Maximising mental performance

Keywords

Resilience - Coaching - Focus - Emotions - Performance - Self-awareness - Decision-making - Neuroplasticity - Intentionality

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled Evan Marks, a seasoned mental performance coach with over 25 years of Wall Street wisdom, shares his journey from a career in finance to coaching professional athletes, C-suite executives, and Wall Street professionals. He also talks about his experiences coaching NASCAR drivers including Jimmie Johnson and their pit teams, and the need to focus on the significance of acknowledging and utilising emotions for enhanced performance.  He also discusses the mental and physical stamina required for professional drivers and the exceptional conditioning that enables them to maintain focus and performance under pressure for extended periods.

Evan also focuses on the importance of self-awareness, emotional management, and intentional decision-making and explores the concept of neuroplasticity and its relevance to personal development.

Main topics

• How the human brain's perception of time and its ability to slow down and speed up can be useful in high-pressure situations.

• Intentionality in decision-making and how it allows individuals to create beneficial behaviours despite their feelings.

• Neuroplasticity and its relevance to personal development.

• The importance of being conscious and intentional to create new neural pathways for personal growth.

• The role of emotions in shaping behaviour and the importance of self-awareness in managing them.

• The need for individuals to prioritise their values and energy to achieve a healthy work-life balance.

 Action items

You can find out more about Evan at M1PerformanceGroup.com or through his social media LinkedIn in/Evan-Marks, x-twitter @EMarksPW or Instagram @EMarks72Web: M1PerformanceGroup.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.   

The interplay between mind and body

Keywords

 Resilience - Emotions - Perception - Emotional Energy - Self-care - Energy Balance

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled Denise Schonwald, a mental health specialist, discusses her holistic approach to patient care which emphasises the interplay between mind and body. Denise explains how emotions can manifest physically and highlights the role of perception in shaping experiences.

Denise also explores the concept of resilience, suggesting that suffering can contribute to its development and discusses the concept of energy, the role of emotions in emotional energy and the importance of self-care for energy balance.

Main topics

• The interplay between mind and body

• How certain emotions, such as guilt or grief, can manifest physically in the body.

• The role of perception in shaping our experiences

• Grief as a transformative force in life

• How suffering can contribute to the development of resilience

• The concept of energy in relation to emotions and physical wellbeing

• How joy and gratitude contribute to resilience

• The importance of self-care to maintain energy balance through exercise or relaxation

• Understanding how high energy frequency energy is crucial for wellbeing

Action items

• Find out more about Denise at https://deniseschonwald.com/ and access a free 10 question quiz to assess your mental health

• Email your name and address to Denise to receive a free copy of her children’s book about anxiety

• Denise’s book are Insightful Self-Therapy and Healing Your Body by Mastering Your Mind

  
   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.   
  

Integrating connections for well-being

Keywords

Resilience – Writing – Memory Consolidation – Cogent Narrative – Self-reflection Identifying Emotions – Developing Connections – Mental Constructs and Patterns

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled Dr Jacqueline Heller, MD shares her journey of writing a book following the grief from losing her mother. Jacqueline feels writing helped her consolidate memory and connect emotions to visual memory and in this podcast, she discusses the power of self-reflection through writing and emphasises the importance of identifying emotions for better judgment.

Main topics

• The benefits of writing for memory consolidation and creating a cogent narrative.

• How writing helps in self-reflection, identifying emotions, and developing connections to past experiences.

• The importance of managing emotions to prevent outbursts.

• How reflective writing helps in understanding automatic mental constructs and patterns.

Timestamps

1. Introduction. Introduction to the podcast and guest, Dr Jacqueline Heller, MD. 00.02 - 00:27.

2.The Power of Writing. The benefits of writing for memory consolidation and creating a coherent narrative. How writing became a cathartic and connecting process for Jacqueline. Writing as a tool for consolidating memory and connecting emotions to visual memory. 00.27 – 03.15

3. Reflective Communities and Parenting. Jacqueline's background in attachment theory and Reflective Communities. Bringing reflective parenting programs to schools. How Jacqueline's book is resonating with people and helping them 03.16 – 05.07

4. Self-Reflection and Introspection. Exploring the concept of introspecting and identifying emotions. The importance of identifying and understanding emotions for self-reflection. Connecting emotions and past experiences through writing. 05.08 – 08.28

5. The Process of Writing. The circular nature of self-examination and creating new connections through writing. Writing as a tool for developing new insights and connections over time. Managing emotions through writing and promoting higher cortical functions. 08.29 – 12.25

6. Personal Reflection and Journaling. Jacqueline's personal experience with mental journaling and reflection. The pressure to journal and the various forms of self-reflection beyond writing. 12.26 – 15.34

7. Writing Process and Book Creation. The organic process of writing Jacqueline's book. The importance of a well-being narrative and stability in one's self-story. Target audience and potential benefits of reading the book. 15.35 – 19.38

8. Book Overview. Jacqueline gives an overview of the book's content, including triggers, psychological principles, consciousness, and parenting. Chapters on defence mechanisms, cognitive distortions, and neuroscience of attachment. Example chapter "Dana's invisible trigger" and writing style. 19.39 – 25.37

9. Conclusion. Closing remarks and information on where to find Jacqueline's book and website. 25.38

Action items

• Jacqueline’s new book is, Yesterday Never Sleeps 

•  You can find out more about Jacqueline at jackieheller.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.   

Make anxiety your friend

Keywords

Resilience – Anxiety – Mental Health – Emotions – Anxiety Toolkit

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled, Dr David Rosmarin, the founder of the Centre for Anxiety (New York, Boston, Princeton), associate professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of the McLean Hospital Spirituality and Mental Health Programme talks about anxiety and how to make it your friend. Often, people who suffer from anxiety either exhaust themselves trying to cure it or resign themselves to a lifetime of fear and worry but Dr Rosmarin suggests that instead of fighting their anxiety, people can turn it into a strength. 

Dr Rosmarin defines anxiety as a response similar to fear but triggered by uncertain or future events rather than immediate danger. He emphasises that anxiety can be a normal and potentially positive emotion if managed correctly, challenging the notion that it is always negative or pathological.  He also discusses exposure therapy as a technique to deal with anxiety and how leaning into anxiety can be liberating.

 Main topics

• Tools for managing anxiety.

• The importance of spirituality in mental health and how it often gets ignored in psychiatric treatment.

• The concept of increasing tolerance of uncertainty as a way to cope with anxiety.

• The role of community and social connections in managing anxiety and improving mental health.

• How exposure therapy can be used to manage anxiety.

 Action items

Find out more about Dr Rosmarin at https://dhrosmarin.com/
His book Thriving with Anxiety: 9 Tools to Make Your Anxiety Work for You is published in October 2023.
Connect with Dr. Rosmarin on LinkedIn for further engagement and updates.

    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.  

Controlling our emotional states

Keywords 

Resilience – Neurodiversity – Neuroplascity – Creativity – Brain - Emotions

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled Chris Marshall, a behavioural scientist who specialises in decision making and foresight. discusses the relationship between stress and pessimism.

Chris has a wealth of life experience and a unique perspective. As a High Functioning Autistic (HFA), Chris has always seen the world a little differently. But this different perspective has fuelled his curiosity and led him on a series of adventures – from ski racing to behavioural science to global macro strategy – to becoming a Master Distiller and owning an international award-winning distillery. 

Chris is now director of the Fast Paced Complex Environments (FPCE) Institute, which brings together a wide range of fields to address some of the most complex challenges facing society today and he uses his unique perspective to offer fresh insights and new ways of thinking about the world around us.

In this podcast Chris discusses neurodiversity, the diversity in both brain wiring and thoughts and talks about how it has been seen as a disorder or disease in the past, but now it's being seen as a real source of creativity and different thinking. He also talks about his work in foresight, where he looks at trends and megatrends driving change globally. He believes that if we can harness humanity's natural abilities to be innovative, adaptable, and creative, we can overcome all obstacles ahead of us.

Main topics

• How stress can elevate pessimistic viewpoints due to neuroplascity effects on our brain circuits

• Why becoming aware of our emotional state is important for controlling it.

• How emotions are just signals representing ease of thinking about a specific concept and not necessarily positive or negative.

Timestamps

1: Introductions (00:02 - 00:45)
2: Discussion on Chris’s research on behavioural science, risk-taking, and foresight (00:45 - 07:52)
3: The relationship between creativity, innovation, adaptability, and resilience (07:52 - 11:37)
4: The role of self-inflicted stress and pressure in creativity (11:37 - 14:34)
5: The importance of understanding the wider context and the uncertain and unsettling landscape of change (14:34 - 23:08)
6: Human history's ability to be innovative, adaptable, and creative (23:08 - 24:27)
7: Chris Marshall’s book, Decoding Change, and how to find more information about it (24:27 - 29:16)
8: Conclusion and final remarks (29:16 - 29:42)

Action items

• Find out more about Chris at Fast Paced Complex Environments (FPCE) Institute or https://www.theuncertaintyscientist.com/ or https://www.chrismarshall.uk/

• Chris’s book is "Decoding Change"

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.  

Dealing with grief. The Suicide Club.

Alexandra Wyman is a pediatric occupational therapist working with children up to 18. In 2020 her husband passed away by suicide leaving her with a one-year old son. Her book The Suicide Club is about this experience and she wrote it to try to help guide others and in a way normalise the experience of the aftermath and loss of a loved one close to you.

The book is something she wishes had been around when he passed. She had lots of beautiful gifts but nothing really helped her through the business, the drama and trauma that can happen with other peoples grieving styles. Dealing with other peoples grief is a challenge because they often think by grieving so dramatically that somehow it’s helping you. But it’s really not – a trouble shared can be a trouble doubled sometimes.

People want to be helpful especially after a loss but people’s help is not always helpful. Often people will project their own ideas of grief or how to handle something onto others. It creates a sense of security and safety - if I grieve this way why isn’t everyone grieving in this way? There was a lot Alexandra learned about herself and how she liked to grieve and her grieving process did come under a lot of scrutiny initially so she had to navigate that as well. She feels that however you feel you need to grieve is absolutely OK and for someone else to have an opinion or to project that onto you is their stuff. Own what’s yours and try to set up boundaries around that.

Grief is individual but people like to moralise, contextualize and judge that you are not being sad enough, happy enough or down enough. People moralise about grief more than almost anything else and at times Alexandra was considered too cold, too businesslike and not grieving enough. People thought she was working through her process to quickly, that she should slow down because they thought she was trying to erase her husband. She realised she was a private griever. She would hold it together through the day for her son and then find time to let it all go in the evening. She also found that whilst she used to be a very big ‘huggy’ person after her husband died she didn’t want people to touch her. People wanted to hug her so that she could comfort them. They need to feel comfort from the person in the direct line of the loss. They feel comforted and can then continue moving forward.

Grief is a big emotion. It’s challenging and there is no right or wrong way to grieve. There is also no right or wrong way to deal with different types of grief. There can be a sudden loss or longer-term illness, the death of a child or suicide. Suicide has a lot more wrapped around it. No matter how prepared you are for someone to die there is always an element of shock even if you have been grieving for a while. When it comes specifically to suicide, there are so often things that we want to say to people and don't. With any type of loss part of the shock is that you don't get to say what you wanted to say to that person or you don't get to hear what you wanted to hear from that person.

Suicide is more complicated because there are also so many questions. How did we get here? Often there is an idea or a misconception that there are signs or that it’s planned. Alexandra has been participating in a local suicide support group and has come across two people where their loved ones did plan it but the most do not. When that happens it’s like ‘did I miss the signs’ or ‘what did I do’? We start to take responsibility as if the choice was not theirs and that I as the wife contributed to it. There is a higher level of responsibility that we put onto it and a lot of judgment and blame from society so it just compounds the ability to even grieve because you’re having to work through all of these items or parts of it that you can’t even unravel.

Alexandra feels that she needed the book to find out how to deal with other people’s grief. Her situation was complicated because there was some legal action against her and a possible case regarding the custody of her son. There was a lot of additional trauma that happened. Her husband didn't have a will and she didn’t know about anything that related to his job. It wasn't that they didn't communicate, it was just that they weren’t prepared. She needed to know that it was OK to set boundaries, to realise that she didn’t cause the situation or have to take the responsibility for someone else’s choice.

Suicide is a type of death that is no different to any other. Individuals who die in this way are in pain. Its not tangible but they are in pain and their pain is not any less because they decided to end their life to lose the pain. They didn't share the pain because they were protecting you from it in a way. It's a brave step to take. People say its cowardice but people close to it say it really isn’t at all. Its not bravery its just a solution or a removal of the pain.

Although Alexandra doesn’t agree with her husband’s decision she can understand how he got to it. That was a big shift for her and she was then able to start her healing by looking inwards, working through her own limiting beliefs and increasing her own toolbox. What messages had she taken on in regards to how she viewed suicide, her marriage, healing and personal growth? She had to work through those herself to get more clarity and healing.

Time is a component in healing but Alexandra also used a number of different resources. She tapped into everything she could and realised she needed different tools on different days. She encourages people to work through emotions because bypassing them just prolongs the grief. You have to sink into negative emotions and feel through all of them. Part of the grieving process is asking is it too early to move forward? We don't talk about death because we’re not comfortable with it. Alexandra feels that we should get things ready when we’re feeling happy and not wait for death to get things together. Think about your spirituality because this impacts the grieving process and it can change. Alexandra had a basis for what she believed but realised she needed to do a bit more soul searching to figure out where she really stood with this.

People can get stuck on the idea that life is linear – we like to say what life looks like to be successful but the reality is that life doesn't look like that. It’s unpredictable.  We don't know when things will things happen so we need to live our best life now and not put it off. If work or a relationship isn’t working for you or you aren’t happy, find something that does make you happy. We all deserve to have that level of happiness and joy.

Alexandra would encourage surviving friends and relatives to find something in their life that they can live for. This could be a person or a thing but whatever it is they have to work through their grief process for them. For Alexandra it was her son. She thought that he didn't deserve what had happened and that their lives did not have to be dictated by it. There will be days when you don't want to do anything and it hits you really hard and that when you need something to hang on to. The other thing is just to keep going. Sometimes it will feel that you have taken five steps back after you two hard won steps forward so you have to ride the waves and know you can get through.

 Find out more about Alexandra at forwardtojoy.com or visit The Suicide Club: What to Do When Someone You Love Chooses Death,

  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 leaders need to limit their empathy

Empathy, the ability to understand and be sensitive to another person’s feelings and thoughts, is a valuable skill. In the workplace, the challenging times we’ve all been through and, in many cases are still facing, has meant that empathy has become an increasingly important part of managers and leaders toolkit.

However, it is possible to take empathy too far. Leaders are often faced with situations involving dissatisfaction, disappointment, domestic problems or conflict and, whilst it's good for them to understand how their team feels about things, directly experiencing everyone’s problems and emotions without being able to control them can be exhausting.

Emotions, even happy ones, can be draining so finding a way to limit the amount of empathy they feel for their employees can help ensure they don't become overburdened or burnt out. Regulating feelings and controlling emotions allows them to keep a clear mind and helps maintain a balance so they don't get overwhelmed with emotion.

Empathetic leaders can consistently and powerfully engage their teams but excessive empathy can deplete their mental resources and lead to “compassion fatigue, and burnout. Every leader needs to understand when it’s essential to move beyond empathy and define a way forward.

A list of upcoming podcast guests is available here or read our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Leadership, Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The Bullied Brain. A new perspective

Dr Jennifer Fraser has been working for a number of years on the idea that if we are raised in a certain culture, in a very intensely trained belief system it becomes very hard to separate your mind from this. Your brain on an anatomical level gets sculpted by your experience. If we are all raised in a certain culture we all come to believe its reality when in actual fact its not.

In her first book Jennifer looked literature to consider how a person goes from being a reader of culture, growing up seeped in a belief system, for example racism, religion or financial, and how this belief system scripts your brain as a child and makes it difficult to see any alternatives. How does someone switch from being a reader and consumer of culture to someone who writes culture, thinks or does things differently and then expresses this to others.

In neuro science emotions aren’t just something innate or inherent within your being. Neuro scientists now talk about how our emotions are actually constructs that are built based on our past experience. One person might look at a loss that's pending and feel overwhelmed by grief because of past scripting whilst another suffer so many loses that they build a resilience to it. They know its not going to destroy them and use another emotional concept in reaction – the idea of really thinking very consciously and purposely about how they are going to act and behave and also how they are feeling. They aren’t just going to feel how they were told they needed to feel growing up as a child. They are an adult so are going to make some choices based on the emotional concept they’ve drawn on depending on they are faced with.

This is the nature of being an adult. In today’s world a lot of mental health practioners treat their clients as children. At work we see leaders and managers treating their teams as children then go home and treat their children as little adults. Have we lost the idea of adulthood?

Jennifer feels this idea is particularly interesting in relation to bullying and abuse. She was recently asked to comment about a case in Canada where a large group of teenagers physically beat and shamed a girl then filmed it and put it out through social media. It was an horrendous act and the police wanted to press charges but It is incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction for adult abusive behaviour.. The legal systems treats adults with kid gloves, people cover up for them and protect them but the police were keen to charge the teenagers when its well documented that the brain is programmed in adolesence to the age of 25 to be risk takers and reward seekers. The pre frontal cortex is not mature and so the decision-making mechanism isn’t good nor is the ability to think about consequences. The brain is not mature or thinking nor does it have rational adult like qualities.

This may relate to the language we use. The term stress is now devalued and meaningless, there is no distinction in mental health between dysfunction, illness or mental health. Low mood or depression means you have a mental health problem. In the same way bullying has lost significance so now anybody using an unpleasant tone of voice is bullying and this detracts from the real situation. Part of the problem is that we have lost the ability to define what we mean by these terms. Being rude to someone else isn’t bullying nor is saying something on Facebook. True bullying is something that takes place over time.

Jennifer doesn't talk about bullying amongst children. She feels it’s impossible to try to solve the epidemic in the youth populations. She talks about adults who bully and abuse children which she feels is the biggest power imbalance on the planet and the most taboo subject. People don't want to talk about parents, teachers doctors or coaches bullying children.

Brain works, paradigms or belief systems train us to behave in certain ways, stop us disobeying or thinking outside the box and tell us to stick to the plan. The plan is that we tell children at a very early age.and train and sculpt their brains to believe that adults, regardless of their behaviour are to be respected. That is a fatal law right at the beginning. When we use the word bullying it is part of the whitewashing because we don’t want to deal with the situation as it makes us uncomfortable. It brings a lot of anxiety and vulnerabiities. To be an adult a lot of people believe that it means you align yourself with power.

Some of the most powerful people in the world today behave like children. That has to be changed. The public encourages this behaviour and it shows that in a cultural way we have lost some of our training around critical thinking and empathy. We need to understand that if we want to get something done about things like bullying we’ve got to start working together in a thoughtful, purposeful, mindful insightful, educated, researched and evidenced based way. You should not be in a leadership position if you cant do that.

Jennifer has come to realise that what she thinks happens is when we become childlike in our behaviour its because we don't know what to do with our brains. We ignore our brains because we cant see it so we act as if its not there. It used to be thought that concussion was a moral testing ground. If you suffered a concussion and then straight back on the rugby or football pitch it was showing you had resilience, that your teammates came first and that you’d do anything for the coach and the win. It was seen as sign of great character but in fact a person with concussion has a brain trauma which can be really serious but because we are a visual, species we can’t see it so it hasn’t happened.

We can’t see our brains so we don’t think or talk about them. We don't teach children about them or encourage teachers to find out more. We don't tell organisations that when young people come to work for them they are not mature. They have incredible creative and vast learning brains but they don't have mature brains until they are 25 so you have to work differently with them if you want to be successful.

We have two choices if we don't pay attention to our brains. We can remain a victim and turn negative, bullying and abusive type behaviour that happen to us against ourselves and develop a mind bully mentality. We don't believe in ourselves, fullfiil our potential or suffer from substance abuse. We put on a facade when we go to work, become a perpetual victim and don't know how to get better. The other group that suffer bullying or abusive behaviour in childhood and their formative years go out and align themselves with the bully and become the next bully. They are as traumitised as the victim but  they align with power and identify with  the aggressor.

If someone has been abused and then goes out in the world when they meet people they are looking for the emotion concept that helps them navigate their world and creates a sense of reality for them. When they go though their file holder and find abuser they think they know how that works, they are comfortable navigating that world, they know the feelings so they can act it out again. They are not going to choose an emotion concept that they don't have in their file holder such as respect - they don’t have that emotion concept so can’t predict it in their next relationships.To get better they have to change their brain by using neuroplascity to purposefully create an emotional concept for respectful relationship with someone.

The human brain is remarkably skilled at learning everything we want it to learn. If you put in the time you can take someone who is highly abusive and rewire and reprogramme their brain. It takes a lot of hard work but after 6 weeks you can see changes that show the brain is not defaulting to bullying behaviour because its been retrained and rewired to actually pause, take a deep breathe and choose a different path - to choose respect, empathy, compassion, diplomacy or assertiveness because we can train all of those skills in the brain. The exciting thing is that as soon as we start working with our brains we can start changing things because our brains are highly adept at healing.

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.

Jennifer’s first book, Teaching Bullies: Zero Tolerance on the Court or in the Classroom (Motion Press, Aug. 8, 2015), explores what happens when the bully is a teacher or coach.

Her new book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health (Prometheus Books, April 1, 2022), delves into how bullying affects the brain and how the brain can heal.

You can find out more about Jennifer at bulliedbrain.com