Brain Hacks 4 Leadership

G. Cole, founder of Pathwaves. Pathwaves is a realization of over a decade spent mapping studying and balancing brainwave activity with more than 16,000 sessions. And over a million minutes of brainwave recordings to his credit, G is among the world's foremost brainwave experts. He's also the creator of Neuroempowerment, a pioneering science that balances the mind and body empowering people to take control of each day and live consciously in the present. G earned a certification in neurotechnology in 2008, he's trained as a psychological counselor under the direction of Dr. Francis Flynn, Doctor of Psychology, and provided lifestyle and healthy living coaching since 1997. G founded Neuroempowerment through the Pathwaves protocol. He helps you create intentional outcomes and take control by forming new empowered patterns to transform your life at Pathwaves, they spent over a decade fine-tuning, how to use your own synopsis to improve performance. It ends suffering from depression, anxiety, sleep issues, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and more. G's website is https://pathwaveslife.com/

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...

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....

Roddy Galbraith is a Professional Speaker, Coach and Master Speaker Trainer, having worked 1-to-1 with around 10,000 different speakers from all over the world over the last 13 years. John C. Maxwell (#1 New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker) describes him as the "best speaker trainer he has ever seen, anywhere in the world". Roddy believes that we are all speakers, whether we realize it and accept it or not, because we all interact with other people, all the time. He firmly believes that the best thing any of us can do for our business success, our career success and our life success is to become a better communicator, because it will do more for us than any other skill we can develop. He has spoken around the globe and worked with, shared the stage with and developed programs with some of the very best speakers in the world including Les Brown, Robert Cialdini, Bruce Lipton, Bob Proctor, Wayne Dyer, Bonnie St John, Seth Godin, Nick Vujicic and John C. Maxwell. He has a genuine passion for helping people find their voice so they can stand up and speak out in every different area of their lives. As you’ll tell from his accent, he’s English but now lives in Jupiter Island, Florida with his wife Susan, and their 4 beautiful children. You can connect with Roddy on Instagram @roddygalbraith and find out more at www.SpeakerPro.com. So Roddy, thank you so much for being with us. You've really made a big impact on me over the last several years and working with you I've been able to apply your teaching not only to myself but to others that I'm coaching as well. So I'm really excited to hear what you're going to share with us today. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to you Jill and share a message with you and your listeners. So very excited. I thought today what I'd speak on, I have been thinking about this, I think the key to success and happiness really is growth. I think growth is important to one of those things. I think it's particularly true for leadership or anything really, but one of the problems with this is fear often stops us from engaging in the growth promoting activities that we need to do in order to get in the growth. And so if we want to be successful, we have to find ways really. We have to find ways to face the fears or any emotions that might hold us back and get in the way of that. So that's why I wanted to share with you today. Simple process for facing fear, stepping forward into growth in spite of the fairs. I love that. I hear that so many times that what stops people, I'm afraid to fail. I'm afraid that something might go wrong. I'm going to look bad and it perfectly right, which means why. Right? And it stops and it's with everything. So it's not just at work, but it happens at home. So I'm really excited to learn a little bit more. So tell us a little bit more about that. Well, let me start with the words of the German philosopher Johann von Goethe, I'm sure you have heard of many of your readers will have heard of. He said that “if you treat a man as he appears to be, then you make him worse. But if you treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, then you make him what he should be.” You know, as a leader, I think our job is to our team, isn't it, amongst other things? So this quote is particularly true for other people, but I think is never more truer than for ourselves. We need to think about this for ourselves and I think it's far easier to put a 10 on the head of everyone in our team or everyone we meet or everyone, everyone else. We can treat them as if they have already fulfilled their potential. But it's much more difficult to do it for ourselves, isn't it? It's so true, isn't it? I think very often we believe in the potential of other people more than we do for ourselves more than you know, we see our own potential and I think if we think about this Jill, well, I use you as an example. If you imagine someone else taking the actions that they...

Do you want to accelerate your leadership development? It starts with gaining self-awareness and leveraging a coaching relationship that adds value and magnifies your results. My guest, Dr. Ellen B. Van Oosten will share critical elements that you need to have in your coaching engagements to amplify your impact and growth. She will also share the data and science that demonstrates the ROI of coaching as part of your Leadership Development Strategy. Learn how move across the continuum of telling to inspiring as a leader through coaching. Podcast Transcript: Hi, this is Jill Windelspecht. Welcome back to another episode of Brain Hacks 4 leadership. I'm really excited about today's episode. (jillwindel@talentspecialists.net) I'd love to welcome my guest Ellen B. Van Oosten, PhD, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Faculty Director of Executive Education at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Van Oosten is also Director of the Coaching Research Lab. Her research interests include coaching, leadership development, emotional intelligence, and positive relationships at work. Well, Ellen, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Really looking forward to your topic. It's something that's near and dear to my heart, so why don't you introduce the topic. Sure. Thanks so much, Jill. I really am delighted to be with you and your listeners today. The topic that I thought might be of interest to a lot of individuals and organizations is coaching for leadership development and I know you've done a lot of work around that, so tell us what is some of the science that you've applied? Sure. We've known each other for a lot of years and even going back to the early days when we were doing some work together. A lot of my experience over the past 25 years has been in helping organizations develop their leadership talent and that space has been one that I've not only spent time with organizations designing and delivering programs, but served as the bridge to pull together different faculty and instructors to create customized leadership development experiences. Most recently in the last seven years, I've added to that some focus in the space of research and that's what I'm excited to share with you and your listeners. Some of what we're understanding and learning in terms of how coaching can really help. That's great. What I love about what you're doing with yourself and your partners is not just saying coaching works, but measuring it in a very systematic way to demonstrate the benefit. Yeah. That's something we feel really passionate about and are very committed to do at the Weatherhead School of Management. One of the activities that helps us organize ourselves around that and make it a priority is called the Coaching Research Lab. It is a collaborative between industry practitioners and faculty at the Weatherhead School and Organization Behavior and so through the Coaching Research Lab we conduct a number of different studies - including one that I'd be happy to share with you that supports or is interesting to our overall topic of coaching for leadership development. So this study that I'd like to share with you, it started a number of years ago where we had an opportunity to conduct a leadership development program for a financial services firm in the Midwest and this particular organization was interested to break down some silos between various areas of the business and were challenging their senior leaders, the top 300 or so leaders in the organization to collaborate in new and different ways. The way they thought to go about it was to equip the leaders with some new knowledge and some new skills. And through that experience worked with us at the University to design a leadership development program. And as part of it, we included 360 feedback and coaching. So that's the backdrop. So the study looked at two things, primarily does emotional and social...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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: 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YScywp6AU 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...

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...

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 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...