(Rerun) Resilience & Self-Leadership: Mastering Emotional Intelligence in Uncertain Times.

"Emotions are these chemical messengers that communicate from our physiology to our psychology... I think all emotions are important for us. And I think all emotions have positive intent." (11:40)

In this episode, we unpack the essentials of resilience, self-leadership, and emotional intelligence. Discover actionable strategies to navigate uncertainty, foster self-compassion, and maintain your calm in challenging conversations, both personally and professionally.

How can you leverage your emotions and inner dialogue to build unwavering resilience, even when chaos strikes?

Key Takeaway Insights and Tools

• The Three Pillars of Thriving: Resilience, self-leadership, and emotional intelligence are crucial for navigating both personal and professional challenges. (00:44)
• The Sparring Partner Approach: Jason describes his role as a "sparring partner," helping clients articulate intangible thoughts and emotions, making them concrete and manageable. This process fosters agency and autonomy by shifting perception. (04:58)
• Self-Leadership Defined: It's about self-awareness of your thoughts and emotions, understanding the narrative you assign to situations, and the ability to reframe or reappraise them to change your emotional and behavioral response. (07:07)
• Language and Operational Definitions: Using common words like "challenge" or "stress" can be misleading. Deeply exploring and operationally defining these terms helps to understand their specific meaning to an individual, leading to clearer insights. (09:56)
• Emotions as Chemical Messengers: Emotions are not inherently positive or negative but are vital chemical messengers from your physiology to your psychology. Understanding their positive intent and what they are communicating is key to self-leadership. (11:25)
• Navigating Uncertainty with Self-Compassion and Efficacy: When facing difficult situations (e.g., redundancies), focus on what you can control, what is certain, and what actions/efforts you can take. Combine this with self-compassion (treating yourself with kindness) and self-efficacy (belief in your ability to succeed) to build resilience. (14:56)
• Integration Over Balance: Instead of striving for an unattainable "balance" between ambition and self-compassion, aim for integration and trade-offs. Allow time for self-compassion and reflection (e.g., an "after-action report") after setbacks to learn and improve, then re-engage with ambition. (18:37)
• Equanimity: This is the ability to remain calm and collected in uncertain, chaotic situations—the "eye of the storm." It's a learned skill, honed through self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-efficacy, enabling reflective action over impulsive reactions. (23:37)

"Experience... is the best teacher. But if we don't take time to reflect and do to understand our situational awareness or how we reacted to something, then we can never learn." (26:49)

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues to help spread the word! We also welcome your feedback on topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes—whether it's more solo deep dives, specific guests, or other areas of resilience, well-being, psychology, or leadership.

Chapters

• 0:08 Introduction to Resilience
• 1:32 Interview with Victoria Reynolds
• 6:50 The Role of a Sparring Partner
• 8:46 Understanding Self-Leadership
• 14:55 Emotions and Positive Intent
• 18:25 Balancing Ambition and Self-Compassion
• 23:39 The Importance of Equanimity
• 29:49 Practical Tips for Maintaining Equanimity
• 34:50 Navigating Heated Conversations
• 39:14 The Head, Heart, Hand Concept
• 41:10 Evolution of Leadership
• 48:43 Closing Remarks and Resources

Transcript

0:00

Music. Back to It's an Inside Job podcast. I'm your host, Jason Lim. Now, this podcast is dedicated to helping you to help yourself and others to become more mentally and emotionally resilient so you can be better at bouncing back from life's inevitable setbacks. Now, on It's an Inside Job, we decode the science and stories of resilience into practical advice, skills, and strategies that you can use to impact your life and those around you. Now, with that said, let's slip into the stream. Music. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Jason Lim. Today, I have a special episode for you. Today, I'm sharing an interview I did with Victoria Reynolds on her brilliant podcast, Cultural Communication Confidence. Now, in this conversation, we dive deep into resilience, self-leadership, and emotional intelligence. These are the three pillars that are essential for thriving both personally and professionally. I also want this episode to be a vehicle to introduce you all to Victoria's fantastic podcast. Now, it focuses on practical communication skills, communication strategies, and cultural intelligence. So if you're looking to boost your communication skills and to navigate the complexities that are the working environments, the international environments that some of us find ourselves in, well, then her podcast is a must listen. So folks i will leave all that contact information to her podcast in the show notes but for now let me introduce to victoria reynolds fantastic interview skills and some insights from myself from that episode so with that said folks let's slip into the stream into this week's. Music. Lim is a seasoned expert in resilience, leadership, and personal development, bringing over 20 years of experience to individuals and teams across various sectors. As the founder of MindTalk, Jason develops and facilitates programs focused on brain-based leadership and resilient skills, helping people improve how they manage themselves and others in complex situations. Jason joined me from Norway to share his rich insights and wisdom on developing resilience in uncertain times, including the key elements of self-leadership, why we need to prioritize self-compassion, and how to keep calm and grounded in challenging conversations. I absolutely loved my discussion with Jason, and I think you will too. Enjoy this episode. This is Cultural Communication Confidence, the podcast for global professionals who want to speak up confidently and clearly, build trust and collaboration in global teams and speak like a leader. I'm Victoria Rennoldson and I'll be sharing with you practical communication skills and confidence strategies plus cultural intelligence insights. Let's expand your confidence and visibility, increase your impact and influence so you can step up on your global career journey. Hello, everybody, and a very warm welcome to Cultural Communication Confidence with me, Victoria Rennoldson. And I'm really excited to have another guest on the show today. We have Jason Lim with us, joining us all the way from Norway. Hello, Jason, how are you? Hi, Victoria. Everything is well on my end. We have a glorious blue sky here and it's warm, so I can't complain, considering the fluctuation that Norway's weather can be. That sounds amazing. And I'm sitting in very grey UK London today. And it was pouring with rain yesterday. So, I'm feeling quite jealous of you right now. But I am super excited to have you on the show because we met a couple of months ago. I think we connected via LinkedIn. And I was really intrigued by some of the topics you were talking about on your podcast show. And I was really keen to get you on the show here today to talk about some of your areas around leadership and resilience. But to start off with, I know that you talk about yourself as being a sparring partner as in what you do and I'm really curious by this description because it's something I've not heard before. So what do you mean by being a sparring partner and what does that really entail? So I guess a sparring partner, a lot of people hire me, I guess another term could be coach, but I think that's sort of a very watered down term and it can mean many different things. But a sparring partner for me was a little more sort of, it was a little more nuanced. And so what I do is I help a lot of people with self-leadership or managing themselves. Now they may not be a leader per se, but maybe they need to lead themselves through a situation, through a circumstance. And so through being a sparring partner, what I am able to do is help people to articulate their thoughts and their emotions. Because thoughts and emotions can, if trapped in the head, they tend to be, they can morph and they can change. They can be very intangible and abstract. But once you're able to articulate your thoughts and emotions to someone else, me being a sparring partner in this case, what happens is it becomes concrete, it becomes tangible. And a lot of the times what I find is, although people are explaining their thoughts and emotions to me, a lot of the times, it may be the first time they've heard their thoughts and emotions out loud. And from there, what happens is, you know, people may not be able to control or influence a certain situation, right? And the brain can tend to focus on uncertainty and all the things they can't do. But what happens is when you're able to spar and kick around ideas with someone, what happens is that although you cannot change the situation, you can change your perception of the situation. So moving from uncertainty to certainty, where you feel a sense of agency, autonomy, and that's why I call it a sparring partner, because I don't do a lot of talking. I just do a lot of questioning and listening and getting them to sort of explore. But that, in essence, is why I call myself a sparring partner. And I love that idea of, you mentioned right at the beginning, the self-leadership. And obviously, there's a lot of focus on leadership skills, about being able to, people who are listening to the show who are wanting to develop their career. But what does self-leadership look like to you? I think self-leadership for me, at least, and again, this is my definition, there's broader definitions for it, but my personal definition is someone who's able to be self-aware, self-aware of their thoughts and emotions. Because the way I look at it is that we move from sort of, if we can hold the human operating system, right? We move from head to heart to hand, mainly meaning we have thinking. And then thinking leads to emotions and emotions can lead to what we do, how we behave, how we perceive the world. And I think self-leadership is about understanding the narrative that we assign to a situation. The brain is a storytelling machine. And what happens is most of the times we're not aware of the story we're assigning or our brains are assigned to a situation or our place in a certain circumstance or event. Now, that's okay for most of our lives are just sort of mundane, routine and such. But I think when it comes to stressful or duress, negative stress events, I think this is when self-leadership kicks in. Because I think self-awareness is the ability to step back from head to heart to hand to actually see what is the narrative. And if someone is able to redefine, to restructure, reappraise or reframe how they see the situation, well, that changes the emotion, which changes the doing or the behavior or the perception of the situation. So for me, self-leadership is about trying to be present with the narrative, with the meaning I am ascribing to something. And that reframe must be quite challenging at times. So is that sort of part of your role to help them reframe what's going on or just helping them see different perspectives of that narrative, of that story maybe that they're telling themselves? Yeah, definitely, definitely. Definitely. So, you know, a story could be just two or three sentences on repeat or maybe a question we're asking ourself. Now, depending, you know, the brain is an evaluating machine. It's constantly asking itself questions. And I could ask you a rhetorical question right now and you couldn't prevent your brain from not answering it. Right. And so by asking good questions, I mean, well-engineered questions that help people to explore the depth of their thinking, Because we tend to use language, and language reflects how we feel, how we think. But when you explore and ask someone to articulate the depth of what they mean, and I usually ask people to operationally define. So, for example, something very basic in the day, I see this as a challenge. Okay, how do you operationally define a challenge? And then all of a sudden, we get into the nuts and bolts of what they're doing. And a lot of the times, they may not have explored it themselves. Is what I find, you know, my background's in clinical psychology and the cognitive sciences. So I apply a lot of those skills to my sort of being a sparring partner, per se. So I was educated and trained to ask particular types of questions that triggered different parts of the brain and such to explore. Lore and I think by people by people looking into that I think that that empowers them in a sense hopefully that answered your question or maybe in a roundabout way no absolutely and I think it's really you know interesting particularly because of my interest area in communication that you're talking about the language people are using and that for them actually they may not even be aware of what they're using kind of common words like challenge or stress but what does that actually mean to them specifically? And I think that's quite a, that for me is an intriguing idea actually, because we tend to use the same words, right? But, and we think we know what we're talking about and we've got the same understanding of those words, but what a challenge looks like to me might look really different to you or to somebody you're working with or I'm working with. So I find that really, really fascinating. Well, to riff on that, you know, we have emotions, right? I mean, there's, we have this spectrum, at least in English, we have this spectrum of, words that we can use to describe emotions. But the thing is, with emotions, a lot of us fall into sort of the thought process that there are negative emotions and positive emotions. I've been taught, and you know, a long time ago, that emotions are these chemical messengers that communicate from our physiology to our psychology. You know, psychology, we have language, we have grammar and syntax and such. But the physiology, well, language is in the sense of these chemical messengers. You know, they're a different recipe of hormones and modulators and transmitters. But that, so feelings themselves, they can be, if you want to put them on a spectrum from very comfortable, from very uncomfortable. But I think all emotions are important for us. And I think all emotions have positive intent, but it in itself is a language. And if we can pick up those chemical messengers, if we can understand, if we can articulate what those emotions are telling us, then we are much better at self-leadership. And so being part of a sparring partner, coming back to the trailhead of this conversation, I think it's getting people to articulate their emotions or to refine their emotions. Because a lot of people may talk about, I'm angry, right? Or I'm sad. But these are sort of tend to be secondary emotions. There are more primary emotions if you dig a little deeper. So by getting someone to operationally define an emotion, what happens is using their vernacular, using their terminology, what happens is that starts empowering them. Now, I think sometimes we'll feel a certain emotion, but that emotion always has positive intent. I mean, the brain doesn't do anything to hurt us. It's always out there to protect us, whether we call it anxiety, depression, exhilaration, adventure, whatever. But I think sometimes the way the brain goes about it or the chemical messenger, what we call emotions, goes about it, positive intent, but the way it's communicating may be counterproductive. So I think it's very important being a sparring partner when you're having someone talk about leading themselves or managing situations. I think, Victoria, it's about getting them to articulate again, to operationally define their thinking and their feelings. Because when we do that then we can start seeing is it is it faulty thinking because sometimes our brain our physiology our nervous system does lie to us right it creates these nightmare situations right and i think that is why it's so important to sometimes take the abstract thoughts and emotions again and to find tangible words to give them tangibility yeah and i think one of the the most interesting things that I picked up on from what you just said was about actually our emotions are not good or bad positive or negative there's always some sort of positive intent behind it and if I make it sort of very I say it's practical now that I think about some situations my clients or my listeners might be experiencing I know that there is a lot of uncertainty in the world at this moment of recording so there are lots of situations I'm hearing about around restructures, redundancies, potential fear of it coming up as well, like a sense of in the world today, this is happening. And that comes with it, stress and that anticipation, negative anticipation. So I'm quite curious, you know, in these kinds of times, in these kinds of situations, how can we best use this idea of emotions have positive intent to help us move forward rather than to get stuck. I think what's very important is to, you know, we've talked about self-awareness. Self-awareness is, I think, an essentials tool. It is the keystone. But on top of that, I think we also need to understand about self-compassion. Now, self-compassion is understanding that, you know, we tend to, as human beings, we tend to use self-flagellation more than self-compassion. We turn compassion onto everyone else, but when it comes to ourselves, we give ourselves a boot in the head when we're already down. And I think when we're facing redundancy, if we're facing layoffs or whatever it may be, cutbacks, that's the reality of the situation. And, you know, it's not to wish it away, right? This is the reality of the situation. But make sure, and I think this is like a lot of what I've been working with with clients is just that. What is the reality of situations? What are the facts? So all of a sudden when we start describing and giving vibrancy to the situation they're facing and finding the adjectives, finding the nouns, finding whatever language is to describe it, but it's factual base. Because if someone's telling me their assumption, of course, you're allowed to have your assumption. But assumptions are just assumptions. There's no validity to some unless they're based in facts, of course. Right and so when you shift the conversation to I think three things if you can shift the conversation to certainty what are they certain about what are the facts what is they control because when we are in a situation where there is duress we tend to focus on all the things that we don't have control all the things that we have uncertainty about but if you focus on the things that they can control and influence. There's another one. And I think the other one is to also invest in action and effort, because if someone can do something about their situation, there is some level of sense of control. Now, it is it is not a panacea that will fix everything. But, you know, to find resilience, to find a sense of equanimity in the turmoil and turbulence of whatever situation we might find ourselves in and everyone finds themselves into it. I think that is so important is showing self-compassion and I think self-efficacy is just the other point if we can launch self self-awareness uh compassion efficacy into the situation we're facing again it's not a panacea but it will give us a level of confidence to move through the situation because sometimes we can we can constantly avoid the storm but the storm just gets, it just rages and rages and becomes even more, more tumultuous. But I think if someone's able to move through the storm and come through the other end, they may come out bruised and battered, but they come out on the other end, learning something about themselves. And I'm not saying it's always going to be an easy walk. That is brilliant. I mean, gosh, there's so much in there I want to ask you about. And I think like the first bit I want to ask about is the self love compassion bit, because look, I know this is the tough bit, right? You know, I know this myself, like to be, it's easy to be compassionate to others, to, to offer that to others, but to yourself, it's tough sometimes when you, particularly if you're, you know, ambitious, you're talented, you know, I think about some of the people who listen to the show and how they're quite driven towards their career goals and what they want to achieve in their careers. Maybe if they're running a business possibly as well. And so how do you balance that, that drive, that absolute ambition with the self-compassion? Because sometimes I think people see that as two opposites, right? I think, first of all, I think balance is a dangerous word because balance in a tumultuous world is not, again, this is just my opinion. I don't think it's viable over the long term. You can try it. I think it has more to do with integration and trade-offs. You know, sometimes let's say you have to give a presentation in front of your team or in front of the board or from an executive team and it didn't go so well. You know, you can be hard on yourself that day. Fine. That's allowed. But the next day, I think self-compassion in this sense It's like, okay, what do I learn from this? What is this? How can I improve my game? Yeah, and they may be hard things that you need to deal with. And that feedback to yourself or feedback from others may be a hard pill to swallow. But this is how we build resilience. This is how we deal with equanimity. And I think at the same time, if we can have self-compassion and just put ambition on hold, just as a tradeoff for that moment, for that day, so I can pick apart the experience I had, what actually went well. I can do an after action report, right? I can actually look at what went well. Okay. How can I repeat that? What didn't go well? How can I improve that or eliminate something? What do I need to do more of a less of, you know, these are sort of six basic questions we can ask ourselves and sort of, uh, when we're trying to do have more situational awareness, I guess is the word I'm looking for. And then once we do that, then we can go back to the ambition. So I think it's and integration. We need to understand that sometimes I have to put ambition because if we're driven by an ambition mindset all the time, that means at least from my experience, again, I just want to qualify from my experience, people move towards self-flagellation. They don't learn. They just rip into themselves. Again, a boot to the head when they're already down. And it's okay to feel bad for a day, a couple of days. But if you want to build a more resilient mindset, if you want to be better at leading yourself, then I think it's putting on the brakes on the ambition just for, you know, whatever, 24 hours and figure out the DNA of that situation, what went well and what didn't go well and, you know, really take it apart. And yeah, as I said, it may be a hard lesson. And sometimes as a sparring partner, back to the original question, you know, being a sparring partner, I kind of call myself sort of the third road. I'm not a colleague. I'm not a friend. I'm not family. I'm a person where you have kind of a unique relationship with where I will challenge you. I will always catch, get your six. I cover your back, support you, but I'm not going to paint a rosy picture. And I think that's where the self-compassion is, right? Because then I'll sometimes ask, do you think you're turning off the compassion right now to yourself? I think that's brilliant. And I think there's something I sometimes say to people as well, which is occasionally you need to slow down to speed up again. Like you need to be able to take that pause to work out what's going on so you can kind of head off again. And I think what is really interesting around this is that you talk, the self-awareness piece is important. And you gave that great example of, let's say, a really important customer presentation or internal presentation to the board or to the senior leadership team. and it didn't go well. Interestingly, I noticed that people are often not self-compassionate in that moment and struggle sometimes even get that awareness to work out what did I do well and what didn't I do well. It's almost quite hard to see it when you've been doing it. And in fact, sometimes it requires an external person, a colleague, somebody who was in the room, somebody like you or me to give them that actual real picture of what's happening I think for me it's particularly true with communication what I notice is people find it hard to get the sort of like true picture of what's going on and they hear themselves in their heads you know quite a different way from how others are hearing them does that make sense it makes complete sense but just to I think when you're getting feedback, it's not just feedback from anyone. I think it has to be someone you truly trust and respect because there are nefarious people out there who, you know, who will act in passive aggressive ways to undermine you, to gaslight you, what have you. But I think what's very important is to get that feedback because sometimes you, you. You don't have the capacity. I think we can have blinders on when it comes to ourselves. And I think that's why it's very important to sometimes have a sparring partner, a coach, a trusted and respected colleague to give us to act as a mirror, right, to bounce ideas off of. So I completely concur with what you're saying. and you also mentioned earlier on about equanimity and i would just love for you to just define that a bit more perhaps talk a bit more about what that means and looks like and what you think is important about it for you well equanimity is being is trying to be it's not trying to be it is being uh collected it's being calm in uncertain situations right when the chaos hits it's to find the calm and the centeredness, kind of the eye of the storm, if we may use that, maybe it's overused, but that's kind of what it is. You need a picture in your head. But equanimity is not something that we're born with per se. I think equanimity is something that we have to hone, that we have to sharpen, that we have to learn over time. And that's why I think having a learning mindset, having self-compassion allows us to learn because we can be in very tough situations. It may be it may be professional, it may be health, it may be financial, whatever. And there it is. Life has thrown this at you. It's not like the gods have lined up the planets to strike you, right? To just pick you out amongst a billion of us. No, life happens and chaos sometimes reigns. The question is, equanimity is moving into that. Not that you have to like it or look forward to it. No, you can wish it away all you want, but you still find the mindset to move through it, to get the bad news, to move through the hard conversation, the tough times. But it's finding to be calm and collected so you can reflectively act on things and it's not all reflexive and just reacting to situations because i think that is what many of us do and myself i mean i talk about this every day and i sometimes find myself in a reactive mindset but i think what we want to do equanimity is the ability to learn from ourselves through self-awareness and self-compassion and applying self-efficacy to move towards being able to reflect in the chaos in a very simplistic term of course is very nuanced yeah and I'm really curious because for me I know this is a challenge for me I know most this morning I really struggled with my son to maintain my equanimity we had an argument about something and and it happens and that's obviously a family situation but it happens at work you know people I know I talk to I work with they struggle with not reacting to situations particularly with the speed of work the speed of meetings that are going on so what are some practical tips like how can we on a daily basis maintain some elements of equanimity understanding that that's not a state that we can be in perhaps perhaps permanently? No, no, no, there's no way. I mean, so one thing is, is if you catch yourself blowing up on someone or having some sort of. Let's say not the most professional reaction to a situation, well, then that's when you need to move to learning mode afterwards and kind of take, like when you're more calm and collected, right? I'm not talking maybe right afterwards, but it is to reflect and to take notes and to look at yourself and think, okay, how could I have better done this? Because experience, I think, is the best teacher. There is no better teacher than experience. But if we don't take time to reflect and do to understand our situational awareness or how we reacted to something, then we can never learn. We're constantly in a state of flux. I think this is very important. I think also if you have the luxury of knowing you're going into a difficult conversation or a challenging situation, then the question is maybe it's to, you know, I talk about writing a lot or people call it journeying. I call it expressive writing or expressive journaling, whatever you want to call it. It's sometimes to write down, you know, what you're thinking, like address the emotions you're going into, right? Because if you address the emotions, the emotions die down. It's when we ignore emotions, they become, they go away for a sec, but they come back much more intense. Like anxiety. If I'm constantly worried about a dog biting me and I avoid dogs all the time, well, that phobia, if it blows into a full blown phobia, it becomes even stronger and stronger and stronger. And we create these irrational fears, these mindsets that hold us back. So I think back to your question, if we have the luxury of knowing that we're going into a difficult situation, well, maybe take a moment and write down what are the thoughts going through your head? Negative, positive, neutral, what have you? See them, give them life on a piece of paper or on your screen. If it's an emotion, ask yourself, what's the emotion I'm feeling? What is it trying to communicate? What is it based on? I think, again, going from head to heart to hand, before head is self-awareness, right? And that awareness allows us to understand the script of the narrative we're telling us and the emotion. To give you an example, and this may be an overused example, and your listeners have probably heard this ad nauseum, but the difference between anxiety and excitement, well, there is no difference. If we look at it physiologically, they have the identical markers. workers. What changes between anxiety and excitement is the meaning I ascribe to the situation. So a roller coaster, you know, I used to love roller coasters when I was younger. Now I hate them. But there, you know, I was excited. But now if one of my sons or daughters want to go on a roller coaster, I'm not really game for it. I feel a little more anxious now. But again, it's what do I assign to it, right? And this could be in the corporate setting too, right? So those are type of things to help you deal with things. I think, again, if you can find a sparring partner, which may be a colleague, a trusted and respected colleague, again, I just want to qualify that. And maybe talk to him or her about what you're feeling, what you're going through before you go into the event. That will give you a sense of control, a sense of certainty, and it will lead you to have more self-efficacy. You'll focus on things, actions and efforts you can take. I love that. And I myself particularly enjoy journaling, expressive writing and exploring and really thinking about what's coming up and how I am, my truest intention going into my day. And I'm really kind of also interested. Let's imagine a situation where actually a surprising conversation has come up, something challenging has come up in the meeting. And you somebody feels that sense of equanimity going away like draining away is there anything in the moment that you can do from a brain point of view to bring yourself back in like to kind of just try and get back into that mode so that you're not reacting so that you are able to perhaps pause and respond more to the situation yeah I guess there's a number of things like especially if you're in sort of a negotiation or it's a tough conversation and you feel yourself slipping. Derailing i think it's okay to ask for a bio break you know to step out just for a second say look i need to what have you and who's gonna deny you right if someone does the night double check so a bi-break like a comfort break like going to the bathroom basically yeah go in the bathroom or something or getting a cup of water or so what have you right because once you extract yourself from the situation that neural pattern that's firing in your head it melts away because obviously there's new environmental stimuli right and it gives your sense of pause to collect yourself and we all need to do this right we can't all be black belts and equanimity all the time as you said right and sometimes we need to extract ourselves from the situation and let our nervous system calm down. Sometimes, there's different ways, but sometimes by just gently rubbing your lips. Um, it sounds a little weird, but if you, we do this all the time. So someone will say something and we'll kind of rubbing our lips, trying to contemplate and ponder what they're saying, because we find it interesting, but it's a natural thing that we do. And so what I suggest, because the lips are part of your metabolism, it's their, their exposed nerve endings. And so without getting too into it, we have part of our autonomic nervous system, as you may know, is the sympathetic and the parasympathetic or the sympathetic sort of the fight flight light and the parasympathetic is the rest digest what we want if we're losing our equanimity as you said is it's melting away or it's draining from us by rubbing our lips sometimes what that does it fires off our rest digest part of our sorry parasympathetic system and that kind of can calm us right so that's a very elegant way of just stimulating that nerve system system. Another one is sometimes deep breathing, but that might look a little weird if you start deep breathing right there in the meeting. So there are certain things. If you also know, if you kind of, you know, you're going into, you don't know if it's going to be a difficult conversation, but there's a certain personality that just kind of rubs you wrong way. And you, you know, you're going to be sitting with him or her. What I also suggest is sometimes taking a piece of some sort of paraphernalia, something that is different than what you usually like a a pen or a pad or a um a computer maybe if you have something that's a little different like a coin or a little pebble or something and you just put in front of you what that does that pebble or that that that thing that stands out maybe it's just a blank post-it notes that you put sticking in front of you but what that becomes victoria becomes an anchor saying okay you're starting to derail what does that post-it note mean what does that little pebble mean it means to keep level level get back on the rails take a time and that in itself so sometimes when we're in this situation it can be so emotionally engaging that we are just on reactive mode we're just firing off patterns habitual ways of thinking and feeling right but that one little physical anchor can kind of wake us up out of our stupor and activate self-awareness okay that's what this means to me okay reflect reflect, breathe, ask more questions and listen. So there are a number of ways. Yes. I love that. I love that. And I sort of heard about obviously breathing, but I agree. You don't want to be doing too much deep breathing actually in the meeting. That might sound a bit weird, but I love the one about rubbing the lips. That is really interesting. And in fact, you were demonstrating, if you're watching the video, you know, actually looks very natural because this is kind of what we do when we're thinking. We put our sort of hands or our our fingers near our head or our lips. So that's really, really fascinating. And I also love the idea of creating that anchor, something just to remind you almost to get back in the zone again, I suppose. Is that kind of what it is really with having a coin or a post-it note or something to remind you? Well, it's to step you back from the head, heart, hand kind of thing. It's to make yourself aware. So, you know, you may have a very fractious relationship with a particular colleague and you know it may not end up it may be okay conversation but if you know you're going into something like that then I think it's okay to arm yourself with some things to keep you at some sort of cognitive equilibrium right so you're not constantly getting derailed by this person pushing your buttons excellent and let's imagine in just another situation like it's not a meeting so you're not physically sitting down at a table you can't physically kind of do that but let's say it is in a spontaneous situation where, I don't know, you're having a chat by the water cooler or it's kind of you're standing up and just chatting while you're making coffee, something like that, but then it's suddenly turning heated. There's something that's triggering you. Again, I suppose the lip sync could work there, but I suppose the anchor would be more sort of challenging to do in that situation maybe. I think in that case, what I tend to fall back on is questioning, listening, and silence. You know, silence meaning, you know, when we were training in sort of clinical psychology, you know, most people feel uncomfortable if silence goes on too long, if there's too much dead space. But silence is actually a very powerful tool, right? If someone asks you a very passive aggressive questions to push your button, and you're just silent, and you kind of look at them all of a sudden you'll see you'll you'll see them start to squirm there's a sense of awkwardness in in the interaction and all of a sudden they will jump in to fill the space, another one is to sometimes ask questions right it's not the form of why because why may be taken as you need to justify why you're asking me that ask it in a more diplomatic cordial way like what What is the reason you've asked that? Right? To explore the reason, right? And all of a sudden, the power is back in your court, right? And they have to kind of, they have to try to answer, articulate some sort of reason, right? And I think listening, listening is always something. And it may be, oh, could you repeat that again? What do you specifically mean by that? So I think questioning, listening, and the power of silence are three skills that you can always fall back on. And again, that's so you don't get lost in the emotional entanglement of whatever you're arguing about or debating about. And again, it's not so easy. It takes experience to build these skills again and again and again. And again, even though I talk about this all the time, Victoria, trust me, I'm human. I slip into those. I get derailed too, right? I get emotionally engaged in certain topics. Yeah and i i think that is very powerful because we sometimes forget that silence not saying anything is communicating too right it has a role and i know that's very true for certain actually culturally that can adapt as well like for some cultures silence is a very big indicator of things like disapproval or disagreement or perhaps even not being sure but yes silence questions i love your reframe on questions as well now why can be almost too direct in some situations and we might need to ask more about like what's the reason or how come fantastic i love those very practical ideas and i'm sure our listeners have really taken a lot from that i i just can i just add yeah so what are the reasons asking for an explanation people are much more better at explaining but sometimes it's also understanding how to engineer questions so So there are many ways, but there's one thing we were taught. It's an acronym called TED, or Tell, Explain, Describe. So if you can ask questions in a neutral way, people don't see it as an attack or like you're trying to get at something. So it might be something, you might say something to me, Victoria, say, oh. Could you explain more about that? Could you tell me more about that? Oh, could you describe your thinking or your thought process behind that? Now, again, they're very neutral, but by using TED, tell, explain, describe, what that helps you to get them to articulate, to operationally define what they're meaning, to understand the roots that led to why they asked a certain question or why they came up with a certain opinion or said something, right? And that gives you so much more latitude and altitude to play with. Right to understand what was the engineering behind their opinions or their question so i just wanted to add that because that's a very simple tool to ask neutral based questions it's very diplomatic and very fractious uh conversations brilliant i love that so ted tell explain describe excellent way to to frame questions and the other thing that i i picked up on you talked about the sort of head part hand and i think i know what you mean but i would love for you to again just Could you just describe exactly what you mean by that idea of those three? Yeah, so the head is the thinking. It's the narrative we assign to things, right? To the situations. Heart has to do with the emotions, right? Now, of course, the heart's not. It's an organ that pumps things, but it's just to, it's sort of metaphorical, I guess, where it's about the emotions. It's understanding what is the thinking that's triggering the emotions. Because any emotion we have, from my understanding, is driven by the thinking, the thoughts going through our head, the narrative. And a lot of that time, it's pattern-based, right? For example, I might have some anxious thoughts around something, imposter syndrome or being a perfectionist or whatever it is. These common things we've always talked about, which will lead to those emotions of, someone's going to discover me. I'm I feel incompetent or whatever right these these feelings then that will drive the behavior the hand, right? And so again back to that maybe overused example of between anxiousness and excitement and. There are two different narratives that fire off emotions, but those emotions have identical physiological markers. But depending if someone's feeling anxious or excitement, that will drive a different behavior, the hand. So it goes from thinking to feeling to doing. Got you. Absolutely. And makes a lot of sense. So thank you for explaining that in a bit more detail. Now, I just want to ask a slightly different question, which is about how you see in your kind of the the work that you do, leadership changing right now, because the concept of a leader was something different probably 10 years ago. It probably is something different sort of pre pandemic as well. So I'm really curious about how you see with the people that you support, the people that you are sparring with, like how is leadership changing? I think leadership's changing in the sense that if you see a really good leader as he or she's to find by their team, you'll find someone who is very self-aware, who's someone who's in, again, an overused term is in a growth mindset, who's able to show compassion for themselves, who's able to focus on efficacy, who's able to not always focus on confidence, right, but on focusing on a sense of certainty, control, and actions. Because I think that a good leader is someone who can lead him or herself through situations because then they will have, and that's drawing from a lot of experience and knowledge that they've had to earn the hard way, right? They've been, and it's not a university degree per se, or a college degree. No, it's going through life's hard knocks, right? Through the gauntlet. And if someone is much better able at leading themselves, then they will show much more awareness and compassion and efficacy to those that they are leading. And they spend time to do that. But I think also at the same time, I think. Because of the sense of wokeness, if we can call it that, if we had to put a word on it, I think everybody is so worried about saying certain things that I'll be seen as a sexist or a chauvinist or an ist of some sort. And I think I see a lot of this, the fragility and the brittleness in teams and organizations because we can't have hard conversations a lot of the times. I don't want to say anymore, but I see those teams, those leaders that are able to create a sense of diversity and inclusion and all these words that are very important. But at the same time, they're not constantly worried about every single opinion in the room or people getting overly sensitized, right? I mean, you're allowed to have your opinion, fine, but we don't have to agree with it. I mean, I can believe the earth is flat, which I don't, but I can believe the earth is flat, but I don't have to, all of you have to, you know, to agree with me, to concur with me with this. So I think leadership is two things. I think it's being much more better able to lead ourselves through difficult situations and using compassion and awareness. But at the same time, I think it's a team that creates rules of engagement where we understand that we have team norms and that cultural norms, as important as they are, when we're in the professional corporate environment, we need to stick to the team norms. And we can agree on those things but you know if we're constantly worried about the delicate flower in the room and how he or she's going to react and all the sensitivities then then i i think on on on reality is i see those teams fall apart because there's this underlying animosity that's constantly cooking the background but nobody addresses the elephants in the room okay so it sounds like clearly self-leadership is really key and then this ability to have honest conversations is that how you would frame it okay got it i honestly think we've taken from my experience a step backwards i don't think we've evolved in that i think we've become so much so much more polarized again this is just my opinion and based on my experience so i don't want to talk across the board but i see those teams that can base their culture based on team norms that everyone's agreed with and keep to those, then you can see people can have hard conversations because they understand it's about the problem. They don't always take it personally. And I think a lot more organizations, unfortunately, people are taking things so much more personally and they take every comment as an offense, as an attack. And if we can't address that in all seriousness, then you have a very brittle and fragile team or organization, especially when you consider all the market forces, all the different things that are hitting organizations now, and you add that on top. I don't personally, I don't think that's a good mix. Okay. So the ability to have honest conversations, the ability to have open conversations. And it sounds like that's really about establishing a team way of engaging is what you're saying. Understanding how people should be able to contribute and say what they think. Yeah. That's great. I don't think it's about being brutally honest. I think it's about being diplomatic and cordial, but at the same time being direct, right? It's about being fair and firm. firm and so there has to be a balance it's not about radical candor just radically ripping into someone right i'm just being honest with you no that's well that that just undermines psychological safety in these type of terms that we've talked about yeah for sure well listen i feel like we would need a whole another podcast episode to get deep dive into there but i'm very conscious of of time today and i you know i would love at this point perhaps to wrap up and because i feel like we've covered so many different topics here and I feel very um very honored Jason that you've come on the podcast today and shared so much wealth of knowledge insight so much um thought around leadership and how leaders can be successful today and future leaders can be successful and I know our listeners have greatly benefited from this today I'm really curious like you know if people want to find out more about what you're up to in the world what you're doing I can imagine Imagine the podcast that you do would be a really great place to start. But do you want to just share now some ways that people can find out more about who you are, what you do, and learn more from you? Yeah, I mean, they can always go to mindtalk.no. That's the website where I write articles on these different matters. But I guess the best place is the podcast, you know, It's Inside Job. I release it every Monday, and I have people of your caliber on the show. Where we talk about different areas of resilience, equanimity, and well-being and how that shows up. And there I have my voice. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit. So that's the social media I tend to use more. But I guess those would be the best place people could find me. Brilliant. Well, we'll make sure we put all the links in the show notes. Everybody can see where to go and kind of catch up with you, link with you, connect with you, and of course, listen to the podcast as well, which I highly, highly recommend. I've really enjoyed listening to the episodes. But Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a real pleasure. And I know I've learned myself a lot here today as well. And it's just been such a brilliant conversation. So I very much appreciate your time and generosity with all the insights you shared here today. Yeah, back at you. It was very nice to be invited onto your show. And I hope your listeners learn a little from my ramblings. Absolutely. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much and look forward to seeing you next time on the show. Music. You enjoyed that special episode featuring my conversation with Victoria Reynolds and on her brilliant podcast, cultural communication confidence. It was a true pleasure to dive into the topics of resilience, self-leadership, and of course, emotional intelligence. And I hope you found the insights we shared valuable for your own leadership, for your own self-leadership. Now, if you're interested in learning more about how to strengthen your communication skills, build confidence and develop cultural intelligence for working in global teams. Well, well, I highly, highly recommend checking out Victoria's podcast. Now, it's packed with practical tips and strategies that can make a real difference in how you conduct and how you lead and how you motivate and engage on many different levels, both professionally and in your personal life. And a personal thank you to you, Victoria, for me, for allowing me to take that episode and to put it into my podcast feed. I really appreciate it. Well, folks, thanks for tuning in for another episode of It's an Inside Job. I want you to feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions. And I look forward to sharing more conversations on resilience, well-being, and leadership. And I will see you on Friday for Bite Size Fridays, where we have shorter episodes that highlight some of the old archived episodes and take some key learnings from that. And then I will see you Monday for our normal long-form conversations with another brilliant guest. Well folks, until then. Music.