I am very excited to welcome my guest, Dr. Bill Crawford.  In addition to being named TEC Canada Speaker of the Year in 2016 and Vistage Speaker of the Year for 2019, Dr. Crawford holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Houston.  He is also a licensed psychologist, author of 8 books, and organizational consultant.  Over the past 30 years he has created over 3500 presentations for organizations such as Sprint, Shell, The American Medical Association, and many others both nationally and internationally. His two PBS specials on stress and communication have been seen by over 15 million people, and he has been quoted as an expert in publications such as The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Investor’s Business Daily, The Chicago Tribune, and Working Mother just to name a few. 

Website - www.BillCrawfordPhD.com

Welcome to another episode of Brain Hacks 4 leadership, really excited to have Dr. Bill with us today. And thank you first off for taking the time to spend time with myself and my listeners on Brain Hacks for leadership.

My pleasure. I'm really looking forward to this. I love the title of your podcast - Brain Hacks 4 leadership. I work with a lot with CEOs, and they really seem to like when we talk about that neuroscience and how to actually understand how the brain works in order to really bring those decisions to life. So the neuroscience of effective decision making seemed like a pretty good idea to use as a framework for what we're going to be talking about.

Yeah, I think you're spot on. It's often called soft stuff, and then we have science behind it. We can help them, it's got a little more validity, right? Well, great. Thank you so much. And I'm excited about the topic that you're going to discuss. You want to tell us a little bit more about the topic and some of the science behind it?

Sure. So when I was getting my PhD, I really wanted to understand the science behind why we think and feel what we think and feel. So I was learning a lot about the psychological theory, but I wanted to know the science. So I actually left the college of psychology and went to the college of biology and took a course called the biological basis of behavior. And in it, I learned that everything we think and feel and do, and say how we react to others, how others react to us all has to do with how the brain processes information. So I've spent the last 30 years of my life creating a system of philosophy, a framework that I call "life from the top of the mind" that basically teaches people how to access their best by accessing a specific part of the brain and how to avoid the stress, frustration, anxiety, the stuff that gets in the way of our ability to make effective decisions by avoiding a specific part of the brain.

Yeah. I love that. Well, tell me what is some of the brain science behind the decisions? Where is that, in the brain that, that helps us make good decisions that maybe sometimes stops us from making the best decisions.

Sure. And the brains, of course, very complicated, people spend their lives, studying the brain. So what I try to do just to make it as simple as possible, but also to make it understandable by dividing the brain into three parts, I call it top, middle and lower brain. So our lower brains is the brain stem, everybody's heard of that, that's the fight or flight part of the brain. The middle brain is the limbic system. And this is actually what I've learned is the gatekeeper or in today's terminology, this middle brain limbic system serves as the scanner, the processor and the router. So it scans incoming data, processes it, or interpret it, and then either routes it down to lower brain or up to the upper 80% of the brain, the neocortex, what I call the top of the mind, because this is actually where we have access to our interpersonal skills, problem, solving skills, confidence, creativity, et cetera.

Some people called these frontal lobes of the neocortex. The executive function part of the brain because, this is where we make those executive decisions and those purposeful decisions. And so what I like to do is help people understand how and why this middle brain and the lower brain gets triggered. And then I give them a model that actually spells brain that shows them when they get triggered, when they're experiencing stress or frustration or annoyance or anything that gets in the way of their clarity, how to actually shift from the lower brain up into the upper 80% of the brain. So they can access those qualities and skills and decision making abilities that help them be most effective.

I love that this is great because like you said, the leaders, executives, you're working with one of the critical roles that they play is making decisions and the types of decisions they make, how quickly they make them, how they're thinking through decisions, not only impacted them, but impacts hundreds, thousands of people that are working for them as well. So, yeah. So I'd love to hear how you have applied this in the executives that you coach, how they really, taken these concepts and put them in place.

I do a lot of work with Vistage. Vistage is an organization of CEOs and they bring in a speaker on a regular basis and I'm one of the speakers. And so when I'm talking to these leaders, number one, they don't have a lot of people to bounce things off of. So they're kind of, if you know, the whole lonely at the top thing is, is important. And this is really one of the reasons why this just works so well because it gives them an opportunity. Not only to learn things from speakers like myself, but to have a group of people that they trust and can bounce things off of. So I will start by making sure I understand what gets in the way of their effective decision making. So I'll ask them a question, what are the things that trigger? What kind of situations or people have kind of stressed you out or got under your skin?

And they'll say things like man, you know, difficult people and not enough business and angry customers and people who don't listen and traffic and, you know, there's all kinds of stuff I'll say. Okay, great. So when we're dealing with all of that stuff, how have we found ourselves reacting in the past? And they say, Oh man, I get stressed and I get frustrated and I get annoyed and I get angry. And I say, okay, so now we understand what I call - "the what" I like to talk about the what the why and the how so the what is the fact that this situation has triggered this response, but it's not just that it triggered a response. It's just, it's when it triggers this response, we try to use the response to deal with the trigger. So when we get stressed or frustrated or annoyed, we try to use that to deal with a difficult person or a difficult situation.

And we can't because that actually is a lower brain response. So the stress, the frustration, the anger is a wonderful response in a fight or flight, dangerous situation, but it's a terrible response or an ineffective response, in real life because it actually keeps us from being effective. We don't know that and therefore we try to use that stress to deal with the trigger and we can't, and that makes the trigger seem worse, which triggers another reaction. And that makes it seem worse. And we get caught in a cycle. So in terms of the what, the why, and the how the, what is the cycle, it's not just that we get triggered it's that we get caught in the cycle. The why is the brain. So I teach them the three parts of the brain and I show them how these lower brain responses of stress, frustration, or anger, or just this middle brain interpreting some negative situation is dangerous and throwing us into that part of the brain.

So once we now know what that is, we now know that in order to be effective in life and make effective decisions, we got to get to this clear, confident, creative part of the brain. So I teach them a model that spells brain that's about breathing, relaxing, asking questions, like how would I rather be feeling, what would I teach to someone? I love imagining being that way, because in the image we hold in our mind triggers a corresponding chemical effect in our body and then noticing a change. So it's B R A I N Breathe, Relax, Ask, Imagine, Notice. So that gets people to the top of the mind. Once they do the brain model, they are now in the top of the mind. Then I talk about, okay, now that we are there, let's talk about how to stay there. Let's talk about how to live there.

Let's talk about how to rewire the brain. So we talk about neuropathways, we've got some old neuropathways that are going from my middle brain down to the lower brain. And what we want to do is create new neuropathways going from the middle of the brain, to the neocortex, the upper 80% of the brain. And then, and so what I do is I show them how to begin to rewire the brain and give them something to practice that if they'll practice every day, they will have rewired their brain within two to four months. So that's the second part of the model. Then the third part of the model is okay, when you're dealing with a person who is stuck in their lower brain, how do you actually get them to