Leading in a Non-Linear World
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, I spoke with Jean Gomes, New York Times bestselling author and CEO of Outside. Our conversation centred around Jean's fascinating new book "Leading in a Non-Linear World: Building Wellbeing, Strategic and Innovation Mindsets for the Future."
Jean shares powerful insights from the latest scientific research on how our mindsets shape our realities. He explains that our mindsets are comprised of the frames we hold, the assumptions we make, and how we feel physically and emotionally in any given situation. Our mindsets act as a broker between our inner and outer worlds, mediating how we make sense of ourselves and navigate uncertainty.
Jean emphasizes the importance of understanding our physical feelings and emotions as sources of valuable information, not distractions to be ignored. By tuning into our body's signals and reading our emotions as prompts about unmet needs, we can become more aware and make better decisions under stress.
For leaders, Jean advocates adopting a "sufficiency mindset" where meeting people's basic needs takes priority over short-term efficiencies. This enables greater innovation, inclusion and adaptation in organizations. Jean also discusses how vulnerability is the key to empathy and building truly inclusive cultures.
In a complex world, making sense of ourselves and situations starts with asking three simple questions - How am I seeing this? What am I feeling? What assumptions am I making? Self-awareness and mindset flexibility will be vital leadership capabilities going forward.
I highly recommend tuning into this fascinating conversation and reading Jean's book for deeper insights on mindset and navigating change. Understanding how we construct our realities has never been more relevant.
Episode Highlights
How your mindset works and what the latest science tells us about how we construct reality
How you can build and strengthen your mindset and the mindset of others
The mindsets that are foundational to world’s fastest growing organizations
How to apply this knowledge to improve your personal wellbeing, leadership and solve topics such as strategy, innovation and culture
Recommended Resources
Follow Jean on LinkedIn
📕 Grab a copy of the book Leading in a Non-Linear World: Building Wellbeing, Strategic and Innovation Mindsets for the Future
Learn more about Outside
Learn the 2023 Global Hiring Trends
In an age of evolving worker expectations, unpredictable economic conditions, and questions around the ever-changing future of work, talent leaders must keep their sights on attracting and hiring the people who will build and shape the future of their organizations.
🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript
Jean 0:00
The definition of mindset that I've come to is that it's the interplay between the frames that we hold up to the world. The assumptions we make about what's happening in any given situation and how we feel about it physically and emotionally how we feel, think and see generates what we know what we doubt. And that's your mindset.
Chris Rainey 0:24
Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by John Gomez, who's a New York Times bestselling author, CEO and founder outside and co host of the evolving leaders Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking about his new book and leading in a nonlinear world, John will share how your mindset works, and what the latest science tells us about how we construct reality. He shares how you can build and strengthen your mindset, and the mindset of others, their mindsets that are foundational to the world's fastest growing organisations, and how to apply this knowledge to improve your personal well being leadership and solve topics such as strategy, innovation, and culture. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in. John, welcome to the show. How are you?
Jean 1:16
I'm really well Chris, lovely to be here who has spoken
Chris Rainey 1:19
online quite a few times. And now you're here in the flesh? How have you been? First of all, most
Jean 1:22
I have been very well, very busy. Post COVID. Life has changed dramatically. Yeah, years of sitting in a in an office to travelling the world. So yeah, just being out and about a lot.
Chris Rainey 1:36
Amazing how how's the book going?
Jean 1:39
It's had a really good reception. Happy to say sales are good. I had some lovely reviews and great kind of feedback in the work we're doing around it. So yeah, it's been very
Chris Rainey 1:49
amazing. Before we get into more about the book, tell everyone a little bit more about you personally, and your journey to where we are now.
Jean 1:56
Yeah. So I started off as a neuroscientist. That's a long time ago, that was my first degree. And then I found myself in consulting, working largely on on change programmes at an individual and global level worked all around the world worked with a very big variety of industries and organisations. And about 15 years ago, I looking back at all of the big projects that we've done, I came to a conclusion that there was something missing in the change agenda. And that's kind of the origin story of what I'm doing today.
Chris Rainey 2:29
So my next question was gonna be what inspired the book leading in a nonlinear world? What was the inspiration behind that? Well, I
Jean 2:35
think two things coming together. One was this journey to try and find another way of thinking about how people change and adapt to the environment. And the other was just this colossal sense of change and uncertainty that spiked massively from 2016 onwards. And a number of things happened to me in that year, that just made it very, very, kind of it felt very important to try and work on this in a new way.
Chris Rainey 3:00
Yeah. It feels like perfect timing. When we first spoke given current events. Obviously, it's not great that the things that are happening around us, but it felt like your your work in the book becomes even more relevant right now. Would you agree?
Jean 3:14
Yeah. Well, it's it's deeply purpose driven. You know, I've kind of got to a point now, I've been doing this for 37 years. So I've got a kind of point in my career, where what I'm doing is something I want to leave a legacy rather than just, it's not, it's not a commercial priority. For me, it's more to do with solving something I deeply believe needs to be solved. Who is it for? It's for everybody. And even though this book is quite an academic book, it's, you know, it's kind of like the credentials ation of these ideas. Future things that I'll do will be aimed at a much broader audience. But essentially, you know, how do you make sense of yourself in the world, when things get crazy, and we're in this unbelievable pressure cooker of demand and uncertainty. So it's, it's for everybody starting out in work, and those who are leading it,
Chris Rainey 4:02
I saw a video where you where you spoke about the what the word mindset means to you. And I realised it was very different to what I thought and very different to what I've heard others say, so what does the word mindset mean to you?
Jean 4:16
That's a good starting point. Well, I didn't really know. And when this word kind of became very, very popular in Silicon Valley 15 years ago, largely because of the work of Carol Dweck, it became like a code word. And when I asked people and we subsequently asked 1000s of people what it went, they didn't really know. They knew it's important. They kind of thought they should know what it meant. But they were using it as a label for all sorts of things ranging from how this person shows up, you know, their kind of state, their personality, their social affiliation, the ideas, they hold all sorts of things. So it's a kind of blurred and fuzzy thing. But something that's so important and when you ask people about Carol Dweck work again, they I had this very superficial understanding of a growth versus fixed mindset because the idea has a great degree of rightness about it. So I wanted to find out what it actually meant. And I read and talk to neuroscientists, and psychologists all around the world. And they didn't really know, they had all pieces of the puzzle. And what I came to really was that the definition that people had fell into two broad categories, one was more like a dictionary definition, mindset as an attitude or a belief, you know, how you show up. And the situation is largely shaped by this belief. And it could be a Brexit mindset, or it could be a project management mindset, or something like that. And the other thing that they they routinely described was mindset as an idea, something external to you that you hold a frame that you look at the world through, and so on. And that could be through your expertise. It could be about politics, it could be about being part of community, and so on. But essentially, those two things are very different. And people use them interchangeably. So where I got to having spent a lot of time working on this, and looking at all the descriptions of mindset, in academia, and in the business world, there's kind of two things that are going on these descriptions are a partial description of what a mindset is. But what they do is they describe what a mindset is, and what a person who adopts or holds a certain mindset does in terms of behaviour, or the ideas that they use. So if I looked at 1000, papers on entrepreneurial mindset, none of them told you how a mindset work, they will tell you what it was, the here are the six behaviours of somebody who has an entrepreneurial mindset in a corporate setting. And the problem with that is that that's tells you only half the story, it's useful. But if I said to you look, you know, adopt these behaviours, the chances of you being able to do a very slim near, because the origin of those behaviours comes from what's going on inside people. So I wanted to find out and their experiences, their experience, their their skill sets, the way they look at things, how they feel about risk and uncertainty in different situations, and so on. So that isn't part of that story in any of those papers. So the frustration I had with it was, particularly when you're trying to help leaders drive growth in large organisations, and they say to their people, like we need you to become more entrepreneurial. And here's the programme stuff like they just don't do it.
Chris Rainey 7:17
Now, what are some of the new understandings of mindset from the research?
Jean 7:20
So what's really exciting about this is that when I was studying neuroscience, and in probably in the subsequent 20 years after that, it was a very interesting field, but it wasn't particularly actionable. You know, that stuff that you learned, wasn't particularly actionable in the real world. And in the last 10 years, things have dramatically changed with the quality of it, the intersection between psychology and neurobiology, and scanning technologies, all of this stuff has now come into, into a place where we can learn stuff that we can, we can use, the definition of mindset that I've come to is that it's the interplay between the frames that we hold up to the world, the assumptions we make about what's happening in a given situation, and how we feel about it physically and emotionally. How we feel thinking, see, generates what we know what we doubt what we ignore. And that's your mindset. And it's a broker between what's going on inside you in terms of personality and culture and genetics, and what kind of stuff and what's happening in the outside world. So it sits in between you and your interior world and the exterior world, and it helps you to navigate and once you understand that, there are mechanisms of mindset that neuroscience is teaching us can be developed and strengthened. So you can actually build a mindset, you'd have to adopt one. Here's the six behaviours, you'd have to adopt it, which is a high failure rate, you can actually build one that's the exciting piece for me. So what
Chris Rainey 8:43
are some practical ways then people can use this?
Jean 8:47
Well, I think the piece that's most neglected and misunderstood is the field part of it. Essentially, you've got this brain that's constantly making predictions about what's going to happen based on the past, and the circumstances you find yourself in. So this predicting brain is constantly trying to reduce the amount of energy it uses, because it's a very energy rich kind of demand by making predictions because predictions are cheaper than reaction. So if you have a moment in your life where you felt exposed or doubtful about your worth, or your competence in this situation, that's a prediction about what's going to happen in the future. But what happens is that your body actually creates the circumstances for that before your mind does, oh, your your physiology will change when you're in that situation. And that leads to you constructing emotions to make sense of that situation. And that might be fear or anxiety or doubt. And that generates then the kind of self talk one of the simplest ways of thinking about it is that you know, let's imagine we're in the Arizona desert and the big rattlesnake comes along. What happens first you feel fear, or does your heart rate go up? Maybe heart rate down, your heart rate your body knows, maybe seconds as your body The starts to generate this emotions and you make motions to make sense of what's happening. There are two things that that sit here that are actionable for our listeners. The first is that when we tune into physical feelings, we start to build physical intelligence. This is like the foundation of a mindset, where when you are more clear about what your body's doing, you're more likely to interpret the situation better. So there was a good example of this neuroscientists went into a trading floor in 2016. And they measured the sensitivity that those traders had to the physical signals within their body. And they do this in a really simple way. So like, we could do it right now if you wanted to. But it's, essentially you calculate your heart rate for a minute. And someone measures at the same time. And the difference between your guests and the real number is your interoceptive accuracy, your ability to know what's going on inside your body. And this is a really simple way of doing it. The people had the greater sensitivity were about between 17 to 25%, more profitable, and their careers were consistently longer. And that's because in a situation that's incredibly pressured with huge amounts of uncertainty, and these guys only get paid if they on the basis of the bets they're gonna get salary. Because they can tune to their body, their body tells them what's going on, because the principal purpose of physical feelings is to give you a readout of your safety in the world. So your body knows intuitively
Chris Rainey 11:31
crazy to your body knows before you Yeah, I had it, I had it a completely the opposite way.
Jean 11:37
as well. There's another example of this in a gambling test that was devised by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, where he asked people to do this on a quite traditional in psychology terms, at least test where you have four decks of cards, and you're turning them over to make money, you've got a pot of money that you're given. And as you turn them over some, some cards give you money back. So yeah, you lose it, you will detect over a period of time of doing this is that two decks are good and two decks are bad. And it's really to find out how long it takes you to know that what's interesting is that he devised a test where he measured the skin resistance of of people on their fingertips, because when you experience any form of threat or risk, you produce micro amounts of sweat, and they could measure that. And what they noticed was that when people were touching the decks of cards that were bad, the sweat, no way, before they knew, sometimes 10 turns before they knew last crazy, physical intelligence is actually an incredibly powerful resource that we can draw upon, because it gives us something we all have access to it, it's not about your intelligence, it's not about your, your wealth, or means or anything like that everybody can develop this. So that's the first thing. The second thing on the field, part of it is that we all know that emotional intelligence is important, but we kind of missing something about how to action it the thing that people like Lisa Feldman Barrett is an absolute Rockstar in the neuroscience world has come up with a new way of defining what emotions are instead of them being hardwired responses to the things that are happening in the world. So you know, I'm rude to you, you get defensive, that's the kind of hardwired response, and you can't really do much about it, it's not actually what's happening, what's going on is the brain is constructing the emotion to make sense of the physical toll that that little bit of unsafety is creating in you. And depending on how you see that and how you react to it, you can change the narrative very dramatically. So you can reframe it, and you can, you can offset it. One of the things that that comes with this is that we don't really know what we're feeling most of the time. It's suppressed in our culture, you know, just don't, don't acknowledge what you're feeling. And most people have between five to six words describe what they're feeling. And most of those words aren't emotions at all their physical feelings, I'm tired, or I'm just a bit drained or pumped, or whatever it is, or I'm, I'm fine. You know, yeah, just the same thing. It's nothing. And if you don't know how you're feeling, you don't know something very important about what's happening to you. Because negative emotions in this predicting brain negative emotions are really error signals telling you that a core need in you isn't being met. And when you know this, you get to first principle problem solving. So if you're in a situation where a boardroom or in a conversation with my team, and I'm suddenly starting to experience, you know, feeling judgmental, or defensive or angry or something like that, really, there is one of maybe a dozen core needs that that signalling. So it could be I'm physically not resourced. I'm just exhausted or I need to go to the bathroom. I don't feel valued by you. I don't have a sense of volition control over the situation. I don't feel connected. I'm being excluded. I don't feel informed. I don't feel purposeful and so on. And when you recognise that that emotion is telling you that then you calibrate you're problem solving, you don't act out, you don't make interpretations about what people's motivated, it's
Chris Rainey 15:05
about, like catching you in the moment catching yourself in the moment and go, okay, yeah, and then work through that.
Jean 15:10
Yeah. And it goes beyond just trying to avoid the negative emotion is reading the negative emotion as a valuable source of information rather than going, No, you just need to stuff that down, you need to adopt a poker face and and try and ignore those feelings. And the most reliable thing for me is to defer judgement. When you're feeling a physical reaction, just focus on the physical reaction, you know, I'm triggered, I can feel my heart rate going up, I can feel myself and just stay with that. Don't say anything, don't do anything, you're not actually in a state where you can read the emotion. Just let that physical reaction Calm down, then read the emotion and you'll, you'll solve so many problems.
Chris Rainey 15:48
One of the things that I love about your work is is the link with well being how does this help us improve our well being?
Jean 15:53
So I think it starts with an understanding that there is a prevailing mindset at work, and in society about work in the past, probably served us, okay, because the costs of that mindset were outweighed by the benefits. And that mindset is a sacrifice model. And basically, it says, You have to be all in to succeed. That's the frame that you how you see the world, the assumptions that come with that frame are that there is no other way. If you want to be successful, you have to give everything and that means you have to sacrifice your health, your well being your family, your interest, outside of work, and so on. And when you do that, particularly when you don't get anything else in return, which a lot of us are not really feeling we are is that you feel a predominant emotion of resentment. And that you can't tolerate. So you have to justify it. And so you end up justifying why your family is not getting what it needs. I'm doing this for you, for example, or I can't look after my health. Well, my job won't let me do that, and so on. So that that prevailing mindset is the one that we need to reverse at before lots of other things can happen. For us and the mindset, we need to increasingly try and try to figure out this, how to build a sufficiency mindset, where we get what we need. Because when you don't get what you need, you pay it forward, you can't get what you need. If you're in my team, and then your needs are not met, then all your performance is undermined, and we create burnout, and we create inflexible organisations. So all the higher level mindsets that sit on top of a sufficiency mindset where my needs are met, like innovation, inclusion, adaptation, all of those are, you know, sort of working sub optimally right from
Chris Rainey 17:36
the start. So how do we build a sufficiency mindset? The sufficiency
Jean 17:39
mindset starts with a needs based lens, which says if we meet people's needs, then we create more value, they can bring more of their value to the table. And that goes beyond the kind of superficial wellbeing stuff, it means designing the organisation to actually enable people to be sustainable. That means if you look at lots of job descriptions, now people can't cope with the jobs, they're just crazy, they're destined to fail. From that perspective, the processes and systems that are in many organisations mean that, you know, people are spending 20 hours a week actually trying to get round the systems to get their jobs done, and so on. So you look at all of this and you go, well, that's not needs based culture, it's a sacrifice one way you say do it in spite off, then we need to think about, well, how can you create value out of people its needs. And this is where the AI thing comes in. Because as we start to automate more work, we want to be asking ourselves, what do we want from people in that world, we want them to be better at Four Courts, core sources of value creation, being able to see what's going on in situation, situational analysis really be clear sites about what's happening, to be able to do creative problem solving freely, to be able to make really good decisions and to be able to form and enrich relationships. All of those are undermined when our needs aren't met. If you're feeling resentment, and you walk into your team, how are you going to create value? Yeah, so we need to elevate our sense of value. And I think that's the big shift we need to make is like that's the people innovation agenda is how do we create value by meeting people's needs, which is completely the opposite of what we're doing today. In many cases,
Chris Rainey 19:19
we obviously, you know, darwinius HR leaders, do you think this is a role of HR, who who owns who should own this,
Jean 19:24
I think HR do have a role in it. I don't think they can do on their own. And many of them wouldn't think they could, because when they when you talk to them about these things, they they acknowledged as you know, an important challenge and then they think about it from a practical point of view, and it's not going to happen. So I think they have to build a coalition around this and bring other people into it because organisations that are starting to do this and think like this are going to become the ones that people want to work for.
Chris Rainey 19:55
Well, you mentioned or like systems and processes already. There's something I need to get it Yeah, the rest of the business is everyone I feel like everyone, I feel like my answer to everyone is everyone's wrong.
Jean 20:05
Wouldn't it be brilliant if you kind of applied a design thinking methodology to organisational design organisations are designed to be efficient, they're not designed to enable people to create value.
Chris Rainey 20:17
That's just good way of putting it resemble, we mentioned change, I feel like the last couple of years have been really tough. And one of the people that suffered the most in many ways are the those line managers and leaders who both trying to take care of their own mental health and well being, but also of the others of their teams, right? And that lead, how can this help leaders and managers face change differently. And it also be good after to maybe go into some of the characteristics that you see in the CEOs and the companies that you work with,
Jean 20:48
I think the first thing that you mentioned there around the middle manager layer, they are the most essential you creators in the whole of the organisation, and they're often the most deprioritize, when it comes to these things. So the leadership team comes up with this enormously compelling new idea for change, then they spend a little bit of time trying to convince this level to do that. And then the exact same time Yeah, and they don't give them any real resources to make it happen. Because they don't really understand the capacity of the organisation. So I think the challenge of the most senior leaders is to actually understand the capacity of their organisation. And they don't, I don't think anybody does. I mean, I know one big company that we work for the IT director came in, new IT director came in and did an analysis amount of emails that people were having, and it ran into gigabytes a day, that that the majority of people were getting in their inboxes. Now, no human being can deal with, you know, five 600 700 emails, just even reading the headers and trying to figure out which ones to resource then. So we need to be thinking about the capacity and where, where the limits of that are, and then what we can actually achieve with that, because ultimately, that's what you've got. So I think there's something there. Then the second piece for, for middle managers is that they are often the most skilled, knowledgeable people in the business. And I was just with a group yesterday and it was just markable watching them solving problems and positive and all the things that the the layer above seem unable to do. They were just doing it for me. I wish they were watching them. It was fun. It was funny. So I think there's a lot of talent in that area of business, which is often miss characterised as the cynical, they're the lead, lightning, all this kind of stuff. And nothing could be further from the truth. Yeah, in many organisations. So I think we need to rethink that. And then coming back to your your question about leaders that I've seen, that have done extraordinary things, the starting point is that it takes a level of awareness and understanding of values. To be able to do this, what we're talking about here, I'm researching a story at the moment about a particular leader who's done something extraordinary in their career, and just trying to get under the surface of how they've done that. And they have intuitively built this sufficiency mindset. And the way they've done it, is to really hold themselves deeply accountable to what they want in their life, and then ask themselves, are they living those values? And it's meant that they've drawn some absolute red lines in what they are willing and not willing to do. And then achieved in spite of those red lines, because everybody else says, No, we can't do that. You can't be successful. If you do these things. Now, you know, incompetence, I can't say what those things are. But they're things that narratives that we tell ourselves, Well, I can't be successful, and do that. And they found a way of doing this. They've moved from the either or to the both end. And I think that's, you know, that's the big challenge, that we need to find leaders who are willing to push themselves to be able to role model and, and, and push the social innovation agenda. Because if they say it's impossible for themselves, What chance does anybody else have?
Chris Rainey 24:06
I was gonna ask you that was part of that was how do we do this for our teams? And I was assuming that unless we can do this ourselves, it's pretty difficult to set that example for our teams.
Jean 24:20
Well, I think this is where you get the kind of like the clash between knowing and doing Yes, you know, I go on this course. And it says, These are the five things you should do to help your team have good well being, you know, they're all things that we know. And then because I've had a period of time where I'm absolutely burnt out, and my team member sounds around says, Look, you know, I need a mental health day or or, you know, can we spend a bit of time talking about this and you just act out and go we haven't got enough time for that, you know, get realistic you know, you really not seeing what's going on? Yeah, now, you know that that's wrong, but you're acting from deficit, you can't actually arise to the challenge because your needs have been met. That's the Yeah vicious cycle that we're in
Chris Rainey 25:01
mentioned earlier, the inclusivity piece and how does this help us create inclusive cultures?
Jean 25:09
Yeah, so I think there's like a hierarchy of mindsets. So if you're if you have a sufficiency mindset, then your basic needs are met, your chances of being able to build more sophisticated, complex mindsets on top of that are much higher. An inclusive mindset, really has the counterintuitive idea that at the root of it, if you want to be empathetic, and you want to be able to include people into your world that are not like you, in any way, you know, age, gender, you know, and so on, you need to accept that the biggest barrier to that is your vulnerability when you're around them. Interesting people like that, who are not like you make you feel vulnerable. And when you don't understand that, the emotional response, you misread, you misread the core needs of feeling valued, secure in control, and so on. So you have to be able to deeply embrace and that word embracing vulnerability is often used. And it's sort of Yeah, it gets a bit squeamish about it, and so on, like, it's associated with weakness, this normally couldn't be its strength.
Chris Rainey 26:16
I said that before. Like, since I started sharing my journey with my battle with my mental health and well being, I always saw it as that's why I never shared it for like 15 years, I was so terrified. And the moment I started sharing, it actually realised actually one of my biggest strengths, much more meaningful relationships in my team, my family, my wife, my daughter, everything
Jean 26:35
improved when you're embracing parts of yourself that otherwise you try to ignore. And so you're not your whole self in that situation. And you can also see what you need. Because you're those feelings of vulnerability are telling you something about what you need. And when you pay attention to them. You don't need to have the perfect language to deal with the inclusive agenda. You don't need to know the perfect kind of things to say in every situation, because people will feel your vulnerability and they'll feel you could be a bit clumsy and get me no get through it. But so that's the first piece really, I think in terms of a mindset. And that means paying attention to how your body and emotions are reacting, because if you're not, you're going to do
Chris Rainey 27:19
that's not an actual thing. If people more, some people more naturally. Notice that more with themselves. Yeah. Like, is that a skill that, you know? Or is it more of a skill that needs to be developed? Well,
Jean 27:29
you know, people sit on a spectrum of all of this into what do you call that spectrum? What do you like? It's a sensitivity spectrum to their their physical feelings.
Chris Rainey 27:39
Is it emotional intelligence, or no, it's
Jean 27:40
physical, because it's called interception. Interception, interesting. And interception are all the signals inside your body that are giving you a readout on your body's resourcing your body budget, okay, and those signals or the sensors inside your body get pulled through nerves into the heart. And that's why the heart rate is such a good indicator, it gets fed through the insula cord, through the vagus nerve to the insular cortex and the part of the brain. The more you tune into that this is comes actually, how do you build a mindset around all of this, the more you tune into those feelings on a regular basis, through mindfulness, or body scans, or anything like that, you actually strengthen this connection, and you strengthen part of the insular cortex that allows you to regulate your energy and your decision making under stress. So people who do this, this is why those traders make better decisions is because their brain mobilises resources for decision making quickly ahead of when they need it. Wow. And then it calms the brain down afterwards, whereas people who don't get panicked, and their brain spikes, and it doesn't come down and they can't think. And that's the difference.
Chris Rainey 28:48
Wow. Have you done any research with athletes? Yes. fascinating to see that happen at the top of the level of sports?
Jean 28:57
Yeah, well, if you think about an athlete, and I've worked in the Olympic system, in tennis, and other sports for a long time, if you think about athletes are actually generally pretty good on this front, they're pretty connected with their bodies, because they pay such attention to it. But imagine for a moment, an athlete running around the track, who has a very solid connection with a body that can feel the floor, they're really rooted into that sense of physical connection, versus one that hasn't, with that person's got brain going to be, instead of focusing on themselves, they're going to be focused on
Chris Rainey 29:33
on four people behind not you know, they start thinking negatively and start you know, as opposed to being is that kind of what people call flow state? will flow state
Jean 29:42
is a psychological experience that comes from sort of several layers of connectedness. So you're connected your body and you're connected, all right, and you're then deeply focused into something you love doing. Then you experience this flow state, which is the absence of F But everything's Yeah, it's easy and time disappears and all this kind of stuff, and you can stay in that, you know, for quite some time. And you're operating, where you have maximum access to all your neural capabilities. So you're able to think more creatively, we're able to think big picture, and then zone between detail and, and so on. So it's an amazing state to be in. And you can generate it through exercise, you can generate it by, you know, really deeply focusing on something you love, and so on. But, you know, those connections are almost impossible to achieve when you're exhausted or fatigued or emotionally, you know, in a negative space.
Chris Rainey 30:35
One of the things I was thinking about while I was having this whole conversation is how do you hold all these different mindsets at the same time? You know, we've spoken about the fissures in mindset, future now mindset. So it's a lot
Jean 30:47
said like that, it might seem seem so I think, when you boil it down, it's quite simple. You're asking yourself, in any situation, any given situation, because we all do this anyway, we are able to adapt and use different problem solving techniques in different situations all the time we do intuitively. A mindset really is, well, how am I seeing this situation? What is what what am I feeling? What assumptions am I carrying? Is the frame, I'm holding up to the situation helping me to see what's there. Love that. And that's it, you know, and, and the more you do that, the more you ask those three questions, the more information you get about what's actually happening, and how you're responding to it, how you're making sense of yourself in the situation. And if you think about them, the moments where you feel least secure, that's when it's most important. Because if you rely upon things in the past that have got you through in situations where you're experiencing it for the first time, you might make a really big mistake and big error judgement, that might lose your career. I mean, the stakes are very high now for particularly for senior people. Were just one unguarded comment. Yeah, on a town hall meeting, reverberates around the world. And guess what? They didn't get promoted or worse. So we need to understand our mindset and how it actually orientates us to situations. And so I think the simplest, it's that I feel, think and see that what's that allow me to do in terms of making sense? Yes.
Chris Rainey 32:19
Well, I think that's amazing way to end and the podcast. And that's such a great practical tool, just ask yourself to take take a pause. Ask yourself those three questions. And yeah, take a minute before you react and say to everyone, but I appreciate you come on the show is honestly I speak to you forever is absolutely fascinating, the work that you do. And it kind of when we first spoke, I was like, why are we not having these conversations? Why are we not speaking about this inside of organisations, I speak to HR leaders and other leaders every day. And this isn't something that comes up. And I'm like, it almost seems crazy that we're not having this conversation. And so I'm really excited to want to read the book, you also got the audio version, where's the best place for them to find a copy to book audibles easiest place? To get a hold of it? Yeah. And where can they connect with you directly. If you want to reach out to me personally reach
Jean 33:09
out to me on LinkedIn or on my website, or, John, we are outside.com
Chris Rainey 33:14
Amazing. And I'll also definitely do a special shout out to your podcast evolving leader. There'll be a link in the description wherever you're listening or watching right now to make sure you subscribe to the podcast, but apart from that, appreciate it Come on show and I wish all the best until next week. It's
Jean 33:27
been an absolute pleasure.
HR Leaders Newsletter
Sign up below and well send our weekly newsletter packed with actionable insights, podcasts, clips and compelling content directly to your inbox.