My guest today is Dr. Tamsin Astor.  Tamsin helps busy executives and corporations organize their habits and their mindset so they have time for what they want and need and time for fun.

Welcome to my new podcast, Brain Hacks 4 Leadership.  I am Jill Windelspecht and I have spent over 20 years working with leaders around the world, helping them to apply neuroscience and social science to help them advance towards their goals.  I want to bring extraordinary value to you as a leader by brining the latest thinking about the science, but more importantly I want to provide you with practical ways that you can apply this to yourself, those you lead and your organization.

My guest today is Dr. Tamsin Astor.  Tamsin helps busy executives and corporations organize their habits and their mindset so they have time for what they want and need and time for fun. Women are the self-driven nurturers who rarely make their needs a priority.  All the other voices demand immediate attention and leave little time for personal care.   We make 35,000 decisions every day leading to Decision fatigue. Dr. Tamsin Astor, your Chief Habit Scientist, helps women to create the necessary connections between their daily habits and routines in order to clear the path for more personal time & energy. Tamsin Astor holds a PhD in neuroscience and psychology and a post-doctorate in education. Also, certifications in yoga (RYT500, Yoga Ed.), Ayurveda (Living Ayurveda, Yoga Health Coach), Mindset & Executive Coaching.

Dr Astor is a published author of Force of Habit: Unleash Your Power by Developing Great Habits. She is a mother of three, an immigrant and a lover of dark chocolate, coffee and travel!

Well, Tamsin, we are so happy that you're here with us today and I've had a lot of opportunity to get to see you speak and spend time with you and I've just always grown. Every time I hear you talk about how you have impacted your own life and impacted others lives by applying the neuroscience in what it is that you do in your coaching and consulting and speaking and so really happy that you're going to share that our listeners here today. So Tamsin tell us the neuroscience and what you're going to be sharing with us today.

Well, hi Jill, thank you so much for interviewing me today. I get very excited about talking about the brain and neuroscience and how we can, you know, hack this amazing brain. You know, what I call the goal achieving machine between our ears. What I want to talk about today was vision and I'm very interested in how we can harness our brain's ability to create the life and business that we want, the home we want, the relationships we want, the engagement habits that we want in our business. The employee commitment was recently, I was reading a Gallup poll that said that only 34% of employees are engaged, which costing the U S economy somewhere between like $200 and $450 billion a year, which is a real issue. And I think part of that is connecting to the vision of what a company is looking for and whether that matches to the vision of the individual employee.

I mean, I think this is a real issue that we struggle with is connecting our visions. And one of the things that we now know with the brain is that it's plastic, which means that we can change it. You know, we used to think, you know, 40 50 60 years ago that the brain would, you know, stop devolving at a certain point. But we now know that the brain can continue to evolve as we move forward and understand the connections in between the neurons. And one way, if you can think of this is like neurosculpting. Like when you see those great shows of people cultivating a bonsai tree, right? Or pruning a beautiful Rose Bush, you know, you have to cut and prune the connections or the growths that are not serving the overall whole. And that's the way that I like to think of what's going on in our brains.

That we are creating the connections that are positive, right, that are nurturing the full goal. And when we've never done something before, we don't have the neurological connections. We don't have the Synaptic connections to get us there. So part of the way that we have to work to create the vision that we want, the life we want, the business, we want the engagement habits, all of these parts in business, right, is to start talking about it, writing it, seeing it, and you know, looking in the direction we want to go. I love that.

What do you think gets in the way for people to do that?

So I think often we get stuck with our goals. We have these goal deadlines. We have to meet tasks, we have to complete things that we have to check off. And the problem with goals is that it's very energetically exhausting, right?

You know, we, you know, we make 35,000 decisions every day. And when we're sitting there and looking at these to do lists and trying to get stuff done, we just need it. It can be really exhausting and particularly if we are not bought into the vision, if we are feeling like we're just having to do stuff and get stuff done rather than really believing in it and buying into it. And one of the great ways to shift that is to cultivate the energy of creativity. And when you crawl, cultivate the energy of creativity, you release dopamine, right? So when you start to shift out of the fight flight, sort of overwhelmed, burned out stress situation that so many people, so many employees are in, so many entrepreneurs are stuck in the sort of the hamster wheel, right? You cultivate dopamine, which is boost your energy and boost your creativity.

And one of the best ways to do that is by shifting into offering questions.

Okay, Tell me more about that. And especially, I would love to know, I know that you coach leaders around this as well. And so how have you seen leaders apply this?

Well, I'll give you a concrete example of a client of mine who when I first started working with her, she was in a state of, you know, massive, overwhelm. She was working for an organization working really long hours, feeling like she wasn't able to be present for her clients who wasn't able to present for her husband and their children and the way that she wanted to. She just felt torn in all these places. And one of the things that she really started to dive into as we work together, we were looking at what was she doing on a daily basis, what I call the microscope, what was she looking at every day and how was she connecting it to the telescope, to the life she wanted?

Right. So she had in mind, but she hadn't really allowed herself to articulate it of this vision of the kind of life she wanted, the, the direction she wanted to go and terms of how she showed up for her clients, how she showed up for her husband, how she showed up for her children. And then she wasn't able to initially connect that to what was she doing on the daily basis to tie those two together. And so as we work together, she really started to think about what kind of relationship she wanted with her clients, what kind of relationship she wanted with her children and her husband. And she realized that she really wanted to take her children to go and live in a different country for a little bit of time and to experience different way of, of being and living. So she and her husband and the children went and lived in Africa for six months and she was able to massively shift how she showed up and what she did by creating a new vision of her life and looking at the daily habits and connecting those in a way that shifted her brain.

Right. So she used her mind to change her brain.

Wow, that's quite, quite a big shift moving across the world into another country to really change your mindset. How did that change when she came back? How did, how did she stop from going back to those old habits and old thoughts and stress and anxiety?

Well, what she realized is it's possible. It was possible to create a life which tied the vision that you want, feel like to your daily habits. So keeping that front of mind and thinking about, okay, so you know what's really important, right? So often one of the things that people find when they do something is they realize that they don't need as many belongings, for example. And you know, we spend a lot of time caring and managing for things in our personal space, right? So she realized that that was one thing that she could create a big change around. She realized that the things that she and her family did when they lived in Africa was very nourishing to her. You know, family dinners, regular yoga classes, things that really shifted the day to day interactions that produce, you know, a happier feeling and more productive life. A feeling like she was living the life that she wanted to live. Right? Keeping that front of mind on a regular basis and committing to the vision. This is the vision that's important to me and what am I doing on a daily basis? What daily habits am I doing to keep that vision going?

Yeah, I love that. And I work with clients quite a bit as well to really help them first get clear on their purpose and, and get clear on that vision. Tell me what is it about the brain that, that makes this so critical that really it, that makes it important for peop