Ep 57 w Carolyn Hart

[00:00] Carolyn: Well, basically our nervous system is this incredible system that helps us understand how to interact with the world. And one of the elements of the nervous system is that it communicates with people, things around you, and is always evaluating. And so the reason why I say that "the nervous system walks through the door before you do" is just to like stop people and realize, like you can't outthink your nervous system.

You can't control what people are gonna think of you. You can't control what people are gonna feel, like your energy. And so that's why before you even say a word in a room, in a meeting, in a party or whatever, your nervous systems are already communicating with each other. It's under your conscious level of control. 

[01:00] Gerrit: Dear listeners. A warm welcome to a brand-new episode of Second Crack, the Leadership Podcast. If you're new to the show, this is where we explore complex leadership dilemmas and paradoxes, and where we invite you as our listener to self-reflect. I'm Gerrit Pelzer, I work as an executive coach, and I bring to my coaching a combination of Western science and Asian wisdom. Joining me today, as always, is my dear friend and business partner, Martin Aldergard. Martin specializes in driving change and transformation within organizations, and what we both have in common is that we always put people at the center of our work. Hi, Martin. It's great to be recording again with you today.

[01:48] Martin: Hello, Gerrit. Likewise, and today exciting conversation is coming up. What does being resilient as a leader have to do with our nervous system?

[02:01] Gerrit: Yes, and to help us with that, we have a wonderful guest today. Joining us from Ontario in Canada is Carolyn Hart. Carolyn, welcome to the podcast.

[02:16] Carolyn: It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited for our conversation.

[02:20] Gerrit: Thanks for joining, and I am super excited about our conversation today and can't wait to get into it. But for our listeners who might not know you yet, let me briefly introduce you. So Carolyn, you work as a leadership consultant and workplace culture architect. The focus of your work is to help leaders and teams improve performance by thring- strengthening how they show up under pressure.

And when you do this, you don't do this just based on, let's say, theory, but also based on your own leadership experience. So for many years, you have worked as an executive in a large pharmaceutical company. You have also authored two books. One is "Evolve: The Path to Trauma-Informed Leadership". The second book is "Rules of Engagement", and until recently, you also had your own podcast, "Evolve: A New Era of Leadership".

And as if this wasn't enough yet, you are currently also completing a doctorate in organizational leadership at Adler University in Chicago. What have I missed? What else would you like to add?

[03:37] Carolyn: I mean, those are a lot of the accomplishments on paper. I'd say the biggest joy and the biggest accomplishment in my life is raising my two sons. So I have a twenty-one and a twenty-three-year-old, and I think they have taught me more than anything else in the world.

[03:58] Gerrit: that's beautiful. Yes.

[03:59] Carolyn: And I do have a dog, I need to add in. I'm, I'm a recent dog mom, and so, uh, Springer is my little ten-month-old Cockapoo.

[04:08] Gerrit: So challenges in many ways. And, "recently" gives me a- another keyword. So we've been in touch for a few years now, and, I said initially what I have in common with Martin is putting people at the center of our work. What the two of us, Carolyn, you and me have in common, is that we are both interested in how the brain works and how we can apply the knowledge about the brain in leadership and coaching.

And so recently you have founded a new company, Resilient Voices. And when you go to the webpage, we make sure we put a link in our session notes, it says on your homepage, "Your nervous system walks through the door before you do."

[04:54] Carolyn: Mm-hmm

[04:55] Gerrit: And "most of what's, what gets called a leadership problem or a communication problem starts somewhere else." So I was intrigued by these s- two sentences and was wondering if that's a good opening to our conversation. What, what, what does it all mean?

[05:15] Carolyn: Yeah. Oh, there's so many places, um, we could go with that. After I wrote my second book, Evolve, I was really, really curious about why I couldn't lead the way I wanted to. I was a director at a, a, a large pharmaceutical company and exposed to a lot of different scenarios. And when, when I left that career, I left with this sense that I wasn't good enough, that I failed, and now what I've come to learn is my nervous system, my biology, did not have the capacity to hold the stress and pressure that I was within. Now, on the outside, people might be shocked to hear that. Um, I look like I can carry a lot, and I can in a lot of ways, but it comes with-- it came with a lot of cognitive, I'll say, "gymnastics".

And life doesn't need to be that hard all the time. I want to acknowledge, too, I certainly had a lot of privilege, able to, to work and had an education. And so I just became really, really curious about the biology behind leadership. And that, that brought me to the nervous system, which I choose to talk about the nervous system more than the neuroscience. To me, the nervous system made it bigger than just my brain, which helped me understand that I can't outthink what my nervous system is trying to do. And I think that's probably why I refer to the nervous system more than just the brain.

[06:57] Gerrit: Oh yes, definitely. And, what does it mean for you that the nervous system walks through the door before you do?

[07:05] Carolyn: Yeah. Well, basically our nervous system is this incredible system that helps us understand how to interact with the world. And one of the elements of the nervous system is that it communicates with people, things around you, and is always evaluating. And so the reason why I say that the nervous system walks through the door before you do is just to like stop people and realize, like you can't outthink your nervous system.

You can't control what people are gonna think of you. You can't control what people are gonna feel, like your energy. And so that's why before you even say a word in a room, in a meeting, in a party or whatever, your nervous systems are already communicating with each other. It's under your conscious level of control.

And when we hear people say, "Oh, you know, back when we were cave people, you had to defend yourself against a saber-toothed tiger," that, that's just sort of today's version of saying, we're always interacting with our environment through these,... and I like to use the word signals. They're signals that we're giving off. 

[08:14] Martin: What, what is the awareness among leaders today about what you're introducing here? It seems today there is a lot of pressure on leaders, managers. There's a lot of stress. It seems like we need to train ourselves. We need to build skills, like leadership skills. But if I understand you correct,we also need to understand that part of this is just pure biology. S-

[08:39] Carolyn: Absolutely. Yeah

[08:40] Martin: is the awareness there today, and, and what do I need to learn as a leader to, to take this in?

[08:48] Carolyn: Yeah. Well, and thank you for that question, Martin, and that's why, um, a friend of mine, Ryan Clark, and I started Resilient Voices. I started sharing some of these insights with him, and he was like, "What? I never saw that side of communication." He, does a lot of advocacy work, and so when we looked at bringing our skill sets together, his ability to help people learn how to advocate effectively, and my perspective around nervous system resilience, which we can talk-- we can unpack a little bit more, but basically understanding our nervous system. Those two things together allow us to communicate, I'd say, with more intention and not only focus on what we are saying, but also understand what impacts how we say it. So to come back to your, question, Martin. I can tell you I-- when I talk about it in my work, it comes up in almost every coaching call I have, in every workshop that I have, not because I'm trying to insert it into the topics. It comes up because people are burnt out. There's a term "overwhelmed" that's used a whole lot, and so it naturally comes up. And this is where I'll talk about capacity and our ability, how much we can hold, how much pressure we can hold. It's gonna be different for every single one of us. And you know, I'm just like most of us. I try to push through a lot of things as a leader, thinking that if I didn't, I wasn't good enough.

[10:28] Martin: And I certainly recognize this among people that I talk to, that there seems to be either you have to keep pushing to keep your professional lives toge- together, to show up at work, deliver on all the deadlines, keep a smiling face, deliver at home, and keep the whole wheel, so to say, spinning. Or you need to get off this wheel completely. And it seems perhaps by a greater understanding of how to play with our nervous system, perhaps there is not such a binary choice, either keep pushing or completely getting off the wheel. So perhaps this is a direction that this conversation could go, because I would certainly be happy to hear what is the solution to not having to choose between those two extremes.

[11:24] Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. Well, here's, one of the things that really helped me understand how, um, how my biology worked without becoming a scientist and really getting into all the, the details of it. And it was a theory called the polyvagal theory, discovered by Stephen Porges, the polyvagalinstitute.org is a great resource. And while that theory has been challenged, uh, on some very detailed levels, the essence of it still holds. And the essence is that our nervous system moves through different states and is always looking to understand safety, and always trying to manage how much energy is being expended.

Um, and so with polyvagal theory, what I understood is these three different states will impact how I make decisions as a leader and how I communicate. Now, it's not as simple as here are the three states. I like to think of it more as a continuum or even like a Venn diagram. They've got some amazing resources on their site. But if we just make it super simple, there are three states that we will move throughout the day based on our energy levels, based on our capacity, how full we might feel emotionally, um, or e- physically as well, and what we're sensing around us. And as we move through these three states, our nervous system hones in on certain things.

So understanding that alone, there's a sleepy, shut down sort of state, dorsal vagal. There's an activated state which a lot of people will, will recognize 'cause we're in that state a lot. Like gotta perform, stress is on, you feel the pressure, you know it's there. And that's not a bad state. Actually, none of these states are bad, by the way. They're just a part of how our biology works. And then the other state, which is called ventral vagal in the theory, I like to just call it the green, the open, social engagement is able to really exist between people. And it's in that state where we feel safe enough to really be connected with other people. In those other two states, our connection, is compromised somewhat, but it's doing it to try and, and keep us safe. And the thing with all of this, Martin, is that we do not consciously control what state we're in. And there are cues that our body gives us, physical cues for example, like you might feel your heart race a little bit, you might feel little flippies in your stomach. So there are ways that we can tune in, those are two just very basic ones, to understand what state we're in. It's sort of like we're walking by free money on the f-- If you saw a hundred dollar bill on the floor, would you step over it, try and pick it up? Probably. It's, it's a s- a significant amount of money I'm not gonna walk by.

We have all of these cues that our body is giving us on a regular basis that we are essentially just pushing through and ignoring. And so what does this have to do with leadership? Why would you be giving up free resources and information just to try and push f- through to get through faster? So to me, there's just, there's, a lot of information that if we could access it and, and just pause to access it, it would make a remarkable difference in how we lead.

[14:59] Gerrit: And Carolyn, maybe to expand on this, I, I found very interesting in the beginning you said it's not just the brain, it's the nervous system. Really grateful you made this comment because another thing that I also read from Stephen Porges, I think he coined this term "interoception". And many people may think the brain is the control center of the whole body and sends signals from there to the rest of the body. But interoception means, in, in my interpretation, the brain is also collecting information from the body, which then in turn contributes to the state that we're in, right. These, these three different states. And, and the second thing that I wanted to comment on was when you said we can't, or at least we are limited in consciously controlling these states. There was this wonderful example that Stephen Porges gave. He had to undergo an MRI scan, and in this scanner he had a panic attack. And funny enough, I had a similar experience. I had, um, an MRI which took quite some time, and I experienced this when you know you are safe, nothing can happen, and yet the nervous system says you are in a dangerous place here.

[16:25] Carolyn: Mm-hmm

[16:26] Gerrit: And it's overpowering everything else. So I, I somehow managed to stay in that machine, but I got sweaty and I was very close to, to pushing this, this panic button. And I think this is when it comes back to this idea of, oh, as a leader I just need to push through, I need to be tough, I need to do this, and I'm I'm the big boss here, i, I can manage everything. Uh, no, the point is we are all human. All our nervous systems may operate, m- what should I say, individually slightly different, but we have this common nervous system which to a certain extent, probably a big extent, we can't control.

[17:13] Martin: I'm just remembering me being in different type of meetings with managers or executives, and sometime as a consultant having to come in presenting project propos- proposals, et cetera. And sometime I'm, I'm nervous, I'm stressed, I'm, I'm almost scared. There's something triggering me to feel very uncomfortable, I need to watch out for something. And when I'm reflecting back, I'm certainly not at my best in that state. I cannot speak properly, I cannot be creative, I cannot connect. I'm fighting on the inside, and I can recognize now when you're talking about this, this state. But in other meetings, I feel totally relaxed. It can still be a, you know, a powerful executive there, perhaps I'm trying to pitch a very important project. We need to win this project, for instance, because we have 30 people on salary in the company. But I'm still feel, I feel totally relaxed with this guy. And at the end of the meeting, everybody's saying, you know, how I was able to build trust and connect, coming up with solutions, moving the meeting forward. And I'm, I'm clearly in two different states. I'm, I'm thinking you're talking about this green state and perhaps one of these lower states. That, that is what I thought when, when Gerrit mentioned this MRI. I, I couldn't control it, but the outcome for how I can perform is so different.

[18:49] Carolyn: Right. And, and so here's, where I think it's really helpful to know how this concept helps us in leadership, because we could go a lot of different places. I mean, polyvagal theory has informed a lot of different areas, uh, therapy being one of them. I'm not suggesting that we understand our state so we can go back and unpack and understand, "Why am I reacting this way?" But where I think it plays a role in leadership is exactly like you say. "Wow, I'm noticing right now that I'm not speaking as clearly as I thought I, I would be, or as, much as I'd like." Or, "Wow, I am not really fully understanding everything around here right now." or, "This person beside me just got really aggressive." Maybe they didn't, maybe they did. But all of these perceptions, when we can notice them, and if they start to pull us out of a way we want to be, again, I'm keeping the language really simple here, there are things that we can do, cues that we can give back to our nervous system to say, "Hey, we're good. We're safe." 'Cause what can happen is your body can pull out a memory. I'm gonna give an example of me. I really, really struggled when people had dissenting views in a room together. It was fine if our tone of our voice was at a certain level, but as you know, that's not always how conflict or really heated, passionate discussions go. And so as I got higher up in, in the organization, the more intense these conversations would be, the more I started to shut down, and I could just like literally... I, I almost wanted to push myself away from the desk. I took that to be, and all the feedback that I was given as well, was "You need, you need to do better. You need to get more strategic." And, and so I took it, took it as a personal failing. What it was was that my nervous system had never really been-- felt safe around conflict when voices would escalate. I'm an only child raised by my mom. So, there could be a whole bunch of things in my history, that's irrelevant. I don't remember all of those things when I'm sitting in that meeting room, but my nervous system does. And so it starts to give signals of, "You're right, you know what, we need to keep you safe. We're just gonna shut things down." You're gonna start to feel your heart beat a little bit more. You're gonna wanna push away. All of these things start happening in my body that give me a cue. Now, what I can do now when this happens is there are certain ways I can communicate back to my nervous system because it's trying to protect me. It sees a threat that I know isn't there, and I can return back and say, "Okay, nervous system, I'm good. I'm gonna do some intentional breathing." So I could do box breathing, in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. I could do cyclic sighing, inhale, and then, uh, another quick inhale, inhale, and then a long exhale out. I could put my feet flat on the floor. All of those things are going to communicate back to my nervous system that I am safe. And breathing in particular, your body cannot have a regulated breathing practice or, uh, your body can't do regulated breathing if you are in fact unsafe. So those are just some examples. Now, obviously, it's not that simple, right, that's not gonna work for everybody, there are gonna be different exercises to, or cues, to give back to your nervous system.

But my, my idea of bringing this into leadership or my point of it is, imagine if we could bring those extra pieces of information back into our body so that we can make better decisions, so that we can be kind and caring even when we are in difficult situations. I think so much of where we think people are jerks is when our nervous system takes over and tries to protect us. And like I said, the goal of this in leadership is not to unpack it and figure it all out with everybody, and we don't need to share our stories with people. We don't even understand our stories a lot of the time. But we can start to recognize this as a leadership tool, and our nervous system is really a leadership tool for us.

[23:20] Gerrit: And I think when you say leadership tool, I, I might wanna go back to what you said earlier. How can I-- you didn't say train myself, but maybe how can I build the capacity for myself? But when you say a leadership tool, I'm also thinking about, I am in a leadership position, full in a room of, let's say, followers or whoever it is. What can I do to put the nervous systems of all the other people in the room at ease so that they can be at their best?

[23:54] Carolyn: That's exactly it. And so another concept that I talk about is signal. We all give off a signal, and that comes back to your nervous system walks in the room before you do. We hear a lot of conversation about psychological safety and a lot of research to show how important it is for team dynamics and bringing healthy discussion into the room. You can't have psychological safety without physiological safety. You can have the best intent, but if your nervous system is coming in hot, it's in a really activated state. You know, k-kind of like the word I use with my son is, like, kind of bouncy or, like, buzzing. You know, you come in and, like, ooh, you know, y-you just feel that. That's your nervous system, and it doesn't just, like, wind out of that just because you like, "Okay, I'm gonna create a psychologically safe environment everybody. Okay, let's do it." Even the words, the tone, all of these things show up. Again, you don't have control over. I mean our face is where a lot of these things are picked up, our cues, the tone of our voice. And when we're in that state, we don't always necessarily see it or hear it. And so I think it's a huge element of team dynamics and psychological safety that we need to talk more about is, is what does this look like? How does it look like for you? Again, we're all gonna have... our nervous system's gonna respond to different things. For me, cyclic sighing, that inhale deeply and then take another quick inhale and then breathe out slowly, oof, that really-- my nervous system really responds to that. And it might not pull you out of a state entirely, but what it does is it just tells your body, "Okay, we can shift down a gear." Um, and, and just learning what your, what works for you.

[25:49] Martin: I think this is so important that this becomes acknowledged in a corporate culture, for instance, that it is okay s- for instance, to start meetings with everybody sitting for 30 seconds and just arriving, calming down, or whatever rituals you have. Uh, because I'm guessing if you're alone with this awareness and there's a lot of, so to say, tough people in the room just powering through the whole day on, I don't know, on pure adrenaline,

[26:23] Carolyn: Mm-hmm

[26:24] Martin: it, it would be very difficult for you to, to do this. But if there is this ritual, it's, it's accepted and understood.

[26:33] Carolyn: So there's two things I wanna say there. Um, there is a technique that I learned in the Dare to Lead community, around a two-word check-in, and there's various d-- like different variations around that. But just coming into a meeting and giving everybody's bodies, everybody's nervous systems, a chance to just settle in. And the two-word check-in is you just go around the table or go around the, the Zoom room or MS Teams room, two words to describe how you're showing up right now. You can type that into the chat, you can say it out loud. And I'll be honest, for a while, I was like, "Okay, whatever. We're using the same words, let's just move on. Why do we need this?" We're giving ourselves, our bodies, a moment to transition out of whatever meeting or whatever conversation we've been having to land, and it's that intentional wind down to allow us to be present, so then we can focus on what the task at hand is. And too often, and this was me, this has been me for a large part of my life. I would just wind up faster and faster. You know those tops... Okay, I'm gonna be really old here for a second as a fifty-four-year-old. You remember those tops that we used to have and, it was like this big round piece of metal, and it had this like piece on top, and you would just push it down, and it would go faster and faster and faster and spin? Yeah. Um, it's like that's what happens when we wake up in the morning, and we just go and go and go and go, and it spins faster and faster. And the thing is, the faster we spin, our nervous system is go, go, go, go, go. We are not-- We're missing information. We are missing connection with other people that could help us, one, create more psychological safety and two, also allow us to make better decisions. When we go that fast, our capacity gets limited. There's no space for new ideas or new things to emerge.

[28:34] Martin: And I, and I guessing also we're creating a lot of problems unintentionally because we say things that we could have said in a better way, and then we have to fire fight and it becomes like a vicious circle. 

[28:47] Carolyn: Absolutely. You know, and then you get the feedback like, "Oh, well, you just gotta toughen up. You know, you're, you're in this new... You're in X whatever role now. This is what it's like here. You just need to have thicker skin." Okay, sure. But again so much of team dynamics is how we interact, how our, our nervous systems interact, but also, like, how-- learning how to repair. This is something that we are not taught how to do in the corporate world. Well, even in life. Now that I've learned how to repair, it's hard. It's hard to repair when your nervous system is in a shutdown mode, when your nervous system is so activated that it can't hear other people. And again, you can't think your way out of it. So I think of a technique that I use often with executives in coaching, it's very simple andremember, I've, had this conversation with many executives. I'll ask them, "Where are your feet? Where are your feet when you're in the middle of a heated reaction to somebody?" Sometimes they don't remember, and sometimes they do. They're like, "Oh, they're dangling all over." I'm like, "Just try, try this and see what happens. Just put your feet on the ground and let that energy come out of your feet." It sounds so simple, and I will be the first to say, before this work, before I found this, this field of somatics, I was like, "Come on, that's silly."

[30:11] Gerrit: Hmm.

[30:13] Carolyn: I encourage you as listeners to give it a try when you're in the middle of a heightened response. Just one of many options, but that one I have found you can do that in a meeting, nobody needs to know what's happening.

[30:28] Gerrit: Yeah. And Carolyn, based on what you're saying, I feel reminded of a few conversations I had recently. One was with Martin about the idea that there's always people who have something going on. And what I mean is we often show up at work, we're expected to deliver results, and, and, and. And for everybody, there may be something going on. A person may be going through a divorce. They may have a sick child or a sick parent. Half a year ago, we had a fire in our house, and all this impacts the nervous system, right? So when you are at work, and maybe it's not the right metaphor, but a part of your nervous system is still at home let's say, how do people show up. And I was talking this, this morning with a friend where we also addressed this subject and said, "You know what, so when, when people are angry with you, what's the reason behind that? What else is going on?" And usually we don't look that far, right, so this person is angry. What's my response? I get angry, too. Ahhh. Yeah, and, and this rarely leads to a good outcome. So yeah, just wanted to throw this in as, as, something that came up when I was listening to you.

[31:44] Martin: I think it's wonderful what Gerrit is saying here because there can be also the personal life issues. I mean, there can be a m- a meeting I had in the morning where I got yelled at, and now I'm in a second meeting after that. We 

[31:59] Gerrit: Can I yell at somebody else?

[32:00] Martin: we, we n- we never know what, what the colleagues around the meeting room have been going through at home, or previous in the day, or last week. Or perhaps this poor guy has a very challenging meeting coming up. Uh, I'm, I'm reminded one episode when I was in, in a team, and it became quite heated, and the manager got really upset. But I was so impressed. He said, instead of fighting back ... Uh, you could see he was, he was losing his com- what, what, what you say, his compulture. His com- his composure,

[32:38] Carolyn: Have composure

[32:41] Martin: and he said, "Sorry, guys. I need to go outside and have a short break." And, he went out, and the whole meeting was, "What's going on? What's going on?" And then he came back in the meeting room, and he said, "Sorry, guys. I'm okay now. I'm ready to listen. Let's restart, where were we?" And now hearing to the both of you sharing this, I thought, that must have been a great way to, to understand what's going on and also to break a potentially bad cycle.

[33:15] Carolyn: Yep. That to me is a superpower that leaders, I believe, the higher you are in an organization, you have an absolute responsibility to act like that leader. To learn how to navigate your own bodily cues and respond and work with your nervous system rather than pushing through and using your power in, I'll say, destructive way, because I do think it is destructive. These small little things that, um, I'll, I'll say small, when you are aggressive in a meeting and really trying to push people for results, we hear, "Oh, don't worry," like it's gonna toughen us up. It's not. It's destructive. All those things can tell all of our different nervous systems different stories, but they're not creating safety.

They're not. And it's not like we need to go around and sing kumbaya and be all like kind and warm and fuzzy all the time. But there is a level of civility, there's a level of connection that tells our nervous system it is safe, and it is only in that place where we can truly turn on what's called our social engagement system and be in a position where we feel free to share without reprimands, without being judged. And there's so many things that go on be- you know, in, in each of us. You know, when you, when you say everybody's got their story, Gerrit, everybody is going through something. Everybody. And it's not a competition about who's got it worst and you know that.... But it can be. I mean, I had certain points in my career where I was like, "Oh, well, you know, she's going through some pretty hard times." And I used to joke, I was like, "It's like I'm in Survivor and, you know, nobody's gonna vote me off the island 'cause y'all feel sorry for me." But I didn't realize it at the time, my nervous system was so activated and so stressed that I just could not show any emotion or let down. Like, I was that wheel that, that top that was just spinning and spinning and spinning. But back to capacity, I had such a large capacity, nobody, including me, realized how much I was spinning.

[35:44] Gerrit: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Carolyn, you just gave me before another keyword when you said, uh, toughness.

[35:52] Carolyn: Right

[35:52] Gerrit: I think resilience is a hot topic these days. Sometimes my impression is organizations looking for resilience trainings with the idea, oh, you know, we just need to get tougher. So it's more like what we want is we wanna withstand all this, this pressure, and we just wanna push through harder. I wonder what is your take or is, is there a difference between resilience and toughness?

[36:25] Carolyn: I think there is. When I think of the word toughness, I think of like force and tough and I'm gonna meet you head on, and I'll be tough and I'll tough it out. Again, when we're in that state, it's a very activated state, and there are times when we need that. Absolutely. I think, you know, I've been through a lot of my life being tough and like really trying to prove my worth and show how capable I am. I think resilience is different is resilience to me is a fluidity, an ability to oscillate, maybe not seamlessly, but to not get stuck in cert- in certain states or certain situations. So, this is where we got the name Resilient Voices from when Ryan and I were creating the company, is a nervous system that can move through the states, that can respond when I give it a cue, for example, of putting my feet on the ground or can respond by some breathing exercises. That is resilience, the ability to not be stuck. And I think what happens is we are so focused on being tough that our nervous system just gets stuck in this state, unable to navigate out of it easily, and this is where we see so much burnout happening.

 How would you suggest can we raise awareness? Or if somebody is listening to us today and says, "Okay, yeah, I, I wanna learn more about this. I wanna build my capacity. I want to make sure the other people in the room can also feel physiologically safe." Um, how, how could people start when this is very new for them?

Yeah. Well, you go check out my website, or our, our website. Uh, I think there are more and more people talking about this. So in leadership development programs, I think there is a really wonderful opportunity to talk about how our physiology can prevent us from, um, living into our values, can prevent us from a level of vulnerability that can create the psychological environment.

Um, getting really curious, and noticing your own body talking to you. And this was a very foreign concept to me. I just thought life belonged above the shoulders, and everything below that was just something to hold my head. And so my body took a long time to unders-- like, it was so full of, I'll say so full of frozen memories that I hadn't allowed myself to process, that there wasn't a lot of room for space or reflection or thinking. So learning just to sense signals and not judge them. So here's an example: before a big meeting, I'd get a little, the little flippies in my stomach, and I used to berate myself. "Carolyn, you wanna be a senior leader? That... This is unacceptable." So I'd push it a-aside. And there's, there's a saying, "What we resist persists." And the more I'd push it away, the stronger it would get. So th-that's just one example. I now can notice these waves that will move through, like, my solar plexus area, so, like, just aro-above my belly button area. And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, now I realize my body's telling me something." And again, it's not like I need to figure out, like, decode it, but it's just pausing to recognize that there is this communication happening. I didn't know what the heck it meant for a long time. I still don't fully know. I think it has something to do, though, with, me b-being, like, feeling maybe a little bit of shame and nervousness. I'm still not entirely sure. But I'm noticing it, and I'm open to it, and I'm receiving it without judgment.

And now I can feel all sorts of, like, pings in my head or sometimes my hands will get, like, really tingly. It's gonna be a different, you know... Again, the neurodiversity that, that we have in our society, we're all going to experience those communications differently. And it's not like there's a, a, a map that says this is what this means and, and so on. It's for us to figure out. It's, it's our own language. So I'd say that's the very first thing to get curious with that.

[41:09] Martin: To me it's super interesting because then also draw this to a group, how a group can also be more aware of what's happening. Me as working with facilitation a lot, not only understand my own reactions, am I getting nervous? Why am I feeling unsure? Am I thinking the agenda of the meeting will not work? And in the past, I would try to push it away and power through. And now, perhaps when I recognizing that feeling, I can say, "Guys, this is what I feel. This is where we are. Do we need to do something about it? What does everybody think?" Being nervous for making a mistake in the meeting, not meeting the timeline or finishing too late, it disappears. And then I'm suddenly I feeling I get a connection with the room because I'm real. And actually everybody is trying to help me, rather than, than feeling, "Oh, this guy is not sure of what he's doing." It's really strange, ... when I recognize my feeling, I can share it, and suddenly it becomes joined in the room and we everybody helping each other.

[42:27] Carolyn: Right. And notice you just said, "Isn't it strange?" And it is strange to us because we have not embedded it into how we operate in our organizations. And this leads, I think, to a second thing that people could start to do: is really invite yourself to label or name an emotion when you're in it. You know, on average, we can name three emotions: mad, sad, glad. And that really limits our ability to digest that emotion. And I will talk about emotions like that. Just like food, if you go to bed-- Well, at my age, if you go to bed having just eaten dinner, so if I eat really late, my, my body doesn't digest the food as well, and I have a really rough sleep. We charge through our days, and there are lots of emotions that we experience. And again, if I come back to that top, that spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, and you don't give yourself any space to even name or acknowledge what you're feeling, it sticks with you, and it's like that, it's like that feeling of being undigested. Now, it's not like you need to sit down and have an hour and write out copious amounts of notes to digest the feeling, but simply pausing like, "Hey, Martin really, really upset me today." And just pausing in just that, that can give us an ab-- like gives us the ability to digest it a little bit. And when we give ourself a bit of space, it just opens up the room for more possibility. And so what I've noticed with me as I've stopped and paused and noticed something in myself... I did this the other day with someone close to me, and I turned around and I said something, and it wasn't bad. And I said, "There's a discrepancy with what you're saying and what you're acting like." And I did that because I noticed a feeling that I was having, and that is not a skill that we're taught in schools yet at least not when I was going to school, and we're not normalizing that in our workplaces. And I think our interactions would be very different.

I think we would get the values that we say we want to have, like collaboration and innovation and creativity, if we could work with our biology. We all have emotions. Those emotions are going to impact our thoughts, and our thoughts are gonna impact what we do. So the more coherent we can be with what we're thinking, what we're feeling, and what we're doing, what our nervous system is helping us with all of that, I think we're gonna have better interactions, healthier workplaces, healthier individuals, less burnout, and a lot more happiness, even amongst the sadness and the feeling of despair in a lot of areas of our world.

[45:33] Gerrit: Yeah. I'm, I feel reminded of, I, I think it was Rick Hanson who said this, "Who's driving the bus?" So are, are you in the driver's seat or are you, so to say, just driven by your nervous system and just reacting to whatever comes up for you? And I think exactly what you said, this stop and pause helps to get back into the driver's seat.

And I also feel reminded actually of my introduction in the beginning where I say I bring, to my coaching Western science and Asian wisdom. And my experience is, it's, it's hard in a tough corporate environment to talk about emotions, but it's easier to talk about the biology you mentioned. And then when you link biology to emotions, then all these tough executives are thinking, "Oh, okay. Now I'm allowed to talk about emotions because actually it's biology, and I need this in, in my environment." And at the same time, I sometimes also feel a little bit sad. We often think in the Western world we have everything fig- figured out, we are better than everybody else. And in the Asian wisdom traditions, we knew th- this much, much longer, much earlier before. F- for instance, we now know from the Western science how something like meditation, mindfulness meditation, can positively influence your brain. It can change your brain. Uh, neuroplasticity is, is the key word here. Um, you mentioned the, the body before, and when you look at actually philosophies like yoga, in the Western world we turn it into a sport. Originally, it was a way of life with the, uh, poses, the asanas, only one aspect of it. And if you go to a traditional yoga studio in Asia, you won't have mirrors on the wall because you're supposed to sense the alignment of your body. You don't need to look into the, into the mirror. And I think that is something, uh, we have completely lost in the, in the Western world, so I'm, I'm grateful that you are, uh, bringing this up in the conversation as well.

[47:49] Carolyn: Mm-hmm. You know, that, that reminds me too, Gerrit, that one of the biggest things I learned that moved me into this space was understanding the different centers of intelligence. Now, I learned that through the Enneagram community, but there are lots of different wisdoms and s- and, and spiritual traditions that talk about the mind or the mental energy or the mental intelligence, the heart, the emotional intelligence, and the body or the somatic intelligence.

And that was the piece that put it all together for me. I'm like, "What? There's intelligence in my body?" And, and the fact that it extends into so many different traditions and spiritual practices says a lot. and I think ultimately I just use the word nervous system because it's something that I understood that helped me understand that the body had intelligence, and that's what spoke to me and got me into this.

Beautiful, And I think we can still go in so many directions, but I'm also wondering if it's maybe time for us to wrap up for today at least. And we usually do so by, offering some reflection questions for our listeners. Just, just wanna double-check before we do that, is there anything that any of you, Martin or Carolyn, would like to add? I mean, there's so many things I would love to add. You know what? I do-- I would like to add one, one more thing. Um, understanding my nervous system states was a lot less about the precision and being right, and more that it developed an awareness, and it gave myself, and my sons to start, a language so that we could communicate better.

And so our conversation today, while we focused it on leadership, there's certain application across your whole how you move through the world, and it can be done at all ages. I mean, there's, there's things that we can do when we're really, really young. So, um, yeah, I just wanted to end with that, that it's-- I think if we can be better humans, then that will inevitably allow us to create healthier organizations.

The reflection question I would leave with people is What do you notice? What are you noticing? In your heart, in your head, and in your body?

[50:36] Gerrit: Wonderful. That actually also goes into the direction of a reflection question I had in mind. So I'll take something else, and I go back to the leadership role of creating in a meeting, for instance, the psychological and physiological safety. So before I walk into a meeting, what's really my intention here? And what can I do to help the other people in the room to bring their nervous systems into a green state? 

[51:13] Martin:  I'm thinking if I'm a leader, how does my state impact my team? And how aware am I how my state impacts others?

[51:32] Gerrit: It's funny how all our three questions are somehow interlinked. Carolyn, thank you so much for today. Um, if people are curious, want to learn more about your work, want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[51:52] Carolyn: Uh, well, Carolyn Hart on LinkedIn. I, I have recently changed my name, so, uh, some of my, my work is under Carolyn Swora. Uh, that's website carolynswora.com. Resilient Voices though, is where I would direct you, that's my most recent work. Um, LinkedIn. I'm also on Instagram, becomingcarolynhart. So any of those places, I'd love to hear from people.

[52:19] Gerrit: And we'll make sure to put links in the session notes for this episode, which then concludes today's episode. If you would like also our support in improving your leadership resilience, apart from Carolyn, you can also contact Martin and me through hello@secondcrackleadership.com. That's all in one word. And if you enjoy our podcast, which is a project of passion, you can help us grow our community by telling a friend about Second Crack. And if you could leave a positive comment or five-star rating on any of your preferred platforms, that would mean a lot to us.

Thank you very much, and bye for now.