Reinventing your brand.

Rocky Buckley is an entrepreneur and a hybrid coach and consultant who primarily works with solopreneurs – experts, thought leaders, authors, speakers, coaches or consultants as well as people who are successful corporate executives or service providers looking to reinvent themselves into that space. Rocky helps them with their business models, personal brand and how they package themselves as a soloprenerurs and experts.

Rocky had another business for over twenty years where he was primarily working with very large publishing companies and their authors in a consulting role by helping to take ideas and intellectual property and packaging it into different products. He worked with the biggest publishing companies, produced over 3,000 projects and built a successful business but wasn't happy or fulfilled. He has always had a desire to help people, particularly those who were stuck, people who had very high potential, who always thought they could have been someone, had big dreams and ambitions but also had the talent to do it. It was a crossroads moment for him and he decided to reinvent himself and his business. He figured out that strategically the people he could help the most were entrepreneurial, aspirational people who had talent, personality, and leadership ability but were trapped in their business model. He wanted to teach them how to unlock that model and change their life and business.

The context Rocky uses for a solopreneur is as part of the social media age where they must be online and must have a personal brand. There is a celebrity element to it now. He was a solopreneur for many years and nobody knew who he was because he worked behind the scenes and did not have a public presence at all. When you put yourself out there today, the way you promote yourself, the way you get your message out and market your business is through online means. You need to figure out how to communicate what you do to the right audience, to message it properly, be able to engage people and show a different side of your personality. We are all living in a social age where having a public persona is no longer a choice. We are all forced into it and the question is how do we maximise ourselves and put that best version of ourselves out there.

The market is very crowded now especially after Covid when a lot of people realised that what they were doing offline could be taken away from them very quickly. A lot of people pivoted and now there are so many more people coming online and there is still a lot of the world not even online yet. If you look at a phone where you can only have so much information on a feed, the structure makes it highly competitive. We can only look at so many things in a day or have so many messages coming to us. The more people there are on the feed it becomes more difficult to stand out.  Rocky’s aim is to help people figure out how to be the best version of themselves so they do stand out. In a period of rapid change that is only getting faster, the business models and strategies that are successful now might be obsolete in six months. Having to change and reinvent yourself is a skill and knowing how to do that and do it well over and over again is really a core skill of the 21st century.

Many of the people Rocky works with already have their own business but they sometimes get stuck. Typically, the people who start businesses have had a job that they become very good at and then decide to go out on their own as their own boss. They have the idea that they want to be their own boss, to work and build something for themselves that will create more free time and a better life. Often though if they are good are what they do and become successful they are swamped with work, busy all the time and stuck in the day-to-day of their business. They can’t work on their business because they’re working in their business.

People get out of this by making structural shifts in their business, and choosing a different market that is more lucrative. Things such as changing the way you deliver your product or service so instead of working one on one or change to a group setting or a digital product that gives you more leverage or going wider to use promotion and marketing to get your message out further than you did before. Most people starting out are dependent on referrals so you’re looking for the business to come to you. Breaking out of that and using the leverage of marketing allows the business to grow.

Differentiating yourself in a packed marketplace is a systematic and strategic process. People understand they need to get out there and create content but then find it doesn’t get a lot of engagement so they get frustrated. The mathematical aspect is that you have to put out a lot more content than you think but there is also the question of what makes a piece of content or persona engaging. It requires an in-depth, inward looking process to figure out what it is about me that makes me different. What is that sense of purpose I have that makes me more animated and bring s out my charisma? What are other people in the market saying or doing? How do they sound and what assumptions are they making about the people they are talking to and how can I cut against that?

You need to become strategic about the strengths you have and the things that other people tell you you’re really good at. What are the things you’re interested in that would make you more colourful, interesting and fascinating to people? It requires a step-by-step strategic process to develop and create that best version of yourself. It’s a creative process and most people never think or do anything about it and that is the critical step for everyone.

Entrepreneurs need resilience and one key element in building this is to tap into your sense of purpose which is what drives you and creates resilience. When you emotionally tap into the thing that drives you and you stay connected to it, it will drive you forward and also animate the way you appear as the natural passion, enthusiasm and desire to help people is what draws other people to you. Staying tapped into purpose from a resilience and personal charisma standpoint is the essential centre of this world. If you drift from purpose its really hard to succeed.

Once you tap into purpose and start to understand it a deeper level it becomes a life, business and personal vision with identity and belief shifts that stream from purpose. If you remove purpose from life you’re looking at a very grey world with no joy or change.

You can find out more about Rocky at rockybuckley.com

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Messages from Angels

Lorna Byrne was born in the 1950’s in Ireland and was growing up, like many at the time, in a monetarily poor family. Despite being severely dyslexic with the help of speech recognition software and assistance with proofreading and editing, she has written seven highly successful books, with the first Angels in my Hair becoming an international bestseller.

Angels have been in her life from the moment she was born. She didn't realise they were angels but she remembers reaching up to try and touch them when she was in her cot. Later, when she was with her brother playing with blocks in front of a fire their hands touched and at that moment angels circled them telling her that she must keep them a secret. She was very young at the time but the angels told her that her brother had died before she was born and was a soul. Lorna thinks keeping it a secret was one of the things that the angels were doing to protect her. 

From a very early age, the angels told Lorna that she would write a book about them. She used to laugh when they said it, telling them it was unlikely because she had dyslexia and could not read or write. Because of her dyslexia she was put in the bottom class at school and never finished primary school education after doctors told her parents she was retarded

Some people see angels as a metaphor for goodness, kindness wisdom and knowledge but Lorna talks about actual entities and sees angels physically with clarity. When she was a child she didn't know they were angels and it wasn't until they told her that her little brother was a soul that she started to understand. Even then she still thought her parents could see them but the angels kept reminding her to say nothing. Lorna sees angels as a beautiful light and sees them tumble down from the heavens and stop before they land.  She can’t really describe them further but says they give a human appearance in the light but that they can be very faint. Sometimes they tell her their names but because they are always around people and give the impression they want to help even with trivial things, she gave them a name of the unemployed angels.

Lorna doesn’t know why she can see angels. She thinks perhaps it is because she was considered retarded. No one talked to her and she was very silent and quiet so the angels became her teachers. They also made predications about her life. They told her when it was time to write a book but at the time she was busy being a mother. When she was about 10 years old, an angel showed her the man she would marry and told her that he would die young so in some ways Lorna feels her life is predetermined and that she has no free will like everyone else but she realises that to do that the world has to play its part so she can play hers.

Lorna feels that it’s to do with spiritual growth, connecting the soul with the human person. She feels everyone has a soul and that it is waiting to intertwine - the soul exists and the human attaches to the soul so when someone dies, the soul continues with all knowledge of that human person. The soul is the life force. The human body gets weaker but the soul never weakens. She also thinks that everyone has a guardian angel that never leaves them while other angels or the soul of a loved one can come or go. The guardian angel tries to help and give guidance to make life a little easier. Connecting into that is really important.

For many people their resilience comes from their ability to believe and having a path laid out for them. Lorna feels her angels have helped her to push ahead and given her the courage and resilience she has needed to overcome the obstacles in her life. This has taken her to incredible places and extraordinary experiences and people and shows that being limited in some ways in terms of skills doesn't mean you don't have the capability to achieve great things. When her first book came out a number of young people who had learning difficulties approached Lorna and told her she had helped give them the courage and resilience to achieve what they wanted to achieve.  

Lorna doesn’t know how she has achieved what she has and has needed courage because she has been ridiculed by any people but she says she loves them anyway because the love she has for mankind and for nature overcomes all of the negatives. This represents the idea that if you are secure in yourself it doesn't matter what other people think about you. It doesn't matter what the source of the security is, whether it's a rational, cognitive thing or a faith, belief or spiritual, the idea of being a strong version of yourself is important.

Lorna set up a children’s foundation in 2015 that supports the work of charities around the world in helping children who are suffering from poverty, illness, grief or war and has also helped to set up a online sanctuary for people from around the world, of all backgrounds and beliefs to come together.

Over the years Lorna has met with a lot of scepticism but many other people have visited or contacted Lorna, seeking healing or wisdom through God and the angels. She feels the scepticism doesn't matter because she just wants to help to change people’s lives.

You can find out more about Lorna at lornabyrne.com

 You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Empowering Change. Lessons I Learned from the Tortoise.

Donna P. Dahl is a master empowerment coach who works with individuals looking to take a step forward into the realm of confidence and enthusiasm. She is also a professional book development coach and feels stepping in to the foray of building a manuscript is a very special and intimate process that deserves all the care that can be brought to it.

It had never occurred to Donna to write a book herself but ten years after a car accident she was invited to write an article for a magazine. She didn't think she was qualified or an appropriate choice or that what she had to say would really matter but she started working on it. Writing and putting words together on paper had become a very difficult exercise post accident and it took three weeks to write a thousand words. When she finished it, she hesitated about sending it but her husband finally said ‘just send it’. She did and five minutes later the publisher sent a message back saying it was perfect.

Donna wasn’t sure she wanted to do it again as the bench mark had been set really high and she didn’t want to set herself up for failure. She wasn’t very confident in her ability to do something twice let alone three times but when the article came out she was challenged to make it into a book. She wasn't certain but she kept being prodded until finally she decided to see if she could do it. The first draft was fifty-three pages and she decided she could work to make it into a book and fourteen months after the article was published she launched a book and that book launched a coaching enterprise and that's what she’s been doing for seventeen years.

Sometimes something as unfortunate as an accident can provide choices and opportunities although it doesn’t feel like that at like that at the time. Donna went through a long grieving process for the things in her mind that she thought were lost - her former career and the social environment at work. She was in a situation where she was alone and needed to find a way to support her belief in herself and that she could heal. When people around you cant see there is anything different, its difficult for them to understand that what’s going on inside is different.

Donna had lost functionality in her right arm and hand in the accident and had difficulty with walking, with short-term memory and being able to engage in conversations. She could tell you that had something for breakfast that was round, that you could peel and came out in sections but someone the word orange wasn’t in her memory. In situations like this people can see how you deal with a lack of right arm functionality but when you have a mind or brain impairment people cant see it so its very hard to deal with. It's a challenge for people to be able to articulate and get treated for this type of situation.

As soon as we attach the word mental to something people seem to want to go into denial.  Because we can’t see, feel, smell or touch it, its vague but Donna feels that neural science is making tremendous advances and that we can do things in our work environment as teams, as leaders or as freelancers or entrepreneurs that we can do for ourselves in order to maintain our wellness of mind.

Many people feel they have a book in them but never start it. Donna feels it’s important to start with the ‘why’. Why would I write this book? Would I be writing it as a legacy for future generations of my family? Am I writing it to help support the realm of wisdom in the particular area I’m excited about? Would this be a children’s story that has value in the lessons that it beings or opportunities for discussion? Whether its sharing recipes you made with grandma, bedtime stories you told your children or something in the area of thought leadership, are you building something that has some sort of remarkability about it? Something that engages and invites people to the conversation. It doesn't really matter what the topic is, it's the why that will drive and motivate you to commit to the task and get it done.

There is more resilience required in writing than anything else because it brings together being judged and critiqued about what you've written very personally. Even if it's a non-fiction book that critique is about something you generated yourself. It’s very hard to separate ourselves from the words we’ve written and the content we’ve delivered. If you remember a time in your life at university for instance where your examination was being graded, there were times when you felt as though the evaluation that appeared on your report card exhilarated and empowered you to do even better next time but there were other times when you felt diminished, disheartened and that quitting would have been the best choice.

Donna cautions people if they are looking for critiquing to choose their critique wisely because there is no one size fits all. Donna prides herself on her ability to bring out the best in the people she works with who are becoming authors so that at the end of the exercise they can take a deep breathe and say yes! Whether it moves towards the stage of being published or not is their personal choice. What she is dealing with is fulfilling the goal to complete the manuscript.

Donna’s book ‘Lessons I learned from the tortoise’ contains twenty-two lessons that Aesop didn't write about.  One of the stories is about multitasking and how if you’re moving from one thing to another you are simply moving from one level of distraction to another so at the end of the day you feel you have accomplished nothing. Sometimes it can feel as if we are being drawn in different directions but we need to just focus on one thing, get that done and then move on the next. When it comes to having a multiplicity of choices in front of you try to think of them as individual purchases you are going to make.  How would you prioritise the purchase list? Which one would come first? Part of the problem is that we are governed by other people mistakes and we need the discipline to do deep work.

There is another aspect that is important. Research tells us that when we continually shift our focus from one thing to another we are encouraging our brains to not be able to sustain attention to a task and that is critical in teams of workplace wellbeing if we expect our team members to sustain attention to a task for fifteen minutes of each hour. This the beginning of how we develop things like neuroplasticity not just doing different things but doing them to a high level and not just skimming over the surface.

 You can find out more about Donna here.

 You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Preparing the mind for difficult situations

Lt Col Brian L. Slade started as an enlisted man in the US Army as a diesel mechanic. After he got his commission as an officer he then stated flying Apache helicopters. Shortly after a very long and arduous deployment he decided to transition into the Air Force in an attempt to save his marriage.

His first deployment was for twenty-three months and he had only been married for five months prior to that so for the first two and a half years of the marriage they were separated for two. The problem is often not the separation but when you come back together again and military personnel who are dealing with potential trauma in a very strong comrade type team often find it very difficult to go back to a routine husband, wife and children environment.

Brian’s ex-wife had also had a mental disorder borderline personality disorder so the relationship was really tumultuous. In some ways it was more traumatic than some of the things he was being asked to do in the military because he wasn't as prepared for the dynamics. The military prepares you for certain dynamics that you are going to experience. You are used to a certain regimentation and interaction that didn't work with the relationship.

Brian’s book is about trauma and the reason he wrote it was because when he was deployed as an Apache pilot there were crazy, traumatic, intense experiences that he was exposed to. He started asking why would he experience post-traumatic growth rather than the post-traumatic stress we always hear about. He looked at his peers and although they had the same stimulus they had different results. Brian felt he had grown from his experiences and that they increased his resilience and his ability to see things as opportunities rather than obstacles that would drag him down. Other guys on the alternative end of the spectrum were thinking about taking their own lives - that's a very big spectrum for the same stimulus

Brian’s book outlines seven principles. Things like growing a healthy perspective, how do you do that when you experience things that pull you into a myopic perspective but need to maintain that macro perspective?  How do you build a healthy support system and what does that look like. What are we talking about when we say we need to release hate? That's a big one that we don't really talk about. There are a couple of meanings to it. When you are at war, when you have to kill someone it makes it easier to de-humanise them and make them into something they aren’t. Harboring a hate for them is a coping mechanism but it’s not a healthy one.

As well as releasing the hate for the enemy you have to release the hate for yourself. As we start doing the things that the ugliness of war calls for we start painting ourselves as ugly to, that that's part of who we are. You need to remember that just because you’re there doing things other people wouldn't do it doesn’t make you an ugly person - it makes you a proxy for the people who aren’t suited to doing it or cant do it.

This is similar to a disassociation technique and it plays back to one of the other principals of defining and embracing your honorable mission. Brian’s honorable mission wasn't really to get Osama bin Laden, that was what got him on the plane but realised his honorable mission was to make sure that as many of his brothers and sisters in arms made it back. You are going to do ugly things at times to make sure that your honorable mission is accomplished,

How do we avoid festering, emotional wounds? If you're a banker and go to work and you have a transaction or something happens that's interesting you go home and talk about it. It’s so much harder to do when your job is blowing up twelve people but the fact still remains that your honorable mission is to make sure the ground guys make it home safely. It’s harder to talk about it but that’s how you avoid the festering emotional wound. You just talk about it in a matter of fact way.

Building resilience is never ending. With an honorable mission there’s a beginning and end. There are moments of high adrenaline and then lots of time doing mundane things. The mission allows you to compartmentalise things. There is the focal point that we are looking at and around that are lots of ugly things but when we pull the trigger we have just completed our honorable mission. We know there is lots of auxiliary stuff in there but that stays there because you’re in the ugliness because of your honorable mission. You don't have to take that home with you. Part of that is sharing it. You share it as matter of factly as you possibly can. You use humor because it makes it easier to share. Brian realised humor was his stepping-stone to talking about it seriously. In a way it’s doing the same thing with hate – you’re coping but it’s a positive emotion for coping not a negative one. It's a lily pad to being able to talk about it.

Brian also uses chair flying which is an aviation technique. He added the meditation and role playing pieces to the visualisation aspect. A lot of people will struggle with anxiety if they are visulising a very stressful event so you control the environment through meditation and create a safe space where you plant the things you want to grow and get strong. Breathing exercises help to get in the right headspace and then start to visulise an emergency procedure.

One exercise has a co-pilot and engine getting shot out. In a matter of seconds you need to react to the rotors going down. The co- pilot is screaming in the background and you automatically think that's the first thing to deal with but in fact its number three on the list. The rotor is most important. The flight controls are jammed so that’s the second action then the co-pilot but it all needs to happen in one or two seconds. You don’t get through that by thinking about it. In the leadership world they practice so they get it right, in the military they practice so they don't get it wrong. Things do go wrong but the risk reduction is there. The noisy drama is not always the first thing to do!

You can find out more about Brian at https://www.clearedhot.info/ or find his book Cleared Hot.

 You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Upskilling to retain your top talent.

According to the World Economic Forum, by 2025, 50% of employees worldwide will need to be reskilled as the adoption of technology continues, whilst LinkedIn’s ‘2022 Global Trends Report’ reveals that upskilling and development opportunities were top priorities for employees.

As we move into 2023, in the UK economic uncertainty, and a competitive labour market means businesses face an on-going talent shortage. The pandemic changed job requirements and left many people feeling unprepared as businesses quickly reorganised and traditional learning and skills development tried to adapt.

The global labour market is also changing. A report from the McKinsey Global Institute says 14% of the workforce will have to change their careers by 2030. With so many employees looking for new jobs, employers have to be creative in their retention strategy and upskilling is an effective way of retaining top talent in the organisation.

Acquiring new skills or knowledge in order to improve job performance or career opportunities is advantageous to both employers and employees. For employers, identifying skills gaps and then investing in training initiatives to upskill the current team moves the priority to talent development rather than recruitment. This helps the business to remain competitive, increases the efficiency and productivity of the current team, boosts employee motivation and job satisfaction which results in improved employee retention. From an employee perspective, it not only offers the opportunity to develop or learn new skills, but also to increase their value and enable them to take on more responsibility or higher-level, better-paid positions within their organisation.

As we move into 2023, it’s clear that employees need to be prepared for the ‘future of work’ and that businesses will need to be resilient to the economic problems ahead. Upskilling can become an important part of a businesses workforce planning, talent acquisition and retention strategy and those that show a commitment to employee growth and implement better learning and development opportunities will be the ones that attract and retain top workers.

Move from shame and blame. The benefits of collaborative divorce.

Nanci A Smith has been a divorce lawyer for thirty years and is currently based in Vermont, North East USA. She is an advocate for collaborative divorce, a new model and mindset, which will allow a couple to emerge healthy and wholehearted from the divorce process rather than bitter and resentful. Her aim is to change the paradigm for divorce away from the blame and shame adversarial process to one that's more consistent with people’s core values of integrity, individual respect, transparency and compassion.

She feels that when it comes to the divorce table, lawyers are trained in the adversarial system. They get the basics of the story, the clients are wounded, frightened upset, scared and are maybe even feeling betrayed. There are lots of intense emotions going on and lawyers are not trained to handle these emotions so they say ‘you go get a therapist, I’ll do the legal stuff and then we’ll go off to the courthouse. There is no chance for healing or personal growth. Nanci feels the gift of a divorce is the opportunity to transform and grow through it.

In the UK we are used to the process of mediation. Its an out of court dispute resolution process where you have one neutral person listening to both sides and trying to come to some sort of compromise that both sides can live with. It's a real opportunity for people who are on an equal bargaining footing and who understand the psychological and financial issues and are both ready to get divorced.

Collaborative divorce is like ‘mediation on steroids’. It offers the couple more support with two lawyers trained in the process, a mental health coach and financial neutral so it’s an inter-disciplinary team. It provides a safe place to have the really difficult conversations that need to be had at a time when they are feeling their worst and we are expecting them to show and be their best.

Many people have the idea that a marriage is just a thing that happens to a person and don't consider the parties that are involved - the relationship, children and the different roles that can change over time. Dr Thackeray feels that no marriage should last more than ten years without a reprogramming or reengineering because we get so comfortable and familiar and becomes so easy to stay together. It’s almost as if we need something to happen to make us look at the relationship maybe when we get married we should be thinking how do we ensure we want to stay together? What you want when you’re twenty or thirty is not necessarily what you want when you’re forty-five, or fifty or sixty. Maybe there is a case for us we to review   our relationships every ten years?

People step out of marriage for different reasons but in Nanci’s experience it’s usually because communication has broken down or people are just not being honest. They don’t feel secure enough to say what they mean and mean what they say. The failure of communication leads to a lack of accountability and people get entrenched into positions of misery and want to blame and point the finger at others. They are just not feeling satisfied but they don't have the emotional training to engage in difficult conversations about important things like Am I happy?  Am I satisfied? Am I feeling constricted about money? Am I not feeling fulfilled in my work? If you don't have the capacity for that or take the time to dig deep during a marriage you’re likely to end up at the divorce lawyers. There is a choices – do it yourself, go to mediation or through a collaborative process or go to court and make a public display of all your trauma.

People who are drawn to collaborative divorce process tend to be internally driven and motivated to grow. They have the idea that they don't want this to be a nightmare for everyone, they want it to be reasonable, amicable and civil and they don't want to lose their relationships with their partner and in laws. Because there are children to consider they want to have a there is so much grief and loss involved in divorce. If you can look at it through the lens of grief you might be able to have the opportunity in the collaborative model to see that this is the opportunity to ask yourself truly what do I truly want? What do I need? I want to be heard. I want to be able to love again, I want to have a good relationship with my children. I don't want my ex to hate me. I don't want to lose the whole concept of our family

Nanci feels we have to reposition it, reconfigure it and take feedback. If your outward and pointing fingers at your ex for ruining your life then its going to be a long haul through the divorce process, If you view it as an opportunity for a major life transition and don't let layers bully you through an adversarial process you can use it for personal growth and transformational change

Collaborative lawyers are not going to make it worse. They are orientated towards settlement and are not going to ask you to make major decisions about children or major financial issues until both parties are psychologically ready to be divorced. Often one person is ready because they have been thinking about it for some time but it comes as a complete shock to the other person so they are not prepared. With enough support Nanci feels the shocked spouse can come back stronger if you give them time and grieve the losses and realise that this is good thing, an opportunity to move into the next stage of my life confident, secure and feeling good. The process provides the skills to do this and in so doing set an example to your children about handling adversity and building resilience.

Levels of grief can vary but the grief is generally for the relationship rather than for each other. There are so many loses. You lose your best friend, lover, status as a spouse, maybe your home, time with your children, your extended family and of course money but you are also losing the dream. This is one of the hardest loses. Shock and denial are so string then you’re mad and struck by the unfairness of what is happening rather than your role as co creator of the dynamic that has led to this. You are also a co creator in the resolution that is going to work for both of you and your entire family. Many people get so stuck in their anger at being betrayed that it becomes solely the other person’s fault and they don't accept any responsibility for their own role.

Nanci is the author of Untangling Your Marriage: A Guide to Collaborative Divorce (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Oct 11, 2022). You can find out more about her at nancismithlaw.com.

   You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Remodel your brain for happiness

Dr Dawson Church, PhD, is an award-winning science writer who aims to bring science to various exponential and personal and global questions around the way our brain activity changes as we shift our awareness. In his latest book Bliss Brain, Dawson looks at the mental states of people who spend a lot of time meditating such as Franciscan nuns and Tibetan monks.  The book also looks at the science behind meditation and what works as well as showing that certain parts of the meditation are highly effective at inducing those states.

The research Dawson carried out shows how the brain state of these nuns and monks is extraordinarily happy and at a level we can’t comprehend because they are in an ecstatic state. The research also showed that their corpus callosum, the part of brain tissue that connects the left and right hemispheres, were very large. The question Dawson then asked was whether they were happy because their left and right brain had a lot of neural connections, because they had a large corpus callosum or whether these states were triggering brain growth?

Harvard psychologist Sarah Lazar looked at this issue in 2005, asking whether it was because brain anatomies produced these states or whether those states produced brain anatomies. She gave definitive answers, showing that the states that produce the brain anatomy can turn temporary states of wellbeing. When we cultivate these pleasurable states over time, they become traits. We don't just feel more blissful as a temporary state; the changes are literally hard-wired into our brains, becoming stable and enduring personality traits.

The states to traits progression in people who meditate, especially those who meditate effectively means they are able to increase neural mass in parts of the brain like the corpus callosum and the memory and learning system. There is an increase in neural tissues in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that hooks the executive centres in to the emotional brain and down-regulates all the irritations and distractions of everyday life and focuses on happiness joy and wellbeing. These parts of the brain get bigger and stronger in meditation adapts.

On the other side of the coin are people with major depressive disorders where the ventromedial prefrontal cortex actually thins and starts to disintegrate. What’s left of it starts to signal the wrong way. The emotional brain that can be miserable, worried, anxious and stressed actually starts to control the executive functions and people start to say that they are stressed because of xyz. They then start to invent reasons in their executive centres for their misery rather than controlling it with the same part of the brain. These states produce measurable changes in brain anatomy.

Dawson published another study that explored meditation adapts used by the nuns and monks. It found that the traditional model they used took 10,000 hours to achieve with many having done over 40,000 hours of meditation in their lives. So how do you get there without taking vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and giving up all of your possessions? Dawson has found that there are certain things that you can do that to produce those changes quickly. If ordinary people, even non-meditators, do some highly effective practices culled from ancient traditions in a controlled way they can achieve similiar results.

In the trial some people did the meditation whilst others did other things such as mindfulness and mindful breathing. The trial found that in the first group doing the effective things, there was evidence of rapid and radical brain change and measurable functional changes in two parts of the brain after just one month. They were only meditating for twenty-two minutes a day but, by using effective practices, brain remodeling began and over time these structural changes in brain anatomy can make us calmer, happier, and more resilient.

Dawson found that three things were highly effective. One is to meditate intensively so you feel the good feelings in your body through breathing and relaxing certain muscles. You can then dial-up your emotions.  Neuro-research shows that if you have a positive feeling in your body you need to amplify it. Second, is that the effect is better if you do the practices in a group.  Group meditation is known to provide more positive neuroplascity. Having a body physical experience, dialling up your level of intensity and doing it in a group is really powerful.

The final thing that makes a difference is compassion. Compassion meditation has greater positive neuroplascity than other kinds of meditation. If there is an element of feeling compassion, the part of the brain called the insular lights up. Negative thinking is associated with the activation of brain regions like the mid prefrontal cortex, the “seat of self.” Positive emotions such as altruism and compassion light up the insula, key to social interactions and pro-social emotions such as gratitude and joy.

What we find in these people is the focus has been on emotion and the value of compassion because that's what Buddhism calls it. What we are now seeing more in neuroscience is a single positive meta emotion - you just feel really good and its up to an academic to label whether its happiness, gratitude or compassion.

Meditation activates certain parts of the brain. The commonality amongst all meditation styles is the deactivation of the default mode network. This is how the brain defaults when you are doing a task. When people are just resting they definitely feel better and more relaxed but what often happens is that the default mode network kicks in and they begin to ruminate and cataptophise because the default mode network is associated with thinking about the past especially threats and bad experiences and any problems that might occur in the future.

During deep meditation, ‘the 7 neurochemicals of ecstasy’ are released in our brains. These include anandamide, a neurotransmitter that's been named “the bliss molecule” because it mimics the effects of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. Meditation also boosts serotonin and dopamine; the first has a chemical structure similar to psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”), the second to cocaine and cultivating these elevated emotional states literally produces a self-induced high.

You can find out more about Dawson at http://blissbrain.com/ and https://www.eftuniverse.com/ You can buy his latest blook Bliss Brain at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401957757?ie=UTF8&tag=energypsych00-20

 You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

A work in progress. Resilience to evolve and succeed.

Martha Aviles is a marketing executive based in Austin, Teas. She has 20 years of high-tech marketing experience in SaaS, semiconductor, networking, and network security at start-ups, private, and public companies and has focused on impacting high-growth companies with innovative, measurable marketing strategies. Martha’s dynamic background is in leading and building high-performance marketing teams that include demand generation, integrated marketing, product marketing, digital marketing, public relations, brand management, analyst relations, and crisis communications.  

Martha parents were Nicaraguan immigrants who arrived in Miami Florida in the 1970s. They didn't speak the language but they both worked really hard and became college graduates with her father becoming an electrical engineer. Martha was born and grew up in Miami before moving to southern California and then Austin, Texas in the early 90s primarily because it was developing into a tech hub. She didn’t want an engineering career for herself so became involved in technical marketing, the career she has pursued for the last twenty years.

When she was a child many people didn’t know that Nicaragua was a country let alone where it was. People would ask her if it was in Africa and when she said it was in Central America she would be told there was no such place. She got very tired trying to explain it so often just said she was from Cuba! Martha felt she didn't really fit in anywhere. In Miami she grew up with many Nicaraguans. Her first language was Spanish and she didn't even speak English until she was six but she always felt there was an American edge. Now though she feels she is a third culture child – she doesn't totally fit in either Nicaragua or the US but rather can fit in anywhere.

In Miami a lot of Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Nicaraguans stayed together. There were Nicaraguan restaurants that had been run by families for generations and these became gathering places. This was not the case in some of the other places she lived in. Her family moved a lot before she was twelve and when they eventually moved to Austin she realised there were not a lot of Nicaraguans in Texas.  Martha feels that you can’t build that type of community and most of her friends were from other ethnicities such as Philippine or Vietnamese with immigrant parents and being a first generation American.

Houston is a very diverse ‘international’ city but other parts of Texas are far less diverse and are very ‘Texas Proud’. Martha found it a struggle because many people thought she was Mexican and that was particularly frustrating because it felt as if Mexican was only Hispanic culture. When Martha moved to Texas in 1986 she lived in a small town for a couple of years called Harper Heights where she got beaten up at school every day because she was the only brown kid. It was very challenging but she knew she was resilient as a child – she didn't know the terminology but knew she couldn't quit and that there was something better waiting on the other side.  

Martha feels she had tenacity and stubbornness and that this built over time by having to deal with a lot of challenges. It’s something she still work on though - things keep getting thrown at you as you get older although you think you’re resilient enough and don't need another challenge! Children are often very resilient and Martha feels that there is an immigrant work ethic that tells you that you don't quit. She was also an oldest child so knew the pressure was on her to blaze a trail for the family in the US. This was difficult at times because her parents didn’t know what she was going through for the first time. She often asked why didn't they know about this or why didn't they give me the heads up about that until she realised it was up to her to make it easier for her family and sisters. Not wanting to disappoint her younger siblings did help build her character though.

Some parents expect their children to feel gratitude towards them. They say ‘look at what we’ve done for you’ but Martha’s parents used to tell her to remember her name and that she shouldn’t tarnish her reputation. Martha always felt this was very negative and not a good pressure and sometimes when she was a bit down her parents would say she was setting an example her sisters.

As an adult she now feels that what was a difference and a negative when she was a child is now her superpower and that it has given her an advantage in the real world. At college when she decided she was not going to be an engineer she realised she had a knack for people. She grew up feeling it was unsafe being who she was because of her skin colour, her language and lack of English and that to survive she had to figure people out very quickly. She had to adapt to stay safe so now feels that it really helps her in marketing – she can listen to people’s stories and get in their heads at a different level to other people. As she gets older she finds that she embraces her story and finds it empowering – it was a hard road to get there and to understand who she was and that's she’s OK with it.

Martha thinks that it she could go back and talk to her ten year old self that she would say a couple of things. One that its going to be OK because there were many times she couldn't see the path forward and two that she shouldn’t care so much about what other people think. However much you try to be a good person, you’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and that you shouldn’t waste a lot of time trying to get people to like you because it's a real waste of time. To navigate this path you need to understand what parts are mine to own and what parts can I lose. Martha still struggles and wants to be liked but different challenges and life has helped her realise that being a people pleaser doesn't work long term and that you will still get through even if everybody doesn't like or understand you.

To try to get ahead some female executives have developed social fluency, others a ‘bitch from hell’ persona whilst others try being a woman in a man’s suit. All are legitimate strategies but social fluency and being able to get on with people in a more adult and honest way of getting on. If you are agreeable it can be easier to get on in life but then people can be shocked when you do disagree about something and find it hard to take you seriously.

Martha feels that life is work in progress. Her background gave her goal metrics and an idea of where she was meant to be going and the points she needed to hit but then she realised that once she hit the goals there were still more challenges. Life is about evolving and facing challenges and continuing to broaden your knowledge to be a better person. This is a process that continues until we die so we need to look at it as a process and try to enjoy it rather than consider it a mountain to climb and once you reach the top its over.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Recovering from childhood trauma to rebuild the sibling bond

Ronni Tichenor and Jennie Weaver are sisters and survivors who found a way to emerge from a tragic cycle of intergenerational trauma and abuse

Ronni and Jennie grew up in a home with abuse, addiction and mental illness. There is a lot of conversation around these issues nowadays about recovery from childhood trauma, its impact and how it can be difficult to realise that you grew up in a home with these dynamics because denying that these things are going on can be common. Sometimes this denial lasts to adulthood.

Both of them took some time to figure out what had happened to them in their childhood and have spent the last couple of decades trying to recover from their experiences. One of the things they noticed as they tried to get information and educate themselves about the dynamic they had experienced as children is that there is a lot of talk about childhood trauma these days but not a lot of discussion about what happens to siblings.

The relationship between siblings is nearly always damaged in some way in homes like theirs. Its not their fault because the dynamics the parents set in motion often sets children against each other in very explosive ways. Children can grow up and have really tough relationships with their siblings or be estranged from their siblings and not realise that it’s not their fault. The fact that Ronni and Jennie were able to come back together and heal the relationship in addition to healing individually is something they didn't see a lot of people talk about so that is why they are trying to bring that forward in the conversation.

Siblings can have different experiences, especially male and female relationships. Often one sibling is on the side of one parent and the other is on the side of the other?

Jennie was the youngest of three children and she was identified as the patient or scapegoat if you use the terms talked about with addiction. Ronni was the oldest and the hero. She was set up to succeed and to be the champion of the family. Jennie’s role was to be the problem of the family. She was a sensitive child and very intuitive so was constantly trying to read the mood of the room and her parents to try to avoid the next explosion. She really didn't feel particularly closer to one or the other - they were equally frightening in their ability to rage and to afflict pain. She feels Ronni seemed at times to be a confident of father so there was definitely a constant loyalty of ‘who do you love more’. That's probably very common in families with these issues.

Ronni agrees that they had different roles that they played and although neither of them was fun, Jennies’ was terrible. There were times when Ronni felt that her father was trying to draw her into being his confident, especially during her teen years. Her mother did that as well sometimes so there was a loyalty trap. It was also difficult because when her father was looking for looking for someone to talk it was because he felt he couldn't  talk to her mother in that way - it was both flattering and troublesome that she was being put between her mother and father. It was just one of a number of uncomfortable and unhealthy dynamics that were set into motion n homes like theirs.

If you are a single child and you’re abused there is a different set of dynamics going on.  In families are all the siblings involved or is the abuse confined to one and with the others not being part of it?

It’s unusual to have just one sibling targeted. You’re targeted in different ways. Their parents were verbally and physically abusive to all of them but because of her role as the ‘hero’, Ronni received less of that than Jennie did. Jennie got the brunt of it and that disparity intensified into adulthood. It got to the point where they had to break contact with their parents and their brother because they realised what was happening and wanted to get help whilst their parents and brother did not.  This happened when Ronni and Jennie were in their late 20’s/early 30’s and whilst Ronni was getting much less of the abuse, Jennie was constantly targeted. There can be disparities but usually all the siblings get some measure of maltreatment. Their brother was abused as well although he did not see it that way – when they tried to point out the abuse he had endured when he was growing up he couldn't see it and sided with their parents as they were trying to pull out of denial.

It is quite common that you see different roles. They are almost strategic partnerships or relationships that build because sometimes the best defence is to appear to join the enemy. When you were experiencing the abuse did you talk about it or was it only later that you began to unpack it that you discovered what was going on? How did that awareness of each other’s role come about?

Jennie feels it really evolved over time.  They both knew that they wanted very different types of marriage to what they had witnessed growing up. They both married really good men and as they started to have their children they started to talk about parenting and how they wanted to parent. One weekend Ronni invited Jennie to visit alone with her 8 month old daughter. Ronni knew Jennie was really struggling – she was living with their parents as her husband was overseas on Operation Desert Storm and there wasn’t a lot of direct communication with each other. They were still entrenched in part in denial and what therapists would call triangular communication – in order to maintain control somebody in the family had to be controlling the communication. At that time most of the communication was running through their mother who kept a tight lid on what she decided to share, which often wasn't accurate at all. It was all part of maintaining loyalty and keeping them in line.

The weekend was a big deal and Jennie received a lot of flak from their parents but it turned out to be an opportunity for Ronni and Jennie to open up. As soon as Jennie walked in the door Ronni realised she was suffering from severe depression. Over the weekend they started to talk and they stepped out of denial and broke the taboo of silence by discussing the family dynamics and how their parents were treating Jennie.

It’s often the case that each individual sibling treats what’s happening as a secret and doesn't share it. There is a futility to those years where you don't realise that you have somebody else, that you have a supporter or ally. There must be part of the sickening sense of waste that comes from this?

You are so entrenched in the denial and following those ever changing roles of control. Its about controlling each of the children and they realised as they started to talk to each other how isolated they were from each other and their emotional needs. They didn't really talk much directly to each other about what was going on because they were conditioned to keep silent. You are conditioned to believe that after a horrible beating that you’re not hurt, too stop crying, I didn’t mean to hurt you so don't talk about it. When you are conditioned from infancy it takes a lot to break out those patterns and recognise the patterns and then talk about and have someone to talk about them with. A therapist who is well versed in abuse and addiction and the mental illness dynamics in families is imperative to start unpacking but to have a sibling to validate the memories and say ‘I was there’ ‘I remember that’ ‘you’re not imagining it’ accelerates your healing process dramatically.

One of the major challenges is building a relationship with a partner who is taking on someone who has been through such an experience. It creates trust or commitment issues and the need to not have the relationship you had with your parents. You need to construct something that is a figment of your imagination because you can’t use your experience. How do you begin to work with your partners in sharing issues and begin to develop relationship and parenting styles?

Ronni and her partner talked a lot in the beginning about what they wanted. They recognised patterns with both his father and her father and mother’s anger issues. It wasn't until she started going to counselling early in their marriage before they had their children that she started unpacking some of what had happened. Her husband was very supportive, he is a very healthy and loving person in his own right and they just wanted to work on creating the most loving relationship they could have with each other and then when they started having children to be the best parents they could. To parent as consciously as possible.

Ronni and Jennie have both pursued really successful careers and are examples of people who have not been defined by past significantly learned from it.

They have both taken what they were given as children and tried to figure out how to live their lives in a healthier manner and also use that information to help other people. Ronni feels that because we don't talk about these issues they are swept under the rug and society helps people stay in denial about what they have experienced because we don’t talk about it.

You learn from the process of sharing. You learn more about yourself in the process of enabling and helping other people. What was behind the decision to write the book?

Ronni and Jennie both felt that they had done a lot of research and that it was helpful to hear other peoples stories. It also helped them find the name what had happened to them. A therapist told them that it is really unusual for the hero and scapegoat to become as close as the two of them had and they started to think that there might be probably some kind of formulae that they could share in terms of what they did on their path to increase the possibility that other people could heal their sibling relationships as well.

You can find out more at www.ronniandjennie.com or https://www.facebook.com/theheartandsoulsisters

Their book is available at  Healing Begins with Us: Breaking the Cycle of Trauma and Abuse and Rebuilding the Sibling Bond 

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Why businesses need resilience

Recent research by MHR International shows the challenges mid-size UK and Irish companies are facing in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. Over 500 senior leaders from businesses employing between 500 and 5000 people were interviewed to find their views on the importance of resilience in dealing with change and challenges. The major threats they saw were the expectations surrounding their businesses growth as they compete against multinationals and of staying ahead of agile start-ups.

Recessions and financial crisis are of course not strangers to long-established companies but the pandemic brought unforeseen and previously unknown challenges. Now, businesses face another set of problems including the cost-of-living crisis and the war in Ukraine. 

Many businesses came though the pandemic and will now deal with these new challenges because they are resilient and have the ability not only to deal with change but also to use the experience as a catalyst for further development.

So, in the short term, a resilient business will get through challenging periods but then in the longer term they will start to see a positive impact on productivity and work quality as well as improved employee engagement, performance and an inclusive and secure work culture.

There is no doubt there will be tough times ahead but a resilient business will not just survive, it will thrive.

Look for the opportunity

Carrington Smith trained as a lawyer and practiced law for seven years before becoming an executive search consultant. She now owns her own executive search business so has to interview different executives to see if they fit the criteria for opportunities she is recruiting for. Part of this is finding out if they would be a good fit culturally and the way she does this is through character and values. Her favourite question is that ‘we all have moments that define us, can you tell me about an event that has shaped you and how it did’. During the pandemic she decided to write a book to provide the answer to her question.

One of the things Carrington really looks for is resilience. She finds that people who haven’t had a defining moment haven’t had any hardships in life so are not able to deal with a ‘hurricane’ whereas to someone who had life experiences and developed emotional resilience it might just be a ‘rainy day’. Executives need to react and change quickly and be able to flex their resilience muscle.

In the US there a are number of laws and regulations regarding what you can ask people in an interview situation. Carrington uses that particular question because it’s very open ended. People respond with many different answers but being willing to be open and vulnerable can tell a lot about them. Some say getting married or the birth of child but this doesn't give much about character, values or resilience. You need to dig deeper – some moments can be almost everyday but also very transformative.

Carrington came from a very religious family where there was emotional, spiritual and physical abuse. When she got to college she was raped and the family response was to tell her not to talk about it. Now people ask how do she find anything good in being raped. How did she bounce back from it and not be defined by it. She knew she didn't want to be defined by it. When we tell ourselves about not being defined by something it’s generally not talking about it. The traumas that happen and that we don't want to be defined by we don't talk about and we don't deal with them. They then become what Carrington refers to as ‘the monster under the bed’. They end up controlling us because we haven’t dealt with them. We have to face these things head on. Feel the emotion then go back to what happened to us and incorporate it as part of our life experience. That is how we grow.

The motivation for Carrington’s book came from the pandemic. When it hit she realised her very ordinariness made her story compelling. We all experienced universal trauma but the way she responded to it was different.  She saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime – a historic moment that we might never have again to stop, evaluate and change course. She felt she was equipped to handle it so wrote her book by knitting her stories together as a road map and as a gift to share how she had experienced different traumas and got though them.

An example is her second divorce. The death of her marriage meant she got a whole new life. She went from she had lost to what she had gained – the opportunity to reshape her life. Carrington takes focus from what’s lost to what’s gained. Mindset is a muscle so the more you use it the stronger it gets. Now whenever something bad happens she looks for the opportunity. She now recovers faster having been through several traumatic experiences. That's not to minimise the feelings but to focus on there being something good on the other side. Having a sense of purpose gives meaning to the challenge you are experiencing.

Many senior executives have feet of clay. They don't have character but have been over promoted, have a good network set and strong political acumen.  Carrington feels there used to be two separate personas  - the personal and professional. The pandemic changed this with zoom calls providing a window into people’s lives so the two personas came together.  She also thinks the pandemic showed peoples authenticity and vulnerability so a lack of vulnerability and authenticity in executives are red flags. Some people are never going to share their emotions but are able to show empathy and meet people where they are and this willingness to acknowledge things will impact workplaces positively.

You can find out more about Carrington at www.carrington-smith.com where you can download the first chapter of her latest book Blooming free.

You can purchase the book at Blooming: Finding Gifts in the Shit of Life

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Growing a business to give back. Critical lessons in love and leadership.

Revanti “Rani” Puranik is co-owner, EVP and Incoming CEO of Houston-based Worldwide Oilfield Machine (WOM). Over 15 years ago, she joined WOM, an oil and gas equipment manufacturing firm, and has since implemented the framework for communication standardisation operations and business development. As a result of these frameworks, the company grew to more than $350 million in annual revenue. Rani has been named one of the “Top 25 Most Influential Women in Energy 2022” by Oil and Gas Investor and Hart Energy.

Rani grew up in Houston, Texas for the first nineteen years of her life. For the next nineteen she lived in Pune, India were she founded and ran a dance company for leadership and empowerment. In 2007 she moved back to Houston where she joined WOM and in 2014 she graduated with a MBNA in Finance from Rice University. In 2016 she became the global Global CFO at WOM before becoming the incoming CEO. A different part of her life is that she is the Chair for her family foundation. The Puranik Foundation operates a residential school in Pune India for under-resourced children with 250 children currently living on campus. Three generations of Rani’s family are involved with the foundation, her mother who set it up, Rani who is very active in multiple programmes across the globe and Rani’s eldest daughter who is the managing director for all of the US based foundation projects. Rani also has a third hat, with her first book due to be published in November 2022.

The oil industry is still heavily male dominated so Rani has needed to be resilient.  She feels that there have been a number of women ahead of her who paved the way and allowed her to be stronger in the business. She also believes that the industry goes beyond gender and is more about merit. If we show up as human beings, are dedicated, committed, understand our skills and talent, are open minded and able to collaborate with a variety of people it goes beyond what your gender is. When people start to look at you in a meritocracy you are taken forward and that is what has helped her to stand her ground.

There a lot of women in senior positions who feel they are more talented than their male colleagues because they've had to fight twice as hard to get where they want to be. Rani would give these voices credit because they have had to fight a little harder, been stronger, showed up a bit more, been more resilient and had to give the benefit of the doubt. It has happened in the oil industry but it is easing up a little bit and Rani has seen a change with a push towards hard work and merit.

Rani’s family has always had an ‘earn and return’ philosophy. WOM was started by father and he was always focused on business growth but her mother is more about what can we give back to society. Rani can understand the views of both parents and the way she sees is that we are not immortal. With that in mind she is building and growing the business to really give back. The goal for the next five years is to be a $1 bn company but in tandem with that is the life goal – the company wants to positively impact one billion lives around the world. This is more than a company philosophy, its the culture and fabric of who they are as a company and team.

By wrapping meaning into the working day people can see that they are there to achieve not only a financial goal but that they also have a goal of purpose. When things get tough you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Their customers are not just clients who pay - they are every life they can touch. This can be the lives of people working in the company though employee programmes and benefits or the career ladder but also by impacting positively and making life better for the end customer. What keeps the company going is innovation and efficiency. If they can bring the overall coast down that gets handed over to the customer so their expenses come down and the end user eventually gains the benefit.

The company is also very clear on its impact on the environment. They do provide equipment to drill for oil and gas but use technology to minimise the disposal, the materials used and the overall harm to the environment. In operations they consider the people out on the fields to make their life safer, better and easier as well as produce at a more economical rate. Their philosophy is about people.

The nature of business is to innovate and many businesses in the sector are getting into more renewable alternative energy. At WOM they consider themselves to be a vertically integrated manufacturing company with their core competences being in bending and molding steel with very specialised coating processes. They are primarily an engineering and manufacturing company who can cater for any heavy industry requirements out in the field, for example rail, defence or shipbuilding, so that is the type of expansion they are looking at in addition to renewables.

Being the founder and CEO of a dance company in India and now CEO of a multinational, Rani has realised there are 4 stages to leadership.  Stage 1 is listening, Stage 2 is acting as the bridge, Stage 3 is providing inspiration and Stage 4 is letting go, which Rani feels is the best part of leadership. Employees have gone through the different stages and now have the inspiration, confidence, and know how to lead.

The idea of legacy is important to Rani. This hit her when she lost her brother in 2018. He was 8 years younger than her and his sudden passing made her realise that we are not immortal.  She feels that if she can make conscious and mindful decisions today she will have the potential to make the next life better and her efforts will pass on from one life to the next. To Rani the effort and intension of making a life better are a legacy. This can be linked to her creation of meaning. When things get tough there is a sense of purpose and legacy in both the organisation and the foundation.

People often see large companies with huge resources and wealth but whether it’s in good times or bad, Rani feels we are all just stewards. She has always been spiritually inclined and has looked for a larger purpose and meaning in life. This isn’t just because she is part of a big family business but because she feels very responsible and that has made her look for that meaning. There are always situations when we have to dig in our heels, stay determined and keep going but there are also times when we have to surrender and say I’m not in control here. Not everything goes our way and that's when it clicks and you realise you are just a steward, a bridge to connect one generation to the next. If you give your best then everything else will come together and when you give with a good heart in some shape or form it does come back.

Rani’s book Seven Letters to My Daughters (Morgan James Publishing, Fall 2022), pulls together different threads and strands of her life. The motivation to write it came from her girls who said she should write her story so her message can become her legacy. She dug into the science of ourselves and found that conceptually we regenerate ourselves every seven years so as human beings we are new people every seven years. She wrote a letter for every 7 years and each contains a critical lesson of love and how to lead. What is it to be a leader How do you lead? What does legacy mean and how do you build that? They are things she believes has made her successful, satisfied and peaceful in this day and age.

For more information, please visit https://ranipuranik6.wpengine.com/

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

A practical approach to leadership. The Zen Executive

Jim Blake is the CEO of Unity World Headquarters, a spiritual, non-denomination, non-profit founded in 1889 in Kansas City, Missouri. It helps people of all faiths and cultures apply positive spiritual principles in their daily lives. He had previously held numerous executive positions in the corporate world, including as Director of Customer Operations for Landis+Gyr, a global leader in the utility industry, and Vice President of Products and Technology for Rhythm Engineering.

Jim is based in Missouri which is known for its weather threats including tornado’s and recently the state has been experiencing 95 - 100 degree heat. There is an on-going threat from nature whether its fire, snow or storms and you need resilience to deal with these sudden changes in weather. Part of being resilient is acceptance of where you are and what may or may not happen. Establishing the proper mind set for being prepared is important, as preparation is the key to eliminating fear. If we accept the risks and prepare properly then you can reduce the fear and anxiety that might come with threats from the weather and from anything else.

Acceptance is a vital skill of understanding. Taking the stoic approach when things happen - what you do about them is the thing that makes the difference. Some people come out of adverse events well whilst others are completely defined by it, sometimes for the rest of their life. Acceptance is also an important part of healing. Our emotional posture and thoughts about these things dictate our experience of it. Something happens in your life and its how you handle that through your thoughts and emotions that determines your experience of that event. Accept and move though it and you’ll still have the rest of the day to be fine or hold on to it and let it impact your decision-making and how you interact with people for the rest of the day. It’s an important self-awareness skill.

Jim’s undergraduate degree was in IT coding but although he enjoyed it he found it to be isolating. In the early 1990s IT companies were moving away from main frames and mid ranges to PCs. With new devices and the Internet coming on line Jim took the opportunity to move into network communications. It was more social and more big picture and so he took his career in that direction. Since then he has led teams in general IT, application support, coding and network development until in 2016 he joined Unity World Headquarters as CEO.

Leading a non-profit is a very complex role perhaps more so than a commercial organisation. Jim’s background in programming and project management work formed a great base and he had learned huge amount from the leading global organisations he had worked in. The main things he had taken away were their commitment to innovation, their dedication to new product development and their focus on bringing on talent. That innovation served him well at Unity and gave him a really powerful way to use his experience and apply a whole new set of thinking in how it does it does its work.

Unity sits under an umbrella of teachings called new thoughts from the late 1800’s. These ancient principals that were mainly taken from the east and are traditions based on spiritual principals related to emotions, thoughts and how these create the experience you have as your life unfolds.  All of these new thoughts, areas or traditions work on a practical level not as a lot of dogma. Unity didn’t want to be classified as a religious organisation because it wanted it’s teaching to continue to evolve over time. Through its website it provides a lot of resources that are practical with sections on healing, grief, addiction and other everyday problems but looking at them from a spiritual perspective that takes its truths from all of the major traditions from the east.

Jim’s book, The Zen Executive, is based on the experiences he had during his corporate career. The first section is about self care - getting in touch with how your feelings and emotions impact your experiences and why and how you can better care for yourself. The better we do this in mind body and spirit, the better we perform and the better we show up.  When we show up stressed and angry, it affects our decision- making and the relationships around us.

The second part of the book is about the intersection between business and life and the practices that make people feel that they cannot combine their spiritual and work lives. Jim feels they can be combined so you can bring your whole self to work. The last part is about leadership and understanding leadership from a new perspective so you bring compassion, empathy and wellbeing for yourself and those you serve with to bear. There is the idea that you cant be good to people and that you have to treat them with fear intimidation, command and control. Jim thinks that if you do it the other way the results are even better. When a person feels safe, heard and appreciated, they are far more productive than if they are in fear and stress around their work.

Some people confuse the message about being safe, heard and appreciated as being soft, woolly and non-accountable but those things are not true. People still need to be measured, to show they are doing a good job. They need to be encouraged and have their potential understood and maximised. Leadership is not just about letting people run riot. One of the major points in the book is that you can still hold people accountable but that you can do it in a way with compassion, respect and transparency so you bring out the best in their performance. People know when they are doing a good job and what they are capable of so it's the job of the leader to hold a lens up and say ‘you’re doing this and that's great but you could be doing more’. Some people find this threatening, challenging, bullying or patronising. That's their choice. The job of the leader is to see the potential and then help their employees to see it to.

Jim feels we need to bring our whole self to work and advocates that some of the things we do at work are in alignment with things that exist in our spiritual life such as compassion, empathy and deep listening. The idea that work just has to be work and that `I can t bring some of what I believe in terms of my own spirituality’. You don't have to put it on blast but Jim suggests we can bring a spiritual approach to our work and posture of service to what are doing and how we are doing it. We don't need to share the reasons and motivations that inspire us with everyone but we don't need to exclude them from the workplace either. Jim feels the way to do this is to bring the same spiritual posture we feel in our most comfortable setting to the office in how we treat people how we approach our work and how we endeavour to inspire others. By finding the why and then giving context you understand the meaning of the work you’re doing. You are linking work to meaning.

You can learn more about Jim at www.1amjimblake.com where there are details about his book “The Zen Executive”. You can find out more about Unity at http://www.uinty.org

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The actor’s mindset. The role of resilience

Craig Archibald is an acting coach in California who works with actors at all levels in their careers – from movie stars to those just starting out. He grew up in western Canada and got involved in the theatre when he was 11 years old. He became a professional actor when he was 15 and put himself through college using the money he made from acting. His college professors were British ex-pats and at the end of his course they suggested his next move should be to study in the UK.  He came to London and got a job at the Royal National Theatre as well as studying with leading teachers from RADA, Webber Douglas and the Guildhall. He then moved to New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse and studied the Stanislavski method to acting. He had a twenty-year acting career before realising he also had a different set of skills, those of writing, producing and coaching.

Craig went through a major life change in his mid 40s and moved from Manhattan to Malibu where he took some time to get some perspective on life. He then decided to focus most of his attention on coaching and set up a west coast version of his New York coaching operation where over the last 12 -15 years he has worked with a lot of young artists to get their careers on the road as well as working with people higher in the industry to help them become more grounded.  Hollywood can be distracting and very ego driven and the problem with that is that is that you are going to be disappointed because your ego will always find reasons for failure. Turning that around and making it a positive is part of what Craig does along with mentoring people coming into the industry so they are a little more prepared. There is so much judgement nowadays particularly through social media and the capacity for people to say unpleasant things is far more common than it used to be. People in the public eye have to be able to take those negative comments and turn them around – to use them and then let them go.

Anyone who has worked in the theatre has had to learn the idea of doing something day in day out, whether you want to or not. If you are ill, tired or just don’t feel like it, you still have to turn up and perform. This teaches you a certain type of resilience – the ability to weather the storm, to manage your performance and give what needs to be given. This is not necessariliy 100 % but its always ‘just good enough’. You then lose the idea of perfection.  Craig tells his clients to aim to be above 95% every time. True professionals are disciplined enough to be above 95% every time. They aim to be the best they can be on the day but also to allow themselves room to be human, to be vulnerable and to weather the storm. Craig feels true professionalism lives at that level. With discipline, focus and the ability to maintain a performance focus, the audience might not know where you are on the scale but they receive the very best you can give them at that time.

Craig uses the expression ‘Acting is living truthfully under the imaginary circumstances’ to describe what actors do. Sometimes you get roles that are very close to who you actually are so the imaginary circumstances are very similiar to your personal circumstances. If you don't get a role like that and are an actor who can do deeper character roles and knows how to address getting into character you have the ability to create a character, and change the voice, hair colour, accent and stature. Gary Oldman is a master of this - he uses ‘Gary’ when he needs to and creates other layers to characters when he doesn't. He crosses that line so that some performances he gives are close to who he is whilst others are another character completely. Really it comes down to the individual given circumstances of the character. Some people are more comfortable playing someone closer to themselves whilst others are happier diving into the deep end of creating a character. It depends on the individual actor and how they see it.

Working in TV is completely different. It moves very quickly so its easier to use your basic personality to be in front of the camera 9 to late, Monday to Friday. Generally actors love playing something other than themselves so can find a way to put something different in their perspective, attitude or characters point of view. It’s more fun for them than playing themselves. On TV its a difficult job, full time and intense with lots of pressure and script changes. Actors tend to be a bit more protected, simple and starrtightforward with their work so they can adapt to those changes as they go through the day and not be thrown off and have to recreate all the time!

In leadership terms and in human behaviour terms there is a great drive for authenticity. Craig thinks authenticity is the key to everything. Actors give their authenticity depending on their characters authenticity. They can play someone whose not authentic through the given circumstances - whatever the script tells us we have to live truthfully inside those given circumstances. Within this wecan find where the character is or isn’t authentic. We have to ask  ‘what is my obstacle?’ What you do when faced by an obstacle gives the audience that characters moral code. The moral code is given by the actions a charcter takes. Actors ‘what is my obsctacle?’ and as a charcter what do I do as that character to get around it? It gives the moral complasss for that character. We have to be that character and use that mortal compass and authentically use myself to fill up that moral compass at whatever level that is.

Actors have to deal with a lot of rejection which can be pretty brutal. Boundaries are part of dealing with rejection and are also essential in life. It is not the rejection that hurts you rather your self. The rejection can be small but the negative voices that you have are going to come out and take over. Craig recommends daily practices such as meditation of physical activity. Positive self care makes a difference and helps you get into your own world again. Craig tells his clients that if they are being rejected its a good thing because youre actually auditioning and not just sitting around waiting for someone to call. You are actively pursuing your career so that’s a win. Each casting meeting means you are proving that you are a quality artist even though you might not be right for this project. If you can win the room you’re going to have an acting career.

You need resilience to come back from rejection. Craig feels you need to make a crisis management plan so you are ahead of the game. Whatever happens you will know what to do, how to come back from those moments and pre think a crisis. In this crisis this is what I’m going to do. If you give youerself the space and time to feel your feelings before you respond and take your time to remove yourself from the situation so you can clear your emotions and get ack to your authientic self so you can respond in a way you are proud of.

You can find out more at the Archibaldstudio.com Craig is also the author of The Actor’s Mindset: Acting as a Craft, Discipline, and Business.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Choice, growth and resilience

Amy Eliza Wong has been a leadership coach for ten years and partners with leaders and teams on growth, transformation and flow with a particular interest in communication, which she feels is the entry point for all things transformation. Before she became a leadership coach, she worked at Sun Microsystems for ten years having studied mathematics at Berkeley. After having her first child she gained a Masters in Transpersonal Psychology, a subject she found fascinating, and this combined with her Maths background provided the perfect balance for coaching.

Psychology is the study of mental processes in human behaviour but Transactional Psychology is not limited to mental processes. It looks at the systems view of the human condition, factoring in things like consciousness in the womb, consciousness as a whole and also pulls in ancient wisdom traditions so becomes a much larger study of Psychology. 

Amy looks at resilience in terms of growth. We are interfacing with the stuff of life and every moment is contributing to our growth. Perspectives and beliefs are growing whether we like it or not. Growth and resilience go hand in hand. We can think about our growth in two ways - by accident or on purpose. If we want to be resilient we need to take life by the horns and maximise our wellbeing by embracing both. Most people focus on growth on purpose because that's what’s wanted – its the things we planned for, were hoping for and were willing to get uncomfortable for but it's the growth by accident that we need to look at. This is usually related to shame, disappointment or embarrassment - the stuff of failures, mistakes and setbacks - but where we have tools to harness both categories that's when we live on purpose.

Amy uses purpose as an adverb - on purpose meaning that it is intentional and we are fully harnessing choice with full intension and awareness. When we can choose to be on purpose we choose to harness our choice and respond rather than react to life.  Doing things with a sense of purpose knowing where you are growing and doing it purposefully.

Amy’s book is called Living on Purpose which is based on her own personal stories about growth and transformation and conversations she has had with a diverse set of individuals. She uses these powerful stories with social neuroscience to present a roadmap of the five choices of perceptional shifts that we can choose to make in order to stop self sabotage and loose the self imposed limitations we have. These are born in our belief system and it’s the interpretations we make that end up muting the quality of our own life.

People want to achieve something. The thing could be to make more money, to own their business, become a CEO etc., but Amy feels that we only think we want the thing we want. What we actually want is the feeling we think we would have as a result of achieving that thing. We are trained to use the thing as a proxy – we became attached to the thing and the strategy of realising it. This is largely due to educational system and how we develop as humans. In school we do what we were told. To get good grades, to make our parents happy and get into a good college and university, then to get a good job, make lots of money and then we’ll be happy. We put all our trust into following this strategy because it’s what I’m supposed to do to be happy. It never works though because we never really check if that's what’s going to get me to what I really want to feel. The choice is to feel it out rather than figure it out.

The chief source of failure is choosing what you want in the moment rather than what really want. This captures the slipperiness of choice because we can say we want to be healthy but at the same time we really want a bag of potato chips and to watch the game. We have to look at what we truly want and be honest with ourselves. What is the choice that aligns with what we truly want rather than what we want in the moment. We are not set up to have deferred gratification and are constantly investing in cognitive processing and energy to achieve that. Aligning our chemistry with our purpose is important. Quick wins are important. Self care, getting enough sleep and eating well are all important because if we are if not in an optimal state it is even harder to find the band width and reserves to make the choice that truly serves us.

Her new book is Living on Purpose: Five Deliberate Choices to Realize Fulfillment and Joy (BrainTrust Ink, May 24, 2022).

Learn more at alwaysonpurpose.com. 

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Making it happen

Sam Syed is co-founder, CFO and COO at Capsll, an app that enables users to gather their once-scattered memories into digital time capsules. Sam was born in London and is one of six brothers from a working class family. He has a Portuguese and Pakistani heritage and became aware of racism at a young age. but feels this helped him build his resilience. He looked on himself as different but in a good way. He was the only coloured person in his group so any racial slurs toughened him up and made him a better person. His working class background also meant he grew up wanting things but didn't always get them. His friends all got weekly pocket money but he didn't and he quickly realised that he would have to break the mould so he could obtain things for himself.

Sam says he had a fantastic childhood and upbringing but is also thankful that it wasn't ‘silver spooned’ so that what he accomplished was from his own personal success. He thinks his biggest success is that he never settles and that he’s always looked for the ‘what if’. He started his career as an equity broker in London advising clients on Commodities, Equities and FX, eventually rising to the role of Derivatives Trader.

In 2012 he was offered a wealth management position in Dubai helping clients achieve their financial goals through all areas of wealth management. Originally he wanted to think about it but he now thinks it was the best decision he ever made. After building a successful career in Dubai he was then asked if he had ever thought about moving his career to Manhattan. He hadn’t but he was very curious and that was what took him to New York. The first year was very difficult. The salary he had been promised didn’t materialise and he was unable to move any of his clients from Dubai so he had to start from scratch but he managed to build a new ‘empire’ in New York and won some national awards. It was at this point that his long time friend Clint called him with an idea he wanted to run past him.

Sam’s passion for history and philosophy added to the lessons he had learnt as a boy and from the time he spent in Dubai and New York meant he was up for the challenge and he moved from managing other peoples wealth to having to create a new business. He feels that building from scratch is much harder. The challenges he faced during the start- up of Capsll App were completely different to those in the corporate world.  Having raised all their funding, he realised the things that he had left behind – the support from a mentor or boss, a calendar filled with what you should be doing and when which provides a routine and structure for each day.  

Sam feels you need external help and advice as well as internal support and help. There is a fear in the corporate world now that you can’t disagree with each other. But if you cant have disagreements then innovation and creativity disappear.  If you have different views or highly passionate and enthusiastic people conflict is inevitable. Companies need heated debate but also a way of not making things personal so you can see the point of the conversation in the first place.

Sam is now excited to be making a difference to people’s lives by utilising the Capsll App and helping them preserve memories of their legacy in a different way.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

For more information, please visit https://www.capsll.app/

Leadership in the remote workplace: Opportunities and challenges

The combination of technological advances and shifting cultural norms has resulted in the remote work trend continuing to grow in popularity as numerous companies embrace this new way of working. 

However, with the rise of remote work, there is an increasing need for leaders who can motivate and inspire team members from a distance. Effective leadership in the remote workplace requires a different set of skills than traditional office management.

The rise of this new setup in the virtual world has presented new challenges for leaders. How can leaders effectively lead a team when everyone is working in different locations? And how can they leverage the opportunities that come with a more dispersed workforce?

In this blog, I'll be discussing the challenges and opportunities of remote leadership. Leadership in the remote workplace can be difficult because leaders can't always rely on face-to-face communication. However, there are many opportunities to take advantage of when leading a team remotely. Keep reading to learn more!

The opportunities in leading a remote team

Leading a team remotely can present a number of opportunities. For example, it can allow leaders to build a more diverse team, as they are not limited to candidates who live in their area. It allows them to tap into a global labor market.

It can also allow leaders to create a more flexible work schedule, as the traditional 9-5 workday does not bind them. It can improve work-life balance. This can be a huge convenience when managing time and meeting deadlines.

Additionally, leading in a virtual world can help leaders develop their communication and organizational skills, as they will need to effectively communicate with their team members in different time zones.

Opportunities to be innovative and experiment with new ways of working are also beneficial for leading a remote team. This can include experimenting with different communication methods, such as utilizing video conferencing instead of email or developing new corporate policies based on input from everyone in the organization.

In addition to these practical benefits, working remotely also encourages a broader mindset, encouraging all members of a team to think creatively about how to succeed in their roles and what is best for the company as a whole.

The challenges of leading a team remotely

One of the biggest challenges is maintaining team cohesion. Without the daily interactions that take place in an office setting, it can be difficult to build relationships and stimulate a sense of teamwork.

Additionally, remote work can make it harder to monitor employee productivity and identify issues early on. As a result, leaders need to find new ways to stay connected with their team members and ensure everyone is on track.

Another challenge is managing expectations. When members are not present in the same physical space, it can be difficult to manage deadlines and ensure everyone is on the same page. This is why leaders need to overcommunicate and provide clear guidelines.

Communication is also a challenge. With team members working in different locations, there can be a lot of miscommunication. It's important to find ways to effectively communicate with the team, whether that's through video conferencing, instant messaging, or another method.

There can also be technical challenges, such as internet connection issues or problems with video conferencing. These challenges can be frustrating, but it's important to remember that they are not insurmountable.

Lastly, remote work can be lonely and isolating. This is why it is significant for leaders to make an effort to connect with their team members on a personal level. 

Effective strategies for leading a remote team

One key strategy for leading a remote team is establishing clear communication guidelines and protocols. It is important to set expectations around how and when leaders will communicate with the team members and ensure that everyone follows these guidelines consistently.

In addition to establishing communication protocols, it is also important to adopt different communication methods that work well in a remote setting. For example, video conferencing can be used for team meetings, while instant messaging can be utilized for quick questions or updates.

During a video conference, encourage an open webcam policy so that team members can see each other and build relationships. Participants may use an online webcam testing tool to check their setup before the meeting.

When communicating with the team, it is also important to be clear and concise. This will help to avoid miscommunication and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Make certain to provide a written record of team communication, such as in a shared document or chat log.

In addition to these strategies, it is important to foster a culture of trust and respect within the remote team. Leaders should make extra effort to connect with their team members on a personal level and set aside time for relationship building over video chat or email.

Summing It Up

Leadership in the remote workplace is a new and evolving field. There are multiple opportunities for those willing to take on the challenge, but there are also several matters that should be considered. 

Leaders in the remote workplace need to focus on communication, culture, and trust. Communication is crucial to be certain everyone is on the same page. Culture helps employees feel connected to their work even when they're not physically present. Trust allows employees to feel comfortable taking risks.

Ultimately, for anyone who is eager to shake up their routine and find new ways of working, being at the helm of a remote team can be an exciting opportunity indeed. It might not be without its challenges, but these can all be overcome with the right approach.

Guest Blog Author

Jennesa Ongkit is a content writer for VEED.IO and an all-around wordsmith. In her spare time, Jennesa enjoys reading books, watching movies, and playing with her pets.

Mastering the nine pillars of resilience

Dr Stephen Sideroff started his career as a research looking at a learning and memory. He then moved into clinical work where he quickly realised stress was a major modulator of how people felt. They could be feeling really good but as soon as the amount of stress in their life increased, their coping abilities become strained and they began to develop different kinds of symptoms. He realised that if he helped people deal with stress it would help in all areas of their lives.

Dr Sideroff feels that people have a lot of ambivalence about managing stress because not all stress is bad and also because many of our successes are accompanied by stress. Because of this he switched to a more positive concept of resilience that he finds people are more attuned to.  As a result he developed his own nine pillar model of resilience. Stephen’s nine pillars encompass three different areas:

1. Relationships

a. Relationship with self. This is the foundation of all the other pillars. How you relate to yourself. Do you come from a place of love, acceptance and compassion or from a place of judgement, criticism and negativity.

b. Relationship with others. Do you have good boundaries. Can you make good choices in who you choose as people to relate to. If you have no choice eg a boss or colleague can you maintain good boundaries so you don't absorb negative or conflictual energy.

c. Relationship with something greater. This includes spirituality and having meaning in life. Having purpose or giving service, something that connects you to the larger community.

2. Balance and Mastery

a.    Physical balance and mastery. This is usually what people refer to when they talk about stress management.  Being able to relax readily, getting a good night’s sleep and being able to keep your nervous system in a place of balance.

b. Cognitive balance and mastery. This is about having a positive outlook and expectations. It doesn't mean you ignore dangers but once you've planned for them and handled them you switch into a more positive frame of reference.

c. Emotional balance and mastery.  Are you able to notice feelings that arise in your body and do you handle them appropriately so that you can let them move through and out of your body and not carry any excess emotional baggage

3. How we engage in the world

a.    Presence. People usually refer to being aware of your surroundings and being present in the moment. Stephen looks at two directions of presence. One is what I’m receiving and being aware of my environment and the second is my presence. What is the energy I project out to the world and that includes facial expression, posture etc.

b.    Flexibility. Am I able to make adjustments based on current circumstances. This has been very important over the last couple of years as paths of success have been blocked because of the pandemic. Are we able to make adjustments so that we can still get satisfied. Are we able to have different perspectives and also see those of other people. It’s about flexibility on many levels.

c.     The ability to get things done. We’re able to go out into the world. We have courage, persistence and perseverance so we can be successful in life. When we are successful it increases our sense of agency and self-confidence and then we experience stresses less impactfully.

One of the things about resilience is that it takes challenges to become more resilience. Challenges are resilience fuel. Dr Sideroff found his challenges in relationships, moves to different locations and jobs as well as challenges in the jobs forced him to challenge himself and become more resilient. He worked for fifteen years as an apprentice to a shaman which showed him a whole different way of viewing the world. It was in those years that he broke through some of his own defenses. He feels we can’t stay just on the surface of life.  The wounding is what breaks us open and causes us to reach deeply inside ourselves. All of this was what shaped him and how he approaches resilience.

Dr Sideroff has used biofeedback in and research biofeedback for many years. Biofeedback is a way of monitoring some aspects of your physiology and feeding that back to the person you’re working with or yourself. When you make an adjustment physiologically you get immediate feedback letting you know of your success so its an optimum conditioning or learning model that helps us tune in better to our bodies so we get into a better place of physiological balance.

Neurofeedback monitors brainwave patterns so you are able to get more directfully to the origins of physiological control For example, Dr Sideroff participated in a research study where they went into a drug treatment facility where they did a series of neurofeedback sessions. The first stage was to help people become more present by enhancing their access to prefrontal cortex and the cortex in general so it helped with attentional issues and being able to focus. They then shifted into another neurofeedback approach called Alfa Beta. This creates a deep state, a beta state in which memories can come up. Trauma can also come up but in the context of a very calm state so it’s a way of helping someone move through their trauma and be able to let go of it. It had tremendous success in the research study where there was twice as much abstinence two years post treatment as in the control group and 77% after three years.  This helped to put this kind of neurofeedback model into a number of drip drug treatment centres.

Resilience is a lens that brings together many schools of thoughts into a more tangible set of circumstances. Right now Dr Sideroff feels it is very important for people to learn resilience. We are all faced with huge challenges in the world. The complexity of life right now and with the pandemic and war in Ukraine makes it really challenging people all over the world. Resilience is a fluid kind of concept because it’s always about the best way of being in the present moment.

The future is evolving so quickly in comparison to the last twenty years. We are moving to adaptability and the reinvention of the future for ourselves.  There are some factors that interfere with our adaptability. If we adapt very well to our childhood environment that adaption can get locked so we carry the same type of adaption into adulthood.  If we have difficulty adapting to the adult environment it may be because we carry the lessons of our childhood into adulthood. If we grow up in a very dangerous childhood environment where we are always on the lookout for danger as an adult we keep our stress response activated much more that it needs to be. The lessons of childhood very frequently get in the way of fully adapting as an adult.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more or take Dr Sideroff’s resilience challenge or download a relaxation visulisation exercise at drstephensideroff.com  

A resilience assessment booklet is available by emailing sideroff@ucla.edu

Whats Next? Mindset, Choice and EFT

Sallie Wagner is a speaker, author, lawyer, real estate broker and instructor and life coach based in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

She started her career in the law and real estate and moved into the coaching environment a few years ago. This had always been her passion. In college she started as physics major and ended up in theology and she had always had a hunger to learn more about it so when she had a ‘this is how I need to live my life moment’ went back and did some additional training and certifications and expanded what she was doing.

Sallie feels resilience is incredibly important and is crucial to our lives and our wellbeing in four major areas – physical, emotional, mental and social - and that there are some very simple ways to build resilience. Resilience can also help us to move out of all the regret we have in life – the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘if only’.  As we build resilience we can move out of those regrets.

The epiphany in Sallie’s life came when she started to feel that she was living someone else’s life.  At some point in life many people feel that they are successfully discontent - their life looks good on paper but doesn't feel so good inside. Research shows that the top regret of mid career professionals is ‘I wish I’d had the courage to pursue my own interests and my own studies rather than what was expected of me’. When it hit her, Sallie reconnected with her earlier trajectory for her life, that of being a professor of theology. She had always had a vision of herself as a teacher and as she extended her opportunities to teach more the opportunities flooded in.

Sallie took her law and real estate knowledge and used it to teach other people. She teaches many different classes every week and this also sharpens her skills and knowledge about what’s happening in the industry. She also teaches as part of her life coaching work and much of this is around Mind Apps and how we make conscious choices in life and uninstall those mind apps that take our conscious power and choice away. The process includes Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and NLP modalities to get to that level of the subconscious so that we can make lasting change. Sallie feels that if we’re depending on willpower we’ve already lost the battle. It takes a lot of energy to make those choices and if we’re stressed, tired or hungry we don't have the energy to do it so revert back to those apps that were previously programmed into us.

There are two main ways to undertake EFT. The Gold Standard and Optimal EFT. Sallie uses the Gold Standard which involves tapping on the energy meridians that acupuncture and acupressure are based on.  Sometimes the energy fields in our body get out of sync. This could be because of environmental factors such as our thoughts, emotions or even food affecting the energy flow so by tapping on certain meridian points on the body the energy becomes more aligned so we can address things and respond rather than react.

EFT can be remedial, if someone has a habit they want to get rid of or are dealing with grief, loss or anxiety. It can also be preventive for example if you know you are going to be in a challenging situation such as public speaking or exams it can help you prepare ahead of time or it can also be aspirational, helping to develop new goals for life. 

Another area it can be used in is in dealing with trauma. Sallie has used it when people have been stuck in an event in the past. They aren’t able to be in the present and can’t see anything good happening in the future. EFT can help in getting relief as the energy that is carried in our bodies can affect us physically so releasing the energy can help resolve the trauma. This is also one of the benefits of building resilience so we can get rid of some of those bad effects and life longer and healthier lives.

Sallie believes that to create success we need to make a process for everyday. Mindset is not taught and we need the mindset to view the success we have and also past it to see what it looks like afterwards. We need to have the right skills to have the right mindset for our careers, businesses and lives and then to take action to make it happen. Without action it’s just a philosophy. Without action it’s just hoping and dreaming.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more about Sallie at Salliewagner.com

Time Management. The bigger picture.

Jane Shaw is Learning & Development professional who started her career in the hospitality industry. She did a full time MBA at Henley then bought a pub in Suffolk, before going back to L&D, becoming an Associate specilising in senior leadership teams, EI, executive and group coaching. She is now starting a Masters in Business Psychology. She feels running a pub is very similar to learning and development. It’s about facilitating a room full of people - sometimes a very diverse group with some who want to be there and others that don’t.  

Jane considers herself a life long learner. For example everything she knew about leadership and management ten or twelve years ago has been reshaped completely.  Deepening knowledge also has the benefit of increasing self-awareness and the ability to empathise whilst exposure to different perspectives improves connection with other people. She also feels the process of learning is good for you with huge benefits to mental health. Learning or training whether academic or vocational is important to good mental health.

Jane doesn’t really believe in time management beyond the productivity checklist which she considers a helpful concept. She thinks time management is broader and bigger than this – it’s about how we manage ourselves and it links to many different things. Often people attend time management courses and come back very enthusiastic but after a short period slip back. Jane thinks the question we should be asking ourselves is how are we managing ourselves. In the bigger context it is apparent that more people are asking themselves this question now than three years ago. Post pandemic people are perhaps struggling to reset the boundaries, of what’s acceptable, about how they work, what productivity looks like and how that gets measured, how they compare themselves to others and their productivity and how they can still establish credibility with their bosses when there has been less presence around and people aren’t seen to be doing as much.

There is the question of whether it is about task management rather than time management. If you do the right things and do these things well then you are never doing nothing so why manage time when it’s about the choices you make. Every tool is about a task rather than the time itself. It's the same thing over and over again. The task is what matters not the time itself. You need to disengage to engage – its OK to not do anything, you just need to give yourself permission.

Leaders who inflict pointless meetings on the workforce are adding to burnout. The person who holds the meeting finds it more valuable and more enjoyable than anyone else. To many attendees it’s just a waste of time. Using Teams has made people feel that time is a limitless resource. Everyone is talking about going back to how it was but many people weren't happy with meetings before February 2020. Now it’s not about going back, it’s about cherry picking what was good and then moving forward. There is the opportunity to reframe. In poorly led organisations continuing to use the same processes and will produce inferior results and people will be expected to work harder but will still be doing the wrong things in the wrong way. Employees will walk away or end up taking time off with stress. People are slightly more fragile after Covid. Many have been stretched to the point of breaking but no one has informed the leadership world. Some old management ideas are still in place so it’s fundamental that we re-examine leadership to reset these ideas and be open to change. Influential thought leaders are saying that leadership cannot continue in the same way.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more at https://ninedotsdevelopment.com