OVERVIEW

Our brains are responsible for everything we think, feel, believe, imagine and do. How we choose to use them will go an awfully long way to determining every aspect of our future.

Indeed, almost every responsible employer is fully aware of this and takes steps to support the health and wellbeing of employees, as work should be a positive, rewarding and fulfilling activity.

But what to do? Stress and anxiety seem such enormous issues – whole industries are built around them – that they can seem overwhelming, as workplace pressures aren’t going to simply dissapear.

A 5 minute Google search will reveal 60+ techniques for managing stress, ranging from chewing gum to practicing yoga or from getting a massage to managing your email inbox more effectively. While many of these techniques might be effective, they are often based on the belief that the answer to stress and anxiety is simply to relax more. Of course, relaxation is critical. But many of the promoted relaxation techniques are more for the beach or the weekend than a modern working environment: they’re not much help in the ‘there and then’ situation.

For us, it goes beyond just ‘managing’ or ‘reducing’ stress and anxiety. Rather, we help people understand how and why they react, feel and think the way they do. And, critically, provide them with simple and powerful cognitive tools and techniques to manage their responses.

Based on cutting edge insights from neuroscience, these tools and techniques go way beyond simply reducing the problem. Rather, they help participants understand the underlying cognitive and biological drivers of their thoughts and actions. In doing so, they are able to go beyond merely ‘managing the problem’, to having a greater sense of control, agency and autonomy in their lives. And it is this is which leads to real motivation, performance and creativity in the workplace.

Workshop Content

NOTE:

The below is illustrative as the precise contents included in the workshop will depend upon the length of time available. 

Beyond Positive Thinking: Managing States

We all know the importance of looking at things positively, but if it was so easy, we would do it. Focusing only on our thoughts is like trying to steer a car by leaning out of the window and trying to move the wheels with your hands. Much more effective and easier is to use the steering wheel. The same is true with our underlying states (the combination of our thoughts, motivations, emotions, body, etc.). Not only is managing the underlying state more effective and comprehensive, ironically it is also easier.

Here we focus on:

• Understanding and identifying different states
• Experiencing the transforming power of state change
• Developing resourceful states of our choice
• Learning to enter and manage states which are appropriate to the task at hand

This section is foundational to the rest of the workshop.

The search for the new and different: The Key To innovation in your life

Innovation is often thought of as a process or a thing to be managed or something done in ‘creative times’. But really, if there are things that you wish to change, whether personally or professionally, it is always about thinking more flexibly, exploring new options and making and implementing changes. In other words, innovation.

Here, we only briefly look at different types of innovation (e.g., trial and error v Aha Moments), rather focusing on how our brains process and organise information.

In particular we look at:

• Exploring how your brain makes sense of the world, including core concepts in modern Cognitive Neuroscience, including Signaling, Predictive Processing, Unconscious Inference and Spot-light v Lantern consciousness
• Helping your brain search for the new and different
• Tools for rapid changes of perspective

From Stressed Multi-tasking to focused performance

Probably the most often cited challenge of the modern working environment is a continuous sense of overwhelm, pressure and distraction, with seemingly impossible expectations compared to the time and resources available. Not only is this an inefficient way to work, but often it is simply unsustainable over an extended period of time, leading to stress, lack of motivation and loss of sense of agency. In this section, we explore tools and techniques which can help us enter more productive and enjoyable states which enable us to move from a feeling of stressed multi-tasking towards more focused (and pleasant!) performance.

Here we:

• Understand stress from a physical, psychological and cultural perspective
• Explore simple techniques to lessen stress ‘in the moment’
• Understand and manage stress triggers
• Taking the ’emotional sting’ out of memories
• Learn how to focus and shift our attention

Getting back into the Driving Seat: Agency

A fundamental aspect of self-management is the sense of agency – the perception of being in control of one’s own actions and their consequences. In the absence of this, we feel powerless, unmotivated and unhappy. And, unsurprisingly, we have a very hard time getting anything done in such a state.

Clearly, the external environment effects our room for action. But in most situations we normally have more choices available to us than we recognise. Here we look at:

• The narratives and stories that we tell ourselves and others and how they shape our perception of what we are capable of
• Changing perspectives quickly and rapidly
• Breaking out from the expectations of others and giving ourselves permission to accomplish the things that we want

UNLEASHING YOUR IMAGINAtiON

For many people imagination is an adult super-power; for others it is dismissed as childish fantasy. But the reality is that it is neither and both – the ‘real magic’ comes when we combine the (child-like) uncensored imagination with our (adult) technical or domain expertise. When we are able to do this, we can develop strategic approaches to solving problems, open up new options and explore novel ideas for the future.

Here we will:

• Explore how the brain makes connections between different pieces of information
• Develop your own 24/7 advisory committee
• Use metaphors to open up stuck situations

Action: From moving Your finger to moving Mountains

Movement is the only way we can do anything, from delivering a key note speech (tongue muscles), typing a report (fingers) or dancing the Samba (your whole body). For intentional action – the core of achieving anything- this ultimately means linking up your sensorimotor system with your higher cognitive processes. This is relatively straightforward when you know what you want, what to do and have the motivation to do it. But in an increasingly uncertain world, things are often unclear, we don’t know what path to take and we can lack the motivation, courage or belief that our actions are worthwhile.

This module is, in a sense, where all of the rest starts to come together, as it builds on the previous approaches and incorporates them into action. Here we will focus on:

• Linking optimal states, imagined outcomes and movement to improve motivation and agency, as well as helping the brain to develop new options for actions.

Diving Deeper into imagination: Deep Relaxation, Dreams and Sleep

For 2 – 3 hours every night we go into a world of delusional, make believe hallucinations where, according to modern studies of sleep and dreaming, we explore possibilities, run scenarios and test hypotheses. While most of our dreams are seemingly mundane, sleep is also a time when our experiences and information gets deleted, cut, stored and rearranged and, in doing so, new insights can emerge. Indeed, the number of scientific and artistic breakthroughs in dreams highlights the enormous creativity that can occur when we are no longer anchored in our waking reality.

While it is beyond the scope and available time of this course to explore dreams and sleep in detail, it would be a significant oversight to ignore it entirely, given that we spend about a third of our lives sleeping (it obviously has a very significant evolutionary advantage). In particular, we will not focus on sleep per se, but rather daydreams (Einstein got to call them ‘thought experiments’), hypnogogia (the intermediate stage between being awake and sleep, which was used by the likes of Edison and Dali) and non-sleep deep relaxation techniques.

More specifically,

• The role and importance of sleep
• How to use day dreams to open up new options
• A simple technique for quickly getting to a state close to hypnogogia and the ‘space’ where insights are most likely to occur