Ep45 Dulcie Shepherd Swanston, Iain Price PhD: Finding your Inner Confidence

How can you build your self-confidence and have a happier life? In this podcast, Kristian and Dr Amanda interviewed Dulcie and Iain the authors of DOSE a book that articulates 52 Science based ways for a happier and more confident life. They share both the psychological and neuroscientific benefits of each of the 52 actions in terms of the positive neurotransmitters and chemicals for short - DOSE (Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin and Endorphins) and the role each of these play in helping us to feel happier and more confident. This podcast is an introduction into their story behind the book, the impetus for their research and we look at some of our favourite habits and why. 

The Chief Psychology Officer episodes are available here https://www.thecpo.co.uk/
To follow Zircon on LinkedIn and to be first to hear about podcasts, publications and news, please like and follow us: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zircon-consulting-ltd/
To access the research white papers mentioned in this and other podcasts, please go to: https://zircon-mc.co.uk/zircon-white-papers.php
For more information about the BeTalent suite of tools and platform as mentioned in this podcast please contact Amanda via email: TheCPO@zircon-mc.co.uk.
To purchase the DOSE book please go to your reputable book shop or go to https://amzn.eu/d/1q6pz8u

Timestamps

Finding your Inner Confidence

·       00:00 – Introduction to Inner Confidence

·       00:48 – Welcome Dulcie Shepherd

·       01:27 – Welcome Iain Price

·       02:28 – An invitation into the arena

·       03:45 – Interactions take many forms; mainly over a cup of tea

·       05:09 – Psychometrically…

·       06:42 – Psychological safety revisited

Changes

·       07:36 – Becoming the thinker

·       08:59 – DOSE

·       10:21 – Change the world with tea, not coffee!

·       11:38 – Stacking (not subbing)

·       12:03 – Time; the giver and the deceiver

·       13:27 – Not cold showers… swim in the sea instead

·       16:34 – 52 ways (not to lose your lover)

·       19:10 – Eyes on the ball

P***ing Red

·       20:23 – Beetroot juice?

·       21:32 – Try one tip, try another

·       21:58 – It was red earlier- this isn’t a urine infection, is it?

·       22:37 – I’ll take aromatherapy, over a cold shower

·       23:44 – I love it, buy this everyone!

·       24:35 – Imposter Thinking and it

·       26:12 – A circuit breaker

·       27:01 – A space to change over time…

Cause and Effect

·       29:26 – “Where the attention goes, the energy flows”

·       30:40 – From social media to the written page

·       33:18 – It goes beyond the world of work

·       34:29 – “Lotion is motion”

·       36:06 – Habits revisited

·       38:22 – Is it Murphys Law?

·       40:05 – Focus on one thing at a time; stack it up!

·       42:07 – Join our (book) club

·       43:16 – Thank you both for sharing

·       45:32 – The end.

Episodes are available here https://www.thecpo.co.uk/

To follow Zircon on LinkedIn and to be first to hear about podcasts, publications and news, please like and follow us: https://www.linkedin.com/company/betalent-by-zircon/

To access the research white papers mentioned in this and other podcasts, please go to: https://www.betalent.com/research

For more information about the BeTalent suite of tools and platform please contact: Hello@BeTalent.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

Maintaining a personal level of self-confidence and happiness is a job all by itself. We can do this by understanding and unlocking the way we think. And with just a few small steps, we can incrementally and consistently help to see ourselves in a more positive and confident light. Welcome to this episode of the Chief Psychology Officer with Dr. Amanda Potter, chartered business psychologist and CEO of Zircon. I'm Christian Lees Bell, and today we have for the first time two guests at once. We have co-authors of the book DOS: 52 Science-Based Personal Prescriptions for a Happier Life. We'll be looking at a few of these 52 tips to build and maintain confidence and what we need to do to have a more self-confident and happier life in these challenging times. Dulcie, thank you for being our guest on this episode of the podcast. Could you please start by introducing yourself?

SPEAKER_02: 0:54

Oh yeah, I'd love to. Thank you for having me. Well, I'm Dulcie Swanston. I work as an executive coach all over the world and I also run a training company. But prior to doing all of that and becoming a writer, I worked for almost 25 years in FTSE 100 and 250 companies. Actually, I always describe myself as an operator who latterly came into HR in their mid-30s when they realized what they wanted to do when they grew up. So I try and bring that really pragmatic business approach into the work I do as well.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25

Brilliant. Thanks, Dulcie. It's really interesting. And uh and Ian, would you mind introducing yourself as well?

SPEAKER_00: 1:29

Absolutely. And great to be with you as well. And I really love that, by the way, Dulcie, want to know when you grow up, because I very much resonate with that. So in Price, I'm a neuroscientist, trainer, and coach, and I basically work with all sorts of people to help unlock their thinking to release their thinking and elevate that. And that's often with individuals. So it can be with C-suite, it can be CEO, COO, CFOs, and the like. It can also be with their teams as a whole, and it can also be with elite athletes. So I often work with elite athletes and helping them with their performance and dealing with that topic of today, really, which I will let you introduce. So work all over the place, having done my PhD. Then I've really worked very hard with people like the BBC to help with their sort of engagement programs as well in the past. So this is kind of really me learning how to be what I do and learn what I want to do as like Dulcie and now work all over the world as a result of it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23

It doesn't sound like a bad job at all, Ian that. I do, I genuinely love it. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I've got potentially an idea as to why or what would have attracted Amanda in the first place in terms of inviting uh yourself and Dulcie on the podcast. She does love a dose of neuroscience. Amanda, why did you invite Dulcie and Ian?

Dr Amanda Potter: 2:41

I love that link, the dose of neuroscience. That's completely right. I love the book. I think it's an absolutely brilliant book. I love it when I understand the neuroscience, but I've also got practical tips that I can take away, something that I can apply, something I can use, and the book is full of them. And the reality is I work with a number of clients who struggle with confidence. And I'm continually learning. And so the reason I asked Dulcie and Ian today is because I think we can learn quite a lot, Christian, for our clients, but also I think all of our listeners will learn a huge amount. And in particular, I think the thing that makes a real difference for me from Ian and Dulcie's thinking and writing is about how can we help people unlock that lower confidence and what does it mean to have low confidence? So thank you so much, both of you, for coming along. I'm going to be quite quiet on this podcast. It'll be my first one, but I I wonder how much I interject as we go.

SPEAKER_01: 3:33

This will be a challenge, but uh yeah, don't be too quiet, Amanda.

Dr Amanda Potter: 3:36

I won't, I promise.

SPEAKER_01: 3:37

So today's podcast is about increasing motivation and confidence. So could you both tell us a bit about the work that you do in this space?

SPEAKER_02: 3:45

Yeah, sure. So I could work in a number of different ways. I could either be working one-to-one with somebody as an executive coach, and they might say to me, I'm lacking confidence still, so you know, what should I do? And as an executive coach, I always remind them that it's not my job to give them advice, it's my job to understand and for them to unlock for themselves what they could do. But I wear another hat which is training, and I specialise in short, sharp training interventions. So it's under the name tea break training. So the idea is over a cup of tea, I should be able to describe to you something that would make a difference, and then over a cup of tea, you could then describe that to somebody else. So I talk about changing the world one cup of tea at a time. I drink a lot of tea, as you can probably tell. I could be doing two things on confidence. I could either be offering practical tips or I could be unlocking for somebody what confidence actually means for them and getting them to access their own tools to unlock and to learn and to think about that.

SPEAKER_01: 4:45

Thanks, Dulcie. A wonderful way of explaining that as well, that we can uh we can all understand over a cup of tea. Yorkshire tea, is it?

SPEAKER_02: 4:51

Yeah, absolutely, Yorkshire tea.

SPEAKER_00: 4:53

It probably is Yorkshire tea. In fact, Dulcie has a pile of tea taller than she is.

SPEAKER_02: 4:58

Do you? I did approach the people at Betty's for a charity event, and they did send me my height in tea. So I'll send you both a picture of that. Because if you like tea and land, it's worth seeing my height in tea.

SPEAKER_01: 5:10

And uh Ian, what about yourself? Tell us a little bit about the work that you do in this space.

SPEAKER_00: 5:14

Very similar to Dulcie. So my company think it out as a group of associates, including Dulcie, for any old thing. And we work very much more with kind of the neuroscience, but it's the neuroscience of sometimes of psychometrics. So both Dulcie and I will use psychometrics and sort of discovery tools, if you like, to try and help people really get to the bottom of why there might be some roadblocks about their confidence. And it's amazing, actually, often those are quite simple things, but they've remained with those people for some time. Occasionally, if that's going towards trauma, then Dulcie and I will be the first to say, well, actually, that's time for you to seek therapy, but we can work alongside people who are in therapy. And again, it's very much a one-to-one to one-to-many. So that's sometimes it's group coaching, which sometimes is a bit more like Dulcie said, that's training. I've got some tools, we've got some tools. Having again, wonderful thing about working with Dulcie is you know, the number of connections and the way in which we've been able to overlap with our models. So often it's giving a model in that sort of sense, but it can also be with coaching, giving a model, how can that help you? And I love the way Dulcie just said that one of the key things with unlocking and releasing thinking has to be that that thinking has come, the connections, the interactions that have happened within that person's brain to come up with a solution has to happen in that person's brain. And that's often when we find the greatest impact, obviously. We'll flex between training and coaching, and there's overlap there, of course, too.

SPEAKER_01: 6:42

I see the same thing as uh in my work as a therapist and coach too, in the fact that uh yeah, the biggest changes come when people have to reach inside their own resources, and then that's when the biggest insights come, don't they? Sometimes you can get that incremental change. It doesn't happen every day, but it it can happen.

SPEAKER_00: 6:57

I think part of the professionalism there, I know this is something you've done podcasts on before, is about you know that psychological safety, creating and holding a non-judgmental space. And I'd say that is one of the keys, whether you're training or coaching, and it's a specialty and our ability to flex to the needs of the clients, of the person that's in front of us or the people that's in front of us. Again, that's why I love what I do because there's no guarantee going into a situation. I have to react to, I have to be able to flex.

SPEAKER_02: 7:23

Also, I don't call my coaches coaches, I call them thinkers because it makes it really clear who's doing the heavy lifting and the relationship.

SPEAKER_01: 7:30

They're not receiving, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 7:31

Yeah, they're doing more than just reminds me that I'm not there to give advice, so absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 7:35

I have to say I have called coaches before, but I can definitely see the benefit of uh that change in language, as in they're not receiving the coaching. There's there is an active process.

SPEAKER_00: 7:44

I know that Dulcie said this to me before, and it's a great reminder just to say, even in my own head, thinking about people being the thinkers. I think there's a great respect there as well. I love that.

SPEAKER_02: 7:54

I'm not sure I invented it, by the way. I think that's the thing. I'm I'm a real magpie, and that's how I got into doing what I'm doing. I was an operator, remember. Came into HR my mid-30s and suddenly discovered the neuroscience behind actually why I made lots of mistakes as a leader. So I always approach this as I've made lots of mistakes, and I'm here to help you to make them earlier and to learn from them sooner. So, with that thinkers thing, if there's somebody out there going, she stole my thing, I am like a magpie, but just try and then offer it up to everybody. It's this change the world one cup of tea at a time by sharing it all out. So if there's somebody out there who did invent thinkers, thank you so much. Because everybody I share it with loves it, but I don't claim IP on it.

SPEAKER_00: 8:36

I think that really helps as well. Talk about how we work together. We are very much about being a community, we share our practice. And again, it's not about for us the win, and I'm hoping this will come up as we sort of talk more about confidence today and the stuff that we've done. It's about how we work together so that we can be more together. Friend of I says the eye to the power of we, which I really love.

SPEAKER_01: 8:57

Yeah, I love that too, Ian. Obviously, the book that you and Dulcie wrote takes a neuroscience perspective. Um, it's called DOS. First of all, I mean, I'd like to, I know that's an acronym, but can you tell us more about that?

SPEAKER_02: 9:08

I'll definitely let the neuroscientists take this one, right?

SPEAKER_00: 9:12

So DOS is an acronym for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. And these are neurochemicals that your brain releases, both locally, but also sometimes throughout the body, that has a big impact on mood, rewards, on just general well-being as a whole. There are four of the key ones. There are others that we might talk about, but those are the ones time and again when we were looking at how you can gain sort of confidence, how you can gain well-being, those are the ones by doing some very simple actions raises those within your own body, specifically in certain parts of the brain as well. And that's why we called it personal prescriptions, because we like the idea of play on words, so like dose of neuroscience, and you can dose of self-prescribe. And I have to say again, that was another one of Dulcie's brainwaves.

Dr Amanda Potter: 9:58

And I love the card. There's a bookmark as well. So the fact that you actually give us a bookmark, a card which summarizes what dose means and gives us in-depth definitions of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphin, and also some tips. So which I love that because that actually is really simple. You've almost put the book in a page.

SPEAKER_02: 10:20

And that's lovely. That's hopefully the idea of this tea breaker pro to man, is that hopefully now over a cup of tea, you could describe dose to somebody, give them the gift of that, and just say, listen, there's some really simple things that you can do in your everyday life to increase your dopamine levels or to increase your oxytocin levels. Because I think sometimes when we talk about confidence or motivation, it feels like it's going to be a real uphill struggle. But actually, you could do something simple in three minutes that increases your oxytocin level that will make you feel better. You could do something in three minutes that's really simple that could increase your endorphins and would make you feel better. And there's just this beauty about for me sharing these really small wins. Because when you stack them together, you can actually increase your confidence in quite a straightforward way. But without those tips, it just feels as sometimes I've been here myself, you just think it's too big a mountain to climb. I'll just pretend I'm alright. Whereas that's what we were hoping to do is be really transparent that hey, however successful you get, whatever level of job you get, if you don't have a crisis of confidence or feel lacking in motivation, you know, now and again, you're probably not being as honest with yourself as you need to be. But actually don't worry, it's fine. There's lots you can do about it, and let's make it as simple as we can.

Dr Amanda Potter: 11:37

The idea of stacking is great because the fact that you've got a number of small activities that you can try, you can get confident in doing and get into a habit. I love looking at your book. I love the bookends, the habits at the beginning at the end of the day, because you start the day well and you end the day well. I really, really love that. But I love the stacking idea as well, because start small and keep building. I love both of those ideas. They're great.

SPEAKER_00: 12:02

I think there's two parts to this. One is it's about time strapped. One of the biggest lies our brain tells us, and our brains lie to us all the time, as you know, with biases. But you know, one of the biggest lies is we haven't got time. So this idea, as you said, of little and often, and then certainly beginning and the end of the day is really important. And often this is the biggest thing when we're working with teams so they can team or lead us to lead, they just say, I haven't got time. Well, this is the whole point. You can actually do something in a matter of seconds, if not minutes, and you can do it when you're doing something else. And as you said, with the stacking, that means that you can use time, like you know, classically. I know for Dulcie, she'll say that when she's waiting for the shower to be cold.

Dr Amanda Potter: 12:39

Okay, not hot.

SPEAKER_00: 12:40

Which again, cold showers is one of our tips. Yeah, she'll be doing the plank, and I do the plank when I'm about to have a glass of water. So, you know, again, it's the idea is it flexes for you so that it can fit within your day. And these are common sense. As Dulcie's first book, It's not Body Rocket Science, is the reason that we got together, or one of the reasons we got together, because I love that book so much. You know, it's not bloody rocket science, but the classic thing is we don't do it. It's not common sense, isn't common practice. And this is what we found talking about the neuroscience and giving that as an offer, and again condensed in the way that you can look at each chapter within a matter of minutes, just means okay, now I have more confidence in what I'm actually doing, and now I can have more, almost authority over oneself, more self-direction about what kind of things I want, and that comes from dosing again.

SPEAKER_02: 13:27

But the the cold showers for a minute is a really good way to almost encapsulate the simplicity because in order to feel more motivated, releasing extra endorphins is a really good idea, okay, and the science tells you that, so that's great. But then you go, okay, so how do I do that? And then you'll read loads of things about increasing endorphins and be like, yeah, bit lots of exercise and cold water swimming. But what we try to do with Doe's and with working together is go, right, okay, how can you get these endorphins really quickly and with no fuss? Because open water swimming in the Sierra River absolutely gives you loads of endorphins because you get a bit of cold water shock. But the bottom line is the effort of getting to the river, I mean, with five kids, two dogs, busy life, and the fact it's freezing outside, going to a cold river is going to be a massive undertaking. But what Ian helped me with was you can get the 80-20 rule going. You can get 80% of the endorphins by turning your shower cold for 30 seconds at the end of your shower. So if you look at which of those habits is going to be stackable and doable for somebody with a real life, you go, I could probably manage a 30-second shower. You then feel brilliant that you did it. So it's a bit like um I remember your previous podcast, Amanda, when you were talking about like the quick wins and make it feel like a win. If you do 30 seconds in a cold shower, you feel like you've had a win. So it increases your confidence, as Ian says, in yourself, rather than knowing that going for an open water swim would give you a high, but never quite getting round to it. That feels like failure and does you no good when you're in this lower confidence, lower motivation space. So it's all about quick wins, 80-20, and actually appreciating that in people's real lives, some of the things that we are told to do as good, and just feel a bit unmanageable when you're feeling a bit low anyway.

SPEAKER_00: 15:19

I felt certainly uncomfortable with the idea of saying go out and swim in cold water. Having been a swim coach, the idea, a number of people who drown each year in this country. So we didn't want to encourage people to go out and do something well out of their comfort zone that's dangerous.

Dr Amanda Potter: 15:34

And it takes your breath away as well, doesn't it, when it's particularly cold?

SPEAKER_00: 15:37

That's it. And so again, with caution, you can the other way of doing this is having a bowl and literally putting your face into some cold water. That's possible. But again, one of the things we thought is the easiest thing, and it's not dangerous. Well, you will get the same kind of shock, an endorphin rush, just from having a cold shower. And again, you can just dial up. So if you can start off with 10 seconds, you can go up to 20 seconds. And when we say cold here, people, what I'm saying, what we're saying is it doesn't have to be freezing cold, it's just much colder than you normally.

SPEAKER_02: 16:05

Oh, it does for me now, Ian has to be really fed up in a hotel if I can't get it proper cold and get my get my road.

SPEAKER_00: 16:11

We can build up to that. So Dulcie, that's one of the ones that Dulcie's particularly being good at. And I have to say, when Dulcie said, you know, would you do this project with me? We've got this idea, and we're going to start off with cold showers. And I remember thinking that's the night. This was in January because it was one a week. So I must admit, the fact that I put up with that for a while, I must admit, I think that was saying a lot. We're challenging ourselves through this project as well.

SPEAKER_01: 16:33

So through obviously finding out uh and all these different prescriptions for leveraging the neuroscience and increasing sort of confidence and motivation, you've I suppose it's a fantastic opportunity for you both to learn what works, what doesn't, and probably to learn a lot more strategies and techniques that probably maybe individually you're even aware of. So in the book, you talk about asking friends and family, you know, what do you know? What techniques work for you? And I suppose you learn a lot through conversations with them, right?

SPEAKER_02: 16:59

100%. When I came up with the idea for the 52 project, which is what it was, we were all in lockdown, it was miserable, it was that Christmas where we all got locked down at the last minute and everybody was fed up. I literally just started thinking, just having a glass of wine and just thinking, do you know what? How lucky am I that I've learned some resilience tips as a coach in the last two years that I've been using, and cold showers have been one of them. And I started thinking, Oh, well, I wonder how many people know about those, and I wonder how I could share them really quickly. And I wonder if I how many I could think of. And then I started thinking, wouldn't it be cool if I could think of 52? This was in December, and I decided then that I was gonna like do it over a year and I was gonna introduce one a week, but I reckoned I did a quick count up, I've got about 21 or 22, so I thought, well, who's gonna know some? And I thought Ian, so I texted him, this is like Christmas saying, how many good, how many well-being tips do you think you know? Because I want to get to 52, and I think between us we got to about 36, and then we were like, Well, if we want to do something, because I just said to him, Would you fancy doing this? and got him to commit to doing something on a Friday at 10 o'clock for a year, without really knowing what it was committing to, to be fair. But you know, he probably had a drink himself and was just like, Yeah, whatever, I'll I'll I'll say yes, it's easier. I do have that impact on people I've been told people go say yes because they just think it's actually a lot easier to do. I genuinely wanted to do it.

SPEAKER_00: 18:21

I I know where you're coming from, but I'm genuinely excited by it.

SPEAKER_02: 18:24

But then it was amazing because what then happened is we got a bit of steam, and people came to us and said, Oh, do you want to check this one out and see if this tip's got legs? So people would lob an idea in, and Ian would check out the science. And if the science met our bar, which was it's gotta work, it's gotta be cheap, it's gotta be easy, but it's got to be backed up by proper science from a proper institute. We'd go, Yeah, we'll we'll put it in. So there were some really random ones that we got from other people that neither me or Ian had heard of. And what was brilliant was then people joined in by chucking stuff in. So again, with this idea of it's not all our IP at all, it's more accumulation of all our community's ideas and ideas that we gathered along the way.

Dr Amanda Potter: 19:07

And so, what were the odd ones? Because maybe the ball was that an odd one? Or did you know about that one?

SPEAKER_02: 19:13

Yeah, so the ball came from my personal trainer, a guy called Hedge Hay, and he knows me really well. And as in when I say he's my personal trainer, I see him probably once every six months. So he knows how short my attention span is. And I I spoke to him about my hips and my back being sore, and he just went, I know you'll want something quick and easy, try this. So he came on the show to show us that about the ball one, but really, because he knows I've got a low attention span, he recommends it. But the science, when Ian went to check it out, was really remarkable for simply rolling your foot on a ball under your desk. It's like it's a no-brainer because it doesn't really take you any effort.

SPEAKER_00: 19:51

And that was the point, really. Many of the tips, or in fact, all of the tips, the real brief we gave ourselves was it was either no money or virtually no money, so tennis ball. Was probably the most expensive thing, I think, possibly, unless treat yourself was about treating yourself with chocolate. So depending on what chocolate you prefer. But that was very much the sort of remit that we gave ourselves. And the other thing that we had, which we're really grateful for, is these people they would go out and test stuff. So not only would they come up with it, they'll then say, Well, even if they didn't know it for themselves, they said, Well, we'll try it as well. For me, it was the beetroot juice, and this is a Dulcie one. Yeah, I read about that. Yeah, okay. So, uh, have you tried it?

SPEAKER_02: 20:28

Yeah, I'd heard about on the tele watching a programme about the British cycling team, I think it was. And I'm just one to jump on a bandwagon, try anything once, so I'd started drinking beetroot juice, and it did make me feel better. So, again, when we were talking about it, I said to him, Will you check out beetroot juice and just see if it's something that I I remember off the telly that's not accurate? And he went and did the research. And proper scientists say that if you have a bit of beetroot juice before, particularly before a sporting activity, increases the nitrates in your body. I think and we have people doing it and getting their personal best in their training 20 minutes after trying beetroot juice. When you've given somebody that bit of science, it's not yours, but you've just over a cup of tea shared it, it just feels brilliant, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00: 21:14

It's amazing. And again, talk about confidence is taking a little bit of science, putting it in people's hands in a way that it matters, it's applied. They try it out, there's virtually no time, but again, it's that impact, and suddenly, oh my goodness, and that's given them more confidence as a result. I think the other meta part of this as well is that if you try one tip and you start to get some traction, then why don't try another tip? And again, it's the combination of those tips. 52 factorial, which apparently my eldest son's doing maths and physics at university, and he said it's roughly 800,000 combinations, if not more. That's again one of the tips here is that you can make this as bespoke as you like for yourself, and you incrementally gain more confidence by doing these things and having the impact. I would say with the beetroot juice, just it's okay for your weed to be pink. That's what alarmed me. I tried it. What works for one person doesn't work for somebody else, or at a certain time of day doesn't work for somebody else. And I think the idea of in fact nitrates are available in other foods, and again, we list those in the books. It doesn't have to be beetroot, just how happens that beetroot's probably one of the easiest to consume as a juice. But I was alarmed, I must admit, Dulcie said, try this out. Then I was quite alarmed, and then I was relieved to read. No, that's kind of a normal side effect.

Dr Amanda Potter: 22:27

It made me giggle that after the beetroot juice, you had be smelly, and I was thinking, is there a connection? But actually, you meant to have nice candles and things around you, not that you become smelly as a result of your beetroot juice.

SPEAKER_02: 22:38

There are some lovely ones about that sort of thing. So, to be fair, cold showers was tip one, but I think tip three was a warm afternoon bath, and there's really good science behind that as well as aromatherapy, because I'd always thought, a bit like you're saying there, Amanda, that aromatherapy was a bit of a soft, fluffy thing that was just a bit nice to do. But it turns out that if they look at people who are feeling more alert and they've done proper tests on it, and they give them rosemary, there are different amounts of blood chemicals in their body. So, in effect, the rosemary scent appears in your blood. You can actually measure levels of rosemary in your blood. Dr. Ian's nodded.

SPEAKER_00: 23:18

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: 23:19

It's the same with lavender for relaxation. They can physically, clever scientists, look at who's been sniffing lavender and who hasn't. And then let's look at how calm and relaxed you feel. And there is a positive correlation between phenols from lavender in your blood and feeling more relaxed and rosemary and alertness. And it was this stuff that we were uncovering.

Dr Amanda Potter: 23:42

I love, love, love the fact that they are practical tips. 52, really practical. Some of them I'd like, some I don't at all like, by the way. I'm never gonna do them. But many of them I like, but I love the neuroscience. So for me, everything has to come back to is it going to make a difference in the way I think, the way I feel? And it's the brain chemistry that helps me to change the way I think and the way I feel. So that's the bit I absolutely love about this book. And for me, I think it's almost every every coaching client that I've got. I'm going to encourage them now to buy this book because as we go through the conversation, identifying what are your objectives, what would you like to achieve. Confidence always, in some way, comes down to that as one of the areas, or imposter syndrome is the other language they use quite a lot, or creating a growth mindset. There's a number of different words they might use, but the tips in here will all help with that, which is amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 24:34

You can take control. That's the sort of message we wanted to get over in doing this project is if you feel that way, and and I do a lot of work in imposter thinking as well. I call it it, Amanda. So I call it imposter thinking, so that you can make it into little letters and call it it, but you can kind of put it in its place by having lowercase it. It was about if you feel this way, if you just do this, it will make you feel a bit better for the reasons you describe, Amanda, which is the science proves that it's true. So even something like gratitude journaling, you might go, really? I mean, seriously, you're telling me if I write down three things I'm grateful for of an evening, I'm gonna feel better. That's the sort of response I might get from a CEO because you feel as though you're giving them quite an easy thing to do. But the bottom line is the science says you will release dopamine by thinking the grateful thought and serotonin by writing it down. So, yes, it is that simple. It will start to make you feel better, you will start to feel more in control. When you start to feel more in control, you will start to regain the confidence that we both know is there. So it's that sense of control we were offering back to people, if you like.

Dr Amanda Potter: 25:45

I've been applying it. I haven't been doing it every night, but what I have been doing is when I'm struggling or I had a really bad bit of news, I will literally sit there or stand there and go through the list and remind myself of all the things I'm grateful for. It does make a big difference. It's mostly about mindset, but thank you to the serotonin, to the dopamine, which makes the difference. I go from feeling quite sorry for myself and having a moment of self-pity to thinking, okay, actually things are not so bad.

SPEAKER_02: 26:12

But the thing is, it gives you a circuit break as well. So, as well as the dopamine and serotonin release, it just makes your brain pause between an option of staying in that negative headspace in that vicious circle. It enables you to just have a pause and then you can decide if you want to go back to the vicious circle. Or actually you feel a bit better and you can make a choice that then do you know what? I'm just gonna acknowledge that that's difficult, but actually I'm gonna give myself some time away from thinking about it. If we don't have that circuit break, the very time where you need these techniques is the very point at which you really can't be bothered to do the right.

Dr Amanda Potter: 26:47

Absolutely, it needs some incredible strength of character at times to actually say, I'm going to avoid the fridge and the red wine and the vodka and everything else that's bad for me.

SPEAKER_00: 26:56

I love that about control and I love the idea of a circuit breaker. So it's not just the neurochemicals, of course, it's the way in which our brains make connections and make habits ultimately in the way in which those operate. And I know you've already spoken about that in another podcast. And the neuroplasticity is important, and we're plastic throughout our lives. And I think again, what we're trying to say is that you can take control of that plasticity. Obviously, there are different times of life that you're a bit more neuroplastic as a child, but you still have that plasticity and you can still have that control. And one of my favorite phrases is, you know, which I use throughout Dulcie got you really, really used to this as well, is you know, where the attention goes, the energy flows. So, in terms of bielectrically, when we're talking about mindset, that's what we're doing. We're refocusing the energy, we're retelling our brain what circuits are most important to focus on. It's no surprise, you know, working with all sorts of people who challenged in different ways. Maybe it's, you know, a whole company going through a restructure or they've been venture capital, and they're going for funding, or it might be a charity that's trying to work out how they can deal with the rising price of cost for things. Ultimately, they manifest, they become the things that they focus on. And the danger is that when we are faced with problems, and we've all been faced with you know with challenges, that is really where what we're trying to say is that you know, little incremental practices of this helps train your brain to be more solution focused, to take more control, to have more autonomy and be more of a master of your own destiny, and to then leak that truth to other people. And the other part that's happening there, of course, at the same time is that you're getting these boosts of neurochemicals, which is helping you to have more resources for yourself and for the people that rely on you. One of the things, again, Dulcie and I, when we work with, and I'm sure both of you, when you're talking with these big C-suite people, well-known characters, and that's they'll say, Well, I've got and you know, I don't need that, give me something complicated. I say, No, this is about being simple so that you can build this in, so that you will then have the capacity to do the complex stuff. Again, this is all about giving toolkit stuff so that you can practice it. So when it is an issue, you've got stuff in your toolkit. You can pull them out. Dorcy and I have both through been through sort of different phase of mental health issues. And this book very much comes from that place of we don't know everything, but we know some of the feelings and how powerful these things can be. And we've test driven them from a therapy point of view, but we've also test driven them because of the same kind of things as you will know, Christian, from stuff that you do with performance level, right? Circuit breaker is how do we refocus on what's important to ourselves? How do we retake control and at the same time be energized in the process?

Dr Amanda Potter: 29:26

Do you know what? That's my favorite quote, I think, where the attention goes, the energy flows. I think that's just profound because the more we practice something, I think is my interpretation, the more we create excitement for it, but also we're also training our brains and we're creating the neuroplasticity. So we're getting the firing and we get to release the dopamine more readily. We're activating those parts of the brain that we want to be activated. I think that's right. Is that it? Is that right, Ian?

SPEAKER_00: 29:55

Spot on. We're bioelectrical beings. There's completely it's the other way around. Uh Tony Robbins actually says it's the other way around. It says that where the energy goes, the attention goes. I think that both things are the are the same, but I prefer it that way around for the very reason, Samanda, that you've said, because it's absolutely literally biophysically true. But it's also true in the sense of the sort of meta, whatever it is in terms of our purpose, whatever we want our purpose to be, or whatever we think is important, what our values, it's the same thing. Where our attention goes or effort goes, therein goes the energy. There's a saying as well about you know whether your treasure is, there is your heart. It's the same kind of thing. Your brain will know what to look for in a way that is again profound. And we're always blown away by our clients we work with, and the stuff that they achieve is just frankly remarkable.

SPEAKER_01: 30:39

Have you built a community around this? There it's a Facebook page or obviously people write in and tell you.

SPEAKER_02: 30:44

I literally Googled to see if the 52 project had gone because we had a quick family brainstorm to see if it had gone and it hadn't. So I thought, right, I'll have the 52 project. We just created it on Instagram. We literally created an Instagram with no followers, and we didn't we didn't go viral or anything. But the thing was the people that followed us week in, week out did as you were saying, Amanda. They went, Do you know what? I'm always gonna do that. And I'll go to a party now, or I'll meet clients and they'll go, Do you know what? I'm still doing the cold shower, or do you know what? I still do the early morning walk every day without fail, or I still sat this and this, it's that that gets us. So it's still live. You can still go and look at the 52 tips, you can still go and look at the 52 project. We've got a website, 52project.com, and all of the recordings are still on there, and the work we do is ongoing. We just did it as a 52-week project, but it's there for free.

SPEAKER_00: 31:37

That was very much part of it. I mean, when the people got asked us, would you make it into a book? So just because I can have it in my hand, and it really forced us to condense even more the science and the tip, so it was really, really, really bite-sized as possible, and to the point, again, like coming down to a postcard as Dulcie's does, which is brilliant. And I think the other thing then is just the way in which that whole process, the means of having the book, means that you can actually look at the videos. So if you look at the distilled version, if you really want to look even more of the science, or laugh at us as we're trying stuff or talking about the sort of funny things that happen to us. And we had some amazing guests. We've had professional comedians, we've had uh athletes, people who work and do all sorts of things, adventurers, pilots. We had James Bush, who's one of the first openly diagnosed HIV pilots as a commercial pilot. Absolutely amazing guy. The guests, again, they did so much of the work for us. And the idea is that you can look at all that through the book, and all the references we've tried to make as much as possible are free. These are not articles that are just hidden behind ivory towers. There will be those, and I regret that in many ways. But the whole point of the references was that if you've got access to the internet, you'll be able to look them up, you'll be able to read them. This was very much a labor of love and a gift to the people. We didn't hold back and how we wrote about the. I know that as an academic, I've worked with people that have held back and how they share stuff. But this was not about that. This was about people are being generous with us and we want to be generous back. And honestly, the impact, though we didn't necessarily go viral, the impact on individuals has been immense. And setting us all up with uh Jen Smith helped us do that. But then Jen went from just being one of these people that thought, oh, I'll come along, I'll have to because they're you know, Dulcie's a client, to being one of our biggest contributors and testers. That was for us the proof of the pudding. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 33:18

And I just wanted to go back to something you said, Amandra, if that's all right, because you were talking about like making those changes. One of the things that I hoped we helped people to do was not just to think about well-being changes, but you can use this science to make any change you want in your life. So I quite often now use that in my training to say to people, look, if you want to make a change, there is very little from a neuroplasticity that you can't train your brain to do, but you've just got to keep doing it. And actually, I've learned to surf, for example, I'm learning to speak French, I've learned to play guitar in recent years to purposely practice things that I'm can't do, not very good at naturally, no skill set in them, to prove that that's the case. So I think, as well as the well-being kind of avenue, we also hopefully gave people confidence that if they wanted to learn to do something, they absolutely could. If they wanted to keep motivated, learning something new, even if they weren't very good, you can, but it's about this where your energy goes, how much practice you do, and hopefully it had that benefit as well. Because I've certainly taken that to my training room and people say, I'm just not very good at that, I'll never be very good at it. You go, well, that's a choice.

Dr Amanda Potter: 34:29

It reminds me of a tip I got given by one of my fellow trainers at the gym, and he said, Lotion is motion because I get arthritis in my foot. And he said, You just have to keep using it. You can't just sit down, you have to keep walking, you have to keep moving, lotion is motion. It's almost the same, isn't it? Unless you use it, it's just gonna disappear. So get on with it.

SPEAKER_00: 34:49

And in getting on with it, this is part of forming the story of yourself. I think this is the other thing, again, through lockdowns and through cost of living crisis and all the things that have meant for all of us can lose a sense of identity and purpose. And how do I have control over that? And again, part of this is incrementally to start retaking control, as we've said, and then starting to retake charge of your own life story. And our brain believes the stories that we tell it, and who's telling the story most often, it's ourselves, it's inner voice and outer voice often. And that's again one of the tips that we look at. This idea of taking that is so important when it comes to confidence, of course, because confidence is this metacognitive thing, so it's it has so many different things that play into it. This is a way in which you can, again, through the book, looking at the senses to be very central in the way in which you think about things and you be able to manifest those things. But it's also then about how you start to have building blocks to the story that gives you more confidence about who you are. And dare I say, what is our reason? What is our why? And again, the whole point of the book is to both give the capacity as in the dosing that you need to make that happen, but also the toolkits in order to make those connections in your brain and to build that confidence because there are so many aspects, as I said, to confidence. It's a really difficult thing to get hold of. But again, that was the point of the book in many ways.

SPEAKER_01: 36:07

What I love about the book also is what you've got a section on once you've introduced the science and some of the benefits of each tip or prescription. One of the last pages is a stack with other prescriptions and other habits. And I guess that when we were talking about habits and habit formation and actually getting to do things, then obviously if we can maybe start off with one thing, it's sort of that acts as leverage or a lever to make it easier to do all the other things. A really fascinating book I read by a quite famous American psychiatrist called John Ratey, who mentions that idea of a well-being lever. So, for example, we all know that sleep and nutrition and movement is you know have very strong links to well-being, but it's often maybe just one of those for each of us that has an even more of an impact. So, and by focusing on one of those things, it makes the other things easier to do, like a domino effect. So I love the fact that with this book, you've got an idea of okay, well, you can try this and then you can stack this with other things, and then you've got that sort of cumulative combination effect, which I think is quite unique. People need a structure, don't they? There's so much information around well-being tips. I should do this, I should do that. But I love the way with the book gives you that sort of fun, but also really engaging sort of structure based on neuroscience that people can go, okay, right, this is for me. I can do that. I think it's yeah, really, really good. I enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_02: 37:26

That's brilliant. And it's just that simplicity, Christian, because it comes back down to if you can give people a like a double whammy, if you like. And if we say, Do you know what? If you're doing this one and you can wire this one in at the same time, you get the best of both worlds. There's no either-or here. It's fantastic. So it was one of the things that quite early on we did a bit of reading about it because we started reading about habits, and um, I also listened back to your um habits podcast. Was it BJ Fog you talked about in that podcast? And we were literally on gathering magpie mode, and that stacking principle was one that we just shamelessly stole because we were like, hang on, if we get people to do three at once, but that are easy to do together, Ian, does that mean that you will get the benefit of doing all three? And he's like, Yeah, and we're like, Well, okay, well, that's a no-brainer then. So if you do six minutes, three things.

SPEAKER_00: 38:19

It's even better than that because it's greater than the sum of the parts. And again, this is that meta effect, right? So there are all the other side benefits as a result. So it's not just cumulative, then it's not just summative or iterative, no, it can be because of the complexity of our brains, and it's the way in which we've started to allude to already. It's the way in which that in a nice way pervades other aspects of our life and our thinking. If we can do it here, we could do it there. Brain is the most complex thing that we know about in the universe. Again, the power of it, we're unlocking.

Dr Amanda Potter: 38:47

In the same way as when we do the power of three, we think well, one thing that happened that's bad, and two things that happen that's bad. And then be like, oh, something else now is going to happen that's bad. Everything comes in threes. And we catastrophise, don't we? We create things to be much bigger than they are in a negative way. How fabulous that we can actually tell our brains to do the same thing in a more positive way. Let's focus on those good things and enhance how great things are for us at the moment.

SPEAKER_02: 39:12

Certainly, since I started doing the habits, it's not that bad things don't happen, it's just that I have fewer bad days when bad things happen. Whereas something bad happening used to derail me. You'd used to have to go and put on your smile for your clients, but inside I'd feel derailed. Whereas now just stacking some of these habits together every morning without fail. So my morning stack is there is always a pint of water next to me that I drink while I'm doing Girolingo. And then I'll get up and do the plank and the shower. But the point is then I'm not picking my phone up and looking at the news first thing. I'm not going downstairs to get a cup of tea and then getting embroiled and jobs. I'm having a pint of water, which I won't even start on the signs for that. That was one of Ian's, but it's like bonkers that I only had my night water, you know, to drink. In the night is now no, I've got two pints, I've got a pint for the morning. But doing my Duolingo means that my brain is actively doing something that we know to be really useful for growing your neurons anyway. But it also means that I'm not going into that catastrophizing first thing by either looking at my emails or looking at the news, which is the first thing I used to do in the morning. But that stack now is wired in for me. And it's not that that stops something bad than happening. And the email that might have some rubbish news in it is still there to read, but I've built my resilience up and I've I've got myself hydrated so I can think better about it. And that's the only thing that's changed is just what I do before I read the bad news email.

SPEAKER_01: 40:40

I suppose you become better at actually directing your focus of attention because that's one of the challenges nowadays, you could argue, is that there's a lot of distractions and more stimulation. So there's a war on our focus of spotlight of attention.

SPEAKER_02: 40:53

But do you know what, Christian? I always talk though about it because people say, Oh God, you must be mega at this now. And I go, No, I'm a work in progress. I'm better at not doing the catastrophizing. And I always now very much acknowledge that as better at it, certainly not brilliant. Because I think the other danger is that then people look at you and they think, Well, she's got everything sorted. So no wonder she's like on and up with all of these tips because everything's fine. I'm much more transparent now about the fact that I'm a continuous work in progress and I've not got it all sorted. And I'm much more transparent about talking about my own imposter, for example, because actually it makes other people go, Oh gosh, you as well. And I go, Yeah. And they go, Oh, right, okay, well, and and then people come to you to talk about it more. It's now we've got these habits, we're a bit better at it than we used to be, and you can be a bit better too.

SPEAKER_01: 41:43

Which would make you more as effective as a coach, as well as you know, improving your connection that you have, for you're also helping them get through maybe the roadblocks that you've gone through. You have more of an active experience of that. So then I think that's more powerful as a coach rather than being that 100% enlightened being that maybe you forget exactly how much of a struggle that you were going through when you first did that exercise or tried that strategy, which was novel to you.

SPEAKER_00: 42:06

And I think that's really worked as well for teams and again, book clubs that have used this and that they've talked about how they've done it and then the vulnerability in practicing vulnerability with each other and having fun with it. And then actually that's helped with their leadership. So self-leadership, but as also leadership of other people. So if you're struggling to know how to do that, just somebody said, Could we do a book club? We said, absolutely, go for it. And I had a video the other day and they came back and it was just mind-blowing, just you know, the giggles that we're having. Talk about culture. How do we really get that? How do we train in, as you said, attention? Now, if you said we're gonna do a workshop on that, we're gonna do some learning development, no way. And you know, Dulcie and I'll be the first ones out the door, and we train this stuff, right? So this is about how making it fun and that you can do it, and it's accessible in a way that actually goes much deeper. It's a bit like the classic question, you know, is it right or wrong? No, is it fair? There's something of that, and I'm still, I think one of the things that we're finding is that we're seeing the outcome of the book and the project is ongoing, as Dulcie said, you know, and we're just amazed at how people are taking that.

Dr Amanda Potter: 43:05

What a wonderful way to end the podcast, to realize actually the difference that you're making in the fact that your book is now being shared and people are encouraging each other to read it. It's great. It is lovely.

SPEAKER_00: 43:16

It is, it's lovely.

SPEAKER_01: 43:16

Yeah, and I think we could probably genuinely carry on talking for another hour or two, couldn't we, about this? Unfortunately, our podcast, we've got to keep it relatively brief, but I think we've actually gone to a deep dive in uh yeah, some of these topics. So I think that's hopefully going to be really valuable for our listeners, and I know I enjoyed this conversation as well. Thank you so much, Ian Dulcey, for your time. It's been fantastic having you on the podcast.

Dr Amanda Potter: 43:37

It's been amazing. I've loved it.

SPEAKER_01: 43:40

Thank you. If people wanted to hear more about your research and your current work, where would they best go to?

SPEAKER_02: 43:45

52project.com for both of us, and then toprightthinking.com for me, so you can find me there. Or just buy the book on Amazon. Actually, we'd rather you didn't buy it on there. We'd rather you went to your nice independent bookseller and ordered it in. Just buy the book and it's got all the links for where to find us in there.

SPEAKER_00: 44:01

All the links are there, the deliberately the links to the work that Dulcie and I do. So if you go to the fifty twoproject.com, the minds think it out, my company of again, that's very much an associate community platform and group that's very deliberate, very much a heart of what we do together. We explore, we're constantly challenging ourselves in that way and be excited and excited by stuff. And then the other places and LinkedIn actually for Dulcie and I, and I appreciate that's not for everybody, but in terms of business stuff that we're doing and interactions that we're having, then LinkedIn's a great place for laugh as well.

SPEAKER_02: 44:31

Is if you look at me up on Instagram. I was about to say that's not a bucket science on Instagram. You can actually see me taking the cold shower to extremes in the North Sea in a bikini in January. Oh my goodness. I'm not a coloured person, I'm normally really near shall I'd be fired, but I've discovered a rich seam now of endorphins.

SPEAKER_01: 44:48

So um that's we need to create a new ice bucket challenge, I think. Uh Dolce challenges every day.

SPEAKER_00: 44:54

Reach out to us, we'd love to hear from you. You know, both the things that you're doing, the successes, challenges that you might be having. You know, we try our best to answer all the sort of contact that we have. So you imagine we're pretty busy doing stuff and it is great. But you, the people listening, the people going through stuff, as you as Amanda and Christian, I'm sure it'll be the same. That's what we do it for. So when we hear stuff, how you're doing, challenges that you're going through, that makes it real. That means we're applied in what we're doing, and it helps us to do the work that we're doing, which is hopefully making a difference to people.

Dr Amanda Potter: 45:21

Amazing. Thank you. So just to confirm, the book is called DOS, Personal Prescriptions for a Happier Life and 52 Science-Based Ways to Get It. So I hope everyone buys it.

SPEAKER_01: 45:31

Thank you, Amanda. Thank you, Dulcie, thank you, Ian, for such an engaging conversation. I know we've mentioned uh psychological safety and habits and habit formation in the course of this conversation. So please check out um some of our former podcasts on those topics. And also we're welcome to visit the website to download our white paper on psychological safety, for example, from the Zircon website, or feel free to contact us on hello at btalent.com. So thanks very much, everybody.

Dr Amanda Potter: 45:58

See you.

SPEAKER_01: 45:59

Thank you.

Dr Amanda Potter: 45:59

Hope everyone has a wonderful and successful day. Thank you. Bye.