Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to the next edition of our work Healthy podcast. I'm John Ryan, and today's guest is doctor Alan Watkins. Originally a medical doctor at King's College London, he later moved to the field of neuroscience and human performance. Identifying coherence and the regulation of your emotions as the key to success in life. Honestly, this is a truly fascinating conversation where we discussed, discuss the difference between emotional literacy and emotional regulation and the need to select the correct antidote to move from a negative emotion to a more positive one. Because according to Alan, the research is absolutely clear that our life literally depends on it. This is not about reframing, but rather about developing the skill to fundamentally change how we feel. Alan shares some great stories about how he helped the UK to win more medals at the London and Rio Olympics, and how he made a cynical corporate leader cry.
We discussed complex systems like our bodies and the need to measure the most important aspects of our biology, and how through a focus on developing lines and becoming more stably coherent and less erratic, we can make our brains work better and deliver more for us. I started the interview by asking Alan if he was 100% coherent.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Well, I try to be. I mean, I'm a big believer in practice, what you preach, so you can't teach other people unless you do it yourself. So, in fact, all the coaches that work for me, we don't even call ourselves coaches. We're practitioners because of this very point, is we're in practice and we're teaching other people to practice. So we have this sort of mantra, you are what you practice, not you are what you eat, you are what you practice, right? So careful what you practice particularly, and we'll get to this later. The emotions, like what emotion is anybody experiencing and what are you practicing right now? What emotion are you practicing? We're always in practice. So we think of ourselves as practitioners, not coaches.
[00:02:10] Speaker C: Work in progress constantly.
So if you have to nail that sort of concept of coherence, how do you describe it best?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: It's stable variability, essentially.
And if you look at complex systems, and going back to my medical days, I mean, the human body is a complex system, right? Is you need a certain amount of variability.
If you've got no variability, you've got no flexibility. That is a risk to your health.
And so you need a certain amount of variability to be healthy. So that's not just true of the human body, it's also true of a building. So if you look at the Burj Khalifa, which is an example I often use when they built that, the tallest building in the world, they built it to sway a little bit in the wind, because if they built it completely rigid, the first strong wind, it will actually snap under the tensile pressures, right? So it sways a bit. If it sways too much, then everybody feels sick. So a complex system needs a bit of variability. So that's point one. So .2 is like, once we accept and understand that healthy looks like a bit of variability, the same would be true of a strategy for a business, right? So a business that never changes its strategy, despite changes in the market, will go bust. A business that's changing its strategy every 2 seconds also goes bust. You need some variability, and then you're into, well, what type of variability? Now, things can vary in an erratic, chaotic fashion or in a stable, dynamic fashion. And so coherence is kind of stable dynamic variance. That's what coherence is. And to boil it down to a right biological level, if you imagine a sine wave, you know, a pure sine wave, that's essentially what coherence is at a biological level. So if you look at your heart rate varying between 60 and 80 beats per minute, it can vary in an erratic way, between 60 and 80 beats a minute, like the needle on a seismograph, very erratic variance. Or you can vary it in a sine wave. And what we now know scientifically is if it varies in that coherent fashion, your brain works better.
So that's why coherence matters.
[00:04:32] Speaker C: So it's, I suppose, looking at the Burj Khalifa, the foundations are pretty important there in terms of keeping that structure so that it can actually vary a little bit. So would that be where you're talking about the values you have as an individual and understanding those?
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Well, what we talk about when we get people to zoom in on, of all the things that you can measure, when you're looking at the health and performance of a system, measure the stuff that matters now, and I literally have just come off a call with a client. Talking to them at this very point, is a lot of organizations measure the wrong stuff.
And the reason for that? There's two reasons for that. Largely, it's historical, because that's the stuff they've always measured. But the world's changed, and what they were doing is now out of date. And we see that in pretty much every company in the world, they're still measuring the wrong stuff. So in measuring capability or performance or health, what people tend to do is they do what we call descriptive measures. So when you're assessing organizations is they'll describe a leader in terms of his personality across the five dimensions. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, introversion, those sort of things. Or they'll do a Myers Briggs, a typology or a Belbin or any kind. What type of leader? It's a bit like doing your horoscope, you know? You know, oh, I'm a sagittarian. I'm this time. Or they'll do strength finders. They'll pick six random strengths and try and make the case that these are the important strengths. So most organizations are doing these descriptions of you and you get the report. And of course it's fascinating because it's describing you, but it can't predict the future. And it was never designed to. In fairness to although that type of technology, it was never designed to predict who's going to succeed and who's going to fail. Now, fortunately, there's a second game in town of which values is one of them, which I'll come to. And that's what we call developmental assessment, not descriptive. It's not describing you, it's pegging your level of sophistication.
So if I can bring this alive for you, imagine you've got a six year old. Now, whether the six year old succeeds or fails is not down to their introversion or their conscientiousness. And it doesn't matter whether an INTJ or an ENFP six year old. The reason they fail is this job needs a twelve year old, and a six year old just hasn't got the sophistication to handle the complexity. So it's nothing to do with personality or strengths or typology. It's a lack of sophistication. So you need a developmental assessment, not a descriptive assessment. So that's the first thing. And of there are, it goes back to the days you may be familiar with. There was a guy called Howard Gardner who did this thing for kids in schools.
[00:07:33] Speaker C: I actually interviewed him on a previous work healthy podcast.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, he was standing on the shoulder of the giants. He was a genius, right. In the sense that he spotted that educational systems were set up predominantly to cultivate mathematical and verbal intelligence. But there were loads of kids who were brilliant at music and terrible at maths and verbal, and they were thought of as thick, which is not the case.
[00:08:01] Speaker D: Right.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: Or there are other kids who were really good at sport, no good at maths and writing, but very good at sport, who were also thought of as thicken. So as you know, he proposed this whole thing, multiple intelligences. Now these are now called lines of development. There are hundreds of these lines of development. So, for example, you can look at the cooking line of development, but if you're not running a restaurant, that's irrelevant. So measure what matters. Now, in most organizations, we think there are eight lines, or intelligences, if you like. Eight lines that matter in every company, one of which is values, which is what motivates you. And there are eight different value systems in the world, and they're not variations, they're evolutions.
And that single point, I tried to explain this to the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK after the global financial crisis in 2008, because I got through various methods introduced to the folks at the FCA who were charged by the UK government to stop another financial crisis happening. And I went and met with these people and they were coming up with a plan of how to interface with the finance community in the UK, and the banks in particular, of how do we stop the bankers doing it to us again.
But what they didn't quite understand is they were operating a level below the sophistication of the people they were trying to educated. So they were less sophisticated than their customers, if you will. They were coming up with an answer which their customers had already gamed around. And I tried to point this out to them metaphorically. They were coming up with a six year old plan and their customers were all twelve years old. So the customers would look at that plan and they will already very easily gamify around it. And I couldn't get them to understand. It's not variation, it's sophistication that matters is you've got to have something more sophisticated than your customers to help them, not less sophisticated. And so they fell on that point. It was all around the sort of values and motivations, what causes anybody to do anything.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: I actually found that the whole values discussion was really interesting in terms of looking at different nationalities and the like, and the Nordics, for example, independence and fairness being really, really important, whereas in South America, family and community and the like. So it's interesting to see that. So in terms of that level of maturity, I mean, like, you're obviously dealing with a huge amount of people across the globe.
Do you believe people are really immature in terms of what's required to operate in the world of today, or where are we in terms of that?
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Well, again, you've got to get into these different lines. So some people are very mature cognitively, but very immature emotionally. They're different lines. It's a bit like somebody's very good at math, but terrible at music or vice versa. These are different lines of development. So you've got to look across multiple lines. And it's really, you know, horses for courses. So some jobs need high emotional intelligence, and you don't need to be too cognitively smart. Other jobs need high cognitive intelligence. You don't need to be emotionally very smart. So it depends what people are doing. You know, obviously, if you're an athlete, you need brilliant kinesthetic. It's called kinesthetic intelligence. And you don't have to be very good at music. Now, if you're a concert pianist, you need it the other way around.
So it depends what you're doing. So, but we've got to understand, in measuring what matters is measure the right thing and quantify according to the job you're trying to do, whether you've got the stuff that you need, have you got the sophistication that you need. If you're a chef, you need to be very advanced in the cooking line, but if you're a CFO, you don't need that one.
So it depends what you're doing as to whether you've got the right level of sophistication for it.
[00:12:13] Speaker C: And the one with all your work that I've read and the like, the one that seems to be kind of universal across the board in terms of this, is that sort of literacy around your emotions.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: It's a foundation stone, really, John, because imagine, you know, you're very advanced cognitively, and actually you're quite sophisticated in terms of your values or motivation systems.
And you've got a ton of energy, like you're a real energizer bunny, but you've got very poor emotional regulation, that one will completely scupper all the others. So if you easily triggered, somebody easily winds you up and annoys you, and then you sort of lash out, that can do so much damage, you know, it will kill off. Even though you're cognitively smart and you've got tons of energy and you've got the. Your heart's in the right place, you've got the right motivation, but you're easily triggered. And we can discuss why that happens to people that will scupper everything. So often when we're coaching individual CEO's and their teams is, we'll actually, in the early part of our help, we'll focus a bit on that, because until you've got some degree of emotional regulation, you're at risk of the whole thing getting scuppered because you get triggered by stuff. So you've got to teach people those things. And the reason it's kind of interesting, we also work with schools. We're just on a big project with schools. In fact, my 11th book was all about the future of education.
It's sort of ironic we're having to teach this to 40, 56 year old executives because they never learned it when they were eight at school. And that's one of the reasons we have all the mental health problems, is because we never taught children how to regulate their emotions, how to build their emotional literacy. So you end up having to teach it to CEO's because they didn't get it at school.
And these are fairly foundational capabilities, really, John.
[00:14:15] Speaker C: So the education system has let people down, and I agree with that in so many ways. I think we kind of are. Yeah, that's a whole nother debate anyway.
So in terms of emotional literacy, what's the journey that people need to go on to improve their skill set in that regard?
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Well, so we looked at this when we were looking at the whole emotional intelligence piece, and I've been interested in this right from the get go. In fact, when Daniel Goldman, who popularized the concept, as you know, first lectured in the UK, I keynoted on the same stage at his very first UK conference. I was also lecturing on the biology of leadership as he was talking about emotional intelligence. So I've been interested right from the get go, and we've done a sort of assessment of, there are hundreds of tests that purport to measure emotional intelligence, and we've looked at the top 200 assessments in the marketplace and we think there are twelve dimensions to emotional intelligence. And most of the tests out there don't measure all twelve dimensions. In fact, the best ones only measure six of the twelve dimensions. So they're only covering half of the, of the territory. So we think it's really important to have a detailed assessment. So you mentioned emotional literacy a few times.
Well, you know, emotional literacy is not the same thing as emotional regulation, for example.
[00:15:52] Speaker D: Right?
[00:15:52] Speaker B: So literacy is the ability to accurately differentiate different emotions. So am I. You know, somebody says, well, how you feeling, John? You might go, you know, I'm a bit frustrated. Well, are you frustrated or are you annoyed?
Do you even know the difference? That's literacy, right? Whereas regulation is, regardless of whether it's frustrated or annoyed, can I get myself off the planet of frustration or the planet of annoyed to the planet of joy, for example? Can I do that? That's the ability to change how you feel. That's regulation, not literacy. So that there is, I can walk you through the twelve. But there are these twelve dimensions of emotional intelligence and even Goldman's latest instrument only measures six of them.
[00:16:36] Speaker C: So actually let's do, because I mean, you're a universe. You built a universe, haven't you, Alan? Yeah.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Well, we've got an app, one of the things on the app, because people do this test, right? Get people, ask anybody, what emotions have you noticed in the last week? Give them ten minutes.
Usually they can't come up with more than a dozen. You know, they go, oh, the last week I felt annoyed, frustrated, disappointed, aggravated, let down. Oh, blimey, they're all negative. They desperately scramble around for something. Pop. I felt okay last Tuesday, you know. And so first of all, people are more negatively valence than they realized and the maximum they come up with. And even if you give them another five minutes, you know, they can't come up with any more. They've noticed about twelve. And then you say, well, how many do you think there really are?
And the truth is there are about 34,000 different emotions that you can feel as a human being. And most people don't know more than a dozen. So most people are profoundly illiterate. And the reason for that is never taught this at school. It wasn't the subject. And also, as we're adults, we're focused on our email and our project plans and the stuff out there. We spend stamped attention looking at what's going on in here, particularly men, and tuning into what do we feel. And we've done our literacy. So in the complete app, we've loaded up two and a half thousand emotions so people can start to explore.
And we're going to crowdsource the other 32,000.
[00:18:10] Speaker D: Right?
[00:18:11] Speaker B: So we've loaded up 2000 for people to play with or two, two and a half thousand for people to play to start to figure out. And the reason that's important, John, is if you're on the planet of frustrated, the antidote to frustration is very different from the antidote to anger.
So if you don't know whether you're frustrated or angry, you'll choose the wrong antidote. So you have to know, is it frustration or is it anger? So, you know, on the app, not only do we show you these 2000 emotions, but there are what we call twelve missions on the app which will step by step walk you through these twelve levels of emotional intelligence. So one mission per level of how to get really good at all twelve sort of capabilities within the emotional intelligence and emotional regulation kind of domain.
[00:19:01] Speaker C: It is incredible. 34,000. I mean, like when just did a bit of research on this.
I came across, I can't even pronounce the word, but it was a word that the Chinese have for an emotion you feel when you get a really bad haircut.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: I mean, that's just bizarre. And that would be wonderful if you could bring it down to that level. So then, so the literacy is understanding the emotion and been able to really drill down into the lowest level of which I'm actually feeling and experiencing that emotion.
Then the control piece.
Why is it important that I control my emotions?
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Well, because it affects your brain function, it affects your health, it affects your performance.
So the superhighway, I mean, I know this is a doctor. I mean, I spent twelve years as a jobbing doctor, wandering around hospitals. The superhighway to disease is unregulated emotion. So if we are stressed to the eyeballs, or we're depressed, or we're overwhelmed or we're anxious, that has biological consequences. We pump out cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, which impairs your immune system, increases your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, senile dementia. So all the modern diseases that kill most people on the planet, if you're running a high cortisol and a low dhea, which is the cortisol antidote in the body, then you're at risk of all those things. So it has a profound influence on health and well being. It also has a profound influence on your ability to do well in your job and therefore generate money for your family and look after your family and your loved ones and so on. And so these things really, really matter. So if stuff triggers you and you get frustrated or wound up, and you can't get off the planet of frustrated or overwhelmed, to something that's more useful, like patience or contentment or excitement or something that's more helpful to you, you stay stuck on those negative, unhelpful planets with all the negative health consequences, the negative performance consequences.
So it's really key to be able to shift planets to move around the universe. In fact, I often say to people, of the thousands of things that we built to try and help people have a better life, if I could only teach one thing of all the thousands of things that we built, what would be the one lesson? And it is the ability to change how you feel, because if we can change that, then that opens up the possibility of having a more fulfilling life, a more enjoyable life, a longer life, a more healthy life. It opens up the possibility of us maturing and growing as a human being, adding more value to the lives of others.
If you can't regulate your emotion, it really constrains your life in so many ways. So that's really key.
[00:22:10] Speaker C: But this is different to repressing feelings, isn't it? So just could you tease out the nuance there, please?
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Yes. So when you look at men and women have a different strategy when they feel bad, right?
So men tend to prefer repression, suppression and denial.
You know, I'm not angry. What do you mean angry? You know. Yeah. Well, clearly you are angry as a judge by that response. So they're in denial that they're angry or they stuff it down, they repress it or suppress it, and of course it then festers. So that's men's preferred strategy. Women tend to like to share or, you know, what other people might call venting.
You know, they're sharing that, you know, on this sort of freudian idea. And it does come from Freud that a problem shared is a problem halved, right? That's not necessarily true. Sometimes a problem shared is a problem reinforced because you're rehearsing, you're practicing the anger.
So none of these strategies are useful. Repression, suppression, denial, not helpful.
And actually one of the predictors of cancer outcomes is not processing the emotion and sharing itself may not be helpful. What you really need is the ability to change how you feel, not change how you think, change how you feel. So you've got to feel differently rather than just think differently. That's why positive thinking really doesn't make that much difference.
Affirmations and all of that. No, you've got to genuinely change your experience. Do I genuinely feel frustrated or am I now on a planet of contentment or patience or virtuosity or any of those?
[00:23:59] Speaker C: So is this the ability to reframe the events that you're actually experiencing that are causing you emotion?
[00:24:05] Speaker B: No, reframing is a cognitive process, right? This is not reframing, this is not visualization, this is not imagination. This is genuinely shifting the energy in your system, not re interpreting and telling a PR story to yourself about that energy. It's genuinely changing. So emotions are energy in motion, which you then feel, right? So you've got to be a genuine shift in that, not a change in the cognitive description. The reframing of the energy, the energy has to change.
[00:24:41] Speaker C: So if I'm interacting with somebody and they're just frustrating the hell out of me. So, you know, I know that that's just how I'm responding. It may not be the best response in the world. But that's what's happening in me. That's what I'm feeling. I'm just so bloody well right. So what are you saying? I'm not reframing something. You actually want me to move away from frustration?
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Let's work the example. So we go if I'm frustrated, let's imagine that's true. Let's look at the biology of that frustration, right? There's a certain. And you did it as you were talking to me there. There's a certain muscle tension, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's part of the biological signature of frustration, right? There's a certain breathing pattern when you're frustrated. So when people are frustrated, they hold their breath. It's called a gottic stop, right? Oh, my goodness.
You know, they're holding their breath, right? So there's a muscle tension, there's a breath hold, there's a certain heart rate, there's a certain body temperature. So these are all the biological signature of this thing that we call frustration. So what I'm talking about is changing the tube, right? So how I help people try and understand this is when you think of an emotion, think of it's coming from your body, and your body's like an orchestra. Now, clearly the guts are the wind section. Obviously the heart will be the string section.
So you get the idea, right? So your body is always playing a tune. That is the emotion, knowing which tune, that's a feeling. So the emotions are always there, but you may not feel them. So what we're talking about here is changing the tune, right? So not reframing, not calling Rachmaninoff Pearl Jam. That's a reframe, right? No, no, but it's still Rachmaninoff, right? You haven't changed the energy. We've just reframed it as you know something else. No, no, that won't work. You actually have to change the tune. Now, how you do that is, first of all, understanding the tune, right? That frustration, for example, involves breath holding. So in order to change the tune, one of the things you can do is to change the breath pattern. So rather than breath holding, as you breathe rhythmically and evenly, that starts to change the tune. In the same way as Chopin's piano concerto needs a piano, we take the piano out, we haven't got the piano concerto anymore. In the same way, in frustration, if you take out the breath holding and replace it with rhythmic, even breathing, frustration disappears. Because to experience frustration, you have to hold your breath, take that away and replace rhythmic breathing in there, the frustration would melt away. In fact, I'll often challenge people to, say, try and maintain frustration in the face of rhythmic breathing. It's almost impossible.
[00:27:50] Speaker C: So where am I going, then? I'm moving away from frustration to what's the.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Well, to one of 17,000 positive planets. Right. So you'll find out, like, when you sort of dig into this, is some of the planets are easier to get to than others. So the shift from frustration, which is on the right hand side of the universe, to something more helpful on the left hand side of the universe, frustration to love, is a much tougher journey than frustration to patience.
So the journey you want to go on is frustration to patience. That's a much easier journey then frustration to love. So once you start to dig into these things, you'll find that there are certain positive antidotes that work better for things like frustration.
Certain positive planets that are better destinations than from these negative planets.
[00:28:46] Speaker C: Yeah, I love this. I always remember when I read, because many years ago that I read the coherence book and I was very taken by the mixing of emotions.
And how can you combine two? They become something else. That was fascinating. Could you just talk a little bit about that?
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Yes. So, again, remember, it's all energy in motion, right? So if the bassoon starts to do something different and the violin joins in, you've got a different state of energy, you've got a different tune, you've got a different emotion, right? And so that's the point about literacy in these 34,000.
You've got lots of tunes, right? So you make some subtle changes to the tune. You know, the triangle starts playing metaphorically and it didn't before. The tune's changed, the energy's changed. Now, what's fascinating about that is human beings change their emotional state all the time, every day. We're just not doing it on purpose. So, for example, yesterday it was beautifully sunny. I know you're in Rio today, but yesterday in the UK, beautifully sunny, right?
And the sun comes out, everybody feels better, they're not doing it on purpose. It's sort of almost spontaneous. So we've changed our energy, we've changed our inner weather, our inner tune, if you will, in response to the sunshine. All we're suggesting, John, is take conscious control of that process. So rather than be at the mercy of the weather or a letter lands on your doorstep and it says you've won 10,000 pounds and suddenly you're super excited, so that letter causes the excitement, and then you read a bit more closely and you realize it should have been addressed to your neighbor, and it's come to you for your. And then you're crushed. The letter causes excitement or crushing.
[00:30:36] Speaker D: Right.
[00:30:37] Speaker B: But you're doing an energetic shift. Your tune is changing. It's just that people haven't taken control of that change. And that's what we're trying to teach people to do, is get control of the change. Move from one tune to a tune that really helps you in this meeting versus something that doesn't help you in this meeting.
[00:30:55] Speaker C: What about the intensity of which you're experiencing emotions? Is there a sense that you can kind of bring it down a little bit to a more measurable, or is that good or is that bad?
[00:31:08] Speaker B: Neither good nor bad. So if you imagine a grid, what we, the vertical axis, which is the autonomic nervous system, is high energy, low energy. So at the top it's high energy, the bottom is low energy, right. And then to the left, we put positive on the left because it sort of disrupts people's thinking because everybody wants positive on the right. So we put the positive on the left and the negative on the right. So these are the vectors, positive to the left. So top left is high energy positive, bottom left is low energy positive, top right, high energy negative. Bottom right is low energy negative. Now, in that universe where we've organized these 2000 emotions for people to play with, some of them are more intense than others, right? So you can have a profound tranquility.
[00:32:01] Speaker D: Right.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: That's a low energy positive. Or you can have an intense excitement. That's a high energy positive.
[00:32:10] Speaker D: Right.
[00:32:10] Speaker B: So even on, you can have an intense version of the experience of any of these planets, right? So intensity is a very interesting phenomena. Now, some planets are naturally more intense than others.
So chillaxed might be a planet, right? Not very intense.
[00:32:30] Speaker D: Right?
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Exuberant, a bit more intense. So some of them have a natural intensity that is greater than others.
And some of them, you can go to that planet and have a more intense experience. You can have intense frustration rather than frustration.
Kind of like a moon off the planet of frustration. There's intense frustration. Okay.
[00:32:52] Speaker C: Wow. There's so much here, isn't there?
[00:32:54] Speaker B: Beautiful, isn't it?
[00:32:55] Speaker C: I know, like, honestly, there's so much fun to be had here in thinking and talking about it, but it's so much more important than that in terms of it's critical to performance and to how we operate as individuals. And it's scary that it's just not, that it's not part of the educational process. From the get go. It really should be. I mean, you must have seen some changes in terms of the people you've coached, both from a sporting point of view. And then in business terms, what are the big standout things that you're sort of saying, if only I could get across to leaders in organizations across the globe, performance would be better, but also their lives would be actually better. What are the key kind of messages?
[00:33:39] Speaker B: Yes. So let me share a couple of stories of things that we've seen then, is, I remember many years ago, almost like in the first couple of years, I was teaching this, we're doing a workshop at Shell, and we did some biofeedback. So one of the ways of getting people in, because you've got these executives who've been on a thousand training courses, and it's never really made deep cynicism. Here we go again. Another one of these company training bits of nonsense.
And we did a bit of biofeedback. So rather than try and persuade him, we'll just show you the live data. And there was this guy, I remember him clearly in his fifties, and we were showing him his own biology. And of course, it was pretty chaotic and in terms of his heart rate variability. And I showed him how to regulate his breathing, and it changed his biology. Before his very eyes, this 50 year old man started crying.
[00:34:28] Speaker D: Right?
[00:34:29] Speaker B: It was the first time in his life when he had the realization that he could control what was happening to him, because a lot of the time of his life, he felt a bit out of control. Life was happening to him. Other people were doing it to him. Whether it's frustrating him or pissing him off or disappointing him or upsetting him, it was happening to him. And then literally, in that one or two minutes when I was showing him in front of a class of other people, he suddenly realized there was a possibility that he could control it himself, reduced him to tears.
He had a profound experience that actually, maybe I could control this. I'm going, yeah, that's exactly it. You can control this. So we had a very interesting conversation then about. So you're saying that if I learn these skills, I could get control of my anxiety? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying to you. What, so I don't have to feel anxious? No, you don't. Not unless you want to.
Whatever. Again, I said, no, never again if you don't. It just was like, really? Oh, my God, that's amazing.
We got to kind of joke about it. Well, is that even legal, that I don't have to feel anxious?
No. It's totally legal, right? You could learn to regulate your own system.
You don't have to feel anything you don't want to feel. Now, that is a game changer for most people.
Most people go through life believing it's being done to them, and they're powerless in the face of all of this stuff. The government, their boss, their partner, their kids, or whoever it is, is doing it to them. Now, they're only doing it to them because people haven't learned the ability to regulate it for themselves. Now, until you learn that skill, people will do it to you. People will annoy you, disappoint you, frustrate you.
[00:36:16] Speaker C: But as often, most people are in that victim. Yeah.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: I mean, I've seen it, right, 20 years. And say, look, you got angry. Yeah. Well, Frank really annoyed me.
[00:36:25] Speaker D: Right.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Okay. Did Frank inject you with anger?
Well, no. Did he give you tablets, and you took tablets, right? You took tablets, and it made you angry? No, I didn't take any tablets. Was it a drink? Did he spike your drink?
[00:36:39] Speaker C: No.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: None of those things happened. So who created the anger?
And then the penny drops.
Well, it must have been me. Bingo. You're the architect. Nobody's doing anything to anybody. We're doing it to ourselves. Now, if you can accept that simple truth, John, if people could simply accept that one trick, we do it to ourselves. If we do it to ourselves, we can undo it.
If we think somebody else is doing it to us, then it's down to them to make us feel better. And, of course, they don't. So we trap ourselves.
[00:37:13] Speaker D: Right?
[00:37:13] Speaker C: It's the classic Viktor Frankl, isn't it? Responsibility.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Victor's great book. Yeah. Man's search for meaning.
[00:37:20] Speaker D: Right?
[00:37:21] Speaker B: That was basically his message, is I can. I couldn't. The Nazis could take anything away, including my life and my family. And, of course, they sadly murdered a lot of his family. The one thing they can't take away from me is how I feel about them.
That's down to me.
[00:37:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: So that was his insight.
[00:37:37] Speaker D: Right.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: So there's lots of historical reference point where different people, over the course of humanity's evolution, have realized this thing, right. Ultimately, we can take ownership of how we feel. Now, the trap is to blame the government or the customers or my boss. It looks like it gets you off the hook. Oh, it's their fault. It looks like it gets you off the hook, but what it does is it traps you. If it's their fault, it's up to them to make me feel better. So I'm powerless. This is what we call the victim position. I am the victim of my government, boss, customer, whoever it is, I'm their victim. They're doing it to me. But once you take back ownership like Viktor Frankl and you accept nobody does anything to anybody, we do it to ourselves. It's unbelievably empowering. And that's why this guy, you know, was reduced to tears. So indulge me. I'll tell you another story. When I was coaching the Olympic athletes in London, 2012, best gig I've ever done in my entire life. I was a rower at med school, and I got to coach some of the rowers and the coaches of the rowers at our home Olympics in London. So best together. So three months before the Olympics, I said like, okay, look, home Olympics rowing is my sport. You're the rowers. If I'm not with a client, I'll turn up for free. Here's what I want to teach. And I worked. There's about 15 crews in the rowing in the Olympic regatta, and I worked with seven of those crews and all the athletes and all the coaches, and then eight said, no thanks, we've got it covered now. Of the seven I worked with, six of them got meddled. Of the eight I didn't work with, only three of them got medals.
[00:39:22] Speaker D: Right.
[00:39:22] Speaker C: So what was the difference?
[00:39:23] Speaker B: It was teaching them this, that was it.
[00:39:26] Speaker C: The emotional management piece, teaching them to regulate.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: So the rowing rate is 2000 meters. So what we did, you know, there was a Helen glover in her pair. So she was the women's pair is we taught them to regulate their emotions down to 2000 meters. Because what happens when you row, rowers will tell you, this is the first hundred meters. You got all excited, you go flat out and then after 100 meters you basically died.
And so it's 1900 meters of pain.
So it's pain management is basically what the race is about, right. So with Helen and Heather, we taught them how to, at 900 meters, where every signal they were getting them from their body, you know, would stop rowing. Your mad person. What are you doing? You're killing me. I don't want to do this. That's all. What's going on in their cognitive chatter, right. We taught them to get excited, to trigger excitement at 900 meters just before the halfway point because that excitement would unlock a bit more energy. It's like turning.
[00:40:34] Speaker C: How did they trigger excitement?
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Well, we train them during their practice saying, look, can you feel excited? So just when you're paddling very gently start to get excited. And we told them, what is excitement? Is the heart rate high or low? What's happening with the breathing? What's the muscle tension? Like, where in your body are you feeling excited? You get people to objectify the experience of excitement. It's called the mastery skill. And then reinstall that experience. So we train them when they were on the bank and then got them in the boat doing it when they were paddling light, and then increased the pressure. Could they maintain the excitement when they were going hard at it? And then could they do it in race conditions and so on? So eventually they got the Olympic final and they were able to turn on this state of excitement at 900 meters. And what you'll see in that, if you watch the video, is at 900 meters, it was all nip and tucked, and then they suddenly took a length.
That's what caused them to win the medal. They suddenly turned on the state of excitement because they were excited that the pain was nearly half done.
And suddenly they surged away from the competition. They went on to get the gold medal.
[00:41:46] Speaker D: Right?
[00:41:47] Speaker B: And then they did the same in Rio. I trained them for Rio.
[00:41:50] Speaker D: Right?
[00:41:51] Speaker B: So the emotional regulation made the difference between winning a medal and not getting a medal at all. It was that because most of these athletes, depending on whichever sport you're doing, they all do the same training regime, they all eat well, they all go to bed early, you know, all that stuff. That's all the same in most athletes. That's not the difference. The difference is how well on the day of the Olympic final can they manage their emotions.
Now, you train them to do that. It gives them the competitive edge.
[00:42:23] Speaker C: And that's really. It's. It's down to, when you look at the F. Formula one, I don't know if you're a fan, but, like, it's. It's milliseconds is the difference between winning and losing. And it's. It's those factors that can make that difference that is like. It's. It's absolutely back.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: John, we did some research with. In the simulator, in the Formula one simulator with this guy, and we looked at the racing drivers coherence and correlated it to lap times.
[00:42:54] Speaker D: Right?
[00:42:55] Speaker B: And the more coherent they are, the faster they drove. But we've just started working with Williams Formula one team, trying to teach them. These things actually give you the edge, whether it's in business, coming up with a better business strategy or something, a competitive edge, or whether it's in sports like rowing or Formula one, you're basically optimizing your system that's essentially what coherence does, optimizes your brain function, you know, the availability of your energy, your perceptiveness. So do you choose the right line in a Formula one? I've got some really interesting data on world class golfers. I was coaching an expert number one world class golfer, and I had. Did it. He did a pro am, and I had his biology in front of me, and he had his scorecard, and I went, okay, so hole number one, par, and he went, yeah. Hole number two, par, whole number three part, hole number four, birdie.
And he went, yeah, I did get a hole. I did get birdie on. How do you know that? I said, hole number five, bogey. Yeah. Hole number six part, and I went through his scorecard. I was just looking at his biology, and I could tell whether putt or missed the putt just based on his biology.
[00:44:12] Speaker C: Wow, that is incredible.
I was one of the other Jim Lair, I don't know if you know Jim Lehrer. He's a. Yeah, yeah. And he did the work healthy podcast with me, too. And again, he was talking about, it's not the bad shot, it's the effect it has on your next shot as a golfer. I know that only too well. It's raining.
[00:44:35] Speaker B: But that's emotional regulation, John. That's, you know, like how much contamination, like if you can't regulate your emotion, the frustration when you shank, it might affect two or three shots.
[00:44:46] Speaker C: So you play guard, do you?
[00:44:50] Speaker B: I've played enough to know that you really have to regulate your emotions and the yips or on the 18th to win the championship.
[00:44:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: In fact, as you know, in the coherence book, I told the story about Sergio Garcia, you know, was cream in the field up until the Saturday, six shots, head got to the Sunday, suddenly became a disaster. Amateur level golfer Warwick Harrington comes past to him and gets the green jacket, right.
[00:45:17] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: It's not like he suddenly lost the ability to play golf. What happens is he doesn't regulate his emotions right. On the Sunday well enough, and it causes him to lose nine shots.
Yeah. That's not from bad golf. That's from a lack of emotional regulation.
[00:45:33] Speaker D: Right.
[00:45:34] Speaker C: So these things make a difference just like I. Look, I wanted to talk to you about your step change, but we're going to have to get back together again, if you don't mind, and thrill into those, because that change piece is so important. But just sort of as a final kind of piece there around, sort of talking to those leaders and managers who are struggling in this area. What is that kind of final piece of advice? Is there an actual process that they can go through so that they can actually get on top of this area of their life?
[00:46:04] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, again, people can download our app for free and then there's a subscription version. It's called the complete app. It's available everywhere.
And it would take you step by step through the processes that you need to do to get back your system under your own control. So there's lots of skills, there's the controlling your breathing, controlling your emotion, accelerating your perceptual awareness or the speed of your thinking. You can train your brain to control time. So I'm flying to Shanghai tonight to see a client and I do like a 14 hours flight, no jet lag because I control time. So I can do a 14 hours flight, get off the other end and it feels like 2 hours.
So you can hold on a second.
[00:46:51] Speaker C: Sorry, I know we're supposed to be finished, but I've got a, I'm going to drill into that.
I've got a twelve hour flight home. Tell me how do I do that?
[00:47:01] Speaker B: Right, so you got to, again, one has to study to get good at these. You have to. How does this actually work?
[00:47:06] Speaker D: Right.
[00:47:07] Speaker B: So you may have had, I'll give you a quick, the quick version of it is quite a lot of people, when I talk to them about this in sort of time, you know, changing your perception of time is that, have you ever been in a car crash where your brain's gone into slow motion?
[00:47:19] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:47:20] Speaker D: Right?
[00:47:20] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:47:20] Speaker B: Have you had that?
[00:47:21] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: Yep. So what's happening there, right, is in normal functioning. Your brain samples realities, four frames a second. So we don't live stream reality. The brain takes a sample, it's about a quarter of a second long. So you have a moment of awareness and that then collapses, then you have another moment which then collapses, then you have another moment, you have four frames a second. So it's going past your reader and so you think I. It's continuous. People think their life is continuous but it's really discontinuous. Four frames a second. So when you have a car crash, your brain samples at 20 frames a second because it thinks you're going to die and it's looking for an exit. So the sampling rate changes. So how when you're doing long haul flights, if you go from four frames a second to one frame every 2 seconds, time flies.
[00:48:11] Speaker D: Right.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: So you can alter the sampling rate. And one of the Ways that you do that is through putting yourself in a Sort of suspended animation and massively dialing down what's called signal importance, the importance you give to anything that's going on in your awareness. So you can watch a film, but you're not terribly interested in the film. You know, you can eat the meal, but it's not like, oh, my God, this Food's so great or so bad or what, you know, you're not giving importance to anything.
And of course, one of the things that prevents your ability to manipulate time is your perception of the most important thing to you is yourself.
[00:48:49] Speaker D: Right?
[00:48:50] Speaker B: So it's called autobiographical perception. So if when you're thinking about what's going on, you know, you're in your own sort of story, the more kind of wrapped up in the idea of I, you know, don't you know who I am? You know, the sort of self importance, pomposity sort of thing, whereas the more mature you are, you're not really bothered by the eye. Seems to be very important to you. It enables you to manipulate time because you're not anchored in the moment, in your own story.
So there's lots of things. I mean, that's the quick version of it you can train.
[00:49:25] Speaker C: Wow, that's incredible.
That's all new to me. Wow. I've got so much to learn. I've got so much to learn, to listen.
Thanks a million.
Listen, honestly, please, let's get together again, if you couldn't possibly spare the time, because I want to talk about that, the change piece, because I was fascinated by everything I was learning in terms of that, particularly the wake up, own up, grow up and show up. I really have to get back to that because I think that's been. Been so good. But listen, thank you so much for your time and thanks for your work, by the way, because it's just brilliant. It's really inspiring and it's helping me every day. And I love your app, by the way, too. So thank you again so much, Alan.
[00:50:14] Speaker B: My pleasure, John. Lovely to talk to you.
[00:50:17] Speaker A: What a fascinating interview. And so interesting to learn that we need a new level of sophistication to handle the complexity of today's workplace. We need to tune in a bit more to our own biology and learn how to change the way we feel and also learn how to slow time down. That is something I am so looking forward to learning how to do and trying out. Right now. I'm emotionally, I'm feeling very optimistic and excited. I'm highly aroused. My heart rate is elevated. I'm listening to my body. The reason for my excitement is that for the first time ever, we've actually decided to ask a guest back. So we've invited Alan back to talk about getting better at change. His new book is step change the leaders journey, and it's a great book, and we're looking forward to digging into that. You can also check out Alan's app. It's called complete coherence, and you'll find all those emotions he mentioned earlier. Next up, we're off to Brazil, and it's time to learn about the christian importance of samba. That's next time on the work healthy podcast.
