Brain Hacks 4 Leadership

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 th

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

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

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'

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

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'

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 wh

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. An

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 Incubation The 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

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 jillwindel@TalentSpecialists.net and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.  

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 Leadership Highlights 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=79428 Your 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, jillwindel@talentspecialists.net