Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. You're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Hi and welcome to the Fulfilled Leader.

Speaker 1: 1:08

I've spent much of my career, and certainly the last 15 years, focusing on how I can learn to live better, with the negative thinking or worry or anxiety that shows up in my working life. I know it shows up for a lot of people. Often, maybe a small work event or something that triggers us, sends us off into a constant state of rumination or worry or self-doubt. It's something that comes up with leaders in coaching sessions a lot. Maybe we call it imposter syndrome, but we all experience it worrying about things, doubting ourselves and we all at times have anxiety. It can be that we're worried about whether we're good enough at our job or worried about relationships with colleagues. I recently asked a group of executives on a workshop how often they doubted themselves and everyone in the group said that it was at least once a day. But for more than 50% of the group they were doubting themselves many times a day. This was a very senior group of people. It's in the small things that we often end up in this rumination or negative thinking spiral. Maybe we say something in a meeting and then think, oh, why did I say that? Or we do something and why did I do that? Or we send an email we regret or we make a mistake and it triggers this kind of flight of thoughts about am I good enough? What's my boss going to say? Am I worthy enough to do this job? And the, of course, what if they find out? The classic imposter syndrome piece. And it can also be because we're worried about what other people think about us or we're experiencing somebody not being very nice to us and it triggers a whole flood of negative thinking. So, as I've said, I think this type of thinking actually is happening to most of us some of the time, and for some of us it happens a lot more. We all experience it at some point in our lives and in our working lives, and what I want to explain today is a bit about why this is happening to us, why it's so prevalent, what the impact of that is and what we can do about. And this is another in my episode of refreshed podcasts.

Speaker 1: 3:30

Let's start with the ultimate cause of this. To put it very simply, our brains evolved as a problem solving machine to keep us safe and alive. So when something comes in and triggers it, it goes into problem-solving mode At it. We, our mind starts looking everywhere for what happened and what we can do about it and, unfortunately for us, it often looks for the negative what did we do wrong? What did we say wrong? And this is because of the negativity bias that our brain has and it's programmed really to look for what might be unsafe. And there's a good evolutionary reason for this.

Speaker 1: 4:12

As many of you know, when we evolved as humans, we had three key tasks. Number one to stay safe and alive. Number two was to learn the lessons from what we did that kept us safe and alive. And number three was to remain part of the group. We did that kept us safe and alive. And number three was to remain part of the group so that we could stay safe and alive. Now what you're hearing, of course, is that these aren't, in fact, three main purposes. There's really only one, and that's to stay safe. That's to keep us alive. So let me give you a little bit more depth on each of these areas and why they matter and how they're impacting us today.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Let's start with the problem solving. In order for us to stay safe, we're programmed to constantly look out for danger, to stay on the alert, and when we do that, we tend to predict the worst, so that we can avoid things that will hurt us or make us stay unsafe. The problem is that when we were evolving, those dangers were not happening so often, but in our modern world, danger is presented to us all of the time, at least, that's what our mind perceives. It's not true in reality, but our mind is constantly saying, oh, look, they're in the news, or they're in social media, or they're that thing that's happening at work and because of that, it's constantly looking for this, what could go wrong, and then we end up feeling anxious and worried about this. Alongside this, we also needed to learn, as we were evolving, from things that happened. So we could remain safe so we can eat that plant it's not poisonous, but we can't eat that one. Remain safe, so we can eat that plant it's not poisonous, but we can't eat that one. It is poisonous.

Speaker 1: 5:47

When a bear attacked us it's assumed that's happening and we survived our mind needed to work out what was it that we did that kept us safe, and what did we do that stopped us being eaten by the bear? It looked for the lessons learned. In our modern world, we don't seem to be able to stop doing that, and this leads to rumination. So we ruminate and ruminate over what we could have done, should have done, could have, should have said whatever it was. And so, for example, if you say something in a meeting and then you think, oh, I shouldn't have said that, you can end up going over and over and over again, because your mind is programmed to keep you safe and that initial intent of the brain to learn from something is now being used in a way that's not helpful for us, and then we just end up with the inner critic telling us that we shouldn't have done that.

Speaker 1: 6:39

The third thing is that we lived in small groups and we needed to live in a small group to be safe. It wasn't safe for us to be alone, and anthropologists think that we had a maximum number of people about 150 people in our group, but in reality it was probably much smaller and our job as we were evolving was to be happy, liked and welcomed by this group, because if we weren't, we were unsafe because they might then expel us and then we would be on our own. And of course, there's safety in numbers. Now, today, this plays out as a really big problem for us. Our groups just keep getting bigger.

Speaker 1: 7:16

We have, of course, the people we meet in person our family group, our work groups, friendship, social media, church or temple and so on and we're expending a huge amount of energy worrying about all of those groups and our minds unconsciously keep worrying to stop us from being expelled by the group. We don't even know this is happening, because it believes that that is physically unsafe. So we're thinking am I fitting in? Am I a good enough leader? Will they reject me? Am I a good enough colleague? Am I a good enough friend? And so we worry about being judged, and I would argue that, in defense of ourselves, then we often end up judging as well. So we're ultimately scared about not fitting in because our mind is telling us that it's dangerous to not fit in Now.

Speaker 1: 8:01

All of these things served us when we were evolving, but then they're mostly not serving us now. If we're in a dangerous situation where our lives or the lives of the people around us or the safety of the people around us are at risk, they're really good, they serve us really well, but whether or not somebody talks to me when I'm in the pantry or doesn't quite reply quickly enough to my instant message is not that level of risk, but my mind doesn't understand that. So it's serving up these lovely negative messages for me to worry about and to ruminate on. Our job, then, is to learn to stop listening to these messages, to stop them from hocking us into the emotional responses that they give us, to be less gripped by it, to feel released and to get on with our daily lives. We can learn that our minds are always going to look towards the negative. We can see that and we can begin to shift it around and look for alternative views. Rick Hansen has this lovely way of describing this that the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive experience. So the Velcro is very sticky, the negative experiences stick and the Teflon positive experiences just slide off. So we have to work hard in order to hold on to the positive and to ignore some of the other things.

Speaker 1: 9:25

Now, in our working lives and in our personal lives, these types of experiences, as I've said, can be triggered by so many things, such a wide range of things, and it can maybe create self-doubt or low confidence and worrying Perfectionism can trigger it, or perfectionism can be a part of the outcome of it. I know for me that I try to get things perfect so that I don't have to worry about other people, and then, when it's not perfect, I worry about it not being perfect. This can lead to comparison, which can then send me off into a negative spiral. Maybe we're looking at a colleague and thinking that we're not as good as them, and maybe we're out of our comfort zone, and then we think, oh, I don't know how to do this, and this triggers us into negative thinking.

Speaker 1: 10:13

Always, I've seen people moving into a new role go through a period where their thinking becomes really difficult. They have big imposter syndrome and that can lead to a lot of lower confidence and a lot of self-doubt. I've seen as a coach that when people take on a new level of responsibility, they suddenly feel that they're not good enough, they're worried about what's going on and again, this is really just the mind looking out, it's problem solving, it's looking out for danger and because of this, because in all of these situations, our brains are going to problem solving things like what do I have to do? How can I be liked? We end up in this rumination cycle. So we want to think about what can we do about it. But before we do that, I want to share a little bit about my own story and journey with this and share a bit about what's happened. So I have had a big journey with this.

Speaker 1: 11:10

I really really struggled for much of my career with low self-confidence, a lot of negative thinking, a lot of anxiety and a lot of rumination, worrying about things turning them over and over and over and over in my mind. Lot of rumination, worrying about things turning them over and over and over and over in my mind and it has had a really big impact on me. It stopped me from putting myself forward for jobs or coaching assignments. But it's also been very draining. I have and would spend so much of my time turning things over in my mind that I often felt very tired and I usually felt that this was disproportionate to how hard I was working. So some of the tiredness was linked to this and all of that actually was happening despite me having some good therapy and dealing with personal issues.

Speaker 1: 11:53

This rumination, this negative thinking, was impacting me a lot and it was something that I was struggling to resolve. And because I knew it was affecting me, I knew it was holding me back, and because I was really stuck, I actually made a very conscious decision about 15 years ago to do something about it and I really decided to go on a journey of it and I called it Project Jean and decided that I was going to really see if I could change this way of functioning. At the time there wasn't the amazing materials that we have now. There are some fantastic books and I'll recommend one, but I went and found what I could and I found the early emerging neuroscience. But the thing that I found from that early reading was how much my thinking patterns had an impact on what was going on Now. This might seem really obvious now, because we see a lot of this everywhere in social media and all the books we're reading, but it wasn't so obvious then, and through it I saw that if I could learn to become more aware of what I was thinking, if I could observe it, then I had a much better chance of managing it. So the first thing I did was I went on a journey to do that. I increasingly became aware of what was the story, what was my mind telling me and what were the particular negative thinking patterns that were showing up. You know there were usual suspects that came a lot.

Speaker 1: 13:21

I began to build in some mindfulness practice so that I could become increasingly aware, so that I could notice what it was that I was thinking and feeling, and then I learned that I could usually track it back. If I was perhaps not feeling great, I could think what was I thinking earlier and I began to see the pattern. If I had low energy, I could think what was I thinking earlier and I began to see the pattern If I had low energy I could think, oh, have I got some rumination going on? And, sure enough, I would go back and think oh, about half an hour ago I started worrying about X, because often the thinking was happening unobserved by me and when I did that I would go back and think oh my goodness, for the last half hour I've been unaware that I've. Oh, my goodness, for the last half hour I've been unaware that I've been worrying about something and it's been going, going and going and going, and now I feel really depleted and a bit sad. So I practiced and I practiced and I practiced and I really can honestly say I got better and better at it. I used some of the techniques I'm going to share with you today. I did some great reading, found a lot of books.

Speaker 1: 14:24

Once the neuroscience emerged more, I studied it and I'm still constantly learning new things about this, and it's all made a significant difference. I know that I am much less often impacted by the negative thinking. It's still there and for all of us it never goes away, but I'm able to live with it in a very different way. It doesn't take me over in the way it used to. So because of that I feel like I'm living proof that we can all do something about this. We can all build a different relationship with the negativity bias that we all have.

Speaker 1: 15:03

One of the things I learned along the way is the whole role that the amygdala plays and is that danger alert signal in our brain, and in fact, some neuroscientists believe that every single piece of information that comes to us goes through the amygdala to check it to see if it's dangerous. When it has sees any sense of harm, it sends that message to the brain, which then sends messages to our hormones, which then leaves us feeling not great, feeling low, whatever it is. And when I learned that, it made a huge amount of sense to me because it's I could see how it was affecting my energy, because if I wasn't aware of what was going on, my thinking would go on forever and then I would be feeling bad and I was in a bad cycle. I think of amygdala signals worry, feeling bad going around it. So, as I've said, I learned all of that and I learned to become really aware of it, and I learned some good strategies that mostly work. They don't always work If something's really painful or something comes at me and surprises me or if I'm really tired, I struggle to manage it, but I know I've got those strategies and because many, many times something will still come back to haunt me, but I know what to do. So let me go on and share with you some of the things I've learned to do from all this reading and all the practice and the courses I've done. But before I start that, I want to share one of the things that I've learned and that I think we have to come to terms with the nature of life being like this.

Speaker 1: 16:36

Modern society has got a big idea that we need to be seeking happiness all the time and looking for all the positive. In fact, some people have been talking recently about the problem with this and introduced this idea of toxic positivity, and I really sign up to this. I think it's important that we accept that human life, the human condition, has highs and lows, has challenging experiences, and that we will experience that and not allowing and embracing that and looking for the happy and everything is not real. And in our work lives, of course, this is really, really true. No, successful career doesn't matter how successful it is does not come without setbacks and we can't stop that happening. There are sunny days and stormy days. What we can do is learn to weather the storms better, and this is what I've learned to do, and I'm really keen that we accept that this is not about looking for perpetual happiness. This is about looking for and learning strategies that can help us to live well through the highs and lows, the challenges and the opportunities that come our way Now, for me, step one on this journey actually reflects what I've been describing for myself.

Speaker 1: 17:53

I strongly believe that we can't change what we're not aware of. That unless we learn to become really aware of our own thinking, of our own feelings, we're not going to be able to stop them from hooking us, from taking us down into the pit. And this can seem a bit counterintuitive, because we're often taught in fact I think we've grown up to believe that we should push down our thinking and feeling. We're taught that to let it up means it will have more power over us. But it's really exactly the opposite, and there's a really lovely metaphor that helps me think about it. If you think about a beach ball sitting on water so a really light ball with a lot of air in it and you try and push that ball underwater. You can, but it's going to be really hard. But if you keep trying to hold it down, your energy will go and it will keep trying to pop back up. Because it's a beach ball, it's supposed to sit on the top of the water. It will roll around, it'll get in the way. And this is the same idea with our thoughts and feelings. If we try and push them, then they pop up. They come up in other places and if we don't learn to see them, we're not going to find a way to deal with them.

Speaker 1: 19:06

So the first part of our recovery in learning to be psychologically safe in ourselves is to learn to notice our thinking and feeling and to accept it with self-compassion, to acknowledge that this is part of us. This is part of the human condition. Step two is what I would call learning to unhook. When we're worried or anxious or ruminating about something, we often become fused with it. We see it as being part of ourselves, part of our identity. We become gripped by the feeling and the thoughts that go along with it and then we can't seem to stop them. They become part of us. So, for example, if we go back to a meeting, example, if I say something in a meeting I regret, and then I start to feel anxious and worried about that. It fuses with ideas like I'm not good enough, I'm not capable of this, and that then begins to become a fact and we think, oh, it's true that I'm not good enough. And we go over it and over it and over it again.

Speaker 1: 20:05

What we can learn to do is to observe those thoughts and step back from them and see that they're just our mind, making up some sort of defensive or protective thought. Our problem-solving mind is helping to keep us safe, and we can learn to observe them and see them for what they are. And this is what's called unhooking or diffusing in psychological circles. And there are a few different ways to do this. The first one that I found to be really useful is just to write down all the different thoughts that I'm having. I know this sounds strange, because surely we don't want to get them out, we don't want to look at them all, but once we do, I really tell you they hold less power. So you could even just write them in a speech bubble and then look at them and think, oh, look at that, that thought's going on again. Or there are those thoughts that my mind is saying, and putting them in a speech bubble makes it seem really symbolic, because then you can see that it's just the thought that's popping up. You can thank your mind for sharing those problem solving ideas with you and ask it to nicely pause a while. This might sound a bit silly, but it's actually part of letting the thoughts come and the feelings come, not pushing them down and then acknowledging them and saying thanks, mind, can you just go and sit in the corner for a bit while I try and get on with my work? You can say to it I know you're trying to help me, but actually for now I'd like to set those thoughts aside and I'm going to move on to the job that I'm doing at hand.

Speaker 1: 21:28

Perhaps one of the most helpful strategies I've used comes from the book the Happiness Trap, which I'll talk a bit about in a minute. In the strategy you write down the thought that you're having so it might be, I'm not good enough at public speaking, for example and then you write in front of it I'm having the thought that I'm not good at public speaking. And as soon as we do that, we begin to unhook. You can even do it by saying I noticed that I'm having the thought that I'm no good at public speaking. As we do, that we become more and more detached from it and more able to observe it. We see that it's a thought and then we can begin to think what can I do about it? There's a couple of other things you can do that are a bit different. If you want to be a bit more creative, you can take your thoughts I'm no good at public speaking, for example and sing it to a song. You can sing it to happy birthday or something like that. Just doing that can take the sting out of it and some of the power out of it. Another thing you can do is name it. So when a group of thoughts come up, maybe you're worried about being in the team and something's happened in the team and you're worried about whether people in the team like you you can name that story. So it might be an I'm not likable story. So when it comes up, you say, oh, there's that I'm not likable story again. Hi, I see you. Observing and noticing allows it to have less power.

Speaker 1: 22:49

Something I do pretty consistently is I distract myself, because when I'm having this thinking, when I'm really gripped by it, even if I've written it down and I've externalized it and I'm struggling to think it. I decide to do distraction. Actually, for me, the best one for this is music. Music is a big distractor. It's jazz. I put some jazz on Quite often. That will move my mind enough away from the worry, away from the kind of churning, into being able to focus on work.

Speaker 1: 23:18

You can find a strategy for you. It might be looking at photos of your kids or watching puppy videos or anything that's going to help you to kind of come back into yourself. There's sometimes called glimmers. Look out the window at the clouds. Do anything that's going to help you to kind of come back into yourself. It's sometimes called glimmers. Look out the window at the clouds. Do anything that's going to help you.

Speaker 1: 23:34

We can also learn to name the thoughts based on the type of thought they are, and this is a really helpful middle of the night strategy. So if you're awake in the night and you're really worrying about something I often talk about Martha Beck, but she writes a lot about anxiety and worry, and so this is a good one from her she suggests that when you wake perhaps, as I said, in the middle of the night you're worrying about something. It's going round and round and round in your head. You just name it. So I tried this recently. So it was like oh, that's a thought, oh, there's a worry, oh, that's fear, hi, fear, I can see you. Oh, there's my brain problem solving again. Oh, there's fear. Again, there's some more worry. And I cannot tell you how amazingly simple this was and how quickly I went back to sleep. All I was doing was naming the type of thinking that was going on or the type of worry.

Speaker 1: 24:25

Now, these are an introduction, if you like, to things that you can do. They're very practical and you can have a go at them. But, as I said earlier, I cannot recommend enough the book the Happiness Trap and the work by Russ Harris. He also has a lot of videos that you can watch that are very easy. They're based on something called acceptance and commitment therapy and there's loads of resources. It's a very generous community that they have to help us to understand this.

Speaker 1: 24:50

So back to this idea that we're always going to have a relationship with negative thinking. It's not going away. The thing is, we can learn to live better with it. I am living proof of that, and you can. If you're struggling with it, you can go and find somebody to talk to about it. You can come and work with me.

Speaker 1: 25:09

I do a lot of work with people in the coaching setting around learning these strategies, helping them, helping us to be better at living differently with our negativity bias, because the good news is that we can form a different relationship with it. It can have less power over us and I know for me. I'm in such a different place. I have a lot more energy than I ever had really. And here I am. I'm much older, I'm 15 years older, and I know that it's made such a good impact in my life.

Speaker 1: 25:42

So I really encourage you to go on a journey of choosing to shift your relationship with your thinking and your feeling, and see how you can change it. And while you're doing that, remember you're not alone. We're all in this together. Thanks for listening to the Fulfilled Leader. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader or friend, and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate and review. You can find more support and resources at jeanbalfourcom or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.