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At the beginning of this series of GuidePosts we noted that the number of people reporting stress, anxiety and depression is massive! The WHO note that mental health issues have increased 13% in the last decade (in 2017) and substance disorders up some 20% and with suicide as the second leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds - you realise that this is a huge problem.

1 Billion people across the world suffer a mental health problem in 2022!

That’s 1 person in 8!!!

WHO World Mental Health Report 2022

The increase of substance abuse is evidence that people are trying to cope with their stress, anxiety and depression with the “pleasure” of the dopamine high. This is creating a dopamine imbalance which can lead to addiction and is instead making us chronically unhappy according to Dr Robert Lustig in his excellent book, Hacking of the American Mind.

In all our striving in the pursuit of happiness we seem to be paying the price in alcohol and drug abuse, gambling, excess unhealthy food (ice cream, chocolate), smoking and social media “likes”. Meanwhile stress and anxiety are on the rise and incidents of rage make the news daily.

And that stress and cortisol increase reward seeking behaviour and decrease reasoning ability!

The world isn’t in pursuit of happiness, it’s seeking pleasure to offset the stresses of living… because it’s quicker than actually pursuing happiness and joy!

How do you increase happiness and joy in your whole life?

I’m so glad that you asked.

As I mentioned - taking a dopamine pleasure high route is quicker - especially (ab)using substances. BUT, it’s short lived and within minutes or hours you’ll be after another high due to the increasing dopamine imbalance and addiction.

Instead we can deal with chronic unhappiness and gain long term benefits through some simple, deliberate changes to how we go about our every day life. Dr Lustig proposes a solution he calls the 4C’s of Happiness: Connect, Contribute, Cope and Cook. (Check out “Hacking the American Mind”)

Connect.

Connect with people you like and enjoy. Join your local church, a social group or simply have a conversation. Preferably in person. Make sure that you practice empathy with them - this engages your mirror neurons to feel what they feel, or to “walk in their shoes”. The result is a serotonin boost and a feeling of personal contentment and fulfils your own personal need for belonging and perhaps mattering.

Time with pets can also be beneficial and achieve much the same result.

PS. Emailing, Facebooking, Insta’ing, Threading or X’ing is NOT connecting.

Contribute

Give something of yourself: your time, your resources, your skills, your energy and your attention to something larger than yourself. Volunteer at a shelter, help a charity, make or repair something for someone else who needs your help.

Giving to others is self-transcendent (spoiler alert! This is a large part of your purpose in this life!) and fulfils your personal need to matter.

Cope

Three activities that will improve your serotonin receptors in your brain (and hence make you feel happier and better): Sleep, Mindfulness and Exercise.

Sleep deprivation increases stress and cortisol and causes depression!. Sleep is so essential for your brain and body and can fill several volumes alone for the essential benefits and much advice. Read Why We Sleep, by Mathew Walker or Claudia Aguirre’s 7 Healthy Tips for a Better Night’s Sleep.

PS. Screens KILL sleep!!! And trying to multitask (which you cannot!!) is costing you sleep because it increases stress and cortisol.

Mindfulness practice helps you alter your brain waves and calms your mind deliberately. We’ll be using a mindful process in bridging from stress to joy.

Exercise regularly. Whatever takes your fancy. I personally recommend walking - even better with some company or a dog. Decent brisk walking is nothing but beneficial. Running is tougher on your body, cycling means dodging pedestrians and cars. And good stretching is amazingly beneficial - pilates or yoga for low impact.

Combine exercise with mindfulness is better than using SSRI’s for treating depression!

PS. TV/Netflix surfing increases dopamine, kills sleep, is mindless and usually accompanied with unnecessary trips to the fridge for another beer, candy bar or ice cream.

Cook for yourself! If you don’t know how to cook, you are being held hostage by the food industry (most who are in it to make profit and care less about your health and well-being and like you being addicted to sugar highs etc!)

You need to boost two items in your diet and knock one out: Up Tryptophane, More Omega 3 and Less Fructose.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid found sometimes in whole milk, nuts, seeds, eggs, poultry and fish (esp Salmon). It is the precursor to serotonin. You need more of it!

Omega 3 is another fatty acid that is an anti-inflammatory and improves your mood. Find it in fish (esp Salmon and Mackeral), algae, nuts, plant oils.

Fructose is added sugar. Reduce and better still, cut it. It depletes serotonin and ramps up your dopamine. It is the anti-happiness food of choice!

PS Fast food is your enemy. Fish is your friend (and no I don’t mean filet o’ fish burgers!) Learn to cook and choose wisely - your body and brain will thank you.

That’s it! Connect with others, Contribute by giving, Cope by sleeping well and mindful exercise and Cook (fish, poultry, eggs, nuts and seeds) for yourself. You will be happy!

What about Joy?

Where happiness is an emotion (serotonin) and circumstantial, Joy is a choice in spite of circumstances.

It is said that Joy is of the heart, happiness is on the face.

We’re going to tackle How to Increase Joy@Work next.

From what we’ve learned so far, we know that to raise performance anywhere, we need to be able to choose to be At Cause.

We’ve also learned about the affects of five important neurotransmitters: Dopamine (pleasure), Serotonin (happiness), Cortisol (stress), Adrenaline (fear), Anandamide (Peace and Joy).

We need to know about four additional Neurotransmitters in your brain’s “cocktail bar”: Oxytocin (love, trust), Vasopressin (attachment), Endorphins (resilience) and Acetylcholine (focus).

Stay with me, because I am coming back to the impact on your leadership and performance improvement @work. Meantime, let’s talk about love:

Love, often confused with joy or happiness (and sometimes pleasure) is a combination of two things: Attachment and Attraction:

Attachment

Attachment is tied to the neurotransmitters Oxytocin and Vasopressin. Oxytocin is known as the “love and trust” chemical. It’s responsible for increasing the bonding between a mother and her new born, and for that trusting relationship bond with a colleague or team member.

Vasopressin’s effects are less well understood but it appears to be gender specific. For men, Vasopressin is believed to make men more suspicious, even aggressive, towards novel males. Thus a new male joining the team may be viewed with more suspicion by the other males in the team.

In contrast, for women, it appears that Vasopressin makes them friendlier towards novel women.

Attraction

When you enjoy doing something, you are attracted to it, which makes you feel “happy” with a cascade of Dopamine, Norepinephrine and Serotonin.

You can see why feeling attracted to someone or something can easily get confused with fear mixed with pleasure mixed with happiness! Explains a lot that I wish I’d known when puberty struck!

It’s also why attraction can also cause a lack of appetite (your digestive tract got shut down in the fear response!) and a loss of sleep (which is affected by Serotonin).

Performance Enhancement

As you do things well and get into your “zone” or in your “flow”, your performance improves thanks to the additional cascade of Anandamides and Endorphins.

Endorphins are your brain’s natural pain killers. They are released to help cope when your body feels pain or stress. You can get a boost of these through exercise or any demanding activity.

Performance improvement @work

Ok, we’ve got the necessary foundational understanding.

When you do something that matters to you, you are attachedto it (Oxytocin and Vasopressin).

When you do something that you enjoy, you are attracted to it and just a little fearful (Dopamine, Norepinephrine and Serotonin).

Then you get into your zone or flow or your high performancestate (Anandamides and Endorphins).

You stay focused on task because the dopamine high mixed with a little fear to make it an exciting challenge triggers Acetylcholine - and signals your Reticular Activating System (RAS) to focus attention on the task at hand.

These eight neurochemicals significantly enhance performance and is addictive (scientists prefer to use the word “autotelic”). Hence we experience “flow” in our performance and we will go out of our way to re-experience it. Basically, we increase our own intrinsic motivation and inspiration to continually enhance our own performance!

AND there’s more! These chemicals also augment the creative process and pattern recognition. Oxytocin and Vasopressin disregulate your Neo-cortex, widening your self perspective, liberating your mind to new thoughts and feelings. Making us more creative and faster in how we do things!

Command and Control leaders should be aware that, in contrast, fear narrows perspective and inhibits performance and increases distress further degrading performance!

Which would you choose?

Regardless of your choices in life, you will face adversity, trauma, threats, difficulties, trials and tribulations - such as family or relationship issues, health problems, financial concerns, or workplace stressors. Everybody does. Nobody likes it, nobody wants to, but everybody does.

How you respond to those challenges makes all the difference in the world!

Where is your Locus of Control - “At Cause” or “At Effect”?

When you choose to be “At Cause” for your life, your focus is on choosing your actions and this increase your Circles of Power and Influence expanding them into your Circle of Concern. You have an Internal Locus of Control - that is, you believe that you have control over external forces in your life.

When you are “At Effect” of others or circumstances, your focus is on factors outside your inner circles, your Concerns gain ground, shrinking your Circles of Power and Influence. You have an External Locus of Control - that is you believe that external forces beyond your control have control over your life.

When you are “At Effect” you are more likely to experience anxiety, which gives you the illusion of control over others or over external events.

This bears repeating: When you are anxious or you worry, this gives you the illusion of control over others or external events!

Congratulations, your anxiety and worry about something beyond your control just reinforced and perpetuated your need to be anxious and worry!

On the other hand, when you choose to be “At Cause” you are reinforcing your stress resilience.

Remember The “Shortcut” and The “High Road”?

You’ll notice that I say that you "are At Effect versus you “choose to be At Cause”. That’s because your default is to be At Effect. It’s not a conscious, thought through, choice. It’s unconscious and automatic. Choosing to be At Cause is a conscious, considered, deliberate choice you make.

As our brain senses information about the challenge ahead, you’ll recall what we learned in Fear, Stress, Anxiety and Depression in Your Brain that stimuli from the outside world first take “The Shortcut” either directly to the amygdala (smells and touch) or via the Thalamus to the amygdala (sights and sounds). That is: your brain is already reacting and responding to the threat of the challenge ahead!

Meantime, some information takes the “High Road” through the cortex and your thinking brain can choose to change or reinforce the threat response. Milliseconds after your brain and body have started to react and respond, this is your moment of choice! This is the moment you can choose to be “At Cause”.

How does this help me? How do I stop worrying, anxiety and distress? Let me be clear, there isn’t a magic pill that does this (no matter what Big Pharma tries to tell you) but we do have access to a simple solution. Before that though, let’s recognise two common enemies we all have in the (conscious) mind.

Two Enemies of Being “At Cause”

And allies of remaining “At Effect”

People, most often, spend much of their time and energy worrying or concerned about the challenges that they cannot control, which cause them to feel anxious or stressed.

The first enemy is “If only…”

If only I had the [skills, money, strength, power, connections, knowledge, fortitude, faith] I would have…

If only … my parents had… I could have…

If only I … were a different race, gender, nationality, person … I should have…

If only I … had studied harder, taken that job, not taken that job, gotten married, not gotten married, had kids, not had kids…

“If only” pines over the past.

The second enemy is “What if…”

What if… I fail, succeed, look stupid …

“What if…” frets about the future.

The problem of these two enemies is that they give you the illusion of control over others or external events!

That is, you think that worrying about something makes a difference!

"Your mind would rather fret about the future or pine over the past so that it can cling onto its own illusion of control." But the current moment cannot be controlled. So our mind discounts it and we forget to savour and enjoy every now moment.”

Adapted from Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts

The Great Benefits of facing Challenges

No battles. No spoils.

Without challenges in life, life becomes tremendously boring and mundane. We wouldn’t learn and grow. Anything alive in this world that stops growing is dying. There is no stasis or status quo, it can be a slow dying or it can be incredibly quick.

Challenges, problems, obstacles or opportunities - whatever term you prefer to apply - kick your fear circuits into action and by default, your brain and body reacts.

How you choose to face those challenges makes all the difference in your world.

Now that we recognise the two main enemies and that we will all face challenges, which we still don’t particularly like but realise that they can be good for us to grow, let’s see what happens when we choose to be At Cause.

Choosing to be At Cause

Some of the incoming stimuli information is directed by your Thalamus (your brain’s “reception desk”) along the “High Road” to your cortex and, of particular interest to us here, your Pre Frontal Cortex or PFC.

Your limbic brain is already reacting to the threat of this challenge and your body is responding as your Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) signals the production of cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart is beating a little or a lot faster. Your blood pressure rises. Your digestive tract is shutting down. Sweat glands begin to ooze. And your taking the time to stop and think!

In your mind you’re experimenting with possible solutions that you can do, will do, might be able to do. You’re researching your memory banks for previous encounters and similar situations and your pre-frontal cortex makes a decision to test out a possible solution. This is what Carol Dweck calls the Growth Mindset.

If it works. Brilliant! Store the success in memory and get ready to party!

If it doesn’t work. Hmmmm. Let’s try this instead. Rinse. Repeat. Until…

The optimal solution:

* You’ve overcome the challenge! Hurrah for you. Well done. Another lesson learned. What’s next? Oh yes, party time and here’s another challenge.

* You’ve gotten past this challenge somehow, not brilliant but good enough. Next time I’ll be better equipped for such a challenge by having more X or Y available. Another lesson learned. What’s next? Oh yes, party time and here’s another challenge.

* I’ve tried everything and this challenge is a bit too much. Good job I am already:Lesson learned. What’s next? Oh yes, party time and here’s another challenge.

* 🥶Hiding in this corner

* 🏃Running away, fast

* 👊Fighting with every ounce of strength I have

For every challenge you face, you have a choice. You can choose to be At Cause or you can allow yourself to remain At Effect.

It’s not that one is better than the other. There are challenges that you are much better off leaving your brain and body to do what it does best: keeping you “not dead”. This was especially true when your forefathers lived in mud huts and faced the daily commute to the field where lions roamed.

There are, however, other times when your default fear response, stress and anxiety are less than helpful. Particularly in the modern urban jungle and commute on the crowded freeway or train to the workplace with the horrible boss and unkind colleagues. Times when choosing to be At Cause will be more profitable for you.

How then do we lift performance @work using this knowledge? This is obviously about lifting performance for your bosses, staff and colleagues because we already know that you are the hardest worker at your organisation 😜. How to Raise Performance and have Joy@Work… coming soon

It’s not all doom and gloom in the brain! There’s the positive aspects of Eustress and on the flip side of fear, anxiety and depression, we can feel Pleasure, Happiness and Joy!

If you ask, most people will tell you that their goal in life is to be happy. Indeed the United States Declaration of Independence considers the “Pursuit of Happiness” to be an unalienable right.

But there’s a problem. When most people think about happiness, they’re really thinking about what gives them pleasure and having more of those things. These are by definition, temporal - Aristotle referred to this as Hedonia, which is happiness as pleasure.

Eudainomia, on the other hand is happiness as personal Fulfilment.

Let’s begin with a quick reminder about the six essential human needs and then examining the important differences between the three states: Pleasure, Happiness and Joy.

Six Essential Human Needs Recap

Everyone shares six essential human needs that drive our behaviour to satisfy those needs. When those needs are not being met or they are threatened, our fear, stress and anxiety response kick in.

The more basic the need, usually, the more pressing our response.

For example, freedom needs were being threatened across the globe throughout the COVID pandemic by well-intentioned authorities. At first your response, like most people, was accepting such limitations on your freedom as justified and “for the greater good” (notice how they appealed to your need to belong and transcend and care for others!)

As the weeks and months passed with further restrictions imposed, your freeze, flight or fight response kicked in. Some of you kept your heads down and stayed quiet until the danger passed. Others, with the means, ran off to other countries with fewer restrictions. Others fought against the restrictions risking arrest, fines and worse.

In a moment, we’ll also see how those more basic needs are the key areas of our hedonic pleasures in life. We’ll also see how our higher needs are areas of Eudainomic happiness and joy.

Pleasure

Pleasure is visceral when we enjoy taking something from outside of ourselves, like taking pleasure in eating, having a good massage or receiving an encouraging message from a friend.

Pleasure is short-lived and is experienced alone.

Pleasure can be addictive and may also be achieved through the use of substances.

Pleasure is tied to the neurotransmitter dopamine which fires motivation and desire. The dopamine pathway includes five areas of receptors in your brain:

Happiness

Happiness is ethereal, circumstantial, outward expression and usually involves us giving or serving others, like volunteering to help a charity, organising community events, giving money to someone in need.

Happiness is longer term and experienced in social groups

Happiness is not addictive and cannot be achieved through the use of substances.

Happiness is tied to the neurotransmitter Serotonin which regulates your mood and general well-being. The serotonin pathways touch at least 14 receptor areas in the brain:

Joy

Joy is an ethereal state of mind. It is a choice you make in spite of your circumstances, often manifest as encouraging, giving and serving others.

As a choice, joy is always available to you that overflows to your social groups.

It may be addictive and similar feelings may be achieved through the use of substances (though only for self and not for others).

Joy is linked to the neurotransmitters Serotonin (as happiness) and Anandamide - an endocannaboid fatty acid which binds to the cannabis (CB1) receptors of the brain. These receptors are throughout the brain in the Cortex, Cerebellum, Hippocampus and Basal Ganglia and throughout the body.

The Timeline of Pleasure, Happiness and Joy

As I was researching this, I began to notice a difference in tense people use when considering each facet of these phenomena.

The event(s) is now and in the future, I am choosing to respond appropriately now

#😲 Insight: Pleasure, Happiness and especially Joy appear to be the flip side of fear, stress, anxiety and depression.

It is both difficult to feel pleasure or happiness when you are fearful or stressed AND difficult to feel fear, stress, anxiety or depressed when you are filled with happiness or joy!

Is there a switch in the brain that will help us to do just that?

Yes, there is, and we refer this locus of control as Choosing to Be At Cause or At Effect And that’s what we’ll discuss next.

Fear, stress and anxiety increase when we believe or perceive that our power, influence or control are diminished or threatened by challenges beyond our control. Fear, stress and anxiety are reactions (not illness). We have shifted our locus of control from us… to ”them”.

The similarities and differences between these reactions.

Internally, your reaction to fear, stress, anxiety and depression are similar yet with key difference in triggers, affects and timeframe.

Fear is an intense, biological response to immediate externalthreat and a danger to your safety. Your response is usually intense, physical and very short term. It’s usually unsafe, negative and unpleasant. During the event time dilates, you see more, feel more. By the time you think about it, the trigger is in the past and you may then experience the euphoria of relief and survival. “Adrenaline junkies” thrive on that “high” and deliberately seek such challenges.

Stress is your brain’s response to, mostly externally triggered challenge, change, demand or threat that may trigger a physical response but mostly psychological and short term. It can be positive and helpful (eustress) or negative and unpleasant (distress). Both eustress and distress are of the moment, they are in the present. Eustress fires you up 🔥, distress shuts you down 🔐. Eustress motivates, distress demotivates.

While anxiety is the result of internal tensions creating fear about your ability to perform or address a future challenge. Your response may be physical discomfort, but mostly mental (such as humiliation or rejection) and can be very long term if left untreated.

Depression is an experience where you feel low most of the time and you have also lost interest in things you usually enjoy. You may also have changes in your sleep, appetite, feel guilty, de-motivated and generally withdraw from others.

What Happens in Your Brain:

In the brain: fear, stress and anxiety each have specific triggers for an individual, and each have certain reactions. Between trigger and reaction, a lot of what goes on in the brain is remarkably similar.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that a challenge we consider fearful, someone else may consider a little stressful or even pleasurable!

One simple example I experience regularly. I have a dog, she’s a sweet, but nervous rescue dog about the size of a Labrador. Some people find her adorable, others consider her to be very frightening.

On the other hand, some people find snakes to be interesting and pleasant, whereas I run from them - even video or images of them!

Six stimuli

Remember, Your brain’s #1 job is to keep you “not dead”. You are constantly scanning your environment for any threat that might compromise that situation. Which can be anything that is deemed to threaten your circle of power.

Scanning for threats are your five senses - and these have two routes into the brain:

Visual and auditory stimuli (sight and sounds) go to the Thalamus in the brain. You can think of the Thalamus as the reception lobby of an office where incoming visitors are screened and sent to the appropriate office. If the sight or sound is threatening - the amygdalae are signalled.

Olfactory and Tactile stimuli have direct access straight to the Amygdalae! That is smells and touch go straight to the amygdalae. That’s why you recoil immediately from bad smells or unpleasant touch. Fractionally later from something you see or hear.

Yes five senses, but six stimuli. When they pick up a threat, the information takes one of two routes in your brain:

Route 1 - The Shortcut

Smell, taste and touch stimuli bypass the Thalamus reception desk and gain immediate access to the Amygdala. (This is why smells can evoke such powerful responses!)

The amygdalae informs other brain structures to respond to the perceived threat:

* Your Hypothalamus and Pituitary gland trigger your adrenal glands to boost your stress hormones: adrenaline and cortisol.

* Too much cortisol short-circuits the Hippocampus (your main memory centre) making it difficult to organise memory.

* Your Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is stimulated which increases your heart rate and blood pressure, you sweat more and even your skin tingles. All to prepare your body for action against the threat.

* Your Freeze, Flight or Fight response is activated - enabling you to increase your sensory awareness and drink in more detail to better deal with the threat.

* Your digestive tract is shut down. This diverts energy from digestion to responding to the threat. You may even evacuate your digestive tract in readiness for a survival response. Lunch is less important than escaping the lion behind you!

Route 2 - The High Road

You see or hear something - that information heads to the Thalamus - it’s like the reception lobby of your brain where it “registers” and is directed where to go:

In the case of a sensed threat, that information is sent to the Amygdala which rings the alarm bells down via the Locus Ceruleus and the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) which signal the adrenal glands to release hormones called adrenaline (epinephrine) and cortisol. It shifts your heart rate and blood pressure up, shuts down your digestive system and initiates your freeze, fight or flight response - whichever is your most default response to similar situations.

The Freeze, Flight or Fight Response

At first, your response to a new challenge is unconscious. Your response to the "fear" of this new challenge is typified by the Freeze, Fight or Flight response.

🥊 Fight Time: You might get angry and blame others, or

🥶 Frozen: you hide your head and pretend the challenge isn't there (hoping someone else will deal with it), or your mind simply shuts down with the enormity of the challenge, or

🏃‍♀️ Flight: you flee the scene and get away from the challenge.

And all that happened in an instant without ANY conscious thinking!

That is. Your brain and body have responded to the stimuli BEFORE you have consciously thought about it.

And this is a GOOD thing…. most of the time… at least in real emergencies. In the workplace jungle, or driving along the street…not so much.

It is only AFTER the Sympathetic response is activated that your conscious mind gets involved in thinking about this. Some of the sensory incoming information was sent from the Thalamus reception desk on a longer route through the cortex. Here, the sensory information is analysed and gives meaning to what is seen or heard. If the threat is passed, then the PreFrontal Cortex (PFC), the “executive suite” of your brain is responsible for shutting the fear response down. It’s a little like putting the brakes of a car beside the hot engine, but that’s the way it is.

Stress

Stress, or at least stress inducing hormones are essential to your survival. Even in the modern world. Without cortisol, for example, your blood pressure will drop to dangerously low levels and without immediate intervention, you die. Too little adrenaline and you’d probably not react to real threats and also probably die. Your brain would have failed it’s #1 task to keep you “not dead!”

Distress is a chronic subset of the fear and anxiety response. It’s when our brain’s response continues to signal the production of more cortisol and adrenaline. Your locus of control likely shifts external to being At Effect and believe your circle of power and influence is threatened. Stress manifests in the same way as fear but continues for longer and is perpetuated by the cortex (Route 2: the high road describes above). That is, your thinking determines that the threat is still present and requires the high alert response. Even if your thinking is inaccurate, faulty or toxic.

The upside of stress!

Too little stress and you will be calm. This is perfectly fine if you intend to be calm and doing little, but if you want to perform, you’ll need a little oomph!

Eustress as it is known, is the positive affects of stress. Or rather when your thinking brain (Cortex and PFC) alters the way you think about the negative threat as a positive challenge, that is, your locus of control shifts to being At Cause

That is, effectively puts the brakes on an overwhelming stress response to a situation keeping you in a productive action zone.

It’s how you choose to view the challenge!

Anxiety and Phobias and other toxic thinking (the sixth stimuli!)

The cortex, and especially the PFC is where we also find our 6th stimuli - our thoughts. It’s when our internal thoughts and emotions analysis interpret stimuli as catastrophic, or incorrect, or irrational and inform the amygdala to commence or perpetuate the fear response.

An example would be my “phobia” for snakes, even an image of one sends my thoughts into a tizzy and triggers a fear response. Basically our thoughts can be toxic, unhealthy and unhelpful.

When we “worry” about something in the future, our thoughts and associated emotions (probably from memories, real or imagined) informs the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminals (BNST) to perpetuate the fear response typical of longer term anxiety. And even though the PFC should put the brakes on because worry about the future does absolutely nothing positive ever, this irrational or “stinkin’ thinkin’” is allowed to perpetuate and hence, the BNST gets reinforced to continue the fear response. This gives us the illusion of control we saw earlier.

Raw sensory information, attached to our emotional response then heads to the memory centre of the Hippocampus for memory storage.

One of the biggest problems that people face, often without realising it, is that what you fear, you focus on. That is, the very thing you fear is something that you instruct your Reticular Activating System (RAS) to pay special attention. Without realising it, what you fear infects what you serve and worship (it’s the centre of your attention) and it becomes your idol!

Once the threat is passed, we like to post-rationalise any disproportionate emotional response in a desperate attempt to regain that sense of control and power. This is where some people justify their explosive fit of anger as being “righteous” or the victim “deserved it”.

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Or perhaps you feel guilty (self-criticise for a mistake or behaviour) because you achieved less than optimal results. Guilt, oddly, enhances our sense of control!

Or perhaps you like to add on some deep shame (complete self-condemnation for your actions or behaviour). Possibly the most difficult and painful emotion causing feelings of disgrace and dishonour to the point where the sufferer may feel that they don’t deserve to be helped, even by themselves!

Amygdala Hijack

Made famous in his seminal book on Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goldman tells us that an amygdala hijack is an intense emotional reaction that's out of proportion to the circumstance.

It is most often manifest as anger - even rage and effectively disables intervention by the Pre Frontal Cortex (PFC), cutting across the brain and avoiding feelings of guilt and shame (which might have helped you stop yourself at the time).

Depression

Anxiety and depression share overlapping symptoms, but where anxiety is a high-energy state filled with active worry about the future and often something specific, depression appears as a low-energy state where there is a general dread about the present and the future. They can and do co-exist in a cycle where anxiety can lead to depression and depression causes (further) anxiety.

Hormonal imbalance has long been considered a major cause of depression (perhaps because this suits the pharmaceuticals industry?) However, the neuroscience of depression is much more complex than that.

Research is showing that depression isn’t simply about having too little or too much of particular brain chemicals. The cause of depression are much more complex and may include faulty mood regulation in the brain, genetics and stressful life events and continued anxiety.

For example, experts believe stress can suppress the production of new neurons (nerve cells) in the hippocampus, which appears to be smaller in depressed people. And activity in the amygdala is higher when a person is sad or clinically depressed, and this continues even after recovery from depression.

I posit a theory that if our cortex adds a little guilt or shame to these events, we might create the perfect brewing conditions for depression?

Important Note

If you have experienced anxiety for more than two weeks, you should seek professional help and guidance.

Depression is deeply unpleasant and sadly pervasive and it is treatable through counselling and, where appropriate, supported with proper medication.

The Timeline of Fear, Stress, Anxiety and Depression.

As I was researching this, I began to notice a difference in tense people use when considering each facet of these phenomena.

Fear: Past. The event has already occured, I am now reacting to the event

Stress: Present. The event is taking place now and I am responding or reacting to it now

Anxiety: Future. The event is in the future, I am reacting to (anticipating) it now

Depression: Future Ongoing. The event(s) is now and in the future, I am feeling unable to respond appropriately now

Let’s wrap this part and prepare for some pleasure, happiness and joy.

We know that a life without challenges simply does not exist. And if it did, it would be a slow tedium with no growth and hence, only death. We know that to perform any task, our brain and body require a certain level of stress inducing hormones.

We know that we can feel threatened by anything that appears to take away our power or control over our own life. That can be as real as a lion bearing down on you at high speed as you cross its path or as innocuous as a beep on a smartphone.

We also know that our own thoughts can, and often are, the source of our own worry and anxiety. Whether factual and real or not.

The fear response is essential for survival. Less so now, perhaps, than for our cave-dwelling ancestors. However the Bible tells us to “Fear not” (or similar words) 365 times! That’s one for each day of the year.

Fortunately, there’s also a flip side to life beyond stress and performance. There’s pleasure and happiness and even joy this side of heaven. Next time to look at Joy, Happiness and Pleasure in Your Brain

We know that choosing joy means higher performance, more happiness, less stress, less anxiety, better results, greater health. And we know that choosing joy is simple. So why do we all find it so dang difficult?!?

In large part, it’s about another need we, or rather our brain has; to feel that we have control.

But, we have established that you cannot control what happens outside - you may be able to influence it or concerned about it, but you cannot control it. You only control your own thoughts and your own actions. Sorry, you CAN only control your thoughts and your actions. It’s your choice.

You can influence others and some things outside but you do not control them.

So, I’m borrowing and adapting from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Imagine 3 circles:

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* The inner circle is our circle of power and contains all the things that you know that (on your better days) you can control. In this inner circle, you have the full power of choice. These include your own thoughts, the words you use, the actions you take. You also have control over your emotions, your effort and your own self-care.

* The middle circle are things over which you have influence, limited control and less power. These are things that you can directly influence. These include your health, your family, home, job, finances and friends.

* The outer circle is our circle of concern. Things and people that matter to you but over whom you have much less influence and even less power. The further from your inner circle, the less influence you have. These might include the weather, world events and politics, accident or injury or illness. Also other’s perceptions and their actions.

When you perceive or believe that external events or people threaten your circle of influence or your circle of power you are focused on things that you cannot control. And when you choose (or allow yourself to) focus on what you cannot control, your Circle of Influence contracts! You have chosen to have an external locus of control.

In contrast, when you choose to focus on what you can control, your Circle of Influence expands. You have chosen an internal locus of control.

A third, and more profitable focus is on the Spirit within and a God who is still on His throne and in control of everything (a fourth outer ring) and then we humble ourself to the finished work of Christ knowing that “…all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” Rom 8:28

Fear, stress, anxiety and depression can increase when we believe or perceive that our power, influence or control are diminished or threatened by challenges beyond our control. Fear, stress and anxiety are reactions (not illness). We have shifted our locus of control from us… to ”them”.

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.

Stephen Covey

Six Essential Human Needs - SPACES Recap

It’s not just about any threat to your circle of power, it’s what you perceive is being threatened and how important that need is to you!

You’ll recall that we all share six essential needs. These are the key things we wish to influence.

When we perceive that our circle of power is being threatened, our influence to have our own needs fulfilled diminishes.

The more fundamental the need, for example something life threatening, the greater our fear response to the threat.

And, we should all be acutely aware that the more fundamental the need for us, the easier it is for someone else to influence our response both positively and negatively. The advertising industry is successful precisely because it plays on our more fundamental needs and fears.

For example, your need to eat food is most often associated with pleasure and price in advertisements. New cars are associated with prestige or significance (a higher need for mattering or significance) but also scantily clad human models (a fundamental sexual need).

#😲 Insight When you focus on the external threats to your needs, your circle of influence and power to protect those needs diminishes. When you focus on what you can control, your circles of power and influence over your needs and concerns increases.

Start where you are. Do what you can. Use what you have.

Arthur Ashe

Our lives are always moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts. What we think shapes who we are.

The better we grasp this truth, the better equipped we can be to influence the trajectory of our lives. But don’t take my word for it. Both the Bible and modern science provide evidence that this is true. So throughout this Guide, we’ll unpack both Scripture and what we’ve learned from scientific research.

What science is demonstrating today is what God told us through Solomon almost three thousand years ago: “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” Proverbs 23:7 NKJV

“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. “Eat and drink!” he says to you, But his heart is not with you.”

The Serenity Prayer - known chiefly through its use in Alcoholics Anonymous begins, but a useful prayer for everyone who wants to win this battle in the brain:

“God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.”

Thank you for reading Joy@Work. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Let’s take a look next at what happens when you are faced with a challenge (threat) and Fear, Stress, Anxiety and Depression in Your Brain.

You're Biased!

Now, before you go off in a huff and rant against my assertion do, please, let me explain. Everyone has biases. Actually, you have to or else your brain would drain all of your energy.

Power and Purpose

The purpose of this guide is to allow you to be aware of your own biases and those of others - NOT TO FIX THEM! - That is NOT your job. Your awareness will enable you to re-frame your communications and be prepared to challenge unwarranted assumptions or faulty thinking - with love and kindness.

The power of your payoff when you put this into action will be to listen much more deeply and effectively and communicate with empathy and clarity for mutual understanding.

Key questions to be considering as you read, watch or listen to this AdvantEdge Coaching Guide:

* What is the ONE thing you will stop doing, start doing or change how you behave or act that will have the greatest impact on your leadership performance from your learning here?

* What is the single, tiniest step you can take immediately that will begin that improvement and by when?

What is Prejudice?

Prejudice is one example of cognitive bias that is most often a preconceived, unfavourable opinion about another person or group. Indeed this is known as the “In-Group” or “Out-Group” Bias. It enables you to judge another person almost instantly based on very limited data. Which is very efficient but often seriously flawed. Yet, we all have them.

Blame your parents, upbringing, society, politicians, culture, race, language, tv, Hollywood, the Interweb, FaceBook... whatever you like, you still have biases.

Some biases are potentially helping you make better, quicker decisions, others could be, and almost certainly are, undermining your true power and potential.

But I’m not biased!

You already know that everyone else you meet is biased right? (That’s your confirmation bias kicking in by the way.) Especially those people who disagree with you or have a different political or religious viewpoint. So are you and everyone else is too because your brain HAS to be biased.

Your brain hates ambiguity and uncertainty! And, it is willing to take short cuts to remove it from the situation. If there's insufficient information to go on you will use whatever is available and unconsciously fill in the blanks from your memories and beliefs until you recognise a pattern and come (jump) to an internal representation.

It’s one way that your brain saves you precious energy and stress and saves time making decisions.

If we were to allow our brains to take in all the available information, process it, evaluate it objectively and make a decision. Well, that speeding vehicle would have wiped out your life already. OK, maybe it’s not so drastic, but your brain sees uncertainty as a threat and triggers your threat response biasing decisions toward habit and modulating our propensity to take risks (do something new and untested).

A Quick brain primer (so that you don’t use your biases and fill in your own wrong answers).

Your brain is programmed to minimise effort and save energy.

In his fabulous book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shows that your brain works using two different systems, 1 and 2 (yeah, terrific names ;-)). System 1 is fast thinking - mostly unconscious, prone to biases and errors and can be exploited by others to influence your responses and choices. System 2 is slower thinking but more reliable and it is supposed to monitor System 1 but often it doesn't bother when it's feeling a bit "lazy" or it's overloaded.

Your brain is programmed to minimise effort and System 2 requires more effort and energy, hence, System 1 runs the show by default.

And therein lies the problem.

Top Ten Cognitive Biases

The list of cognitive biases that have been identified is incredibly long and grows monthly.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases and I've come across 10 repeatedly in my coaching with leaders that could really use your conscious attention now.

Similarity

In-Group Bias

Favouring whose who belong to your group

You unfairly favour those who belong to your group.

We presume that we're fair and impartial, but the truth is that we automatically favour those who are most like us, or belong to our groups. This blind tribalism has evolved to strengthen social cohesion, however in a modern and multicultural world it can have the opposite effect.

Try to imagine yourself in the position of those in out-groups; whilst also attempting to be dispassionate when judging those who belong to your in-groups.

Most people prefer to pretend that this doesn’t apply to them. In particular along discriminatory lines - but it does, and the sooner we all recognise this, the sooner we can do something about it.

Functional Fixedness

Seeing objects as working in only one way

If a conclusion supports your existing beliefs, you'll rationalise anything that supports it.

It's difficult for us to set aside our existing beliefs to consider the true merits of an argument. In practice this means that our ideas become impervious to criticism, and are perpetually reinforced. Instead of thinking about our beliefs in terms of 'true or false' it's probably better to think of them in terms of probability. For example we might assign a 95%+ chance that thinking in terms of probability will help us think better, and a less than 1% chance that our existing beliefs have no room for any doubt. Thinking probabilistically forces us to evaluate more rationally.

A useful thing to ask is 'when and how did I get this belief?' We tend to automatically defend our ideas without ever really questioning them.

Expedience

Availability Heuristic

Placing more value on quick to mind information

Your judgments are influenced by what springs most easily to mind.

How recent, emotionally powerful, or unusual your memories are can make them seem more relevant. This, in turn, can cause you to apply them too readily. For instance, when we see news reports about homicides, child abductions, and other terrible crimes it can make us believe that these events are much more common and threatening to us than is actually the case.

Try to gain different perspectives and relevant statistical information rather than click-bait headlines.

Anchoring Bias

Relying on the first piece of information you learn

The first thing you judge influences your judgment of all that follows.

Human minds are associative in nature, so the order in which we receive information helps determine the course of our judgments and perceptions. For instance, the first price offered for a used car sets an ‘anchor’ price which will influence how reasonable or unreasonable a counter-offer might seem. Even if we feel like an initial price is far too high, it can make a slightly less-than-reasonable offer seem entirely reasonable in contrast to the anchor price.

Be especially mindful of this bias during financial negotiations such as houses, cars, and salaries. The initial price offered has proven to have a significant effect.

Optimism Bias

Leads you to believe that you are less likely to suffer misfortune than others

You overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes.

There can be benefits to a positive attitude, but it's unwise to allow such an attitude to adversely affect our ability to make rational judgments (they're not mutually exclusive). Wishful thinking can be a tragic irony insofar as it can create more negative outcomes, such as in the case of problem gambling.

If you make rational, realistic judgments you'll have a lot more to feel positive about.

Experience

Confirmation Bias

Favouring information that conforms to existing beliefs

You favour things that confirm your existing beliefs.

We are primed to see and agree with ideas that fit our preconceptions, and to ignore and dismiss information that conflicts with them. You could say that this is the mother of all biases, as it affects so much of our thinking through motivated reasoning. To help counteract its influence we ought to presume ourselves wrong until proven right.

Think of your ideas and beliefs as software you're actively trying to find problems with rather than things to be defended. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman

Curse of Knowledge

Assuming the other person should already know this

Once you understand something you presume it to be obvious to everyone.

Things makes sense once they make sense, so it can be hard to remember why they didn't. We build complex networks of understanding and forget how intricate the path to our available knowledge really is. This bias is closely related to the hindsight bias wherein you will tend to believe that an event was predictable all along once it has occurred. We have difficulty reconstructing our own prior mental states of confusion and ignorance once we have clear knowledge.

When teaching someone something new, go slow and explain like they're ten years old (without being patronising). Repeat key points and facilitate active practice to help embed knowledge.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

When someone believes they are smarter or more capable than they are

The more you know, the less confident you're likely to be.

Because experts know just how much they don't know, they tend to underestimate their ability; but it's easy to be over-confident when you have only a simple idea of how things are. Try not to mistake the cautiousness of experts as a lack of understanding, nor to give much credence to lay-people who appear confident but have only superficial knowledge. Remind yourself of all those “experts” at the beginning of the Covid Pandemic who ended up getting it so very very wrong.

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves, yet wiser people so full of doubts.”- Bertrand Russell

Almost no-one who suffers this effect is cognizant of it. Everybody else is through. Dare to ask your colleagues?

Distance

Actor-Observer Bias

Attributing your own actions to external causes whilst others act on internal causes

You judge others character based on their actions, but yourself on the situation and your intentions.

If you haven’t had a good night’s sleep, you know why you’re being a bit slow; but if you observe someone else being slow you don’t have such knowledge and so you might presume them to just be a slow person. Because of this disparity in knowledge we often overemphasise the influence of circumstance for our own failings, as well as underestimating circumstantial factors to explain other people's problems.

It's not only kind to view others' situations with charity, it's more objective too. Be mindful to also err on the side of taking personal responsibility rather than justifying and blaming.

Safety

Self-Serving Bias

Blaming external forces for bad things and taking credit for good happenings

You believe your failures are due to external factors, yet you're responsible for your successes.

Many of us enjoy unearned privileges, luck and advantages that others do not. It's easy to tell ourselves that we deserve these things, whilst blaming circumstance when things don't go our way. Our desire to protect and exalt our own egos is a powerful force in our psychology. Fostering humility can help countermand this tendency, whilst also making us nicer humans.

When judging others, be mindful of how this bias interacts with the just-world.

Very few people like to admit to this as most of us are simply too proud of ourselves and find this a little too much humility and honesty.

What are Your Top Biases?

What biases, short cuts and heuristics have you grown and developed over your years of life and experience that aren't being monitored by you. You just carry on with your day allowing your faster, unconscious System1 to get you through today and might not even see the trail of destruction left in your wake.

Over the past 30 plus years, I've worked with a lot of geeks and nerds, and the biases I've seen most in action can undermine your potential career as a leader and sabotage your success. They were all useful for you at some point along the way, but many have outlived that usefulness and could do with an overhaul and a serious upgrade.

From this group of top ten biases, which do you immediately realise that you have operating in some way?

Ask someone who knows you well, that you trust and love regardless, to go through this list with you.

What Next?

Now, become consciously aware that you may be prone to making decisions using these biases, and using the secret power of the pause you can now hold onto your tongue just an extra moment or three. Is there something that you might be missing here? Is there a possible alternative viewpoint? Have I considered all the angles? And test your new decision in a different frame. How does it feel now?

Oh, and please do not concern yourself that you are taking time to think and be silent. Your audience is already beginning to think that you could just be the wisest person they know, and they are about ready to listen.

Consider the biases here and note those that you now notice that you hold and check your own thinking each time that you come across situations that may involve the use of this bias.

Use the The Secret Power of the Pause to interrupt your unconscious thought patterns and deliberately assess your thinking. Adjust your response and behaviour as needed. At the beginning, don't fret too much about your physiology, that will have already happened, but eventually, you will overcome your bias and perhaps, create new ones that serve you better.

Key questions to be considering as you read, watch or listen to this AdvantEdge Coaching Guide:

* What is the ONE thing you will stop doing, start doing or change how you behave or act that will have the greatest impact on your leadership performance from your learning here?

* What is the single, tiniest step you can take immediately that will begin that improvement and by when?

What do I do if I need help to do this?

The first step is to talk to someone you trust. A medical doctor, a pastor, a true friend. Maybe a coach or mentor. Remember, this is a world of rapid change and people want to be reassured by a leader who is consistent (with the same story) yet adapts in good time to changing circumstances (changes the story).

If you want to consider coaching, you can learn more about AdvantEdge Coaching so that you can have Joy@Work and Your Team to becomes United in Trust and Collaboration, contact us here and arrange a complimentary, confidential, no obligation Discovery Session.

How Can We Serve you? – Leadership AdvantEdge

How do I get started? First, we need to focus on what we can control… in our next edition…

Now that we know Why Joy@Work Matters, it’s time to let you know about a battle going on in your brain.

Imagine a battlefield with two opposing sides. Only one side doesn’t realise that it’s in a battle!

The enemy is steadily picking them off one by one and there’s no retaliation. Just acceptance. 🎶 Que sera sera 🎶. “Life is difficult!” “What do you expect me to do?” “They’re bigger, more important, smarter, slimmer, richer, stronger, prettier, older, younger, senior, more talented, more experienced, better connected, luckier…” Did I miss yours? Add it to the list.

In my experience, there are two types of leader who struggle the most in this battle:

1. Those who (secretly) believe they are not good enough - the Imposters

2. Those who need to be recognised as significant and important - the Egomaniacs

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The Imposters

These are people who, often secretly, think they are somehow lacking but don’t want anyone else to know it. Instead they have to be seen as invulnerable. Stoic, “stiff upper lip and all that chaps”. Whatever you do, don’t let your emotions show. In that lies weakness and when people see that I’m weak, they’ll attack and destroy me.

Inside they’re ashamed to be living a lie and, afraid to empathise, don’t open up to deep relationships or dare to ask for what they truly desire and struggle for worthiness. They desperately want to be liked by others for who they are, but dare not show who they are because they don’t like themselves very much.

Instead they allow the enemy to chip away and wear them down thinking that they “deserve it for not being good enough”.

The Egomaniacs

These are people whose ego makes them over-estimate their own abilities and worth, and under-estimate the effort and skill required to achieve their goals. They feel superior to and better than others. And they need to be recognised for their significant greatness.

Ego is the outsized sense of self-importance. It is the toxic force that makes real teamwork, empathy, vulnerability and artistry impossible. Ego Is The Enemy - Ryan Holiday.

The enemy simply has to “poke the bear” and the egomaniac inflicts damage to themselves and bullies and blames everyone else and their own team.

Some Imposters protect themselves by becoming Egomaniacs:

And its easy to flip from one to the other in six steps as Brene Brown shares in Dare to Lead about the armour we use to protect our vulnerability. Here’s six pieces of armour from Imposter (“I’m not good enough”) to Egomaniac (“I’m better than them”):

1. I’m really not good enough. [Imposter Syndrome]

2. But if I’m open and honest about this, people will think less of me or even use it against me. [Shame]

3. No way am I going to be honest about this. No-one else does… why should I? They’re not honest about anything and they’ve plenty of issues. [Accusation]

4. It’s their issues and shortcomings that make me act this way. [Blame]

5. It’s their fault. And they’re blaming me! [Anger]

6. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m actually better than them. [Superiority]

- My Ego is stroked [Egomaniac]

You cannot change what you do not confront!

You cannot control what happens outside. You only control your own thoughts and your own actions. Sorry, you CAN only control your thoughts and your actions. It’s your choice.

You can influence others and some things outside but you do not control them.

It’s time for you to become a thought warrior. It’s time for you to dare to have Joy@Work.

When you dare to have Joy@Work you’ll feel vulnerable and focus your attention on helping and recognising others.

When you have Joy@Work you will feel vulnerable

Many leaders ask me to help their teams trust each other and improve collaboration. They know it’s hugely beneficial and profitable for that to be the case. But they fear being vulnerable to their team because the team isn’t trusted by the leader - so why would they trust each other? Let alone collaborate?

Once you accept that you cannot control what will happen but you still speak or act in an authentic way - that’s being vulnerable. And only when you are being vulnerable are you able to build authentic, supportive and trusting relationships.

When you have Joy is when you feel most vulnerable. But because it is rare (or we only allow ourselves to feel it rarely) it is most often a “foreboding joy”. We insist on rehearsing tragedy (when will the s**t hit the fan?)

It is beauty and fragility and deep gratitude and impermanence wrapped up in one emotion.

Why? Because joy is rare and we’re not used to it. And we don’t trust it… yet.

When we practice Joy@Work we focus on others

Those who practice sustaining joy have one thing in common, they practice gratitude. Not an attitude. It’s a practice!

At dinner everyday you say or sing grace; thanks to God for your food, share one thing you’re grateful for today.

And recognise other’s achievements at work! Every day and eventually, every one. Rinse. Repeat. Celebrate the small wins. It could all go sideways in five minutes. Celebrate now and recognise good work. Engagement increases, retention improves, performance goes up.

And for those with Imposter Syndrome (“I’m not good enough”)

You are not how other’s say (or have said) you are. God says “I say how you are. You are qualified to achieve my purpose for you.”

It’s time to have the courage to be vulnerable, to practice gratitude and recognising others, it’s time to dare to have Joy@Work!

The Biblical way to win the battle in our brain.

The apostle Paul in Phi 4:12 and 2 Cor 10:5  shares:

1. The battle for your life is won or lost in your mind

2. Your thoughts will control you. So you have to control your thoughts.

OK. Are you ready to Dare to have Joy@Work? Excellent.

Now, we need to spend a little time understanding and recognising that each of us are biased! And knowing your own biases is incredibly important. Next Pride and Prejudice.

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Have you shared this GuidePost yet with someone who needs it?

The number of people worldwide reporting feeling stress or anxiety is massive! 80% of US workers say they experience stress on the job (American Inst of Stress). (70% according to APA). Covid added to the problems with a spike in anxiety (37% up from 8% pre-Covid!) and depression (30% up from 6%!) according to the World Economic Forum.

One positive thing about Covid though has been that employers and Governments are beginning to take mental health a lot more seriously. Though many fall back on the health systems who seem intent on flawed idea of medicating people out of the problems rather than dealing with the root causes.

In this AdvantEdge Guide Series, we’re taking a rather special approach to the issues by looking at the flip side of fear, stress and anxiety in the brain, by comparing and contrasting these with Happiness and Joy in the brain. One side raises performance, the other inhibits it.

Why Joy@Work?

Every one of us has this war going on inside our minds. Only one side doesn’t realise that it’s in a war!

Within Joy@Work lies the bedrock of wisdom and insight into the art and neuroscience that underpins your journey as a leader. This invaluable resource is your AdvantEDGE to begin Winning the War in Your Brain.

* Encourage you to Understand the war that’s ongoing

* Develop and Equip you for the battle

* Guide you to transcend the limitations holding you back, and

* Empower you to UnStuck your true potential for unparalleled joy and fulfillment in both your personal and professional life.

With this incredible knowledge, you will forge a path towards building a thriving and successful organisation, with collaborative, high-performing teams comprising of engaged, joyful employees.

This powerful AdvantEdge Coaching Series has been refined and developed and is the basis for helping many clients to have Joy@Work, improve their own performance and that of their teams and businesses. Throughout 2023, we’ll be making this powerful AdvantEdge 11 part series available by Podcast, Text and Video.

This series has 11 parts and we intend to publish in order a new part each month. The working links below (in red) are available to you now. If you want access to them all now, that’s great and you can sign up for AdvantEdge Coaching here.

Subscribe now to Joy@Work! And be first to receive new GuidePosts, Podcasts and Video.

Winning the War in Your Brain - AdvantEdge Guide Series:

* We’ll begin with why Joy@Work matters and then I’m going to share something that has discouraged far too many people from even thinking that they can do this. I trust that this will encourage you to know that you, me and everyone else on this planet - we all doubt we deserve to be joyful and that’s a lie from the pit of hell.

* Why Joy@Work Matters - Live

* Do You Dare To Have Joy@Work? - Live

* Then we need to understand that you, me and everyone else are biased and prejudiced! That is we each have our own set of lenses through which we see and interpret the world around us, and how these lenses may alter our perception. Understanding our own biases and how to mitigate any negative impact is essential for personal development progress.

* Pride and Prejudice - Live

* Then we’ll develop your understanding of the circles of power, influence and concern so that you can easily assess what challenge is within your power to change or affect, what matters to you and what is beyond the reasonable possibility of your control.

* Understanding Your Circles of Power, Influence and Concern - Live

* We’ll then develop your knowledge about fear, stress and anxiety in the brain and compare and contrast these with Joy, pleasure and happiness in the brain.

* Fear, Stress, Anxiety and Depression in Your Brain - Live

* Joy, Happiness and Pleasure in Your Brain - Live

* Next, we’ll guide your understanding of how we respond to challenges choosing to be “At Cause” for our life or “At Effect” of others, events and the challenges we face.

* Choosing to Be At Cause or At Effect - Live

* Finally we’ll empower you with four practical guides that you can choose to raise performance @work, Increase happiness in your whole life, Increase Joy@Work, and lastly, how to bounce back from stress to joy.

* How to Raise Performance and have Joy@Work - Live

* How to Increase Happiness in your whole life - Live

* How to Increase Joy@Work - Early December ‘23

* How do we shift from Stress and Anxiety to Happiness and Joy? - Late December ‘23

This GuidePost talks about how we are always in pursuit of happiness. But happiness is based on chance and not something that can be constantly achieved. Pleasure is also temporary and not something that should be constantly strived for. Instead, we should focus on having joy, which is more internal and based on making peace with your self. To have Joy@Work, we should focus on leveraging our talents and doing something purposeful for others. Although it will take time and effort, the benefits will be worth it in the end.

This GuidePost answers the following questions:

1. What is the problem with the pursuit of happiness?

2. What are the benefits of aiming for joy instead of happiness?

3. What does research show about the benefits of being happy at work?

4. What did the Energy Project find were the benefits of going beyond engagement?

5. What is the most underutilised way to increase productivity, engagement, and performance?

6. What are the three things that bring joy in the workplace?

7. How can you have joy@work?

Thanks for reading Joy@Work! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Seeking Pleasure, Finding Joy

When you ask people what they want in life, the No 1. answer is “Happiness”. But, there’s a problem with the pursuit of happiness found in the root of the word which is “hap”. Which is the same “hap” in perhaps, haphazard, happenstance and happen. It means luck, chance or fortune and to have happiness means it has to happen to you.

And another problem, when many people think about happiness they’re really thinking about what gives them pleasure and having more of those things. Pleasure is extrinsic, visceral and temporary.

Joy, on the other hand is more consistent and cultivated internally. Joy comes when you make peace with who you are, why and how. Whereas, happiness is externally triggered and based on other people, places, things, events and thoughts.

Aiming for joy is far more beneficial and less transitory. So how can you have Joy@Work

Imagine that someone created a green pill that adds years to your life; it reduces the risk of having a heart attack or stroke; cuts your risk of Alzheimer's disease by more than fifty percent; helps you relax during the day and sleep better at night; it doubles your chances of staying drug and alcohol free after treatment; activates your natural killer cells; diminishes your inflammatory cells; increase your good cholesterol (HDL); and it repairs your DNA.

What if this imaginary green pill reduced hospitalisation so much that it put a big dent in the national health crisis?

Oh, and as a special bonus, it gives you better sex.

The company that made that green pill would be worth gazillions right? The green pill's inventors would win Nobel Prizes and have institutes named for them.

But it's not a green pill. It's the Resilience of fulfilling Your Purpose. And it's free.

And you get side effects. More friends. Greater happiness. Deeper engagement in life. And better sex.

Now imagine a red pill that makes your work almost effortless, yet simultaneously fulfilling. Every moment at work you are in the zone. You're flowing and your performance is so good, and your productivity increases and you are more engaged with your work and with your colleagues.

The company who made that red pill would be worth even more gazillions and businesses would be clamouring for their workers to take this magnificent drug so they could profit even more and keep staff happily employed and engaged for years to come at higher wages with shorter working hours and greater productivity.

Well those red pills would be flying off the shelves faster than an speeding bullet.

But it's not a red pill. It's leveraging your Talent. And it's also free.

Now, what if you take both the green pill and the red pill?

What if you were joyful at work, found deep pleasure in doing what you do and it felt effortless and your job was meaningful for you?

I've worked with so many people who want this to be true for them. I'm certain that you do too.

And there is a way that you can have this. But I must warn you. This is not a magic trick for instant success, nor a silver bullet that will instantly make everything bad disappear.

Some things will appear to be magical but they're actually social cognitive neuroscience. Some things are going to turn your world on its head.

It will take you some time and effort. So if you don't like taking on things that take time and effort you should turn back now before you get a glimpse of the potential joy you could be having at work.

What do you want out of life?

You want to be happy right?

Of course you do. Ask anyone what they want in life and the vast majority will reply that they want to be happy.

They want their partner to be happy. They want their kids to be happy. They want their entire family to be happy.

Ask them if they are happy at work, and you'll be met with a kind smirk as if you had lost your marbles. Ask them if they experience joy at work and they'll laugh at the absurdity of the idea.

Yet a 2015 study shows that happy staff are 12% more productive than unhappy staff. And happiness has an even greater impact in sales - raising sales by 37%!

We've known this for years! Centuries even!

3,000 years ago, the wisest and wealthiest man who ever lived understood this: “So I decided that there was nothing better for a man to do than to enjoy his food and drink and his job.”  Ecc 2:24 TLB

So every organisation everywhere has implemented fantastic training and coaching to make sure that their staff are all happy? This is immediately evident as you walk into almost any workplace in any country. How everyone is smiling, laughing, being friendly, helpful, cooperating. How they’re so joyful its contagious you cannot help but smile and wish earnestly that you could join that organisation and get paid handsomely for having fun and enjoying every day… or perhaps not 🤷

In the Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor's research shows that an individual's job success is 25% predicted by IQ. Meanwhile, 75% is predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat. That is: your success is largely dependent on your happiness

Conventional "wisdom" holds that if we work hard, we will be more successful. And, if we are more successful, then we'll be happy.

This is broken and backwards!

The problem is two-fold:

1. When you achieve (i.e. your brain has a) success you just change the goalpost of what success looks like. Now success is beyond and you never achieve it. So if happiness is based on success and you never achieve success you cannot achieve happiness.

2. Secondly, by raising a brains positivity in the present, they gain a happiness advantage and the brain performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Intelligence rises, creativity rises, energy levels rise and every single business outcome improves: Increased 31% productivity, greater resilience, less burnout, less staff turnover, 37% greater sales (Lyubominirsky, 2005)

But being happy isn't enough!

Being happy isn't the only ingredient to a life well lived.

When I spent several days recovering in hospital from a quadruple bypass, I spoke with many other patients who had had similarly close calls to meet their maker. Two things became abundantly clear:

1. Those with a positive and grateful attitude recovered more rapidly and were discharged sooner.

2. The closer someone had been to death, the more determined they were to live a life filled with meaning and that always, always meant doing something FOR other people.

Why this matters to your organisation

The statistics on workplace engagement are grim to say the least. Depending on the survey you read, anywhere between a whopping 70% of employees in America do not feel engaged at work. Around the world, that increases to 87% who are not engaged. In Singapore alone, a Gallup survey has 77% of employees are unengaged and 6% are actively disengaged.

Going beyond engagement

The Energy Project undertook a survey with Harvard Business School and found that employees who derive purposeful meaning and significance from their work were more than three times as likely to stay and reported 1.7 times higher job satisfaction and were 1.4 times more engaged at work.

Increasing a sense of purposefulness at work is one of the most potent - and underutilised - ways to increase productivity, engagement and performance.

What if employees were happy AND derived significance and meaning from their work aligned to their own purpose in life? Wouldn't that be Joy at work?

Joy appears 214 times in the NIV Bible - and always associated to living in your purpose. When psychology, neuroscience and the Bible concur, I get kinda excited to find out more, don’t you?

What brings joy in the workplace?

- We derive joy from our using our talents and strengths.

- We derive joy from doing something purposeful, meaningful and significant.

- And we derive joy from our relationships (at work and at home).

- We are joyful when we feel as if we are in control and feel safe and optimistic and that we matter.

- And we get most joy from doing something for others.

- And money helps ... to a point.

Do you Dare to Have Joy@Work? Let’s find out…

Public speaking is one of the top fears of many people – in fact, it’s been rated as the number one fear for some. But why is that? Is it really the act of standing in front of a group of people and talking that’s the problem?

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It turns out that the real fear behind public speaking isn’t the speaking itself, but rather the fear of public humiliation. We’re all concerned about what other people think of us and being put in the spotlight can be a scary thing. We’re concerned about whether we’ll make a fool of ourselves or look out of place. We worry that people will laugh at us, ridicule us, or even outright make fun of us. This fear of looking “stupid” or “silly” is what really stands in the way of many people.

And, because we fear this, we can quickly become overwhelmed with performance anxiety. Now, any time we need to perform in front of anyone else, anxiety sets in.

Performance Anxiety is the fear or stress you experience before, during and after a performing any specific task.

Public speaking is one example, but it could be as simple as brushing your teeth or getting out of your bed or a chair. Or it could be your boss asking you a question for which you haven’t got the answer - it’s not necessarily that you don’t know the answer, but in the pressure of the moment…. Poof! It’s gone. Or maybe the factual answer is not the correct answer?

Any time that you feel pressured to perform or feel the need to meet an expectation, performance anxiety can take centre stage - your mouth dry, head aching, nauseated, shortness of breath, uncontrollable shaking, racing heart, loss of concentration and feeling overwhelmed… heck, you only need to add incredible intense chest pain and you were off to A&E and the cardiac ward!

Performance anxiety is not fun! It’s an equal opportunities affliction caring nothing for age, gender, experience, fitness or race. And fortunately, it’s all in the mind.

If only there was a way to interrupt our anxious thinking and overcome performance anxiety…

If you ever suffer from a little or a lot of performance anxiety, here’s four simple mind hacks I’ve learned from people who always appeared to be calm, cool and super-confident. And anyone can do all of them as easily as you can breathe, laugh, pose for a picture or dance. I didn’t say that you could do them all well, but easy for sure 😃.

Before we get into this, a little medical disclaimer - the information presented in this article is not medical advice and should not be used to replace the advice of a qualified medical professional. Please consult your doctor to discuss any medical issues or treatments you may be considering.

First up is the easiest of all and something you’ve been doing since birth: Breathing. Only, you probably don’t breathe well at all (few people do!)

Breathe!

Instead, deliberately breathe in through your nose for 4, hold for 4 and breathe out sharply through your mouth for 4. And do it 4 times!

This reduces your stress hormones, especially Cortisol, and triggers your vagus nerve and your Parasympathetic Nervous System and helps calm you down.

Easy peasy, right? Ready for something a little more tricky?

Have a Laugh!

No really. Laugh out loud. Start making the sound of laughter and just keep at it.

Of course you can watch the crazy, funny videos on YouTube or TikTok or wherever, or listen to a joke. Whatever tickles your fancy. Or just laugh like the laughing policeman song:

The Laughing Policeman - Charles Jolly / Penrose

It takes a while but I know that you feel way better already. That’s the dopamine rush that’s making you feel good.

And any time you witness someone performing in any capacity who kicks off with a joke… they usually think it’s to warm up the audience, which it can do (but it can backfire badly!), it’s really to warm themselves up.

Ready for a little challenge?

Pose!

This is an astounding trick to play on your own brain. Lets boost testosterone and serotonin in the brain - and a drop of dopamine for good measure :-)

You know that feeling you get at the end of a race where you win? Or when your favourite team scored the winning goal? Or maybe when you scored highest in a competition, or your name was on the coveted list? That moment when you were a winner, a victor, a conquerer, a champion?

Yes? Fantastic - that’s the feeling we’re after. What did you do with your body at that moment? Chances are it was the V for victory pose, a fist pump, a salute, hands on hips or a high five. Whichever you like the most, that’s your pose. Strike it!

No? Oh really? That’s sad. Not even once? You ever felt proud of any achievement? What did you do? A nod to yourself, a secret fist pump, a little “uha” under your breath?

You can strike a pose anyway right? Hands on hips like superwoman, V for victory like a winning runner, fist pump for a medal winner or an ace in tennis.

Strike your pose and let out a roar.

The roar’s just for added bonus 🦁

Feel the pose, close your eyes and hear the crowd cheer. They’re cheering for you. In less than two minutes, your brain is switching channels from SNS to PNS, increasing testosterone, a smidge of serotonin and a dose of dopamine. Feel it as your performance anxiety melts away and is steadily replaced by pride.

Too embarrassing for you? Head to the toilet facilities, and do it in private.

Not so tough after all, huh? A bit odd, sure, but your body is telling your brain that you are proud, a winner, victorious - and your brain, ever wanting to get the world to make sense, responds.

And now for the pinnacle of positive feelings…

Dance!

Dance is complex for your brain. There’s usually music, a beat, which involves your hearing and sense of kinaesthetic touch. There’s some sort of coordinated movement which involves your motor cortex and your body muscles which releases endorphins which make you feel good. There may be memory involved for a specific dance routine - a dose of dopamine. It can be social (some oxytocin) and it’s always fun and it makes you happy. All that and it’s good to stave off dementia, alzheimers, dizziness, anxiety and depression.

Do yourself a favour. Have a little celebration jig. Flail your arms, move your feet, swing your body.

It doesn’t need to be pretty, it doesn’t need to be coordinated, heck it doesn’t need to be in time to any music. Just do the movement and your brain will respond with the appropriate signals, chemicals and feelings because you’re celebrating with a jig - ergo, you must be in a good mood, having fun and are happy.

I saw a Tony Robbins video of his pre-stage routine and adopted something like it for myself just before a vital meeting with the board of a major organisation I’d been trying to win over against much more established and branded providers.

Just before the meeting I was anxious in the waiting area outside the conference room and I was alone. Every “what if” doubt and worry came to the front of my thoughts. There was a large mirror on the wall, but that as OK. I started my jig. I got into it. I did a few vocal exercises, a couple of fist bumps, and slowed down to breathe. I shook it all off and my intense anxiety subsided.

I was invited into the conference room all smiles and pumped and confident and then I saw the huge glass wall looking directly out into the waiting area. The very spot I had been doing my little jig… And I looked at the people and there were a few smirks and looks of disdain… Nothing to lose - I flushed beetroot and shared my little trick with them. I even got them on their feet and doing a jig.

Our fear and anxiety isn’t that we can’t perform, it’s that we will be rejected and feel humiliated!

So accept yourself. Breathe because it’s good for you. Laugh because it makes you feel good. Pose because it makes you feel victorious and dance because it’s fun.

Thanks for reading Joy@Work! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’m Dr John kenworthy and it’s been my pleasure to share this Joy@Work AdvantEdge Guide with you today. Thank you for joining me and supporting my work.

Remember if you ever think that you might benefit from an outside voice with a fresh perspective to challenge and empower you, your team or your organisation to a new level of performance and engagement, then let’s talk now. You can follow the link at my website joyatwork.coach

And if you know someone who you know would benefit from this Joy@Work Guide, please share this with them either by sharing the podcast link or, if you’re listening on the Joy@Work website, it’s even easier to just click the share button.

Be blessed and have an awesome day.

We all want an inspirational leader. Someone to look up to, to give us hope and direction. A leader who engages us as individuals and treats us well. But most of all makes us want to be better.

But what if that leader is you?!? And today, You’re just not feeling up for it?

Welcome to this Joy@Work AdvantEdge Guide to Find Your Mojo Again by harnessing the power of your inner chemistry.

Thanks for reading Joy@Work! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

And today you're feeling a bit blah. Everything's sort of "meh" and you'd like to just hang in there for the time being and let Future Self take responsibility for that.

We all go through phases in life when our mood is uplifting, positive, dynamic and we feel like we could conquer the world. And then there's that "meh" moment, when everything is a little bland, and what would be really really nice is if someone else would just take charge and be the one to inspire and engage and buck us up.

To choose to switch your drive and motivation on so that you can inspire others, we're going to delve into the neuroscience of how your brain works, learn what drives you (and everybody else) and then we're going to take charge of the chemistry cocktail bar inside your brain.

The Neuroscience of your Get Up and Go (aka your MOJO)

Your brain is not your best friend when it comes to feeling positive, enthusiastic and inspired. In fact, neuroscientific evidence shows that our brains are hard-wired to make us feel mentally crappy most of the time.

Let me geek out with some acronyms for a moment - it's interesting stuff. Briefly, your brain is survival focussed and it is controlled by the Sympathetic Nervous System (the SNS) and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (HPPA). Both the SNS and HPAA are reactive systems. That is, they register any (and every) possible threat and fire you up chemically to respond.

This is fantastically useful in keeping you safe but it has the rather unpleasant side effect of making you feel anxious, stressed, disappointed and generally low spirited.

Today's living environment for most of us, especially in urban areas means that both your SNS and HPAA are fired up much of the time in response to the daily challenges you face on your daily commute, in noisy, crowded offices, surrounded by beeping devices and with a boss imposing impossible deadlines... Modern life is taking a large toll on your peace of mind.

Yet, you have another system available to you called the ParaSympathetic Nervous System (PSNS). And when your PSNS takes charge you feel great: calm, relaxed, chill, tranquil, clear-headed, and well, happy.

Yes, the name of the Sympathetic Nervous System is a little misleading in our modern understanding of the word "sympathetic", but it is the system that makes you feel stressed or basically, crappy.

OK, so a quick summary, your brain automagically, or rather, unconsciously, reacts to environmental stimuli through your Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and/or your Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (HPAA) to prepare you to deal with any threats. Once the threat passes, or you choose to consciously engage it, your ParaSympathetic System (PSNS) switches on to calm you down and get back to other important stuff like digesting your food, maintaining homeostasis, slowing your heart rate and so on.

Just make a note that you can choose to consciously trigger the PSNS. I'll be back to this at the end.

Before that though, let's remember what actually drives you. i.e. what gets you getting up and going?

As you know, we all have six foundational drivers that are at the heart of practical neuroscience.

Of course, your brain is an incredibly complex organ and variations of human behaviour are an endless ocean of subtle differences. But we can identify six neuro-scientifically founded basic needs of human beings and how these influence our motivational behaviours and how we interact with the world around us.

As human beings, we have developed to use the environment to its best and allow for reproduction and the furtherment of our species: our survival and growth.

Your six drivers are:

* Physical Survival! Our physiological needs of hunger, thirst, sleep and sex.

* Maximising Pleasure and avoiding pain to feel safer and more secure.

* Growing Attachment, so that we have a better sense of belonging.

* Increasing our Control.Which helps satisfy our need to matter.

* Boosting our Self-Esteem: Which helps satisfy our need for self-actualisation.

* Being of Service to others. We are only truly satisfied when we help other people.

Each of these stimulates different neuronal circuits and will activate different regions in the brain. Let me briefly share a little more about each of these needs and then we'll examine how we can consciously and deliberately affect them and hence, our FEELING of drive, inspiration and engagement. You can easily remember this using the SPACES acronym.

For a full reminder about SPACES and details of each of your drivers:

Is Your Battery Running Low?

Understanding the 6 Essential Human Needs of Your Team for Successful Leadership

Now, we’ve reminded ourselves about what drives you, it’s time to geek out on some chemistry…

What's chemistry got to do with my feeling driven and inspired?

Well everything!

How you FEEL in any situation is your conscious interpretation of the physiological response of your body, triggered by the combination (or cocktail) of chemicals released as a result of your conscious thinking and your SNS, PNS and HPAA and unconscious responses.

It's a lot more complex than the five chemicals I'm talking about here, but understanding how these affect you will help you understand the essence of how a change in the balance of these chemicals inside you changes how you feel, and hence your motivation and desires.

You will already know much about adrenaline and cortisol - your key stress hormones. And just in case you don't, I have a wonderful little whiteboard video you can watch.

But you also have some "happy" chemicals. These are Oxytocin, Serotonin and Dopamine.

Five chemicals you need to know about:

* Oxytocin - regarded as the “love” hormone. Makes you feel "loved", "trusted", "cared for".

* Serotonin – closely linked with your mood amongst many other vital functions. Makes you feel "proud", "satisfied", "content".

* Dopamine – triggers the joyful hope of anticipated reward. Makes you feel "happy", "joyful", "driven"or "motivated".

* Cortisol – our stress chemical. Makes you feel "stressed", "anxious", "on-edge"

* Adrenaline – creates arousal and readiness to ‘fight or fly’. Makes you feel "frightened", "scared", "angry", "stronger", "alert".

Good times, bad times, you know I've had my share...

(whoops, a little Led Zeppelin slipped in there.)

When our thinking and perception of the environment is associated positively to our own experiences, this triggers the release of our "happy chemicals" : serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

On the other side, when we feel stressed, anxious or upset about the fulfilment of our basic needs, this is the result of cortisol, Norepinephrine (the brain's 'adrenaline') and adrenaline.

On the positive side:

* Increased self-esteem means more serotonin.

* Greater orientation and control means more dopamine.

* Having a trusted attachment means more oxytocin, and

* When pleasure is maximised we get more dopamine.

On the negative side:

* Lowered self-esteem means more cortisol.

* Reduced orientation and control means more cortisol.

* Little or reduced attachment increases adrenaline,

* as does pain increase adrenaline.

Your approach to your six basic needs may not be the same as mine of course. Generally speaking, I am a very positive and optimistic person. Someone else might be more negative and pessimistic about it. These approaches are known as your motivational schemata.

Motivational schemata

Motivational schemata are the instruments and methods that a person will develop through their lifetime to help satisfy their basic needs or to protect them. Within this there are two base schemata. On the one hand the approach schema which is a result of a person striving to fulfil their basic needs. On the other hand if a person strives to protect their basic needs this is known as an avoidance schema.

What does this mean?

Depending on your approach, you may be someone who continuously seeks to fulfil your personal needs, or someone who focuses their attention on avoiding the bad things. The way you speak, as in the words you use habitually, often reveal your schemata or approach.

By the way, neither is right, nor is one necessarily better than another, expect to say that we tend to get in life, what we focus on. Thus if you focus on avoiding pain, you'll probably experience (or be aware of) more pain than someone who focuses in the exact same circumstances on pleasure.

Dale Carnegie summed this up beautifully:

Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”

Are you happy or unhappy?

Happiness is a perception of how well the world matches your expectations and desires.

Stress, in contrast, comes from the expectation that our resources are not enough to achieve our desires,

There are days when we don't feel as if we are progressing towards our purpose. Heck, many people don't consciously know their purpose, but unconsciously we are all aware of those days when something just isn't right. we have no sense of progress or fulfilment. These are the "blah" days. the days when we don't feel like "getting up and going". The days when we have lost our mojo.

Well those days are days we have incongruity between our perception of the world and how well you have fulfilled your basic needs.

Any mismatch between your current motivational schemata and your perception of the world defines your feelings, behaviours and actions. Whether you act with the intention of fulfilling your needs or protecting what you perceive that you have.

You sense a need for change.

And maybe, just maybe, the world will see fit to make that change happen to you. Some call this luck, or karma, serendipity or synchronicity. But in the 99.9% of times when that lady luck doesn't happen to call on you today, you'll want to be able to pull yourself out of that funk and reignite your engines.

As a leader, it is your job to inspire others, to engage them and motivate them to do the things that matter. And that's awfully difficult to do when you are not feeling inspired, engaged or particularly motivated. And you already know that it's unlikely that someone else is going to lift you up right now.

Sure it would be nice, and I know that you deserve it, but here's the rub: your boss isn't inspiring you because they ain't feeling it either. So let's choose to take charge of life and choose to switch the motivation engines on.

We can even measure how well we are aligned to our basic needs by assessing how much each of the six needs matters to use personally and how well that is currently being fulfilled.

I'm sharing a simple SPACES assessment tool that you can use to measure the congruity between your current work environment and your preferences:

Now this is going to be a whole lot easier for you if you already (consciously) know your own life purpose (that is you are a eudaemonite). Per chance you don't have clarity on that then here's a podcast and guide for you. In the meantime let's switch on your motivation engines shall we?

If you're busy paying attention to something else right now, like emailing, facebook trawling, driving a vehicle wait until you can take five minutes out. I'll need your complete attention.

Ready?

Breathe!

Yes, I said: "Breathe."

Deep, long, slow breaths. In through your nose and blow it from your mouth.

Surely I'm kidding you? You've been doing this all the time and feeling "meh". Yes, there is more to it, but right now just breathe.

Give it a few more seconds of deep breathing.

...

Powerful huh?

Breathing is your first step to Relax!

Now as you continue focussing attention on your breathing, I'd like you to touch your lips with your (clean) fingers. You might like to lick your lips with your tongue.

Now, you can choose what to do for the next four minutes.

* Practice deliberate physical and mental relaxation

* Meditate

* Pray

* Bring your attention towards sensations in your body

* Focus attention on immediate sensory experiences and feelings (also called mindfulness)

Choose one of the five. I like to spend my time meditating on a verse from the Bible and praying to God.

Whatever you choose, be aware of your breathing, deeply in through the nose and blowing sharply out through your mouth.

Pause the podcast and do it now, safely of course. Come back when you are done and I'll wrap this up with why it works.

Good to have you back (or maybe you're going to do it later.)

What just happened?

Your brain needs a lot of oxygen because it burns a lot of energy, 20% of your body's calorific burn for a 3 pound mass! You just increased the availability of oxygen in your body and hence available to your brain.

Breathing out sharply through your mouth reduces cortisol in your body, which reduces your stress and anxiety.

Because you have taken executive control (by deliberately choosing what to do instead of your body reacting to the environment) you have reduced adrenaline production. The threat must have passed if you aren't concerned about it!

With the two key stress hormones reduced, you then touched or licked your lips, which triggered your PSNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System) to get working - remember this is the system that slows your heart rate and calms you down. You're clearing your thinking brain to consider positive, uplifting thoughts and ideas.

Touching your own body (especially the lips) also stimulates the release of oxytocin - better still when you do this with your life parter. This makes you feel more loved, trusted or cared for and increases your feeling of attachment.

Thinking positive, uplifting thoughts stimulates dopamine and serotonin production and you are believing that you have taken charge of the situation, which increases your self-esteem and sense of orientation and control.

You will also begin to feel greater pleasure whilst reducing pain through this very simple exercise.

To find your Mojo again, Take 5

All it takes is 5 minutes to breathe and either pray, meditate, be mindful, or simply be relaxed to regain that sense of control, to engage and re-ignite the fires of your motivation.

And if it doesn't happen in the first 5 minutes. Take just 5 more.

If you need an outside voice with a fresh perspective to challenge and empower you, your team, or business to a new level of performance and engagement then let’s talk now.

And if you know someone who you know would benefit from this Joy@Work Guide, please share this with them. Just click the share button.

Be blessed and have an awesome day.

Thanks for reading Joy@Work! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Abraham Maslow proposed a sixth level in his renowned five level hierarchy of human needs, which behavioural neuroscience has since confirmed. These levels explain the essential drivers of our behaviours, reactions and reactions.

We all have six foundational drivers that are at the heart of practical neuroscience.

Of course, your brain is an incredibly complex organ and variations of human behaviour are an endless ocean of subtle differences. But we can identify six neuro-scientifically founded basic needs of human beings and how these influence our motivational behaviours and how we interact with the world around us.

As human beings, we have developed to use the environment to its best and allow for reproduction and the furtherment of our species: our survival and growth.

For leaders to be successful, they should first ensure that their own needs are met, and then understand and help their team members meet their needs. To do this, a leader needs to understand that their team members have 6 essential needs easily remembered with the SPACES acronym - Survival, Pleasure, Attachment, Control, Esteem and Service. Each of these needs must be fulfilled in order for an individual to reach their fullest potential. Leaders should strive to provide their teams with meaningful work, opportunities for growth, and an environment of trust, collaboration and respect.

Only by understanding and meeting the essential needs of their team members, a leader can develop a successful and productive team.

SPACES - The Six Needs We All Share

* Physical Survival! Our physiological needs of hunger, thirst, sleep and sex.

* Maximising Pleasure and avoiding pain to feel safer and more secure.

* Growing Attachment, so that we have a better sense of belonging.

* Increasing our Control.Which helps satisfy our need to matter.

* Boosting our Self-Esteem: Which helps satisfy our need for self-actualisation.

* Being of Service to others. We are only truly satisfied when we help other people.

Each of these stimulates different neuronal circuits and will activate different regions in the brain. Let me briefly share a little more about each of these needs and then we'll examine how we can consciously and deliberately affect them and hence, our FEELING of drive, inspiration and engagement. You can easily remember this using the SPACES acronym.

Why you need this

You need to be able to help your team fill their own power cell and ignite their destiny. Every team member has different needs and motivations and it’s the job of the leader to understand and meet those needs through different strategies.

They need to feel accepted, respected and that their ideas matter. Leaders should be mindful to include emotional intelligence in their leadership strategy. They should be cognisant of the emotional needs and psychological dynamics of their team and give team members the space to express their feelings.

Leaders should use empowering language and be mindful of their team’s limits. Each team member should have meaningful work and have opportunities for growth. Leaders should also be conscious of what their team members value and strive to provide them with those things.

It is also the leader’s job to foster a team environment where team members can collaborate, solve problems and grow together. Leaders should recognise the importance of building trust and rapport within the team, and ensure that all team members are treated fairly and equally.

Finally, leading a team requires understanding the different needs of each team member. A great leader is someone who has the ability to empathise and be compassionate with each team member and see things from their perspective. By doing this, the leader can help each individual in the team realize their full potential, and maximise the collective potential of the whole team.

The Sixth Level - Why It’s So Important

Abraham Maslow wanted to add a sixth level to his renowned five level hierarchy of human needs. Today, with our increased understanding through behavioural neuroscience, he was right to want to include it. These 6 human needs are THE essential drivers of our every day behaviours, actions and reactions.

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

Every leader needs to understand:

* How to fulfil their own needs, and

* Their role in helping all of their team members meet their essential, human needs.

Ultimately, by doing so, those leaders can fulfil their own need to help and serve others.

Is Your Battery Running Low

Imagine that your needs are like a discharged battery that you are able to charge through your life activities.

When the bottom cell is sufficiently filled, the next cell can be charged. All human beings have 6 essential needs, or power cells.

Though, some people have faulty power packs - with a corrupted sixth cell that has been taken over by a leaky fifth cell. That is, they care less about other people because their self-esteem is so overfilled they hold others in total contempt - because they matter less than me!

Beware overfilling any one cell: Gluttony and Obesity with an overfilled Cell 1, Excessive risk taking for Cell 2.

And many have a leaky battery, where their own needs never get filled.

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

Every leader needs to understand:

* Your own needs need to be met BEFORE you have enough to give others, and

* Whilst things may look OK on the surface - people tend to hide their emotional needs fearing that they are the only ones who have them.

By this, you’ll be better able to ask the right questions and better positioned to serve others and help them fulfil their real needs.

Empty Power Pack

If your needs are not met, you are an empty shell. Imagine that your brain is being powered by a rechargeable power pack.

The very first thing that you need when you are born is air. Soon after you need food, warmth and shelter. Sorry to tell you, but you were born needy and totally dependent upon others for your basic survival, and that is our first and primary need…

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

* If you’re running on empty - you’re not much use to anyone!

* As a leader, you help your team understand what they need and how you can help them satisfy those needs.

Survival Needs

Your brain’s number one, primary job is to keep you not dead! Thankfully, your brain has been doing a pretty fantastic job of that for you and will continue to do so, providing you look after just a few tasks. You can help your brain and yourself a great deal by attending importance to 4 key areas in your life:

* Eating good, healthy and nutritious food and water

* Getting sufficient rest and good sleep

* Exercising and stretching your body’s muscles regularly.

* Avoiding things, people and situations that may harm you

Do these, and your brain can do its job. Neglect them and your brain will give up sooner than you might prefer.

As a responsible leader you owe a duty to yourself and your continued good health to ensure that you enjoy good rest and sleep, exercise regularly and eat healthy, nutritious food.

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

* If you don’t look after your health, exercise, sleep and nutrition - you won’t be able to achieve much.

* Encourage and guide your team into a healthier lifestyle of good nutrition, suitable exercise and proper rest and sleep.

Pleasure maximisation (and avoidance of pain)

We follow a simple logic to increase our pleasure and avoid unpleasurable, dangerous or painful experiences. This helps make us feel safe and secure in the world.

Our experience over time gives rise to a whole network of mostly unconscious triggers and associations that are linked to either positive or negative experiences and our resultant pleasure or pain.

You may be seeking hedonistic pleasure focusing more on the subjective experience of maximising personal pleasure and minimising personal pain, or a eudaemonic experience with a more rounded psychological well-being that encompasses the combination of the other three basic needs being fulfilled for a long term meaning or purpose.

Our subjective experiences colour our view of the world and each person has their own unique internal rating process based on our own unique previous experiences.

In short:

* We strive to increase our belief of our own self-worth to ourselves and our perception of how others value us.

* We need to believe that we have some ability to control what happens to us and we need to feel cared for by another human being.

* Lastly, we seek to maximise the personal pleasure we derive from life and avoid unpleasant experiences.

To be able to deliberately impact our feeling of drive, motivation, inspiration or engagement we need to be able to fulfil these six needs in a way that satisfies us personally. And to understand that, we need to get back to those chemicals I talked about earlier.

This is going to help us hack your thinking by knowing the main chemicals involved and what you can consciously and deliberately do to alter the cocktail mix that your SNS, HPAA (and PSNS) do unconsciously for you.

We all need to FEEL and be safe and secure and be free from fear.

In organisations, Psychological Safety is the #1 differentiatorfor personal and team effectiveness!

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

* If you do not feel safe and secure and free from fear - then you are likely to make this even worse for your team.

* As a leader, allow your team members to speak up without any negative repercussions. Protect them from other leaders. Encourage all members to speak up freely and always encourage useful conflict and opposing ideas. Encourage everyone to build on previous statements with “Yes, and…” (NOT “No…But…”)

Attachment and Belonging

Our need for attachment is laid down at birth in our brain and memory. It helps us believe that we belong to a protective family or tribe.

This means that our perceptions, behaviours and emotional reactions and motivations can be laid down very early in life.

This is directly linked to the availability of an attachment figure, usually one of the primary caregivers, for normal social and emotional development. When this is not the case this has a negative influence on the fulfilment of this need for attachment.

(Bowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., & Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of attachment theory. Developmental Psychology, 5, 759-775)

Whether your primary caregiver wasn't there physically or emotionally doesn't make a great deal of difference.

We all need to truly belong to a tribe of people connected to us and who help us meet our needs. A tribe where we have equal value and treated as equal.

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

* You need a tribe too! If it’s lonely at the top - you ain’t leading, you’re on a walk!

* Treat all team members equitably - they may not be equals but they have equal value! Encourage sharing, and proactively acknowledging each other.

Control and Mattering

Everyone has a basic urge to be able to design and control their environment. This helps fulfil our need to matter.

We need to know where we are going and how to keep ourselves on the right path to reach our chosen destination.

A situation that is unclear and ambiguous stimulates a negative reaction in the limbic system of the brain, specifically the amygdala. This in turn, will stimulate an immediate fear reaction.

If the resultant stress can be controlled and mastered this may stimulate reward circuits and be saved as a learned memory. Otherwise, this can destabilise the neuronal circuits and trigger a negative cycle of thinking.

(Whalen, P.J. (1998) Fear, vigilance, and ambiguity. Initial neuroimaging studies of the human amygdala. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7(6). 177-188.)

What may matter more, is not that you are actually able to control your environment but that you believe that you control it. This is known as having an "internal locus of control" When the locus of control is external, we'll blame everyone and anyone else and outside forces for what happens to us.

(Fournier, G. (2016). Locus of Control. Psych Central. Retrieved on June 3, 2018, from https://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/locus-of-control/).

The big downside of an external locus of control is that even if they are to blame, they don't give a damn because they are in it for themselves and their own locus of control.

In modern society our greatest punishment is to remove or reduce a persons ability to control what happens to them by imprisoning them, beating them or executing them.

When our base needs are being met, we want more control over our lives (or at least we perceive we have more control) and need to be recognised that we matter and that what we do matters.

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

* Learn to recognise and appreciate yourself. Respect yourself and achieve mastery in your leadership walk.

* Go out of your way to “Catch them doing something good!” - and deliberately recognise all team members achievements, individually and specifically. Not a catch all - “great job team!” - that’s about as genuine as it seems to you. Show complete respect for others and especially your team members. Coach them for mastery in their roles and beyond.

Self-Esteem and Actualisation

Every healthy individual is constantly seeking to increase and protect their self-worth. This is large part of fulfilling our need to self-actualise.

Self-esteem is a specific human need and only possible through having the ability to reflect and be able to perceive this and bring it to conscious attention.

Our interactions with others enable us to form this self-image that is influenced by a complex network of interactions with others in the environment and their reactions and observations of us.

We therefore develop a perception of our self-worth and a need to be valued and for value.

(Cast, A.D., & Burke, P. (2002) A theory of self-esteem. Social Forces, 80(3), 1041-1068.)

When a friend ignores you (and you notice this), for example, it is likely that you will question your own value to them and hence the value you bring to the relationship.

When your boss tells you that you did a great job on that project, your self-worth increases and your value on that relationship increases.

As Dale Carnegie put it many years ago in the classic ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’: “Everyone wants to feel important”. That includes you!

“Everyone wants to feel important.”

When we are healthy and safe, we belong to a tribe and we matter: we need to pursue our God given talents, to be creative and to fulfil our destiny

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

* Leadership develops daily! Pursue excellence and keep learning how you can be and do better. Think before you speak and remember to Pause and Breathe.

* Encourage, Develop, Guide and Empower your team members daily! Your task is to make them better than you. That’s what will be noticed by those higher up the food chain.

Serving Others

Or self-transcendence as Maslow called it, is our highest need. Serving others boosts your health and well-being (survival), happiness (pleasure), greater connection (attachment), that you matter (control) and uses your giftedness (esteem). That is, serving others helps fulfil all your other needs. But to be in a position to do this, you need to fill those needs. You need to be blessed to be a blessing.

When we are personally fulfilled, we transcend to think more about others than ourselves. We need to give and to serve and to fulfil our spiritual selves.

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

* You will only be truly fulfilled when you give and give some more. If you have yet to uncover your purpose in life - here’s a clue that will save you many hours - “it’s not about you! You were born to serve others.” How you serve them - that’ll be your gifts to them.

* As a Leader your job is to serve others and when your power pack is filled to bursting, you can charge them up and help them find out and practice how they too serve others.

If you would like to learn how AdvantEdge Coaching can help you, your team and your organisation, then join me for a Complimentary Discovery Session by applying here.

In this AdvantEdge Guide we’ll discuss how establishing Command Intent is a more specific way of setting goals than SMART goals, as it has an embedded purpose. It involves imagining a successful future in each of five areas of life (your Rocket Ship for Life), and focusing on the senses of sight, feel, smell, taste, and sound to create a captivating and rich picture. For teams, the unit in charge of military simulations for NATO recommends asking themselves "if I do nothing else tomorrow, I must ____, so that ____". AdvantEdge Coaching can help to further equip and empower individuals to reach their Command Intent goals.

Why do we need a Rocket Ship for Life?

The Rocket Ship for Life came about because I used to suffer from a major problem. Basically, I was easily distracted. Teachers’ could rarely get, let alone keep, my attention. I’d start a new project only to quickly get bored or frustrated and move onto the next shiny object. If ADHD had been popular back then, perhaps, I could have gotten myself medicated for it!

Thanks for reading Joy@Work! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It wasn’t because I lacked goals. I had much that I wanted to achieve in my career. But, for some strange reason, I was always looking for something. I couldn’t get or keep focus long enough to stick with it and finish.

The big issue it turned out was not lack of clear goals, not an inability to focus it was that there were gaps in what I was trying to achieve. There was no balance. What many have badly described as work/life balance - but what I prefer to call work/life integration. It’s where you identify your desired intent in the five key areas of your life as the drivers of the things that you do every day, steered by your values and aligned to your overall purpose or mission in this life.

If you ask most people what they want from life, they’ll tell you a variation of “to be happy and successful”. What the Bible calls “Good Success”  in Joshua 1:8.

Some people think that more money will make them happy. The problem is money is a great servant but a lousy master.

And so what if you achieve great success at work if you spend all your time at work and neglect your family and health?

As I mentioned, we have identified five key areas in life that, when attended to fully, will bring you real happiness and success as you fulfil them.

What are the five key areas?

These five key areas are like the engines of a rocket ship that you ride towards your life purpose. Your values are the way you steer and choose which paths you are following. The five areas that we’ve uncovered through our research are:

1. Family and Relationships

2. Health and Wellbeing

3. Spiritual Fulfilment

4. Personal Development

5. Work and Career

As you can imagine, like most people, I’d paid great attention to Work and Career and found it increasingly difficult to keep steering straight. I was working 80 plus hours each week (this was in the days when I was in the hotel and restaurant business) with no breaks, rarely a weekend off and scant holidays. I got away with it health wise for a good few years, but it shouldn’t have surprised me when my body rebelled and finally got me to pay a lot more attention to my health and wellbeing when my heart threw a hissy fit on July 4th 2014 at 11:33!

When you neglect an engine, it’s always going to be much more difficult to keep going towards your purpose, and very easy to get blown off course. It’s why your life and work are “off-balance.”

In the many years I have been coaching, fewer than 20% have anything remotely resembling “balance”. And they’ve usually been coached before or have had their own health or personal life crisis.

There’s many a successful person in the boardroom whose family life is in shambles.

Why these five areas and is one more important than the others?

As you think about each one you’ll realise that if you stop feeding one of these areas and consider the repercussions in your own life:

If you show no ambition in your work, your career stagnates and it just becomes a routine you could do with your eyes shut. Your brain becomes inactive and you are simply marking time until one day you retire… and then what?

Or you don’t bother with personal development after school or college and you learn nothing new. Now everything in your life stagnates. Your brain is bored (it is a learning machine). When your brain is bored, you get depressed through lack of Serotonin and Dopamine and opt-out of everything else life has to offer.

Neglect your spirtual man and there’s a big hole in your life. An emptiness that you can’t quite put your finger on. You’ll try and fill it with all sorts of other things but nothing seems to satisfy.

Neglect your health and well-being and your body will, one day, sooner or later, quit entirely. Your brain tried to keep you not dead (that is it's job) but somehow you resisted that urge until it too gave up fighting you.

Neglect your family and or relationships and you will soon be alone. And humans are social animals. You have an innate desire to belong to a tribe, to matter to others.

We all need all of these engines and just like a vehicle engine, you need to keep it maintained properly.

The trouble is, everyone is fundamentally lazy. Or perhaps fairer  to say that your brain is fundametally lazy. If there’s a “do nothing option”, your brain will take it because doing anything requires effort which burns scarce energy. So, if you do not deliberately attend to each of your engines, your brain will neglect them until something breaks.

If we’re going to burn fuel in these five areas, you're saying that we need to have a reason for doing so.

Each engine needs a driver or motivation for the brain to switch from it’s default “do nothing” to “do something” to get... whatever we intend to get.

So we need to tell our brain specifically what we intend to get once we do something. Then your brain is prepared to spend precious fuel in that area.

Why not set a simple Goal? Or even a SMART goal?

Goals are great, and SMART goal even better. However, Command Intent is usually more suited to changing situations (which is real life) and, very importantly, has an embedded purpose. This is what turns your brain on to motivation.

I've written extensively on why goal-setting matters - here for those wanting to know more.

Establishing Command Intent in each area Really Matters then?

Absolutely, noone climbs aboard a space rocket ready to launch into the heavens and then asks, “so where shall we go today?”

And noone replies, “I don’t know, let’s just start her up and go from there.”

No. Everytime there is a clear command intent for the mission and each and every engine has a very precise role in achieveing that intent to help the rocket ship and crew fulfil that mission.

What’s the difference between purpose, mission and intent?

We don’t have time here to delve into the difference between purpose and intent, suffice to say for now - your purpose is why you were born (it's your overall mission), your command intents are what you achieve along the journey to fulfill your purpose or mission in life.

Let’s get practical: How do you Establish Command Intent in each of these five Areas of Your Life?

Ask most people what they intend to achieve in their career (their career goal), for example, and you’ll probably get a vague answer about money, position, happiness level, and maybe a job title. Honestly, that’s about as useful as telling a blind footballer that the goal is at the end of the pitch.

“Which end?” you ask. And many other questions besides, not least is “how will you know when you have scored a goal?”

So we change the question…

Establishing a Command Intent for anything is simply a case of answering the question:

What does success look like?

And when I use the word “look” - I mean all your senses (look, feel, taste, smell, sound). And be as specific as you can be.

And, when we’re asking what does it “look like” - we mean literally what do (will) you see with your eyes in reality and in as much detail as you can.

Repeat with feel (emotions AND touch), smell (the most evocative and immediate of your senses), taste and sound.

And if it’s not evident in your answers: “How will you know that you have acheived it?” (i.e. how will you measure your acheivements?)

Ask, what will you Win or gain (and lose) when you have achieved it? (This is the embedded purpose).

And lastly, “by when?”

Now that you have a very rich, sensory description, you will have a captivating picture of your future.

And You Do this for all Five Areas of Your Life?

You’ll find it helpful and inspirational to have a clear command intent in all five areas of your life: Your work and career; your family and relationships; your spiritual life; your health and your personal development. Making sure that they support each other and are congruent. Miss one area and you risk struggling to steer your life purposefully forward.

You said, “by when?” - is this just for the long term future?

It’s best to have Command Intents for the short, medium and long term.

Most clients also find it helpful to establish these command intent’s in three time frames of short, medium and long term futures - whatever is short, medium or long term for you.

A little aside on future time frames - most teens struggle with a long term time frame of 10 years, as do most young adults. As we get older, it becomes easier to imagine further into the future.

What’s next?

If you lead a team, then you are responsible for identifying a worthy and compelling vision and articulating it to the team. People continually need to be shown the team's compass clearly and creatively so that their actions align, and they stay motivated with a captivating picture of their future.

In their book, “Made to Stick”, Chip and Dan Heath share help from the unit in charge of military simulations for NATO, the Combat Maneuver Training Center, who recommend that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves this question. I’ve adjusted this for use with your personal intents:

“If I do nothing else tomorrow, I must . . . , so that . . .

Answer this question in each of your five key life areas and every day, you will have that often elusive, almost mythical: balance.

Where can you go to learn more now?

As an AdvantEdge Coaching client, we’ll help you fine tune your Rocket Ship for Life so that you have a crystal clear picture of the future you and what your success in each of these areas of your life look like and we’ll guide you on the path that will equip and empower you to achieve them. Apply for your complimentary AdvantEdge Discovery session today.

Or you can take up our 6-part Rocket Launch Coaching Program which is designed to help you Establish Your Command Intent in each of the five key areas of your life, then help you identify the core values, beliefs and habits to support your mission. You’ll be more equipped and empowered to achieve your purpose with a practical, systematic and proven approach to transforming your life and moving you closer to the future you. Apply for your complimentary AdvantEdge Discovery session today.

Thanks for reading Joy@Work! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

All AdvantEdge Coaching is based on our unique and powerful AdvantEDGE leadership development process based on Neuroscience Research in how people learn, change and develop: EDGE stands for Encourage, Develop, Guide and Empower.

It’s based on my post-grad research into effective management learning and development methods.

EDGE isn’t a silver bullet or a magic pill that gets instant results but based upon the latest neuroscience and social cognitive psychology research, EDGE is like a recipe for a pragmatic change focused approach to help clients realise genuine, sustainable results in leadership, work and life.

EDGE isn't only a model for coaching. You can use EDGE in any communication situation where you want to empower change or influence others.

We will use the EDGE development model in all our GuidePosts, and, as well as explaining the EDGE model we’ll also clarify two other critically important aspects that enable us to help you get those results: That is,

1. to clarify what coaching is (and what it is not!) and

2. how AdvantEDGE coaching truly empowers you to sustain your results.

The Purpose of this AdvantEdge Guide is to help you make better, informed decisions as you consider coaching to develop yourself or your team and organisation. There’s a lot of very convincing marketing out there that coaching is a panacea for all that ails business and organisation. 

Your Payoff will be you can understand for yourself, if coaching is suitable for you, and what type or style of coaching might best suit your needs. You’ll also challenge some of the common assumptions that you may have been making.

The truth is, coaching is not for everybody, and there are very good reasons. Here’s the top 10 I hear from clients, in reverse order and coming in at number 10, but still a biggie:

For the Full AdvantEdge Guide, all the links mentioned in the podcast and easy access to the (free!) resources mentioned, please go to the AdvantEdge Coaching System Website here.

It's not that there is this thing called the “Great Resignation” where an unprecedented 44% of people intend to quit their jobs this year. (58% in Singapore!) 

It's not that there is a global problem for CEO’s and leaders of many organisations who want their staff back in the office and are finding that impossible. Some, like Elon Musk, even after threatening to fire them all.

And it's not really about greed for more money, though when you get approached and offered a 20% pay hike for crossing the street, it is a temptation.

It's not even that it's your best and brightest talent who are abandoning ship first. Even though they are the first to be hunted and poached.

It’s a lot more systemic than the headline numbers suggest. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

During covid we all learned to keep our distance from people because they might just be a tad toxic. We avoided buildings and gatherings and events and restaurants, all so we wouldn’t accidentally meet someone toxic.

After 2 plus years we’re tired of avoiding people. And yet, there's one place many still want to avoid going, and that's their workplace.

The underlying problem? It's considered a toxic workplace. And not because there's covid lurking in dark corners but because there are loud and proud managers who think that disrespecting staff is a motivational weapon, that inequity is unavoidable and diversity is a fad. They seem to think that inclusion is exclusive and ethics are a matter of political expediency.

If your talent are quitting for more pay, it's because someone else is willing to pay them more and dangling a glimmer of hope that this new place won't be toxic, or at least, not as toxic as the current place.

But there is something that leaders and managers can do. And if you want to plug your talent drain, you might want to listen up to this AdvantEdge guide:

READ THE FULL GUIDE HERE 

Imagine that your needs are like a discharged battery that you are able to charge through your life activities.

When the bottom cell is sufficiently filled, the next cell can be charged. All human beings have 6 essential needs, or power cells.

Though, some people have faulty power packs - with a corrupted sixth cell that has been taken over by a leaky fifth cell. That is, they care less about other people because their self-esteem is so overfilled they hold others in total contempt - because they matter less than me!

Beware overfilling any one cell: Gluttony and Obesity with an overfilled Cell 1, Excessive risk taking for Cell 2.

And many have a leaky battery, where their own needs never get filled.

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

Every leader needs to understand:

1. Your own needs need to be met BEFORE you have enough to give others, and

2. Whilst things may look OK on the surface - people tend to hide their emotional needs fearing that they are the only ones who have them.

By this, you’ll be better able to ask the right questions and better positioned to serve others and help them fulfil their real needs.

This is Part 3 of a four part series asking the question: "Are you In Control" or "Controlling"?

In this edition os the AdvantEdge Joy@Work Podcast, we're learning how wee can break free from the "Controlling" cycle and get "In Control".

Stress, worry, and perfromance anxiety can be crippling your life. It's not always easy to break free of the spiral of anxiety but there is a simple solution for most people that does not involve medication or therapy.

It's so shockingly simple that many people scoff at the idea. But the thing is, it works. It's how your brain works and this is a simple technique that you can employ immediately to break your brain out of the Controlling cycle and give your Frontal Lobes a chance to oput the breaks on and stop your stinkin' thinkin. 

When you understand what is happening in your brain you'll see why it works, and, I absolutely guarantee, you can do this. This is not like getting your body fit by going to the gym 6 times a week or training to run a marathon. It's even easier than going to the toilet and takes about the same amount of time. In fact, you can even do this whilst doing your toilet business. In fact, that's a particularly excellent time to practice.

This is Part 2 of a four part series asking the question: Are you In Control or Controlling?

In this guide, we are digging into the roots and what is happening in our brain when we enter the Controlling Cycle.

We'll learn what happens inside our brain when we face a challenge and how your unconscious mind immediately reacts to this challenge as a threat - triggering your freeze, flight or fight response.

We'll learn how our brain then shifts the challenge into worrying and anxiety UNLESS your frontal lobes put the brakes on and you choose to be In Control rather than attempt to fruitlessly control others or the outside world.

We'll learn that EVERYONE on the planet faces the same choices every single day and we'll learn how worrying gives us the illusion of control making us feel good about worrying - as if it ever did us any good.

We'll learn why the Pre Frontal Cortex struggles to intervene and shout down the worrying cycle.

See the previous episode for Part 1 if you have yet to do so. And remember to subscribe on your preferred platfrom and please rate this episode, it helps others find it and learn too.

Double Blessings to you this new year.

Ask what they want from the coming new year and most people are seeking to be happy and successful in the year ahead. We see the new year as a fresh start where we can put the past behind us and move ahead.

Sadly, most people never achieve happiness or success and, in large part, that’s down to the way we set goals and commit to new year’s “resolutions”.

The problem is a lack of motivation and a lack of balanced prioritisation.

Resolutions tend to be negative shifts of behaviour that we “should” do for our own good. Things like: get fit, lose weight, quit smoking, quit drinking, be kind to everyone, stop complaining. All things that our flesh just screams to keep on doing because we don’t like change - or at least our brain does not like change - and your brain was getting something it liked from the “bad habits” of last year. Your brain would rather “do nothing” than “do something, anything, taxing”.

And those new goals, we try but they tend to throw us even more off balance than we were already. What we need is to re-consider goals across all key aspects of our life. And those goals need to have an embedded, motivational purpose - our reason for achieving them, our “why” I should put in all this effort. Without which, our brain quickly defaults back to its preference of “do nothing”!

We need a crystal clear, compelling picture of our future and what success looks like in each of the key areas of life. What is called a “Command Intent” and we need one or more for each of our five key life engines.

Listen, watch or read the podcast now - it’s in a new format which we hope you like. It’ll be 15 minutes very well spent.

I hope that you enjoyed a joyful festive season and you are ready for the excellent challenges that 2022 may bring.

Be blessed - and remember - let us know what you think of the new podcast format.

Welcome to the AdvantEdge Joy@Work podcast with me, Dr. John Kenworthy. In this guide to developing your five essential qualities of expert hybrid leadership: we're learning why your attitude to hope and how you communicate it, determines how your days and those for your team will unfold. Welcome to Hope and Mirrors.  

In this episode of the AdvantEdge Joy@Work podcast, we're looking forward to a future in hope and expectation of something new and exciting in the days ahead. And how you can choose to be the leader who inspires hope for yourself, and for others.

Full episode and show transcript here: https://joyatwork.coach/hope-and-mirrors

The choice is yours. I stick to my favorite verse to start every day from Psalm 118, Verse 24, in the New King James Version.  This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.  

All the faces in the world are mirrors. What kind of reflections do you see in the faces of the people you meet? What kind of reflections do you want to see?  

To learn more about AdvantEdge Coaching so that you can have Joy@Work and your team becomes United in Trust and Collaboration. Contact us through the link on the show notes and arrange a complimentary, confidential, no obligation Discovery Session. https://joyatwork.coach/apply

The Power of Deep Listening: Creating Psychological Safety for Team Effectiveness and Joy@Work

Google's "Project Aristotle" sought to determine the key factors of effective teams and found that Psychological Safety is the #1 factor for team effectiveness, followed by Dependability and Meaning/Impact. Listening deeply and asking questions is essential for creating a culture of safety, belonging and mattering in the workplace and preventing disasters resulting from a lack of open, candid communication. Doing this can help create trust, collaboration and joy at work.

Collaboration is when an effective team harnesses the best out of individuals working together and appears to be disarmingly simple:

“to work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something”

But everyone in the team comes with their own personality, their culture and way of doing things and their own competitiveness, their fears, their concerns and their needs. For successful and fruitful collaboration, the leader needs to help the team be actively engaged in what they are doing, and that they trust one another by setting the groundwork to build a solid foundation and then maintaining it rigorously.

Many thousands of leaders have failed to create team unity, trust and engagement through team building courses and enforced jollity of casual Friday or a virtual happy hour. But the buzz from that ropes course wears thin after a few days when your brain recognises that what it wants and needs is still missing.

How do we fix that? Well, before we get to that let’s check in on what your brain really wants and needs:

What Your Brain Wants and Needs:

Fortunately, we know that every human being shares a fundamental need for three things in life:

The need to feel safe

The need to belong to a group or tribe, and

The need to believe that they and what they do, matters

Getting a team to be actively engaged, to trust each other and collaborate takes plenty of leadership time and effort - so why would you destroy it before it has a chance?

Purpose

In this guide we’ll understand how to build and maintain the critical foundation's of Safety, Belonging and Mattering by Listening Deeply so that the team can trust each other and, with clarity of their own purpose and direction, be actively engaged and collaborate to achieve the desired results.

Process

We'll look Pat Lencioni's famous work on the five dysfunctions of a team and see how further research shows that Safety, Belonging and Mattering are crucial to your brain and thus to your ability to trust and collaborate. We'll then look at how listening deeply is the ONE missing ingredient that all leaders can do and use to help build the foundations and hence, ultimately, get the results they desire.

Payoff

When you start to listen deeply you will begin to dismantle any climate of fear or the lack of safety felt in too many organisations. Team members will learn that they can speak up and help the leader build and maintain the edifying climate to guide themselves and other team members towards effective trust and collaboration.

Have you ever sat in a presentation and successfully listened to everything that the speaker shared, remembered what was essential and acted on the information whilst simultaneously fielding emails, carrying out a chat message and planning lunch and all before a really important client meeting.
OK, now in this very short space of time, what do you remember? Not a lot huh?
You just experienced cognitive overload. And that was just thinking about those 5 things happening in theory.
"That went right over my head!
Cognitive overload is more common than you might realise.
Cognitive overload occurs when your brain is being tasked with too many things at once or you are trying to process too much information. It happens when you use too much mental effort in your brains working memory to continue effective processing. You may well feel that the words flew over your head. You stopped taking any more information in and tried to clear the backlog.
It is also remarkably common. A leader does a data dump of the facts and figures for the quarterly report, a manager relates every little detail of a problem and the presenter rushes through the material either because their time has been reduced or they've taken too long over the early part.
Specifically, what does your audience need to know? And I do mean need as an absolute
New and Knew
One way to help your audience understand is to relate something that they already do know with the new information that you are sharing.
New information triggers curiosity, which is something you want to do. But if everything is new, you'll trip over the edge of curiosity into anxiety. And anxiety is something we don't want.
Filling your presentation with all things new is like opening photoshop for the first time and being presented with all 300 icons on the taskbar. Or like visiting a strange city for the first time. It's overwhelming. Sure, you'll find your way around eventually, but it takes time.
You see what I did there?
I related the situation (new knowledge for you) to something that you know already - either you'll know about photoshop and the vast number of icons or you'll have experienced visiting a strange city. And even if not exactly aligned with your knowledge, the two examples provide adequate common experience for you to relate to, or imagine.
And that's just what you need to do with new information. Align it with something your audience knows already by using examples, metaphors or analogies.
And remember, you only want to include new information if it is something that your audience needs to know. It is not so that you can show how knowledgable and brilliant you are.
On top of this, your audience is likely to find 90% of your presentation as forgetable. So what do you really want them to remember?
Your 10%
Dr Carmen Simon, author of Impossible to Ignore, a neuroscientist and expert in making your content memorable, shares some bad news that your audience typically remembers just 10% of your presentation content. Worse news is the 10% remembered by one person differs from the 10% another person remembers.
The 10% that you really want them to remember needs to be identified and then you are going to take control of what they remember. You can do that by noting:
- What you want your audience to remember - 3 or 4 points, and
- What you want your audience to do (your Product or call to action)
Now we are clear what our audience knows already, making certain that we recognise our own curse of knowledge and taking care with our assumptions. We are also clear about what they need to know, avoiding cognitive overload, aligning the new with the knew and identifying the 10% of our content that is essential. But do they care at all? We need to understand the audience's opinion.
Let's wrap here for now and prepare you for the next part: Opinion.
In the next section we'll talk about Opinion and then get deep into the Who of your audience. We'll consider their power and interest, how they might resist, a

What do they Know?
Let's start with asking what do your audience already know about you and your topic?
There are two extreme dangers here:
1. Assumptions and
2. The Curse of Knowledge
You see I carry a curse. A curse of knowledge. Just as you do:
The Curse of Knowledge!
I attended a networking event recently where someone was sharing about Bitcoin.

"Bitcoin is a type of digital currency in which encryption techniques are used in a blockchain to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank."

Yes, but what is it?
I don't fully understand Bitcoin. I don't get how you "mine" them and I don't appreciate how they can be worth more than $10,000. And I'm a geek!
I feel utterly stupid when someone who does know, speaks down to me as if I really should know and it turns into a crushing sense of hopelessness.And that's not a great place for your audience to be.
jill and colleagues peering into empty skull.png
When someone assumes that you should know something and you just do not. They look at you as if peering into your emptyheadedness with disdain.
Sure, I'm biased and think of Bitcoin as eTulips and a bubble that will hurt a lot of innocent people, but I'll come back to bias when we discuss the audience Opinion.
I know quite a lot. But I don't know Bitcoin, Blockchain, Etherium and now I've heard that there's one based on organic bananas.
My knowledge may be similar or utterly different to your own. You have your jargon, and I have mine. The only time we have a real problem is when my jargon makes no sense to you. When I assume that something I know is common knowledge.
Tappers and Listeners
Here's a terrific little experiment that you can do later today with a friend or family member to truly understand the curse of knowledge.
Firstly I shall tap out a very well known song - this of course only works well if you are listening to the podcast, if you're reading this, it doesn't work :-)
I'll tap out this well known song and you guess what it is.
 
Easy right?
Wrong.
If you were to ask someone to do this and estimate how quickly people would guess the song title correctly, you might guess at the commonly agreed 20 or 30 seconds. And the real answer is that roughly one person in 20 will guess correctly and that after 3 repeats. - and those are usually "lucky guesses".
So, you try this with a friend or colleague. Tap out "Happy Birthday". Oh, well now, of course, you recognise the tapping. It's easy now. Because now, the tune is humming in your head AND you hear the tapping in time. Previously, you only heard tapping.
The problem is that I cannot unknow what I know - it is humming along in my head as I share. I cannot remember what it is like to not know what I know. And of course, I think what I know is easy. It would have to be easy if I know it. But maybe, just maybe, it is not as easy or obvious as I think that it is. Just like Happy Birthday ain't so obvious when all you hear are tap tap tap tap tap tap. (Interesting by the way, now that you know that it is Happy Birthday, you heard it immediately!)
And when someone does not know something (especially something that colleagues appear to know), they may feel intimidated and that may just shut down their attention and choose the ostrich manoeveur, or worse, they may get defensive and disrupt your presentation by heckling.

To avoid making bad assumptions and the curse of knowledge, you must find out what your audience already knows. And a terrific way to do that is to ask questions.

If there's one complaint I hear about a leader’s skills from their boss or their HR, it's that they don't adjust their communication for their audience. And yet those leaders genuinely believe that they do adjust for their audience.
So who is right? Well, they're both correct of course. The presenter thinks they are adjusting but they don't really KNOW their audience.
What about the audience themselves? What do they think? Sadly the audience don't have an opinion because they stopped paying attention and moved onto other, more exciting things like thinking about lunch or updating Facebook.
To capture their attention and motivate them to act, you have to get to KNOW your audience
If you want to capture the attention of your audience and take some sort of action as a result of your Communication , you need to get to KNOW your audience and present to them as if it were tailored exclusively and entirely just for them. Because you will have done just that.
Below, I share how you get to KNOW your audience so that you capture their attention and motivate them to do the things that you want them to do. You can take it one step at a time
But first, let me introduce you to a oft-practiced technique that is guaranteed to do the opposite of knowing and engaging your audience:
The Ostrich Manoeuvre
Politicians are especially good at this manoeuvre. Be sure to look down at your notes most of the time and read the speech prepared by some flunky in a monotone. Remember to look up at any random audience member and plaster a fake smile on your face.
I am really an introverted person. Maybe you don't believe that because you've seen me run a workshop or speak at a conference. But when I first started out, I was terrified that I was going to look like an idiot, that I would forget my words, lose track and generally do a terrible job. So I adopted what I call the Ostrich Manoeveur, a technique that essentially guaranteed that I would successfully look like an idiot, forget my words, lose track and do a terrible job.
The Ostrich Manoeuvre is a favourite of insincere politicians and leaders, frequently seen in after-dinner speeches and boardrooms. It is very easy 2 step process and it is guaranteed to make you look really bad.
1. First, please make sure that you stand behind a podium and place your written script on it. If there is no podium available, then turn your back to the audience and read your slides instead.
2. Step 2 is read your script, preferably in a monotone and rarely, if ever, make eye contact with your audience.
This works brilliantly well to show your audience that you do not know your content well enough. That you don't practice because the audience doesn't deserve your effort. And it shows the audience that you could care less who they are, what matters to them or even if you are in the right venue.
You will have seen someone using the Ostrich Manoeveur as long ago as yesterday. Perhaps you used it yourself. I understand, I much preferred to read a script than dare look at the audience and witness the devastating effect my appalling presentation was having on them.
The better you KNOW your audience the better you can engage them
If instead, you would like to engage your audience and make an impact then it will greatly help if you KNOW your audience, that is: be able to fully answer four key questions:
1. What and how much do the Know already?
2. What do they Need to know?
3. What is their Opinion?
4. And, Who are they?

You'll notice that the keywords here make up the KNOW acronym: Know, Need, Opinion and Who.

Easy to remember.

“There are no such things as wrong turns, Only paths we never knew we were supposed to take.” Proverb
AdvantEdge Coaching is about change
“Change is the only constant” goes the refrain. There would be little need for coaching, training, mentoring, counselling or any development if people were happy to stay the same as they are now.
Being coached by someone is all about being empowered, equipped and enabled to change. Coaching empowers people to find new jobs, work through transitions, enhance performance, build better relationships, make wise decisions, transform organisations and reach new spiritual levels. Coaching is about establishing a vision of the future and reaching goals. When coaching is successful, it’s about bringing and maintaining change.
But coaching is more. We also help people determine what needs to stay the same in times of constant flux. We encourage our clients to stake out their core values, established strengths, basic beliefs, ethical principles and lasting relationships that remain firm and provide an anchor to their lives.
Coaches are both change agents and constant agents. Coaches help people see what needs to change and what needs to remain constant.
 
Change is difficult!
 
Let’s start by recognising the obvious: change is difficult. Going on a journey with people through change can be challenging and exhausting. Bringing sustainable change is even harder. Most people resist change even when they see the need and believe it can occur.
The owner of the first hotel I managed was just 40 when he suffered a heart attack. His lifestyle, booze, food and a lack of regular exercise were contributory factors but prior to the heart attack, there were no significant symptoms. Life was good, then BAM! He was on the floor in agony. He survived. His doctor told him bluntly that he had to change his diet, give up alcohol, smoking and take up regular exercise. Change or die! A stark choice. And one that many people face. Initially, my boss came out of hospital ready and eager to take this advice seriously and changed everything that was harming his health. It wasn’t easy for him, but he stuck with it and now enjoys a slim, healthy life retired and sailing around the Mediterranean.
Yet, in the US alone, some 90% of heart bypass patients can’t change their lifestyles, even at the risk of dying. It’s not surprising then that changing people’s behaviour in business is a challenge.
 
How people face change
 
People respond to change typically in four different ways depending on their personalities and past experiences:
- Innovators – who value change and often try to make it happen.
- Embracers – who thrive on change and accept it with enthusiasm, sometimes without thinking too much about it.
- Acceptors – who initially resist change but eventually go along with it because there is no alternative.
- Resisters – who may not even notice the change, deliberately ignore it or be so overwhelmed that they push it out of their awareness. Some even deny any need for change and refuse to budge an inch.
People usually lean towards one of these responses. There’s some excellent news, though: simply because you are reading this, you are likely to be an innovator or embracer. If you are reading this reluctantly, you’re an acceptor. And those who aren’t reading this well, they’re the resisters (but, of course, they won’t know that because they didn’t read it!).
#joyatwork #trivia

Potential is much more than just knowledge or the ability to score well in exams.
In this guide we’ll consider what are the components of potential so that we can distinguish between them and choose to develop those that will provide you the greatest chance of succeeding in your endeavours.

In this guide we’ll consider how critical it is to make a good choice in response to the many varied challenges we face every day. How easily we can get trapped by “Effect” and the two enemies of our mind into a spiral of anxiety and fear or be at “Cause” for ourselves and our life.

I’m going to explain how performance is unleashed using the AdvantEdge Potential to Performance System model.
Performance happens when three things are aligned at the same moment: Your Potential, Your Drive and a Trigger.
The Model
You can visualise this model has two dimensions. The Vertical axis is your level of Drive to perform an action, and it can range anywhere from high drive to no drive.
The horizontal axis is your Potential to perform an action. Also a continuum. On the right side is high potential making this action easy to perform. On the left side of this axis is low Potential or hard to do.
Consider a simple example.
Suppose you want someone to donate money to a Stray Dog Shelter. If they have high drive and it is easy for that person to do, they will be in the upper right corner of the model. When a person is triggered here to donate, they will donate. They are in the productive zone.
On the other hand, if someone has low drive to donate to the Stray Dogs, and if it’s hard for them to do, they will be in the lower-left corner. When triggered, that person will not perform the action. They are in the procrastination zone.
The Action Line
There is a relationship between drive and potential. This curved line is called the Action Line. If someone is anywhere above the action line when triggered, they will perform the action. They are in the Productive zone. In this example, they will donate to the Dog Shelter. However, if they are anywhere below the Action Line when triggered, they will not perform the action. They remain in the Procrastination zone.
If someone is below the Action Line, we need to get them above it for the Trigger to initiate action. Either, we need an increase in Drive, or the action needs to be easier to perform, or both.
In Summary
This models applies to all human performance. When Drive, Potential and a Trigger come together at the same moment, that’s when performance will occur. If any of the three elements is lacking, then the performance will not happen.

Organisations want an AI that you feed 100 resumes and it spits out the top 5 candidates, without bias. But what's it like to be rejected by a computer?
Current Recruitment AIs are being built on flawed systems and processes that favoured white, male candidates and HR seem surprised when the AI joins the same party.

This guide will clarify the history and etymology of Talent from its Biblical roots and why this matters in modern business.
This will enable you to be crystal clear about talent, skills, strengths and potential and form the basis of how we unlock and leverage talent to unstuck potential and develop the skills you need to thrive.

The world is filled with fear and trepidation about the future. Staff are concerned for their jobs and what the future holds for them. World leaders have proven themselves to be uninspirational through being indecisive, divisive and destructive. So staff are looking for a leader who will inspire them and lead them forward into the future.
This guide aims to help you be that leader.

Trust is about how we deal with uncertainty. Even when I have proven myself trustworthy to you time and time again, over many years, there is always a remnant of uncertainty. Heck you aren't even completely certain that you can trust yourself!
Our ability to choose to trust another person is an emotionally driven choice. Paul Zac's neuroscience research into what makes trust in the brain clearly demonstrates that the neurochemical oxytocin is a precursor to trust by the conscious, deliberate actions.

In this AdvantEdge Guide, we discuss how the lack of trust in recent months is largely due to lack of physical interaction and the negative effects of the pandemic. The author then provides a step-by-step guide for leaders to reinforce the foundations of safety, belonging, and mattering in order to rebuild trust and collaboration. This involves honest communication, using names, recognising individuals and their contributions, and reducing cortisol with deep breathing exercises. By rebuilding the sense of safety, belonging and mattering, trust can be restored, allowing collaboration to thrive.

You only learn when you review and reflect on your failures and successes. Journaling is the single, most powerful, easiest means of ensuring that you develop your leadership daily.

Over the past 30 plus years, I've worked with a lot of leaders, and the biases I've seen most in action can undermine your potential career as a leader and sabotage your success. They were all useful for you at some point along the way, but many have outlived that usefulness and could do with an overhaul and a serious upgrade.

How can leaders get better at their Virtual Leadership using Neuroscience hacks?
Live interview with Roberto Bendana of Leadership Link

Long ago in a small, far away village, there was place known as the House of 1000 Mirrors. A small, happy little dog learned of this place and decided to visit. When he arrived, he bounced happily up the stairs to the doorway of the house. He looked through the doorway with his ears lifted high and his tail wagging as fast as it could. To his great surprise, he found himself staring at 1000 other happy little dogs with their tails wagging just as fast as his. He smiled a great smile, and was answered with 1000 great smiles just as warm and friendly. As he left the House, he thought to himself, "This is a wonderful place. I will come back and visit it often." In this same village, another little dog, who was not quite as happy as the first one, decided to visit the house. He slowly climbed the stairs and hung his head low as he looked into the door. When he saw the 1000 unfriendly looking dogs staring back at him, he growled at them and was horrified to see 1000 little dogs growling back at him. As he left, he thought to himself, "That is a horrible place, and I will never go back there again." All the faces in the world are mirrors. What kind of reflections do you see in the faces of the people you meet? Japanese Folktale

Encourage Two Mindsets When I first started training and coaching more than 30 years ago I found that there were two distinct types of client or participant: Those who were motivated and eager to learn, did so and enjoyed great results, and became more successful, and Those who believed that they didn't need to be there. They knew everything they needed and were pretty much brilliant at everything. They were unmotivated to learn and gained little, if anything, from their limited interaction and went off to be just as excellent as they always believed they had been. I blamed myself about the second group, of course. Somehow, I wasn't getting through, but try as I may, somehow I couldn't find a way to get them to learn. Then I read Carol Dweck's excellent book on Mindset and my lightening fast brain ignited with insight: In every group of people there are two base mindsets, those who have what Dweck calls a Growth mindset and those who have a predominantly Fixed Mindset. Develop Your mindset is a set of beliefs that you hold about yourself: your intelligence, your talents and your personality. And I'd like you to take a moment to pause and think here: Do you believe that these qualities are pretty well fixed traits, carved in stone by your DNA or at least by the time you reach late childhood? Or, do you believe that these qualities are things that can be developed and changed through dedication and effort? If you are more inclined to the first belief, you believe that your traits are a given. You have a certain amount of brains and talent and nothing can change that. If you are more inclined to the second belief, you see these qualities as things that can be developed through your dedication and effort. Now, I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect that you are more inclined to the second belief. After all, why would you be reading or listening to something deliberately designed to help you learn and grow if you were of a fixed mindset? If I'm wrong, fantastic, and please let me know, because I too want to learn, understand and grow. Guide Let’s first take a look at the Growth Mindset: Individuals who hold the Growth Mindset believe that intelligence can be and is developed, that the brain is like a muscle that can be trained. With this belief is the desire to improve. To improve, firstly you embrace challenges because you know that overcoming challenges makes you stronger. No matter what you decide to do, there will be obstacles. For the Growth Mindset believer, external setbacks do not discourage you. Your self-esteem and self-image are not tied to how you look to others or your success. You see failure as the best opportunity to learn. Thus, either way, you win. You don’t see the effort as something useless to be avoided but as necessary to grow and master useful skills. No-one truly enjoys criticism or negative feedback, but the Growth Mindset individual integrates feedback that has genuine worth as an opportunity to change and learn. Negative feedback is not seen as a personal attack, but for what it is; feedback. The success of others is seen as a source of inspiration and information. To Growth Mindset individuals, success is not seen as a zero-sum game. Growth Mindset individuals will improve because of this, and this creates positive feedback loops that encourage them to keep learning, growing and improving. Fixed Mindset Let’s have a look at the Fixed Mindset side: Those who hold these beliefs think that “they are the way they are.” This doesn’t mean that they have any less desire for a positive self-image than anyone else, and they do want to perform well and look smart. But, to achieve these goals… The challenge is hard and success is not assured, so rather than risk failing and negatively impacting their self-image, they will often avoid challenges and stick to what they know they can do well. Obstacles face everyone, but the difference with the Fixed Mindset in

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Ecc 9:11 NIV "They really should..." begins another tirade of disgust at the ineptitude of the leadership to fix the problems. "Why they can't..." interjects the thought of an easy fix that "anyone with an ounce of real experience would have known from the start". "Why doesn't somebody do something?" "Why doesn't God do something about this?" And then, if you quiet your mind for just one moment, you'll hear him say "I did. I created you!" And He gave you choice: You can react to whatever the world, your boss, the economy, a pandemic throws at you, or you can choose to take action to overcome the obstacles in front of you. It's easier to react, like a thermometer, and blame others for the tragedies that befall you. It requires a lot less energy. But you won't be happy with the results, until you choose to be like a thermostat, someone at cause for their life. Purpose Here we're going to understand why it's easy to fall into a survival thinking mode and live a less than fulfilled life and how you can break that cycle and choose to be at cause for your life and actions. Process We'll discuss the two thinking modes and how you can shift yourself from being the victim of survival mode to being at cause and creating your future. Payoff It's not that one cycle is better than another, it's realising that we have a choice and that most people, most of the time, are at effect because they don't make a deliberate choice to take charge. Are you at Cause or Effect? Life happens. "Life happens whilst you're making other plans." John Lennon. Most people, most of the time, just allow life to happen to them. They react to whatever the day brings. They are happy when their happenings are conducive to their happiness, otherwise they are unhappy. They may have a plan, but they are easily blown off course and, unless the winds of chance so happen to return them back, off course they remain. This is completely understandable behaviour for your brain. Unconsciously, your brain is always scanning the environment for threats and changes and reacting to them with little, if any, requirement for energy expensive conscious processing. If you make a deliberate choice to pre-empt environmental circumstances and choose to take action - that is conscious, executive brain processing - which is energy expensive. The downside of allowing your brain to be lazy is that you are essentially allowing other people to choose your circumstances and hence your life. Of course, this might be utterly wonderful - hopefully you had a happy and splendid childhood and everything went swimmingly. Perhaps you are blessed with an incredible boss who gently nudges you to do what is essential, pays you extravagantly well and expects little in return. You have a choice. A very simple choice: To be a thermostat or a thermometer. You can choose to create your future, or you can accept the one that you get. Every moment of every day, you make a choice. If you are in a survival mode, that is you're just trying to get by and survive, the chances are that you will react to a new situation. You will then face an obstacle in your path. And you get another choice, this time you can choose to avoid the obstacle or address it. Avoidance of obstacles leads you to adapt and change yourself thanks to the obstacle that someone else put in your way. And you will get undesired results. Which results in disappointment and reinforces your survival vision to just try and get by for another day. On the other hand, when you have a creative vision you choose to take action. Sure, the same obstacles lie in your path but this time, you are going to address the problem and experiment until you find a desired solution and get the results you want. This means that you can, and should, celebrat

Purpose: To equip you with purpose to lead and inspire your staff and to manage uncertainty with command intent, to emerge powerfully, ready for the new normal. Process: I'll explain how uncertainty causes stress because our brain craves certainty, purpose, and direction and lastly how you can be a different type of leader, the sort of leader who provides the very certainty, purpose and direction that will empower you to emerge stronger. Payoff: You'll learn how to energise your staff to continue in the face of difficulties. You'll know how to communicate certainty, direction and purpose and what success on the other side of the current difficult time looks like and how you and your now continuity energised staff will achieve it. Times of crisis demand a different type of leader where the only certain thing is that there is no certainty. Dr John Kenworthy Uncertainty causes stress, and we go into our "critter state" Your brain has a single primary concern: to keep you in the "not dead" state. That is its first and foremost function. It really doesn't matter how brilliant, rich or talented you are when you are in the "dead" state. When the world around us becomes even a little uncertain, your brain is marvellously designed to allow your older "critter brain" to take charge of survival. In a time of crisis, the "critter brain" rules the day until you deliberately choose to intervene. For leaders who haven't been close to a crisis before, managing during such times can feel thrilling. Your brain triggers norepiphrene and adrenaline spikes as you make decisions and take action. You feel a sense of adding tangible value. The stress hormone, cortisol, steadily builds up in your body and pressures from the home front add to your anxiety. The longer you struggle, directionless through a crisis the more stress and anxiety builds up that could blow any second. Before long, more people look to you for decisions and direction as they begin to flounder trying to make sense of the latest information and like Sisyphus, you discover the boulder you are pushing uphill becomes less stable with each step. Leaders need to guide people towards the best possible outcome over time. Your focus is on what is likely to come next and preparing to meet it. You go beyond the immediate to anticipate the next three, four or five obstacles. At the same time you need to address the urgent needs of the business, making immediate choices and allocating resources quickly and decisively. On any normal day your "critter brain" is assessing the environment asking three questions: Am I safe? Do I belong? and Do I matter? This isn't a once in a while process, it is every minute of every single day. "Am I safe?" is simply checking your surroundings for threats. An "all is well" response allows your brain to relax for a brief moment and if this extends for some time, you will physically relax and your brain waves will slow down. When "Am I safe?" gets the answer: "No" then the amygdalae are brought swiftly into the action, the stress hormone norepinephrine production is triggered in your brain and your body produces adrenaline is ready for "freeze, flight or fight". If the threat is not judged to be imminent, the "Do I belong?" question may get out to check on the whereabouts of fellow tribe members. After all, who wants to face a ravenous wolf alone? If there is a wolf, the "Do I matter?" question probably doesn't even get a cursory glance. A crisis is, by definition, a time of intense stress, difficulty or danger. Even if you only experience it through a social media feed or a news bulletin. Our safety is being threatened in a crisis. And in times of difficulty or danger, we're usually better of with our tribe on our side. At least then we might stand a chance of survival, let alone emerging triumphant and ready for the post-crisis world. A great leader knows this and pulls and energises the team together towards a clear

Have you ever wondered why change is so tough? Why is it, that with our very best intentions, we still find it difficult to make changes that we know would be good for us? Why is it so much more difficult to get other people to change and do the things that matter? Even when you have a crystal clear picture of what success looks like and you have tapped into the emotions, drives and values that motivate and there's still no action!!!!! How do you get started? You need the Power of the First Step. see the SWING exercise in my last episode if you don't have a clear picture of what success looks like. The Purpose You'll learn how to make change happen for yourself or for the people you lead. The Process The Power of the First Step is a purposeful leadership technique to create momentum. And just like any journey, we'll define your future desired end state and your current situation and using the most useful one of three variations of this technique that works for you, you will create momentum on your change journey. The Payoff You'll wake up in the morning and your problem is solved, or it is on its way to being solved. Way back in 1995, John P. Kotter shared: why change efforts fail in organisations. He talked about 8 distinct errors that prevent success from happening. But that was ages ago, surely we have learned and moved forward since the mid 90's? It seems not. 10 Reasons change efforts fail as described by Lee Colan in 2014. In 2017, Brent Gleeson posited that the 1 reason most change efforts fail is battle fatigue. Bill Pasmore at CCL highlights 4 reasons why you fail at change in 2016 If you have ever failed to change, you'll know all the reasons (aka excuses) why you failed. And that's perfectly OK. Unless you actually do want to change. The common factor through so much research is inertia. That is, the desire to stay the same. i.e. the desire to not change. Even if and when we are completely certain that change would result in a better situation for us. A situation we want. The truth is, we want the success without the pain. After 30 plus years of coaching and training leaders to change, I help my clients overcome their own inertia through the Power of the First Step. You can use this to get your own change started, or use it with your team to get them to start on their change journey. Often, during coaching, a client can understand and describe their future goal or outcome. They can describe their current situation. But, they struggle to know exactly what they need to do now. Sometimes, a client cannot "see" what they need to do. Others, state that they do not "know" what to do. What we are doing is scripting and directing the critical moves. to change you need a director - you be the director of your own movie There are three variations of this technique. I recommend that you start using the visual template (using pictures). If this is not working well, use the digital template (using a descriptive process). Or, you can ‘act’ this out. Imagine that you are the writer and director of a movie and you're creating a movie storyboard. Commence with the “Future” situation - the very last scene of the movie (this is a Hollywood movie with a happy ending by the way, not some Filme Noire or Pathe real life drama). This is what success looks like, and for aa detailed review on that, check out the SWING process I shared in an earlier episode here. The "Present" situation is the current situation - as with the "Future", you want specific sensory information about it. In this technique, you are creating a movie storyboard or script of the change you want from the movie’s very first scene (now) to the last scene (the future goal or outcome). You (and/or your team) is in the starring role, you are the central character of this movie. And, procrastination is the villain you are going to vanquish. The first step is the very first ‘action’ that this character takes in

The Purpose To show you a way and give you the urge to inspire your kids, family and your work colleagues with a real and tangible hope that will lift their spirits and yours, and fill everyone with the urge to emerge stronger and ready to lead the world in the recovery so that you will see good days. The Process I'm going to share a powerful tool and neuroscience hack that you will easily use to bring absolute clarity to the future expectation of good you want to create and use to inspire others. The Payoff Your kids will want to do something creative, your family will look at you with newfound respect and admiration and your work colleagues will be eager and ready to listen, collaborate and be more productive. In times of difficulty or crisis, the trap for leaders is trying to control everything. And this applies as much to leading in your home as it does in the office. When your locus of control is hindered or even removed, when you feel even slightly that your own life is out of your control, your threat response fires up. Our favourite almond-shaped friends inside our brain, the amygdalae, take up the reins of your response with plenty of stress hormone production of cortisol and adrenaline. It's a never ending barrage of negative news and many people scoff at the notion of remaining optimistic in light of these "facts". The human brain is programmed to narrow your focus in the face of a threat. It's an in-built mechanism designed perfectly for self-protection. It means that your field of vision is restricted to what is immediately in front of you. Perfect for hunters in the Serrengeti and your cave dwelling ancestors. Pretty useful in the 21st century office and home, but unseeable threats lurking in the very air before you... not quite so useful. Leaders, whether at work or at home, need to intentionally pull back and take a broader view. Leaders need to look up and see a new future. A new future that is good and positive and filled with promise. We call it hope. And we could all use some hope right now. What we want is some real hope. Real hope is the positive expectation of good. It's not just wishful or fanciful thinking. It is something you believe will come to pass. Like everyone else, you want to have this positive expectation of good and I know it is difficult. And we all would like someone to stimulate this hope within us. We want someone, anyone to fill us with the urge or ability to feel something hopeful, something positive to rescue us from this pit of negativity and confinement and restriction. You can probably think of a small handful of leaders who truly inspire you with hope of a brighter future. Martin Luther King was pretty inspiring with his "I have a dream" speech. Winston Churchill inspired a generation to give their lives for freedom promising to "fight them on the beaches". And just recently, Queen Elizabeth 2nd ralleyed hope for an end to Covid 19 with "We will meet again." But it seems, inspirational leaders are few and far between. Yet, there's one in your household. There's an inspirational leader in your workplace. There's one who can inspire hope and rally people in your community. And that person is you. Yes, you. You have all that you need to inspire hope in others and hence for yourself. You might not believe it just yet, but give me half an hour of your time and you will. Working from home ain't what it's all cracked up to be Well, I actually think that it is, but then I've been doing this for many years. But I do recall how tough it was at the beginning. And now it's much more difficult. Now, your partner is at home also (or perhaps worse, if they are in essential services and escape every day) kids are at home too, either from school or university and even they are finding their phone and netflix is getting less exciting. We're confined in space, and there's a limited number of spaces to work, and bandwidth is a premium. Young kids especially, expect yo

Purpose: Sharing neuroscience hacks to help you win the battle in your soul during this time of lockdowns, social distancing and a strange lack of toilet paper. Payoff: You'll regain control to and be able to encourage others so we can all emerge better, stronger and ready to reinvigorate our lives and the world. Encourage We're 3 months into this virus spreading its fear and anxiety across the globe. Different people in different places are in various stages of grief. We all started in full denial and several went into isolation immediately. Information was scare as no-one accepted responsibility and no-one wanted to be accountable. Experts were dumbfounded - only this time they actually admitted that they were dumbfounded. Some closed borders, others said it was premature. Some stopped flights, others continue to this day. Some said it is airborne and we all need masks, others said it was droplets and we needed to wash our hands. That period seemed to last forever, some would suggest that there's a couple of world leaders still there, which rather helped many tip over into the anger phase. The promises of no shortages triggered the exact opposite effect - after all, no sensible person trusts a politician at the best of times, and suddenly they were talking about the worst of times, but everything else was carrying on as usual? Toilet paper was the first surprising victim. Now, everything is in diminished supply. Some leaders started bargaining with the virus only to discover that it didn't come to negotiate but to infiltrate. It came to spread and reproduce and take out the weaker members - which unsurprisingly led many back into anger. Self-isolation measures began to take root and social distancing was no longer about focusing only on your phones and choosing to ignore others, now we were encouraged to avoid others. Churches shut their doors, Mosques and temples too. The misery continued as depression kicked in. The massive deaths in Italy made us all question what was really happening. Holidays cancelled - many with little prospect of a refund and , naturally, the insurance companies would claim exceptional circumstances. Slowly acceptance of quarantine, isolation, stay at home, the lost holidays, the lost income, the lost job, and yes, the lost toilet paper. We're all grieving. Grieving for a life that was, just a few short weeks ago, looking so promising. A new decade was dawning and there was hope in the very air. Well now the air is clean and clear. At least until China's factories ramp up to full production and poison our scarred lungs. Hope has faded for many, a few hold on tightly to the promises of God, who is, by the way, still on His throne. If we haven't personally lost someone dear to us, why are we grieving? We're grieving the loss of agency and control. Develop The little girl coughed as we descended in the lift. A deep, dry and loud cough. She didn't cover her mouth. I flinched. It was instinctual, my heart rate shot up and my body and brain flooded with adrenaline. I stopped breathing. I left the lift as the doors opened and realised I had stopped breathing. The fresh sun-soaked air was my welcome refuge. Humans everywhere are deeply concerned for their safety. We cannot not be. It's the Critter part of our brain. The part that houses and runs our emotions. A place where chemistry rules the roost and floods our brains and blood stream with chemical messengers to be afraid, to be very very afraid. Don't know what it is? Be afraid. Don't know what to do? Be afraid. Don't know what's happening? Be afraid. And this isn't a conscious "knowing". We have no experience or memory that helps guide us on the better course of action. We can quickly be so overwhelmed with emotions of fear and anxiety that we forget all else and forget to engage our thinking mind. It is going to help you to better understand how our body and soul - our mind, will and emotions operate and thus we feel as though we have no agency or contr

My hands clammy, my shirt beginning to soak with perspiration in the air-conditioned room. I walked to the front of the meeting room past my muttering colleagues and got blinded momentarily by the projector; I faced my audience. Their faces raptly attentive as they waited for the first words to come.   The Purpose This AdvantEdge Guide hacks the neuro-psychology of influence to uncover the chemistry and maths used by our critter and executive brains respectively and learn how to leverage and use this understanding to yield the fruit of motivating people to do the things that matter. You'll be a better influencer and thus a better leader. The Process First, get your own EDGE by listening or reading to the guide and then ponder privately or with your buddy coach on the Empowering questions at the end of the guide. Every guide uses the EDGE development process: Encourage - trying something new or different is uncomfortable and challenging so what's in it for you? That'll be the Payoff below! Develop - your understanding and knowledge of the neuro-psychology research that supports this leadership hack. Guide - Specific actions for you to consider to put this into practice. Empower - One specific action for you to take away, together with templates when needed. Second, buddy up Take this guide further by buddying up with someone else. Use this as a mentoring tool that takes all the guesswork and myths out of a leadership development conversation. The Payoff You'll grow as a leader and influencer, they'll grow as a leader and together you'll achieve better results. If you're in sales, you'll sell more, more easily. If you're in tech or engineering, you'll get the support you need from colleagues and motivate those marketing and finance types to collaborate. This was my most important performance ever, and I was about to go down in flames... I noticed my boss as he glanced at his watch. A phone buzzed in silent mode on the table and all eyes were drawn toward it. Someone muttered an apology as he picked up the errant phone and read the message. I had spent weeks preparing for this meeting. We were about to introduce a new computer system across the entire business and everyone in the room would be affected. The only problem was that nobody wanted the new system. If only they would realise how beneficial it was going to be... I stumbled through my slides, gave them all the facts in laborious detail and outlined the plan. Still, nobody wanted the new system. I had failed to influence my colleagues to support the project So why had my long-prepared presentation failed to achieve the intended result? When we link the required resources to the goal through personal benefit - the fruit is motivation to change. That is, we influence the person to change.  Develop The answer lies in the Triangle of Influence   We are influenced EMOTIONALLY in our critter brain first. This has a lot to do with brain chemistry. Aristotle called this "Pathos". Then we are influenced RATIONALLY in our executive brain which essentially relies on maths. Aristotle referred to this as "Logos". When we are influenced to do something, we connect three things inside the brain: The goal (Command Intent) we will achieve The resources (Talents, Skills, Time and Money) achieving the goal costs, and The personal benefits (fulfilling Purpose and Values) that we get out of achieving the goal. The Critter Brain and The Chemistry of Motivation and Influence Any perception of cost in using my talents, my skills, my money or my time triggers a fear response. I might get protective (fight it), pretend I didn't hear it (freeze) or stop hearing anything else (flee). In large part it triggers the production of norepiphrene (better known as adrenaline). This is not good news for motivation.   But that doesn't mean that you can or should avoid being open about the cost of doing something. If you don't tell me, it's highly probable that my emotional memory will tag on a p

I just returned from a long and exciting trip to Israel where I was reminded that even the very best of us face rejection and are criticised. Encourage It seems that it does not matter whether your intentions are to help and serve others. It doesn't matter if you are the kindest, gentlest, most loving and caring person the world has ever seen. You will face rejection. And you will probably face rejection by those you truly would think should be the tribe you can most trust, your own family, your own people. In fact, oftentimes, it's those closest to you whose rejection hurts the most. The chance of being rejected by someone used to be limited to our social and work circle and our dating pool. Nowadays, thanks largely to social media and technology, our posts, chats, profiles, pictures can all be easily ignored, disliked or flamed by a multitude of vague acquaintances. And rejection hurts deeply. Its wounds pierce our very soul and hit the core of our being. It has happened to you and it will happen again in the future, so how can we equip ourselves now to overcome rejection and soothe the sting of rejection? Develop it will greatly help to understand why rejection hurts and what is happening inside the brain. Before we dive into ways we can soothe our rejection, it will greatly help to understand why it hurts and what is happening inside the brain. When researchers placed volunteers in functional MRI machines asking them to recall a recent rejection, they found something astounding. When we experience rejection, the area that lights up on the fMRI is the same area activated when we experience physical pain. But social rejection is worse than stubbing your toe or even being punched in the face because physical pain diminishes over a short period of time. Research shows that even being rejected by a total stranger can simultaneously make you feel sad and angry. Indeed, your brain doesn't distinguish who or what is rejecting you, the same response applies. Whether it's someone in your own group or someone you don't relate to at all. Whether it's a human being or a computer rejecting you, being ostracised stings! Sadly, the greatest damage of rejection is self-inflicted. For most people, the natural response to being dumped by a dating partner or being the last person picked for a team is not to lick our wounds and get back on form but to become incredibly self-critical. We feel disgusted with ourselves, call ourselves names, lament how we are truly not worthy, and dwell on our shortcomings. This means that just at the moment when our self-esteem has taken a beating, we lay it on the ground and give it a good kicking ourselves. It's when that self-damaging refrain learned from a very young age that "I am not good enough" repeats it's toxic mantra. In the days of our long-ago ancestors, rejection served a vital function. Being ostracised from our tribe in our hunter/gatherer past was akin to a death sentence, as you would be unlikely to survive long alone. The same area (the anterior cingulate cortex) of the brain that is constantly on the watch for danger or change in the environment is the same place scanning for the social clues that might point towards a future rejection. It was so vitally important to continue to belong to a tribe that mimicking intense physical pain is a terrific way to get our attention. Those who paid attention early were more likely to correct their behaviour and remain in the tribe. It's all happening in the primitive part of our "critter" brain. As modern evolved human beings we did not, unfortunately, evolve a more reasoned response that would negate the need to gain our vivid attention. Rejection still has a way of destroying a person's life in a way that few other things can. And the number of people affected by rejection is staggering. Why do people face rejection or being ostracised by others? Few people who have rejected someone else can readily explain their reasoni

Encourage  Are you tired of wasting time dealing with workplace drama and politiks? Perhaps you are crippled by toxic leaders and uninspired cultures and you know that there is a better way. In this episode we're going to introduce you to the triggers of exemplary workplace behaviour at the neurological level. And we'll tap into four of these triggers that will #UnLock performance and #UnLeash Team Power. By implementing these four you'll see higher productivity, well-being, retention and accountability. You'll see reduced absenteeism, less drama, the end of corrosive gossip and fewer accidents. Develop In Leading Difficult People, I shared with you about our deep seated human need for safety, belonging and mattering. The first two of those, safety and belonging are so primal to our personal engagement at work (or in life) that this time, I'm digging in a little more to the neuroscience that will allow us to create the ideal conditions for our teams to thrive. Human beings are social animals, we need some degree of social acceptance in our lives, and without it, we shrivel and die. Our limbic system is the mid part of our brain and is responsible for overseeing our emotional lives and is important in what we learn and commit to memory. You'll know about the amygdala, for example, the primary control centre for our freeze, fight , flight mode. That's housed in the Limbic system. Dr Jim Coan of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory suggests that the limbic brain spends the entire day asking two questions: What's next? and How am I doing? And whilst these are broad generalisations, it's an incredibly helpful way for leaders who seek actionable models to improve engagement at work. How safe do you feel when you do not know what's coming next compared to how you feel when you do know what's coming next? Like most people, you'd probably feel less safe. When leaders become more predictable, consistent and transparent they become clear on what will happen next. When a leader seeks closer alignment around shared values, purpose and command intent - they are creating a consistent and predictable and participatory culture with immediate benefits to the limbic system. Our biological need to belong to a group or tribe drives the question: "How am I doing?" Our survival depends on the social resources of the group and so our limbic system is constantly assessing our membership status. "Am I in?" it asks. "Am I worthy? Do they see the value I add?" The limbic system doesn't ask this question once in a while; it asks every minute of every day! When a leader validates and recognises a team member, when they are acknowledged or appreciated, that isn't just some silly social gesture. It's a deeply important message direct to the recipients limbic system: "You have been noticed. You are seen and valued. You are safe. You are in." "And here's some useful feedback to help you stay safe and remain in the tribe." Don Rheem, author of Thrive by Design, says that answering these questions are behaving in a consistent and predictable manner and offering validation, recognition, and feedback. This makes team members (and others) feel safe and that they belong. He goes on to share four ways that leaders should focus their efforts to help their team members feel wanted, trusted and supported which in turn will improve retention, engagement and profits. Guide Neuroscience points us towards creating the ideal conditions that allow the brain to thrive and perform much closer to their potential. These conditions will help team members be more engaged, productive, healthier and happier in their work and workplace. Encourage trusted relationships and collaboration We thrive in a culture of trust, caring and collaboration. When our work tribe trusts each other and shares resources to support each other and the overall command intent, team members feel safer, feel that they belong and that what they do matters to the rest of their work tribe and the organ

Encourage Even in the direst circumstances, people seek out their purpose in life: Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning 1 Human beings have a deep, innate desire to find meaning in their lives. We want to matter. For some, it is to leave a legacy, to put a ding in the universe, or to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done. For others, it is about success, reputation or recognition. For many who have found their true meaning, they know it's about others and less about self. And yet for many many more, it is an unknown, idealised and unrealistic dream. Researchers have shown that meaningfulness is more important to employees than pay and rewards, promotions or even working conditions. 2 Work that is meaningful can be highly motivational, performance enhancing, satisfying and leads to greater commitment. 3 Yet, recently I was running a workshop with a group of millennials and I was unsurprised that not one of them had a clear purpose for their life, not even a career plan or really a semblance of any idea what they wanted let alone why they might have been put on this earth. My surprise was that this time, not one of them has put thought into it. Usually, one or two will tentatively raise their hands that they have some sort of idea or plan for their own future. And yet we hear so many stories that Millennials seek more from jobs than a salary. They are , apparently, greatly concerned about environmental issues, climate change, social injustice. And they want to be engaged at work- yet less than 30% are. And they seek personal life balance int heir work. So not so very different from Gen X'ers, Baby Boomers and Founding fathers. Develop I was given some pretty poor advice when I was young to pursue my passion in life. "Do what you love and you won't work another day in your life." Which is all well and good until you change your mind about what you are passionate about. Passion is self-serving, egotistical and selfish. It's for you alone. And it changes. For some people it changes over years, for others it changes in minutes. Most often, your passion tends to be associated with something you are good at doing. You love doing this. You enjoy it. I've met many an accountant who went into it in part due to parental expectations and bias, in other part that they were good at maths and liked earning and counting money. A few years later, the glisten of accounting can wear off and the feeling of something missing looms larger and larger. The dictionary can help us out here: Passion: a strong or powerful emotion This is not the same as being engaged with work: Engaged: to occupy the attention or efforts of (a person or persons): Though you could argue that your attention would be occupied by doing something that you are passionate about. Passion is good to put fire in your belly but as Ryan Holiday points out in his book, “Ego is the Enemy, ”Passion is for the amateurs" he says, and continues with, “passion is seen in those who can tell you in great detail who they intend to become and what their success will be like.” Though they haven’t gotten there, and might not even be on the right track. Ouch! If passion is the fire, then purpose is the fuel. It is "Why" you do what you do. It's "Why" you were born, "Why" you have the gifts and talents you have. Purpose: The object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or goal: the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists As you search to make your work meaningful, it aligns with your purpose (and if you are truly blessed, aligns with your passion as well.) Research at MITSloan Management Review found five qualities of Meaningful work: Self-transcendent (it's not about you!) - your work aligns with your purpose or even is your purpose. We find meaning in work when our work matters more to others than to just ourselves. Abraham Maslow's original hierarchy had "Self-transcendence" at the apex Poignant (meaning doesn't always co

What if you could feel truly appreciated and deeply satisfied every single day? What if you could experience a more joyful, appreciative and considerate workplace and it only costs you seven minutes of a day? In an earlier podcast I shared about the seven most important minutes of your day. Well, here's another hack for your Joyous delight and satisfaction that could be an additional 7 minutes, or instead. It's up to you just how much joy you want in your life. Well you can. Encourage I'm going to take a wild guess here that your work and your life has become more demanding. Furthermore, I can be pretty certain that you feel under-valued. I'll even dare to suggest that your pay is not the main issue in feeling under-valued, rather it's because it seems that no-one truly appreciates the value you deliver. Something deep inside our pysche screams out to be appreciated. When we're not appreciated, then our satisfaction with life, with our job, with ourselves, is diminished. You might have quit a job to take another with more salary in the belief that you would feel better. And for a while, that might have worked well enough. But after the honeymoon was over and the realities of everyday started to take their toll, even the extra money began to seem insufficient. The offer of a higher salary felt good because it aroused your anticipation of pleasure (increased dopamine in your brain making the offer attractive). But dopamine is short-lived in making us feel good - so we seek another dose, then another and another and then some more (not necessarily a good thing!). Sadly, the extra cash doesn't (ever) deliver the anticipated long-term happiness. What we're really after is some oxytocin and a dose of serotonin - we want to feel loved (or at least a sense of belonging to a trusted tribe) from the oxytocin and a sense of delighted satisfaction with the serotonin. And what better way to feel valued than someone else to appreciate you for your contribution? You feel more loved (appreciated) thanks to the oxytocin, and you'll feel more satisfied thanks to the serotonin produced when you are appreciated by someone else. So how do you get your boss, colleague, staff, partner, kids, parents, customer to appreciate you for well, anything at all? You could be giving the very best possible service, providing the very best of you and yet still it seems to go unnoticed. You could yell and scream and beg them to appreciate you. Throw a hissy fit and stomp off telling them that they don't deserve you. You could just suck it up and think that life is like that and people are unappreciative. You could try and stop being so wonderful and find out of they even notice. Or you could try something radical that actually works. Develop So, you've tried one or more of the tactics everyone uses at some point in their life to get the appreciation you so richly deserve to no avail. Or was it? It is possible that they did try to show you their appreciation. They just used the wrong language. And by language, I mean your language of appreciation. Dr Gary Chapman and Paul E. White wrote a wonderful book called the "5 Love Languages" that has impacted millions worldwide with their love and marriages. And they've written a version for work (because it seems that "love" is a bit too squishy and personal for the workplace) called the "5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace" on how to effectively communicate appreciation at work using the 5 languages that matter to people. Essentially, each of us feels appreciated in different ways. That is, we have different "languages of appreciation". Typically, we will use the language of appreciation that matters to ourself. If you have a different language of appreciation, my appreciation of you goes unnoticed. It's as if I am speaking perfect French and you only understand Chinese. Most, if not all that I speak will just be non-sense to you. Similarly, you speaking Chinese will make no sense to me. The five languages of a