SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey there, Maureen Cherna here, founder of the MindSight Academy, neurocoach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you deliver results by learning to work smarter, be in control of your brain, manage yours and others' emotions, change behaviors, flourish, and exceed expectations. I am so excited to be back with another episode of Lead to Excel podcast. I hope you're having a lovely day. So, the reason I'm excited about this episode today is because yes, we are talking about the brain, but we are specifically going to talk about the leader's brain today. So without wasting any more time, grab your cup of coffee, tea, whatever that might be, put your feet up and listen in. Yes, so today we're gonna be talking about how emotional intelligent leaders use their brain. As a leader, how do you know the right thing to do? Have you ever had to make a difficult decision and one where the consequences could affect many people? How do you determine the right thing to do? It's very important to develop the habit of making better and more effective decisions, even in difficult and uncertain circumstances. How do you develop the habit of making effective decisions? Is a big question I get a lot of times. During stressful times and when working under pressure, leaders and managers and entrepreneurs need to be skilled to pay attention to and manage their emotional state because this impacts directly on your capacity to focus your attention and make wise decisions. Recent research from neuroscience now shows us what actually happens inside the human brain. That's the locus of mental activity and the physical organ called the brain itself associated with that activity when we make choices. If you understand these dynamics and how they affect yours and other people's actions, behaviors, and thought patterns, you'll be able to make appropriate adjustments and even replicate those beneficial patterns at a larger scale in your team and organization to enable you to transcend your limits and achieve your desired goals. When making a personal or business decision, you're either aiming to satisfy your own needs or those of others, such as experience, immediate value, and problem solving. This activates your brain's fast low-road pathway that passes the cortex, that's the thinking brain, and thereby can only provide the amygdala in the emotional brain with a crude representation of the stimulus or information being received. But when on the other hand you reflect on your deepest long-term goals and how to achieve them, or when you reflect on what other people are thinking and what actions they are likely to take, this will trigger the brain's high road response. This response involves the cortex of the brain where we make conscious decisions and it makes the process slower for that reason. When you take the high road, you are listening to your conscious inner voice that focuses not just on your needs, desires, and success, but to the overall big picture. It enables you to take a dispassionate perspective on things. So when under stress, the first thing you should do as a leader is to pause and engage your conscious brain by being mindful, and thereby you calm down those low-road, fast impulsive reactions that are not necessarily wise ones. Stress can take its toll on us. I see too many leaders and business owners complain of working long hours, their relationships suffering, going to work feeling anxious, which ends up resulting in being short-fused from the irritation that is setting in. This affects your ability to achieve high performance, and if it goes on for a prolonged period of time, it can result in people really getting overwhelmed, burned out, and suffering from panic and anxiety from fear of losing their job. So it's it it really becomes it really becomes like a vicious circle. By engaging the high road of your mind, you will continually strengthen the associated brain circuits, and over time, this will give you a greater capacity for wise leadership that allows you to navigate your team and organization towards seemingly impossible goals. When you're faced with a challenging situation, what's your go-to approach? Do you default towards familiar in order to muster confidence and make quick progress? Or do you stretch yourself, embrace the unknown, and take your time to explore what's different and what's possible? This will tell you which of the brain pathways you're using. I had a client who once, in telling me about her work, said, and I'll quote, I'm just the head of accounts. The real decision makers are in the senior leadership team. The sad thing is that she believed that this was a fact, and it thereby prevented her from making suggestions or giving ideas in meetings, but yet she complained that she felt undervalued and unappreciated. After working with her for a period of time, she has now relabeled those false brain messages as she learned to become more aware of her thoughts and now dispassionately observes them as they arise. She now consciously chooses to look at situations differently. And I'm emphasizing that word, chooses, because it's a choice. And this has taken a lot of practice that has paid off because she now confidently makes valuable contributions, does not take rejection personally, and asks for what she wants from her seniors, colleagues, and direct reports without second-guessing herself. And this has now enabled her to move up in her career into a senior leadership position. After taking her brain mapping diagnostics, and she developed an understanding of hers and others' behavior patterns, she's now able to think through things before meetings with other leaders or her direct reports to how they might respond to points she raises so that she can follow up more effectively as she consults her conscious brain for guidance and perspective. Because this is a key technique that will move you from a place where you're constantly harassed and focused on pleasing others to becoming an influential emotional intelligent leader with strategic perspective. We all have the ability to transform our thoughts by refocusing our attention and developing an emotional intelligent leader's brain needed at this time. So don't feel that it's beyond you. You can do it. Finally, as a leader, manager, or entrepreneur, or somebody who just wants to move up in their career, ask yourself constantly, what do I want myself and my people to do daily in this environment? This will help you overcome the challenges of changing your brain and behavior. Understand the underlying context of situations and take the actions needed so that the desired behavior becomes easy and rewarding. When your focus is on the behavior, you can create change that outlasts any old limiting habits. I really hope this podcast challenges you to take the appropriate action to develop an emotionally intelligent leader's brain. Okay, three things before we finish today. Have you subscribed to this podcast? If you haven't, make sure you click that subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast because once you subscribe, you will not miss an episode. I will also appreciate that you leave a review and let me know if there's a topic you want me to talk about or a guest you want me to bring on. Finally, do have a fantastic week and remember that you are limitless. So I look forward to seeing you in our next episode. Bye for now.