Unsaid @ Work

Understanding your emotional brain with neuroscience with Lori Shook

• Catherine Stagg-Macey • Season 2 • Episode 58

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Our emotional brain reacts quickly without thinking, often driven by biases.

In this episode, my guest Lori Shook, helps us gain a deeper understanding of how our brain and body react to stress and emotions in the workplace.

In our conversation, we seek to:

  • Understand the neuroscience behind our need for belonging and its influence on our well-being and performance at work.
  • Gain insights into the connection between neuroscience and coaching techniques for personal and professional development.
  • Discover the role of the prefrontal cortex in managing emotions, making logical choices, and problem-solving.
  • Learn about the limbic system and its influence on our emotional responses and decision-making processes.
  • Gain practical strategies to create a sense of belonging, fairness, and certainty as a leader in the workplace.

Lori Shook has been a coach for 27 years and has been training coaches for 25 years.  Along the way she’s also developed other talents, especially in training others. Her superpower is to demystify what’s going on and present it back to people in a palatable way – which is why she’s accumulated a pretty big fan base.

She believes that neuroscience is one of the key factors that helps to people understand themselves, their interactions with others and to develop “people skills”.
Lori refers to her model, Be SAFE and Certain, and you can follow along with the visual here.

Follow Lori on Linkedin and check out her program, Rewired to Relate

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Big shout out to my podcast magician, Marc at iRonickMedia for making this real.

Thanks for listening!

Lori Shook:

because we didn't get the full picture, we need our PFC to go, Okay, what's the big picture here and we have to slow down to do that. Or PFC operates at a slower rate, like a factor of four or five, compared to the limbic system. So we need to slow it down and give ourselves a chance to engage the PFC. So we can do its magic of noticing the big picture, the complexity, incorporating other people's perspectives, limbic system doesn't care about any of that stuff. It's just going wow, I see this problem problem. And here's the thing and let's go and let's solve it this way. Let's go build a wall.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

Hello, and welcome back to unset. At work, I'm your host, Catherine Stagg Macy. I'm an executive coach and team coach, and I'm interested in the conversations that we're not having at work. Today, I've got a treat for you, as I've invited someone that I considered to be an elder in the coaching community, this person was at the forefront of coaching and over the years, she's she's really continue to challenge and grow the industry for the better. I've attended many of her programs that she's created or that she's helped create. And I know that she's got a really deep understanding of how as humans operate. So today with the help, we're going to talk about neuroscience, and how do we apply this to ourselves and our team. So let me tell you a bit more about my guest and what you can expect. My guest is Laurie shuck, who has been a coach for 27 years, and been training coaches for 25. Along the way, she has developed other talents, of course, especially in training others, her superpower is to demystify what's going on. And I've certainly experienced that, and presented back to people in a palatable way, something the way that people can get their arms around. That's why she's got a pretty big fan base, including me. Nowadays, she's got three programs that she offers, she uses her demystifying power and a coach is going corporate program, which he helps coaches use a personal development approach to coaching. Her alchemy program breaks down how to smoothly co facilitate with someone else, and create magical training or team coaching experiences. And then more recently, which is gonna be the focus of our conversation. Today, she's created her suite of rewired programs, which is the leadership development programs all using neuroscience at its core. And she says neuroscience is one of the key factors that helps people understand themselves, their interactions with others and develop people skills. So that's what we're going to be talking about today, we're going to look at creating a deeper understanding of how our emotional brain is actually running the show. We all think we're rational, I like to think that too, but we aren't. And Laurie will explain this through now what is very evident in the neuroscience research, he's going to share with us how we can become more aware of our emotional brain and that it is running the show. And a tip for managing that in real time, she's gonna help us make the links of how we can use this insight for ourselves to start with, because leadership starts inside and then with other people, and also how we can influence other people. This is gonna be the first of two episodes that Laurie, she makes reference to her be safe and certain model in this episode, and it's a next week episode where she she coaches me on an issue I'm stuck on and it will get much more into detail with that model. But so just know that this is a light touch on the details of this model and more coming next week. But for now, let's go and learn about our emotional brain with Lori. Lori, welcome to the podcast. It's so nice to have you here.

Lori Shook:

Thank you, Catherine. It's great to be here. I look forward to a great conversation with you.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

We've been planning this conversation for a little while as well, haven't we? We have? Typically, yeah, we keep having to postpone it. So I'm glad we've made it. So today we're going to do what neuroscience and what listeners should know care about neuroscience. And what do we mean by I think it's a term that I know of. But let's unpack what we mean by that neuroscience is a term and why should we care? Yeah,

Lori Shook:

so neuroscience, first of all, is a massive subject broken down into hundreds of different sub parts. And the type of neuroscience that we're talking about is the emotional brain and what it's doing. And in the last 20 years or so, there's been a lot of research on what's going on in the brain for all those different types of neuroscience. But let's keep focusing on the emotional bit and the interpersonal bit. So what we care about is what's going on in my brain, how does that affects me, my emotions, my behavior, and my feeling of how things are going, and then my interactions with others, it has a huge impact on how we interact with others. And if we understand that we can modify how we behave, we can influence others better. There's a lot of different things that we can do with it. When we understand some of the basics.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

You're giving us a real leadership hack here, which is that I know you and I live with like, I

Lori Shook:

love that term. Yeah, yeah, there's Yeah, many aspects of leadership are enhanced. I think by knowing a bit about what's going on in brain. It

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

also feels like a key to emotional intelligence, which gets thrown around but I think a lot of us don't really understand like, yes, we get what I mean, but how do I break that down for me? Absolutely.

Lori Shook:

I did a lot of emotional intelligence based on neuroscience. So emotional intelligence. As we could define as, how do I understand my own emotions? How do I manage them? And how do I understand others and where their emotions may be coming from, not necessarily manage others, but we can influence others, as well at least understand them have some compassion for others, and why they might be having a meltdown or an emotional reaction that we might think, wow, that's just really irrational. Yeah, it is. The brain isn't necessarily rational, this emotional brain isn't necessarily rational. But

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

it brings a bit more science to the understanding your emotions, I've had experiences where I asked my client how they're feeling, and then they can can you stop asking me that? Because I have no idea. I love with with love. I've been there. I don't mean to shame anyone he doesn't. He doesn't know how to navigate the equation. Why would any of us you know, most of us, I'm told that most

Lori Shook:

of us are not taught that it's not taught in schools. It's not used in families a lot of time. So where would people learn that? A lot of times we're taught to deny our emotions, and we do feel obey. And we deny those emotions, because it helps us get along better, or it helps us get over things or whatever the reason, just fit

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

in. Before you started your decades long career in coaching. You were in the US Navy, is that way?

Lori Shook:

Yeah, I wasn't in the Navy. I was a civil servant. I know, I worked for the Navy. So I worked in a navy lab for about 12 years

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

as our Marines, I think that knowing about you says so much about how do you end up with this curiosity by neuroscience, because I know it's a real passion of you. And

Lori Shook:

it's I've always liked biology and a bit of physiology, I was heading towards being a biologist. But there was too much memorization in that. So engineering, instead, learn a few principles and then apply them. That's what I love. So I've always been well, being an engineer, I had a and being from California, I had a personal development fascination. I was always interested in psychology from late teenage years, like what's going on? What's going on with me? What's going on with the world? So there was an interest in psychology. But I really studied engineering. Yeah, there was always this little passion on the side about what's going on over here in our brains, and why do we do the things we do and all of that. So that's been with me constantly, since then. And as I went into engineering, it wasn't satisfying. And so I came back to the psychology ish kind of thing, and studying coaching. And yet, the science then stuck with me. So it's been a combination of the psychology science thing all the time. And it's like, I couldn't not see the neuroscience stuff that was going on. And the kind of books that I read were the more logical, pragmatic side of emotions like Candace pert, and the Molecules of Emotion, how does how do emotions show up in our bodies and our brains and what's going on there? That was in the 1990s. And then that just led to other books and research that was coming out in the early 2000s. And by that time, I was coaching and training coaches and starting to sprinkle in, here's some of the things I'm learning about neuroscience and what the brain is doing. I was seeing the mapping between the coaching tools we were using in the neuroscience that was coming out, and it just seemed obvious, but this is why we're doing this thing in coaching. And this is the impact that we're having. And here's why that impact works. Because the neurosciences saying so, and people tended to like that. A lot of people did. Some people didn't want to have anything to do with it. But there were plenty of people were like, Oh, thank you. Now I understand why we do this thing and coaching. I'm

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

laughing here to myself, because our stories are so similar. Like, I got a BSc in computer science, but a passion for serial killer books, because the books were is like some sort of insight into how the mechanics of a mind I mean, it's a bit pathological. But anyway, yeah, I didn't live in California. It was all I had. South Africa in the 80s. It's the closest I could get with serial killer novels. So right, yeah. And I try to bring them two together the sort of the science, how do you rationally understand what's going on with the more feely touchy supposedly feely touchy stuff was coaching?

Lori Shook:

Gosh, I'd love to go off piste a little on the serial killer novels.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

That's another episode. What could we learn from serial killers?

Lori Shook:

Yeah, yeah. And the psychopathic brain, for example, is fascinating. I

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

think they're too okay. Notice off another search officer long lessons from the apocalypse. There we go. So you've landed in this place of blending the coaching tools of psychology understanding of the human through the empathizing with the human, rather, the understanding of the brain. Tell us a bit more about that approach.

Lori Shook:

So some of the basics of this approach, first of all, is about understanding the emotional brain and how powerful it is. I'm sure people have heard it before. We tend to think that we're logical beings and we make logical decisions. But really, this emotional brain is driving so much, and it's mostly unconscious. And there are things we like and things we don't like and all of those are underpinned by what our brain is telling us is good for us. So the emotional brain, it's all about survival. And it's been programmed, I think of it all is programming and chemistry, by the way, it's been programmed to help us survive by, say, for example, belonging, having a yearning for belonging, a need for belonging. And so we're programmed to have a need for belonging, because that keeps us alive, because it kept us alive, kept our ancestors alive on the savanna. If you had the impulse to go out and leave your tribe, you were much more likely to be eaten by a woolly mammoth or attacked by a rival tribe or something like that. And so the ones who develop the impulse to stay the need for belonging, in other words, there's the ones who survived and passed on genes. So that's what I mean by programming. It's an evolutionary kind of thing. So we have this need for belonging, we want to be a part of we feel good when we're a part of whether it's a family, a team, a tribe, friendship group, one of the worst things that can happen to us is to be kicked out to be excluded. And that's super painful. And the reason it's painful is that it's violating this inner need of ours to belong. And that has so many implications for inclusion work, for one thing, but also just our daily experience of do I feel like my team likes me, am I part of this team? Do I have a role to play? Am I in or am I out? And, man, if you understand that, it's like, okay, so how can I talk to my team, a leader? How can they talk to their team, about what's coming next? You know, if you have a meeting, just a small thing, if you have a meeting, and you invite three quarters of the team, and you're not inviting the other quarter of the team, that quarter, the team might go, Well, what about me? How come I'm not invited. And so then we ended up inviting all these people to a team meeting, or some kind of functional meeting, where a quarter of them don't belong. And we're doing it because we're just trying to play nice and have people feel included, but maybe it's not needed. And so there's pressures, both ways to do things that make sure people feel included. But maybe we also need to explain, here's what this meeting is about. I'm not inviting you. Because not to say you're excluded. It's just, you'll be invited to these meetings, because that's where you're needed. And just having software and where you belong. And having some awareness of that can help us make the small decisions every day and keep the team engaged and happy. And, and their experience will be Oh, I'm included. Oh, I can feel good about that. And that creates dopamine. And what's talked about as moving towards energy. Okay, great. I'm motivated towards and the exclusion is moving away from okay, you excluded me, well, I'm not coming next time, is the kind of thing that the way our brain works.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

It makes me think of redundancy announcements to high stakes version of belonging and not belonging. Right. Absolutely. And all that all the communications before we are thinking of wearing a consultation for you might be enlist. Yeah, massive need to belong and fear of not belonging in their own. Yeah, a fear of not

Lori Shook:

belonging, because part of what the brain does is anticipates and sort of projects into the future. And it isn't necessarily realistic. Oh, you know, redundancy announcements are coming, I'm probably on the list. The brain is fear oriented, and it'll go for the worst Avenue, oh, I'm probably on the list. So now, I'm afraid because it might be on that list. And it might not be logically true at all. But we convince ourselves and so then, we start getting stressed, because that's what happens when we have these threats to our belonging or other factors, we start getting stressed, and then we don't sleep well. And then we don't work well. And then we end up on the list because we've been down this path of stressing ourselves out over nothing

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

to ourselves. And it seems that when these needs are not being met, there's a whole bunch of hormones that have been kicked off. You mentioned, dopamine, I think, but in the negative sense, the cortisol, adrenaline and other hormones that

Lori Shook:

exists. Exactly, yeah, so cortisol is a stress hormone. And that gets released when we, when our brain is saying this is dangerous for you do something don't go there or it's not right. You get cortisol, it's which is preparing the body to do something and adrenaline, which gives us the energy and the muscle power to, to act in some ways. And our bodies are not designed for regular doses of both of those chemicals.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

And then in the reverse if the need is met. So we go and I weigh day, like we know we do some great activities, and we belong to the team and yeah, but in a real genuine way, not in the kumbaya kind of way. Does the dopamine get released them when my need for belonging is met?

Lori Shook:

Absolutely. Yeah. So in a way day or in little things during a regular day, I'm included in the meeting or my contributions are valuable acknowledge of demand for that, that has us keep moving, keeping motivated.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

When you say emotional brain do you mean the limbic brain or the

Lori Shook:

limbic system is often is what I use to refer to to it now there's some debate in the neuroscience community about whether that's a good expression or not. But whatever I, my philosophy is, models are all wrong, but some are useful. And so it's a model that I use because I think it's useful. The limbic system is a collection of different things like the amygdala, a lot of people have heard of the amygdala and amygdala hijack has just one of the parts. There's other parts that notice what's going on. And the part that alerts the brain, hey, something's happening, and the amygdala that's triggering the chemicals. They're all working together, and they connect with our memory. So something in the present might be looking like something in the past. And so the memory goes, Hey, look at this, this is a dangerous situation, because it was in the past. So yeah, so limbic system, the collection of those bits that are working together to help us survive according

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

the emotional brain, the big system is the same, referring to some of the same sort of things, which is then different from your prefrontal cortex, which is the cognitive functioning rational, where we think we spend 90% of our time, we think we spend

Lori Shook:

90% of our time there, but we don't. The prefrontal cortex or PFC I often use for prefrontal cortex is, yeah, a rational part of the brain that can manage all those emotions. And on a good day, we have a lot of PFC power, and we can manage our emotions and make logical choices. And we can become more aware of how the limbic system and the emotions are present in our bodies and our minds and what the impulses are from the emotions, we can just become a lot more aware of that and make choices, more conscious choices about how we want to move forward. PFC is also a problem solving brain, it's powerful. And it does a lot of amazing things, like, withstand uncertainty and notice complexity, our limbic system and emotional brain, it likes to narrow things down into really simplistic things and then solve those simplistic things, which is why we end up with a lot of solutions that are not necessarily appropriate. Because we didn't get the full picture. We need our PFC to go okay, what's the big picture here, and we have to slow down to do that. Or PSC operates at a slower rate, like a factor of four or five, compared to the limbic system. So we need to slow it down and give ourselves a chance to engage the PFC. So we can do its magic of noticing the big picture, the complexity, incorporating other people's perspectives, limbic system doesn't care about any of that stuff. It's just going, Wow, I see this problem problem. It's, here's the thing, and let's go and let's solve it this way. Let's go build a wall.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

That we all have biases live like that, like sunk fallacy and any sort of cognitive biases live in the limbic system, because it's the way of getting to an answer really quickly, because you make a whole bunch of assumptions.

Lori Shook:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of other functions going on in the brain. And the limbic system is certainly connecting to a lot of them. But there's like a stored set of guidelines that say, This is good, and this is bad. And some of those we've investigated and others we've just picked up. Some of these unconscious biases we've just picked up through life and or some of them are programmed in. I read a study the other day of some students, usually, psychologies tests are done students, university students, they were watching some misuse, or perhaps abuse of a particular person. And their responses were being measured by them. And the limbic system was responding. You know, if the person looked like them, the limbic system would respond with a real response as if that was happening to me. So if, let's say, a person who looked like me, was being abused, I would have the reaction of, no, that's horrible. But if the person didn't look like me, the limbic system was not responding like that it wasn't having the same response. And yet, when asked consciously, how would you respond to this? What do you think of this, the PFC was kicking in, and the PFC then had the person connect to their empathy, and Oh, that's horrible that happened. And so that says a little bit about how our bias is, for me, that's sort of a huge story about how our biases are just naturally in there. Like, I care more about the person who looks like me, because that's where my emotional brain, what my emotional brain is telling me to do. But if I tap into my empathy, which my PFC can help me tap into, then I will care more. Does that make sense? Yeah,

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

completely ours is that I'm thinking about how much this then asks of us to not be activated to access the PFC. And this part of us that we wait, if we want to be empathic and these other bigger thinking or rational thinking we have to be very present and grounded, being triggered having limbic meltdown. Like, none of that is available to us.

Lori Shook:

Right? When we're triggered and having a meltdown. The PFC is not available. Yes, because that's the hijack place. The limbic system is just so fast, it can take off running and later we might go wow, why on earth that I react like that. But that's because it's just so fast. And if we're grounded and we have a little more measured nature, or we let ourselves just take a breath before we're reacting. Even if we feel the impulse of this emotional brain or the limbic system and the adrenaline cortisol, we might feel the impulse in that. But we can actually catch ourselves. Well hang on a second, let me take a breath, and have a pause and see what really is going on here. Of course, if there's a fire or something, you don't want to be doing that you want to limit system as well suited for getting an action quickly. But most of the time, it's not a fire. That's the

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

point, right? It's like, our brain is designed for fires 99 of the time, and only 1% of the time. It's true. I've been doing some work on in another course called nervous system mastery, about understanding the nervous system, how to regulate and regulate the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that feels like really great work for this. I've How do I have the capacity to know what's going on inside of me? Before I react? Yeah, can I feel the rising anxiety and nervousness and no, that's an old story being triggered, rather than Lori's really sitting here. And being mean, to me, making it back to the emotional intelligence and I do have the capacity for that. Do you have other suggestions or tips for people to build that capacity,

Lori Shook:

I have a little tool that I teach called ABC, very simple, where the A is for aware, be aware, B is for breathe, and the C is for choose. So first of all, is getting in the habit of being aware of what the body is doing, how much adrenaline and cortisol is being released, what's your reaction, take a breath. Now you can do this, like as a meditation and spend a lot of time with it, or it can be a few seconds, a lot of our grandmothers would say count to 10, before you respond to them, it really is the same. So just count the 10. Or take a breath, notice your body try to relax it if you can. Because that helps release some of those adrenaline and cortisol chemicals, the more we breathe, and relax and get some oxygen in our system, or even go for a walk and burn up the adrenaline that can help us burn all that off and let it go. Or just a breath, or maybe going into the restroom for a minute and going okay, I'm grounding myself. And then choose, I noticed what my limbic system is telling me to do. It's telling me to punch this person in the face, or it's telling me to run or swear or whatever, and taking the breath and go, Okay, do I want to do that? Is that going to be the most useful thing in this situation? Or can I do something else? And what's my mind full mind the PFC is tapped into when we have that mindful moment. What is it telling you to do? So ABC is something I teach all the time and just help people practice just a little ABC, and it's just a minor reminder of

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

our grandmother's wisdom? Never muddled, but had the wisdom for it? Yeah. I like the simplicity of that. You could do it in a meeting. You could do it without people knowing. Yes. Either in the meeting when a bathroom break, and I think those are tools are really helpful. How can I do it in in motion, and for her to have an impact? And

Lori Shook:

the more we do that, the easier it is, people talk about it like a muscle and the prefrontal cortex is not a muscle, but it's a nice analogy.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

Personally, I can speak to that for sure. Expect You can too, right? Yeah,

Lori Shook:

I love flying off the handle, man. It felt like power and, and it you know, it kind of is it's adrenaline. It's just so I'm going after the perpetrator or whatever, you know, I felt good. Having a bit of drama. We love a bit of drama, a lot of us feels good, it feels powerful. And yet, that road often doesn't lead to the best solutions or the best relationships.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

Yeah, therein lies the dead bodies right there in lies, the dead bodies. I'm going to speak up because I feel I have a different response. And they may be people who don't fly off the handle. I'm the frozen penguin response. I go into the shutdown. Yeah, if it's a real Olympic meltdown, I go into a shutdown. And I'm from the outside, I don't think you can tell. unless someone's really tracking me. I just got very quiet. And inside, it's like I have a like, I'm in a movie screen and there's like, I just have a blank. There's no being movie being shown just the white screen. Interesting. And it doesn't got nothing. No to say I don't have any thoughts, nothing gone.

Lori Shook:

Well, they do say fight flight freeze options and the fear based brain and I've heard different opinions about that as well. That the freeze is actually just a collision of lots of other too many neurotransmitters running around in the brain and it's too much it's overwhelming. So we go to this sort of place very much like you describe a stalled dead place. I think that's very interesting. There was a mouse study with there's a little mouse in animes as they do, and you get the mouse learning about the light associated to the cheese He's into when every time it sees a white light, it goes towards it because it knows there's cheese there. So it's learned that thing. And then there's another version of, there's a red light and shock, okay? When I see a red lights don't go there because there'll be a shock. But if it's running down a little maze corridor, and it gets both a red and a white, it's having both impulses of move towards the move away and move toward the move away and freeze. It freezes because it's all of that cancel each other out. And there's just a freeze

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

interesting little mice, to the mice have given us this insight into the human condition. Yeah,

Lori Shook:

the mice, the chimps.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

There seems as I think about my own sort of frozen Penguin, and knowing that that sort of lies and trauma, there is seems to be a link to me of our pattern of response to what might have happened or how we might be have been treated as children by our caregivers. That'd be the case. Yeah,

Lori Shook:

there's, I believe, I read this with Candace pert, I mentioned her book earlier, she was said, and you're the first woman neuroscientist who was making strides in the industry in the 1990s. I believe I learned it from her, where she taught us about the Molecules of Emotion. I think we all know about the neural receptors that we develop if we smoke, for example. So we get nicotine neural receptors. And the more neural receptors we have, the more they get hungry, and they expect nicotine. But the same kind of thing works if we have chemical of drama, like a chemical cocktail of drama, or if shut down or have this sort of that or of anger, when we have all these things in our brain develops the neuro receptors for those. And we get used to that they get hungry like they do for nicotine, smokers say they just automatically pick up a cigarette Well, we automatically pick up the thing that's going to create the chemicals that our brain is expecting. And we also develop the status quo in our bodies. This is the chemistry that our body is used to. And it will do whatever it can unconsciously to keep recreating them. That's why we have drama queens, and all these we have habits of responding. And we can't change that. Just like you can stop smoking, it's hard to quit smoking. And we can quit some of our drama, things as well. More drama, addictions, as well.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

As in having related to that same pattern of relationships, you date people, and then it always ends in the same way. Or there's always the same sort of problem or in the same thing in a work the same pattern of hating your boss in the same sort of way as your bosses would cost from the same mold, which clearly they aren't.

Lori Shook:

Yeah, because we experience our world the way we see it, and we see it in the way we're used to seeing it. And so we keep recreating those things. I love the expression of wherever you

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

go, there you are, you are dammit. I can't this boss be different. I remember arguing with an ex partner of mine who made the banks ought to be perpetrate like complete perpetrators. And it was like not every bank is set against you and your credit rating, I could just and he just couldn't see it. It was like no, it's always the banks like they're bastards, they weren't not putting my checks through when they should. And I was part of a pattern that we you and I are in the business of change. So I like what you say these patterns are set quite young. But there is an opportunity to change that you've got a great model that you've created yourself and said model, which I've taken the course over. And it's amazing. So what we thought we would do in the next episode next week, is that you coach me using that model. And so people can get a sense of what it's like to go through that will give them some guidance as to how to code I can go through it with the same time as I'm being coached by you. And then we can pick up the conversation. How does that sound?

Lori Shook:

That would be amazing. For one thing, just doing a coaching session with you on that, for many reasons, really exciting. And I'll just say a couple of words to entice people to go listen to that you save in certain model is belonging is one of those things we talked earlier in this conversation about belonging. But there's other things that our brain is programmed for. And so it's a collection of those things, status and autonomy and fairness and a couple others. And we're triggering off of those things all the time, consciously and unconsciously, and some of our unconscious triggering that creates those patterns.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

Right? I love a framework. There's something so comforting about leaning into a framework. And I think it's a very, it's a very solid framework to use, either on your own when you're stuck. You're teaching other coaches how to use it. But I think there was also a way of using it to understand someone if someone else's behavior feels you're trying to understand what's motivating them, even if they're not in the room to use the same framework as well. That's another way of using it right?

Lori Shook:

Yeah, I used to be safe in certain in all kinds of setting so understanding why do I behave the way I do and I react to or I think I might be being kicked out of my tribe, but I make that up and I react to that or certainty is one of the elements and, man, when there's uncertainty, it really upsets me. So self understanding, but also as a leader, people are team members are reacting in these ways as well. And so as a team leader, you can think how do I create belonging for the team? How do we create fairness? How do we create certainty? And when we can't have certainty? What else do we need to bring up to get some dopamine somewhere else? So it's a really multi use model. For a lot of situations. It's also a way to influence. So if I want something from someone, how do I suss out what might be their favorite thing? Oh, they're a certainty person, okay, I need to give them a lot of data if I want something from them, or they're not a certainty person, they like a lot of autonomy, or they want status. Okay, great. How do I make them feel really good about this? I know, it sounds like manipulation, but all kinds of influence.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

And I know people have different views on this. But I spend a lot of time talking to people about how do I influence stakeholders ever, which I have no direct control. And it's very real. Once you get into leadership positions, that's the reality. There are absolutely loads of stakeholders, you have direct reports, you can do things because you're the boss, and you have all sorts of overt and covert power over them. So I think there's a lot there's a lot to be said to understanding how to influence people to ultimate. So anyway, so that should have our listeners super excited to come back next week. Great. Laurie, it's been a delight.

Lori Shook:

It's so fun to talk with you all the time.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

Appreciate your time and your and the work that you're doing in neuroscience and bring it into coaching. I think it brings a solidity to coaching in a credibility that I think the industry has, sometimes lacks No, but we could deal with them more credibility. So thank you for your work.

Lori Shook:

Thanks, Catherine. Well, I want to thank you for your work to I and I feel privileged to be invited on set at work. So thank you for that what you're doing here, and what you're doing the world is awesome, quite amazing. Thank you.

Catherine Stagg-Macey:

love fest ending with a big thank you to Laurie for sharing her expertise in neuroscience, and really providing some great insights into how our brains really influence our behavior and our responses to work. And remember, just by being aware and taking your breath, making conscious choices for ABC model, which is how simple but so effective, we can navigate our experience like in the moment we do have choices, even if it's sometimes feel like we don't we do. So next week, we'll have the first of its kind I'll get a client in the coaching hot seat, and Lori will coach me using her model of be safe and certain. This is going to be really real and meaningful way to see the principles that we spoken about in action today. So join me next week but until then, this is your wing woman signing off.