71. Using Neuroscience To Become A Better Leader with David Rock
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January 28, 2025
TLDR: Discussion between Emily Fletcher and Dr. David Rock, founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, on understanding brain mechanisms for transformative leadership, creating powerful habits, neuroscience behind mindfulness/meditation, and adaptability.

In a compelling episode of Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This?, host Emily Fletcher welcomes Dr. David Rock, a leading authority in the field of neuroscience and leadership. Dr. Rock's extensive experience, including consulting for two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies, sheds light on how understanding the brain can fundamentally transform leadership styles and human interactions.
Key Highlights
The Intersection of Neuroscience and Leadership
- Neuroscience Overview: Dr. Rock explains that the brain's structure and function play a crucial role in effective leadership. He emphasizes that leaders who understand their brain mechanisms can manage their teams more effectively.
- Mindfulness and Meditation: The discussion dives deep into the neuroscience behind meditation and mindfulness. Dr. Rock illustrates how these practices can promote emotional regulation and improved decision-making skills.
Transforming Habits Using Brain-Based Strategies
- Creating Lasting Habits: The podcast outlines strategies for building powerful habits, emphasizing that habits should be cultivated systematically.
- Key Strategies:
- Start Small: Initiate changes with manageable habits that can be easily integrated into daily routines.
- Accountability: Engage with peers or accountability partners to foster habits collectively.
- Key Strategies:
- Neuroscience of Habit Formation: Dr. Rock discusses how consistency and social reinforcement lead to deeper neural pathways, making habits easier to maintain.
Insights and Adaptability in Leadership
- Insightful Leadership: The connection between insights and effective leadership is explored. Dr. Rock suggests that brainstorming sessions and reflective practices enable leaders to adapt quickly to changing environments.
- Emotional Intelligence: Understanding one’s own emotions and those of others significantly enhances leadership effectiveness. Cultivating emotional intelligence through practices like mindfulness can foster a healthier workplace culture.
The Power of Intentionality
- Mindset Shift: A focus on positive expectations and intentions can profoundly impact how individuals perceive and respond to their surroundings. Dr. Rock uses the analogy of searching for colored squares in a box to illustrate how focusing on specific outcomes changes perception and reality.
- Practical Application:
- Visioning Exercises: Leaders are encouraged to practice visualizing successful outcomes to help cultivate the necessary mindset for achieving goals.
- Practical Application:
Neuroscience as a Life Hack
- Understanding Brain Mechanisms: Dr. Rock stresses the importance of understanding the brain’s functioning as a means to navigate personal and professional challenges.
- Actionable Takeaways: Readers are encouraged to:
- Integrate Mindfulness: Implement mindfulness techniques in daily routines to enhance self-awareness and emotional freedom.
- Foster Collaborative Spaces: Create environments where team members can openly share insights and feedback, driving collective growth.
Conclusion
Dr. David Rock’s insights provide a rich foundation for anyone looking to enhance their leadership qualities. Through understanding and applying neuroscience principles, individuals can effectively build habits, increase emotional intelligence, and lead with adaptability. This episode serves as a motivating call to action for professionals to harness their cognitive abilities for better leadership outcomes.
As we navigate the complexities of leadership, understanding the brain’s potential is undoubtedly one of the most impactful life hacks.
Stay tuned for more enlightening discussions and don’t miss the opportunity to deepen your leadership skills through neuroscience!
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My loves welcome to a brand new episode of why isn't everyone doing this? The show brought to you by Ziva. I am your host, Emily Fletcher, Broadway performer, turned meditation teacher, turned magic maker, and I'm delighted to share this episode with you so that we can help solve these big challenges that we're being faced with as a species and have a great time doing it. So in today's episode, you're going to learn how you can use neuroscience to become a better leader with the brilliant Dr. David Rock.
So David has a PhD in the neuroscience of leadership and has spent over 26 years helping not only individuals but also organizations unlock the power of their brains to become better leaders, better communicators, and ultimately better humans. David's work has reached millions, including consulting with over two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies.
I'm going to say that again, he has consulted over two thirds of the Fortune 100 companies on how to use neuroscience to become better leaders. He's also the best selling author of four books, including your brain at work. So in this episode, we explore what's really happening in your brain when you do Ziva meditation, the profound differences between mindfulness and meditation and how understanding neuroscience can make you a better leader and a better human. So whether you're managing a team, a family or your own personal growth,
David's insights are going to empower you to adapt, thrive, and elevate your performance. So settle in and get ready to understand your brain and yourself in a whole new way. So welcome to the show, Dr. David Rock. Sweet friend, my favorite year and manifesting exercise is here. So if you've been waiting for a sign to design a life that you have been dreaming of,
This is it. So here's the truth. You have the power to become a magnet for your dreams, but it is not just about wishing or hoping. It is about reflecting and celebrating the year behind you, even the challenges, and then setting powerful intentions for the year ahead. Plus, using a formula that actually works to design and manifest what you truly want.
So this is where design your dream comes in. Now, this is not just a practice. This is a step-by-step guide into turning your deepest desires into your everyday reality, whether that is health, happiness, abundance, relationship. This is your chance to create a life so good that it almost feels too good to be true. So if you are ready to design a life that you would be truly proud of, go to zivameditation.com slash dream or click the link below and we will send you that exercise right away.
Sweet friends, welcome to today's episode of why isn't everyone doing this? I am so so excited for this conversation because it is with a relatively new friend, but we have gone deep fast and I want to say thank you for being on the show and welcome Dr. David Rock. How are you feeling?
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. When I met you, we just immediately started talking and saw so many things we had to talk about. And you're like deep in this one world. And I'm deep in this world over here. And they're actually the same world in so many ways, but from completely different contexts. So it's always so energizing getting to talk with you. So I'm excited, excited for the conversation.
Me too. And I think it's fun to just give people a little window into how we met because it's such a good story. So I don't socialize all that often anymore. But I went to this party in New York City and my friends were giving me a little tour and they were walking up the stairs and there was a few of them. They said, Emily, we think you're an alien. I was like, I kind of get that a lot.
And just when they were calling me an alien, I, you know, make eyes with you. And you said, well, you know what every alien needs. You set a spaceship and you pull out a photo of this house that is shaped like a spaceship. And next thing I know, four days later, I'm in your beautiful home that's actually shaped like a spaceship.
And it turns out that another mind-valley author, Jade Shaw, was there doing a workshop. And it just felt like such a beautiful, serendipitous, synergistic meeting. And then, of course, we've had so many fun adventures since then. And as you said, I think our work is on paper, perhaps seemingly wildly disparate. But when you get to the core of the core of the core, there is so much overlap. And so I'm so excited to talk about your depth of knowledge and neuroscience
And actually, why isn't everyone using neuroscience to become a better leader? Which really means becoming a better human, right? Like leading yourself, leading others. Some people are leading families. Some people are leading companies. And something that's interesting to note that I'm very impressed with about you is the fact that you have consulted over two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies.
So that is, I don't know anyone else. And I've been in this game for a long time. I don't know anyone else who's had a hand in shaping the culture, the decision-making matrix, the leadership styles of two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies. Which, just to put that in context for people, each one of those is like its own city-state. You know, we're talking, you know, hundreds of thousands of employees, sometimes in one organization. And, you know, we were just talking earlier that your work has now reached over 3 million people, some of these concepts.
So just last year, which is amazing over the last few years, just last year. So I guess, can you just back it all the way up? And like, how did you originally get interested in neuroscience? And I know neuroscience is a big topic. So how did you originally get interested in it? And then what is your lane when it comes to neuroscience?
It's a long story, I guess, in my 50s. So it actually started when I was very, very young. I was very, very curious as a child, taking everything apart. And when I was about 15, I started sort of randomly going to these personal development workshops and learning to meditate. We learned to meditate at 15 years old.
Yeah, and a pretty intense form like twice a day, 20 minutes twice a day, you know, sort of like a cross between mindfulness and kind of mantra meditation. And I did that for quite a few years. And I just, it was so fascinating, like what was going on in my brain? Because I'm literally being taught to observe my brain, right? And at some point I was like, this, what's this brainy thing going on here? And I started reading and I started like really reading. I've got a,
voraciously hungry brain for sort of understanding patterns. And at some point I kind of went off and became an entrepreneur for a while and kind of came back and started coaching people in my 30s. And cut a long story short, I was
I sort of had this side interest in neuroscience of reading, you know, dozens and dozens of books and papers and really trying to understand it all. And then this is around the, you know, just early 2000s, I had built a coaching program. I've now got about 25,000 graduates of this coaching program we built back in 1998.
I started teaching this program at NYU and being a university we needed a theory base and I went back to all the books I'd been reading and started photocopying just like a few snippets from a couple of my favorite brain books and kind of bringing them into this coaching class. So we had a room that was airless and terrible lighting and low ceilings with like 70 people. Oh really good factors for brain health and brain performance.
terrible at NYU and I'm like and everyone was sort of falling asleep and then I brought in these these quotes and I just I can remember distinctly the room completely changing like we like everyone had just had you know three cups of coffee and was suddenly awake and what happened was we were explaining some of the elements of coaching at the time from the lens of the brain and everyone was connecting
all these just seemingly disparate things they'd been learning up until that point. And it made all this stuff make sense. And it was sort of at that moment, I realized it was something really important here to understand. And that started a long journey of
like starting to write papers and writing several books and a textbook and building a master's degree and running an international conference. It's been a long journey, but it kind of started with just seeing there was tremendous value in understanding coaching through the lens of neuroscience. And then it was a really quick transition because a lot of my work with organizations at the time was not just coaching but leadership. It became really clear that understanding all of leadership, not just the coaching aspect,
was incredibly helpful through a neuroscience lens, like everything about managing yourself, you know, mobilizing other people, you know, getting driving results, managing accountability, you know, seeing the big picture, kind of all the things that a leader has to do with any scale, actually becomes kind of clear and more effective if you understand the mechanisms involved, at least even to a little degree. So I probably had that insight like around 2003, 2004, and
It's been a wild ride ever since of just trying to kind of share that and develop that. But that's kind of where it started. And then where we are now is kind of building a whole language for leadership based on the brain. So any kind of skill you're learning, you can go, OK, well, this is what's going on. And this is why this is happening. And it turns out to be really, really helpful.
And that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited for this conversation is to really go into the neuroscience of meditation of what is happening in the brain. And I love that that was your genesis, that learning to meditate at 15 years old, it almost sounds like it gave you a separation from your mind and your brain, right? Like there's the observer and the observed, even at a very young age, and so like, because a lot of people wouldn't even know, oh wait, there's something to study here, because you can't see the forest for the trees.
So it seems like at such a young age, what a unique vantage point to be able to pull the lens back and be like, oh, what is happening inside of this thing versus being fully subsumed by it? Like, I am my mind. I am my thoughts. So before we go into meditation and the neuroscience of manifestation, I'm curious, like, why are people coming to you? Like, what is happening in these
Fortune 100 organizations. How are people becoming better leaders? Like what's happening to their brains? What's happening to their ability to have peak performance? What's happening to, yeah, I guess what you would define as being a great leader.
Yeah, firstly, I'll just say that the way I think about leadership is anyone who has to manage another person. So in a company of 10,000 employees, there might be 1,000 people, managers, and leaders, right? I don't really distinguish between them. If you're managing someone, if you're in the front line, you're in the middle of the business, you're senior. That would apply to a family as well, like if you're raising kids.
You're raising kids, you're an entrepreneur, you're a creative person, trying to get other people to do what you want as a creative person. You make films, like anything, even artists. There's an element of leadership across the board. And you can think of it as making complex decisions and getting others to do what you want them to do and getting difficult things done. How would you differentiate getting others to do what you want to do without manipulating? Or is it manipulation?
I mean, everything is manipulation if you boil down to the fact that we're just sitting next to someone changes your brain. Is that manipulation or is it just the way it works? Every ad campaign is manipulation. Every conversation you have to some degree, you're trying to focus people a certain way. But the brain's like a forest that changes every day with the light,
rain, seasons, it literally changes with the seasons and the light. But we're constantly changing and massively influenced by very small things around us. So I think what we're trying to do anyway is give people a really accurate
understanding of the mechanisms moment to moment when you're trying to do a task, and hopefully those tasks are really ethical, but it's an understanding of what's going on in your brain and other people's brains, so that you could act like adaptively and respond to what's really happening. I use this story a bit, but you remember the movie The Matrix? I think every human alive, pretty much.
Neo in the Matrix, he was always losing the battle against these agents that were these AI bots.
And at some point towards the end of the movie, he sees the data streaming down. And in that moment, he starts to win because he knows what's going on inside the brain, so to speak, of these agents. And now he knows when they're about to punch so he can duck and he knows where their weaknesses are. So is that ethical? That's a separate question. But he can see in real time, or just ahead of time,
what's about to happen and it's really amazing was you the more you understand about the brain the more you can see in real time and sometimes ahead of time exactly what's going to happen when you phrase something a certain way or when you send an email out a certain way or when you design a change strategy a certain way you could actually imagine because you know how brains react
you can imagine much more accurately what's about to happen. So I think it's about making people more adaptive and responsive as opposed to hopefully more meaningful. I love that. And I would argue that humans' ability to adapt will be the number one marker of success in the coming years. The rate of change and the acceleration
of change is going to get exponentially faster. And so I think that one of the reasons why I love meditation so much is that it gives you the ability to adapt. Your nervous system is not so rigid. You are not trying to hold onto the illusion of control so tightly. So you're able to really notice what is and flow with what is. And so it sounds like this is giving you like the almost like the software and the intellectual framework and
understanding of what meditation is giving you on that empathetic and spiritual level. So it feels like this right brain, left brain combo, and actually side question, what do you think about right brain, left brain? I know it's a gross oversimplification, but it's just become such a part of the vernacular.
Yeah, there's a lot of things about the brain that are sort of in the pop culture that are really not accurate, but have this tiny element of accuracy that's then taken out of context hugely. The answer is it's complicated. There's some tendencies in the prefrontal, but some of it they think is based on left or right handedness. There's certainly abstract networks versus more concrete networks.
for thinking, but there's no real right brain left brain construct that's studied that way in the science. Let me go back to something you said, because we've written about this and studied this, and at one point I want to do an actual study. Maybe we can do it together. But I believe that learning about your brain, step by step, a little bit of time over time, actually gives you really similar benefits to meditation.
Now, hear me out. I'm not trying to put you out of business. The ideal is both together. But there are certain people who are not going to sit down and meditate every day. But those people might be fascinated as an entry point to learn about their brain. And when you learn about your brain, you're actually practicing. Think about this. You're practicing watching what your attention's doing.
Right? Noticing it, labeling it, and then maybe switching it. Right? So you might notice that you've tried to solve a problem three times and failed, and then going, oh, that's a marker for needing to let my unconscious come through. I'm going to stop trying and have a cup of tea now. Right? And so that's a switching of attention. Right? So learning about the brain, you begin to notice your attention, and you begin to practice switching it.
guess what you do when you're meditating you're practicing noticing your attention and labeling it and switching it and in both cases I believe you're building two really really important actually really three really important cognitive kind of muscles in a way if I can use that word
One is sort of separation between the observer and the observed, as you call it, so getting a little bit of separation, noticing that you have some ability to make changes, and then separately it's like noticing what is happening, so observing what is happening, and then making a choice about maybe you want something else to happen.
three mechanisms are consistent to learning about your brain and mindfulness or meditation of many types, maybe not all. But so we've had this hypothesis that as you learn more about the brain, you actually become more mindful because you're more conscious of what's happening moment to moment. And I think the combination of those two is really powerful. Yeah, that makes so much sense because even introducing a framework into your consciousness
about your consciousness is going to create some level of separation so that you are not exclusively identified with the thoughts themselves or with the emotions themselves. It's like it's creating almost an intellectual level what the meditation is doing on a spiritual level, or I would even say on a nervous system calibration level, right? Because in specifically with Ziva, we're de-exciting the nervous system. We're giving the body rest. That's about five times deeper than sleep.
And I'm talking specifically about the meditation portion of the Ziva technique, because I think this will be where I'd like to go next, is helping people to understand the difference between mindfulness and meditation, and then talking about the neuroscience of these two different modalities.
So I think what you just described where you're noticing a thought, naming a thought, choosing something different, I would put that more in the bucket of mindfulness, which I would define as the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. It's like back to the now, back to the now. It's anytime what I would call pop culture, your left brain or your prefrontal cortex is engaged and you are directing your focus in some way, I would put that in the buckle of mindfulness.
It's quite different than what I would define as meditation, which in the Ziva technique, you're giving your body your rest, it's about five times deeper than sleep, and you're doing that. The metabolic rate drops, heart rate slows, body temperature cools, so everything is slowing down in the body, and so it feels kind of like a supercharged power nap sitting up, but without the sleep hangover.
But when you do that, when you de-excite the nervous system, that backlog of stresses that we've all been accumulating in our body starts to come up and out. It's like when you stop smoking, the junk comes up out of your lungs. When you do a fast, your body, you know, four days into fasting, you start pooping again, and you're like, wait, where'd that come from? And it's like the body can finally expel. So that's what Ziva is doing, is that it's giving your body time to rest so that it can release
the things that aren't serving it. And then what I found is on the other side of that catharsis really, on the other side of that expelling, you have more space, you have more bandwidth, you have more cognitive power, you have more spaciousness to receive more information, which looks like better focus, better performance, more presence. But what's interesting is those byproducts are coming
not through focus, not through performing, but rather through laziness, rather through rest. So given that frame of mindfulness is very good at handling your stress. And then now meditation, very good at handling your stress from the past, I'd love to have, I'd love to hear your take on like from a neuroscientist perspective, how is one technique different from the other? And how would mindfulness and meditation change your brain in different ways?
So I'm curious if this sounds like you. Every New Year's, you set intentions, you journal, you meditate, maybe you've even tried all the manifestation tricks out there and yet nothing seems to really be sticking. You're not seeing the progress and you wonder what am I missing? What is wrong with me? But here's the thing, you are not a failure, it is not you, it's the structure. When we try to manifest from a place of hope,
or wishful thinking without a clear aligned formula, then it's easy to get stuck or feel like we're just spinning our wheels. So this is where design your dream comes in. This is one of my favorite exercises I've been doing with Ziva students for over a decade. So this is not just a journal prompt or a guided visualization. This is a manifestation exercise designed to help you go deeper, get clear, and actually create your desires.
So with this formula, you're not only going to feel progress on your journey, but you're going to step into your highest potential and the best part. This exercise is rooted in reflection and celebration, not pressure. Let your intentions come to fruition to bring your gifts to the world and create a life of purpose and joy. Now is the time. So click the link below or go to zivameditation.com slash dream and let's make 20, 25 your best year yet. Your dream life is a whole lot closer than you think.
Yeah, so I apologize. I should have done more background on like really understanding the Ziva technique so I can answer that more thoroughly. But I think we can actually get into this. I mean, I'm very weighted on the mindfulness research. I think it's much more common.
Yeah, yeah, so there's a lot of studies on that. So if you think mindfulness is... But I think you could actually bring it back to the training that you were doing when you were 15, where you had Amantra and you were doing it twice a day, those sounds similar. And it's basically like a self-induced transcendence style of meditation.
So it's just that hypnagogic state is what you're accessing. It feels a little bit more sleepy versus like back to the breath or back to the visualization. It's less focused or concentrated and more like what Dr. Srini Palais from Harvard might say like a, what does he call it? Like just like a non-focused state of awareness.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, I know I guess definitely a lot to say about that. I know Strini well, he's a great character and a brilliant... He's also going to be a guest on the show. Of course, I should hope so. It'll be better dressed than me, I'm sure. Always. But there's definitely a really interesting phenomena that happens when you put the brain into some kind of distractor task mode.
Now, that can be like a mantra, or it could be something like repetitive and pleasant that is non-goal-focused, right? There's a lot of different things to say here, but there's actually a network in the brain for being goal-focused. And to some degree, when you're actually mindful, you are being goal-focused, right? You're in the present trying to keep your attention on incoming data. And it is activating this network here and here. There's a goal-focused network.
you probably had this experience only you wake up in a hotel somewhere and you wake up and for the first moments you're like where am I and I don't know if you've ever tried this I do this all the time like I'll try and hold that uncertainty for as long as I can right I'll look at like oh isn't the light pretty isn't the bed nice I don't know which country I mean literally at that moment
I could be anywhere. I'm traveling all the time. I don't know which city I'm in. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Is it a Monday? Is it a Sunday? And it's actually so restful, right? It's actually so restful. And what scientists know about this state is the state where none of your goals are activated.
All the different schemas around those goals are not activated. As soon as you go, oh, it's Monday, all the schemas for everything you're supposed to do on a Monday get activated and start this ripple effect. As soon as you go, oh, that's right. I'm in Canada. I'm supposed to give a talk today. You go, all these things you're supposed to do come to mind. Your brain is very quiet.
while you have no goals in that way. And there's a number of things about that. It is very quiet in the brain. It turns out that's actually the best state for insights to come through. Insights come through much more. In fact, Mark Beeman, who's one of my favorite neuroscientists studying insight in the lab, he had this set of insight problems he would test people on.
And he got a bunch of like 10,000 hour meditators in who did mindfulness meditation. He got them into his machines to see how many insights they could have. He had like a set of 20 puzzles or something. And he found they couldn't have many insights. They actually had fewer insights than average people who came into the lab to do this experiment.
And then he had this realization that they were like focusing. And he said, look, I want you to do another round, but I want you to focus on being unfocused.
And they actually had this breakthrough in the number of insights they had in being unfocused. And there's a whole like neural signature of that that's really, really interesting. So there's a big body of research we've done about sort of how you bring about insights in yourself and others. And one of the elements is some kind of distract a task that induces this non-goal focused state that just creates this kind of metacognition
And scientists have been studying the different kinds of distractor tasks that you can do, and it should be something pleasant, doesn't take a lot of mental effort at all, so it's not like, it's not Sudoku, it's not watching TV, but it's something pleasant, repetitive, easy to do, and puts you in this kind of state. So that turns out to be a state that really turns down your nervous system, and it also increases the chance of insight in many ways. And so accordingly, I would imagine it could bring up things from the past, it could bring up all sorts of
So, you know, deeper insights as well. So that's the way I would kind of understand that. Yeah, that sounds exactly right on. Like, that sounds exactly like what we're doing at Ziva, where it is, it's pleasurable, like the mantra that we're using, like mantra is that word gets a little confusing. I think in the pop culture, because we think it means affirmation or slogan, but it's actually a Sanskrit word. It means mind vehicle.
So we're using the mantras as mind vehicles to access those hypnagogic states, to access that state of relaxation with no goal. And I feel like largely what I'm doing when I'm teaching is being like, hey, let go of the goal. Like we're here, like we're not, there's no, there's nothing to do, there's nowhere to go. You don't have to quiet your mind because when people do, when they go into meditations, they get the goal of quieting their mind.
They're like, oh, how few thoughts can I have? How silent can I make my brain? And then they're trying to achieve what's essentially an impossible goal. Certainly when you're trying to achieve it, I think it's like sex. It's like the more you're focusing and trying to orgasm, the further you get from it. And the same thing happens with people when they're meditating. They're like, I'm going to quiet my mind. And they use all this effort and all this strain. And then they're getting out of the exact seat that you just mentioned that creates the insights.
I'll share one funny story. I'm always like, don't keep a journal next to you. You don't have to journal. When you're in the meditation, you're going to have all these amazing insights, all these ideas, but just let them come. Stay in the meditation. They'll be there for you afterwards. I'm preaching this all the time. The one exception to this was my second course I ever ran. To make an exception, I'm just a baby. I'm a baby meditation teacher. You better follow the rules. It was my friend and she was going through a nasty divorce.
like had raised this man's kids. And he like cheated on her with this like famous actress. And anyway, it was messy. And he ran all of their money. She had been like supporting his two children financially, but he was running all the bank accounts. And halfway through the meditation, she goes, I remember the password of the bank accounts. And I was like, get up. And that was the one time I made the exception to the insight and taking action on it.
That's hilarious. The way people normally quiet their brains is with alcohol and there's like a tiny piece of my brain that's like trying to hide the fact that there's a bar fridge just there because I'm concerned that listeners will think like I drink a lot. I bought the apartment. It had the bar fridge and it's full of coconut water just to get that out of the way. Well, let's talk a little bit about that because I think that we're entering this age of
this burgeoning of the psychedelic revolution and and I think that for so long because nicotine and caffeine and alcohol have been the substances that have been legal that we think we thought that like oh those are safer for you those are better for you but
LSD, psilocybin, that's bad. Those things are going to fry your brain. My understanding is that alcohol is quite simply killing the neurons in your brain and dimming your consciousness, whereas there are other substances if in the correct set and setting can actually increase neuroplasticity, can increase neurogenesis. Why did you want to make a disclaimer on alcohol? Is there anything you want people to know about neuroscience and alcohol?
Yeah, I mean, it's not good for your brain is the simple is the short answer. It's not good for your brain. I mean, a little bit actually the data is really confusing because until like the last year the data said a little bit of alcohol is actually better than no alcohol because of the social benefits, weirdly enough. And then this year some new studies have come out maybe confounding that saying no alcohol is probably best. But there's this weird social benefits you get and
It turns out like getting your social needs met and really connecting with other humans is very, very nourishing and healing comes the nervous system, you know, turns up the right neurochemical. So, but I think on the whole it's probably very, very little. Look, I'm not involved in psychedelics. I come across some of the research and I've been really curious why.
some of that is working. And what I've seen in the research is, depending on the substance, it's over lowering the threshold at which you're on spike. So if you normally have like, you've got 100 billion neurons, sorry, 100 billion neurons, not 100 billion neurons, if you normally have like 12 spikes a second at sort of baseline per neuron.
A spike is like a little electrical spike, a little electrical activity. So you've got- The activity in the neurons, not like a new genesis of new neurons. It's just the- No, it's like every neuron is spiking sort of like a clockwork, like about 12 times a second. Like a heart is beating. But then the neurons are firing with more electricity. The neurons are firing about 12 times a second each. So what happens is they basically fire a lot more.
So what makes them fire is much can be much smaller things. So they're basically the brain gets much more connected, particularly with things like psilocybin and LSD and MDMA, those in particular. And you get a greater connectivity. So things that sort of didn't connect before are now connected. And the theory is in the right set and setting and dosage, you're kind of connecting things up that need to be connected in some ways. But that's also why folks
report, you know, all sorts of randomness as well. And there's, you know, there's dangers in those things and some misuse, but there's something to it's improving the connectivity overall. It's not my space. I don't dispense psychedelics to leaders. I've had one CEO ask me one point from my advice, and I explained what I just explained, but it's an interesting area that others are studying. So let's get back to the work that you are doing with these, you know, in neural leadership.
So can you give us a window into any of the modalities or what a program look like? What is the transformation that people are going through when they start to practice these neuroscience techniques to become better humans and better leaders?
So it's interesting that I've been doing this for 26 years. And when I very first started, it was sort of me coaching people one-on-one. And then I started training coaches. So it was sort of me with 20 people or so. And then it's sort of the group size became bigger. Now our kind of unit of scale is a whole company. So a company of 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or a million people will say, hey, we want to achieve x, y, z.
The way our work is morphed is that we're really the world's leader in habit activation at scale. And it almost doesn't matter what the habit is. We're not going to work on bad habits. We're not going to make people nasty humans. But we can work on any habit that a company wants to work on. So inevitably, today, we're working a lot on how to make people more adaptive, more flexible.
And so it might be a whole initiative around growth mindset, and I'll get into that. Or it might be, look, everyone that manages people just needs to be much more effective at that. And that's a different kind of strategy. Or they might say, look, we really want to do something about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Can you really do something that gets to the heart of the bias issue?
across all kinds of decisions. So our entry point is with a whole company, and it can be any size. They're actually doing some amazing work with schools, with individual schools of a few hundred teachers. But we're also one of the lead partners at Microsoft. Everyone learns all that stuff at Microsoft.
200,000 people. So we're sort of working, but the entry point is like there's a particular thing we're trying to achieve. And so we look at that in sort of three bodies of work. How do you make this change of priority? How do you define the habits that people need and then build those the way habits actually get built?
And then how do you put in systems that support all that? So it priorities habits and systems. That's kind of the meta model that we start with and sort of do it design from that. And can you give us a window into how do habits get built? Because I know so many people listening to this either have started meditation and have made it a habit. Maybe some people have started and fallen off. But let's use meditation as an example. Someone wants to build a daily twice a day Ziva habit. Like how would you help coach someone in implementing that?
Yeah, that's a great question. So there's kind of personal advice for that, like you'll get from atomic habits or some of our research or other things. There's like hacks and tricks. We look at it from a slightly different direction. But I'll give you some of the hacks and tricks that are really tried and true, like attached to something you already have as a habit.
And so it's connected, so it's kind of automatic. And make it like really easy, really, really easy. Like I have an exercise habit. I can do it in any amount of space. Like if I can lie down somewhere, I can exercise. And if there's a bit of floor the size of my body, that's all I need. So there's really no excuse if I don't have time or I can't get to the gym. And I also can do a great workout in literally 15 minutes.
while I'm like, you know, watching a show or listening to something or even on a call, as long as it's an internal call, I'll do my workout while I'm on a call.
So anyway, the habit to be really simple, you want to be something you can do every day. And every day is really important. If you're trying to do something, get it into an every day. But start very simple. If you want to get fit, one of the best things you can do is push-ups, including for women. You just start with the half-wish-up. But start with one. Do one every day for five days or seven days. And then see if you can do two.
for like seven days. You find that you actually like literally in a few months you're doing like a lot your whole body is completely different but you're starting very small. I remember when I did I was in a show called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and it was like back in my Broadway days and the show was on a raked stage.
which means that like downstage is lower than upstage. And I got to the point where in heels with all of my hat and wig and costumes, I could do full plank pushups, but with my body weight down and I got up to 40 because there was a couple guys in the cast and every, there was like a part of our show ritual. Like before a certain number, curtain was closed, we'd meet on stage and we would work our way up and every day we would do one more pushup. And like 40 full plank pushups on a rake stage was pretty good. So I was, I was proud of that.
Unfortunately, I'm of a certain age where the entire song set of GDG Bango is now coming back into my head. I'm trying really hard not to see more. I apologize to you and everyone who that's happening for right now.
but where were we so yeah so so anyway that habits yeah so so every day very small something you're definitely going to do tired to something else like those things are really tried and true really fantastic we look at it from the perspective of what does it take to get other people to create habits so we look good outside
as opposed to yourself. And we worked with Accenture, for example, on a project that impacted 700,000 people. We looked at how do we create a habit of going about feedback a whole different way? And how do you design an intervention that really creates new habits? So you can't just say, hey, try this thing today and try to make it simple. So those sort of hacks don't really work at that level. So we've been studying this for a long time now.
And we've got it down to three principles. And these are very generalizable to helping your family, to running a team, to starting a business, to anything. But the essence of it is the first thing is you need other people to have some kind of pretty strong insight moment about the habit.
So let's say you're trying to make a team organization more inclusive. One of the habits is really getting everyone speaking up. And a good skill for that is going last as the leader. So a particular skill around the habit of engaging everyone is the leader speaking last. So you can just tell people 1,000 times over, you should speak last. Nothing will change until that leader goes,
Oh, wow, I can imagine speaking last could be really, really helpful. And they have an insight moment where they picture it and they go, oh, wow, I'm going to do that. Now, we've actually come up with a measure for the strength of that insight. We call it the Eureka scale. We've published a proper academic paper on this. And you need a level four out of a five-point scale. A four is the level at which people are almost certain to take committed action.
And a five is a life-changing insight, you never forget your whole life. But a four is pretty strong. A three, you've got maybe a 50-50 chance of someone doing something. But a four, you've got like a 90% chance someone will take action. And we've studied all this. So how do you get people to have insights? That's actually the question that every novelist, screenwriter, filmmaker, artist, change maker, politician, pretty much everyone is asking without knowing they're asking because insights what changes people. It's how we see the world differently.
So we believe the way you create the strongest insights is with just the right story combined with just the right data or evidence or science. So you're going back to your left and right brain, which I'm not necessarily supporting, but I will support concrete and story, right, or conceptual and sort of feeling. And the combination of both of those two is by far the strongest. So story without explanation is sort of empathy, but explanation without story is even emptier in a way.
So that's one element. You need people to have an aha moment. Now, when you realize that's your goal, you can actually try different things and measure the strength of the aha, which is really fun. We do that. How do we get a leader to realize for themselves that speaking last is good? What's the story you tell?
What's the science you bring? And we'll experiment with lots of different things until we find the one thing that really creates the most insights for most people. So that's one element. You want your teenage daughter to clean her room. One of the most important things is she's got to have an insight.
about this. That's maybe a blunt example, but that's the first piece of it. The second piece of this is that those insights are way more powerful and may more likely to be enacted if they happen in a social context.
And particularly with people that matter to you. So what that means is the daughter, if she has an insight on her own in her room, that's one thing. But if she has it at the dinner table and shares it with the family, there's all this positive pressure now to act on that insight. And she feels like everyone's going to be watching her around this issue. So that's one element of it. It's called the panopticon effect. It's social.
the panopticon effect. It's an unfortunate idea. It's thinking everyone's watching you when they're not, but it actually has a positive side to it. If you tell people you're going to do something differently, you become a little over-obsessed about imagining they remember, usually they don't, but it's used for good rather than evil. You're using other people's perception of you to hold yourself to account.
I know my friend Zach's Bush is doing some work in small groups, like six to eight people. And he said that he did it during COVID because they weren't able to get like one coach to one person. So they just started creating groups and the groups were wildly more effective than the one on one coaching. Like, you know, multitudes more effective. And when they boiled down to why he said it was because the other people in the group were now seeing that person through the lens of their transformation.
like they were like holding them through a different lens. And I thought that was really profound. And it sounds like that.
I'll bring up two stories. One is there was a fast company magazine story years ago that basically said, change or die. And it was a story of people who were not changing their lifestyle after open heart surgery until they were put in a group. And people had the ultimate cost of not changing. They were going to die. And they wouldn't do it. And then when they put them in a group, there was this massive jump.
of people who did that. And then the second thing I'll tell you is from social science, we saw this in sort of a meta-analysis of behavior change data. The number one reason people actually do something is they think everyone else is doing it.
That thing, why isn't everyone doing this is the name of this show? There you go. You're right on it. So number one reason. So we bring that to organizations. So if we're bringing something like inclusive leadership to a company, we don't want to introduce that deeply to the top of the house. We want to introduce that shallowly to every single employee with just a few things to work on and to everyone relatively quickly. And you get way more culture change doing that than trying to do deep work.
at the top of the house. Of course, the both is the best, but if you're choosing one or the other, it's best to give a little bit to everyone. Anyway, the other reason, and I'll get a little bogged down in the science here, but there's actually a social memory network in the brain as well. So if you learn about, I don't know, how to do PowerPoint on your own in a room, it's stored in a certain part of your brain. But if you learn that with three or four others,
What happens is you might not remember the lessons from the PowerPoint, but you can remember who was there, how they were feeling, where you were all sitting, who was the most important person in the room. So basically, social information encodes automatically in the brain. And when you tap some learning into that automatically encoding network, the learning network is much more robust.
So now you can encode more easily, more deeply, you recall the information more easily and you act more often as well. So anyway, the first principle is strong insight. The second principle is do that socially and the whole thing is much more powerful. And the third one is the hard one for organizations to get the head around. And that's one habit at a time over time.
And you've got to have the overtime thing. And there's this bias called the massing effect, which is that when you poll leaders and say, hey, would you like to do a classroom two hours a week for every week for a month, or do it in a day, everyone says, I want to do it in a day, I'll learn much more. And they're completely incorrect.
And you learn dramatically more breaking it into four pieces, like dramatically more. Even without the accountability mechanisms you can use in between, which obviously accelerated even more. So the overtime effect is really, really critical. And there's a lot more to say about that. We can go two or three clicks into the science of that. But those are the three principles for habit activation in others. Strong insight in social situations, one habit at a time over time. And so we use that as a design principle.
to impact, you know, 1,000, 100,000 a million people. It would give the venture trainings based on those principles. Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't look like a training. It looks like people having insights because they've asked them some questions.
or people receiving a video about something that's just five minutes and they've got to talk about it with their peers during the week and put some comments in a platform. Or what we've just done is people going into a platform for just 15 minutes a week and going through one skill and kind of hearing a story and then reading about the science of this and then like seeing what people would do if they got this right
And then getting these kind of guides of different ways. So we've worked out how to kind of get this done in a completely digital setting now. And we think we can create pretty strong insight socially over time in like a six month journey that we've been sculpting. So that's something where it's kind of new for us, but really excited about. Yeah, beautiful. So I'm curious. I'm sure it depends on the modality, but is there
As far as the one habit at a time over time, is there an optimal downtime? You know, like athletes, it's like trained and then have a recovery day. Is there an optimal amount of time where they are not learning a new habit to ingest it? Or does it just depend on the thing that they're learning?
I mean, we've got 300 active partners at any time, so we've got a lot of data, but it's very hard to compare apples to apples and be really definitive. We test the hypothesis out for a year or two, and then we'll tweak it as we get feedback. But we believe 30 days is a really nice unit of time to focus on one particular kind of issue. We can make people much more flexibly minded in 30 days. We can introduce growth mindset to an organization in 30 days.
then you might take a month off and come back and now look at being more inclusive. In that 30 days, would they be doing something every day or would it be a bit on and then some digest time and then back on? Yeah, it's more like something that's in the background all week. Yeah, it's like a theme that's, yeah, we're putting our background attention on.
Yeah, so it's really weird. If you asked me this 10 years ago, I would have said this would never work. But we found that you can put people in a classroom for a whole day and then measure a month later, like how many of those people have a desired habit, right? And you can do that. Or you can give them like a five-minute video to watch at the start of a week and a one-page guide of things to try. And if you do that every week for three weeks,
And they know the rest of the team is doing that. And then just bring them together for one hour, virtually. You actually get about 50% better habit activation than being in a classroom for a whole day.
Now, that's insane. I know that doesn't make any sense, but it's the spacing effect and the social effect is much higher than we realize. It really does. So it's bringing up two questions. One is totally self-serving, so I'll start with the other one. But I've heard this stat that is that you're 95% more likely to commit to a healthy habit if you have basically an accountability buddy, like a person to check in with and a scheduled time to check in. Have you heard that? Does that feel accurate to you? Do you want to debunk that?
I don't know the data on that. So it would take my research team a week or two to really anchor on a number. I would say massively more likely. The number might be two, three, four, 500%. I don't know. I mean, we did one analysis of taking a three-hour training and looking at the number of people that take an action after that three-hour training compared to three one-hour trainings.
and the number of people that take, the total number of actions people take. So you imagine you got 100 people and a three-hour training. Between them, they might, you know, you might have 50 actions taken, right? Now you take the same 100 people, put them in three one-hour trainings with a little bit of accountability. Now what we found is about a 700% increase in the number of actions people take.
Yeah, so that's in that particular instance, we saw 700, but that was a very particular instance. And we, it's more of a thought experiment than hard data, but we're pretty confident that's roughly the number. It's certainly way north of 95%. It's very generous. So that's good to hear that it's conservative.
It depends how you do it, and also a one-off training doesn't have a lot of accountability at all. So even just adding one follow-up, you get a big bump. But adding three follow-ups, you've got that time in between to go and apply. So there's part of the effect there. But in terms of just sort of any one-off learning and then having an accountability buddy,
there would be a very significant, very, very meaningful impact. I just don't know what the number would be. So I couldn't respond with 95 yet. So I have another question that'll be a good segue into the neuroscience of manifestation. So we're in the process of developing our embodied manifestation course. And originally it was just going to be like 13 days and it would be day after day after day. And then I was like, this feels like too much. Like if you're not training to teach this or becoming like a manifesting coach,
to spend an hour a day for 13 days and something feels aggressive and like overwhelmed. And then I was like, wait, we should split this up. It should be four weeks. And so everything you've just said, it's gonna be, you know, a couple times a week, over four weeks, it'll be the three parts of the modality plus a week of implementation. And what's coming in now is like we've got to have groups, like there has to be cohorts for people to have accountability and small groups. So I don't really know if I have a question except for,
You know, if I were to do like modules over weeks where each week has a theme, would you suggest like an optimal number of times that people should visit that theme? Or is it just about this is our theme for the week? And is it an optimal amount of downtime? Or do you need more info?
It's complicated. I mean, definitely people like this concept called fluency. Fluency is how easy it is to hold an idea in working memory. And so when you say this is a 30-day thing, it's got high fluency. And much more than like this is a 35-day thing or a 22-day thing.
It's like, oh, OK, it's a month. I see it. I picture it. This has four parts over four weeks. That's got high fluency. And so you're trying to get fluency as well as what people are willing to do. There's two touch points a week or three touch points a week, whatever it is. I think an hour a day every day is way too much to ask people.
Also, you don't need it. If you can get the social side up, you can get tremendous power from that. I would say twice a week, you're interacting with workers amazing, Monday and Thursday or Tuesday and Saturday or something. But from my experience, a month is great. Some touch point every week.
you know, one, no more than three, probably, and let people digest and apply the rest of time and kind of, you know, share ideas. Yeah, beautiful. Okay, so that leads me to some questions on the science and the neuroscience of manifestation. Because I think up until very recently, you know, manifestation was seen as very, very hippy-dippy, very woo-woo.
But what I found is that the deeper you go down the spiritual side of it and the deeper you go down the neuroscience side of it is like they meet in almost the same spot. When you go deep into quantum entanglement and then deep into, you know, I'm praying.
It's like, okay, well, where does prayer and quantum entanglement overlap? What's the Venn diagram there? And so I'd love to hear if in your experience, have you studied the neuroscience of manifestation? Have you seen companies or people manifest things in their lives? I'm just very open to where you want to take this.
So let me just kind of go right back to some of the basics of the brain. I think it's fascinating to understand some of the fundamental mechanisms. And there's almost infinite ways you can sort of look at the brain. You can look at it through the lens of the electrical signals. You can look at it through the lens of the neurochemicals. You can look at it through the lens of structure or function. There's lots of ways. But there's one level I think that's really interesting. And that is that everything that comes into the brain is basically noise.
It's perceived as electrical activities. It's dark and quiet in your brain. It's dark and quiet and everything's electrical signals. Things come in and it's just raw data. What happens is you perceive certain strings of that data.
perception, you know, based on a really rich tapestry of things like your expectations, the language you speak, your experiences before, also your goals and intentions, right? So the data that you process out of the noise that comes in is heavily influenced by all of those things. And scientists have studied this really directly looking at like a pain response
coming up the spine and they can look at like 100 people receiving the exact same pain stimulus in the same part of their body. The data looks exactly the same coming up the spine and as it goes into the brain in 100 people there's 100 different patterns for how that pain looks and interestingly people rate
the pain all over the map from a one to a nine on a 10-point scale pretty evenly distributed, the exact same pain stimulus. So everyone has a very different experience. And a big part of that is our expectations. And they found that you can mess with people's expectations and get the same impact as a clinically active dose of morphine in this particular study. So give people, just this pain is getting smaller as you go. People believe it, and that's what they perceive.
So you've got data coming in and then you've got the perception that we make, but then there's a third thing which is the sort of meaning we make of that data as well. So there's what we observe, but then there's the meaning we make out of that. Someone cuts you off in traffic, is the meaning, I'm a bad person and the world hates me, is the meaning, this person's having a rough day, is the meaning, I'm just in traffic, this happens. There's really, really different meanings, and then that meaning creates an emotional response.
right? And that emotional response then obviously can cycle back to what you perceive and all this. So we could talk for three days about the mechanisms involved in all this and how it all connects and stuff. But suffice to say that you can prime your brain
very small things will do it. You can prime your brain to notice really different stimuli, as well as to make really different interpretations, as well as the result will be really different emotions that happen. At a really simple level, I'm playing Lego with my daughter, and she says, can you find the single yellow squares, the tiny little yellow ones? We've got a giant box. I have to do the hard work because it's painful to find things and dig through this box.
I don't know. I have a real bone to pick with them. I need impossible to put together. Right? And so we have this giant box from like generations. And so I'll dig in and everything yellow will jump out to my brain. But then she'll say, find the red squares. And suddenly I won't see yellow anymore. I'll literally only see red. So there's an element of the intention you put in literally determines the data you perceive.
And then also the intentions you put in determine the meaning you add to that. If you go out in the morning with an intention of the world's a magical place, someone cuts you off in traffic, you're much more likely to say, wow, that person must have had a rough day. I wonder if I can be nice to them. I wonder what magic will happen as a result of this delay. Who am I meant to be surrounded by now?
Yeah, yeah. So there's a whole neuroscience of intentions. And we actually did a whole presentation on this years ago at my conference. But there's a neuroscience of intentions and how they shape experience. So they basically shape the data you perceive, they shape the meaning you make out of that, and they shape the emotional response out of that. And it all comes back to these different choices you can make. So it has a very, very
powerful effects. And actually, I didn't mention my book. I wrote a book 10 years ago. I just did an update. It's called your brain at work. And it's oh, there you go. Look at that brain at work. And I just I love the subtitles strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus, and working smarter all day long.
Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. So I did an update just recently and sort of went through and updated. But one of the chapters is a chapter on expectations and the way they work in the brain. And it turns out it's even deeper than you might imagine. Like when I'm saying red squares, my brain doesn't just notice them. Actually, the neurons involved in detecting red squares become active.
before I even start looking. What does that have to do with the reticular activating system? I've understood that to be the filtration device of the brain. Is that the thing that's managing the neurons that would then see the red squares beforehand?
That's a very complicated question. I would just say, like, intentionality, the prefrontal cortex is the sort of is the one network that's connected to everything in the brain. And the network of thinking about yourself and other people is in the medial prefrontal, this network here. But it's also the network for making sense of anything.
and kind of understanding how everything fits together. And so as you're making an intention, you know, what's happening is you're sort of creating this organizing principle, the medial prefrontal is involved, it's connecting everywhere and it's creating these schemas right across the brain. That's kind of the simplest way I can explain it. The much more complex answer to that, there's a book called, by Jeff Hawkins, which is, he wrote a book called On Intelligence and he recently wrote a book called A Thousand Brains.
And that's a fascinating look at the deeper mechanisms of how the cortex actually works, but very complicated, but amazing insights in that. I'm going to check that out. I went to see one of my favorite manifestation teachers this weekend, and someone I've been studying for 25 years, so to be in the room was really special for me. And one of the ideas that came in was like, I need to write about
It's just, I think it's taking this very complex thing and making it so outrageously simple. And it's the idea of just like if you were going to try and eat healthier, you wanna just put more vegetables on your plate, like put more healthy fats, healthy proteins, healthy vegetables on your plate, put the good stuff in, do not put your attention on the things that you're taking out. Like if my son, if I'm like, you can't have any more sugar, no more jelly beans, no more chocolate, like that's all he thinks about, more sugar, more jelly beans, more chocolate.
And then it's just with this constant struggle of the only thing he wants is the only thing I'm denying him of. And I think the same is true of manifestation. It's like you're simply putting more of your attention on the things that you desire. And there's simply not as much room. There's not as much bandwidth for all of the fear, all of the speculation, all of the worry, all of the doubt. And so I think just making it so, so simple of like, I'm waking up in the morning. And I say something simple. Like my partner and I, like every day, were like, today,
It's going to be a great day. And I say it to my son. I lift up his blinds. I'm like, hey, buddy, today's going to be a great day. And it's so simple, but we have this recency bias. And then suddenly the brain is instantly looking for reasons of why it's going to be a great day. I used to do something called the Lucky mantra, which was like, I am the luckiest person I know. Lucky things happen to me every day. I feel lucky.
And then again, the brain, I mean, it's simple. And if you don't believe it, it doesn't work. But if you can get yourself into a place of believing it, then it really does start to change.
It's really true. There's a very, very strong neuroscience explanation of the first part of what you're saying, which is actually a really helpful thing to understand. The way the brain works is it's basically an attention economy inside the brain. So wherever you put attention, you either create new pathways or you deepen new pathways.
And it's a bit like that movie, Speed, with Keanu Reeves from years ago. The bus could only go forward. And there's no going back. The bus just had to keep going forward. And with your brain, there's only going forward. Once you understand that, you sort of do things differently. Because the more you focus on a bad thing, the more that bad thing actually gets connected into the brain. And more it becomes wired up. So you really want to focus on what you want more of.
And it doesn't mean there's not a role for therapy, there's a role for therapy, there's a role for, you know, kind of making sense of the past and all that. But, you know, brief solutions focused therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, most of the other therapies that are really showing the most promise, you know, use this principle of let's focus on what we want more of and build those into the brain. So it's a really good insight. And it's simple way to understand it is neuroplasticity is driven by attention.
It's it's driven by where we put attention particularly regularly and there's a there's a concept Jeffrey Schwartz and I wrote about called attention density which is is the is kind of the time of attention like how much attention multiplied by how intense
the attention is. So what you really want is frequent bursts of attention that's very focused. I really, even just a few minutes a day, like a minute or two a day of intense focused attention, a bit like that, you know, one push up a day, that little burst of attention every day. And guess where that comes from is the social fabric is you see someone and you go, oh, that's right, I'm supposed to do that.
And so you're getting that attention density up. That's the way to think about it scientifically. I love that. One thing we do in the embodied manifesting is we'll invite people to do a three song dance party. And actually, I'm very curious who thoughts on this. In the three song dance party, I'm giving them an opportunity to go right into the sacred sorrow, right into the rage.
and then alchemizing it with their bliss or alchemizing it with their turn on. Because I believe that the sexual energy is so creative that its ability to metabolize that denser feeling, that its ability to metabolize the sorrow or metabolize the rage can be really, really potent. But even lower, like a minimum viable dose of that would be
a one-song dance party where you were simply putting your attention on the thing that you were looking to attract, the thing that you're looking to manifest, or the feeling you're looking to manifest. But before we go into that, I'd love to just know a quick take on what are your thoughts on like
actively, physically moving those thicker, denser emotions, like expressing the rage, expressing the sorrow, as just, I guess, what is the impact of that on the brain? Because some people would argue, like, well, then I'm putting my attention on the weeds, right? Like, I'm rewiring those networks that I don't want. I don't want to be more ragey. I don't want to have more sorrow.
But I feel like Bliss is any feeling fully felt. And us not feeling our feelings is actually causing an extraordinary amount of suffering and devastation on the planet. But I'm wondering if any of your studies have led you into believing that the expression of the feelings is healthy or unhealthy and why.
It's a complicated question. There's a lot of nuance to it. I'm happy to dig into it, but it's a very complicated question. And bear in mind, my kind of playing field is the workplace. And so in the workplace, expression is usually maladaptive, right? Because what the manager wants to express is, why are you such an idiot?
And I'm overwhelmed and can't handle this. And this organization is a complete mess and I'm out of here. But I would argue that that's the entire human experience. Don't cry, baby. Don't cry. Have a bottle. Don't cry. Have this pill. We can't say what we think to our parents. We can't say what we think to our spouses.
Yes, the maladapted, but that's like a social construct that I think is on all of us. It's just very heightened in the workplace. Yeah. So it's a longer story. I'll see if I can simplify it. So James Gross is one of my heroes as a scientist. He really cracked this whole different code around studying emotions.
What he found is that before an emotion really kicks in, you've got a bunch of different choices, like change the situation, take yourself out of it, whatever. But there's a point at which an emotion kicks in. You can see it on a curve. It goes up pretty fast. Now, let's focus on a positive emotion. I'm walking through a hallway at a party, and someone says, oh, everyone calls me an alien. And suddenly, I pull out a phone and say, well, an alien needs a spaceship. And at that moment, you're experiencing delight. And I'm experiencing delight.
we talk for literally three minutes and then there you are at my spaceship right next week but in that moment when you saw the like the spaceship like in that in that very moment an emotion kicked in now this is a positive emotion you don't need to do anything with it right but when that happens with a negative emotion they're generally much stronger than positive emotions right like
If someone would walk past and insulted you when you're in a happy place, that would have been really strong. What we see is when an emotion actually kicks in, there are much more limited choices now. One of those is to suppress the emotion, and that's generally what organizations tell you to do.
you know, grin and bear it, you know, put up with it, all this. You know, we pay you enough money to not have to, you know, deal with your complaining, whatever else. So, and what we see about suppression, and James actually studied this, he saw that when you suppress emotions, the cognitive load is so high that you don't remember what people are saying to you. It's like you're watching television, but it's even worse, the people around you, their blood pressure goes up.
And they actually become uncomfortable, like a secondhand smoke effect. So suppressing emotions has these really unintended consequences. And the scariest thing of all is, however strong your threat response was in your brain, it's as strong or stronger when you suppress. So it not only doesn't at work, it backfires and makes emotions stronger. Now, if that emotion's raising your cortisol level, trying to suppress it has given you even more cortisol, which reduces immune functioning and increases inflammation, all this stuff.
So anyway, suppression, bad idea. But the alternative to suppression is expression, right? So in the workplace, expression is not a great idea. It's maladaptive for everyone to bring their full self to work in the sense of saying everything they feel all the time.
like things grind to a halt. So maybe in a small team, where you've got a lot of safety and stuff, but you can get close to that. But generally, in a company of 100,000 people, you don't want to say to 100,000 people, tell everyone exactly what you think of them every day. It's not going to get a lot of work done, right? So it stays with suppression. But what happens is a lot of that suppression will probably stay in the body.
And at some point, it'll be healthy to get that out because those threat responses will have stayed. And that's when it's healthy to express, but kind of contain it to some degree, so in a safe adaptive environment. The third strategy, and this is where we've been studying, is teaching people cognitive change strategies. So don't suppress, don't express. Instead, just as that emotion comes in, you have some alternatives. One of them is label the emotion.
And when you just summarize an emotion for lower level emotions, it actually turns them down. But for stronger emotions, you need a strategy called reappraisal. And reappraisal is changing that interpretation that you've made. Remember I said there's data, and then perception, and then interpretation, and then emotion?
So you can go in and change the interpretation you've made from like, oh my gosh, this is overwhelming to, oh my gosh, this is a chance to impress people with my ability to stay cool under pressure or whatever. But you change your interpretation and that really changes the emotional response. So James studied that and he found in a large population controlling for everything the people who did that versus didn't do that basically had dramatically better lives in every measure he could find.
It's ain't one of those people who did what exactly? So when a strong emotion came along, the people who reappraised, so found a different interpretation, both didn't reappraise, did something else that wasn't a cognitive strategy, so they suppressed or expressed, or they just tried to distract themselves.
So the people who reappraised at a strong emotion versus didn't, like he was able to categorize a large volume of people into those two groups. The people who reappraised would dramatically above average on all the things that mattered, like quality relationships, experience of life, like everything that mattered. The people who didn't reappraise were significantly below average on every. And it's just like a reappraise, like a reframe. Like I got hit by a car and it was a fender bender. And it's like, well, thank goodness it didn't total the car.
Or, you know, I met this person, we ended up dating. I wonder if this is the love of my life instead of like making them the enemy.
Yeah, exactly. So it's changing the interpretation. So it turns out to be a really, really powerful thing for leaders to have because they're constantly experiencing strong emotions. And a leader can't really express their emotions at work. So it's sort of not suppression and it's not expression in the workplace. It's labeling and reappraisal. And both of those things require a brain that's noticing your internal states.
noticing your internal states is helped by having a really good language for what's going on in your brain. And also very much helped with meditation because it's giving you that pause, that moment before you just launch into fight or flight. Beautiful. So is there anything else that you wish that I had asked? Is there anything else that you're super excited to share or something that you're really lit up about as of late?
Well, I mean, I've been doing this for 26 years and I rarely get bored. I get overwhelmed quite often because there's just so many opportunities and things. But I lead a team of about 200 people. And as I mentioned, we've impacted millions of people every year. But we've never really had anything for the public. And the work's not like being really available. And people sort of take my work like one of the frameworks that I developed
and published in 2008 has become, and it's sort of hard to flex about your own stuff, but it's become more talked about than Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's a powerful tool for understanding yourself and others. Anyway, we've never really had anything for the public, and we've been challenging ourselves to company having our own growth mindset, saying, look,
We have like almost 100,000 people a week coming to our website. We have nothing for them at all. Maybe we should make it possible for people to learn about their brain if they're not inside a company. So it was crazy idea. So we just launched this. We built a six month experience that we just launched. It's called lead because we love really obvious fluent terms.
And lead is a completely digital experience that anyone can sign up and do that teaches you all about like self regulation, in fact, labeling reappraisal is in there, understanding fluency and capacity issues and big, big chunk on kind of
how to have more insights. So there's a whole body of work on managing yourself, a whole body of work on mobilizing others and on driving results. So for the first time in history, people can come in and learn about these really cool insights if they're not working at Microsoft or Kaiser Permanente or some of the other places. So that's at neuroleadership.com. But actually, that's actually the second most exciting thing right now. The most exciting thing right now is in building that,
we realized that it would be incredibly helpful to have a coach that you could call on right when you're like struggling with something. Like right when you're like walking to that meeting with someone you had a conflict with last week, wouldn't it be amazing to have a coach you could just like call on right then and say, hey, what do I do here? Or, you know, you've got to give someone some tough feedback. How do you do it, right? Or, you know, you walk into a meeting and people are arguing. How do you handle it, right? And so we're like,
We've produced like 26 years of content and tools and research and published six papers. They're like, what if we could put it all into an AI and train an AI to be neuro intelligent?
And it was a crazy idea at the time, and we put a team onto it and sort of invested in it, and it turns out we could create an AI and make it neuro-intelligent. In other words, give it the ability to answer in real-time questions. And we're actually just going live with it right now. We've decided it's a neuro-intelligent leadership enhancing system.
which stands for Niles, N-I-L-E-S. And so folks just go to askniles.com. We're giving it away free for a while. So you'll be able to access it. If you go to askniles.com or askniles.ai, you'll be able to sign up and you'll get access to it. Or it might even be there now when this video comes out. But we're super excited about this capacity to, in real time, right when you're at the point of an impasse.
give people exactly the right insight about the brain that could help them do things differently. My whole company is using it already. We've had it for a week and everyone's using it all the time to help them unpack these impulses. That's what I'm most excited about. Maybe instead of 3 million people, it'll be a much bigger number in the next few years.
Amen. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to take your 23 years of studying neuroscience and the brain and leadership and helping so many leaders and organizations to apply these principles and now making them available to folks who aren't working at these Fortune 100 companies. So I know you just mentioned a few places where people can find you. Is that those are the best places to go if people want to deepen in their work with you?
Yeah, so, so neuroleadership.com is my corporate website. We have a really big podcast about a million downloads so far on all things about the brain and the workplace. So it's not really for individuals. It's for like, you know, HR people, leaders, managers, people thinking about workplace issues in the brain. But it's a really popular podcast on just about every topic at work. It's just called your brain at work. And
My last book is also called Your Brain at Work, and then there's a blog called Your Brain at Work. We just ran with it. And so, sort of within the website, there's stuff for individuals. There's also, we still run the coaching program. We started in, you know, before 2000.
So there's still a brain-based coaching program and some other programs for individuals. But a lot of free stuff, lots and lots of free blogs and podcasts at neuroleadership.com. I've written a bunch of books. A lot of them are quite boring unless you're in the space, like textbooks and stuff. But your brain at work is up to date, super relevant now, and it keeps being relevant. It's in just about every language. And you'll see that on Amazon. Just look up your brain at work.
And then the Niles idea is, you know, originally was inside the lead program. It still is, but we've pulled that out. And so if you just go to askniles.ai or askniles.com, you'll see that. So those are some links that are super helpful for people.
And yeah, otherwise I'm just so delighted to be able to tell some of these stories that don't get told very often. And appreciate your enthusiasm for the science. There's a ton of science to explain the kind of meditation you're doing. And you know what? I think that you're teaching exactly the way I learned to meditate when I was in my teens.
the same principles that helped me for years and years. And in fact, I just started increasing my meditation in the last few weeks. I went back to like most days and I started doing that form of meditation. Interestingly, it's a really interesting cycle. But there's a huge amount of science explaining why that works and why it brings insights
And also on the manifesting side, there's so much evidence for putting positive things into your brain and priming your brain to see things in a more adaptive and helpful way. Wow. Well, it feels like such a beautiful synergy, right? It's like we want both. People want to be inspired by spirit. They want those downloads and we want to be able to back it up. We want to understand that we're not wasting our time and just like anything. It's like once you have a
filtration device if you have the scientific data to prove something that you're they're having an experience of.
It is going to strengthen that and rewire that. So it feels really fun to have this conversation. So sweet friends, I hope that you have enjoyed this conversation as much as I have. I feel excited to introduce those of you who have not yet met Dr. David Rock to his work. And if you've liked this episode, if it has inspired you into wanting to start a meditation habit, you know where to find me at ZivaMeditation.com. If you've enjoyed this conversation,
Please screenshot it. You can post it on Instagram. You can share it with your friends. But our desire is to get this media as medicine into the heads and hearts of as many people who are ready to receive it. And I hope you've enjoyed this episode and we will see you next week on why isn't everyone doing this. I love you and I'll see you next week. Thank you so much.
So this is a crazy time of year because nature is asking us to slow down, to get still, and society is asking us to speed up, travel, throw parties, buy gifts, decorate the house, do year-end reports, and so it can feel like there's this internal struggle. And then on top of it, we're expected to make all of our resolutions and design some amazing year to come. And I get that this can feel a little overwhelming, a little stressful when you're like, you know what I want? It's a nap.
But here's the good news. You can actually design a year with more rest in it. You could design a year with breaks that honors the cycles of nature and the cycles of your body. And that is exactly what we've created inside of design your dream year. So this is an exercise I've been doing with my students in Ziva for over a decade. And I love it because it's going to take you into deep rest. It's going to take you into a guided meditation where I have you play the highlight reel of the previous year so that we can celebrate all of your successes. And by the way,
If no one has told you that you are doing a great job, you are doing a great job. It is challenging being a human right now. So you're doing great. And once you have celebrated all of your successes and even the learnings, then we get to design your dream year for the coming year. So if you would like to join me in this, just click the link below or go to zivameditation.com slash dream and I will send you this free exercise. It has changed my life year after year after year.
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