Are you stuck in the habit of believing you're not good enough? Well, yes, yes I do. Hello, my name is Chester Elton and my co-author, and my dear friend is Adrian Gostick. Welcome, Adrian. Well, thanks, Ches. Yeah, do you or someone you care about maybe fixate on a particular story about yourself that you wish you could change. Or any negative beliefs holding you back from reaching your fullest potential. That's what our guest today is going to address. As always, we hope the time you spend with us will help reduce the stigma of anxiety at work and in your personal life. And with us is our new friend, Nicola Vignola, a neuroscientist, corporate consultant, and brain performance coach with a bachelor's degree in neuroscience and a master's in organizational psychology, Nicole educates people in the science of human optimization, health and longevity, and how to enable employees to perform better in their daily lives, and in turn, bring peak performance to the workplace. Her first book, Rewire, Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change, from Harper Collins, has just been published. So congratulations, Nicole. Welcome to the podcast. We are delighted to have you here today Thank you so much for having me. It's great to meet you both Well, thanks Nicole Nicole is joining us from the isles of Portugal and off the coast of Portugal And we are so delighted to have you on the podcast. You know first off looks like you're publishing with our publisher Harper Collins and I have rewiring Rewiring our brain, so why do we need that you say our brains have a negativity bias? So why do we need to start rewiring our brains? Yes, well you know many people are sitting at home And they have thoughts habits behaviors that are perhaps holding them back these narratives that they've been repeating to themselves for a long time, you know, things like, I'm not good enough, I could never, that's not for me. But, you know, for a long time we didn't know that the brain was capable of change in adulthood. And only up until recently we realized that we have plasticity up until old age, so we can change these habits, we can change these behaviors. What neuroscience tells us is that these habits, thoughts, behaviors reside within the neurons or the wiring of our brain. And that's why the book is called Rewire, because we can actually rewire our pathways to let go of these self-limiting beliefs and habits and sort of reshape ourselves to be whoever we want to be. Excellent. So talk about some of the common issues that we face at work. You know, work specifically, how can we rewire our brains to be more optimistic and, you know, particularly now, be more resilient. Yes, well as Adrian said, we do have this negativity bias, so we are hardwired to attach more importance to the negative things in life, probably due to evolution, but we can change that, which is great. So you may find yourself stuck in a loop of repeating these particular habits or jumping to conclusions or jumping to these negative assumptions, either about yourselves or your coworkers, but we can actually reframe that. So one way is to, firstly, in the beginning you mentioned something I wanted to say, a tool that we can use to regulate our central nervous system is the physiological sigh. So a double inhale through the nose, little pause, and a long exhale through the mouth. So let's do it together, we'll do it twice. One more. That feels nice. That feels very nice. It does. And what that does is that it interjects that kind of thought process and it alleviates the stress response. Because when we are feeling stressed or we may be sort of hypervigilant, aroused at work, it's hard to reason with ourselves. It's hard to be logical in that mindset because our emotional brain tends to take over, and that's when that negativity bias kicks in. Now, our brain is designed to run from situations, not reason with them. So if there was a lion in your vicinity, you wouldn't be trying to understand why the lion is there. You'd probably try and get away from it. At work, the brain doesn't really differentiate between stress at work, like your boss coming towards you or a line. So you have to regulate your central nervous system by doing that breathing response, and then you can reframe. So you can reframe it into something more realistic. And it's not about plastering on some toxic positivity on top and saying, oh, it's all fine, it's all good. You might not know something, but the reframing process is saying, OK, I'm not good at this right now, but I can learn and I can ask the right questions to get to the point where I know what to do. I wanted to get into a few other things, but before you just brought up that idea of toxic positivity that we tend to... I think as bosses we do that. Hey, slap a smile on your face, Chester. Get out there and you've got work to do. We tend to do that as organizations. Why is that so, or can be so negative? Yeah, well because it doesn't address the root issue. It's kind of like trying to plaster this, like putting a band-aid on top of it, but it's not actually changing. And I think that being more realistic, like reframing it into something that is logical, more sensical, can help us be more realistic about it because we can't lie to ourselves. The brain, we know when we're lying to ourselves, so we can't say, oh, actually, you are wonderful at this. Don't worry about it. Just dive in the deep end. It will be fine. That's why, as humans, we just have an understanding that we can't lie to ourselves. Yeah, yeah. We can only fool some of the people some of the time, and we can't fool ourselves probably ever. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so take us through this idea of a growth mindset. Carol Dweck of Stanford has talked about this, others have talked about this. You write about this idea. Why is, so if we start rewiring our brains to look at a more maybe positive aspect, first off, what is a growth mindset and how and why would we head toward that? Yes, well, in the book I reference Carol Dweck's research. She's the leading researcher in this field. The growth mindset attaches itself to the journey of the learning, whereas a fixed mindset will attach themselves to the outcome. Now, someone with a fixed mindset, unfortunately, will attach their identity to the outcome. So if you fail at work or you try and go on your own business endeavor and that fails, someone with a fixed mindset will attribute that to being something wrong with themselves and it will impact their self-worth, whereas someone with a growth mindset will learn that, OK, this is a learning curve. I did that wrong. Let's divert and let's maybe redirect and try something new. Let's not do that again because that led us to failure. Now, the way that I've described it in the book is that we are a product of everything we've ever experienced and essentially failure is a data point. It's a data entry point that says, okay, we did this and it went wrong. We're a software that needs to upgrade. What can we do to make sure that we don't ever do that again? And essentially we're just learning, teaching the system what to do and what not to do, which I think is a wonderful thing. Yeah, growth mindset. It's so interesting you say that about we are the product of sort of everything we've done. I don't think we just as people take the time to sort of you know look back enough. Yeah, and say hey, these are all the things that you know that reflection is kind of a discipline as well. You say there's a simple neural hack to replace bad habits and good ones by rewiring your associations. Take us through that. You know, I've always been a big fan of your community, the people you surround yourself with. So when you said, you know, through your associations, that really popped out at me. I'd love your take on that. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, our brain is a piece of machinery that works by association, so cue, trigger, response, and then reward comes after that. So there may be things in your environment that let's use you want to maybe cut down on drinking as an example. You hang out with particular friends that remind you, and this is not that they're bad influencers, it's just that association that maybe you have made with this person and drinking. So if you're trying to stop drinking, putting yourself in a pub and then trying to stop drinking, or you guys call it bars in the US, it's going to be very difficult, right? So you probably want to take yourself away from that association first, change the habit, and then put yourself back in an environment where you have the ingrained habit of not drinking in there. Now, one of the hacks that I've used in the book is that if the brain works by association, then we can actually kind of trick ourselves, or we can hack ourselves, if you will. So if you do something sort of, let's put it in quotes and quote negative, maybe you ruminate or you tend to smoke or whatever it is, you can actually add something positive to the end of that firing sequence because then what eventually will happen is you've got this sequence of, so what tends to happen, let me just backtrack a little bit, lunchtime comes around, you're stressed, lunchtime is like, oh, the clock is there. I normally have my cigarette at this time. What will happen over time is if you add the positive thing at the end, where it'd be, I don't know, drinking water or doing the physiological sigh, or maybe spending a few minutes in gratitude, what will happen eventually is that that association will then fast track, because you're going to say, okay, well, actually, I know that I want to smoke, and after smoking comes the good stuff. So I'm just going to, I'm going to skip that part because I'm there now and I'm going to get to the good stuff. Isn't that interesting? Skip the bad stuff, get to the good stuff, get to the good feeling that you'll have by not smoking. You know, and it is so funny how we trick ourselves to the negative, right? Like I was on this habit, I said, look, I've got to cut out sugar. I have an incredible sweet tooth, Nicole. I mean, my philosophy of life. Yeah, it's like, you know, I've convinced myself that not only does chocolate taste good, it's good for you and you can never have too much, right? That was my philosophy. I do think I have a little bit of chocolate every day. Dark chocolate. Yeah, yeah. But my mother used to introduce herself as a chocoholic, you know, and so I come by it naturally. And isn't it funny how we trick ourselves and say, well, there's a bunch of chocolate and I'll eat the rest of it and then it'll be gone and then I won't be tempted. As opposed to, your hack is, you're gonna feel terrible after you eat all that chocolate, you know you will, get to the good part, reward yourself for the good feeling, and don't go to the cookie cupboard or the chocolate cupboard. I love that, thank you. Yes, and just to add to that, if you do eat the chocolate or go to the cookie cupboard, the problem is that we tend to berate ourselves for that then, so we go into this cyclical pattern of talking badly to ourselves and thinking, oh I should have, should have, should have, should have. And you know it's a spiral. Now if you instead have say two blocks instead of your usual sort of something, I mean two squares, not the whole bar. So let's say you have two squares instead of the whole bar, what would normally happen is someone would berate themselves for having the chocolate anyway. Whereas instead we should say, well look, I only ate two blocks instead of the whole bar. And that's wonderful because then that'll make you feel good and dopamine is released in that instance and dopamine is a reward based learning mechanism so when there's dopamine, dopamine tells you what made you feel good and you want to do that again so wanting to congratulate yourself and being proud of yourself is going to then make you feel good. Awesome, that's great. Hey how do people learn more about your work Nicole? Where would you send them? I only have Instagram. I'm trying to do Tick Tock, but it's not really working out for me at the moment. But it's Nicole's neuroscience. And of course, I have my book, rewire where I've spoken about this extensively, I think it's an amalgamation of my entire social media in one book. Well, and a lot of your book, just so people know is about you know, their lives. You know, there's some parts, you know, that may touch on work, but there's other parts and I thought this was really interesting You write about the neuroscience of a breakup now Sometimes we break up with our companies or our bosses or whatever so so this may work But what's going on in the brain during a breakup? Why do we feel so addicted sometimes to you know texting our exes or checking up on them? And yeah, it was a little of that Yes, but I'm glad you said about the work thing because in the book I've kind of called it endings and losses. It's the mourning of a life you could have had. Maybe it's the job you were supposed to get, the dream you had that you didn't end up pursuing. It doesn't have to just be breakups. Let's use breakups as an example. When we go through a breakup, we're going through a bit of a withdrawal period. The dopamine, the serotonin, the oxytocin, all the feel-good chemicals that you would have gotten from being in a relationship, whether it have been a good relationship or a toxic one, either way, those chemicals are still there. And arguably, the toxic relationships are actually harder to send you into more of a sort of withdrawal period. What happens is your brain is gonna try and find answers. It wants to avenge what went wrong and try and, we have an error detection area in our brain that tells us what we could have done differently and et cetera. So we can dwell on the past and worry about what we could have done differently or we can use that information for future relationships. So with that dopamine activity or that dopamine, sorry, the dopamine withdrawal, may I say, we tend to find ourselves in reward-seeking behaviors such as texting your ex, scrolling their Instagram, maybe checking up on their new partner, finding out what they're doing, and then next thing you know, you know about the new partner's parents, and that's when it gets really weird. So unfortunately, going cold turkey and finding healthier ways to get that dopamine fix is a much better route so that you don't reinforce, again, this passion, because I have friends who have been broken up with their exes for like two years, but they're still in a habit of checking them because it's just something that they now do. It's like, wake up, need to see what he's doing. And hope it's going badly. Yeah, to some degree. The revenge part. It's really interesting, you say that in personal relationships, you know, Adrian mentioned that you break up with your company. We had an occasion where we left the company we were at to strike that on our own. I remember being really torn up about that because of the way it happened. The details now don't matter. Having lunch with a friend of mine and he looked at me and said, why are you so surprised? Breaking up is hard to do. Your feelings are going to get hurt, their feelings are going to get hurt. It's going to be bad, so just brace yourself, you know, and accept that and move on. Well, the neural wiring of your brain, oh, sorry. No, go ahead, finish up, please. Yeah, I was gonna say, your brain has wired itself to enact particular habits and routines. So maybe if you're breaking up in a relationship, you would have called that person as soon as you walk out of the office, or in your case, you would have done particular things that made you feel comfortable within your work environment. When that's gone, you're having to adjust that neural firing, the neural patterns, and your new habits, new routines, which can make you feel a bit sort of at unease in the beginning. Yeah, a little adrift. Yeah, I certainly went through that. Yeah, yeah. Aiden is a rock. Me, I'm the emotional mess in our relationship, no question. I don't think anybody's gonna argue that. We can cry together, Chester. Yeah, there you go. After the podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, listen, you talk about the subconscious brain in your book, and this has always been a mystery to me because it's your subconscious, right? It's that thing that's underneath the underneath that's underneath. How do you affect your subconscious? Isn't it kind of you don't know it's there? That's why we call it the subconscious. And you see that it really has a dramatic impact on most of our habits. So how do we impact the subconscious? So let me give you a bit of a background on it so it helps you understand a little bit better. So your brain wants to maximize efficiency. So it's not going to remind you of all the things that you do. So for example, you don't think about how you walk into a room and put on the light or make your coffee, you just do it. That's part of your subconscious. And all that is, is that that conscious habit has been so deeply ingrained that now it becomes automatic. That is why driving can feel subconscious sometimes. You kind of get to your destination, you think, how did I get here? But you do that route so many times that you don't have to think about it consciously. Because our conscious brain only takes for around five to 10% of our processes on a daily basis. So the brain wants to maximize efficiency and save energy for more cognitively demanding tasks. Problem solving, having conversations with your friends, having these conversations on these podcasts, which you wouldn't be able to do on a subconscious level. So that's all that the subconscious is, is patterns that have been so deeply ingrained that they become automatic. We call it automaticity. Now, for some people, their programming is fine. We grew up maybe in a family that nurtured your skills and encouraged them, but for some people, that programming might have been unhelpful. Maybe they picked up patterns from observing their parents interact in the world because that's how we learn the rules about the world when we're growing up. And maybe a common example is when children are in an environment where parents yell at each other, and they learn that communicating to people is through yelling or stressful situations demand screaming. And then that's something that has become part of the subconscious but can be reprogrammed when you bring it to your attention. When you bring it to your attention, isn't it Carl Jung that said, until you make the unconscious conscious, you will call it fate. It will drive your life and you'll call it fate. And I love that quote because it's true. So the subconscious really is just something that's been deep ingrained and to change that you have to bring it to your conscious attention and sort of divert that route. Okay, I normally yell in these situations when my partner walks in and I'm writing an email so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go, breathe, hey, I'm just writing an email at the moment, can I get back to you in five minutes? Excellent. You know? Thank you. You're welcome. That's great. No, we appreciate it. Yeah, no, this has been very good practical advice. Give us some ideas of how you keep yourself mentally sharp and some of the practices that you found personally help you thrive, Nicole. I mean, I have a tendency to be super anxious if I leave it unchecked. I mean, I have to kind of be on top of it. The social anxiety, it really is like borderline kills me sometimes. So for me, it really is not grabbing my phone first thing in the morning. When you do that, you're increasing dopamine very early on. You're also putting yourself in a state of beta and gamma activity, high stress. Your brainwaves are quite a low frequency when you wake up, when they move from sleepiness to wakefulness. And it's quite a wonderful time of the morning where you could be creative and sort of have mind-wandering thoughts, which are quite wonderful. So, grabbing your phone first thing kind of is quite jarring to the brain. So, making sure that I delay social media use, any emails. I work with the US, so I have a tendency to sometimes want to wake up and check emails first thing because I know that the US would have sent me an email when I was asleep. So, that's been kind of a feat. And then there's two things that I do every single day. It's either meditate or exercise. So move or meditate, M or M basically I call it. And if I can't move on for whatever reason, maybe I'm busy or I've used it as an excuse yet again, then I have to meditate. And then the last hack, this is arguably the most important one. When I wake up, I hydrate first thing. A 2% dehydration can cause temporary sort of a psychomotor activity and cognitive impairment. Now, if you've gone to bed at, say, 10 o'clock, you probably wouldn't have drunk since 8 o'clock. You wake up, let's say, 6 o'clock, that's 10 hours of not being hydrated, and your brain is going to be impacted by that. So hydration first thing, get those brainwaves firing, get those neurons working, and just get everything a little bit buzzed up. And then I, unfortunately, I'm a caffeine addict. I have coffee first thing in the morning. I know you're supposed to delay it by 90 minutes, but that's my vice, and so be it. I'm a human. Well, don't beat yourself up about that. I don't. I love it. You're subconscious. I live for my coffee. If only you could rewire your brain somehow. Well, the thing is, you have to, exactly, you have to either want to change it or accept it, and I accept it. I love my coffee Gets me out of bed nice save yeah Good hey listen if you had like one or two things you wanted people to take away from the conversation what might be be I Want them to know that I know I know your podcast is called anxiety at work And I want them to know that we talk about plasticity in the sense that we can make new habits But plasticity works both ways we can undo habits as well. We can undo pathways as well. So anxiety can become part of an extinction learning mechanism whereby parts that, things that trigger you can diminish in its effectiveness and how much impact they have on you. So the brain is wonderfully plastic up until old age. We know that, and it works both ways. You can do pathways and you can undo pathways. So yeah, that's what I want people to know. Excellent. They're not stuck. Yeah, thank you so much, Nicole. You're so welcome. What a delightful conversation. I can hear the birds in the background. Oh, yeah. Wonderful. On your tropical island. Yes. You and I are both very jealous. Thank you. Listen, her book is Rewire, Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts, and Create Lasting Change. It's from HarperCollins. It's newly out. I'm sure you can find it on Amazon and find bookstores everywhere. Treat yourself to Nicole's great advice. And Nicole, we're just delighted to have had you on our podcast. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful. I appreciate you both. So Adrian, rewiring your brain, rewiring your habits and dealing with your subconscious, give me two or three of your takeaways. Well first off, plasticity. We've talked before about this. Sometimes we think about it in one way, but she's saying, look, plasticity works both ways. You can form new habits, you can break old habits, but sometimes we get stuck in loops and no more so than at work where maybe we've had a bad experience doing something, bad experience public speaking maybe, or a bad experience working with men bosses or women bosses or whatever it is that we think, oh, no, we can change the way we think. And that's a really powerful idea as we move forward. Yeah, we don't have to stay where we're stuck. And she talks about being stuck, right? I thought it was interesting. She said, failure is a data point. It's just a data point. Don't beat yourself up on it. Take that data point, put it in. The other thing she mentioned is that we really are a product of our entire lives. Don't forget that. You've got a lot of habits. You've had a lot of experiences. That's why you are who you are. It doesn't mean you have to continue to be stuck in whatever modality you're in, but you can change and rewire. Then she talks about her hacks. What did you think about those? Well, let me just get this idea, too, before I move on because I wrote some things down too about this idea of the mistakes we make, et cetera, that life is a learning curve and the failure is data points. I thought of our friends at WD-40. For those who don't know, WD-40 stands for Water Displacement Fortieth Formula. They're very proud that 39 formulas before failed. Again, they weren't failures, they were data points. They learned every way along the way. And I think that's the idea, is that, what are we doing to move ourselves forward versus thinking, oh, I'm a failure, failure. Now, coming to these hacks, I just thought, what did she say? The physiological side, one of those little life hacks we can put into place. I think these are really powerful to not just be Pollyanna, but to maybe think and do some things in a more positive way. Yeah, and that you can do this. I thought she was very encouraging. You know, you can change habits, you can change the way you do things. And I love that she gives some really practical advice along that line. I wanna find out what you thought about her theories on breakups. Yeah. Well, you know, luckily I have been happily married for 41 years this year. So yeah, we've broken up with a one organization that we, yeah, it was a little hard. Well, and you know, and, and some relationships along the way that didn't work out. It is, it is interesting how you, well, at least I did, how you really internalize all that and you really do beat yourself up, you know, and, and it's been years and years since that happened. And I still have those moments when I reflect and think, could have done that better, should have been more gracious, should have been more careful the way we did those. Then the other part of me kicks in and says, and they could have been nicer too. Isn't it interesting the way we hold on that for a long time? It's really unhealthy. The idea, we've got to rewire ourselves, we've got to use that plasticity to form new habits and to take away the good that we had. Those chemicals that were in our brains, she's right, that were making us feel good. There were a lot of good things. Let's remember those. Let's move on. Yeah. And when I think of really good things in my life, who do I think of? I think of our producer, Brent Klein. No question about it. Yeah. And Kristi Lawrence, who brings in all these amazing guests. We have all these wonderful conversations. Hey, if you like the podcast, please share it. We'd love to have you come visit thecultureworks.com as well to see all the fun stuff we're doing there, a lot of free takeaways on how to help your team not just survive but thrive. We like speaking too, don't we? Yeah, we do. We're virtually or in person around the world on the topics of culture, teamwork, resilience. Give us a talk. We'd love to talk to you about your event. We'd also love you to try out a copy of our new training that is based on anxiety at work. It's called the Anxiety at Work Resilience Training. And this is several hours of in-depth training from me and Chester and Anthony Gostik, our co-author. And we have guests joining us from around the world, different executives who have used some of these philosophies, and we get into the eight steps of how you can build a really resilient team. It's some powerful, powerful training, isn't it, Chess? Yeah, really, it was a lot of fun putting it together and really eye-opening, you know, and of course, buy the book. It's available in Audible, available at fine bookstores digitally, and on lit video books as well. So lots of resources, lots of places to get it. And Adrian, as always, a delight to be with you here today. I'll give you the last word. Well, it's been fun. Once again, we've learned a lot and we've had some laughs. Jess, thanks again for being with me today. And to everybody, we wish you the best of mental health..