Is it something to do with water or is it giving ourselves space? Like what is it?

There's a funny – I'm laughing because I'm remembering this funny cartoon I used to show because I've been studying this question for years.

And I wondered that as well when I first started down this path like 22, 23 years ago.

I started kind of asking these questions.

And there's a funny cartoon of someone saying, you know, I seem to have all these great ideas in the shower.

So I put a shower into my office at work.

I love that.

can ride bicycles when they're children, and then you might not ride a bicycle for 10 years, but you can get back on and ride it again.

If you can just share a bit about your journey to where you are today and what inspired you to write your latest book.

It's been a 28-year overnight success.

That's how long I've been focused on this project.

I call it a project.

It's my main thing that I do, although I'm doing some other really fun things now on the side as well.

But this is still 80 or 90% of my work.

I was just always really, really interested in the brain from a very early age.

So for our listeners, who are Emily and Paul and what do they represent and what's changed in their lives over the past decade?

Why can we not override bias? And what's the solution? What do you suggest?

Well, there's a whole story about that.

This was one of our biggest research projects.

It was four and a half years to unpack this answer.

The hardest project we did and actually had the most impact of anything we've done as well.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, may he rest in peace, like his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, kind of told the story of bias and other things, but it told the story.

And one of the things he says in that book and in his work is education doesn't make you less biased.

So as people are outsourcing more and more of their thinking to AI, what are some of the dangers you're seeing? What is your opinion on what is happening at such an exponential rate?

be more like coaches, right? We

started to do this work and there was just no good theory for how any of that worked or why it didn't work and why managers never coached well and all this.

And I've been personally reading about the brain since I was literally about 15 years old.

I'd been reading everything I could.

I had this fascination with how the brain worked and I'd done quite a lot of mindfulness practice when I was young as well.

So I'm a real observer of my own attention and I think because I started that early, it kind of settled into my brain maybe more than if you start later.

So it's a very good circus to sort of notice and switch attention.

I mean, when I see how much my kids use Instagram, it's horrifying.

Let's get into it.

Change has never been this fast.

That's the first part of the quote.

And it's so true.

Change has never been this fast.

And it's being studied like we're moving way faster.

than ever, ever before.

Can you tell us, give us a little preview of what's to come and what we can look forward to?

But if it was a human doing exactly the same thing, I probably won't be able to completely detach from the emotion.

Yeah, no, we studied this exact thing.

We studied feedback really, really robustly some time ago, but I've been working on feedback literally since the year 2000.

We've been building and delivering feedback trainings in companies.

Yes.

And so we've been thinking about how to get this right and modeling it and all this stuff forever, literally 26 years.

But we had a real breakthrough in... understanding how to how to create a feedback culture we had a real breakthrough around 2015 we did a study in australia actually in in a company in a professional services firm and we collected real bio data real biological data from about 70 or 80 participants in the study that we set up inside a company and we saw what happens when people give and receive feedback and and what was interesting is unsolicited versus solicited feedback so asking for feedback and we we found three things firstly that receiving feedback is really stressful no surprise there but we were able to get it to a level like similar to your heart rate similar at like you've just gone for a run so like receiving feedback is stressful we knew that but we confirmed it what was surprising was the giving feedback was just as or more stressful than receiving it, which is why people give it so badly.

What must be the things that we should be protecting now to help our clients?

And given how agile we need to be, the goals need to be super flexible too, right? So all of these things have to be built with the idea that they need to change.

Yeah, more flexible, which means more day-to-day, week-to-week feedback, more of that.

So a couple of folks asking about that.

We do have a really evolved perspective on feedback.

I'm trying to remember what year we published the first feedback.

Maybe it was 2017 and 18.

2017 and 18.

Okay, sounds

what is the central spine of the book what's what are you trying to answer

I mean, essentially it's a neuroscience take on, I mean, the subtitle is the neuroscience of what makes us tick and what ticks us off.

So it's really a neuroscience take on what motivates us and what upsets us.

And basically that describes pretty much everything we do.

We do things because we want something or we want to avoid something.

It's called toward and away.

And around 2001, 2002, like 25 years ago, I started to see all these studies coming out about the social brain and all these kind of surprises coming out from a new field called social cognitive neuroscience.

And the same applies to leadership as well when it comes to managing change in the workplace.

But, you know, before NeuroLeadership existed, what particularly frustrated you the most about traditional leadership development?

There's a, there's a really simple insight that's sort of obvious in hindsight, which is if you read, like, one leadership book, you might, like, have these great insights and, and really be moved, and then you read a second one, and you have some other interesting thoughts.

And then you read a third one and a fourth one, and you're like, "This is starting to really sound similar." And then you get, then you kind of read, like, 20, and you're like, "Hang on.

There's only 10 ideas here repeated slightly differently.

What's going on here?" And then you're like, nowadays you could use AI to summarize in, like, 10 points the top 100, you know, leadership books, and you'll see it.

There's just very few things that these books are saying.

And so, so for me, there was one of two things happening.

So I, I'd love to leave it to the pro to, to sort of provide some explanation around it.

But, you know, before NeuroLeadership existed, what particularly frustrated you the most about traditional leadership development?

There's a, there's a really simple insight that's sort of obvious in hindsight, which is if you read like one leadership book, you might like have these great insights and really be moved, and then you read a second one and you have some other interesting thoughts, and then you read a third one and the fourth one, you're like, "This is starting to really sound similar." And then you get-- Then you kind of read like 20 and you're like, "Hang on, there's only 10 ideas here repeated slightly differently.

What's going on here?" And then you're like, nowadays you could use AI to summarize in like 10 points the top 100, you know, leadership books, and you'll see it.

There's just very few things that these books are saying.

And so, so for me, there was one of two things happening.

All authors are terrible plagiarists and lazy, and they're just copying each other and changing the words, which was one possibility.

The other possibility was there was something very, very biological and very difficult about leading that no one, and no one was talking about the biological foundation of it, right? Like, why is it hard, you know, if you work with a friend, for example, why is it hard to like, you know, to, to, to give them feedback if they're underperforming? You know, what, what's, what's-- what, what happens in your brain that makes that, you know, happen? Like, if you're, you know...

Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

[laughs]

Um, and, uh, I, I've, I've got this brain that just loves to, like, find the pattern.

I just, like, m- I can't stop once I start on something.

I'm probably obsessive.

I probably have, you know, all sorts of obsessive traits.

But w- but I spent years and years early on trying to, like, uh, unpack this one particular puzzle that I found.

Um, it was around the year 2000, actually, 26 years ago.

Mm.

Anything else? Yeah, I'd like to open it up for David to respond.

There you go to the next slide.

I want to just talk about the kind of the habits at high level.

Set the stage is a lot about So it can be overwhelming to see all of it.

They set the stages a lot about certainty, like what to expect, like clear expectations.

Also relatedness, like we're in this together.

We need each other.

Any thoughts or reflections on this?

Yeah.

So all of these pieces, these chunks that I'm telling you we call neuro intelligence, right? So learning about three levels of threat, learning about the, like, working memory, dopamine, all this, this is neuro intelligence, and we think this is essential for managing yourself in today's world, this neuro intelligence, right? So basically, to get back to your question, what I worked out was that, um, when I'm on a long flight, I can work for, say, an hour, hour and a half, um, and if I watch something that raises my adrenaline, I'm wrecked for the rest of the flight.

So if I watch a scary movie, and all movies are scary.

They try to get you ... 'Cause basically when you're in a threat state, you shut out what's on the side, and you, you pay attention, right? So, so all, most movies are drama, action, whatever.

They try to, like, create a threat response in you-

Mm

... to keep you focused.

Um, and, you know, things that don't do that are kind of boring to, you know, to people, right? So- So what I, what I would find is if I watched a movie, I, I would have to finish the movie, and I would be exhausted and not be able to write much more.

[laughs]

Yeah.

No, thanks, Emma.

It's, it's been really interesting, uh...

You know, we started working on growth mindset about 13 years ago or so, and it feels like every year it's gotten more important, um, uh, as the world kind of evolves.

And we'll, we'll talk about some of the history of it and all that.

But it's, it's, it's gone...

Like, how can leaders model, uh, instilling a growth mindset in their team? What kind of habits or what kind of, like, small behaviors just over time can they use daily, weekly, in team meetings, et cetera, that just kind of give a snapshot of what this looks like in action? I think that'd be really interesting to hear.

Okay.

Um, so I kinda got obsessed about this question- It's a long story, but, um, [smacks lips] uh, but I, one of the first things I did, um, sort of in this phase of my, my career, uh, so I, I started doing what I'm doing, like, 28 years ago, right? And one of the first things that I did was, um, I, I basically worked out how I wanted to be coached.

S- right? So I, I, I, I was on a long sabbatical, [smacks lips] and I wanted to, somehow I got the idea of I wanted to know how to, like, be coached better, and I, for a year, I sat down with a few people, and we sort of deconstructed what happened when someone was actually [smacks lips] helpful.

Um, and I, I, it turned, that turned into a coaching, like, program.

In 1998, literally, I started launching this coaching program based on a year or two's research, and, um, that's, like, evolved.

We've now trained 25,000 coaches in, like, 24 countries, and, uh, but the basic model was I realized that, um, when you coach people, uh, the m- the, the, the, there was an active ingredient that was very, very necessary in the process, and that was a moment of insight.

And usually, unfortunately, the coach was having moments of insight, which didn't help at all, got in the way, 'cause the coach was, like, asking questions and then having this great answer [laughs] and it was an unhelpful side effect, um, very unhelpful.

Mm.

So I guess the first question is, is what are leaders getting wrong about this?

There's a few things.

There's a few things.

You've got your pussycat there.

Always.

There's a few things that are getting wrong.

The first thing is, you know, it's being seen as a technology rollout.

And so all of a sudden you're a bit more overwhelmed with the work, with maintaining and managing the work and burnout as a result.

Talk about those conversations.

Yeah, I brought Niles along and been involving Niles in conversations everywhere.

And it's been really amazing just how quickly it's getting smarter and smarter about interacting with us.

We recently did a lot of tech upgrades in a bunch of ways.

It's very fast now.

It's almost extremely like right on.

It depends which part of the world you're in and the traffic, but usually it was like two or three seconds of pausing.

Who are the most interesting people that you met along the way?

When you're looking at the use of AI and how that's playing with the neurology, what's happening, the psychology, what's happening in the boardroom, what are some of the things that you're hearing?

Look, it's a big conversation, and we've been studying two really different but connected issues.

One is AI fluency at an individual level.

What is it to be really good at these tools, and, and how do you get there? And then separately, we've been studying AI adoption at an organizational level, and how do companies, like, do this properly? And one of the things we're certainly seeing at a board level is there's this...

It's called a safety bias.

People are scared of missing out and, you know, being behind.

And so many companies are having a bit of a reflex action of, oh, we have to buy Copilot.

Yeah.