As AI becomes more integrated into our workplaces, it's crucial to address its impact on social connections. While AI streamlines processes, it can sometimes isolate team members, diminishing the human interactions that foster a sense of belonging and purpose. In our upcoming webinar, we'll explore: The challenges AI poses to workplace social connections Effective strategies to enhance employee engagement and connection to their roles, teams, and the organization’s mission Practical tips for using AI to support rather than replace human interactions Learn how to leverage AI while maintaining a vibrant, connected workplace culture. Join us to ensure your team not only thrives in efficiency but also in unity and purpose.
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Shelby Wilburn: Welcome back to another week of your brain at work. Live! I'm your host, Shelby Wilburn, for our regulars. We're happy to have you back. And for newcomers. We're excited to have you here with us today. For the 1st time in this episode we'll be diving into exploring and exposing common myths in neuroscience. Now, as I quickly share some housekeeping notes, drop in the comments or chat box where you're joining in from today.
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Shelby Wilburn: we are recording today's session. So if you're interested in a replay, be on the lookout for an email later today, that email is going to include a survey for feedback as well as a number of resources that are aligned with today's conversation. We suggest putting your phone on. Do not disturb quitting out of your email and messaging apps. So you can get the most out of today's discussion. And it's also going to help with your audio and video quality. And we love interaction. So feel free to share your thoughts and comments with us in the chat. Now, to get this show underway, I'm going to introduce our speakers for today.
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Shelby Wilburn: An Aussie turned New Yorker, who coined the term neuro leadership when he co-founded Nli over 2 decades ago with a professional doctorate, 4 successful books under his name, and a multitude of bylines ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, and many more a warm welcome for the co-founder and CEO of the Neuro Leadership Institute. Dr. David Rock.
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Shelby Wilburn: David, it's great to have you back. You've been gone for a bit.
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Dr. David Rock: Shelby. Great to be back. Yeah, it's it's a it's like a. It's a part of my week. It's I kind of miss it when I'm.
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Shelby Wilburn: We're happy to have you here.
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Shelby Wilburn: And our moderator for today leads the research team at the Neuro Leadership Institute, where she focuses on translating cognitive and social neuroscience into actionable solutions for organizations as well as helps to communicate relevant research in an accessible manner. For the public.
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Shelby Wilburn: Previously she was a professor at Dominican College and New York University, and a researcher at the Nathan Klein Institute. She holds a bachelor's degree from Brown University and a Phd. In neuroscience from New York University, a warm welcome to the Senior Director of Research at Nli. Dr. Emma Saro.
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Shelby Wilburn: Thanks for being here today, Emma, as always.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Thanks. Shelby.
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Shelby Wilburn: Send it over to you.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, thanks. Well, David, welcome back. It's been a while we've been struggling through the last few weeks without you.
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Dr. David Rock: I hear it's been great. I hear it's been great.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, it's been fun. But yeah, I'm sure everyone here, listening and watching are super excited to have you back. And I know that you've been gone. You've been traveling the Globe holding different leadership development Mini summits. And hopefully, we'll get to some of those ideas and insights that you've had, as you've been talking to leaders across the world.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, it's really interesting doing the same, or very similar kind of workshop in many different parts of the world. And it's, you know, sort of one after the other. You get to see patterns and trends and what's quite universal. But maybe we'll talk about that a bit later.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. So, as Shelley mentioned, we're going to be talking about those common misconceptions or myths that you hear. I know. Sometimes we do these kinds of episodes. And they're a lot of fun, because it's amazing what people talk about when they and how stories change as you start bringing up this fascinating organ of the brain. And there's a number of them so, and for anyone listening and watching, please, you know, drop in the chat as you're as you're thinking of questions and and things to explore as well.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: So I'm just gonna start throwing some out to you. Hearing what your thoughts are one that we often talk about is just the idea that we only use 10% of our brain.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: So what would you say to that?
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, I mean, I I can give you like the one, the the 3 second sound bite answer, and the answer is, no, not true or the like. 3 day. Answer to that, actually explaining what we really do. I'll try and give you the 2 min answer. But it's but it's so, so, so, so far wrong. But but what it? What it comes from is this.
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Dr. David Rock: you know this observation, you know, ever since humans have been observing anything. This observation, that there's a lot going on under the surface, you know, and you know, all. All you have to do is learn to drive and notice that you can drive without paying attention to it right, and that you can be mentally like you know elsewhere. Thinking about your day. And you're still driving safely like, Wow, that's amazing. My brain does all this stuff unconsciously, right?
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Dr. David Rock: Well, it turns out there's huge amounts happening unconsciously. And in fact, the ratio between that and kind of what you think about consciously is is enormous. It's an enormous difference. It's not 10%. It's not 1%. It's not 000 1%. It's it's hundreds of zeros, 1%
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Dr. David Rock: and it's, you know, it's
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Dr. David Rock: Consciously, you've got this, this very limited capacity
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Dr. David Rock: to hold information in mind at one time. Right? Very, very limited capacity. But unconsciously, you've got.
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Dr. David Rock: you know, this incredible processing power, you know, something like a hundred 1 billion neurons that each got 10,000 synapses. But each one of those have, like 50 different neurochemicals that can be at 50 different levels at every synapse. You know, every connection. It's it's crazy. So I mean, it's literally, there are more ways that a brain can be connected than there are atoms in the known universe.
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Dr. David Rock: which is a crazy, crazy number. But if you just look at an individual, and how much can be processed like sort of calculations, think of it in terms of calculations, right?
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Dr. David Rock: How many calculations per second in the in the part of the brain that you're not consciously accessing right? That's managing, you know, breathing and sitting up straight and digesting and calcium levels. And, you know, like, actually, hundreds of different things, right? The the amount of calculations per second that's going on in there versus the calculations per second in the conscious brain. It's basically about a cubic foot to the Milky Way.
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Dr. David Rock: It's it's crazy, crazy, different. So so 10% is like, way, way way off, right? But it's it's it's noticing that there's a lot going on at the surface. And I think you know, one of the really important realizations is just
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Dr. David Rock: how much is going on at the surface. That doesn't mean we're completely
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Dr. David Rock: you know from my perspective. Anyway, it doesn't mean we have completely no free will. We? We're like a caretaker consciousness like a caretaker that can trim and and alter and actually change through choices that underpinning those underpinning processes to to a degree. But we are very, very kind of
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Dr. David Rock: I won't say mechanical, but we're, you know, biomechanical. It's a huge amount of what we do is beneath conscious awareness. But conscious awareness still has an important role. So yeah, not 10%, not 1%, not even point, you know.
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Dr. David Rock: 21 to 0 is 1% way way way bigger than that.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, I love this discussion. And you're right. We could probably have a whole episode just on this. But this idea that all of this underlying activity is impacting the conscious thought as well. And there was actually a recent study by nature that showed that everything that's going on unconsciously is impacting our decisions consciously. So even if you were to say, only 2% is being used for our decisions that's dependent on everything going on in the background as well. So all of that stuff. And we talk about.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: too, when we talk about insights is all of that unconscious activity that's happening in the seconds before we have an insight. It causes the insight and leads to the insight. So it's necessary.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a there's a whole thing, you know, on insight. But but essentially, you know your your con, your conscious problem. Solving capacity is really, really, quite limited. And you, you really need unconscious problem solving and and that requires a more quiet brain. And so we've we've we've got to, you know, leave space for that unconscious problem solving in our lives. You know much, much more.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. And this is kind of related to it as well. But how many items can you hold in in your, you know, prefrontal at any one time. There's this magic number 7 that gets thrown around all the time.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, this was, this was kind of made up around when telephone numbers came up. It's like, you know, you can remember 7 numbers. And people noticed they could remember a phone number 7 digits that we became harder, 8 or 9. But actually, you could remember lots of strings of digits, if you if you like. Tie them together, like, you know, 53, 47, 2982 you can, you know. Suddenly, you can remember.
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Dr. David Rock: And the reason that's easier is you're chunking
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Dr. David Rock: right, which is a clue to how to maximize working memory right when you chunk things right? You can. You can, you can get more out of working memory. But the whole 1st part of my last book, recent book, Your Brain at Work, is about the limited capacity. We have
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Dr. David Rock: to just make decisions and solve problems right? The limited capacity. And then how to work around that. So sort of like, it sounds like a downer. At first, st like, learn your, you know, learn what your limits are, but then, by knowing your limits, you work around them.
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Dr. David Rock: and it turns out. The limits are.
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Dr. David Rock: It's sort of complicated to explain. It's not so much 7.
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Dr. David Rock: It's actually about a 3 second rule.
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Dr. David Rock: In other words, something that you can say to yourself in about 3 seconds. In your mind's voice, like your mind's eye, your mind's voice. If you could say something to yourself in about 3 seconds. It's it's in a chunk size that's that doesn't take too much effort for working memory. But essentially in terms of numbers of chunks. And this is this is really well established now. And it's it's it's in everyone's experience that's kind of paid attention to this. It's it's really 3 chunks, you know, in any category.
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Dr. David Rock: You can remember 3 chunks of ideas and hold them in mind strongly enough to be able to like, order them or compare them right? And and this is, you know, what do you do with information when you're looking at it? You're like prioritizing it. You're comparing it. What's better, what's worse, what's different? What's the same?
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Dr. David Rock: They sound a lot like mathematical functions. They kind of are right. But you you can hold 3 chunks and do that effectively. Now. 2 chunks even better, of course, and one chunk even better. But in terms of multiple chunks, you start getting to 4 different chunks of ideas in mind. And actually, you start using so much memory to hold them that you can't do the calculations between them
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Dr. David Rock: and and your calculations between them starts to really degrade, and you keep forgetting one
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Dr. David Rock: right, whereas with 3 you can hold 3 as long as each chunk isn't too big. You can hold 3 chunks
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Dr. David Rock: and and do calculations between them
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Dr. David Rock: right? And this is an important point. There's a whole body of study around cognitive constraints. Right? It's it's such a fascinating area. And we've been digging into it in the last few years. Looking at looking at this from the perspective of capacity issues and studying cognitive capacity. It's a word we love, and I think the more you understand capacity, the more you can work within it in the way you design presentations or
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Dr. David Rock: you know, emails, or just about everything you want to work within capacity limits. So 3 is not just a magic number, because it feels right. 3 is the number that most humans brains
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Dr. David Rock: can can hold in any category and still do important calculations between them without so much memory required or effort required, that that degrades is that if that makes sense, whereas 4 or 5 in any category, basically, you just all your effort goes into storing them, and the best thing you can do actually is not store them honestly is is like, put them on a page or on a flip chart or a whiteboard, or whatever
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Dr. David Rock: and and look at the relationship between things. But even then, you know, 3 is going to be better. But, you know, use your brain to to process, not store, but even then try to like break into threes. And and and it's just it's it's more fluent for the brain in in every way you can imagine.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely that the idea of externalizing is critical here. So if it's not something that you feel like, you actually need to hold on in memory, then just put it on the outside, externalize it.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, externalizing is the word that we use. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah. And and the other idea is just that you can. You can work with the idea of our capacity. If there's there are 3 items. You can link them to other things that's already stored in your long term memory. That'll help you kind of pull up all the other details that are associated with it. There's just one little trigger. It'll help you remember all of it, and then easily work with it, and then kind of, you know, just manipulate those important pieces.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah, there's a good question in there about left brain, right? Brain. Happy to, you know. Dig into that. We can. We can, you know you can throw your sort of interesting questions coming in. We'll try and cover some. We've got quite a few I think we were thinking of before. But you know, left brain, right brain is a common one, and a lot of these misconceptions come from just sort of obvious answers to commonly observed phenomena. Right? So so there's certainly a commonly observed phenomena that some people are like really detailed
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Dr. David Rock: right? You you know you give them a project, and they ask very detailed questions. And there's there's a thing called construal. Right? Construal is essentially the level of abstraction. The famous story about construal is, you know the janitor at NASA, you know, when someone asked what he's doing. He's you know, he said. He's he's putting man on the moon
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Dr. David Rock: right. He's cleaning the floor. But he's really. It's all about putting man on the moon right? That's very high, construal, low, construal would be. I'm moving my hands. You know. That's that's very low, construal for janitor's job. I'm moving my hands back and forward, right, you know. A sort of an average construal might be. I'm keeping the floors clean right? But a higher construal might be
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Dr. David Rock: I'm you know, helping, making everyone feel good about their environment right? And then the highest construal is putting man on the moon right or evolving humanity right? I'm helping evolve humanity even higher. Anyway, you can go up and down that all the time, and but people tend to naturally sort of live at different control levels, and some people are very, very detail oriented, very concrete
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Dr. David Rock: in their thinking right, and you'll say, Hey, I'm having trouble with this project, and they'll say, all right, let's dig into the details. Tell me everything like, show me your spreadsheet right? And other people will say, Oh, hey, what's your goal here? What are you trying to achieve? They'll lift up right? And so there are big picture thinkers, and there are concrete thinkers right?
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Dr. David Rock: And people have noticed this and said, Oh, this is left brain, right brain, right? Some people are like big picture more and that tends to be more creative. The big picture stuff tends to be more creative. The more concrete tends to be more kind of a little bit more problem focused a little bit more threat focused. But you know, you're also analyzing problems. And so we've noticed this and said, Oh, must be 2 parts of the brain. What's been confusing is the brain does have 2 halves
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Dr. David Rock: and
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Dr. David Rock: at the same time. It's not like everything happens in one half or another. Really, everything happens, you know, everywhere. But there's what's also very confusing is that there is a left and right dominance of the prefrontal, but it turns out that that has some connections to like which hand you use as a dominant hand. If you're right handed. It has some things. So it's a very complicated you know, situation. What we know is
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Dr. David Rock: people naturally process the world really, really differently. And not just in terms of level, of construal. But you know, in approach versus avoidance, you know some people are very positively oriented. Some people very negative oriented all sorts of different axes in which
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Dr. David Rock: and it can't be simplified to left and right brained. Absolutely not. But I think we you know, it's it's it's a. It's an interesting one that, you know comes up a lot just because we notice people think differently to us. So it kind of. It's very salient, for, you know, for folks.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. And there are. There are skills that are a bit more left or right dominant. So like language, for instance, and that's a classic. One. Language is a bit more housed on the left side, but from all of the work that's been done, and all of the maybe disorders on left or right side. What they found is in general is just a wash across both same thing with male female, and like gender differences. There also are very few gender differences in the brain as well. So those kinds of things become kind of over time, a wash from some initial claim.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: But yeah.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, if we want to. If we want to make the chat explode and and basically get myself cancelled, we can talk gender differences for a minute. But.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: The only thing I'll say.
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Dr. David Rock: I'll say 1 1 thing that that there's there's so much kind of conflicting research on the brain and gender difference, and it's really hard to know what's you know what's culture and what's, you know? Genetics and what's, you know? All sorts of things very hard to know. But they we do know that on average there's more
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Dr. David Rock: act. And this is an average average is lie. But on average there's more activity per second in a female brain than a male brain, so literally just more connections being made. But like what that means? Who knows? Right? Does that mean that women are paying more attention, and being more thoughtful, or does it mean the male brain is more efficient? It's impossible to know. But there's generally more activity per unit of time in the female than the male brain. That's about the only thing you can kind of really
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Dr. David Rock: take to take to the bank in in the research.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Have Valerie.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, let's move on.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Alright. So let's move on to something we love talking about, which is habit formation. We're great at doing it, or great at talking about it and numbers of days that it takes to form habits thrown around all over the place. So sometimes people say it takes 30 days to change a habit. What would you say to that?
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Dr. David Rock: It's it's really interesting. How pervasive that one is right. And
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Dr. David Rock: what what people don't realize is that we actually create new habits many, many times a day, and don't notice it.
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Dr. David Rock: and that that that they're basically new habits.
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Dr. David Rock: and the brain is exceptionally efficient at creating new habits. We do it really quickly, sometimes, hundreds of times a day.
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Dr. David Rock: And it's not that hard to maintain them. Just a little bit of attention, right? The the challenges. When you've got sort of an old habit that's quite dominant, you're trying to create a new one that's almost the same, and your brain can't work out which one to go with. But if you create a really different habit that solves the same problem
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Dr. David Rock: and focus on the new habit, it's really quite easy. Let me give you an example. You know you.
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Dr. David Rock: This happens to me all the time, you know. Go to a new hotel. Never been there before. You don't know the map of it. You don't know the 1st time, literally just how to get to the elevators from the front desk. Right? You do that once.
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Dr. David Rock: The next time you go, you know through the front doors you automatically go to the elevators right? You've got a habit of visual map of where the elevators are. You go up to your room, maybe the 1st time, maybe the second time you have to read the sign. By the time you've gone, you know, twice to your room. You can do it while you're on the phone
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Dr. David Rock: and not pay attention right? Maybe the 3rd time. So you've you've built a habit without really trying, without paying attention. You've layered down a habit, we do it even faster. We meet a new person at a conference. We see their name tag it's an unusual name. We pronounce the name in our in our mind's voice, incorrectly
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Dr. David Rock: and we we sort of mispronounce their name, and now we can't undo that. They tell us their name, and we just we've all we've done is pronounced it a couple of times in our head right badly. So so we're actually very, very quick to create new habits.
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Dr. David Rock: The trouble is in in a domain where you've got you know you. You've got one habit. You're trying to create a different one. If it's too similar to the 1st one, it you'll just keep defaulting like, if you're, you know, like, if you're trying to lose weight, for example, eat, you know, eat less
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Dr. David Rock: and you you know you've got a habit of you, you know you've got a habit of, like, you know, eating all your food on your plate. And you try to create a new habit of eating, you know, 2 thirds of the food on your plate. It's it's too close to the 1st one, right? It's like great. Create a new habit of breaking a meal into 3 parts.
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Dr. David Rock: and and and watching stand up comedy between each one, right? Like something completely different that gets to the result. And you're not going to default back to the 1st thing. And I just made that one up. But it's it's it's creating new habits that achieve the result that are that are a little bit further away from the original one, because new habits are pretty easy to create.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, it's true. And and how you reinforce them, too, whether, if it's a difficult one, making sure there's some kind of social component to it, somebody holding you accountable to it. Or there's you develop some kind of implementation intention if it's a difficult one. If there's a reason that you need to change this and it's the reinforcement is is well developed enough. It's easier to change.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah. And we just need a little bit of attention on that new one. We just need a little bit of focus on that new one, you know I've been. There's such a such a huge power in daily daily practice, but that what people don't realize is that daily practice can be like 15 seconds.
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Dr. David Rock: right? Like it's just the smallest amount of of attention to to to a habit. But every day, and it primes you right to keep this kind of top of mind. You know, I've been working on my fitness and my strength, I mean, like wanting, wanting to really work on that, and I've been working on it for about.
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Dr. David Rock: I guess, about 6 months now, and I I hate the idea of going to the gym and and like feeling pain like. Feel like I've hurt myself for days, right? People like, Oh, no. You wanna go to the gym and feel like you've really hurt yourself, and then that's how you build. But then I'm addicted to the gym. I don't wanna have to be addicted to something. I travel too much to be able to be dependable. So I'm I've been working on like.
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Dr. David Rock: how do I just observe my limits and just push them slightly in something I can do anywhere, anytime, right? And so it's just push ups and sit ups. And you know, I I went from, you know, like 10, you know, from basically 2030 a day to now, about 150 a day and but it's very, very gradually, and a little bit more every day, or even just the same amount every day for a week, and then a little bit more the next week, and a little bit more. But the the thing about every single day a slight change,
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Dr. David Rock: or or just the habit. Every single day, even for a moment, I work out for like 5 min a day right? My body's completely changed. You know, 5 to 10 min. It's probably 5 min total actual exercise in a day. And I can do it while I'm you know, be on calls or do anything. So it's like, how do you get it? Regular? Is the question with habits. It's not about like.
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Dr. David Rock: And people people miss that. It's get it regular. Get it easy, right link it into existing systems. That's how we build habits more so than you know, less than 30 days.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they talk about, you know, starting to go to the gym, putting your clothes out the night before. So you don't really have an excuse, and, like you have that. And it's already in the way that you're you're working. It's on the way to work, or whatever it is because it's too easy to to diverge if it's a difficult habit to build.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah. So you know the cliff, and there's a lot of good books on this atomic habit. Atomic habits is good, but just make it daily. Make it easy, link it to existing things. Those are the 3 general rules, and then you'll you'll be able to, you know, to build those habits, but it's not 30 days. You'll start to build it really quickly, like 2 or 3 days, you know. You'll really start to get a habit, or even, you know, one day a couple of attempts at something starts to build a habit, so have faith about new habits, just make them different to current habits.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. And then, when you're changing that habit, you know, do you really, truly need to understand the habit you're trying to dislodge, to do it, or people.
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Dr. David Rock: A really contentious one. And and you know, this is a really complicated answer and a contentious one, because, you know, the entire field of of therapy and psychotherapy, and to a degree, psychiatry and many other fields, you know, based, you know, basing their insights on, you know, if you understand something, you'll be able to change it right? And then there's a whole other, you know, philosophical approaches like brief solutions, focus therapy, and all sorts of you know other approaches that say, look, let's just focus on creating new habits. And
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Dr. David Rock: you know, to some degree it depends on the kind of domain we're talking about, but generally we tend to default, to wanting to understand. You know everything about a habit to be able to change it. But you got to remember it's an attention
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Dr. David Rock: economy in the brain. And where we focus attention, we either create or deepen the networks right? Where? So so the more attention we give to something, the more we we're priming it in our brain, right? So in a lot of ways, what we want to do is take attention away from habits that we we don't like right and put attention on new habits now, certainly there are some issues in life where we'll need to understand them, but that tends to be the default 100% of the time
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Dr. David Rock: we want to change something about ourselves. We go straight to. Let's understand it more. Let's dig right in and I think that's only relevant, you know, maybe half the time. And I think maybe half the time we should just focus on building new habits and stop kind of giving more attention to things. So it's not a it's not an either, or it's more of like getting some distinction about when to do which one.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, it's true. And there is research showing that when you when you're trying to change a habit, if you're always thinking about that other habit that actually gets in the way. And so if you're trying to understand that habit you're trying to lose, you're always thinking about it as you're thinking about the new habit, and that just conflicts with the whole idea of changing.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot about priming. And and this goes to a question that was in the in the chat earlier. There's there's a couple of things to understand about the brain, it is true. At about 7 years you've got just like a completely new everything in your body like new cells. You're a completely new person in about 7 years. Not just the brain new cells everywhere. But at the same time, it's really important to understand that the the brain is like
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Dr. David Rock: that. And and this is gonna freak some people out. But it's the texture of thick custard, right? That sort of just holds together, and it's also it's dark and quiet in there. It's electrical signals making meaning.
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Dr. David Rock: And it's it's the best metaphor is like a very dense forest.
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Dr. David Rock: very, very dense forest that's actually constantly moving, and is actually massively influenced by the light and the temperature just like a forest light the temperature. This, you know who you're sitting around. You know everything you're doing, what you're wearing like. It's it's constantly changing. And it turns out like the neurons that you use to, you know. Pick up your glasses today and not the neurons you'll use to pick up your glasses in a week.
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Dr. David Rock: That. Actually, you just it's constantly moving. Now, obviously, a lot of things stay somewhat consistent. But you know, at a deep level, there's constant movement. And this is why, like
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Dr. David Rock: you can be a native English speaker and speak, you know, absolutely perfect English, and go to Italy for a month and try to speak Italian and come back. And your English is weird like.
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Dr. David Rock: how does that happen? Right? It doesn't make any sense. It's like because it it's you're constantly being primed by whatever's new. And this is changing the architecture. So it's like a it's like a forest, and small primes make a big difference. Priming is like nudging you to try new things. So so this is, this is good news and bad news. But the you know the good news is you can continue to change yourself. The bad news is, we're massively influenced by, you know, by lots of people.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. I mean the plasticity and the new connections that are formed and taken away. So this kind of leads back to the habit idea, too. If you're not also practicing your habits, those connections can weaken as well. So think about all of those things you're weakening. You're strengthening all of these different mental maps are changing all the time. So your experiences throughout your life are highly impactful. So it's good for the idea that we can learn things throughout our life which is great, right, but also that you know, an experience will have an impact on your brain.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah. Yeah. One of the you know. One of the myths I hear a lot is, you know, you can only learn things till you're about a teenager, or you know, your brain stops learning at 25 or this kind of thing. And you know, neuroplasticity is is, you know, amazing. When you're young, and then basically goes. And neuroplasticity is just the, you know brains, ability to adapt. Is there your whole life? You can learn a language in in your nineties. What happens is you just don't tend to want to. You tend to not sort of be bothered by new things. That's the research. But you you absolutely can learn a new instrument. New language, anything.
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Dr. David Rock: You know. Well, into your, you know, seventies, eighties, nineties, and and lots of people do, and they tend to live longer, those people, because it's it's it's keeping your brain healthier in all sorts of ways. But the sort of motivation to do it is is a little bit less. The capacity is very much there. But there are obviously periods of develop development periods of increased plasticity, you know in the womb is one.
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Dr. David Rock: You learn the phonemes, the units of sounds, you know in the womb. Obviously, the 1st few years you can learn languages, you know. 2, 3, 4, 5 languages just intuitively. There's there's periods of plasticity and there's a period of plasticity that ends around mid twenties where they say your brain is fully formed. But really this, it's continuing to form and grow. And I I think the important
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Dr. David Rock: understanding there is that you can evolve your brain at any point in your life you can change it, you know, in some some meaningful way, at any point. The the key is the motivation.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I love that. And and one of the things that we actually get better at as we age is our ability to learn new emotional regulation strategies and emotion is something that we often talk about and mis construe a bit as well. So one of the things that people talk about is this idea that we can either express or suppress your emotions. It's either one or the other and we talk about something a lot more complicated than that.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, so this is an interesting one. This is like, this is like one of those what I call level 5 insights people have in their life. That sort of changes, their whole life, and a lot of some people have this in their teens. Some of it some have in the twenties. Some don't have it till they're much older, but you know a lot of people are sort of stuck in this mental model that either, you know, when they feel something they they can either let it out or try not to let it out
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Dr. David Rock: right, and that a lot of people are like, quite literal with emotions that you know you feel something, you have to express it. You know they they experiment with that, and they discover that expressing emotions, you know, makes other people upset leaves, you know, anger and upset, and fear, and other people's experience, and leaves a trace in you. So so they go. All right. Let's let's push down our emotions. Let's try not to feel them. You know. You look around an average workplace. You got large numbers of people just pushing down emotions right trying not to feel them.
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Dr. David Rock: And the challenge with this is that to some degree that's true. After an emotion kicks in, and one of the most fantastic scientists in this space. Who's really the founding father of emotional regulation research is James Gross, and he's he's 1 of my heroes. He
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Dr. David Rock: He! He started studying emotions in a completely different way than anyone had and he basically studied them over time and found that there's this really big difference between before an emotion kicks in and after it kicks in right, and we understand that through like emotions, pull away resources from prefrontal.
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Dr. David Rock: which limit your choices cause. That's where executive control is. But he he looked at it, and he he found that you know before an emotion kicks in. You have a certain number of choices. Once it kicks in, those choices become more limited.
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Dr. David Rock: it becomes harder to execute things. And so we should put a lot of effort in kind of the before the emotion strategy, which is, I won't get into the technicals. But but a lot of people are stuck in this belief that you know you either feel it or you push it down.
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Dr. David Rock: And the reality is, there's this whole other path of of essentially interacting with the emotions. And you know, one of those things is to like label them is to just kind of describe them simply, which turns them down and another is to literally alter the interpretation at the source of the emotion
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Dr. David Rock: right, which is called reappraisal. But so some, you know, when people have this insight. It's it can be profound like. Oh, wow! I I can change how I see things
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Dr. David Rock: and therefore change how I feel about them, like people are blown away when they 1st realize that it's it's quite life changing. And you know you can be in a classroom as a teenager. And you know, you know, start to get upset with something the teacher said, and then realize, no, I can actually change my interpretation and and realize that they're just trying to help here.
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Dr. David Rock: And you know they really are trying to help. And now I can calm down a bit. But so people notice this, it's really interesting. So people go 2 ways. Some people like kind of go this like, oh, no, that's wrong.
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Dr. David Rock: I shouldn't like reinterpret the world. I should deal with reality, I should grin and bear it, and like deal with reality as it is. And it's it's wrong to like change how I perceive things, you know. I shouldn't look at lots of perspectives. I should just see the perspective. I see it's more has more integrity. It's more authentic to see what I you know what I see. The trouble with that is you die younger. You have
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Dr. David Rock: worse health, and you happen to see things based on all your past experiences, many of which are random and your genetics. And actually there are infinite ways of seeing every situation.
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Dr. David Rock: And there's a scale. You can look at a situation and see it in a way that makes you more anxious.
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Dr. David Rock: And generally that's not adaptive. Some situations it is. You can look at a situation and see it in a way that's more positive. And there's plenty of situations where that's actually more adaptive. And somewhere it's not right. But you have this ability to change your interpretation of an event.
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Dr. David Rock: Right? You know someone cuts you off in traffic. You can decide that the world hates you right, and it's not going to be a good day for you. You can decide that someone else is having a rough day, and this is a chance to actually make their day better by being really kind, back right and confusing them right and and so these are different interpretations. And the people who sort of stuck in like. No, this is, you know. I feel like this is an awful person. This is how it is, but I'm not. Those people tend to suffer more depression.
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Dr. David Rock: They tend to have, you know, worse health.
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Dr. David Rock: And they're often quite concrete thinkers, and and, you know, struggle with abstract thinking as well. So the people who reappraise it's called reappraisal. The people who reappraise you know too much sometimes also have different different kinds of mental health challenges. But there's a certain amount of reappraisal that seems to be healthy. Now, you know. James studied this, and he actually did this amazing study. That's not talked about enough. He got 2 large groups of people and categorized them. Into which of those strategies they had
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Dr. David Rock: someone when a strong threat came along. They, basically, you know, would grin and bear it, or they would reappraise. And it was a complicated study. There's a whole paper on it.
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Dr. David Rock: I write about it in your brain at work. But the the basic study was like 2 groups of people. What do you do when a strong emotion comes along? Do you just experience it? Or do you alter your interpretations right? And what he found was that the people who altered their interpretations were just massively above average, on pretty much everything that counts right quality of relationships, quality of physical health, quality of mental health.
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Dr. David Rock: you know just everything, and the people who did it the other way were significantly below average, and the gap between these 2 was enormous. It was, you know, a really challenging life versus a really healthy life, you know, taking into account circumstances.
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Dr. David Rock: And just as one variable. So it's it's a really important thing to understand. And I think.
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Dr. David Rock: you know, one of the one of the interesting things about understanding your brain is, it gives you more ways to reappraise.
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Dr. David Rock: Wasn't that a fun rhyme? More ways to reappraise? You know, it's like, Oh, that's a status threat. That's not the person hating me. That's just a status threat that's being created. Or oh, that's that's my pain center kicking off and I don't have to add the distressing component. I can just look at the data, and that'll turn it down. And so the more you understand about the brain, the more you can reappraise in real time
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Dr. David Rock: and alter your own interpretations, which is really, really cool. So sorry. Long answer. But it's a James Gross. He's really the founding father of emotional regulation research. We've had him at the summit a few times.
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Dr. David Rock: See if we can dig up the video of him if my team can dig that up in time. I don't know if we can. But
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Dr. David Rock: yeah, amazing amazing presenter. Actually, one of the things I love about James. Sorry it's an aside, but he's very quiet
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Dr. David Rock: and very like sciencey and unassuming, and like slow and deliberate, and he gets on stage, and he's a completely different persona like, Stand up, comedian. Amazing high energy. I was like, I just didn't see that coming. I guess he reappraises.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Probably does. He probably reappraises where it goes on stage. But you know the amazing thing about reappraisals. You can also do it at any point, even years after you had an experience. And one of the amazing things about memory is that when you pull up a memory so maybe a bad memory that had a bad emotional component to it. You can pull it up and you can act to reappraise it, and it can change. It's vulnerable. At that time. The memory is, you can change your memory a bit as well, which is incredibly powerful for us.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You can reappraise in the, you know, past memories that are causing problems. It's an interesting question from Eric. You know we've been. We've been thinking about sort of the the different tools you can use at different levels of
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Dr. David Rock: of emotions. And we categorize threats into 3 levels level one is, is kind of alert but not alarmed. It's it's being focused but not anxious. Level 2 is quite, you know, is very alert and and a little alarmed, and it's sort of frazzled and level. 3 is the amygdala hijack. It's the overwhelming threat. And so, you know, at level one, you can label.
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Dr. David Rock: You can like, put words on what you're feeling, and it'll turn down the emotions at level 2. You need reappraisal
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Dr. David Rock: and that's because labeling won't do it. So level. 2 threats. You want to really identify the interpretation you've made and change it level 3. You might not have enough oxygen and glucose in your brain's breaking system, which is part of the prefrontal. You might not have enough of that to actually be able to reappraise right? You just like
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Dr. David Rock: just kind of brains on fire. And what you might need is is a biological intervention at that stage, which is a, you know, complex word for a nap. A meal. You know, a workout exercise. Sometimes you just like that frazzle. You just literally need to like a meal or a cup of tea and and then a nap, and then you come back and you're fine. So there's level 3 threats. Which is that amygal hijack in that. In that situation. You often need a biological intervention to calm the nervous system down enough to be able to reappraise, you know. Bring it down to a level 2.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah. And you know what else is coming up for me is a lot of times. We have these emotions in the workplace, in social interactions. And that's where we have this experience. Bias that comes in often is that we just think that we see the world in a certain way. And we think we interpret others intentions in a certain way, and we're often wrong. About that. And why? And you know these intentions might not have been directed at me, they might have just been having a bad day. So these kinds of emotional regulation strategies
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Dr. Emma Sarro: are critical, walking away, reappraising this. Oh, this person just had a bad day. They weren't cutting me off because they didn't like me when they saw me, or whatever it was, and that can help all of our interactions as well.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, it's I mean for leadership. You know, if you can't reappraise like easily, often regularly, you're gonna struggle as a leader because you have really strong emotions to deal with all the time. Excuse me, you know, as a manager all the way up, you know, the basically, the the intensity of the emotions that you have to deal with
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Dr. David Rock: gets stronger and stronger and stronger as you go up the organization. So the Peter Principle might be. You know, you get promoted to the level of your self regulation capacity.
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Dr. David Rock: it it because, as you, as you lose the ability to manage strong emotions, you lose the ability to make good decisions and be insightful. And so you you need to be able to stay cool under pressure at different levels and emotions definitely rise as you go up the organization because of the complexity of problems, the implications of of problems, the number of people watching you. You know all of these things kind of combine to make you know it very stressful as you go up organizations. Yeah.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah. And there's no way to escape that. I mean, in all of our workplaces, we're interacting with individuals. There will always be emotions involved. So working in these emotional regulation strategies and having multiple tools, different kinds to use at different times is critical to kind of pick out
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Dr. Emma Sarro: but yeah. So let's make a little bit of a switch to something else. We talk a lot about which is learning and how best to do it and design. And we did have some people ask about learning strategies and learning design. So one idea is that that we should just throw everything at people in one block.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: and everyone who follows us knows that isn't true. But can you? Can you talk to that a bit.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, so yeah, so I've I've been doing this. This. This event called a leadership development Mini summit a half day experience with like 50 to 100 le, you know. Chief human resource officers and heads of talent, heads of leadership development. But, you know, like 50 to 100 in in New York and London, and and Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and and la, and all sorts of places, and it's been fascinating to do it, and we. One of the things we talk a lot about is ages, the ages
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Dr. David Rock: model, which is, it's the framework for thinking about learning, design and and instructional design and facilitation and all of it. And it's essentially the 4 necessary foundations for easy recall under pressure.
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Dr. David Rock: which is, which is a measure of learning that we think is important. Easy recall under pressure is is the outcome you want for learning these days with
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Dr. David Rock: with you know, leadership skills in particular. And so how do you get there? You need strong attention, strong generation, strong emotions, strong spacing. The the ones people get wrong are are the emotions and the spacing
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Dr. David Rock: and you actually want pretty strong emotions. For people to remember things. You don't just want people comfortable the whole time. You want them comfortable at the start, and then really challenged and then excited at the end. You want actually a bit of a roller coaster for memories to really form, but the spacing one is one that people get wrong as well, because intuitively, again, this is going back to that sort of the intuitions we have sometimes being wrong.
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Dr. David Rock: Intuitively, we think learning in one block is better. It turns out it is actually true. If you're only needing short term memory. So if you're needing to remember something for a few days for an exam, you know. Learning it all in a block just before is great for short term memory. You won't remember it in a month.
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Dr. David Rock: if you, if you're wanting to remember something for months or years, you want to spread out that you know space out that learning, but it's not in. It's not intuitive. People predict it'll be better to do a 1 day class than 4 1 h classes, or you know, or 8 1 h classes people like. Oh, no, I'm gonna learn much more if I learn it in a day, and just kind of see how it all fits and get my head around in a day. If I split it up, I'm gonna lose the thread. It's not gonna work.
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Dr. David Rock: but we don't store. We don't store memories, we grow them. And the effort of attention in different contexts is A is a big part of that. So those are. Those are some of the myths that I think people get wrong about learning and learning design. So there's this really huge sort of free bonus that you get from spreading out learning over time. Even when you're not taking into account the
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Dr. David Rock: the the sort of accountability factor which can increase about 7 times the number of actions people take when you spread out learning, but even without that it just it just makes things stick much easier just by spreading it out. So those are the sort of 2 areas. I think, that that we have myths in. People have to feel comfortable and people learn better in, you know, in a block, or you know, or in person.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, right? And there are some very clear underlying neural support for this as well. And we talk about this with the spacing idea is that there needs to be time for consolidation to happen, and that can only happen when you're not in the learning environment. And it's like a process that your hippocampus has to go under. We happens a lot when we sleep as well. So that's why it's good to incorporate sleep in the middle of those as well. So the benefit that you'll get the return on investment for those
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Dr. Emma Sarro: those those learning experiences is much higher. If you just incorporate some spaces. And it might take 3 days instead of one day. But you'll get this long term learning you don't have to do it again for them.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, interesting.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah. So I mean, we're we're coming close to the end. I mean, I'd love to hear a bit about what you had kind of learned through your mini summits. We talked. We've kind of touched on them here a little bit. But what about the skill? Learning that you've you know you've kind of covered along the way.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, there were a couple of things really jumped out. It's so interesting doing the same event in in different countries, in different contexts. And you know, and and
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Dr. David Rock: you know, you sort of see what's what's really human versus what say American or something? Right? You see, what's everyone struggling with. And I was. I was really amazed at just how consistent the challenges are around leadership everywhere in the world or everywhere I went didn't go to every country, but everywhere I went the the challenges were very, very consistent. Everyone everywhere is dealing with, you know, overwhelmed employees. You know the the fears and challenges and opportunities of AI
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Dr. David Rock: the you know, the sort of divided workplace is happening everywhere. Strangely enough, and the, you know, bunch of things just very, very consistent like this. But one of the one of the insights that really was very powerful for me, and I think for others was we we were looking at
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Dr. David Rock: we were looking at at like leadership development from a brain perspective. Obviously right? And and when you look at like, okay, so leaders have to be better at, say, you know, managing emotions. Right? You look at the the actual brain skills, the cognitive skills involved.
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Dr. David Rock: like learning those when you 1st become a manager, is really really important. I mean learning those, even as an individual contributor is important. But when you 1st become a manager. The level of threat you experience goes up a lot right suddenly. You've got people counting on you. You've got more uncertainty. You've got less autonomy.
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Dr. David Rock: You've got more people watching you. So you know, small status threats. So you 1st become a manager just like your threat level goes way up. And so you need to learn. Often people need to learn better self regulation strategies at that point. But then you become a middle manager. It jumps again right suddenly. You have even more people watching you. Greater status threat, more uncertainty, less autonomy.
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Dr. David Rock: Maybe some unfairness now. And so so as you go up, you get these big bumps in in in in the sort of cognitive challenges. It's not just threat. It's also the amount you have to process. So your, your, the way you move through information has to improve right? The need for insights.
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Dr. David Rock: you know, goes up so all these cognitive skills basically become more important and and and also more complex to execute right. It's more challenging to have insights as you go up. So the insights become more important and more challenging. Right emotional regulation becomes more important and more challenging. And what's interesting is that we were looking at like leadership programs. And all these, you know, like you have a company of 10,000 employees with a thousand managers. Right?
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Dr. David Rock: Those 1,000 managers the company will put, like, you know, 700 of them in a in a frontline leader program. They learn a bunch of stuff and then they'll put 200 in a completely different program for middle managers, and they'll put, you know, the top 100 in a completely different program at a business school. And and what happens is there's no consistent flow.
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Dr. David Rock: And one of the big misconceptions is that is that you need different kind of, you know, leadership programs for different levels of of leader in an organization.
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Dr. David Rock: And we think that that's completely done a disservice to the whole industry. Because when you look at the human skills which are only going to become more important, not less important. When you look at the human skills, there's a there's a there's a there's a friend there. It comes up when I say human skills. Okay, when you look at the human skills involved,
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Dr. David Rock: they actually are the same.
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Dr. David Rock: but harder and in more challenging contexts.
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Dr. David Rock: So really, what we should be doing is teaching 1st time leaders, you know basics about the brain and self regulation and all this stuff, and then coming back to it in different contexts and coming back to it in different contexts. Now, of course, a frontline employee doesn't need to know how to, you know. Run a P. And L, the way a senior executive does. There are some technical skills that are different, but the core is the same. And so I'm a bit of a rant here. But it was really fascinating to see just how everyone agreed with that
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Dr. David Rock: and how it's completely not the state of of leadership development right now. And and so I think leadership development needs to be about like, let's really get good at the core. You know, brain skills of leadership, and let's keep coming back to them and back to them and back to them at different levels of leader and you know, we've been. We've been thinking about ways to do this with, you know, a core, you know, a core learning experience. And then you're adding things to it. So we've been. We've been solving for that. But that's probably one of the biggest insights. That everyone like really resonated with.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, and development in general of leaders should continue so, even if they think they're, you know, like highly experienced, they have to continue to re and practice all of those skills along the way. And it doesn't necessarily change by area of the world either.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah. Very consistent people had the same challenges everywhere in the world, which is kind of spooky, scary, and wonderful. All at once.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah, no great question by Abraham. Do you think how how critical is the role of developing emotional intelligence at various levels? And you kind of spoke to this a bit.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting how this different language for the exact same thing. So and there's No, there's no one right language. But you know, we think of we we think of these as cognitive skills. So the ability to manage limited capacity, the ability to manage emotions, the ability to manage social interactions, to keep others in a toward state. You could call those Ei you could call those social skills. You could call them social emotional skills. They have lots of different words, leadership skills. What I find is that using the language of the brain
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Dr. David Rock: it's really helpful because you can actually show studies and show like concrete, you know, examples and and what's really going on in the brain. And so for really rational thinkers, which are sort of most leaders. It's really helpful not to talk about emotional intelligence. I find we we rarely use those words. You know we we talk about. Let's get in and understand the brain.
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Dr. David Rock: And it's just, it's just you get less resistance in that way. But ultimately it's the same kind of cognitive skills that we're all trying to work on.
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Dr. David Rock: And I could show you a hundred different leadership programs and show you exactly the cognitive skills that every single one of those is working on. And they're the exact same cognitive skills. Right? Everyone is teaching reappraisal somewhere, but in different language. You know, everyone is teaching managing limited capacity in some way or not, everyone. But as an example. So we just like to kind of get down to the source and then be able to explain it. In in terms of the the brain and it just it.
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Dr. David Rock: People's minds talking about the brain ironically.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it gives a a huge why to everything which is really important for us to understand, like the the reason it's important to understand the brain is, it makes us work better together, and.
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Dr. David Rock: Really interesting. I really want to do this study, and maybe Emma will will talk about this some more that in our research team. But I've wanted to do this study for like forever about
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Dr. David Rock: I've noticed to myself and others that learning about the brain makes you more mindful, like learning about your brain increases. Mindfulness and mindfulness is you think of it as you know, not mindless. Right? So you're you're paying attention. The technical definition is you're paying attention in the present in an open way. And
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Dr. David Rock: you know, from John Kabat-zin and others. That's kind of the general sort of layperson's definition paying attention in the present in an open way. And what happens is the more language you have for your brain, the more things you can observe in real time to pay attention to. And it it actually helps. You see things and switch
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Dr. David Rock: like make different choices, which is what mindfulness does as well. And so mindfulness, practice around your breath, or whatever you're doing. Mindfulness. Practice
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Dr. David Rock: has all these amazing benefits. But I think the more you know about your brain, the easier it is to be mindful, and you get kind of similar benefits to it. So I think I want to design a study where we get a control group. We teach them mindfulness. And another group teach them about the brain and see similarities. And a 3rd group teach them nothing and see similarities and differences in brain functioning afterwards. To to see what's going on. Let's have some fun with that in the next year.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: No, that's a that's a great idea. I mean, I know this actually reminds me of somewhat of a study that we're thinking of doing in the next year, right with the some exploration of Ceos and their their brains.
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Dr. David Rock: Oh, yeah, yeah. Good thing. Thanks for the reminder. And thanks, Amy, for being the 1st volunteer. That's amazing. We've got volunteers already.
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Dr. David Rock: yeah. So we we've been I've been thinking about this for years, and we we've we've we're just soft launching sort of a this is like a 1st launch of an idea that we've had for a while.
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Dr. David Rock: And we basically designed a CEO retreat, a CEO brain retreat.
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Dr. David Rock: We're doing it in in partnership with one of the professors
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Dr. David Rock: at Columbia University. His name's Moran Cerf. It's not officially with Columbia, but it's with this professor at Columbia, and he's got an amazing lab
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Dr. David Rock: and essentially, where this came from is is, I've been doing a lot more sessions with Ceos in the last couple of years
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Dr. David Rock: and
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Dr. David Rock: like spending half a day with, like many, many groups of Ceos, and one of the questions I keep getting asked, you know, sort of quietly, is.
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Dr. David Rock: you know, is my brain. Okay, how do I know? My brain's okay? And what you know. And and so we've been, we've been thinking about this for a while. And so we've we've we're launching this experience. We're calling it a CEO brain lab. And it's a it's a 4 day, you know, on site experience in New York City in in the spring, so we'll launch it in the spring next year. But you can just quietly plant the seed in your
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Dr. David Rock: in in your CEO's year, if you like, but essentially, it's a 4 day experience of actually assessing your brain, but also assessing it in the context of leadership. So imagine, like being wired up and doing leadership activities like giving feedback, receiving feedback, trying to influence others, trying to do a presentation with a group of other Ceos, and everyone seeing what their brains doing and studying the synchrony and asynchrony and all this stuff. So it's not just assessing your brain. It's assessing your brain and assessing
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Dr. David Rock: your brain as you do leadership tasks and learning all this like foundational stuff. So we'll pepper in a lot about the core analyze skills, but also real time assessments. So we're excited about that. It'll be a great experiment ground
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Dr. David Rock: and if you're interested in in hearing more about that, just put your company name and CEO brain lab in the chat. That's a lot of words, and someone will reach out to you and send more information. If it might not be for you, it might be for your CEO. But we'll just put your company name and CEO brain lab. In there in the chat we'll reach out, and I think we've put a link. It's very early. It's the 1st sort of announcement about it. The other cool thing that we're doing, which may be more relevant
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Dr. David Rock: to this community is we're going to run a Chro summit specifically for Chros in the winter next year. And this is
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Dr. David Rock: This is this is going to be late February, early March.
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Dr. David Rock: Actually in the snow in Park City in a, in a hotel right on the snow. We're doing like a half day in the morning, and then the afternoons free, for, you know networking also known as skiing or whatever sport you have. But we're doing like a a 3 day, you know. Sunday night arrival, and then 3 days with with Chros and one down. So cease. So folks in charge of people or one down. So that's you'll see more information about that coming up soon. So the Chro summit
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Dr. David Rock: that we're doing in the winter, and then a CEO retreat, a CEO brain lab that we're doing in there as well. The other thing we didn't mention that that I was talking a lot about on the
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Dr. David Rock: on on tour. If I can use that phrase is is a question that came up a lot in this at this time is about it's been about accountability. I know we've talked about that a little bit on the show, but I wanted to to bring that back.
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Dr. David Rock: So I got to like, present our model for accountability out a lot. And you know the room would always.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Always good
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Dr. Emma Sarro: and.
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Dr. David Rock: When we did that. So accountability.
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Dr. David Rock: one of the big myths about accountability. One of the big myths is that it's it's you know it's about. It's sort of a punitive approach, like, you know, accountability is making sure you fire underperformers.
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Dr. David Rock: and we we realize actually that there's 2 types of accountability. There's punitive accountability. But then there's non punitive accountability which is actually about, you know, people like taking accountability and owning it. And and you know it's very similar to responsibility. But we've seen this whole different approach to accountability. That's about basically like making much clearer promises, like much clearer expectations. And then really managing to those exact expectations and then really cleaning up. If you don't.
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Dr. David Rock: that's the sort of simple summary there's a whole fascinating neuroscience of explanation of of expectations. But it's about
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Dr. David Rock: managing to like, really set those properly really meet them
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Dr. David Rock: really clean up if you don't, and very rare skill most of us have a handful of people who do that. And it really should be everyone in an organization. So we've built a solution called Deliver
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Dr. David Rock: and we're now starting to roll that out in in hive format, which is the 3 virtual sessions over 3 weeks, and so deliver, is now starting to go out, and we're getting some some great interest in that. And it's it's teaching those skills over a month
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Dr. David Rock: to, you know. So so if you're interested in learning more about deliver. Just put the word deliver and your company name in the chat. Someone will reach out and send you some information. Maybe maybe chat more about it. So deliver and your company name, and we'll we'll we'll share more about that.
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Dr. David Rock: So those are some kind of cool, new things that we're we've been working on and some, yeah, some really interesting feedback on that. I think we're coming to the end. Any other closing comments or announcements that you wanted to make.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Well, I think the one you forgot was the summit where people will hear about all of these things. We'll have sessions on accountability. The CEO retreat we'll have. We'll talk about, you know, the neural signals and Ceos, that Moran will present all of those things AI technology, everything. So that's coming up soon in October, and you'll hear from almost everyone we brought up today, as well.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, yeah. So 20 end of October 29, th 30th of October. And actually, we're doing it globally. It's virtual. But the upside of that is, we're doing doing it for every time zone. So there's a in a Mia version and North America version and an Apac version and we'll be able to get the exact, perfect scientists along involved as well. So try to hold the 29th and 30th in your calendar. But thanks, everyone for being here great to be back in in New York. Thanks, Emma, for great collaboration, and
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Dr. David Rock: Shelby and everyone behind the scenes have a fantastic weekend a great week. Look forward to to seeing you again next week. Thanks, everyone. Bye, bye.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Wait!
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Shelby Wilburn: Awesome. Thank you guys so much. We really appreciate your time as always. Just stick around for a little bit. We have a Poll, if you want to work with us, let us know how we can help you out. As we just mentioned, Summit 2024 is on the way, we're going fully virtual this year, October 29th and 30.th So you can visit Summitner leadership.com for all of your needs. If you enjoyed today's session, you might enjoy our insider exchange. This is specifically for senior executives.
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Shelby Wilburn: but it is an opportunity to have round table discussions with our internal leaders and conversations. So if that's something that interests you, check that out. And also we want to continue to expand and partner with our community. So if you're interested in hosting an event with us.
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Shelby Wilburn: also check out the link. And there's more information on our website, too. And lastly, if you enjoyed the episode, you can always listen to it on our podcast, along with other episodes, your brain at work wherever you listen and for listeners, if you use your brain at work 24, you can get a 10% discount off of summit tickets. So check that out. And this is where we officially say farewell. So on behalf of our team. We really appreciate you being here every Friday, and we will see you next week.
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Shelby Wilburn: Have a great weekend.