Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Maureen: [00:00:00] Hi, i’m your host, Maureen Metcalf.

I am delighted that today with me is John Wartman, John coaches, executives, and leaders. He trains leaders and assesses cultures and has worked in the financial services, tech, pharma, healthcare, sport, nonprofit, and academic and government organizations as well as spiritual organizations. And John’s expertise.

And where we’re really gonna focus today is resilience, and specifically resilience being a key factor in leadership success during times of stress. Our ability to manage our stress and our thinking have a significant impact on our ability to deliver personally and our ability to inspire our followers.

So John, let’s start with what is resilience?

Jon: Thank you for having me today, and this has been a lifelong journey of exploration to figure out how to get people to be, as I like to call it, human slinkies. So if you’re a resilient person, you’re someone who knows how to face the most difficult moments, and you have your ways of bouncing back, and most people do this intuitively, that’s our survival mechanism.

But what’s really powerful is the original resilience research in psychology started in Hawaii. And they figured out that kiddos who had grown up in environments with lots of factors that would help them [00:03:00] in fact not thrive, uh, things like drug addiction in the household, low income levels, low education levels.

This same cohort had a third of these kids who shouldn’t be success. Somehow finding ways to live rich lives, uh, over time. And what this has led in the world is deep research in figuring out what it takes to be the kind of person who, when things get tough, you know what to do, and you actually use those experiences to make yourself better.

And so, Maureen, for you, what, what has resilience been in your work?

 Maureen: So we talk about looking at how much a, a disturbance a system can absorb. So whether it’s a bridge that’s resilient during an earthquake or a building or a human being. How much disturbance or shock or unplanned change can one person absorb before they break down?

Jon: I like that. What, what, what makes me so excited about teaching resilience to [00:04:00] people is. That everybody’s already really good at. The things that give us strength, that allow us to take difficult situations and make them valuable. For instance, you are a professional breather, so since you were born, you were able to take air, but most people are always doing this reactively, and the stress system in our brain is made to keep us alive.

The good news is we can actually, when we do it intentionally take advantage of those systems. To face tough moments. For instance, you’re at work and you’re dealing with a person who absolutely drives you crazy, and usually people will immediately start fighting with that person or speaking negatively about that person, or in some cases, avoiding that person just using breath.

As a resilience technique on purpose, and we call this mindfulness more on that in a little bit. Mm-hmm. That, that, that intentional use of breath before you interact with that person, your brain [00:05:00]suddenly realizes that you are living on purpose and you then don’t have the same stress reactions to them.

 Maureen: So, and so one of the things then we talk about is staying flexible and focused. I can just simply use my breath then to stay flexible and focused so.

Jon: There’s this really interesting problem happening in the world right now around mindfulness, and everyone has heard it as a buzzword, and I recently did a speaking gig at a big company, and they didn’t want me to use the phrase mindfulness because people have thought it is not scientifically based, but the research that’s gone in the last 20 to 30 years using FMRI, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Has has shown us that literally when you are mindful, when you pay attention to the moment, when you’re the kind of person who knows how to breathe intentionally, and we can talk about different ways to breathe on purpose in a second, if you want that, that literally the stress part of your brain, the [00:06:00] amygdala, which I call the alarm, the gray matter of it, will thin.

And a study at Harvard Medical School found this as well using John Cabot’s. Mindfulness based stress reduction program over eight weeks. People literally had the alarms in their brain thin. They tell us we can’t change in eight weeks. You can literally change your brain, but you have to be the kind of person who, when you’re not stressed, uses breath on purpose to step back from those moments at work, those moments at home, for all of us, particularly in New England where I am, those moments in traffic that drive us crazy.

 Maureen: Uh, so we actually interviewed Marianna Clap. She’s a researcher at OSU and, and similarly has done work with the eight week mindfulness program. She happens to have her own and she’s done it across a broad range of participants from Critical care ICU nurses to school kids to um. Uh, trash collectors.

Yeah. And [00:07:00] so education level doesn’t matter. Profession doesn’t matter. It consistently produces the same results you’re saying. And she measures things like cortisol production. So, so if cortisol is one of the stress hormones, we know that people’s stress goes down in a way that can be measured physiologically.

Jon: That’s it. And what’s so powerful about what you just said is it doesn’t matter. What your background is, where you are in the world, male or female. What matters to be resilient is that you have learned to intentionally use what your body does naturally to nourish itself. And so when I think about breathing, I mean let’s just do a quick breathing exercise right now.

Breathe in for four count. Just follow my, my, my counting here. 1, 2, 3, 4. And now breathe out for. 3, 2, 1. If you literally would do that over and [00:08:00] over again in your non-stressed life, all you would have to do is count and breathe before you have that difficult conversation and your brain is gonna have a deep rutted neural pathway.

The white matter in your brain changes to depending on what you do, mm-hmm. No matter who you are, you’re ready for those tough moments because you know how to step back before you actually interact.

 Maureen: So I would add to that one practice that I’ve personally found really helpful before I have a tough meeting with someone.

Find something productive and positive about them. So what’s the optimal outcome? Rather than focusing on how tough they are.

Jon: And I call that memory mining. So mindfulness is not just. It’s counting, it’s pausing, it’s slowing down, it’s trying to clear your mind just for a few seconds. Mm-hmm. And the part of the mindfulness movement that hasn’t gone deep enough is to be resilient.

You have to actually use the times that you’ve been resilient previously. And these memories of where a person [00:09:00] has been effective are some of the most powerful relationship building tools we have. But what you just said is, again, the most important part of resilience. You have to practice when you’re not stressed.

You have to practice before the meeting.

 Maureen: Mm-hmm. So let’s step back I and make sure we’re grounding how we define resilience. Similarly, we talked about the definition. I look at four components. Um, managing my physical self. So am I. Uh, you know, if you’re in the US you’ve seen the Snickers commercials. Are you eating enough?

And, you know, when, when we’re under stress, we will often not, not make time for food or healthy food. So eating, sleeping, taking time in nature, taking time to relax, breathing. Second is managing my thinking. And so the thing we’re talking about now. On the physical wellbeing side, something like breathing on the thinking side, managing my memories, and being clear [00:10:00] about my intention and purpose.

Third, managing my emotions and a sense of life purpose. So this could also be called the spiritual side for people who have a spiritual practice. And then the fourth is harnessing the power of connection. Knowing that sometimes when I’m struggling, the best thing for me to do is reach out to someone who’s supportive.

And I would say that can also include pets. So if I’m struggling, I’ll often hold my dog. Um, at the end of a tough day. And that, that the physiological connection, often it comes back to the physiology, really helps me reground. So flexible and focused. How about you? Do you define it differently, and if so, where?

Jon: So for me, resilience starts with brain health. And the reason that’s the case is because as a human being, I was not. Intentionally resilient. [00:11:00] Going back five or six years ago, I was traveling back and forth between the Boston area where I was working in a spiritual community up and down the east coast where I was doing consulting.

I lived in Connecticut where my wife was getting her PhD, and I had gained 40 or 50 pounds because there’s nothing more comforting after a long commute than eating a couple of pizzas. Notice I didn’t say a couple of slices. And what goes perfectly with pizza, but beer and what follows beer, but bourbon and what’s better than bourbon ice cream.

And, and my two friends, Ben and Jerry, spent a lot of time together. And so what I had to learn was how to actually take care of the stress reaction in my brain before I could even begin to think about those self-care, uh, quadrants that you just mentioned. Mm-hmm. The reason it was so hard for me is that I was constantly stuck in a hyperactive stress reaction, and I didn’t know at that time about the alarm in my brain.

I didn’t know that I could simply step back to get myself off what’s called the short loop. So, I mean, when [00:12:00] you’re stressed, your alarm is pulling all the negative memories that can, feelings past, uh, experiences, literally the images of your mom or dad yelling at you. And you get stuck in this short loop and you just feel awful in your own body.

Well, what else are you gonna do in those moments if you haven’t been taught to step back but cope however you can. And so for me to be the kind of person who knows how to make the healthy choices that build a resilient body and a but resilient life, I first have to recognize what stresses me out. And I have to then begin to make changes around those patterns in my life.

And so bouncing back for me begins with understanding what causes stress in my brain, what are those triggers, and then what’s gonna get me on the long loop where I’m actually using the frontal lobes in my brain, my thinking center, to actually make better choices one at a time. And I’m lost 40 pounds.

Because even though I was an athlete in college and I was a [00:13:00] person who has a master’s degree, uh, in terms of my education and have always had a good family, uh, and friend groups take care of me, um, what I didn’t have was the awareness of what was gonna drive me to make bad decisions over time. So resilience probably starts with that awareness piece.

 Maureen: Okay. So that’s what I would put in Then the bucket of, um, managing my thinking. Be well, being aware of my, my thought process, but then you’re also managing in the other quadrants, the choices you’re making around food, around breathing, around, um, being aware of your emotions so that, so that all of these things move in unison.

Jon: Yeah, what you’ve done so well in terms of identifying where I need to do the homework and assessing the homework I need to do on a daily basis to be resilient. What I try and give people first is ability to make [00:14:00] sure that, you know, in every moment you have a choice as to how you’re going to think, how you’re gonna feel.

And there’s wonderful new research out there, um, from North University, um, and what we feel in emotions like sadness or disgust or happiness. That’s just a reaction. What we then think about those emotions is still a reaction to those emotions, but what we feel, what becomes the memory about those experiences can actually be in our control when we know how to step back.

And so it’s how do you be mindful first? That’s what’s not out in the world enough these days. Mm-hmm. You can, if you can figure out how to be mindful first in any of the places where you want to experience the ability to bounce back more consistently, then we can go to those deep four buckets.

 Maureen: So mindful first I notice, so I notice my body tensing up in, in my case, I grew up with ice cream, was a reward, and ice cream was also the solution when things went wrong.

So I broke up with [00:15:00] my boyfriend or he broke up with me. My parents took me to Baskin Robins. I did something well in school. My parents took me to Baskin Robbins. So Baskin Robbins became the solution and, and hot fudge sundaes to everything. And so now when I’m not even aware that I’m stressed, I’m now seeking out hot fudge sundaes.

And like you with pizzas, I needed to be a lot more conscious than I was. What was this compulsive desire for ice cream?

Jon: It’s even more powerful than that, is that you had to be aware that in those moments you were reacting. You were cycle, your alarm was firing. And the great part about modern life is that because we’re not fighting to survive all the time, we can pay attention to where our body and brain are.

Step back for a second, get on the long loop and then do this resilience building that you talk about in the four buckets.

 Maureen: So we’re [00:16:00] gonna take a break, a break on that note. But I love the idea of short loop versus long loop and that since we are, most of us not in survival mode, we have the capacity to use a bigger percentage of our brain and really notice what’s happening with our body.

So when do I feel stressed and, and for me, it looks like I’m hunched over often and what’s going on in my head that’s often unconscious. That’s, that’s driving me to do something that is, uh, not healthy and leaving me mentally and physically, not at my best,

Jon: perfectly said.

 Maureen: John, during the break, we were talking a little bit about quick switching.

Can you share with our audience what that is and how it is so helpful?

Jon: So quick switching is when you are mindful first. So you will pause for two 10. You don’t even need to be more than 30 seconds. To get your brain back online. And [00:17:00] what that means is that all the parts of your brain, the highways between them, the pathways between between them, that’s the white matter in your brain are open.

So mindfulness in its first moments doesn’t actually fix anything or make you feel better. You’re not more resilient because you are mindful first. It’s because it then makes it possible for you to get off the short loop and then next choose what you wanna focus on. And quick switching is either in a breath to be breathing in and then filling yourself with the feeling you want to feel from your mentor memory center on the out breath.

Or it’s being mindful first to 2, 10 30 seconds by looking or listening or counting or. Using a great memory from the past that that image that brings you to a peaceful place and then focusing on what you care about. And these are your four buckets. So for instance, if I’m an artist, Annie Lamont, the author was famous for lighting a candle before she’d write.

So that lighting the candle was a mindful moment. [00:18:00] And then she would quick switch into focusing on just her writing. And when Thoreau goes out to Walden Pond, he, he had a quick switch over a year, but it took him a year of mindfulness practice. Looking at the dust in the sunlight, listening to the sound of the tree frogs to be able to then switch to just writing.

Now again, it doesn’t sound like a quick switch. If you did it over a year, the amount of mindful practice that you need to do to make it normal, so in the middle of stressful times, you can use it to get the brain back online, depends on who you are. Um, and what’s even more powerful in the business community is that if I have defined processes.

That I want to use, whether it’s project management or how we have conversations, or the way we make decision making or do problem solving, it’s figuring out how to be mindful first in those business environments. That allows me to then switch quickly to what I want to focus on.

 Maureen: So that’s what I call then a liberating structure, that I have a structure in place in advance, that I practice regularly.

So when I need it, it’s [00:19:00] there. And, and it’s there as habit.

Jon: Exactly. Right. And what’s hard about the mindfulness community these days is it’s being sold as a cure all. If your mind can get better, if mindfulness. And then keep switching into that same form or a different form of mindfulness. For instance, you light the candle and then do breathing exercises.

You go to yoga class and do your movements and then do meditation time at the end. That is the power of mindfulness, switching to mindfulness. But in business, you can be mindful for just a few seconds or a few minutes before you come to a meeting, and then it makes it possible for that process. To lock in without distraction because the alarm in your brain doesn’t need to keep you safe.

It doesn’t need to get you in a place where you’re ready to get away from trouble. ’cause it knows what you’re about to do is important and valuable.

 Maureen: And that’s where I do the intention setting as well. The, this is an [00:20:00] important meeting and this is the outcome I’d like. It somehow tells my brain this is what we should be focusing on.

Jon: So how many times do you think people, when it comes to. Building their buckets. How many times do I have to practice a particular behavior, whether it’s mindfulness or a systems process, before it becomes natural for someone before it allows them to resiliently do it even when there’s deadlines or people giving them criticism.

Or even worse than that, you’re working with a colleague who drives you crazy.

 Maureen: So I’ve heard the, the statistic, 28 days. I can tell you, depending on the stress level, it takes a whole lot more than 28 days when someone’s driving me nuts and I immediately go to that place. That’s not terribly favorable. So I’m curious, what is the real number?

Jon: So I found three different really interesting studies, and one is from uc, Santa Barbara, where college students who would [00:21:00] spend 25 hours doing classes, doing exercise, a little bit of therapy, and then not drinking more than one alcoholic beverage a day. Aha. That’s the key, because again, there’s nothing wrong with bourbon to make you feel resilient, but when you come back from it, it’s not gonna feel better.

When you come back from that experience of being, uh, shall we say, uh, diluted in the stress because of the alcohol, you come back and it hits you worse, your alarm’s gonna hit you worse. So these kids couldn’t distract from the neuro pathways they were building 25 hours a week for six weeks. So that was one study.

When they did the mindfulness based stress reduction at Harvard Medical School, it’s eight weeks, and Cain’s course has been shown from people who had F MRIs before and after the course to strengthen the memory center, strengthen the frontal lobes, and then shrink the size of the amygdala, which is your alarm.

But then Dr. Ford, who I wrote hijacked by your [00:22:00] brain with, he does 10 weeks of what he calls target training and literally without medication. Our military men and women coming back with post-traumatic stress disorder, meaning an alarm that just won’t turn down in 10 weeks, they can actually heal. So it feels to me like we’re somewhere between six and 10 weeks and we’re talking about hours a day.

Of doing some of this intentional work, but if you spend eight hours a day at work, 10 hours a day at work, it’s not wrong to put a couple of those into this kind of habit build.

 Maureen: So, so my example was on the worst cases, I still go to go to a place that I’d rather not. And what I think you’re saying is then I start to build the habit and the capacity.

So I am less often hijacked and for a shorter period of time, but not to say that I will never be hijacked again.

Jon: I mean, you are gonna get hijacked and, and you want to, because you want your brain to be paying attention to the places where there’s trouble. [00:23:00] So, for instance, you’re about to fall asleep in, uh, in the car on a long drive.

You want your alarm to wake you up. You want your alarm to wake you up one minute before your alarm clock. You want your alarm in the middle of a stressful meeting to remind you that this matters, and, and you should be paying attention. And so your brain is always gonna look out for the hard parts of life for you.

Stress is a good thing. When you know what it’s trying to tell you, the reason that hijacking of your brain becomes a problem is when that hyperactive stress makes you feel completely out of control and you don’t know what to do about it.

 Maureen: Okay? So that’s what we would call PTSD, but all of us have, I’m assuming all of us have some level of stress response, and many of us have an unhealthy level of stress response.

Jon: You know, that’s happening in our culture now. Because unfortunately we have smartphones mm-hmm. And done with kids who see an image of their, [00:24:00] uh, Instagram account getting lots of likes. And the same part of the brain that gets happy with cocaine, gets happy with smartphones. And so we are addicted these days to attention.

We’re addicted to the quick stimulation that feels like we’re doing drugs, and as a result, we are triggered much more easily than we used to be. Um, when people used to relax in the family and the only thing that could interrupt dinner was mom or dad getting angry, one of the kids whining or the phone ringing.

We now have people eating and they’re interrupted every minute by someone messaging them or tweeting them or texting them. And so what we’re needing to teach each other within society is that we have to actually make room one to be resilient by taking breaks from our technology. But two, you, you gotta train to be able to quick switch in every kind of situation.

 Maureen: And so this is again, back to the six to 10 week training [00:25:00] of mindfulness based stress reduction, either the, either the Cabot Zi approach or the Marianna Cloud approach, or any number of other successful approaches to this.

Jon: If you wanna make it permanent, you gotta do that kind of homework. If you wanna do it slowly but surely over time, it literally only takes minutes a day and you have to be careful how you do it.

So people are doing mindfulness on their smartphones and having apps that actually will, will interrupt them every hour. Well, if that works for you, great. For most people, that would stress them out more. What I find is best for folks is to intentionally work on your mindfulness in the morning over meals.

And then in the evening, and whether that’s around dinner time or whether that’s in before you go to bed, because those are the times when naturally we’re trying to slow down or naturally trying to get ourself present. And if you do, literally what the Harvard Medical School system found over 28, oh, sorry.

Over eight weeks, 27 minutes a day, that change. Okay? [00:26:00]

 Maureen: And I think Marianna’s is eight weeks, 20 minutes a day. So, so they’re all in a similar, similar time zone.

Jon: That’s it. And in this case, Amish Ja, who studied meditation and the impacts on the brain found that 12 minutes of meditation was the right amount to do.

Um, we can always find different numbers, but what we really have to find is the way that you’re gonna do it. So it doesn’t matter how much you start with, as long as you keep doing it, because it will teach your brain. The, the things that were stressing you out before were more stressed than we’ve ever been, potentially.

That that doesn’t have to stay that way.

 Maureen: And I think that’s a really important point, is we don’t have to stay that way. You can control this to a degree. You can’t control other people and, and the silliness happening in the world, but you can control how you respond to it

Jon: and not just the way you respond, the way in which you actually think about it.

So [00:27:00] let’s go to your four buckets, the way you think about stress. The way you think about the people who drive you crazy, that doesn’t have to be an emotional experience or an emotional thought. It can be a feeling that you go to by quick switching little mindfulness. And then call up the feeling of saying that person who’s difficult is making you better.

That person who is difficult is teaching you something. That person who’s difficult is in fact valuable because they’re talented and you’re gonna work with them even though they cause you stress. We know in our families, we put up with each other even though we cause each other stress. And so the key is to actually start to build memory files of thinking about stress and stressful situations.

That allow you to bounce back quicker. You can’t stop the feeling in your body of stress. What you can do is change the feeling you have about what you’re gonna do with it.

 Maureen: So I don’t change the feeling someone comes in and yells at me or whatever. The thing is, somebody cuts me off in traffic that’s still gonna frustrate me.

Jon: [00:28:00] It’s gonna be an emotion and it’s gonna, it’s gonna absolutely irritate you, and it should cause a spike in your adrenaline, but it doesn’t have to last as long as it does for most of us.

 Maureen: Okay. And it is through awareness, breathing, quick switching, uh, and, and potentially in this case, viewing that poor driver, my view, poor driver, a as a gift to allow me to build this skill.

Jon: Now, if you can call them a gift, you’re better than me. And that, that, that in that case is that the stress this person has caused me is a chance for me to do a little mindfulness practice. You gotta be mindful first, and you gotta practice mindfulness when you are not stressed. You’ve gotta then use that mindfulness to quick switch to the things you actually care about.

And then once you’ve done that homework a few times again, 27 minutes a day, eight weeks, you then are ready to do that deeper. Thinking about your values and what you think about people, your goals, about where you actually want to go, the [00:29:00] processes that are gonna let you live out your values or reach your goals.

Then you’re actually in a place where you can do that long loop thinking rather than just reacting through life.

 Maureen: And so is the quick switching part of long loop thinking.

Jon: If you quick switch, you get yourself on the long loop. So what Dr is something called SOS Self. You wanna first step back, you wanna be mindful again, two seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds.

You then wanna focus on one thing at a time, or orient is what he calls it. And then lastly, you self-check. So you measure your stress. Am I at a 10? I just got in a catastrophic car accident. Am I in a one? I just got up from a good nap. You can’t be zero ’cause then you’d be dead. Remember when you wake up before your alarm clock, you were asleep, but your alarm still woke you up.

It’s still paying attention. And if you hear a noise, you wake up in the middle of the night. When he created this method, I realized that there for, for healthy people, his method is for therapeutic healing. For healthy people. It’s those first two bits that matter most, and you just gotta be [00:30:00] mindful and don’t treat that as the answer to all problems.

Treat that as the door opening to using your brain better. And then you’ve gotta build better memory files about the, you care about values, goals, the places you’ve been successful before, the relationships you want to trust. And let’s go to that second bucket for you, which is trusted relationships. If you know you’ve got people you care about.

They’re gonna support you when you’re stressed, even when you’re the jerk.

 Maureen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And there were times, I’m the jerk. I try to keep my mouth shut those times, by the way, but. So let’s talk, we’ve got a couple more minutes in this segment. Let’s talk about building those files. What’s a concrete thing a listener can do to start strengthening those files?

Assuming we take as a given that we’re gonna do the, the eight weeks or however, whichever program we pick now, now give me a concrete example of building the, that memory capacity and those [00:31:00] files.

Jon: Two quick ones, the places you’ve been successful. So whether you’re gonna record those moments in a journal, whether you’re gonna just reflect on them at the end of each day with a trusted advisor or a friend, um, that’s what pubs are for.

You wanna actually know the places you’ve been good and you wanna brag about it in a safe environment. I work with golfers on the PGA tour and folks trying to get there, and I want them after a round to call me to brag about their good shots. If you can do that, you then build the deeper memory of your success in psychology.

It’s called savoring. The second place you want to build is around your processes. So if you know you’ve gotten better by going through a particular way of either performance improvement, percentage improvement, six sigma, whatever it is that you do, you’ve gotta do that consistently and again, hear that magic timeframe.

Of 27 minutes for mindfulness over eight weeks, 25 hours, uh, a week over six weeks to change every part of your Bain brain except for creativity. By the way, that didn’t get [00:32:00] better in the uc Santa Barbara study. You, you wanna make sure that those processes over a period of months stay consistent because then you’re gonna be able to have them go to.

 Maureen: So, so I’m just to clarify, when you say those processes stay consistent. So for the eight weeks, it’s important that I do this religiously. Is that what you’re saying?

Jon: That’s right. And you find the ones that you can count on. It may become a memory file you can go to in Times of stress, in times of conflict.

In times of trouble.

 Maureen: Okay. So, so I have to do it religiously to build that memory file and then I need to go back to it on a regular basis when I need it and when I don’t need it.

Jon: Practice when you don’t. So you can use it when you do.

 Maureen: So since this is a show largely about leadership, is leadership resilience different?

Jon: It is the same set of practices with the goal being to build better teams. And if you’re a leader, the simple goal is to get people where they need to [00:33:00] go using their resilience to make the organization, to make the team, to make the partnership better. And you have your four buckets about physical and emotional and thinking and relationships.

And for the leader, they have to start with that physical and emotional bucket. Because most eaters are going to be stressed in a way that they’re not prepared for as trouble happens. And so if they haven’t done the, what we call halt issues in the recovery world, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, if they haven’t gotten enough sleep, if they’re not eaten in a way that’s affected for them, cheeseburgers aren’t a problem.

It’s too many cheeseburgers, beer’s not a problem. It’s using it as the coping mechanism rather than those healthy ways to build a brain that is ready to take on the biggest challenges. And when it comes to the the EQ skills, people who don’t actually recognize their emotions, who aren’t able to admit them, that’s when they’re not ready to leave.

 Maureen: Yeah, let me go there for just a second. ’cause I’m thinking of a couple clients, one [00:34:00] completely, well, several completely overworked. Uh, so not just not enough hours in the day to do what they’ve committed to do. And, and in some of their cases, that’s not gonna change, by the way. So my sense is we do the best we can with what we have.

And that means much more focus on things like building mindfulness because I have to be uber aware when I’m exhausted and, and potentially not healthy about how that stress is impacting me and the people on my team.

Jon: The awareness is a leader is essential in its first the habit building begins with mindfulness, and the reality is if a person is so overscheduled consistently, they have to look.

At the ways in which they can over time truly do what I call life that day. So if your kids are important to you and you’re working 16 hours a day, you have to make changes. It’s not that you aren’t gonna have that classic values moment where your [00:35:00] child has an event and you have to go close a deal across the country, and you have to make the choices.

Thank God for FaceTime and other video conferencing on phone models these days because mm-hmm they could actually potentially be in two places at once. But the twist is that the person who’s overworked has to really look at the places where their patterns are. In fact, keeping them on the short loop.

Those partners who are gonna help them get a new schedule, because if they don’t, that’s when they’re gonna react to meetings and beat people up. That’s when they’re, in fact, not gonna be the resilient leader who people wanna work with.

 Maureen: And I, I do see that, and it seems. Insurmountable when that’s the commitment.

You’ve, the, the job you’ve taken. And, and so part of the question is I, is, I’m not saying that people should continue to work crazy hours, but some people are going to continue to work crazy hours and I have often been one of them. So maybe I’m looking for a solution other than taking on too much. [00:36:00] But how do I use resilience?

Even if one of the ca, one of the quadrants in my model is gonna be off balance for a while, so let’s say I’ve just taken on a big project. I know it’s gonna be difficult. I’m gonna be traveling to India a few times. I know that’s gonna mess up my sleep cycle. What do I do to in the other areas to stay as healthy as possible to offset what I know will be an imbalance?

Jon: The first thing you have to do is physical exercise, and it’s not a choice, okay? So studies have found that if you will exercise for just 10 minutes, and by the way, exercise for everybody is whatever gets your heart rate up. And so for some person who’s a couch potato, just walking is enough. For most of us, it means we can get on the bike, we need to swim, we need to do a soft jog, and it is 10 minutes to cut stress because when you’re in that level of working 16, 18 hours a week.

Uh, sorry. Would that be nice? 18 hours a day? Your, your, your brain thinks that [00:37:00] you’re being chased by a bear. Okay? So you run to at least level, set your stress level with what the body is perceiving. And when those things are equal, then you can do 10 minutes more. If you can get to 20 minutes, that’s when you start to have clearer thinking.

So when I work with clients and they’re just completely a mess and no thinking can change them, and no relationship can make things better, and their EQ skills are gone, we immediately go instead of antidepressants, you just gotta get regular exercise every single day. Now people say, I can’t do that. I’m on the plane.

Walk back and forth on the plane. Find the ways you got that airport time, right? Mm-hmm. You know, you can walk sleep for 10 minutes without getting, uh, too hot. That movement is absolutely essential. You can do squats in the bathroom of the plane. It sounds crazy, right? But it’s that that exercise is the first and most important thing.

The next thing you’ve gotta do is find the places where you are going to pause. So whether that’s [00:38:00] doing mindfulness exercises, whether that’s doing entertainment that you love, Netflix, your favorite book, spending time with a friend, you’ve gotta have that time where you’re letting your brain rest because cognitive fatigue.

Happens for most of us in 30 to 90 minutes. The folks in the military and the turrets of tanks in the hot seat of the Humvee, they don’t stay there for more than 30 to 90 minutes depending on how much smartphone usage they’ve had. Then their attention spans are shorter because again, they, their brains literally don’t work anymore.

And the, if you get those breaks, it allows you in the midst of incredibly intense times to be able to come back and keep working. Another version of the breaks, though is every hour they’ve found in the University of Illinois study that if you take two short breaks per hour, it actually makes you more effective as a performer if you don’t take the breaks.

After 30 or 40 minutes, your results decline precipitously,

 Maureen: so is a short break. Going to get a [00:39:00] cup of coffee and then using the restroom.

Jon: It can even be shorter than that. You just need to look at something else. So one of the things that we do for folks who have road rage is we ask them to put a picture of, uh, a family member they love, or of their family or of a place that they love, um, in the visor of their car.

And as they’re having that rage, they pull over to the side of the car of the road and they actually look at that picture. Mm-hmm. If you just from study, look at something different. Now not being interrupted because we found in other studies that 23.5 minutes is how long it takes to get back from an interruption.

You just literally pause and look at something else for just a few seconds. Twice per hour changes everything. But again, if we sit for too long, then obviously our body is gonna think we’re stuck, which is gonna start to cause more stress. ’cause no one likes to feel that way.

 Maureen: So that is the get up, get a cup of coffee or whatever you, you get when you get up.

Um, I probably water would be better. Um, [00:40:00] and so

Jon: everybody’s got different tolerances for what makes their bodies work. I can’t do coffee on a regular basis, but for those who can, it’s a lifeline and it just, it’s, it’s really, let’s put this as a third bullet here. In addition to physical exercises and taking those breaks, you’ve gotta know what rewards.

Are meaningful for you. So if coffee is a reward that you love, absolutely beautiful. They found in other studies that literally you can get three to 5% better results in your running or your biking just by swishing sugar water. Just, just literally having that in your mouth. The su, the sense of sugar will in fact excite your brain.

We know that. We know that at the gym when you see someone attractive, you run faster. Like this is a real thing. We are still animals out on the Sahara, and you have the ability to figure out if a little chocolate, if that beer, at the end of the day, if that downtime with the family is the reward. When you’ve got that to look forward to, you can get through those 16 hour days.

 Maureen: You know what, there’s another study, and I can’t cite who, who [00:41:00] did it, that looked at weightlifting and meditation. So meditation in conjunction with physical exercise and, and they found that doing both made both better. So there were companion exercises maybe that there weightlifting got better because they were meditators and because they were weightlifting, their meditations got better.

So it sounds like you’re saying do the mindfulness practice, physical exercise. Uh, make sure that you stay in motion and, and, uh, not stuck. What

Jon: else? No, and, and those rewards, right? And, and, and again, when you’re doing these things in Symphony, they end up creating more powerful neural pathways because if you’re doing the physical exercise and you’re tired.

And, and you stop thinking, you then end up back, back on the short loop. The reason the meditation is so powerful is that the stressed out body then realizes that it has the power to relax. Those muscles are gonna then relax and recover quicker. And so what we’re trying to do, [00:42:00] fourthly, to be more resilient as leaders, is we’ve gotta know who we can count on.

You can’t do it by yourself. And that’s for you that fourth bucket of trusted relationships. And if people don’t know who their best advisor is outside of the work environment, how are they supposed to get good advice to then take back to their leadership situations? If you don’t have trusted teammates who you know you can go to with your unsorted thoughts or the biggest problem you’re facing, it doesn’t matter how much resilience homework you do on your own brain, it always stays inside yourself.

And I guess a final bullet I’d ask at at the leadership resilience is. People have to be working on their communication skills all the time. And what that means is getting better at presentations, being able to lead meetings more effectively, paying attention to the way your communication tendencies or style impact other people.

’cause take a conflict moment. If I haven’t practiced getting out of conflict, how am I ever gonna be able to remain focused during those negative emotional body [00:43:00] experiences? And so if people do these five things. You’re gonna go back to work and people are gonna love being around you. And the best part about resilience habits is they become intuitive.

You’ve always unconsciously been effective as a leader, but when you start to do it consciously, people see your shoulders relax, your tone, be more warm and comforting, and most importantly, your ideas become more impactful.

 Maureen: So I, which sounds brilliant. I wanna add to one of the, the pieces you’re talking about, and then I wanna ask you to, to restate them.

This idea of emotional intelligence. We talk about building relationships and it’s, and communication and building them when you don’t need them. Talk a little bit about the emotionally intelligent relationship and why being. And, and I am not talking about oversharing at work by any stretch, but being emotionally present, how does that impact others [00:44:00] physiologically?

Jon: Well, so the two skills that matter to be really emotionally intelligent at work are. To be a mindful listener, so to really hear what the other person is saying and their meaning. And then secondly, being able to paraphrase or ask good questions that dig deeper with people. If we would just as leaders use those simple skills a little more often, people would be doing their best homework with us, and as a result, the relationship stronger because they know that you as a leader, are a safe space in terms of the physiology of emotion.

Remember the pattern. You have a negative emotion like discussed. It causes the thought. I don’t like this situation, which then becomes a repeated feeling in the body. I don’t wanna go to work. I don’t wanna work with this person. And so when we practice attentive communication, particularly in conflict, what is it allows us to do is create a different set of memory files that people have around us.

And remember triggers like you will get triggered by so many different things at work that bring up past [00:45:00] experiences that were difficult for you. The leader who is resilient is tied to the best stories that are emotionally grounded with thoughts that make you feel good, and then those deep feeling memories of wanting to work together.

So you either get on that negative short loop feeling cycle. We make people think better

 Maureen: so. Positive stories. Positive feelings, and, and I’m trying to point to a specific thing, so I understand that I have to ask questions and, and then very actively listen. Do I also need to self disclose?

Jon: No. No. You need to be able to tell stories about struggled and learned.

Um, but your deep emotional feelings are things, in my opinion, that need to be processed in the safe spaces that could be with mentors at work. Um, but right now people are triggered so easily by the changes that are happening in society, the advent of insanely fast [00:46:00] technology and the political environment globally.

And as a result, if you get into deeper emotional stuff at work. It’s not gonna be active in the long term. That doesn’t mean you don’t say, Hey, I, I’ve given bad talks before and learned from them, or I’ve gotten into conflict situations that are painful and use those to get better. But it means if you’ve got really raw emotional work to do, um, you gotta do that training offline.

 Maureen: Oh yeah. Got it. I was just thinking that, that sharing, like, I’ve had a tough time too, so it’s not me on a pedestal above you.

Jon: Oh my goodness. You absolutely have to be vulnerable. Okay. Um, it’s such a powerful, resilient moment to show the places where you have learned the twist is you actually. To have learned.

You have to have done. Yeah.

 Maureen: Yeah. So on that, thank you. And thank you for the intensity of that reaction. ’cause I, I think that’s an important thing for our listeners to hear. I need us to wrap up. So, John, first of all, thank you. Can you in 30 seconds, re-list those five elements for [00:47:00] leaders and then give our listeners your contact information.

Jon: You gotta do the physical exercise, 10 to 20 minutes. You’ve gotta be the kind of person who is practicing your, your mindfulness First, you’ve gotta be the kind of person who has rewards. And as you’re doing that reward work, you wanna make sure that you’re the kind of person who is constantly practicing your communication skills.

Um, you do that with people and you’re gonna build trust in a way that they didn’t ever know they could. So you can reach me, um, by going to wartman at thought leaders, LLC. Dot com and I would really like to, uh, get in contact with folks who want to talk more with you and me about how resilience can be part of their regular homework at work and in their lives.

 Maureen: Thank you so much, John.