the piece of neuroscience that was developed by David Rock and the model is something that I've been using them for a couple of years and I found it to be really helpful in lots of everyday business situations.
So what is the science behind the scarf model?
Okay, so it works on the basis that the human brain is constantly, and I do mean constantly, multiple times per second, scanning the environment for external stimuli that may lead to either a threat or reward. So stimuli that are associated with positive emotions and reward trigger an approach response. Stimulus and anything that has an association with negative emotions is seen as a threat and that stimulates us to go into an avoidant response.
These responses then, they're not purely mental or behavioral, and if you look at the data that's been gathered through measures of brain activity such as MRI or EEG scans and so on, they show that threats to any of these social concerns that are listed in the SCARF model lead to physiological responses in the same way as we would respond physiologically to a physical threat. So what we know is that when a person's brain goes into a threat mode, then that has a number of really specific consequences for their mental functioning.
So for example, in threat mode, what a person experiences is reduced working memory. So they'll find it harder to retain short term information. Their field of view will narrow and so they literally cannot see the big picture. And that also is part of generalizing of the sense of threat - so that often people will interpret what might be a very specific thing as being a much more general problem.
So now if there's a sense that one manager at work is unhappy with their performance, they may feel that nobody is happy with their performance. So the threat becomes generalized and alongside that you also get a greater feeling of overall pessimism. So sometimes people describe that as just a general feeling of gloom and doom.
The other side of that is that when the brain is in the state of reward. So we see things in the environment and or experience something through one of our other senses that triggers a reward. What happens is that we certainly have access to much greater cognitive resources. So we have more insights, we have better ideas and more ideas for action. You have a wider field of view, so we literally can see the bigger picture. If you deal with people as part of your work, especially if you're a leader or manager, it's in everybody's interest to keep your people in a reward frame of mind and away from the threat frame of mind.
So tell us a little bit more about the SCARF model. What does scarf stand for?
Okay. So, the scarf model is simply a description of social concerns that drive human behavior in everyday situations. And the S stands for Status. So that's about a relative importance to other people, and the C stands for Certainty, which is about being able to predict the future. Now I know nobody can predict the future, but it's about the perception of having some kind of certainty and predictability to what's coming next. The A stands for Autonomy, which is our sense of control over events. The R stands for Relatedness and people often think about, sort of, communication and connection, but ultimately what it comes down to is a sense of safety with other people, which is obviously very important in terms of the brain staying in a frame of reward rather than threat. And then the F stands for Fairness. So this is our perception of fair exchange between people.
So that is status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. And the thing I learned about this model is, having been in learning and development most of my working life, having been a manager or leader, trainer and so on, if someone had simply shown me that list of things and said, these are the social concerns that drive human behavior, I probably would say, oh, that looks pretty reasonable. And I think most of us would, but what I really like about this is that David Rock ,who developed this model, delved into all the relevant neuroscience and can actually prove this. These really are the things that make the difference to a person's behavior. So that's one of the reasons why I particularly liked this model.
That's great, I'm familiar with it and I like it as well. I know that you have used this and you have trained people around in this and seen them apply it. Can you give us some examples, some scenarios of how leaders have used this to be more effective either in leading themselves are leading others?
Yes, in one of the organizations I've been working with just recently, they designed their communications and engagement plan around this model. And so I went into the company and met with all the senior leaders and we did a day's workshop. We essentially went through the model and said, okay, so if we recognize that status is important to people in the organization and we know from experience that for some people it's more important than it is to others, but we know that at a neurological level a person's perception of their relative importance to other people is really important. Then we said, okay, so what kind of leadership behavior has an impact on this? And so there are obvious things like giving somebody praise recognition, giving them a promotion, allowing them to take responsibility. These things obviously have an impact on a person's sense of their own importance relative to other people and also in just little things - like if you share some important information with someone, then they will feel that they're important because you've seen fit to share the information with them. The opposite of that in there, if you withhold information, people feel excluded. They feel that they're not important and that can immediately trigger them into a state of threat as opposed to a state of reward. So we spent quite a lot of time going through the SCARF model and thinking about that particular environment, knowing things that were going on and specifically looking at a program of change that was being planned, which was going to have an impact on the structure of the organization and the teams in which people were going to be required to work.
So you know that when you announce change in an organization, then that's very unsettling for people and obviously if people are worried about what their role is going to be in in a new structure, then that's going to happen. Impact on their perception of their own status. Things that we spent quite a bit of time on was thinking about this specific change program and the reorganization of teams and saying, “Who in this particular group is likely to be adversely affected by this?” Or is likely to perceive that their adversely effected? Because mostly when you redesign an organization, it's not done with the intention of marginalizing anybody or threatening their status, but sometimes people do end up with a sense of being less important just because of what happens to that particular role. And it's interesting actually. One of the things that David Rock has pointed out with this model is that the person's status is threatened by being left out, which it activates the same parts of the brain that are involved in perception of physical pain.
And I think the people who have known for a long time that there's a connection between what goes on in the mind and what goes on in the body. This is a really concrete example of how something that's happening at an emotional level will actually manifest in a physical experience. And I think this is probably one of the reasons why it's quite common for people to develop, for example, back pain when they're under stress at work. And you know, often the medical profession can't find any reason why they're having this pain. But if you look at what's going on at the mental and emotional level, sometimes there is a good explanation for it. So I think that's one use of the model is in planning is to look at it and say, okay, so if we, if we have a plan to make some changes in our organization, what's the impact of these changes on people's status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and their sense of fairness and what can we do so that we can avoid triggering the threat response?
Or if it's almost inevitable, what can we do to minimize the damage and how can we take action in such that it's more likely to trigger a reward state rather than immediately getting people into threat because you know what it's like in an organization. You know, as soon as you say we are doing a restructure. Then people suddenly start saying, well, what if my job disappears? Or what if my job changes? Or I ended up reporting to someone that I don't like very much. So suddenly all a sense of certainty is gone and that status is potentially being threatened. If they're in competition for roles, then that probably has an impact on their sense of relatedness and as I said, the sense of safety with other people. So if someone that's been a good colleague might now be in competition with them for a job, then that's going to have an impact on our sense of relatedness and then ultimately when you announce specifically exactly what he was doing, which role and who's working with whom and so on.
Then often people feel that there's been some areas that weren't quite fast and that creates a threat in relation to the sense of fairness. So of the leaders that we worked with on this, they were quite surprised how many things they could come up with that they could do as part of this change program. That would make it easier for them to keep everybody in their workforce, in the state of reward and to minimize the amount of time that people would go into a state of threat. So that was one really important area where we've used this model in planning. Shall I go on? Do you want some more examples? Yeah, I would love that. Thank you. Okay, so that's sort of big organizational change. At the other end of the spectrum, one of my coaches has been using this model a great deal in individual one to one coaching and often it's a good model to use in terms of diagnosing what's not working for someone.
So this particular coach works quite a lot with people who have problems with stress. So by looking at the SCARF model and asking the person being coached, so tell me about your sense of status and your sense of your relative importance to other people around you and taking stock of how they feel and how much they are able to predict the future and so on to get their certainty. Then you can quite easily see which bits of their working life are causing the stress and sometimes it's very easy once you've got that too. Also figure out, well, what do I need to do to address the balance and to get out of this subtle states of threat and take action that will get me more into a reward state. Because I think one of the things about this is that it's very easy to say, okay, well this is a neurological response and we don't have any choice, but actually the evidence suggest that you do.
The greater awareness you have and the more you can spot the things that will trigger certain responses for you offend, the easier it is to get yourself out of the state of threat or to avoid going there in the first. So we're using it as a coaching tool as well. So that's big long-term organizational change. And there are lots of different places in between. So one of the things that I personally like to do is I work a lot with leadership teams, because I think that for any one leader to be able to do everything that's required, especially at very senior level, why they might have and people reporting into them, you know, probably in in a structured way, not having an absolute direct reports, but somebody who has a very senior role.
They have lots of responsibility and there are lots of people who look to them for direction. I think it's unreasonable to expect that one person could provide all the leadership that's needed. So when you get a leadership team together, then no one person has to be good at everything. A team can be much more powerful in terms of leadership than any one individual. And I think it's also really important because when you are going through a lot of change in an organization, then it's not just the workers at the frontline who are subject to the threats and reward issue. And so when the organization said, right, we need to restructure some things changed in our marketplace, we need to respond to that. We need to restructure, maybe we need to retrench a little bit on some developments we've made or maybe we need to push forward and need people willing to step up the pace of change.
You know, there's always things that you have to do, so as a senior leader in that kind of environment, then you may know more of what's going on than most of the people in the organization, but that can mean that you're more aware of the threat to your own status, that you're more aware of the perceived competition between you and other people. Especially if it's a highly political kind of organization. You may worry about the fact that you are not being completely fair to some of the people who are employed by the organization. So it's very easy for the leaders also to be triggered into a state of threat. And as I said, when you're in a, your working memory goes down. You'll feel the view is reduced. You get a general sort of feeling of pessimism and you see issues everywhere you look. And then in that state of mind, you need to go out to your workforce and communicate with them about what's going on and you need to really do a great job as a leader and keeping everybody around you feeling positive about it and being able to perceive that their status is not threatened, that there is still some certainty, etc.
So I think a leadership team can go a long way to supporting each other. So for example, in order to create a sense of certainty when there is a lot of uncertainty, when you're doing a lot of change, maybe your marketplace has changed, maybe your investors are getting restless now. There can be all sorts of pressures on people that are very senior level, but you can create a sense of certainty, for example, by having routines. So if you always meet as a team at a certain time and you work through a certain agenda and you have habits and rituals that you do as a team, then that helps to create some certainty. Obviously if it's a really good team, and that helps with the feeling of relatedness, If you've got a really strong leadership team that's worked together that understands each other, they can rely on each other, then that goes a long way towards creating a good sense of relatedness.
They feel safe with each other, and so that kind of thing can really help in keeping the leaders in a good state. When the whole organization is in the state of our people and if the leaders are in a good state, then it's easier for them to behave in a way that enables people who work for them to stay in that state of reward. So as I already said, there's lots of different ways that we can apply this model. For me, applying it to yourself is probably a good place to begin.
I love that. Great examples from an organization perspective, with the engagement plan to a coaching perspective, to a leadership team perspective, and especially since changes and emotions are contagious, a great way that leadership teams can really have that right sense so their employees are comfortable with the changes that are coming up as well.
What is one thing that a leader could do who is listening to this right now? Applying to yourself is important. How could they start applying this to themselves first?
Well, one of the things that I recommend people do, and in fact I have a little a little tool for this, but it's not rocket science. It's basically just a table and I suggest that people look at each of the five elements with the SCARF model, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness and ask themselves for them personally what sorts of things reinforce their sense of status and what things threatened status. You know, this is a very personal thing because it's tied up with your own beliefs and values and your prior experiences and so on. And what you find, if you do this as a group, is that some things will have a very strong effect on some individuals and for others they won't really matter that much, but all have certain things that we associate with each of these areas and so it can be really useful and insightful experience to give yourself some time and go through each of the five areas and just ask yourself so what things for me are triggers for a feeling of reward in this area and what things are a trigger, a feeling of threat.
So for example, we talked about being left out. So this isn't really about actually are you being left out or something. It's about the perception of being left out. So what makes somebody feel that they're being left out? Some people are quite happy that they get the information they need to do that job and they know that there's other stuff going on and they're not being included in certain conversations. And actually they're fine with that because if I've got enough information to do that job, then there'll be content for other people. The sense that there are conversations going on without them might really trigger a very strong sense of being left out, so it's very individual and I think it's worthwhile spending some time and thinking about this for yourself now. What feels fair to you and what feels unfair to you? Again, it's a very subjective thing and the idea of fair exchange between individuals and between the leader in that team, between the organization and the employer, between customer and supplier.
Now these are all different areas where fairness can be applied, but what seems fair to one person may not necessarily seem fair to another. So again, you know it's something that if you spend the time thinking about it, then you can be more alert to the kinds of things that are likely to have an impact on you. And when you're preparing for a meeting and event or conference or important telephone calls, your review with your boss, whatever it is, then it's a really helpful thing to have done so that you know where the potential pitfalls are. And also you can perhaps plan what you will do to either avoid or to minimize. The effect of this sort of thing, some of them are easier to predict than others, you know? There are things for all of us where you could say, well, it's quite possible that this one's going to be tied up with a person's sense of wellbeing.
So for example, in terms of certainty, that for most people having regular work and knowing that they're going to get paid, it adds to that feeling of certainty and that's one of the reasons of course why when you say you're going to reorganize the company, people instantly start to wonder if that means that fewer people will be needed in their area of work. Is this a threat to their ongoing employment? And that's obviously an important thing. There are people in the world who don't worry about that too much. Maybe because they've got a private income, maybe because they have a partner who makes lots of money or maybe because they're not very material and they assumed that they can get by even if they don't have regular work. But it is one of those things that for an awful lot of people having regular work and knowing they're going to get paid for it, it will add to their sense of certainty.
But then there are other things that are very individual. So I was doing these exercises for myself and my team. We spent a bit of time, we all did our own inventory and then we shared them. And one of the things that I realized myself, one of the things that impact my sense of relatedness is if someone gives me a gift and it's something I don't like, if I had that experience and it triggers all sorts of things, you know, because first of all, it sort of suggests that, well, this person doesn't actually know me as well as I thought they knew me because they were giving me something that I would have thought they knew that I wouldn't like. But then it also creates all sorts of issues about how do I react to that? Do I keep it to myself right now?
I need to give them something because they gave me some something. So then all your certainty about how a relationship operates and what's the correct social thing to do, you know, so if people are exchanging gifts at Christmas or a birthday, we will have our little patterns about what we do and how we treat people and how we respond. And then when you open up the present and it's something that you dislike or even it's something that you wouldn't have wanted to own, what does you do? So there are a lot of these things that are very individual. Some people would say, well it doesn't matter to me. I just love the fact that someone's given me a gift instead and they thought about me. They spent time choosing it and the fact that they haven't picked something I really like, then I don't mind that at all.
So I think it was knowing for yourself, what are the things that are likely to trigger either the threat or the reward responses in your brain. So that said, what's something that people could do straight away? That's one thing I would definitely recommend, the great example of using this on your own and then with your team because the more we do this for ourselves, we understand our own triggers, that self awareness and then using this with our team, we can understand how to best get them into that reward state.
So fundamentally it sounds like the brain science behind it is that the brain is wired to move away from threat and toward reward and the SCARF model gives us a model to look and see which of those areas either get in a threat state, which is much more closed and which get us more in a toward state.
Yes. What you find is that in the reward state, people are much more creative and then they have so many more ideas and greater insights. If someone's in a good state of reward, then there'll be able to extract the information from data rather than it just being data, and they can figure out what to do with it, so you just have so much more cognitive ability in the reward state than you do in a threat state. I think in the modern world, a lot of people, especially in the workplace are constantly in a state of threat there and there are so many things that threaten that feeling of wellbeing, lack of certainty or what's like a fantasy that feels safe with people or they're not having a full autonomy on things.
I've seen in the UK in particular over the last 10 years since the recession was that most organizations now are set up financially so that no one person can spend the company's money. So even if you're a very senior manager and you have a multimillion pound budget in theory, you actually can't make a financial decision and say, right, we were going to spend money on that. You have to check it out with somebody else. Somebody else has to say, yes, I agree with you, that's a reasonable thing to spend the company's money on. So lots of people have had that sense of autonomy diminished quite dramatically because of that, so I think as I go around, there were lots of people for whom being at work means being in a state of threat, but if by self-awareness they can take some of that back then I think that makes a big difference not only to individuals but also to organizations.
I love how you've applied it - individually, one on one with the team and also from a large scale change organization perspective and the tip on creativity. We can be more creative in the rewards state. Well Dianne, thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing this with us and this model and work that you've done and are continuing to do with your teams. Anything else you want to share before we wrap up?
I think in general, the reason why I find this model useful is that it takes something that many of us would have looked at and related to as business leaders, as managers, as coaches, we will say, yes, I can see that. That is a fair description of what happens for people. I like the fact that we also have the neuroscience to back it up. For me. That gives me much more confidence in the model that I'm happy to go and share it with people and how could you use it for myself because I know it's not just somebody's opinion.
I know it's actually backed up with good science and we know that these reactions are hardwired into the brain. They're not the result of conscious choices, but as an emotionally intelligent and self-aware adult, anybody can have some capacity to manage their own responses and to get out of a threat response and into a reward state. But you do need to spend a bit of time working on it and figuring out for yourself and experimenting. But I think what it means is that ultimately it gives us all a greater sense of autonomy and spending that time on understanding ourselves also gives us a bit more certainty. Then being able to manage our own responses perhaps increases our self-esteem and makes us feel that we have a greater status with others and so on. So it kind of creates a virtuous circle and that's one of the reasons why I really liked this model.
Thank you, Dianne, and we look forward to having you on another podcast. That will be my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.
You can reach Dianne at https://www.brilliantminds.co.uk/portfolio/dianne-lowther
I hope you enjoyed this podcast and can start applying the principals right away. If you would like to know more about how to apply these concepts, growing your leadership and your team, please reach out to me, Jill Windelspecht, at [email protected] or visit my website www.TalentSpecialists.net. I look forward to hearing fro
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Do you want your team to be more productive, innovative or engaged? Basketball legend Michael Jordan says it all “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” If you want to know how you, as a leader, can leverage neuroscience to increase trust and vulnerability to build and sustain a high performing team, this is the podcast for you.
Paul Zak is my guest, his two decades of research have taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. All this in a quest to understand the neuroscience of human connection, human happiness, and effective teamwork. His academic lab and companies he has started develop and deploy neuroscience technologies to solve real problems faced by real people.
His latest book, Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High Performance Companies, uses neuroscience to measure and manage organizational cultures to inspire teamwork and accelerate business outcomes. His 2012 book, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, recounted his unlikely discovery of the neurochemical oxytocin as the key driver of trust, love, and morality that distinguish our humanity. In another obsession, Paul’s group uses neuroscience to quantify the impact of movies, advertising, stories, and consumer experiences. Along the way, he has helped start several transdisciplinary fields, including neuroeconomics, neuromanagement, and neuromarketing.
Paul is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. He also serves as a senior advisor to Finsbury, a global leader in strategic communications that advises many of the world’s most successful companies.
Paul’s research on oxytocin and relationships has earned him the nickname "Dr. Love." That’s cool. He’s all about adding more love to the world.
Thank you Paul so much for being with us and Paul is going to talk about trust and vulnerability for leaders and how important that is and also the science behind it and some tips that you as leaders can use for yourself and your organization. So thank you Paul. So Paul, tell us what is the science behind trust and vulnerability for leadership? I spent most of my professional life running neuroscience experiments to understand why some teams perform at high levels and other teams not so much. And we found that two components are necessary. One is having a trusted team and the second is your purpose. If you know where you're going, it marshals brain resources that motivates you to draw on social resources like people around you to reach goals, particularly when those are difficult but achievable stretch goals. And so when we started looking at the underlying factors that produce trust between teams, we identified eight components and one of those which I call natural, is really being yourself at work.
And a key component of that is being vulnerable. So it turns out that many studies have shown that people who are, too beautiful too perfect, we kind of hate those people because we can't believe anyone can be that great and most people aren't that great. They're putting on this mask. And so when you let that mask fall and you say, hey, you know what team, we want to do this thing, you guys are experts in this, not me. I know it's important to us. Here's why. Yeah, take a couple of weeks and start exploring whether we can do this or not. So, a concrete example, you know, my lab, we collect terabytes of brain data and we build predictive models of them and we've started investing in machine learning. So I read some books on machine learning. I'm roughly, you know, acquainted with the different techniques, but I don't have time to learn how to do them.
So I have a team and I said, you guys are super smart. You're all learning about machine learning. Here's a couple of giant data sets. Go see if you can improve our predictions using machine learning. And then all of a sudden they want to tell me about, well, we did this and support vector machines. I like, I don't even want to know if it works. Then you explain it to me. If it doesn't work, I don't care, I don't want to waste my brain power. So really empowering those people in my group to say "you are the experts in this, not me." And then come back even though I'm the leader, come back and teach me something and that's a whole different ballgame than "we have to do this and you guys have got to make this work and blah blah blah." So I think the punchline for the work we've done on building high trust teams is that everyone should be treated as a volunteer at work.
Everyone's choosing volitionally to be at this organization. So if you're a volunteer, then you need to ask them to do something you can't demand. You need to explain why they're doing something, not just scream at them to get something done. And at the end of the day, they should be thanked for the extra effort they're putting in to move the organization's goal forward. And so that's really being a servant leader or a vulnerable leader. It's a really effective way to achieve high performance in teams. I love that example of not giving the answer, but letting the team come up with that. So why is that so much more valuable then leaders telling them what to do? I think a lot of that is what we've seen in the past, that type of authoritative leadership. I need to know the answer, if I tell them I don't know, I'll appear weak.
What is it that happens for employees that makes them more willing to volunteer and be creative when you're asking them to come to the solution versus telling them what to do. Right? This is where the neuroscience comes in. So the work we've done in particular on a brain network is activated by a neurochemical called oxytocin, shows that when we asked for help as social creatures, we almost always are motivated to respond in kind. So if you asked me to do something as opposed to demand or in an aggressive way forced me to do something, most of us get this kind of defensive approach like, Hey, what the hell? I mean, even if you're my boss, don't be intimidating me dude! My recent book "Trust Factor" has a lot of Peter Director in there, who was on the faculty with me at Claremont for years.
And you know, Peter is the one who's coined the term knowledge worker. He said if you're a knowledge worker, you need to be your own CEO. Well everyone is a knowledge worker today, literally everyone. So if you're year own CEO and some dude is screaming in the office and I've worked for screamers, you'd probably have too Jill. I don't like it. And the first thing I want to do is get the heck out of there. So we all are our own CEO, so we should treat people like that. Like I'm thrilled that you decided to work for our group. Am I going to push you? Yeah. Am I going to challenge you? For sure. Am I going to talk to you when you're missing your goals? For sure, right? There's no sense in which people are not being held accountable, but I really want to have people give this intrinsic effort and I can't do that, that's internal to the employee. So by the way, I don't even like the word employee, I like colleague or team mate. I think we should get rid of this kind of weird Marxian hangover of capital and labor being at conflict somehow. So anyway, so I don't want to ask colleagues or to force them to do the things I want them to do. I want them to be passionate about what we're doing. If they're passionate about it, they're going to hit the ball out of the park, if I give them the tools to do that and help them learn how to hit the ball. So anyway, I think in the world we're in with an unemployment now, 3.9%, I think I just saw in the US, just getting bodies on board is hard enough, but getting high performers, if I want to do that, I've got to create a culture where people can really thrive and if you are authoritative, if you're aggressive, it's just not going to work and people will go elsewhere and we know that money is a very weak motivator for performance.
So let's create the conditions, the social conditions, that drawn our social brain, and in particular induce the release of oxytocin - make us want to work for the team goal. And when we do that it's anti aggressive, it's inclusive and accepting. It's challenging and it's going to be hard and we're going to make mistakes. But guess what? If I'm a leader, I'm going to make mistakes too. And I'd love feedback from you guys as well, but just all try to get better at this thing. So one of my great examples of this actually from the book is where I live near Silicon Valley. They have many, many tech companies have monthly "Congratulations, you screwed up celebrations" Let's get pizza and beer and let's talk about the mistakes we made this month and see who screwed up the biggest because if you want to innovate, you've got to make some mistakes and when you celebrate, you also share those with the company.
So if everyone is seeking to innovate that we know everyone's making mistakes, right? Jeff Bezos has said this, "one or two out of 10 of the bets we take pay off, but they pay off big enough that we could do lots of small scale experiments." So yeah, let's talk about how we screwed up. Let's make sure everyone knows so no one else makes that mistake and let's make it fun. So if you want to innovate, try some new stuff and empower those, trust those people around you to make decisions that are going to drive performance up. If you're just going to scream at people they make a mistake, then you're going to get status quo and your going to get a lot of turnover. Yes, they keep the best for themselves when you do that, right? Yeah, for sure.
So you shared that there is two things that you found for really high performing teams, a trusted team and purpose. Can you talk a little bit more about purpose? Thank you. Yes, so I think there's two kinds of purposes within organizations. One is the sort of transactional purpose, the processes that you've got to set up to run a company efficiently. I'm talking about a different kind of purpose, which I call transcendent purpose, which is why the organization exists at all and according to Drucker and Edward Deming. at its core organizations exist to improve people's lives. And so companies that embrace that, a sense of service to their client, service to their community, are much more productive and in experiments we've run, we've shown much higher oxytocin release when we have a social purpose, what we're doing, much higher productivity and more enjoyment. So again, I think every organization can find that core purpose that tells us why we're working so hard. Right? Yeah, I need the paycheck. Um, yeah, probably I liked some of the people I work with, but when I got a long day when I've worked my butt off and I realize I'm doing this because I'm saving patients lives or because I'm making my customers day a little better.
Doug Rauch, who took Trader Joe's national, he just retired from them, said that when he was taking Trader Joe's national, he realized that they were not a grocery store. They were an organization that was designed to make people happy. They just happen to do that by selling interesting, funky food. But it was all about making people happy. So that's when they started. If you go to Trader Joe's, if you ask the question to one of their colleagues, they walk you down the aisle to find the thing you've asked about. They will do everything. They'll walk the stuff out to your car. They will do everything until you are extraordinarily happy. So that's a really cool approach, right? It means that everything that you're doing has got to fit into that core purpose. It also means if you're doing stuff that doesn't fit their core purpose, you shouldn't be doing it.
I love that. I love that example as well with Trader Joe's that is a fun store to go into, definitely. You talked a little bit about how you use this with your team personally. What is one thing that leaders could do if they want to really improve on getting that high performing team? I hear that a lot - high performing team, trust, purpose and especially purpose. So what are the one or two things that a manager could do?
I mean it sounds like we're in kindergarten, but it's really simple. Say please and thank you. My group works a lot on project basis, so we have a funded project come in and instead of assigning that task to somebody we say, hey, who would like to do this task? It is a whole different approach. Again, this is done a lot in the silicon valley world. Here's the project, who wants to take lead on this? Who wants to build a team and work on this thing for three months or six months? Who's got capacity? Who's interested? Who wants to stretch themselves and a lot of celebrations. So from the neuroscience perspective, anything that happens more than about a week in the future is almost irrelevant in terms of setting up a feedback loop. So when goals are met, even kinda midterm goals, right? Maybe milestones, have a celebration. do the debrief, get some feedback. I think of that celebration is a chance to have the community of people that you work with come together to celebrate high performance and then you set up aspirations among the entire company for high performance, right? If we're celebrating this. And also if performance goals are not met, celebrate in public, but critique in private. So, very good neuroscience showing that if I dress you down in public, all of a sudden I've shamed you in terms of your social group, that is a guaranteed recipe for disengagement.
So you're not meeting your milestones, I will sit down and say, "Hey Jill, you know what, the last couple of weeks you seemed to be behind on where you're supposed to be. Let's talk about why you seem to be missing these milestones and what we can do to help you get around that". And then if, you know people you can't serve remediate, then we have to have a discussion about maybe this is not the right fit for you. But again, I think the explosion of neuroscience in the last 15 years has really allowed us to make specific well tested predictions about how to manage the humans who are around you at work and they're complicated, they're beautiful, very diverse, and they make mistakes and they do extraordinary things and so all of those I think are part of building this high trust high performance team.
Yeah, I think those are great tips and just because it seems simple doesn't mean it's easy or maybe we think that it has to be more complex to really make it work. So what else are you working on right now, thinking about or having your team look into to help leaders and teams and organizations be more effective?
We've been doing work for the last about 12 years on persuasion, on the neuroscience of persuasion, so how do we create messages both internally to teams and externally to clients that engage them, get them to act, whether that's a purchase post, share word of mouth, and we have identified neurologic signals that are very accurate at allowing us to predict whether messages are effective or not. And recently we rolled out wearable wireless sensors, worn on the forearm in which we can pick up this data coming out of the brain and see in real time how effective a message or an experience is at really engaging people both intentionally, but also emotionally. Do you care about this thing or not? So very exciting, we just released this in January and now working with companies ranging from movie studios and TV producers to large management consulting companies to increase the effectiveness of messaging, of training, of education and just making overall experiences great. So that's what we really want. We live in the experience economy now and so if we want to create great experiences both for our employees but also for our clients, we've got to have measurement tools, otherwise we're just counting on our fallible intuition. So anyway, we're real excited about rolling out these wireless sensors so people can contact me and find out more.
That's great. So the wireless sensors you're working on helping organizations, use those to test with their customers or potential clients? How does that work?
Both, yeah, with clients we are doing a lot of work on effective messaging, but doing a lot of live events, corporate training events, everything from onboarding recently did some work to help company with employee recruiting. So how do I get people to actually apply for my jobs at my company? And then really on communication in general. So how do we create an effective narrative that tells our company's story or purpose narrative and our narrative to customers, but lots of work in advertising. And I worked on movie trailers, you know, it's amazing at this age and time we live in that a movie studio will spend 100 million or more producing a movie and then you know, they look at some trailers and they go, ah, I like, I liked number one and number seven, let's release that. There's no science there, you know, so it's really blending the art and the science, the art of creation. We can't do that. But from a testing perspective we can get better than just intuition. So that's what we're getting to - having a real tool and doing it in real time was hard. Gosh, was that hard, a lot of signal processing has to go on and cloud computing. So anyway, as you can tell, I'm really excited about having a real time neurosensor that is predictive of what people will do.
Very fascinating. Yeah. We are lucky to have all these breakthroughs and ability in technology that allows us to so quickly be able to gather this and use it for good. Right? Absolutely. Yep. Well thank you. So any last words from you? Any specific tips that we didn't cover or anything that you think is really important for leaders to understand as they focus on building trust and transparency with their team.
Thank you. Yeah, it's been great to be on with you. I think really understanding that in the world we live in today with really looming labor shortages and a real need to keep the highest performers in your organization, it's the human factors that matter. Vulnerability also means letting your emotions show, being honest, really being a human. I think when you let your humanity show you also absorb the humanity of those people around you and that's what we really want when we work in teams and when we're stretched and we work hard. Human beings are fascinating species I've discovered in my experiments, so really being a great leader means being fully human, accepting your humanity, accepting emotions and letting them show and making mistakes. No one's perfect. We all make mistakes and owning those mistakes too, so no need to be perfect and no-one is a little god at work. As long as we're trying our best and we'll make some progress, it's all good.
That's great. Yeah. Take that stress off of trying to be perfect or thinking you are because like you said, you get more out of people when you're not and you're honest about that. That's great. I really appreciate that. Well, thank you so much for sharing this and I hope to have you back as you start doing more work on the neuroscience of persuasion and we get to learn a little bit more about what you're learning and how leaders can use this as well. So thank you and I hope you have an amazing week. Thanks so much Jill.
Closing
I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great ideas build high performing teams. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.
Get in touch with Paul: Paul's Website
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Do you and your team want to get better at making decisions that are not status quo? Would you like your team to take the right risks and encourage a culture that learns from success and failure? Did you know that being too results oriented can get in the way of making the highest equity decisions? If so, this is the podcast for you. Annie Duke, professional speaker and Decision Strategist, will share her research and help you learn how to create a process that helps you make better decisions, while encouraging learning and risk taking. She helps people have uncertainty with confidence.Annie Duke is a woman who has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making to excel at pursuits as varied as championship poker to public speaking. For two decades, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2004, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded the National Science Foundation Fellowship. Because of this fellowship, she studied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Well, Annie, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, really looking forward to hearing about some of the work that you're going and starting to think about now around resulting and how it gets in the way of learning. That's what your last book was really about, and also to the ways that we make decisions more defensively that can impact our productivity, something that is near and dear to the hearts of any leaders.
Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here.
Great. Well, tell us first what does resulting mean?
Yeah, so resulting is really something that I take a deep dive on in my book in terms of how it gets in the way of learning, and basically resulting is when we make too tight a connection between the quality of an outcome and the quality of the decision that preceded it. The issue is really we have an outcome, we have the way that the future turned out and that future can end up that way for a variety of reasons, and trying to work backward from the outcome to the quality of the decision that preceded it is really hard because these things are relatively loosely correlated. So, to get this into a concrete example that I think that people will be able to feel pretty deeply and I think that it really gets people to understand what resulting is, I want to take us back to the 2015 Super Bowl where the Seahawks are on the 1-yard line of the New England Patriots.
It's second down, there's one timeout left and the Seahawks are down by four with only 26 seconds left in the whole game. So, this is obviously a super important movement because if Pete Carroll can call a play that gets a touchdown, obviously they're down by four, that's gonna put them up by two. Let's assume they make the field goal, but even if they don't they're up by two and it's very unlikely that the Patriots are gonna have any time to get all the way down the field to score again so this is for the game. So, if they can score here this is gonna win them the game. So, with 26 seconds left they've got a running back, they're only on the 1-yard line, remember. They've got a running back named Marshawn Lynch who's an amazing short yardage running back and everybody's kind of expecting Pete Carroll to call a hand off so that Marshawn Lynch can just sort of barrel through, hopefully, the defensive line of the Patriots.
Instead, Pete Carroll does something super unexpected which is he calls for a pass play. So, Russell Wilson, the quarterback of the Seahawks, passes the ball and the New England Patriot's Malcolm Butler intercepts the ball in the end zone. So, let's agree this is a really, really disastrous result. This is a very, very bad outcome quality. So, obviously the Seahawks lose the game there and when you listen to the in game call, in other words the announcers, Chris Collinsworth, he's really pretty brutal about the whole thing, really saying he can't believe this call, this is the worst call that he's ever seen. Then when you look at the headlines the next day for most of the pundits who are doing a nice job here of Monday morning quarterbacking, they are not disagreeing.
So, it's a lot of this is the most horrible call in Super Bowl history repeated throughout all the headlines and then actually USA Today managed to say it was the worst call in football history period. Now, when Pete Carroll was actually asked about this on the Today Show, what he said was that he would agree that it was the worst result of a call ever, and I think that that's a really important distinction. So, what we know is that the result of this call was terrible but does that actually mean that the call itself was terrible? The answer is not necessarily. We'd have to go back and we'd have to really look at the mathematics of that call. Just super quickly, the chances of an interception there are somewhere between 1% and 2%.
So, once you know that fact that 99% of the time either the ball's gonna be caught for a touchdown or it's just gonna be dropped, which will stop the clock and allow them to go for another play, once you know that fact of what's the interception rate there I think we can agree that probably declaring it to be the worst call in the history of football is probably a little bit of an over exaggeration. I think that we can see how much the quality of the outcome, which was so bad, is yanking us around in our ability to see through to what the quality of the decision is and we can do that pretty easily by just imagining this.
Imagine that he calls the pass play and the ball is actually caught for a touchdown in the end zone, and I do this in front of audiences all the time. I ask them to actually just close their eyes and imagine this, and everybody can feel it immediately. What are the headlines gonna look like the next day? Everybody just says immediately it's brilliant, it was one of the most brilliant calls in football history, and we can actually see this because Philadelphia this year actually called a similarly unusual play but in this case it worked out and everybody hailed the coach of the Eagles, Doug Pederson, to be a genius. So, there's clearly something weird going on here, right?
You have the decision. The decision's the decision regardless of which future happens to occur. There's a variety of futures that can occur, and yet we can feel it very deeply that when the outcome is really bad we think the decision is really back, and when the outcome is really good we immediately think that the decision is really good, and yet based on one time that shouldn't actually affect in reality what we think about that decision, and that's just because in life the quality of an outcome and the quality of the decision are only loosely correlated. I can give you a super example. I've run a red light in my life, not gotten a ticket. I haven't gotten in an accident. I'm not trying to re-do that. I don't think that that was a good decision because the outcome happened to be good. You can see how this is a really big problem for learning.
So, what I've been thinking about recently is how is this a problem when we're results oriented? This is a very common thing that people say, we're results oriented. So, I've been thinking about that because we have this problem which is well what do you mean by results? Because clearly you can see what happened with the Seahawks, that people said oh here's this result and I'm gonna make this results oriented decision and what ends up happening is that Pete Carroll is getting excoriated for a decision that was actually mathematically pretty good. By the way, if anybody wants to geek out on it they can go look at Benjamin Morris on 538 to see some really good analysis of the play.
But, now what I've been thinking about is well what does that do to people's decision making if they know that they're gonna be evaluated based on the result? If they know that what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a collective outcry about the quality of the decision if you have a bad result? And, what are you doing to people in that situation? What I've been realizing is you really force people into a very defensive crouch when they're making decisions. In other words, you're gonna get it so that they're not making necessarily decisions that are going to create the biggest value. They're going to make decisions that are going to defend against being judged for a bad outcome.
So, if we go back to the Pete Carroll situation, I can give you an example of how this might happen and then we can take a deeper dive. If you go look at Benjamin Morris, there's a very good argument that the highest return play is the pass, and obviously Pete Carroll felt that way. He felt like the highest return play was gonna be a pass. Now, the lower return play would be a hand off to Marshawn Lynch. This also happens to be the status quo play. It also happens to be the expected play. This is what everybody expected him to do, but it's actually a lower return. You can imagine that if a coach knows that when you do this unexpected thing when you do the pass play, which happens to be higher return, that if it doesn't work out you're gonna be yelled at, then you can imagine that as a defensive maneuver they might just hand it off to Marshawn Lynch. Why? Well we can do that thought experiment as well.
Let's imagine that you hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch and Marshawn Lynch just happens to fail to score. What do the headlines look like the next day? I've done this thought experiment with people that I work with and they all say the same thing, oh the Patriots were too good. So, now they're not blaming Pete Carroll's decision making anymore because it's just the status quo choice, but it happens to be a lower equity choice. It has a lower return. It's just that it happens to be a choice that defends against people yelling at you for the choice because it's a choice that's more agreed upon. People have talked for a long time about how in the NFL they've been very, very slow to come around to these more creative fourth down plays like going for it on fourth down, for example, and if you wanna know why even though the math has been out there, I think that this problem with defensive decision making is really what tells you what it is.
If a coach whose job is on the line knows that they're gonna be evaluated on the result of one play or one game or one season where you don't have enough data to really say anything about what the decision process is, that they're gonna be just evaluated solely on their short term result then what are they gonna do? They're gonna make decisions that defend against being evaluated on those short term results. In other words, they're gonna stick with the status quo.
Which is definitely not something that you want when you're looking at innovation, trying to compete or beat your competition, right?
Well, yeah, so what you're really trying to encourage in the people that work with you is you want them to be trying to find out what the truth of the matter is, what it is that can be learned from outcomes good or bad, what innovations might be there to be had. You're asking them to figure out what the highest return decision is gonna be. What you don't want them to do is figure out what the decision is the least likely to incur somebody's wrath is gonna be, and there's all sorts of ways in which you, through evaluating people on short term results, you can force them into defensive crouches and that defensive crouch can exhibit itself in a variety of ways. So, one of the ways, and this relates back to what we were just talking about, is that people will very often try to make a decision such that if there's a bad outcome it is a reasonable explanation. It appears reasonable that it could be due to luck. In other words, to factors that are outside of the person's control.
Here's a simple example that's not from business and then we can talk about how this might manifest itself in a business situation, but I think that this will help people to see very clearly where the problem comes from, and this example comes from Kevin Zollman, who's a game theorist actually at Carnegie Mellon. Let's say that you as a leader offer somebody a plate that has two cookies on it and one of the cookies is very big and one of the cookies is small, and the person feels this, that they know if you choose the really big cookie that they will be judged by the leader for being greedy, for being super greedy and a pig. And, if they choose the small cookie they're gonna be judged as a ridiculous virtue signaler. So, no one situation. If the outcome is I've chosen the big cookie, then I'm gonna be judged for that. If the outcome is I've chosen a small cookies, then I will be judged for that. So, the solution there is for them to flip a coin. If you flip a coin, now notice that the judgment goes away.
Why is the judgment going away there? Well, it wasn't in my control. I know I ended up with the big cookie, but you can't say that I was a pig because I flipped a coin. That's how I ended up with the big cookie. Or, I know I ended up with the small cookie and you can't say that I'm a ridiculous virtue signaler because how could I have controlled it? I flipped a coin. There was nothing I could do. So, this is one of the ways that people will get into a defensive crouch. So, they're not choosing the cookies based on what their values are or what they think the best result for them is or what they think the best result for you is. Instead they're just sort of deflecting and saying well let me pick up a coin and I'm just gonna leave it to chance. Obviously this is not something that you want to have happen.
There's different ways that you can do this, by the way, that don't involve coin flipping. Let me ask you this, have you ever been in a situation where say someone that you're on a date with is trying to figure out what restaurant to go to and you insist that they choose?
Yes.
Right, so why are you doing that? Well, because then it's not on you if it's not a good experience.
Exactly.
Shouldn't you be choosing? It's very rare that you don't actually have a preference. You're not going in and examining what your preference is and balancing that with what you think their preferences might be and trying to come up with the most rational choice for the both of you, which is gonna balance out both of your happiness. Instead, you essentially pick up a coin to flip by saying no, no, no, you choose.
Yeah, happens a lot.
That could take the responsibility off of you and you can see how that happens in the workplace a lot, that sort of you choose. No, you choose. It's your decision. We're offloading decisions and we're not really thinking clearly about what our own preferences are, what we think is gonna balance out to everybody's preferences in the room because by saying you choose now whatever the result is it's like well it's not on me, I didn't choose. Notice that saying you choose is a choice in itself. It's interesting because obviously picking up the coin and choosing to flip is still a choice in itself, we just don't think about that because we're just like oh, okay, now luck is a reasonable explanation so we're gonna go with that. And we can see this in the Pete Carroll example which is why is it that as the collective public we feel so much better if he fails by handing the ball off and having the run play happen? Which remember, that's the lower return play. It's mathematically not as good a play.
So, why is it that we feel so much better about that? Why is it that if he had made that decision we would all be like poor Pete Carroll, nothing he could do? And the reason is that that choice of hanging the ball off is the consensus choice. It has a tremendous amount of consensus around it just like not going through red lights has a lot of consensus around it. It's a decision that people, they've already made an evaluation of whether it's a good decision or a bad decision, it's just the status quo choice and when you have a status quo choice, people say well clearly that's a good choice because that's been agreed to as part of the collective wisdom, and so therefore if there's a bad outcome from it it must just be due to luck because that clearly was the best choice because we've all agreed to it.
This is the first thing that we see happen when we put people into a defensive crouch is that they tend to go with status quo choices. They tend to go with what the legacy choice is and not poke around to see if there's a better way because if they go with the legacy choice and it doesn't happen to work out, well there's already consensus around that. So, they know that people are gonna shrug and say well what could you do? Because this is the way it's always been done, but what you really want from the people that you're working with is the willingness to poke around, to push the boundaries, to see if there isn't a better way. This is how progress gets made, and this is certainly how we defend against people coming in who are creative, people coming in who are trying different things. If we continue with the status quo then what happens is we obviously get caught unprepared for when there are big changes and we're not pushing the boundaries and we're not moving things forward. We're not really looking around for that pass play anymore.
So, what is it that a leader can do personally to look at their own decisions and test to make sure that they're not just going for status quo and that we're really making a decision that is the best decision?
I think there's a variety of ways to do that, and I think this actually ties back in to how do you get the people that you're working with to not be in these defensive crouches and defending against bad decisions? I think that these are tied together because what you want to be doing is always examining to try to make sure that you have the best process going as opposed to really signaling that you're results oriented. So, how can you do that? There's a few ways that you can do this. Let's say that an outcome has already happened. So, way number one is to really work with the group when somebody is coming in to try to do the post mortem on an outcome, to have it look more like they're doing it before the outcome occurred to try to reinforce that there's a very lose relationship between outcome quality and decision quality. So, how can you do that? Well, when you're describing a decision to people or when anybody is coming in and describing a decision and asking for advice from a group that you're working with in order to try to figure out whether you would want to repeat that decision or what parts of the decision might be due to luck or what might be due to skill, have them describe the decision that they were struggling with only to the point that they need help.
So, in other words, if you're in sales describe what the relationship is with the person that you were negotiating with. Obviously in this particular case you know what the product is because you're in the same group with the people, so really work with this is what I knew about the person that I was negotiating with, this is what my past experiences with them had been, this is what my goals were in the negotiations so I went in and we're negotiating and we get to this point where he says X and I needed to know what to respond there, and then stop. Our tendency is to want to tell the rest of the story. Our tendency is to want to say and so I did this so this was my choice, and then this was his response, and then so on and so forth. Notice what you've done there is you've let the person know first of all what your choice is, which you don't want to because they're gonna try to in general, the first thing is you don't want to let them know your choice, particularly as a leader because they'll try to make your choice make sense.
So, you've now infected them with a bias which is they're gonna try to attempt to make your choice make sense because that's the sort of thing that you do when you're in a room with someone who's in a leadership role. But then once you've actually told them what the response was of the other person, let's say that the response of the other person was good, now we're in the Pete Carroll problem. They're gonna try to make the good response make sense. So, they're gonna talk about your decision as if it were a good decision because you got a good response from the person that you were negotiating with. If the response of the person was bad, then they're now gonna try to figure out what was wrong with your decision.
It's gonna change the way that they view what you actually decided to do. What you want to do is essentially quarantine all of that off from the group and really describe the decision problem up until the point that you have to make a choice and no further, and then start to elicit advice from people in the room. What you're doing is essentially you're getting them to think about the problem as a prospective decision as opposed to a retrospective analysis. That's one thing that you can do. Now, sometimes the decision is already known. In that case, you have to be asking really good questions. So, if everybody in the group already knows what the outcome was, the outcome is already known, the result is already known, what you can do is say okay, we know that the outcome was say bad so you've told me all of the reasons why you think that this was a bad decision because the outcome was bad, but now I want everybody to really argue the other side.
How are we gonna do that? So, let's go back through this decision and imagine it was a good result. Why do we think we would have gotten a good result from this decision? So, now you're just asking them to do what's called a counter factual, which is imagine that things had been different. So, just say I get that the ball was intercepted but let's imagine that the ball was caught for a touchdown. Now, let's go back and analyze that decision in light of the ball being caught for a touchdown and just see what happens there. So, notice that you're allowing for the fact that there were many different futures that could occur. One future happened to occur, but let's think about what would have happened if other things had happened and get people to really start working with that, and what will happen is that they'll start to focus more on the good parts of the decision.
You can actually query particular things. Okay, this is all great so what do we think was due to luck, though? We know that some stuff was due to luck. Let's try to identify what the things were that were due to luck. What do we really think was due to the decision quality? So, that's another thing that you can do with a group. Another exercise that you can do with the group is to divide the group into two and with one group go and tell them the decision, so this would be if the outcome is not known by the group, with one group go sequester them off. Do break out groups. You've got two breakout groups. One group you actually describe the decision and you give it a good outcome.
In the other room, you describe the decision and you give it a bad outcome and now you have the groups come together and discuss their analysis of the decision so that you can get them to see how much the outcome quality is really affecting the decision quality, and now you can interprelate between the two analytics processes to try to get down into the truth. Now, what this does is it helps you with two problems at once. It's a little killing two birds with one stone. It's certainly helping you analyzing your decision process. So, it's helping you with that retrospective problem of you have an outcome you're trying to figure out whether a decision was good. How do we now get people to give us good advice on the decision quality?
So, that's certainly helpful and that's gonna help your process more because you're gonna be better at identifying the luck elements and the skill elements, but what it's also doing is it's signaling to the whole team that you're interested in process, that you're not so interested in the way that things turn out. You're really interested in whether the decision itself was a good one, and that's what you care about and that you're gonna be poking around at whether something was status quo or not. You're gonna be poking around at what was luck, what was skill, what could we have done better? How do we think that we could have improved this? You aren't that kind of results oriented leader, at least not when we mean results in the short run based on just a few outcomes.
When you start signaling that you want to poke around into the decision process and that the quality of the outcome is not so important to you because you trust that good quality outcomes will come from good quality decisions, what you've done is you've freed that group up. You've sent a really big signal to them that what you care about is really pushing the boundaries of what a good decision looks like.
That's a great example. I can see how that could really not only impact the decisions you're making in that group, but to your point earlier you're gonna change the culture and you're gonna change people's actions by showing what you reward.
Yes, exactly. Here's another way that you can signal this. In a room, if you create a really good scenario plan which involves here's the decision under consideration. This is what we're thinking about. Let's identify what we think the possible outcomes of this decision are. So, let's take a super simple example. So, I actually did this with a nonprofit that I work with called After School All-Stars. They are involved in a lot of grant writing. There's a very simple example of how you can do this and how you can do scenario planning. Obviously when they write a grant, let's simplify this to there's two outcomes. They either get the grant or they don't. What they had done before was there was some award amount for the grant. Let's say they were applying for a $20,000 grant or a $100,000 grant and they just had a list.
Here are the grants we applied for, here are the grants under consideration that we're thinking about applying for, and here are all the award amounts. So, the status quo, the way that they dealt with this situation before was that naturally they wrote the bigger grants first and they prioritized those and if they were gonna hire an outside grant writer, they would tend to hire it obviously for the biggest award amounts and then they would go down the stack. So, that was just the status quo way that they did that. Then, they judged how things went by whether they got the grant or they didn't, so that sounds like a pretty natural process but this creates this problem of resulting. We're really just looking at what's the result of the end point of the grant process.
So, when I went in I said what I'd really like you to do is really think about these grants in terms of expected value, which just means let's think about our decision making process in terms of we have the award amount of the grant, say $100,000. Don't think about that grant as $100,000 grant. Think about that grant as what percentage of the time do you think you'll get it multiplied by the potential award. If you think you're gonna get that grant 80% of the time and the potential award is $100,000 then that grant is worth $80,000 because you're gonna get it 80% of the time that you're applying over time to $100,000 grant. If you think that that grant you're gonna get 20% of the time, then that grant is worth $20,000 in the long run.
I said I want you to walk through all of your grants and I want you to take a stab at what the expected value is, what the percentage is. Now, they said to me well how are we supposed to know what the percentage is? I said well, you know better than anybody else does because you've been writing grants for a long time and you've dealt with grants like this before and so go and try to do your best. Just take a stab at it. Now, what's important about the willingness to take a stab at it is let's say that you take a guess at it and you say I'm gonna say 60% because I think we're gonna get it somewhere between 40 and 80% and the sort of mid range of that is 60, and what I say to them is well that's better than defaulting to I don't know, it's just worth $100,000 so at least you're taking a stab at it, and in taking a stab at it, what you're thinking about is how well does this grant fit? What has my track record been in terms of the grant writing process? What kind of things are out of my control?
What are likely just gonna be due to luck? What are likely gonna be due to the kinds of things that we do? You're actually going to be thinking about the skill and luck elements of getting that grant, but now what I did was I had them go through and did that. Now they had a percentage of the time that they took a stab at that, a percentage of the time that they thought that they might get the award, and now they multiplied that by the grant awards. Not only does that get you thinking about really what are my chances at the grant? But, notice it changes your work stack now. So, you've upended the status quo a little bit because before they would have paid much more attention to a $100,000 grant than a $50,000 award amount just because that's what they would have done.
They would have said well the $100,000 one is worth more. Look, it's $100,000 but now what I revealed to them is that sometimes that's not the case because if you have say a $50,000 grant that you think you're gonna get 80% of the time, that is worth $40,000, and if you have $100,000 grant that you think you're gonna get 20% of the time, that is actually worth $20,000 in the long run. So, notice what you figured out is that the $50,000 grant is actually the more valuable grant to you because you're gonna get it more often so that means you really want to make sure that you're getting that one done. So, the first thing it does is actually gets you to restack your work.
The second thing it does is it gets you thinking well what can I do in order to improve the probability that I'm gonna get this grant? So, if it's a lower probability grant you're actually thinking really clearly about what can I do to push the probability out? It also allows you to see when it's worth it to hire an outside grant writer because if you say well I think an outside grant writer is gonna increase the probability that we get the grant by X, you can actually look at that, figure out how many hours, so let's say you think it's gonna increase it enough such that the grant is worth $5,000 more, what you can do is you can say well is the outside grant writer gonna cost me less than that? And as long as the outside grant writer is gonna cost you less than that, then it would be worth it to hire the outside grant writer so it tells you when you should be hiring independent contractors, for example.
But, then also what happens is that now whether you get the grant or not, you're not going back and blaming anybody because it's now in the stack. What you've said, if you say I think I'm gonna get the grant 20% of the time, what you're recognizing in advance is that 80% of the time you will not get the grant, and that has been agreed upon in the room through a process, through a memorialized scenario plan such that nobody's pointing a finger saying that's your fault that we didn't get the grant. Instead, people are saying okay, well, we didn't get the grant. That was one of the outcomes. We recognized that in advance. What we cared about was the process in the writing of the grant and how we stacked our work, so now let's just take that to make sure that we call up.
So, what you do now is because you're so focused on refining the estimates of how often you think you're gonna get the grant, you call the foundations both where you don't get the grant, which would be our natural tendency is just to call up and say why didn't I get it? But you also call up the foundations where you did because you're gonna be querying on particular things like well how much luck was involved? How much was it because I wrote the grant? Were these things that I could have done better that would have even increased even more the probability that I got the grant? And you're actually querying the awards when you actually get it versus when you're denied also.
So, you're querying on both sides because you're focused on process now. And, you can see all these really nice signals that it sends to the team there.
That's a great example. Nice process and then also, like you said, the reinforced learning on what did work and maybe what was missing from a learning perspective.
And notice that it helps you to not, what we don't want as an organization, not only do we not wanna be defensive in our prospective decision process, which is I'm just gonna stick with the status quo, but we also retrospectively once we have outcomes occur, we don't wanna be reactive. We really don't want to overreact to something. So, there are two disasters that can happen. One is that you have a result that's mainly due to luck and you start mucking around with your decision process because you're overreacting to the quality of the outcomes, so you have some bad outcome that's just mainly due to luck and now you start changing your decisions just because they outcome was bad so you feel like you need to do something.
And, then it also stops you from reinforcing decisions that shouldn't be reinforced, in other words good outcomes that are mainly due to luck where you start reinforcing those decisions when actually it was due to luck. Sports is such a great place to see this. There's a really great study that was just done. People can find it if they look on Behavioral Scientist is where it was reported, where somebody looked at NBA teams and what happened when there was a very close win versus a very close loss. So, let's take the example of an NBA team wins by one point or loses by one point. When there's a one point win or loss, let's assume that the quality of the decision making that led up to the one point win is probably, I think we should just make an assumption no different on average than the quality of the decision making that leads up to a one point loss.
I mean, that's clearly within the margin of error. A one point win or one point loss, it's like did the last team get their shot off? What happened with the shot clock? Who had the last possession? These are gonna be things that are gonna be relatively out of your control, and yet what they found was that line up changes occurred much more often after a one point loss than a one point win. So, in other words when the team won by one point they tended not to be changing the decision process that led to that one point win. They're not really changing the lineup at all. But, when the team lost by one point then they were going in and reacting to that and changing the lineup, and that is not what you want in your business.
You do not want to be changing your lineup all of the sudden when you have a one point loss and not changing it with a one point win. You want as much as possible to react to those same events identically.
That's a great point, great example. I agree on the sports analogy, too. I can really see that. How have you applied it to yourself?
So, let me first of all say that these biases that we have around results, these biases that we have around outcomes, like any bias, whether it's confirmation bias or availability bias or hindsight bias, any of the biases that we have are very, very built into the way that our brains work. So, I just want to say I do apply this to my own life but I'm bad at it. And I want to say that really clearly because I think that once we are aware that these biases exist, we can actually be very judgmental of ourselves when we fail to avoid them. So, one of the things that we need to recognize for ourselves in that they're hard to avoid because I can't look at the color red and not see red. I can't just say oh, I know that there's particular wavelengths and my brain happens to be perceiving that that is red so now I'm just gonna have that not happen.
The biases are very similar to that as well, that while we might know, for example, that confirmation bias exists or resulting exists, that doesn't mean that just knowing it is gonna make us stop doing it and as much as we try to put processes in place I think we need to recognize that we will still be falling prey to that on a regular basis. Otherwise I think that we can get into a stance that is not particularly compassionate to ourselves or the people around us as we hold ourselves to a higher standard than is actually realistic given the way that our brains our built. So, I want to be very clear about that, that I do very poorly at this, but that being said I do better than I would have if I didn't know that these kind of things existed and if I hadn't set up guardrails in order to help me to do this less.
The good news is that like compounding interest, small changes make big differences in the long run. If you can cause people to be defensive less, if you can fall prey yourself less to, say, confirmation bias, if you can be more process oriented and less outcome oriented less, those things will have very big returns over the long run. So, I just want to say that first.
So, in my own life, one of the ways that I've really gotten to be able to change these kinds of processes for myself is that I've really trained myself and worked with other people to enforce this within myself, so a lot of this, notice that what we were talking about is how the group is behaving. Obviously you're creating culture as a leader, but you're reinforcing this as a group that I've really set up where the people around me are holding me accountable to these kinds of processes and I am trying to think and express myself in a more probabilistic way, and I think that that's probably the biggest thing that I've done in my own life that has helped me to be a little bit better at this kind of stuff.
So, let me give you an example. If I were to express to you some sort of opinion or prediction that I had and you were talking to me, you would notice this thing that I do which is I try to actually assign a percentage to it. So, when I was working with the nonprofit, After School All Stars, and I was getting them to assign a percentage to the chances that they thought that they would get the grant. I actually do that in my personal life. So, here's an example. If you asked me if I could go to dinner on Friday, I might say to you I'm 80%. So, I'm not saying yes or no. I'm giving you some sense of probabilistically how likely I think that that is to occur. So, here would be another one as far as expressing something in my own life. So, there's a lot of talk right now about whether say the Democrats are gonna win the house, and what I hear from pundits on TV is they seem to be either in the yes or no camp, but if I were talking to you about it I would say well, at the moment Democrats are pulling way ahead, but November is still a very long way away and a lot of things can intervene between now and November.
I'm not enough of an expert to understand how the districts are drawn to know how I'm supposed to translate necessarily that the Democrats are say plus six in the generic vote. So, if I had to say do I think that the Democrats are gonna win the House, I would say 65% of the time. Now, that's not my actual prediction. I'm just throwing that out right now to make it clear, but I do that about things like that and then I also would do that about belief, for example. There's different ways that I might express uncertainty about a belief. I might give you a percentage, I might give you a range. So, I might say to you Elvis was somewhere between 40 and 47 when he died.
So, notice I'm giving you a range, I'm not giving you an exact number there but that builds my uncertainty into it. It tells you how certain I am of that belief. I might say I think Citizen Kane won best picture, but I'm like 63% on that. I'm always trying to think how sure am I? What's my level of certainty or uncertainty is a better way to put it around this belief or prediction that I have? The reason why I think that's just super helpful in terms of overcoming this is that first of all I'm wrapping in on the front end the possibility that the thing that I believe is not true or the thing that I'm predicting will not happen so that when it doesn't happen, I don't consider that a bad outcome. I consider that an outcome that I had already expressed so it's neither bad nor good. It's just one of the possible things that could happen.
The other thing I think it does for me that's really, really valuable is that it's constantly reminding me that my beliefs are under construction, that they're in progress, that they're not logged so much as true or false but as probabilistically open and that what my goal is is not so much to confirm the things that I already believe, which would be engaging in confirmation bias and to have my view of the world be correct, but rather to always be trying to refine these percentages. So, in the same way that once you're putting a number on the chances that you think you're going to get a grant, what that does is now it causes you to be really, really hungry for information where you're trying to figure out well, what are the factors that will help me figure out what this percentage is so that I can be better at that?
Once I get the grant or don't get the grant, I've gotta circle back and find out what I did well, what I didn't do well, what I could do better. How much luck was involved? So that the next time that I try to put a percentage on this that I'm more accurate. So, by expressing myself this way, I keep myself in the zone less of I know this to be true or I know this to be false and more this belief is under construction, it's in progress, and so therefore I wanna be really open minded to all the information that pertains to this belief that's out there. I wanna think about why I might be wrong. I wanna find out what other people know that I don't know, what other people's opinions are so that I can then wrap that in to become better and refine those percentages more so that I can start approaching a more accurate representation of what the objective truth is as opposed to just reinforcing the things that I already believe.
I think that that way that I talk about things does actually help me. I think it does help me to incorporate other people's opinions a little bit more. I think it does push me toward open mindedness and the people around me enforce that. They really help to hold me accountable to that because they know that this is a goal of mine and I've expressed that to them. So, sometimes if I do express something with certainty, somebody around me who's in on it, because not everybody is, but the people who are in on it who are around me will say to me well, how sure are you? How often do you think that's gonna happen? They'll actually remind me that I'm supposed to be expressing probability when I say that.
That's great. Telling people where you're focusing on and having them give you reinforcement is extremely powerful for learning. So, Annie, this has been wonderful. So, helping us understand resultancy and really thinking about it from a perspective of as leaders in business we want to get results. Of course you want to get results, but when we're so focused on results we can get people to take that status quo decision, the decision that might seem safer so we're not being judged, but what we miss out is a great process and a way to really think through the best decision, think about criteria for that, and really get some consensus from a team perspective.
Right, exactly. And actually, I'm really happy that you used that word consensus because I do think that one of the things that we have to be careful of, and I do think this comes through this idea of creating these processes, particularly I think really valuable is that the two breakout groups where one group is told that the outcome is good and one group is told that the outcome was bad and you then see what comes out of that, because what you want to be really careful of is creating false consensus. What is the thing about consultants? They never tell you to eliminate the department that hired them. So, consultants are a way that you can create false consensus.
Let's say that there isn't a status quo decision that's already agreed upon, that there's no red light, green light situation, and you're trying to work through a decision. One of the ways to create false status quo is hiring outside consultants are used this way a lot where they'll come in and just reinforce what the person who hired them wants to do, and so that's creating false consensus. Well, they agreed with me so therefore we can move through with this or to push the team toward consensus.
So, here's an example of a way to get false consensus is let's say that you have four people interview a job candidate. If you have them all discuss it in the room with each other, you will get false consensus around a candidate. So, it's whoever expresses a strong opinion first, the other people are gonna tend to coalesce around whoever expressed that strong opinion first as opposed to offering up with what their real views are. Now you have some false consensus toward the decision. So, what would be a good decision process there, the same thing is quarantine. So, have each of the four people write a report on how they view that candidate before they get to talk to each other because once they get to talk to each other, you might as well not have had four people interview the candidate.
So, that is one thing that I do wanna stick a pin in is just be careful of false consensus because that's a different way to get to status quo.
Yeah, that group think.
Yes, exactly.
Well, thank you so much. Is there any other last tip to share or how about this? What is one thing that they can take away and put into action after they listen to this call? One small thing?
Yeah, I think that the main thing that's really easy to implement is to start trying to express uncertainty in the way that you speak. Now, that doesn't mean, I don't think that you're supposed to go around being like well I don't know. I don't know, you choose. Notice if I say something like I think that it's 65% that the Democrats are gonna take the House in November, I can express that with a tremendous amount of confidence and it's actually feels very good and believable to the people who are listening to you because by saying that I think that it's 65% that the Democrats are gonna take the House, I've signaled a whole bunch of stuff to you, that I've thought about it, that I'm bold enough to actually assign a number to it, that I'm willing to say that I've thought about this enough that I will put a percentage on this.
I think that you can express a lot of confidence in expressing uncertainty as long as you express uncertainty in the right way. I think it can make you be a much more believable communicator by saying I'm 65% that this will happen, I actually invite you to share your information with me because you know that when you do that we're not gonna be in a fight. If all I say in the Democrats are gonna take the House in November, if you disagree with me you may not open your mouth for fear that we will be in a fight because we disagree. But, if I say it's 65%, now I'm opened the door for you to do that so you're now gonna share helpful information with me, which is actually really important to my process.
If I'm a leader, I want people to feel free to express their concerns or their contrary opinions in the room. It's really important to process, so this is literally one of the simplest things you can do is just start trying to talk this way. Start thinking when you say I think that this is the candidate we should hire, instead of saying that, say and my level of certainty around that opinion is 77%. If that's all that you do, you will change the culture of your workplace, of your team in a way that's very positive.
Well, again, thank you so much for coming. I've really enjoyed your topic. I'll be very interested in hearing about your next book and as you start really thinking through more about some of these decisions and how we can become more effective as leaders, leading organizations, leading our teams and helping people have uncertainty with confidence.
Oh, I love that. Can I use that? That's a great turn of phrase. I would like to be able to use that. I will credit you.
Okay, you can have it!
Thank you.
Thank you.
CLOSING:
I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great ideas to start making smarter decisions. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.
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If your interested in making better decisions, solving problems, getting the best out of yourself and your team and managing your time more effectively, this is the podcast for you.
My guest, Jason Howlett is the Co-founder and change agent @ Manpremo. Jason’s passion is helping people develop, with the purpose of increasing well-being and actualising potential.
Jason uses applied science (neuroscience, psychology and physiology), combined with data, to optimise brain performance and build change competency.
For the past 8 years, Jason has been working with organisations and their employees on programmes that develop Leadership and Talent; Well-being; Strategy Implementation; Mindset and behaviour change; Resilience/Grit in individuals and teams.
Before focusing his work on people, their mindset and behaviour, Jason worked in IT for 7 years.
Jason studied Applied Positive Psychology at the University of East London and has a degree in Computer Science from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Jason is a certified Personal Trainer and Lifestyle Coach.
Podcast Transcript:
Well thank you Jason, again, for joining us, and Jason's gonna share brain science and highlight what leaders can do to really maximize their personal leadership based on what we know about some of the science in the brain. He's done a lot of work with leaders over the last several years. So Jason, why don't you tell us what's important for our audience to know today.
Thank you Jill. I'm going to focus on looking at a data driven approach to increasing the performance of our brain for personal leadership. We're gonna focus on a subset of the brain functions. We'll look at what's commonly known as the cognitive or executive functions of the brain. These are things that help us to get things done, so they're critical for us being able to plan, to learn, the ability to solve problems, make decisions, and essentially to also control ourselves, to manage how we manage our impulses, but also our emotions.
These cognitive or executive functions are also crucial in us building competencies, whether that be leadership competencies or any other particular functional competencies that we wish to learn.
Now these functions are there to help us, but they are not there all the time. We do not have an infinite resource that fuels these functions. They depend on several factors being in place.
There's two key areas of these factors that we need to consider if we really want to have the cognitive part of our brain fully switched on. The first part is looking at the physical needs. The very basics, which we all know we need, which is sleep, rest, fuel, bio nutrition, and movement. So these things have been proven through neuro biological research to be key in switching the cognitive functions on. To give you an example, if we look at sleep, which is really the number one example from the physical needs, just by trying to maximize a good seven to eight hours of good quality sleep will increase our ability to learn by a minimum of 40 percent. It will also decrease the amount of stress we wake up with, which will decrease the amount of anger and fear that we have. But there are a whole host of other benefits that sleep provides. Because essentially, sleep is the number one factor to help us to learn and memorize things, but also to of course repair and restore the functions in the brain.
Another small example is movement. We know that movement's important for our heart and our lungs. But in terms of our brain, there's two key things that regular movement does. It first of all increases the circulation of blood to our brains, which brings more oxygen and nutrients to our brain. It also helps to increase neurotransmitters, which are important for the brain's function. But secondly, regular movement helps to increase factors that help the brain to develop and also become more plastic. In crude terms, you can say the brain is plastic, the brain can change. It's the term called neuroplasticity. But regular movement helps to increase this ability. This is key when looking at behavior change, or again, learning new things.
These are two examples of the physical needs, sleep and movement. But let's look at the other group of factors.
The other group of factors are our social needs, and these needs are also extremely important. They are things like feeling safe in the environment that we're in, feeling accepted, that we have a sense of belonging, that we have the recognition we need, but also a certain amount of autonomy, ability to have control over what we say and do.
These needs, both the physical needs and the social needs, are really crucial to have in place so that our cognitive brain is fully switched on. And essentially a lack of these needs causes the brain to trigger the threat response. This is really important, because when the threat response is triggered, i.e. what we commonly know as the stress response, something that causes us to want to fight or to flee or to freeze. This response puts the brain into a self preservation mode, so it no longer really cares about anyone else other than our own survival, and we become very reactive. The key thing here is that we don't just become reactive, but our cognitive functions that I mentioned before, like planning, learning, problem solving, decision making, they're offline. So the ability to control yourself is offline. So you will act much more under any sort of anger that you may feel, your ability to solve problems, make decisions, to plan, they're also offline. So you become much more primitive in how you behave and act when these needs are not met.
We can monitor these needs and actually simple ways. And today if I focus on the physical needs first, we can, by using simple wearables, but of course also medical grade devices, we can monitor the stress recovery balance in our body, which has a direct link to the functioning of our brain.
To keep it simple, there is a science of heart rate variability, and heart rate variability just means the variation in time between each beat of your heart. If I was to measure someone's heart rate now, and it came out to be 60 beats per minute, the assumption would be, well, there's 60 beats a minute and there's 60 seconds in a minute, so there must be one second between each beat. But the reality is this is very dependent on how activated or stressed you currently feel. For 60 beats per minute is quite a low recording, but what could actually be happening, because the heart rate is quite low at 60 beats, is that between the first beat and the second beat, maybe there is a second. But between the second and the third beat, there could be 0.8 of a second. Between the third and fourth, it could be 1.2 seconds.
The variation is very small. It's within milliseconds. That's not easy for us to measure ourself, but there are devices that you can very simply use, watches, bands, and also medical grade, electro based devices that can measure this heart rate variability. And essentially the lower the variability, the more stressed you are. So that means that using these devices, you can monitor what are the events, situations, or people that cause significant stress, and what are the events, situations with people that promote my recovery?
Because going back to the analogy before, when the brain is experiencing stress, the cognitive functions, like planning, solving problems, decision making, they are inhibited. So if we can learn, if we can trigger us self awareness on what is basically draining resources, we can help to better manage that. And this isn't about measuring yourself a life, it's just about triggering awareness.
To take that a step further, of course, this would involve regular reflection and for you to actually monitor the output from the watch or medical device you use. So what we've essentially done is built an app that takes all of the input from your wearable, and it also takes in input from your calendar, and it then notifies you over the week on what are the events, situations, that have caused you particular stress, and what are the events that have caused you particular recovery. Using this, you get a better stress recovery balance, and therefore you're better able to keep your brain switched on when you want it to be. I think that's an important point to make here, especially in leadership. You cannot be switched on all the time. I've worked with some people and organizations that even have in the signature always on, and the key thing is is that it's scientifically proven that the cognitive aspect, even if you're not stressed, cannot be always on. The brain goes through periods of what's called task positive and then task negative action.
You can think of the task positive like focused attention and the task negative like mind wandering. And it's very important that the brand can go through this cycle of focused attention and mind wandering.
I think the key message is that this is about triggering self awareness around, okay, what can help me to optimize my brain performance when I really need to be at my best, and the other things that I can do before I face a situation, like having to either sit down with my team and deliver a good or bad message. It's about when I've got conflict management, managing ambiguity, when I've got to influence people, any of these kind of key behaviors where you really want to be switched on, you know what you can do to prepare for that. But you also know what to do when things do get tough, when you do feel particularly stressed.
You have simple techniques, and we're going to go through some of those in a minute, that you can use to very quickly reduce the stress and increase recovery so that your cognitive functions come back online again. This is quite individual, hence why we use devices to really work out an issue, what works for who, because we do find a lot of people already think they know what helps them to relax, but when we measure them, their heart tells a very different story. For example, watching TV. It might feel relaxing, but it's actually a quite stressful, quite activating I should say for the brain, and especially not a good idea to do just before bed because of the way that it reduces the production of melatonin in the brain, and of course that being the key rest and recovery hormones, so your sleep quality is reduced.
But there's a whole host of different factors that people can learn about so that they know just the one or two key things to look out for and the one or two key things to practice. They can build a habit around it to to better manage the stress.
Thank you. Can you tell me, if we don't have one of those wearables on us, what are some things that we can notice that are happening that are giving us triggers, our body giving us triggers, that we might be in a stressful situation and need to self reflect a little bit?
Yes, a super question, Jill. Whenever we experience stress, the biological factors that will let us know, and that's why think it's also important that we don't become dependent on devices, but we learn that if we can tap into the fact that our heart rate is rising. Or maybe we don't notice the high rate, but we notice our breathing rate has increased. Or we feel suddenly our pulse. Literally, we become more aware of that in our head, because we suddenly realized tension in our head. Or sweaty hands. This kind of unease would be the easiest way to say it. Suddenly you feel that tension or unease. That's a great trigger to say, "Okay, let me pay attention to what's happening right now. Let me be more present with myself so I can face whatever it is. Whether it's external, being caused by the environment around me or the people around me, or whether it's my own thoughts or feelings inside." Does that make sense?
It does, yeah. I think that sometimes we just don't even realize it's happening, and later we might look, or we might even look at, are our fists clenched, or like you said, sweaty palms. Those are things that I think are important to notice, that that means your body's telling you if we want our cognitive to work effectively as leaders, that's not going to help us.
Yeah. It's a super point, and I think that's where time to reflect or a mindfulness space practice, somewhere where you train your brain's ability to have focused attention and to become more aware of what your triggers are or what are the causes of the different things that you're feeling, so essentially emotional awareness and emotional intelligence. This is a key factor in you reducing the time of what's called the amygdala hijack. Or essentially, keep it simple. Let's say someone says something to you that triggers you, and essentially it triggers the stress response. Your brain will launch this response in literally milliseconds. And it can take a little bit of time for your cognitive brain or your consciousness to become aware of the fact that now I'm stressed, now I realize that I'm clenching my fists or I have muscle tension up in my neck. It can take a little bit longer for that to become aware, maybe a second versus a split second.
It's a short time, but the process of having time to reflect, on mindfulness is a great way to build that awareness of the fact that something's happening, and then to use emotional regulation or a technique to work with the trigger of the stress.
Is there a mindfulness practice that if I'm in the moment and I'm noticing that maybe I'm getting ready for a presentation or getting ready to have a difficult conversation, what's something that I could do fairly quickly as a leader to get my physical back in line and those less stressed so I can think through the way I want to?
Yeah, that's a great question. It's quite individual, but what we've found to be the quickest way for most individuals to reduce stress and switch their cognitive brain fully on is simply to sit there for as little as two to five minutes and to follow the following rhythm. You take a nice slow deep inhalation for a count of three, and then a nice slow exhalation for a count of normally four to seven. This is where it's very individual. It depends. But you essentially need to exhale over a longer period than you inhale.
What that does is it triggers in your nervous system the rest and recovery response, and that's been proven. If you continued that for five minutes, you actually empty your bloodstream of cortisol, the stress hormone. But even within just two minutes of getting awareness of your breathing, you can change a body from what's called a stress dominant state to a rest and recovery dominant state.
That would be the most simple one. Other people like yawning. That's also something that would trigger the recovery response. But I think the breathing would. That simple rhythm, in for three, out of four, is quite easy once you practice that a few times, to do that even in a crisis situation, because you don't even need to close your eyes. You can be in a meeting and practice that and bring more power to your executive brain.
Yeah, I love that you said you can even do it in a meeting without closing your eyes, right? Because you can do it without people noticing, but you're getting yourself back. Because sometimes we go into meetings where something triggers us.
Yeah, I mean, that's a nice short practice that people can use.
You talked about physical needs and social needs. You gave us a nice tip around physical and what's going on in the brain around that. From a social needs perspective, can you talk a little bit more about that?
Yeah. I think the key thing with social needs is that first of all, we need to consider the environment that you're in. We're gonna have a lot higher access to our cognitive functions when our brain is not launching a significant stress response. But that depends on us actually feeling safe. So are we in an environment where there's a constant threat?
Some organizations have a zero failure culture, sometimes for good reasons, many times for maybe not so productive reasons. That is something that will ... You know that if you make a mistake that you're fired or penalized, and of course that will mean that you are constantly moving around in a mild stress response, which will inhibit the brain cognitive functions. Again, you can work with that.
For mission critical situations where you really need to have zero failure, there are of course ways you can work with a case ... The belief system of the people that are doing the work to reduce that. But let's talk about the more general sense. You've got, first of all, a sense of belonging. We're social beings. It's very important for us to be in an environment where we feel like we belong, because we are beings that depend on each other. As much as we like to be independent, we really do thrive in group.
Just knowing that the people around you respect you for who you are, and that you feel that you get regular recognition, helps you to feel like you belong, and that key social need basically helps to reduce stress. On the other hand, if we in a situation where we basically don't get that regular feedback or recognition, then we don't really know where we are. We don't know whether we are doing a good enough job. Are we really meeting the needs of the people around us, and are we also, which is kind of a key thing for our sense of meaning, is are we actually doing something that matters? Are we actually using our time to serve others in some shape or form? Having awareness of that is something that's key to reducing stress.
I think what's key here is to think about a meeting situation, because it's in meetings where we tend to have the greatest trigger of our emotions, especially when we're in meetings with people from all different departments. Maybe we don't know everyone in the room, especially if we're meeting them for the first time. What our brain does in that situation is it's constantly scanning to see, okay, well ... Other people listening to me, do they respect me? What do they think of what I'm saying? Am I getting any recognition? The brain is constantly scanning to see if these things are met.
So often people are sitting in a meeting room, but even if it's a short meeting, their cognitive functions can be inhibited if they are really feeling that they are not a part of the group, or that they're not being listened to or appreciated. So a simple check in, starting a meeting with a one or two minute check in where people literally share what's at the top of the mind or to use eye contact throughout the meeting. Having meetings where each person has maybe even a short time to share, but everyone shares the key things that they need. That's also making sure that there is an agenda for the meeting. Right, so what do they need, what is the information they can give, do they need to seek approval, but that everyone does get a chance to talk, and that they're listened to, just helps to increase that sense of belonging, respect and recognition.
Otherwise people would be in that meeting and they'll be seeking to preserve themselves. So self preservation behavior versus wanting to behave to benefit the group.
The tips that you gave, the things that leaders can do if they're running the meeting ...
Yes.
You said start with a check in to see what's on their mind. Tell me a little bit more about that. What would that look like? Because I could imagine some managers would say, "Oh, I don't have time for that." So tell me what that would look like and help us understand the benefit.
Yeah, that's an important point. I think as a leader, what's really key when you get to that meeting is that, of course, you reiterate the direction, why do we have a meeting, what's the purpose of it, what do we want to get out of it, so that that brings everyone into this current point.
But I think a check in's important because these days meetings are the second biggest waste of productivity after absenteeism. And the reason for that is, one, they normally have too long, two, they don't have a specific purpose or agenda, and three people go back to back with meetings, which by the way, in your second meeting, you would have lost up to 60 percent of your previous meeting or more without having a short break between the meeting, because again, your cognitive functions cannot, one, retain all that information, but two, your brand needs a break. You need to get this stress recovery balance.
A check in is a way the leader can basically give each person as little as a minute to say what's at the top of their mind. And this depends on the size of the team and how close you are. But let's say it's the leader's own team. Here is the sharing. Whether it's a good or bad feeling, you don't have to share why you have it, it's not going into your personal reasons, on the fact that you had a bad start to the morning because you had an argument with your partner. It's not to go into those specifics. But it is important to, especially for the leader to start, by saying what's at the top of their mind. Because what this builds over time is transparency and trust. Trust is number one for a high performance team or a well functioning team of any kind.
Especially on the days where everyone can sense that the leader is not at their best. And by the way, again, being social animals, people don't need to say things for us to realize that there's something wrong. Body language, tone of voice, all these things give out subtle messages that there's something wrong. And I think what's very powerful is when a manager shares that, "I'm not at my best today, it's nothing to do with you." That's key, saying that it's nothing to do with you. "But not quite feeling at my best today, so don't take that personally." It allows people to see that they can be human beings in the workplace, and also, especially from an employee perspective, is they're not going to tread on eggshells thinking that it could have been them that caused the leader to not feel at their best.
The last point on the check in which I found quite interesting is to simply share what is one thing that you feel didn't go well since the last meeting and why, and what is one thing that went very well since the last meeting and why. Some people call this success of failure, but I don't think you need to use a strong term as failure, but it gives a very short term for the person to reflect on. Some people like to focus on work, or it could be both work and at home. But what is one thing that didn't go well, what you learned from it, and one thing that went really well and what did you learn from that. That's a nice way of having a check in.
Probably gets everybody's brain into a more relaxed state to sharpen the cognitive ability and that executive ability of the brain.
Yeah, I agree.
So Jason, you've talked about the data driven approach to help us with our cognitive or executive function of the brain, and that part of the brain when we plan, make decisions, control ourselves. Especially our emotions to make sure that we're online. You talked about physical and social needs around that and gave us a few tip. What else is important for us to know about making sure that we're able to get the best ... We're able to use our cognitive and executive function so we're effective through the day?
I think as a leader, again, what is a really nice practice to build up throughout the day is regularly giving feedback and seeking to receive it as well. Because the nice thing about regular feedback is that you build the self esteem and self worth of the person that you're providing it to. Even if it could be feedback where you feel they could do better, but you're really giving them awareness on how they can grow and develop. Whether it's feedback on something that's gone well or could have been better, you're giving them attention, you're being present with them, and that builds their self worth, and also their self esteem of course. But what it does for you as a leader is it also builds their respect for you.
I think this habit of giving and receiving regular feedback is a really nice way of keeping your employees' brains fully switched on and also your own. Because as I mentioned with social needs, the self esteem and self worth for the individual will help them feel safe, feel recognized. That will fully switch their brain on. The fact that they respect you as a leader will give you that feeling that you're also actually functioning well and providing them with what they need. So you also feel a sense where your self esteem will increase, and therefore again, your brain will not be in a stress response. It will actually be in a mode where it's increasing these executive functions.
Jason, do you have a specific example of a leader that you've coached, or how you've used this personally to become more effective at switching on that cognitive part of our brain to make better decisions and plans?
Yeah. Let's start with what is most likely the most [inaudible 00:28:24] effective for myself, but also for whether I'd estimate over 90 percent of the leaders and people that we've worked within organizations is that it really starts with putting aside time to reflect, and during that time that you reflect, to look at the way that you're also going to be spending your time with the week ahead. So doing this either on a Friday and looking at the next week, or doing it on a Monday morning for the current week.
But really not just reflecting on what did you do the previous week, what are the key priorities you have coming up for this week, but also where in calendar have I already set specific times to practice recovery. Whatever works best for me. Have I set specific times as a leader to have the one on ones that I need to have? That time to reflect with others. Not just reflection on your own, it's reflection with others.
The other part is ensuring that you also have your other physical needs met, so where are you getting the movement that you need? Where do you have your mindfulness practice, or simply having time to be yourself? That reflection period, which can be as little as 15 minutes on a Friday or Monday, that is one of the most important factors that we've seen making a difference, because that's also ... If you build a habit around that, that is like a chain reaction that promotes all of the other things that you would like to build. Again, a habit around mindfulness or a habit around increasing the time you have with your employees. So that reflection is important.
To help people start that habit, we use a tool that basically attracts people's time management. It's completely confidential, so it's not shared with their colleagues or anyone else. But they can use that to look at, okay, how are they spending their time, where do they have back to back meetings, and where do they not spend enough time with the right people, i.e. their own team, with the leaders in the other departments and so on. So you can use that as a way to build that practice up. The key point, with technology aside, is to build that habit of reflection.
I love that you said 15 minutes, do the rear view look at the week, and then plan for your week ahead, making sure that you've got time for movement, and you've got time for recovery, and not having those back to back meetings that often leaders have, or sometimes they take pride in having.
And of course, yeah, it's also about the 80/20 rule, right? If you do that 80% of the time, it's really gonna pay off.
I think that's another thing that's challenging, especially as responsibility grows for leaders, because it's always they don't have time. But that's the thing with finding the right habits. Because I really believe, I mean it's a key philosophy of mine, that if you can automate the key behaviors that drive the greatest success for you, you have way more capacity to do the things that are new or you haven't done before, you need to learn. Because up to 45% of what we do every day is habitual. It's completely automated by, yeah, let's just say the unconscious part of the brain. And that's really important for us. But we need to practice the behaviors before they will become habitual. And we also need to make sure they're small enough to repeat.
If we can start to practice that over time and not punish ourselves too much when we miss it, then we will be able to automate more of these key things and have way more cognitive capacity or performance to address the new or unexpected things that come up in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.
That's one thing we'll never have more of is time. It's fixed.
Yeah. Exactly.
Good point. Thinking about those habits. What is one thing that a leader could do or potential leader could do right now that's going to make them more effective at making better decisions, planning, getting control of that cognitive executive function?
I think the number one thing, to be quite honest, it's simply to prioritize sleep. This goes back to the physical needs. I can of course add one that people can do at work in second. Well, some companies here in Denmark actually can sleep during the work day. But the number one is sleep, just to work - and very specifically here - work with the one hour before bed, because that hour is a very important window on which you can impact the percentage of recovery and quality recovery that you get during yours. A lot of people will spend that hour by working, using their phone, or essentially using devices, and all of these devices emit blue light from the screen and decrease, as I mentioned before, the production of melatonin in the brain, and will really decrease the percentage of recovery you're getting, especially the deep sleep and REM sleep. So switching out television> But when you really need to be your best, no alcohol, actually no alcohol at all during the day would be ideal for your sleep, but especially after 4:00 in the afternoon.
I mentioned devices, but those last little looks at the phone or email is a really bad idea during that hour, because even though the short look at it will not be enough for the blue light to maybe have an issue, the thought process that that triggers, especially if you see an email that means that there's an emergency has occurred or something you're going to face tomorrow is gonna be something that is demanding, subconsciously your brain is going to be working with that. That's very activating.
Getting rid of devices and using that hour to simply either read a book, quality conversations with your partner, catching up with a friend, but actually using something that will help you to wind down. It might be a nice cup of herbal tea. I mean, this is quite individual, but for the majority of the people we see, reading a fictional book or a Kindle that's not back lit is a really nice way for them to allow their natural recovery process to kick in and get a good quality sleep, and that's the number one thing for your brain performance. Good quality sleep.
The other tiny tip, which is super simple to implement, which I think has had one of the biggest effects throughout the day for both leaders, but for any employee, is to put in their calendar for ... Well, you can try it right after the call now, but if they're going to be at work tomorrow, to actually put in their calendar specific time. Just block out as little as five to 10 minutes as a private event so no one else can book them, and practice that breathing I mentioned before, where you're breathing in for a count of three and out for a count of four. Because that's one of the fastest ways to regulate your stress recovery balance, and you don't need any devices, you don't need to close your eyes. You just need the trigger to do it, which could be as simple as a calendar reminder.
Those are wonderful tips. Sleeping and breathing are two things that we do every day.
Hopefully, yeah.
And honestly, simple things to maximize that, to help us think more effectively and really get more control over ourselves can go a long way.
Well Jason, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your insight, and the great data and research about the brain and how we can really be more effective in planning and making decisions. I wanted to give you one last opportunity to see if there's anything else you'd like to share with the group.
First of all, thank you to you Jill for the invitation. Appreciate the talk.
You're welcome.
The only other thing that I will say is that again, it's important to find what works best for you. And as you mentioned before, sometimes technology can help, but it's not something that anyone should depend on. But it's taking the time to build your own awareness on what are the things that are really draining my resources and what are the things that are gaining my resources is a great starting point on which you can then use to build the personal leadership. And that I think is critical when leading others, because it all starts with leading yourself. The greater the self awareness and self management you have, the greater your ability to be able to be present and to be able to know what to do to lead others.
Think that would be the closing point.
Great. Thank you. Well, I appreciate your time today and your tip, reminding us the best way to lead others is lead ourselves first. Thank you very much.
You're welcome, Jill. Thank you.
CLOSING:
I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to create more cohesive teams. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Manpremo: https://manpremoperformance.com/
Article on increasing brain performance: https://beatyourbest.manpremoperformance.com/posts/brain-performance-1505845
Article on building change competency: https://beatyourbest.manpremoperformance.com/posts/change-competency
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Do you care about getting more engagement from you team? Do you want to know how you can create an environment where your team works collaboratively, reduces conflict and supports each other and your organization? Are you focused on retaining and attracting talent?
Are you struggling to build more inclusive teams? If so, this is the podcast for you.
My guest, Jay Van Bavel, will highlight the importance of group identity in building high performing teams and share simple things that you can do right away to get your team moving in the right direction.
Jay Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science with an affiliation at the Stern School of Business in Management and Organizations at New York University where he teaches one of the largest courses in the university. Jay completed his PhD at the University of Toronto.
Jay conducts award-winning research on how collective concerns—group identities, moral values, and political beliefs—shape the brain and behavior. He has published over 60 academic papers on implicit bias, diversity and inclusion, group identity, team formation, cooperation, motivation, and the social brain.
Jay has written about his research for the public in the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. He has appeared on Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman and NBC News, been interviewed on WNYC, Bloomberg News, and NPR, had his work profiled in international media and been cited in the US Supreme Court.
Jay has given a TEDx talk at the Skoll World Forum as well as invited talks at many of the top Psychology Departments and Business Schools in the world (Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Oxford, Stanford). He has also given featured talks at international conferences and numerous organizations (e.g., Uber, Amazon, Reed Smith, Canadian Space Agency).
Podcast Recap:
Human nature makes it easy for us to identify with groups. Go to any culture in the world and people form groups. It is a human universal. Jay’s research looks at how you activate that in people’s minds - how you change that way their brain processes information once you put them in a team.
Researchers have found it as simple as flipping a coin and putting people on the red team or the blue team. This gets them to automatically and quickly identify with their group. They are willing to give more to their group, engage with their group more and show them more trust. So, the first step in creating a good team is creating an ‘us’ an a ‘them’. The hard part is identifying the right ‘them’. You don’t want people to be competing with other members of other groups within the organization or you can get sabotage or conflict, people retreating to silos, lack of collaboration and cooperation. There is certainly an art to it and identifying the right ‘out group’ is often a key element.
The other element that is key is creating an element of a distinctive group. The groups that are stickiest, that they identify with the most, are ones that fulfill a sense of belonging, that make them feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves and at the same time creating a sense of distinctiveness. That they feel that there is something special about being in this group, that is hard to get into and different from other groups. This is referred to as the Velvet Robe Effect. If you run a club and there is a long line outside and a velvet rope with a bouncer, even if you get inside and no one is there, you feel from the outside looking into it that it a special club, something hard to get into …..or as Groucho Marx famously said, he would never want to be part of a club that was willing to admit him!
We like to be a part of groups that are exclusive and distinctive. This is why fraternities and sororities have initiation rituals and why big corporations like Apple are able to hack the psychology. If you walk down anywhere in Manhattan and you walk by a coffee shop, 90% of the people have their MAC books open or their iPhone open, and yet most of these people feel that they are unique, and that their MAC is part of their unique distinctive identity. The reason for this is Apple has been triggering the psychology in people for decades. It started in the most famous commercial of all times in 1984 during the Superbowl, they aired an ad of someone speaking as if they were the famous book 1984, droning on and people were blindly watching it. Then this woman representing Apple came and smashed it and so the message is that you are anti-authority and anti-big brother if you use Apple. Another example with Apple is when Steve Jobs came back and started the Think Different campaign, which was about all these scientists and leaders, from Einstein to Gandhi, throughout history who stood out and were different and challenged convention. Apple is now more conventional and one of the world’s most recognized brand in the world, but now when you have one, because of all the advertising over the years, it creates a feeling among it’s users that there is something special or distinctive about them.
So, leaders who can create this within their groups that you are part of ‘us’ and we are different, are the ones who are able to create the most distinctive, compelling and sticky group identities. This can directly correlate to higher engagement and discretionary effort given to the leader and the team.
If you care about engagement or care about reducing absenteeism or presenteeism, this is a good strategy. When people are engaged and committed to their group, they don’t want to let their team down. They don’t want to fail because they actually care about the group and it’s success. This is useful if you want to retain your best talent or recruit other talent to your team, to give them a sense that there is something special about them, is one powerful way of triggering this very basic psychology in the mind.
As a CEO or senior leader, what should you be thinking about? One is to create a shared vision and/or common goal. Another thing that you can do is create a sense of history, and this is where distinctiveness can really be articulated. If you have this very unique story or history that everybody knows, they feel part of that connection and they feel like they are part of something bigger than them. Leaders could do more to articulate and remind people where they have come from, what their story is and finally where they are going. Finally, another thing is, and this turns out to be key to getting people to contribute, is making everybody feel like they have an important role to play, even if it is a little one, and that their role is essential. Letting them know that we can’t succeed unless you do this little thing. That is something that really increases engagement and is a very helpful way to deal with diversity in teams. The teams that feel like everyone contributes are more likely to be inclusive and will choose to solicit the input and support of other team members and so you actually create the kind of situation that promotes the success of diverse groups and diverse organizations.
What is going on in the brain that is causing this connection? The moment we flip a coin and put you on a team, your brain starts to process how you see in group and out group team members differently. You automatically start seeing people of your own group more positively. This activates early brain circuits like the amygdala and also changing the visual system, so it also suggests that the way you are seeing faces is changing in real time. You are starting to see people that are part of your team more as individuals and you are more likely to remember who they were. Basically, this is engaging a more careful attention and concern about who is with you. It does this amazing this because if you care about your identity, this group you belong to, and you see other in-group members get a reward, the same parts of the brain that respond when you are getting a reward get triggered. So, it is almost as if you were getting a pay increase or benefit. That is only for people who care about the group, otherwise you can get jealousy and conflict if you see others get what you wish to have. Identify solves that problem and it can reduce jealousy and conflict over things like that. This is also what is known as basking in the reflective glory. For example, this is when you go on social media and brag about a friend of yours or a colleague winning an award and you say that you are really proud of them. This means that your bragging on their behalf. You are getting part of the joy that they are getting because you care about them and feel you have a shared purpose with them. We have also found that pattern of activation in the brain when people are thinking about in-group members who are getting a reward. They don’t show that same pattern when an out-group member gets a reward.
Jay personally applies this to the team he leads at his research lab at NYU. Their lab is over 30 people who range from first year student volunteers to people who are post-doc and already have their PhD and are top researchers from other countries, so he cares a ton about identify. Every year he gives a talk to the whole lab about the vision, goals and their past. This meeting marks their progress and he shows graphs showing how many publications they have had over the years, and how it has grown, so they can see that they are getting better and stronger over time -- they are part of that. He also points out all the accomplishments of all the people in that lab that year – people who have graduated or won awards, became professors or had a break through with a method in the lab. He makes sure to call out all of them in front of everybody so that there is a shared identify that if you contribute to the team you are going to be celebrated as part of the team in this annual state of the union.
Another thing Jay does is creating symbols of identity, doing little things like creating coffee mugs with the lab logo on them and once you start doing research with the lab you are part of the in-group and you get a mug. This year he is taking images of everyone’s brain and will be creating pop-art, Andy Warhol type of art in the brain. He plans to frame it and put it around the lab – highlighting all the students who got their PhD in the lab. This is the highest and hardest level of accomplishment.
He is finding ways to constantly remind them that they have a shared identity, showing a sense of history and highlighting all the individuals who came before them who have been part of this culture. The other thing is I get my student’s advice before I hire anybody so they all have a voice in insuring they have a culture of people who care about the group and are cooperators who aren’t just self-interested people. I take that as seriously as somebody’s credentials when I am deciding who to bring into the group. I care about who is going to be a good group member. That doesn’t mean just blindly going along with me or the other people. In fact, often during his meetings, when they have presentations, he tries not to speak too quickly because he doesn’t want to create group-think where everyone has to agree with him. He is very conscious of not creating the negative parts of groups like group-think because there is a pathology that comes if you mis-manage a group with a strong identify. So that is also part of it, giving your team a voice so they have a feeling of commitment and shared ownership over where the group is going.
What is one thing I can do right away to get the group dynamic right? The simplest thing is creating a shared vision, but I would go one step further because most people know that. First of all, your shared vision needs to be simple and you have to be able to say it all the time, so everybody knows what it is, but the second thing and the trickier thing is connecting it to your history. Showing where you came from and where you are going has everyone under the shared vision but also creates a sense of distinctiveness, so there is something special and unique about this group and about your organization.
Jill works with a lot of leaders and finds that communicating a compelling vision is a challenge and often find that they don’t talk about it enough to their team and their organization. They feel that everybody understands it when often that is not the case. Connecting the history is great because you will always have people coming in and out of your organization. This allows them to feel like they are joining something that is bigger than them, reminds them and keeps it fresh for them.
One last thing, if you think of a team as a delicate ecosystem - if you add in one or two bad elements the team can unravel. I like the philosophy of the New Zealand men’s Rugby team as they are the most successful team in any sport. They have a number of rules, but the most important rule is a simple one. They have a policy of No Dick Heads! When you think of the world’s best team you think of the best talent. When you think of the best talent often you think of prima donnas, and that this is what the best talent looks like. They say no…no one is above the team and no one can put their interests above the team. As they leave the field at the end of each game, they all help to clean up the mess at the bench. They act like no one is above the team and that is the single sentence that describes the model. It helps them create a sense of tribe, family and friendship and nothing supersedes that. One of the keys to creating a good team is also not allowing anyone to put themselves above it. As leaders that rule starts with you!
I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to create more cohesive teams. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.
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Have you ever wished you or your team could be more creative? Would you like your team to come up with different ways to solve problems? Do you think that only certain people have that kind of creativity? Would you like to ‘turn a dial’ and become more focused or creative?
My Guest: Balder Onarheim, CEO of PlatoScience
If so, this is the podcast for you. Balder Onarheim, CEO of PlatoScience, will break down how to tap into your creativity and the creativity of your team. The good news is that it is not magical – everyone has the ability to be creative.
Balder Onarheim is a serial entrepreneur and former associate professor in creativity at the Technical University of Denmark.
He is the founder of the Copenhagen Institute of NeuroCreativity and CEO at PlatoScience: making the world’s first creativity boosting headset. Balder’s expertise lies within a neurologically based understanding of creativity, and methods to use this understanding to make people better problem solvers. He is a popular speaker with talks at prestigious conferences and universities around the world, and more than 300k people has seen his TEDx talk “3 tools to become more creative
Podcast Highlights:
Balder has been working with Neurobiologists to understand what creativity is and how it works from a neuroscience perspective so that they can help all of us be more creative. We all have creativity, it is everywhere – the secret is learning how to tap into those abilities.
The first step for leaders is to acknowledge the importance of creativity, as simple as that sounds. When leaders have a mindset that some employees are creative, and others are not, they treat employees differently and can miss out on the creativity of their whole team. Realizing that creativity is a basic human skill that we all have is important. It is a matter of nurturing it, training it and using it for the right purpose in the right point in time. By doing this you can make creativity part of your everyday work.
After you acknowledge that creativity is a crucial skill, using it every day in small ways is important to create that habit. How many little ways can you encourage creativity? For example, setting up rules like ‘we need one bad idea for every good idea’. When you use this approach across the whole organization, it can help people re-analyze the way they solve problems.
There are 5 cognitive traits associated with Neurocreativity, they are:
Priming Cognitive Inhibition Remote Associations Fixation IncubationThe first is priming, setting the stage for what you want, on a management level it could be asking the team for alternative solutions and setting that expectation to think differently. Avoid giving your own idea first or an example of an idea because it can lead people to only think of that type of solution for the program. The key is to mix it up, keeping it random. A few ideas to get yourself to think more creatively:
Go to Wikipedia and select Random Article on the navigation, which can spark creativity because you will get a piece of information you would not normally have read. (Balder explains more about this in his TedX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YScywp6AU ) Take a different route back and forth to work. Grab a random book off your bookcase, flip to a page, have a short read and then go back to what you were doing.The information we take in shapes the ideas we will have. Shaking it up allows you to have new thoughts that allow you to think creatively.
The second trait is cognitive inhibition – it is a controlling system in our brain to keep us from being overloaded with information. It works to restrict the amount of information you get access to, keeping us sane! For most of us it works overtime and the downside is that it can get rid of new information that can lead to new ideas.
Remote associations is the third cognitive trait associated with neuro-creativity. The associative network is where all our thoughts and memories are stored. Think of it like the internet as a whole that can link to multiple websites, everything is connected, it is just a matter of how many steps are needed to connect it. For example, if I say ‘dog’, your brain will most likely bring up the concept of a cat, it is closely associated. Creativity is a lot about finding those remote associations, so the strategy is to find any method you have to get to those remote associations that can help you think more creatively about the problem you are working on. Creativity is about combining things that are normally not related.
So, how can I be more creative? The more you simply understand neuro-creativity, the more you can apply and tap into it. Awareness is the key and the first step. Understanding what creativity is and how it works, then training yourself to use that knowledge through practice.
Fixation is the fourth cognitive trait and we have all experienced this. For example, when you can’t get your head off a certain topic or a certain word. It is the ‘tip of the tongue’ effect when you are trying to remember the name of someone and you get it close….but not right. Suddenly it becomes impossible to get the right word because your brain gets fixated on this other name which is close but not quite there. You are zooming in on this part of your associative network and therefore you can’t see the right word. The more you associate one thought with another, the stronger connected they become. When you get fixated, the best thing to do is to stop thinking about it and think about something else, take a walk or clear your head another way. This is the last trait – incubation.
Incubation – these breaks we discussed are necessary for you to tap into the remote associations that allow you to be more creative. Step away from the problem you are working on and start thinking of something else.
We can’t be creative all the time – the key is to be intentional about when you want to be creative and then using these concepts and acting differently to get the creativity. As a leader, as yourself ‘Do we need to emphasize creativity right now?’ If yes, what are the best methods for you to do so? If you are trying to be creative think about how you are setting up the environment.
How often do you need these breaks? Studies range from 20 minutes to one hour before needing a break and starting to think about something else or just shifting tasks.
What do you do on that break? It goes back to priming, ask yourself what sort of priming will help you get to the next stage? If you or the team is getting fixated, get up physically, go outside if you can, do some exercises. Balder does squats with his team to get some circulation going when this happens. The key is doing something or thinking about something differently. These can be social breaks where you are checking in with a spouse or talking to your peers about other outside interests.
We all have the ability to be creative and as leaders we can create environments that will unleash it for our teams. Once you get started, creativity can be addicting, and your team will continue to be creative if you continue to encourage it. The key is to GET STARTED!!
One thing that you could do today – acknowledge the importance of habits for yourself at home and in the workplace. We tend to be single minded about this if we are allowed to do so. Be conscious about the importance of breaking some of these habits when you want to be more creative. For example, do you always search the same websites or resources when looking for answers to a problem? Think about your team meetings, if you always have them in the same room, in the same seats, looking in the same direction with the same agenda and order of speaking, these influence you and your team. If you want to be more creative, change something up here. So, the starting point for creativity is to acknowledge the importance of random inputs and changing habits.
Quick tip – the direction you look out from your desk has an impact on your creativity scores. Just by turning the chair 90 degrees and looking in a different direction can help stimulate creativity. It can be that simple.
What are the technological advances you are working on? They have been working on ways to get to your brain from the outside for the last three years by sending weak electrical impulses through the brain which allows you to slightly change the brain’s ability to perform a task in a certain region of the brain, essentially trying to hijack a brain function. They have over 150 products in the market today that you can use. Customers range from programmers, lawyers, students, engineers, management consultant, etc. who want to focus on being creative using one of their unique headsets. The way it works is that you use the app to pick the thinking style you would like that would be most beneficial to the task you are working on and the headset will replicate the balancing of the brain for that type of task. If you want to know more and get your own headset go to https://platoscience.com/platowork/
What are some things that leaders should do when they are planning to have these leadership off-sites focused on being creative? There are two ways that Balder and the team have worked with numerous organizations to accomplish this:
Assumption Dumption – bring out all the assumptions people have about the problem you are trying to solve out in the open. Most of these are unspoken and would not be shared any other way. Discuss them and sort them by truth, relevance or those things that need to be just kept in mind. Scrap those assumptions that are outdated or just rumors. This helps to eliminate thoughts that limit their take on the problem – getting rid of the old ghosts! Negative Brainstorm – flip the problem around and ask people to come up with diverse possible solutions that they think are bad ideas. This brings some humor into the meeting and you will find most of the bad ideas can bring something useful to the table. You take the absolutely worst ideas that come up and analyze them – what makes them bad as well as what are the positive elements. Challenge people to remove the bad things and keep the good things and you end up coming up with a good idea that comes from a terrible idea. It is fun, gets people to think about the problem in different ways. It always brings out new good ideas that you would normally never dare to bring up if you were asked to come up with only good ideas.NEXT STEPS FOR YOU!
I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to become more creative and create the right environment for your team. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team and/or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.
Resources:
PlatoScience - https://platoscience.com/
3 tools to become more creative - TedX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YScywp6AU
PlatoWork Headset - https://platoscience.com/platowork/
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Have you ever wished you could get that moment back when you let your emotions take over? Do you want to make better choices and better decisions in the moment? This is the podcast for you!
My guest, Dr. Marcia Reynolds, MCC, is fascinated by the brain, especially what triggers feelings of connection, commitment, and possibility. She draws on her research as she helps coaches and leaders make every conversation is a difference-making experience. She has provided executive coaching and leadership training programs in 38 countries.
Dr. Reynolds is a pioneer in the coaching profession. She was the 5th global president of the International Coach Federation and has returned to the board as a Global Director. She is also the training director for the Healthcare Coaching Institute at Virginia Tech, and on faculty for the International Coach Academy in Russia and Create China Coaching in China. She is recognized by the Global Gurus top 30 as the #5 coach in the world. She was one of the first to earn the designation of Master Certified Coach.
Interviews and excerpts from Marcia’s books Outsmart Your Brain, and The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs, and Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction, have appeared in many places including Fast Company, Psychology Today, and The Wall Street Journal.
Marcia’s doctoral degree is in organizational psychology and she has two master’s degrees in education and communications.
Highlights from the Podcast:
Information doesn’t change behavior, just because you ‘know’ something it doesn’t mean you will do it – there needs to be emotion involved. The first step to being aware is managing your emotions and your energy. Next you need to be curious because when you are with other people you need to think about how you are showing up with them. For example, are you partnering with them and helping them move forward OR is your intention to just get them to do what you want them to do?
Emotions are just energy moving through your body and it is important information to pay attention to that tells you what is going on in the moment – notice it and accept it. Don’t label it good or bad, just notice it. Where in your body do you feel anger? Notice it – it is different for everyone. One tip to start noticing your emotions is to set a reminder on your phone 2 to 3 times a day to just track what you are feeling at the moment. This can help make you more aware. This is how you can start to build Reflective Intelligence – noticing the emotions is the first step.
After you notice the emotion then you can go to what you want to feel instead – but you have to feel the shift. You can’t just tell yourself to be patient – you have to do something to feel more patient. For example, turn on some music or look at pictures to make you feel calmer. You have to understand what your triggers are – what are people taking from you that makes you react? For example, do you feel you are being respected, not safe or now being acknowledged? The thing about triggers, (which she goes into much more deeply in her book and you can go to www.outsmartyourbrain.com and search for emotional triggers to download the list) is that whatever has made you successful in this life is what is going to be your emotional trigger because you are protecting it. For example, if you want attention, control, order or accuracy and feel that any of those are being threatened, you will go on the defense. This happens really quickly and when you realize what is happening you have the choice of (1) asking for that or (2) letting it go. Being aware gives you more control in your response if you understand your reactions and why they are happening.
If something is really important to you, the primitive brain kicks in because the brain is designed to protect you. When we get defensive, it happens pretty quickly, and we react because we feel like someone is taking something from us or not giving us something we feel we deserve like respect or credibility. It is a primitive reaction that happens quickly and we either react or shut down, we are either a flighter or fighter. Now this could happen in the primitive brain, or if it bypasses the primitive brain, then it hits your social brain. Then we have the social needs where I might feel embarrassed or disappointed or frustrated because I am not getting what I think I need. This happens in the middle brain where you get defensive, you argue, you shut down or you feel embarrassed or sad. This affects what you will say or not say and the actions you will take.
It doesn’t hit your logical brain until all this other stuff comes into play, which we use to give ourselves great reasons as to why we reacted that way or why we said that thing! (There is a great example of this in Chapter 1 of Outsmart your Brain).
Once you start noticing these emotions – what can you do? Well, first know that these never go away, just accept that you are human, and this is who you are and they will decrease. You won’t stop being triggered and there will be certain people in your life that will trigger you more than others. The more we acknowledge them the less power they have over us and we get triggered but it is not as strong.
There is a 4-step formula to shift your emotions: Relax…Detach…Center….Focus.
Relax – because it is biological, breathe and release the tension in your body, breathing is the quickest way to release the tension. Do a body scan and relax your muscles.
Detach – clear your brain and wipe it clean.
Center – Take a tip from professional athletes that are taught to shift their awareness to their center, which is at the bottom of your breath – the center of your body. You take a deep breath in and notice the bottom of your breath – that is your center, your core. When you can move your awareness there, you are more powerful.
Focus – choose the one or two words that represent how you want to feel and then feel those emotions before you speak.
This is how you can make better choices in the moment – which leads to better outcomes. The best part is this not only helps you at work, but it helps you at home.
Great resources that you can leverage to learn more about this: www.outsmartyourbrain.com and her books Outsmart your Brain and The Discomfort Zone.
Last thing, people want you to be present more than they want you to be perfect. Listen to what they have to say, this makes people feel valued and important without any words.
I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to build more self-awareness and have better conversations. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.
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Special Guest: Richard E. Boyatzis, Ph.D., Distinguished University Professor, Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science and H.R. Horvitz Chair of Family Business, Case Western Reserve University
Creator of Intentional Change Theory (ICT) Most Influential International Thinker, HR Magazine (2014) Author of more than 175 articles and 7 books, including Primal Leadership and Resonant LeadershipHighlights from the Podcast:
A recent study on motivation and retention, involving 1,800 MBA grads two years into their work, found that salary & benefits were the 7th reason they stayed at their job. The first 6 all had to do with novelty and learning! Development is very important if you want people to use their talent and to stay. People are not looking at their job as a transaction anymore. Training is not typically effective, especially in high power distance cultures, so coaching is the answer.
Richard defines coaching as helping other people move toward their ideal self or personal vision. Coaching in business has been around since the 60’s (not a new fad as some believe) – and it is all about helping. Coaching is desired….but not always effective! His personal studies have shown that 70% - 80% of managers are not adding value in this space…..and that includes CEOs. The Coaching Research Lab at Case Western Reserve focuses on these 3 coaching client outcomes – (1) the person articulates or reframes their personal vision (2) helping someone’s behavior change in the way they want to and (3) helping them build better relationships with their coach and other people so they can continue to grow, develop and innovate. If you want to know more about the research they are doing, follow this link: https://weatherhead.case.edu/departments/organizational-behavior/coaching-research/
Neuroimaging studies are showing how important personal visioning is because when someone dreams, not set goals, it activates the default mode network. It dramatically activates the visual lateral cortex, which is the part of the brain engaged when you are imagining things. These studies helped show us that problem solving coaching doesn’t work if you start with that and don’t get people to think about their personal vision first. If you only focus on solving a problem, you will not get behavior change. Understanding your personal vision is critical to making change last. In the Intentional Change Theory he developed, he said to sustain desired change – you have to want to change – not do it for someone else or because you think you should. It starts with you – you have to really want to change.
We are dismally poor in knowing how we are coming across to others – this is where a coach can help a lot. In addition, a coach can help you set your personal vision – identifying your ideal self by pulling out your dreams. I asked Richard what his dream was and he said his purpose is to help liberate people in terms of their dreams, individually or collectively – to help them find their shared vision in a way that energizes them.
What is one thing you can do today? People in organizations spend time thinking about being more effective….and that is appropriate, but you shouldn’t think about it so much that you are not thinking about how to adapt and innovate. These two tasks take place in different parts of the brain. Learning to have more balance / more flexibility is one thing that is key. The more narrow you are, the worse off you are. How do you become less narrow and more innovative? Talk to people who care about you, who have comparable interests and who see the world differently from you to get the diversity you need. Build relationships that have more caring in them because that is what is going to last. Executives don’t do the work, their job is to inspire others to do the work and you can’t inspire others unless you are inspired yourself and care about other people.
For a free copy of Richard and his team’s latest paper on antagonistic neural networks and leadership in Frontiers:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/Abstract.aspx?s=537&name=human_neuroscience&ART_DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2014.00114&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&journalName=Frontiers_in_Human_Neuroscience&id=79428Your Host: Jill Windelspecht, President of Talent Specialists Consulting, is an executive coach, speaker and consultant who works with leaders like you, across the globe, to grow themselves, their team and their organization. It is all about People….Science….Purpose. Dedicated to helping people, leveraging neuroscience and social science to help leaders and organizations find their purpose. www.talentspecialists.net, [email protected]
