Tony: You're listening to The Present Professional, where we explore the intersections of personal and professional development.
John: To change your experience of life and work with every episode.
Tony: So tune in, grab your notebook, and let's go. Let's go.
John: Welcome to another episode of The Present Professional. Today, we have a special guest with us, Andrea Edmondson. Now, Andrea does a lot of work that I'm going to let her introduce you to specifically. And I was introduced to Andrea by her husband, Chris. And I used to work with Chris in my previous life as in sales and business development. And when I left to move into my current career and where I'm at today, He said, you have to meet Andrea and the work that she was doing. I know that you guys will hit it off. And we immediately had a deep conversation. And I'm so excited to share her work with you guys today and introduce her to you and have you join us in this conversation. Now, this conversation where we're going to dive into. the way that your body and mind work together in responding to high-pressure situations. Now, this can be situations at work, it can be situations at home, difficult conversations, but we'll go into the mechanics of it so you can understand on a deeper level what's happening inside that's not just on the surface level. So, I'll go ahead and let Andrea say a little bit more about what she does and introduce herself to you guys.
Andrea: So hi everybody so I'm Andrea and so I currently work with executives really helping them elevate their energy and navigate their stress so they can perform at their best, but that's not where my journey started my journey started in education. and I did my Master's in Understanding Behaviour and the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning. And I thought I knew it all, but when I had kids, especially one of my children, and I have four, all that I learned and all that I thought I understood went out of the window. I had to spend a lot of time investigating, researching, and learning. It was on that journey that I got to understand the nervous system and the brain and how they work together to really influence how we think and how we feel and we behave moment to moment. It's that learning journey and that experience that I translate now and transfer into business environments.
John: Wow. Now, translating that into business environments, I want to just take it from the viewpoint of some of the folks that maybe that you're introducing these concepts to. Now, as you took your learning journey and started moving it into environments of different levels of understanding, maybe that just refer to the nervous system from a 10th grade biology class and hadn't heard about it since. How do you start to introduce some of these concepts to folks that haven't really gone into this in any depth?
Andrea: So the first thing I do is really, I do something I call a checking in activity. And so I always start my coaching sessions or training with this just a piece of, just stop, just close your eyes and just notice all the things inside your body. and then notice the things on the outside. So I really help people kind of just pay attention to their heart rate, to their breathing, to where they've got any discomfort and where they're holding tension. Really trying to stay away from the thinking part, just about the first level, just noticing those sensations. And then we start talking about, ah, and when you were breathing, what happened to your heart rate? And when you did this, what happened? Okay, so what you're doing then is you are changing, you're giving different information to your nervous system and it's responding. So we then talk about how the nervous system is constructed, and I give them a new model, an updated model of the autonomic nervous system, which is based on the polyvagal theory, because we're told in high school and we're still taught that the autonomic nervous system just has two pathways. But what we now know from the work of Stephen Porger is actually there are three, and they don't work in opposition, they work in a coordinated way. And so I then get into explanation and how a regulated nervous system works, how it's choreographed, what it looks like when it's working regularly in a regulated way, how it looks and how we behave and what it feels like when it's dysregulated, and what are the different types of dysregulation that you might notice inside yourself. where you might see in others and what can you do when you notice those signals so that you can get yourself back to the place where you feel good, you can perform at your best and you can, you know, whether it's a tough situation or whether it's just reparenting your children, you can do it from a place where you are having a positive influence on the people around you.
Tony: Wow, that's super impressive for you to have that genesis story of how you even got to this point. I'm so interested in that. I have a almost four-week-old daughter, so when you talk about relearning and rewiring your brain, I definitely can relate. I wanted to ask just a quick follow-up question to that in your story a bit, is what did you learn about yourself in that process of rewiring and relearning and going from, I know it all, I pretty much have met a level of mastery in what I know, to then have to say, wait a minute, I need to start completely over. What about you? What did you learn in that process?
Andrea: The biggest lesson to me was I was shining the light on my child. I was thinking, oh, there's something wrong with him. And what I realized through all the work that I did and all the learning I did was actually there was very little wrong with him. There was lots of things wrong with our society, but there's also lots of things wrong with my expectation and my ability to regulate my own nervous system so that I could read his behavior and then co-regulate his nervous system so that he felt safe. because when he felt safe, he behaved differently. But because his nervous system was more sensitive than a typical child, what I was seeing in him was his nervous system was very quickly going into a state of fight and flight. And when you're little and you're in a state of fight or flight, it shows up in certain behaviours that are deemed inappropriate or challenging by the adult. So that was my biggest learning was actually I had to do the work first. So now when I'm working in organisations and I often will get asked to work with frontline staff or managers, or if it's an educational, please work for my students, they're really messed up. And I go, no. I work with the person that does the co-regulating. I do work with the person that has the responsibility and has the authority. So that then ripples. from that person who learns how to regulate themselves. And they can regulate the people around them, including their teams. They can share that. And then the next level is, okay, well, we've got these teams that are regulated. What can we do in our organizational structure? What are our procedures? What are our systems? What are our processes that are actually supportive of a safe nervous system? So we talk about psychological safety. So I'm sure you're all familiar with Amy Edmondson's work. But that what I do is kind of look at what underpins that from a physiological, from a biological standpoint. So we go really back to the basics, which is the autonomic nervous system and how that communicates with the brain.
John: Just to give a little bit of light to that for the listeners that might not be familiar with the work on psychological safety. It's really the foundation for providing an inclusive environment. So it's feeling safe enough to bring your ideas, to bring yourself to work or really to any situation. And it's how safe that you can feel in those situations. And a lot of that work around you know, what organizations are safer than others and how they implemented that. And, you know, what things go into creating psychological safety within an organization. And, you know, one thing that we've seen through that is a lot of the modeling work, right? And for example, the, you know, supervisors or management being willing to say, receive feedback in front of the team. to be able to model the psychological safety the manager has to be able to receive even critical or challenging feedback in front of others to say, OK, maybe I can deliver feedback. Maybe I can pull for feedback in different situations. So that's just a little bit of flavor on to the psychological safety piece. Is there anything else that you wanted to add, Andrea?
Andrea: I suppose really nicely leading on from Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety is that I do the work underneath that. We think about the autonomic nervous system. It's like our autopilot. It's working all the time below our awareness. It works on this kind of basics of an autonomic equation. You can imagine two piles. It's got safety on one hand. It's got cues of danger on the other. And all the time, we've got this autonomic challenge. Our bodies, our brains, we're receiving cues of danger or a threat, and we're receiving cues of safety. When this balance is just where it needs to be, and we've got the stability in this homeostasis, that is when we can access the skills of psychological safety. But live in a world of autonomic challenge. We are constantly bombarded with cues of threat. So this autonomic balance, this equation, it's often tipped to the side of danger. And once tipped to the side of danger, our autonomic nervous system responds by fight and flight response. And when we're in flight-in-flight, we can try to access the prefrontal cortex. We can try and hear other people. But what we know from the neurobiology is actually the ear changes when we're in flight-in-flight. We do not hear the human voice. We do not process the human voice as well. So we can't access psychological safety because when we hear other people, we're not hearing cues of safety when we're in flight-in-flight. We're hearing cues of danger. which is why we really need to understand the mechanics of our nervous system so that we can navigate them in order for us to be in that place that we can then use and live psychological safety rather than tick boxes.
John: I'm hearing that there's the environment or the co-regulator responsibility to provide that environment, say the manager, the organization, how can you create more of a safe environment? Yet, I'm also hearing some individual responsibility about understanding the way that the neurobiology works and what's happening on the inside to be able to regulate oneself. to then participate in the environment. Because no matter what environment that someone provides, if you're not doing the work internally, then you won't have access to that safety anyway.
Andrea: Yeah, no, you're spot on. So when we're looking at these cues, these autonomic cues, there are three key sources. We have the cues from inside us. We call that interoception. Everything inside of our skin, my blood pressure, my heart rate, my glucose levels, any discomfort in my digestive system, pain in my foot, all of these internal cues that are just moving up and down the nervous system. We then have things from outside us. Is it bright light? Is it noisy? Is it cluttered? Is it this? Is it that? And then we have this third kind of area, which is between. We receive and give cues from other people's nervous systems and we again send them out. So we have these three sources of cues or information to the nervous system. And this is coming in below awareness, although we can become aware of it by paying attention. And this is what our nervous system is doing. It's taking information and going, am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? Yes, you're right. There is a responsibility of the leader or a team member to play that co-regulatory role. There's the responsibility of the organization to create environments, but there's a huge responsibility for the individual to be able to work on their internal environments. Because what we know about the brain is when we're constructing emotions, one of the sources for constructing emotion is interoceptive information. So this is an example I would do in a workshop. You know, some mornings you get up and you look in the mirror and you go, oh, I look pretty good today. 24 hours on, and perhaps you've been out the night before, you haven't slept so well. You look in the mirror and you go, oh my God, I look horrendous. Now, if I were to photograph you on day one and photograph on day two, nobody else would see any difference. That is because the interoceptive information that your brain is receiving is working on the inside to predict the story about what you see. What happens on the inside, those pathways on the inside are much more numerous than the information received via your eye to your brain. Does that explain interoception? Yeah?
John: Wow, it's like the story is colored more by what's happening on the inside besides the just simply looking at what you see.
Andrea: Yes. So that then translates to our world. So when we're looking at the world, it's not the world giving us information, it's our perception is directed by our internal predictive pathways, which are in part stimulated by our interoceptive information, and then the story we have about the world from our past. Wow. So absolutely spot on, us being able as leaders, execs, coaches, to be able to really curate our inside world, that interoception cues are critical. Because if we don't do that, the brain's going to get information that says we're out of balance and we're at risk. And it's going to direct the energy not to being creative and problem solving and connecting, but to other pathways and more about survival and competition.
John: So that gets us into the situations that we were talking about, the situations that will be presented to folks, you know, throughout their days, throughout their lives, their careers. But just to take one step back and before we get deeper into what's happening on the inside, there is just quickly defining for folks what the autonomic nervous system even is like. Let's just do a baseline definition of that word and understanding what responses that entails.
Andrea: Obviously, our nervous systems, everyone knows roughly what that is, but it's divided into different parts and different parts have different roles. We have our central nervous system and we have our peripheral nervous system. The part of the nervous system I'm focusing on is the autonomic nervous system. which is all the things that you don't have to think about. So your breathing, your heart rate, your digestion, how much glucose is here. It's working all the time to keep you going. Yeah, it's automatic. It's just called autonomic. And we are taught in school that there are two pathways. Sympathetic, which is not sympathetic at all. It's more like your alerting system. It gives you energy. It makes you go. It's like the gas pedal in your car. Then we have this opposing system, the parasympathetic, which is more like your calming system. We're told they work either a little bit of gas or a little bit of brake and you stay balanced. Again, polyvagal theory says, no, that's not the way it works. And I don't want to muddy the water today with explaining that. But I suppose what's really key is it's happening all the time and it influences how you function. But if you can become aware of what those inputs are to your autonomic nervous system, how you can imagine like a control room with dials, you can then tweak those dials. So I can turn up my sleep. I can reduce my breathing rate. I can do more movement. I can eat different food. I can spend time with friends. I can go out into nature. I can turn all of these dials in different directions. And it's those dials that the individual has responsibility and control over that then impact their ability to access and connect with other things, which are maybe beyond their control.
Tony: You know, when you mentioned psychological safety and you talked about the introspection that we receive when we look at ourselves in the mirror, it makes me think about how we end up with these organizations that are full of distrust. And it starts with our own view of ourselves, and then we compound that and continue to bring that to work. day after day after day and it just bubbles up and so someone's calling someone like you, me, or John, right? And I want to ask you when it comes to the leaders that you work with, that are on this kind of work, are they're doing the individual self-work, what difference are you seeing in the organizations that already have a leader that is bought into this work versus organizations that have leaders that are still not sure if they fully agree or understand, but they know work needs to be done? What's your take on that?
Andrea: Yeah, I mean the take is absolutely it's really key and it's not a quick fix. The journeys that lead us to go on in order to not just be able to do this but to do this smoothly, to be able to move up and down in their nervous systems and to regulate It's a long journey. You have to kind of not just look at your interception cues, you also have to then look at story. So when we're looking at polyvagal theory, we're looking at the concept of story follows state. So, depending on what state you're in, your story will change. So, I think what you were saying, Tony, was that when you come to work and you're agitated or you're not regulated, you don't feel connected, then the story you tell yourself about the way you feel whether that's judgment, criticism, self-doubt, everybody else's problem, all those stories need to be unpicked because that's what's being shared. So the impact is if the leader does the work and the leader then is able to co-regulate and, you know, we've got that psychological safety, you have this ripple effect where it becomes self-fulfilling And that is where you have more safety. People want to show up to work. There's some higher engagements. There's less absenteeism because they can be more vulnerable and say, you know, I've got a newborn. All right. And I was up last night for X number of hours. Today, I'm not in my best form. So you're very transparent about the way your nervous system is working and you have this language, so they understand the language, they understand their nervous systems, they're starting to use that language with their teams. The teams have the language and then we're all singing from the same song sheet. Ah, okay, now we have this understanding. It's not about me or you, it's about the state and the stories that come up that sometimes trip us over or trip us up. And I think these stories are really powerful because they can trip us up, they can take us down a rabbit hole, they can make us feel stuck, but we can't just work on the story. We have to do both because the mind and the body really work together. I'm not sure I answered your question, I think I might have digressed, but I hope leave some flavours in there of, you know, the impact it does have. I was working with a healthcare company, you know, 1500 employees during COVID. The CEO came to me and said, you know, I'm noticing we're struggling with X, Y and Z. So I got involved, I did a big research project, I asked lots of questions and I was a fresh set of eyes and I was able to ask those questions because I wasn't inside the company and I had confidentiality. I spoke to everybody from the front line to the cleaner to the chairman and brought all those ideas together and went back to the board and said, look, this is what I'm hearing. And this is what I think needs to be done in order for it to change. And then they put in place some of the recommendations. And now they have a system and processes and relationships that are a lot more supportive and safe and responsive than they did before. But that started with the CEO. It didn't start anywhere else. It had to start there because unless he bought in, it wasn't going to ripple. I'm not saying it's all smooth because there are still people in any organization, especially one that size, where there's resistance. But as long as you've got a quorum, and as long as you've got your roadmap, and you've got enough voices, then that generally is what holds. And eventually, the people who either fit or they don't because they either buy in or they don't is either a change slowly but surely because they may see the evidence or it's not for them and they choose to go somewhere else.
Tony: Right, exactly. It is. There's a percentage of people in every organization that won't change and sometimes they have to leave.
Andrea: Yeah, exactly. And I think it's not hard for me to fix everybody and we can't. So it's about doing the best and letting go when you can't change something.
John: Talk about a good story to tell yourself about when to let go.
Andrea: Yeah, especially, you know, when you're in professions like we are. or you're in education, it's super hard to let go. I was doing some work last year with a school and they had a particularly challenging student and they bent over backwards doing all sorts of things but it wasn't the right environment for him. So actually in the end he did change schools and I remember speaking to the teachers and said you've done all you can, this is what he needed and it's okay. it's okay you didn't fail it just was your solution wasn't solution he needed all right now shifting gears back to
John: the operation of our system we're talking about the individual's responsibility in understanding the way that their nervous system works so we talked about the different pieces of it the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system the stories as well as the body or the physiological responses that are working in tandem with the story to color our world and we take those stories and our physiology and I want to add in a component that you've brought up a couple times here is our awareness. So cultivating that mindful self-awareness of what's happening on the inside first in order to be able to shift. concept that we've unpacked thoroughly in multiple episodes and mindfulness and self-awareness. I wanted to ask you, I guess you did talk about it a little bit and kind of getting folks in tune with their breath and body, but how pertinent is it for folks to develop a mindfulness practice to start doing this work?
Andrea: I mean, you know, I think that what I do as part of the way I work is it doesn't need to be separate from your day. It's integral. So this checking in, it could be 30 seconds, it could be a minute. Brilliant if it's longer at certain times, you might want to use it at certain times for the recovery phase, but it's most important that you're able to do it in the moment. because that's when you need it. And I think it's Viktor Frankl, isn't it? Between a stimulus and response as a space, and in that space lies your freedom. And that's exactly, we're trying to make that space between whatever it is in the environment or inside you and your response to it bigger. Stephen Porteous would call it the intervening variable. He said the autonomic system is the intervening variable, which is why so much of his work has been used in trauma. because trauma rewires and disorganizes the nervous system, and as does chronic stress, as does anxiety. Awareness is really key because unless you're aware of something, how can you possibly change it? That is where I start, is that, you know, we need, and it's a practice. At first, people find it hard. And this is why I do some training for schools as part of my kind of ESG is just to give a bit back that philanthropic thing. And I do training for schools, I think it's really important there. And I say, look, just do this, punctuate your day and your lessons with this checking in, in the same way, I would recommend a leader to do that, you know, as you sit on your laptop, before you do anything, just take three Deep breaths, just regulate. When you go to the toilet, use that privacy to spend one extra minute in the cubicle doing some alternate nostril breathing or do something, or go to walk to the window of your office. And if you're lucky to have a panoramic view, take it all in because we know panoramic views give the brain a cue of safety. Oh, there's so many little ways of, once you have this practice of awareness, to then bring in practices that you can feel in the moment change how you feel. So I use breath, the body, the brain, so I'll use some visualizations, I'll use between, and then we use some behavior. So there's five Bs of how we can, once we've got that awareness, where we're looking, and then what we can do to change the state. once we've got the awareness.
John: Got it. Okay. Now, the awareness. Now we're going into awareness of what? Now, as folks approach certain high-pressure situations, maybe even they feel every day is a high-pressure situation, or it can be difficult conversations with their spouse. There are so many times where our nervous system is taking the wheel. Now, how do folks start to become aware of that? What do they need to know to start this process of being able to shift?
Andrea: One of the first things I do, I spend some time in trainings or in coaching, getting people to take themselves to different places. So how do you feel when you're regulated? That will be called ventral bagel. And that's the kind of, you know, the idea of a tree. So we've got a tree with a canopy. That's the ventral bagel. You're calm, you're collected, you're curious, connected. Your stories are of connection, of possibilities. This is where we want to spend most of our time. And then we have the trunk of the tree, and this represents this sympathetic nervous system. This brings us edge energy so that we can move throughout our day. And then below the ground, we have the final part of the nervous system, which is the dorsal vagal, because polyvagal means more than one, right? So it's not just one parasympathetic, but there's two, an old one, which is the dorsal, and a new one, which is the ventral. This underground system is our digestion, it's our gut. So a regulated nervous system works when all three are working together and they're choreographed or controlled by the green canopy of the tree. Now, if we're there, great. But if we sense danger and more danger than we sense safety, what will happen is our nervous system will shift us into the sympathetic mode, which is the mobilization of our energy. So people will call that fight and flight. In this state, we feel different. Our heart rate's a bit faster. Our muscles are a bit tenser. We breathe differently. We access different brain regions because Ultimately, the autonomic nervous system is about where do I send my energy to keep me alive? So when we're in sympathetic, it's about survival. You may not think about it as survival being in the office, but that's what your body thinks it is. And then finally, if all our strategies don't work or we run out of energy when we're in sympathetic, our nervous system will shift us to the next state, which is dorsal bagel. This feels like shutdown or exhaustion or burnout, or we might feel numb, or we might feel foggy, or we might feel a bit lost. There are three different states. It's more complex than that. There are actually hybrid states, but I'm just going to focus on those three. You can imagine them like a traffic light. At the top, we've got the green, I'm ready to go. Then the orange or the amber or the yellow, whatever you want to call it in the middle, I'm on edge. I'm ready. I've got a lot of energy and I'm like this. Then the stop is the red. And we naturally move up and down all the time. So it's not desirable, it's not possible to always be in green. But what we're trying to look for in the nervous system is that you can move flexibly up and down and it doesn't get stuck neither in sympathetic and it doesn't get stuck in dorsal vagal. Because when we get stuck in those two places, we suffer.
John: So it's our individual work to understand what each of those states look like in each of us. And that takes those small time periods, like you mentioned, just brief periods of awareness. And that doesn't have to be a deep meditation. Well, first, the symptoms of each of these states physiologically, Do they manifest in universally the same ways between all of us, or how can folks start to recognize the states that they're in when you have the green, yellow, and red states? So how can they start recognizing certain signs to develop an awareness of the state that they're in?
Andrea: So yeah, I mean, there's universality to that physiology. There will be some nuances, but yes, by tuning in to your nervous system, you'll be able to go, ah. My body feels like this. My heart's beating a little bit faster, a little bit twitchy. And my breathing, oh yeah, I can feel the difference. And this is, these are the cues. Oh, actually, you know, you'll often see you're like, so my friend says to you, where are your shoulders? And they're like up here. Oh, oh my God, I didn't even realize I was holding them up here. And when we hold our shoulders up here, we are giving cues to our nervous system that we're ready for a fight or ready to run. So it's understand, oh, I'm giving feedback, I'm giving information to my body that I'm ready for a fight. So yes, there are things that are similar about us and there are things that are different. So when I'm doing group training, I'll always start, okay, what do we notice? What's similar? And people will go, yeah, that's me. Oh no, I don't have that. So for example, one of my symptoms of being sympathetic is I get this need to control. I will start writing lists. I will start being bossy. I will start all sorts of little things. And my kids go to me, they know now. They say, you know, you need to go and do something, mum, because you're being really bossy. So I'll get feedback, right? Because we have that language in our family. If I know my symptoms are being read is everything feels a bit hopeless. Yeah. And I sometimes feel that at the end of the working day, especially if I have worked a home alone too much. I know that my nervous system, in order to stay regulated, needs another person's energy. Because my nervous system, it's not about how many cues you have, it's what weight you give to them. So for me, I give a lot of weight to the cues from other people. which can be really helpful when there's a good synergy, but it also can mean that if there's not, I read cues quite quickly and I can change how I feel quite quickly. But this links really well into those presentations, those meetings, the difficult conversations to understand where the weight is in your nervous system. So A, you can do the preparation for the cues inside you. You can sleep well, you can be hydrated, you can take good breaths, you can go outside, you can have a healthy breakfast. All those things you could do for yourself for the input and those signals are going to get good safety signals to your brain. But then environment, if you know, for example, if I'm going to do a presentation in a new place, I will go there way ahead of time. I might even go the day before if it's a really big one, so that I have familiarity. My nervous system feels safe in that space. If I'm doing a workshop, again, I'll go early, and I will not only get familiar with the space, but I might have some informal conversations with some of the audience. This way, I'm giving my system, I'm preparing for my nervous system to feel safe enough, because it's not safe, it's safe enough to perform at its best. And then I have strategies. If I start to feel unsafe, I might have certain people in the room I spoke to earlier that day. I'll get eye contact with them and I will look for cues of safety. So that's what I do in meetings and presentations.
John: It's interesting that preparation piece. It reminds me of something that I do with my fiance, actually. So we have our monthly partnership check in. and we designed together the list of questions that we ask one another and it's a containered space or environment to have difficult conversations to talk about what's working, what's not working, how could I have supported you better, how could I support you better next month, and it's kind of preparing. Now that you've said that about the meetings, it really does help prepare my nervous system to have those conversations with her. And it's really, it's been really helpful throughout our relationship. And I just wanted to bring that up and another place that I feel that that can apply.
Andrea: I think preparation is really key. I had a coaching conversation last week with a lawyer and she's got a young child. So if she didn't come to me about her work, this situation at home impacted her work quite badly. She went away for the first time with her child who's 15 months. to an Airbnb, but she worked in the morning, she got to nursery, picked the baby up, got in the car, drove, arrived late, everything. So we rewound. I said, okay, if by knowing what you know now, when she knows about the traffic light system, she knows about safety, what would you do differently to prepare yourself and your son so that you felt safe enough And she was like, yes, that was the missing piece for her. She hadn't done the preparation. When she was there and she'd settled, but then because she didn't do the preparation, she never really got fully into green when she was there, even though she was with good friends. So when she came back into her work environment the following week, she had used so much energy in being in her sympathetic for so long that she went into shutdown and that shows up in her with migraine.
Tony: Wow. That actually is something I was going to ask you, Andres. What do you say to the people that you meet that feel safe in the unhealthy habits or feel safe in feeling stuck, enjoying being stuck, recognizing that they could move forward if they were to do things differently or recognize the potential data points that could help them? move forward to a better life, but they just don't want to do it because they feel safe in being stuck right where they are.
Andrea: I've had a lot of conversations on exactly that topic in the last week or so, and it's very difficult. I think it's about holding a mirror up. When they tell you the story that they feel safe, I think it's a story. Not all our stories are true, are definitely not accurate, and they're often really outdated. So the hardest part is not telling that person, but inviting them to look in the mirror and to do that introspection and go, really? And actually, can you imagine how it would be if it were like that? Because absolutely, change is difficult. It requires more energy to change in the short term than it does to stay where you are. But it's that concept, if you stay where you are, what are you missing out on? You know, when I'm working with young people, I use the analogy of a bridge, you know, so here you are on this side of the bridge, what's life for you now? And what would it look for you like if you're across the river? what does that future self look like in your dream or your ideal world? Okay, and my job is to show you some different steps you can take at different times to help you go across that. But first of all, they have to be able to have a vision of where they want to go. And for that, they first need to go where I am is not actually where I feel good. So I did this with my daughter. She's now in medical school. But I used to go into her room when she was revising for her exams. And she has ADHD, and she had the most messy, cluttered room going. And she'd be sitting in her bed, not doing any work, even though she had told me a half an hour previously that she had this whole revision schedule sorted. And I go in, and I would just say, Okay, Amy, I'm just holding a mirror up. And I would just show it around her room. And she'd look. And I'd say, how's it making you feel? And she'd go, hmm, not good. Okay, and I'd just walk out. Because she knows what to do, but it was easy for her not to see it. So all I was doing was just holding up the mirror. And then I got to the point where I'd walk in and I wouldn't even have to hold up the mirror. She'd kind of go, I know, I know. But, you know, we don't see it in ourselves. I mean, we don't… We see it in other people, don't we? But we don't always see it in ourselves. It's so much easier, because it's what Jonathan said, they kind of work on the thought in somebody else's eye is much easier than something in your own eye. I can't remember what his quote is, but it's that idea exactly. It's so much easier to see fault in others. than to just look at ourselves. And that is part of that awareness piece. It's not just the physiology. There is a psychological piece and I go so far with that. But for some people, I will have to recommend that they kind of, you know, speak to a therapist or they do some different sorts of work because I know where my boundaries are. You know, I can only go so far before I know it's somebody else's expertise.
John: That's really powerful that you brought that up, Tony. And I think we could do a whole other episode on the stages of change and how that applies to a coaching lens and so many other things. And I guess what we're talking about is what's called the stage of pre-contemplation, like not even thinking about changing yet. And from a coaching lens, from a health and wellness coaching lens, to meet people that are not thinking about change, you only meet them with empathy. It's to meet them where they are, the greatest form of empathy. So you can reflect aspects of their current situation and help them kind of understand the feelings behind that and what's happening. And until they start thinking about that in a way like where they're actually seeing what's in the mirror that you put up, then there's no really driving them towards change. It's getting them to see first. I'm really glad you brought that up. And I think that's another, I'm going to park that for a future episode.
Andrea: Yeah, I think it's why it's actually can be really powerful to do this in groups, because a one-to-one coaching can be very intense. And generally, you don't go to that unless you have elements of readiness. But in a group, I did, you know, some training before Christmas, and there were 20 people in the group. And they would never be exposed to this content unless it had been provided by their organization. But it was an opportunity for them to have time and reflection and insights and tools to start doing some of the groundwork so that they potentially would be ready to do X or Y. But I think you're right, it's, you know, a lot of people, they're just going through the motions. I mean, you could even say many people are a lot of the time in shutdown. And shutdown can look like going through the motions, but there's no joy.
John: I think that's a great place to segue into what are some of the implications of staying in yellow or orange and red states, you know, of choosing to stay unaware of this and kind of allowing the fight or flight or the, you know, reactionary stimuli that are all over the fear based stimuli that are all around us and allowing that run your life. So what are some of the implications of staying in yellow and red states?
Andrea: I mean, with those, you know, the biggest implication for staying in yellow is, I mean, we know that stress is the number one cause of chronic illness. stress is not bad, stress just is. I do a lot of work in that in the workshops. It's like, we need stress. Stress is anything that requires us to burn energy to maintain homeostasis. I do practical examples of that. But it's too much or for too long, it changes the way your body works. And that is where we get the hormonal parts of cortisol and glucose and insulin. It's where we get dysregulation and the reproductive hormones. It shows up, so you're going to get it in obesity, we're going to get it in diabetes, we're going to get it in heart disease, we're going to get it in hormonal issues, fertility issues. So we've got all the physical things, but then you're going to get it in mental health, right? Because we're going to feel anxious, or it's going to show up in relationships, or we're going to be depressed. I mean, it's just a whole domino effect. And unfortunately, we've normalized many of those things in our society, not just in the U.S., but globally. So people just brush it off. Oh, well, you know, another thing we see is substance abuse or addiction. So a number of people that I see on a week, you know, regularly who drink to numb. They drink to socialize. They drink to go to sleep. They drink to alcohol. I mean, there are so many ways that we use things to make ourselves feel better. But the question is, why are you not feeling good? Yeah? But it shows up everywhere, because if you're dysregulated, it's going to play out in your health. It's going to play out in how your brain works and your creativity and your problem solving and decision making. It's going to play up in your interpersonal skills because you're going to be sending signals of threat. It's going to show up in your parenting. It's going to show up in how the health of your children. It shows up everywhere because we are not designed to stay dysregulated.
John: And well, I mean, being able to handle some of these high pressure situations, difficult conversations, it's, you know, with your staying and that being your baseline state, you know, you're going to react to those situations in a way that's not conducive for facilitating flow, like within an organization or within your relationships or within your life. So there's an above and beyond the physical and mental health concerns of remaining in these states, there's the implications to the trajectory of your life and your career and your relationships. I just wanted to take a moment there to really emphasize what are some of the implications of remaining in those states. But now on the flip side, when you learn to regulate, You know, what becomes possible for you then whenever you're able to shift between these states in a healthy way and kind of maintain a bias towards the green state?
Andrea: I mean, my first health is one of the things. Actually, you mentioned an interesting word, flow. So the concept of flow. So that really works very well with Polyvagal because we talked about those three states, but actually there are hybrid states. And one of the hybrid states that's really important for peak performance is play. So play is a hybrid state where you, I imagine you having one foot in the green state and you have one foot in the yellow state. So you have this energy, but you have this sense of safety. And this actually is where, when we're playing tennis, when we're performing at our best, we are not in green. We all have one foot in each state. And the ability to keep one foot in safety and have that challenge and have that energy is what we do with young babies. So you've both got obviously a four week old and one on the way, but you've got a bit of peekaboo, yeah? What you're doing with your baby is you're triggering sympathetic and then you're activating ventral vagal safety. And that experience, a very simple example of play, is what is allowing their nervous system to go into sympathetic or into more energy, but then come back to safety. So one of the reasons we're struggling, I think, post-COVID is because many people didn't get opportunities for play. adults and young people and play is this place where we have a bit of both and we actually almost get the neural pathways that allow us to smoothly move from green to yellow and back again. So when we're looking at peak performance, when we're looking at those challenges, situations, whether it's a presentation or difficult conversation, it's almost like a serve and return. Yeah, it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but we're not sticking in one. We'll be able to move smoothly. And those are really our neural pathways in our brain and body that we're developing from the get-go. From as soon as we're born, we're developing those pathways. And we need to keep doing it. Play is a really important part of performance, part of the flow state that you mentioned, John. So yes, the outcomes are that you perform better and you can have your health. So we see a lot of executives performing really well in yellow, but you can't see what's happening inside your brain. But we now know that it causes issues inside your body that you can't see. And by the time you're diagnosed with something, that situation has been built up for 5, 10, 15, 20 years. You don't develop diabetes overnight. You don't develop Parkinson's disease overnight. That has a long trajectory caused usually by chronic stress is the number one cause of that.
Tony: You know, when you mentioned earlier about what you were able to learn in your journey early on in this work, you mentioned how you realized that society was the one with the problem. And I think what you just mentioned about play, you're just driving the point home because I say all the time that people have just forgotten how to have fun, healthy fun. And I think that we forget that we are still children in a sense. I mean, even in our old age, we're still adult children in a lot of ways. And I think society puts this pressure on us to be these perfect adult serious, you know, all the time people. And it's just not sustainable because we still need to have fun. And then when we don't, we end up choosing unhealthy things.
Andrea: Yeah, we are wired. Our social connection is biologically wired, and you generally play with other people. If you look at the Blue Zones, the most centenarians, they all have play as part of their prescription for health, you know? And they're playing with their friends, they're going outside. I mean, play is something that we naturally do. You don't have to tell children how to play. They just do it. We take it away from them. As soon as they get to 11, It's taken away. You're told it's pointless. It's a waste of time. That's another hobby on the podcast, the importance of play and learning and development. I mean, it really is. And play doesn't have to be playing football. It can be cards. It can be creative. I mean, this flow is a play space. You know, play has certain ingredients. And I think the most important thing is that it's not for anything.
Tony: You're making me feel really good about taking my kid to Chuck E. Cheese yesterday for two hours.
Andrea: Chuck E. Cheese, I remember that place well. I have spent many hours at Chuck E. Cheese.
John: It's like play can be an access point. If we're thinking about folks that are sitting here saying, okay, I'm starting to see some of the times in my life that I've been dysregulated. I'm seeing how maybe being dysregulated impacted the conversation I had with my spouse, the meeting that I flopped, how I felt in the middle of this negotiation. Okay, so I'm starting to understand how those states manifested in myself. And it sounds like play can be a way to say, okay, maybe this is a mindset shift. It's something I've used with clients before is like understanding the business and what we're doing as a game. What player are you calling right now? You know, what player are you calling with this meeting coming up and learning to, you know, not take things so seriously. And even if that being just a mindset shift to help you make that, which is, I guess, part of the story to help shift the nervous system as well. When you're in those dysregulated states, it's maybe that's even just the story of play and applying it to something you're taking so serious to help shift your nervous system into a more calm and balanced state.
Andrea: Play is a really good tool for that. But I think one of the best tools to shift the nervous system is social connection. So we're talking about that ventral vagal, that green state. When we look at where that nerve root goes, it goes to our heart, it goes to our face, and it goes to our neck, goes to our ears. So singing, eye contact, smiling, vocal bursts. All these things, these are cues of safety to the nervous system that we share all the time. But we can do it one-to-one on Zoom or even one-to-two on Zoom. We can't do it so effectively in groups on Zoom. We need to be in the same room. Touch is the most, again, one of the most, the first sensors to develop in utero. We need touch. It's part of our proprio-sensory information. There's different type of type makes us feel safe. We have all these cues of safety. And when we put things to remote and to virtual, we take some of those away. And we don't replace them with anything. So we've got a lot of people now working remotely. And I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there's some positives and negatives. But the nervous system is missing what it needs and it needs cues of safety because we are bombarded with cues of danger so we need to have this need more connection and we need more cues of safety which is how I think, you know, companies moving forward will be really wise to have a look at, you know, not having meetings in person for the sake of it, but how those meetings, what they look like, how they structured. So one of the things I do when I'm doing training is I will do lots of small group work because I know for the brain, social interaction is incredibly demanding. So group sizes of four are about as much the brain can hold. any bigger than that, and then it becomes fractioned and complicated. So I kind of do lots of activities where we do four, people feel safe, people have a chance to hear other people's voices, and then we'll come back and put the ideas together. But again, it's just understanding the neuroscience. This is how the brain and body work. Social engagement is a very highly energetic activity. It requires a lot of the brain. and the body. So let's be aware of that. It can give energy, but it can take it away. Because it's on a spectrum. Some people like more social interactions, some people like less. So it's understanding that we come with this variability. And just because so-and-so likes it this way, that doesn't mean the whole company has to work this way. We need to have this spectrum of offer so that we respect the nervous systems, so that those people can stay regulated, so that they conform at their best, so that they impact results.
John: Now, I feel like this is a lot in things to build into your life, into regular practice, right? Connection, play, nature, like those panoramic views that you mentioned, like these things that can help increase our baseline nervous system function. Now, what are some strategies that you have for folks when they're actually in the heat of the situation? So it's not just keeping your baseline higher throughout your life day to day, but you're in the meeting, you're in the middle of the difficult conversation and you have the awareness developed, but you start to notice the signs of yellow, hyper yellow and red coming up where maybe it might not be as conducive to the conversation you're trying to have or the meeting that you're trying to lead. How do you help people shift in the moment in those situations?
Andrea: The fastest way and the most subtle way is to use the breath. So I'm sure you're aware of the physiological sigh. It depends whether you're having to speak because obviously if you're having to speak that could make it more tricky, but even just slowing everything down, because cues of safety are slower than cues of danger. So just slowing your voice, intentionally turning your volume of your voice down, be just doing a shoulder roll. you know, even just closing your eyes for a real fraction can reset. So there's really subtle things that we can do. Other thing we can do is just tap our feet. But even just stroking parts of your hands, bilateral stimulation, and giving people a menu. Try them out. get them to practice, not when they need it, because you've got to practice so that when you need it, it's accessible to you. I have a menu of like breath techniques, I have a menu of body technique, I have different menus. And people go through them and people will kind of try them out. Oh, I like that, I don't like that, this worked, that didn't work. And you get a little kind of toolkit. And you'll have your go-to ones that work in various situations. And it'd be, you know, again, what works in one situation and one context might not work in another context. You know, at home, you might kind of go, I can feel it. I'm going to just say, you know what, I'm going to go for a little walk. Can we have this conversation later? That could work in the office if that is the environment which you've created, but it might not. So again, there's no one way. It's really about empowering the individual with the insights and the understanding and the tools so that they become the driver and they're able to navigate their stress and they're able to kind of elevate their energy to be in that right place. So, you know, I'm just that coach that gives them the tools and shows them to do it. They have to do the work. That's that accountability part, which it can be challenging because our nervous systems are always easy to control because once we get to certain places, they're like a runaway car, right? They just keep on going until they run out of fuel. But the more you do the preparation, I think the more able you are in the moment to access the tools and the more you do the recovery, the more you then go into preparation phase. It's been like the flow cycle. So you know, just again, all that depends on your awareness piece. And that is something that no one can do for you. It's just a practice that you have to develop and rehearse until you have those neural pathways where it becomes automatic.
John: And as we start to close this out and wrap up this conversation that I feel like we just scratched the surface of, there's so much more that we could dive into when it comes to the nervous system and understanding all of these states and hybrid states. But what would be your last thought to the listeners? as they start their journey to really get themselves in the driver's seat and start having more agency between each of these states of their nervous system.
Andrea: When I wind the clock back, one of the first things that I put into my daily life was the stop practice. Are you familiar with that? And I built the stop practice into, I used habit stacking. So I would put it with something else. And when I lived in Houston, I did a lot of driving, so I would do it at the traffic lights. And again, so different places, when I do it at home, I do it when I have my cup of tea, I will use my cup of tea as my trigger to go, oh, OK, just breathe it in, blow it out, just notice. So it's hard to remember to do these things, which is why it really helps to attach them to something that you already do. I mentioned earlier going to the restroom. Drinking glasses of water, cups of tea, going to the restroom, sitting at traffic lights, sitting at your computer. People need to find where to stick their little tool. But the stop practice is a really good one. So to stop, S, T, take a breath. O, observe. P, perspective. I have two Ps in mine. Perspective, to take a step up, just notice what's around you, think about what the options are, you know, and then proceed. So I think that's a really good practice that anybody can use anywhere in ways that suit them. It only takes a minute. And from there, that prepares you for the opportunity and possibilities. What if I did it a little bit longer? What if I wrote those things down? What if I did this? What if I did that? I wonder what would happen if I tried this way instead. And then, because you're doing stop, take a breath. When you take a breath, you regulate the nervous system, and we know that when the ventral vagal state is coordinating the sympathetic and the dorsal, we are curious. And we need that curiosity in order to grow.
Tony: Wow.
John: Powerful. Any final thoughts from you, Tony?
Tony: I think this has been a extremely healthy and refreshing conversation. I think that the work that you're doing is extremely important and I think more people need to recognize that they're yellow and start to unpack and find the healthy ways to become green. I think that you pointed out something huge about the play aspect and I think that we have substituted healthy play for social adult-like play and that can be a rabbit hole for some of us even the way we use our technology today is a part of it. So I just think there was so much and I think that John's right we just scratched the surface and hopefully we can do a part two because I know that there's more we can do we can do and discuss and this has been so so refreshing for me. Thank you.
Andrea: You're welcome. What I am doing I'm putting together something called a Polyvagal Power Hour and I'm going to try and do a LinkedIn to give people a flavor of polyvagal theory and how it can help them in their coaching practice. And then building on that, I'm just building a course at the moment, just a short course, probably four hours, where people can learn the different states and I can share my three-step process. So that people can then use it for themselves, but then they can share it with their clients. So I'm just putting that together at the moment. So watch this space. I'll share the details once I've kind of cleaned it all up and made it presentable. But I just thought it was something that I wish I had known many years ago. And once you understand it, it's not that complicated. It just needs to be explained in a way that's applicable to everyday lives.
John: Thank you so much for joining us and speaking about some of the things that you have coming up that you just mentioned. What are some of the ways that our listeners can connect with you and to hear about these things upcoming? We would love to share them with our listeners, but what are some ways that you would like our audience to connect with you?
Andrea: So the best way is on LinkedIn. I'm going to try and do some, I interact with that kind of daily. I also have a website, which is www.neurosmartlearning.com. And that's kind of, I'm going to start putting some more resources on there. But you know, if you want a conversation with me, you know, go to my website, there's a link to book some time and I'd love to have a conversation with you and share how I can help. And obviously I'm looking very shortly to have the coaches part. But I do mainly try and work with coaches, because I think executive and leadership coaches, they already have their audience. They already have that relationship. And I come in and do some of the foundational stuff that actually really enhance not just the coach's work, but really enhance the learning experience and the ability of the executives and leaders to apply what they're learning, if that makes sense. So there's two ways to work directly with the executives and training. And I'm looking at doing more work with the kind of coaches so that they can use it for themselves in their own practices. Awesome website, best places.
John: Awesome. Well, we'll have those linked in the show notes. So again, thank you so much for joining us. It really has been a pleasure. And listeners, thank you so much for being a part of the community. And if you've been listening to us for a long time and you enjoyed what you heard today, Please feel free to rate us and review us wherever you're listening to your podcast and reach out. If you have any feedback about this episode or would like to hear about other things, do not hesitate to reach out at the present professional podcast dot com. Tony and I would love to hear from you again. Take care.
Andrea: Thanks, everybody.