Welcome, everybody. I'm Doctor Libby Kim Karen, and I teach human behaviour and business psychology, and I coach people to peak performance, and I help them get unstuck and survive difficult times and come out the other side. And have we ever needed that more than right now?

I also train teams of vets across the country. My letters are, equally vetty. For those of you that haven't met me before, I'm here to help you avoid.

The PTSD, which is going to hit a large swathe of our population by giving you some tools for your toolbox to pull out over the next rocky 6 months. So I hope that makes sense. I was here last March as we went careering into that horrible, shocking first lockdown, and the ever lovely webinar vet have invited me back to reprise material in light of the current situation.

So our subtitle is this. I'm going to be on for about 35 minutes before they're moving into the action steps to take, because neuroplasticity is amazing. But I'm gonna talk first before I give you the tools, because it's really important to prime your brain so that you know the why behind the what and the how you need to do.

Otherwise, you just won't do the what and the how. So I'm deliberately gonna keep the slide deck light so you can sit back and relax as everyone is suffering from Zoom fatigue. Everyone is exhausted after a year of living this new reality.

And that's something we shall cover as to how to manage this. And we're going to start forming some positivity around the situation for you. So if that sounds good, please switch on the curiosity button in your brains and take notes, like you're gonna have to teach this to somebody you love, because that engages your neurology in a really positive way.

And let's go. So, well done on signing up to this webinar in the first place. I congratulate you.

It means you are already using your neurology in a really positive way, rather than the two extremes of head in the sand or everyone's gonna die. I'll go a bit more into depth about where those come from in a moment. But for now, let's get started and let's celebrate you being here, because as ever, my path through this material is from Lived experience.

I got my vet degree from Cambridge, where they're mean enough to make you do another degree for fun whilst you're there. So I plumped for a degree in biological and biomedical sciences as the least worst choice with my major in behaviour and the neural mechanisms of behaviour. And I sensibly decided to fit in having a baby whilst writing that first dissertation.

And then here she was when I then finally graduated as a vet. And why am I telling you this? It's not to impress you.

It's to impress upon you that if you manage your mindset, you can manage whatever happens to you or around you. Everything I'm going to tell you today is scientifically proven evidence, and these are methods that I've personally lived, trialled, tested, and proven works. So as a As a, as a way of teaching it, I, this is evidenced by me actually making out the door with a fold at foot, obviously, because that's not easy to do.

And I'm now bringing you what I learned and what I also go and teach the corporate world to help you, because now is the time to help yourself, guys. You're so busy helping others and their animals. This is for you.

I'm gonna teach you how. And the great news is, This stuff really, really works. And I say that knowing how stressed everyone is, knowing how exhausted everyone is.

So, sit back, enjoy. Here we go. And by the way, I didn't actually realise how much I'd enjoy this first degree that I did there, or how much it would become my life.

And now I actually do more of this than actual vetting. I'm a classicist. I want to know why people do what they do from a biochemical perspective.

And I also focus on how to tilt people's behaviour and affect behavioural change. And I now speak on this all over the globe. I'm a TEDx speaker on behavioural change and effective leadership.

So I'm going to split today into three chunks, as that's the easiest way to understand this. We've got effectively, these periods of time. I'm gonna talk about what happened then.

So that's last Jan to June, then what's happening now? So from July to Jan, and then what's going to happen next? March to July, and we'll be covering these three distinct phases now stress responses to them.

What happens in February is anyone's guess. We're just ignoring that. So these three present us with different behaviours and stress responses.

So what do we mean by that? The term stress actually encompasses three distinct pieces. So the first is changes.

So these are changes in our environment or stimuli in our habitual patterns that cause stress. So we're gonna call those our stress or wars. We then have our responses to those, and that's the physiological and the psychological responses.

We call those the stress response, which then splits into a further 3, which is behavioural, cognitive and physical. I'll come back to those. Then we have the final effect of all of these things, and these are called results.

So this is the mental disruption and bluntly, the diseases that result from an overstimulation of the physiological and psychological responses. And so we call that one the chronic stress effects. And that's the reason we're here today.

So, once we're clear on these, then we can fix it. Phase one, let's go. So this is a really interesting article for anyone that wants it.

When an animal detects a stress or, so this is a change or a stimulus in its environment, it initiates a stress response. The physiological aspects of this stress response are mediated through two endocrine systems that you will probably remember from the wonder. That is 2nd year neurology and endocrinology.

Don't worry, we aren't going back there. I would not be that cruel. So we've got our catecholamine hormones that are adrenaline and noradrenaline, or epinephrine and norepinephrine, if you're listening to me from the States.

These get flooded out from the adrenal medulla really fast, and that's the butterflies. Your tummy, sudden shock, commonly termed fight or flight response. There's actually more.

There's fight, flight, freeze, friend. So that's when you span you up and you roll over and show your tummy. Please don't hurt me, or flop, which is play dead.

So these are our options and depending on your brain type, dynamo blaze, temper or steel, they have numerous effects. On behaviour, metabolism in the the cardiovascular system. But on a longer term stress response, which is what we're interested in today, we have the glorious hypothalamic pituitary axis, the HPA cause me no end of trouble in the second year.

I love it now. And this causes the glucocorticoid hormones to flood out from the adrenal cortex in a longer phasic response, and these interact with your intracellular receptors. They start to initiate gene transcription.

And this production of new proteins means that glucocorticoids have a delayed but more sustained effect than the immediate catecholamines. So the glucocorticoids orchestrate a wide range of responses to the stress that these have direct effects on behaviour, metabolism, energy trafficking, reproduction, growth, and the immune system. The sum total of both of these pathways of response.

Is designed to help the animal survive a short term stressful stimulus, however, and here's a kicker, under conditions of long term stress, the glucocorticoid mediated effects, so that's all around this side. Begin to become maladaptive, they can lead to disruption and disease. And guess why we're all here today?

Because we felt that, right? We're living that. So we need to start to work with our brains.

And my work is all under the heading of tame your brain. The book is coming, the book is coming. And it's all about how to learn enough about these biochemical disasters that happen to us on, on a daily basis of long time.

Misalignment or stress for using that big word so that we can make a difference, because the alternative is pretty dire. So to recap on our first webinar and the subject in April last April, for those who didn't see it, there are several areas we have to be aware of in our responses to stress. These are our big three.

These are cognitive, physical, and the behavioural stress responses. So these are what we do as a result of all that chemical flood. So let's go.

We'll start with the behavioural, and let's unpack those briefly as our stress responses matter hugely, hugely in us interpreting the behaviour of others. So the behaviour of those we see around us. So, in phase one of the January to June last year, we saw huge shifts in habits.

Things like the way we shopped, changed, how we worked, how we commuted. The children who are normally in school suddenly crashed into a home. Homes at times, we'd have been away working and yet there we all are together.

And this changed really basic functional things like how many people you had to feed at lunch. So, how we ate changed. How we drinked changed.

Some borderline alcoholic, hands up. If you just rolled around in your pyjamas all day waiting for that first glass of wine, yeah, that was me for about a month. And, you know, some of us didn't even put on a bra for 6 weeks.

Some people hid in bed, some went into avoidance behaviours, and they just went to ground. Work habits meant that Zoom was the new black, and probably some of you have never been on Zoom before that. And these were huge shifts here, guys.

We've kind of forgotten that now. But this thing causes an alteration in our cognitive change. So we've got this negative risk going on.

We've got this risk of death, which I'll talk about a bit more in a minute because we do have to touch on that. This meant for lots of people, they went into very protective behaviours. People got very aggressive online because when I'm scared, I'm scary is a way to think about it.

Aggression is a form of dealing with the world around you, dealing with threat. There was huge debates going on about mask or no mask, stay in or go out, school or no school. It was a war.

I saw ranting, picking fights, arguments, very strongly held opinions that cannot in any way be called fact, presented as such that I had to then sit on my hands to not reply to you. Rule number one, do not row with strangers on the internet. There was a huge amygdala hijack going on, and we couldn't run away from the threat, so we couldn't go into flight mode.

And friending it wasn't an option, so we were left with fight, freeze, or flop. So far so ugly, right? All that cortisol causes to overload dramatically.

But then we got to the interesting bit, and I just refer you to this empty shelf up here. So if you remember, First, we needed broad-based ways of channelling this overload, this stress and anxiety. So at the start of the crisis, we had this preparation phase with a lot of anxiety, and that that resulted in, who remembers the great toilet roll famine of March 2020.

Yeah, you know why? There was one article printed by the Daily Mail detailing how in Wuhan, the originating region for COVID, they'd run out of toilet roll. And why?

Because that was where the manufacturing was decimated because they couldn't get the people into work there because they're all in lockdown. And this is a bulky item. It's got a low return on investment.

So we work on a swift supply chain. It's just one of those things that we do. So we only hold like one day's stock at any, in any one shop.

And so, when the manufacturing stopped, cue the rest of the world reading, Oh, in lockdown, you shall run out of toilet paper. They started to clear the shelves of more toilet roll than they could use in a year. Which interestingly is 49 rolls per person in China and 141 for some reason per person in the USA.

What do they do? But this was also a very conditioned symbol of safety. This is an anti repugnance device.

So, we have a repugnance response. Which is there to save us from disease and germs. We were being told there's a massive threat of disease and germs.

We locked and loaded on this big, visible Western version of safety, which is our beautifully packaged toilet roll, because we had no concept of what to do without any. And it created this, this panic run on the bank of toilet rolls between 24th of March to 24th of Feb to March 10th. So, This was also at the point at which something really exciting happened, and we began to switch systems.

But before that, there was this physical response as well where people They weren't sleeping well. They weren't eating properly. They, they were so anxious, it affected their physicality.

People had very severe dreams. They had, symptoms like headaches and stress response, symptoms actually coming out of them. But then, as I say, we switched systems.

So what happened then? When our threat systems get activated, we have emotional thinking happens. We stop using our executive brain, we become very chimp, and I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute.

Threats get this fight or flight reaction. It's all the HPA axis. And to put it another way, we do aggressions or avoidance like hiding in bed was the classic, .

And then we went instead to over here to our drive system. We entered a phase where our adrenal cortex had enlarged to cope. So by the end of March, we went into the heroic phase.

Does anyone remember that? We hit our dopamine button repeatedly in order to feel better. Do you remember making a rainbow to put in your window, painting rocks and leaving them for people to find?

Everyone on your doorstep clap for carers, we built in our own reward systems as it feels so relentlessly exhausting otherwise to live over here. So we went into this drive system. And we had this, we're all in this together feeling.

I hope this is beginning to make sense, guys, because when we know why we do something, we can change stuff in order to feel better. We want to move back into power, more, more parasympathetic systems more frequently than sympathetic. This is our hug and heal.

This is our rest and repair. And if we're constantly living, jumping between these, which is what we did in phase one of the then of the January to June, it's exhausting. And this is where we get to make it better, right?

So, this is where I'm leading you today and stay with me because I know this is all very sciencey at the moment, but we have this phasic response, and our adrenals are designed to quickly react in the alarm phase, which causes anxiety, where we dump all this supply of stored hormones into the blood. Then we move to this resistance phase where the adrenal cortex actually gets bigger. Which is our hero phase.

We suddenly feel like we can cope. So there was that lovely feeling of, oh, actually, we haven't died yet and we're fine, and we can deal with stress in a better way. But then, after that, after continued stress, we get symptoms similar to the alarm phase.

So you might be looking at yourself going, why am I feeling so rubbish? Why am I? And it's because your adrenal glands have shrunk back down, guys.

And we've had, we've come off the cliff top, but we've gone into the valley of despair. And we've now got an increased inability to cope with stress, because we're not designed to live under continual stress. Why?

Because this happens. We get to the point where stress makes you stupid. So if you are feeling flaky and inconsistent and you can't prepare for things, it's because your brain doesn't know what's happening next.

It doesn't know what to tell you. If you are feeling that fatigue and exhaustion, it's because your oxygenated glucose is being sucked up at a higher rate. So your brain just runs out of gas.

If you are Feeling that you just can't get your brain to switch and you're like looking at yourself going, come on. I used to be able to do this. Yeah, your brain has stopped the blood flow to your prefrontal cortex, so that you can't use it so that we can stay in this coping mode or fight or flight, or freeze friend or flop.

We're, we're doing it on purpose, guys. This also has a a resulting block on your creative cortexes. You, you divert all that energy, all that blood flow to a very narrow tunnel vision of survival.

And guess what? That means that we don't actually give a flying one of anything longer than a very short term window of time. So your goals, your plans, your dreams.

They might be entirely shelved. You might go, you might get to Friday every week and just go, Oh, is that another week? Really?

Yeah, there's a reason for that. And it's because your belief system has shifted. And a reminder, beliefs are so powerful.

Our beliefs drive everything we do. Everything we do is based on your mindset and beliefs, because why these drive your behaviours? Which drive your communications.

And by communications, I mean with your external, that's your colleagues, your work, your your family around you and your internner. So what beliefs did we have to reshape? Well, a little, a little reminder of what happened to move us from phase one to phase two.

There was a big event that happened, which is called Cumming's Gate in about April, which affected us collectively as a, as a nation. We all got to say, oh, well, it can't be that bad then and he got away with it. Data tracking from this time guys shows behaviour change from that point onwards compliance dropped.

So we changed our belief a little, because we got so scared when it hit, because this was a virus that challenged us at a real base level. And then the events of April, May, June made us think, oh, maybe we, we can change our beliefs now. Maybe it's not so scary.

So here's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you look at our base layer, based on Maslow, his original hierarchy is still used today, even though it was You know, years old, years old. The mainstream psychologists still use it despite being ancient, because Maslow states very clearly, only when your base layer of needs are met, may you ascend to work on your next layer of needs.

And these are needs, not wants. Only when you meet this layer, can you go up to the next level. So there were a lot of partnership problems this year.

There were a lot of people getting forced into a small space. With someone they love dearly, but you lose this layer because there were other threats. There were threats to jobs.

There were threats to body. And look at this. Threats to breathing, you know, how, how base level does this virus attack us in our sense of safety?

It's a huge threat, guys. So if you feel unsafe, you forget all about grand ideas like helping others, feeling good about yourself, creation. You just descend, you slide back down until all the boxes are ticked and you can begin to feel safe again.

And so when you're not sleeping, when you're not eating well, when you, you're, you're struggling to buy food from a shop, that's a huge threat level, and that's where we get these regressions. You see it a lot in damaged kids. You know, they, they start wetting the bed, they start being afraid of the dark.

They go back layers until they go to the last place they felt safe. And so you sometimes See baby behaviours in a grown up child because it makes them feel safer. So we had this virus challenges, we had in April this response to negative threat.

We all thought death was a possibility, but we couldn't remain there, so we changed our beliefs. So we moved to believing, if I do this level of safety, it should be it should be OK. So phase 2 now, and going back to our original little map of our three things that we're talking about, phase 2 had a lot of coping behaviours built into it.

We talked about our responses, our behavioural change. We talked about cognitive change. We now need to talk about the physical responses that we, that we had.

So moving on from looking at the stressors to our stress responses, and then our response to long term chronic stress. So before we do that, let me introduce you to my cupboard. And this is a real, a real picture, which, when I'm on stage in large conferences, people crack up at because it makes me like a complete twit.

I am willing to put this out there. I'm willing to show you what I do to keep myself safe. Because there's things in here that I don't want to run out of.

There's things that are, you know, really annoying if you run out of them. My old life used to be travelling the country, living out of hotel rooms whilst I Train vets and teams in practise, speak on big corporate stages, speak on, big conferences like the SAVA. It's all changed.

So how does this affect how we behave? Well, my cupboard looked like this because getting back at midnight after a speaking gig means you do not fancy a quick jaunt around Tesco. You are not in during the week to receive a home delivery, so you start changing your behaviour.

You build a strategy, right? Because for me, it's not OK to run out of these things. I need them all.

So, I discovered them, you know, that I've got none of X, Y, or Z when I get back late exhausted. That doesn't serve me. So this picture gives me certainty.

Why is certainty important? Well, let me ask you, are you sitting comfortably? Are you in your chair at your desk, or maybe you're listening to me in your kitchen, but I just want, wherever you are, guys, play along.

Just look up at your ceiling. And just imagine. Just for a moment, imagine you, you're looking up and what would happen to your posture and your breathing and your heart rate if suddenly there was a creaking sound and a trickle of dust came from a crack that appeared from the edge of your ceiling and rapidly ran to just above your head.

How would that change how you behave if your ceiling was about to fall down? How would your body behave differently? What would your mind do?

If we take away that certainty, currently you have certainty in you, now you're looking there, aren't you? Currently, you have certainty in your ceiling, so you sit and you breathe a certain way. You behave a certain way.

As soon as we take away that certainty, you are going to behave differently. You will move differently because different brain circuitry kicks in. Your HPA is triggered, those adrenaline surges that we talked about earlier happen.

It changes your blood flow. You stop being creative and dreaming about your goals, you immediately think about survival. It's blood flow, it's heart rate, it's respirate.

Feelings make chemicals, is my point, guys. How you feel really matters, guys. And, and here's the thing, we all need certainty, and it's the one thing that's been taken away from us in spades for the last year.

It's one of the highest of our human needs. Everyone's got a slightly different hierarchy of these 6 and I'll just pop up the rest so that you can see. Depending on your brain type, you will need these more or less than other things.

And so, When we're challenged so much in certainty, and this, by the way, is a slightly updated model from Maslow, it's more recent, just losing certainty on its own, guys, is enough to freak out your brains, but there's of course way more to it than that, right? We had a lot of variety going on, but we lost the ability to vary our lives by going on holiday, by travelling, by seeing friends, by going out to dinner. We lost connection, and that hurts blazes.

If you're blaze like me, that's lethal. We lost those links to our tribe and our, and our village and our extended family. We lost the chance for growth when conferences shut down.

We lost the chance to contribute by doing volunteer work. There were losses at every level on this map. So have a look at that list, see what you think are your two bigger values, because it matters.

So The next thing, I just briefly put this up, this is what I specialise in is, is I'm a flow consultant and I'm all about helping people understand what drives them in their neurology because it's different for everybody. You've got different balance of these percentages. These are the four brain types that we run by.

In talent flow profiling. I'm doing a masterclass on this soon if anyone wants it, who's listening to this, I'm a big fan of the webinar vet, so I'll give that to you for free. Just drop me an email.

It's [email protected], and I'll ping that over to you if you want to know more, or if you want your own profile done, let me know. This is like a Blueprint to take the stress out of your life.

If you know this stuff, then suddenly you can get into flow and literally make your subconscious shut up the chatter and begin to work with you, not against you. It stops the doubts and fears that you have as soon as you know your flow type. And this is so exciting for me as a business professional, and I watched my business rocket overnight when I learned this material.

So, It's the same as disc or Mys Briggs or PRISM. This tool just makes more sense as to how we interact with people and how we talk to people who are not like us. And we look at how to use that in peak performance in teams and in leadership models by keeping you in flow, keeping you using.

The bit of your brain that is where you're good at it. So how, I don't know if you can spot yourself in these if you've listened to me enough talk about this before, but dynamos are that head in the clouds, that high energy. They're always thinking ahead, what's new, what's coming.

They love the VIP treatment. They love being significant, but they like success. They like results because they've got this vision.

They're really rubbish at knowing when and where, because that's not their flow, that's not their skill set. So they'll be walking out their shoulder, walking out of the room, talking to you over their shoulder about their next great idea. And you're like, Sorry, what?

And they've just had another 3 great ideas in the shower that morning, and they tell you about them, even though you're right in the middle of something else. But dynamos are, are so engaged with themselves and what's going on. They're a mix between introvert and extrovert.

So there'll be 1 minute, talk, talk, talk, and the next minute they'll need to go and lie down in a darkened room. And we have a lot of our practise. Owners in that dynamo space, equally a lot of them are in the steel space if we come round to the steel area, and I was an MC at a big conference a year ago and we profiled the whole room of about 200 people, and 70% of our industry is steel.

With a hefty dose of dynamo. So vets are very steely. It's all about data.

It's all about risk averse. You want the micro picture, so you can zoom in. It's literally lifting the bonnet and tweaking and making it better.

You're always about, you know, minimising uncertainty. So you'll always be covering your back and thinking about the return on time and investment. You don't want risk, you like to have a warranty.

You hate to waste time and money. And so you hate that sort of unannounced change because it's, it's Not your flow. Equally, tempos down at the bottom there.

They're all about that, the when and the where. They want that look, and they're very kinesthetic. They're very here and now.

They want a step by step plan. The worst nightmare is being asked, brainstorm your 10 best ideas right now. They like, they like time to build their plan and make it perfect, cause they're very perfectionist.

And they've got a spreadsheet with a list of a list, you know. And they, they want to help everybody. They want that consistency and that context and that timing.

And our final one, the blazes, which are interesting because we get blaze vets. They're the ones that love to talk all day. They're really happy in the consult room.

They're all about the people. They're more people in process. So if you can recognise yourself here, that, that blaze energy is, is the interesting one because it's, it's more about managing the people that is the animal sometimes, although they connect.

Hugely with everything and everyone around them, but they care about that personal journey. So, why did this happen in, in phase one that we were all thrown? Because it hit all of these four brain types in different ways.

It doesn't matter what your brain type was, you were affected. Dynamo's lost the chance to vision and have their plans because they went into short term mode. Blaze has lost all that connectivity and all that.

People Variety and that, that fun that is essential to them. Tempo's lost the certainty, tempos lost that of the, that consistency that they crave. They hate unannounced change.

They can't plan. It ruins their day. Steals lost their risk aversion.

Protection layer. Suddenly everything was a risk. So all of these four brain types were effective.

And why? Because COVID is what we call a wicked problem. So in this phase one, we were learning.

We had no data and again for our industry, horrific and A wicked problem is something that we haven't met before, is something that we don't have a nice solution to. It is the unknown in a nutshell. And wicked problems, which is a a project management phrase.

I do a lot of project management with big corporate clients and change management in in sort of company-wide schemes, and we try and turn wicked problems. In time problems. Tames are linear.

They have a start and an end point. We know the steps. We've met it before.

We've worked with teams before. We've done this. Wicked problems, however, require intensive learning and then behaviour change to fix them, and that's why they're so hideously disruptive to our thought patterns because they can push you out of your comfort zones.

And we've got with tame problems, this lovely bit of our brain that works for us called the nucleus accumbens. This decides our towards behaviours and away from. So it's based on fear and desire.

We know which bit of our brain to activate in a tame problem. We don't, with a wicked, we Don't know if we should be running screaming or moving towards. So our nucleus accumbens gets confused.

And so we start to have pain associated with a lot of our behaviours. There was a lot of pain about, do I send my kids to school? Do I work from home?

Do I ask to be furloughed? Do I stay in? We've got, we're still going through that now, aren't we?

So, wicked versus tame is a really important distinction to have. And what's interesting, I work with, Entrepreneurs. I run two Facebook groups.

One's called The Sisterhood for Entrepreneurs, and then there's another one called the Veterinary Entrepreneur Training Club. Why? Because I worked out very early on, us vety types, your sciencey brains.

You don't do what you're told, unless you know the why. That's why there's, there's this preamble before I get to the action points for you, because I have to tailor my messages and training to you to give you steely. Types, much more data around it.

Otherwise, you won't do it. I know you. I know you by now.

I was speaking at BSAVA this year on this too, on how to effect behaviour change. So when I'm working with entrepreneurs, I'm usually building their businesses for them, with them and around them. And I'm working with individuals where we have to first make the uncomfortable.

The new comfortable. Why? Because this is where the growth happens.

Only when you step outside, it's only 2% will do this, guys. Only 2% are brave enough to go over this line. 98% of people never achieve their full potential.

That's another Maslow fact from you. I have to get people brave enough to know what this feels like to step outside their comfort zone. First, because only then can the growth happen.

If you stick with what you know, you cannot ever reach the next level in business. And what got you where you are isn't what gets you to the next level. The thinking that got you here today, you need to change it to ascend the next level of the enterprise prison.

That's another big subject that maybe Anthony will get me to do a webinar on one day. I use this analogy a lot. When you think about tennis or golf, this really makes sense, because if you just stay in the, I'm just gonna bat the ball.

Over the net. I'm just gonna hit the golf ball as far as I can do it, or skiing. I'm just gonna stick to the green ones.

Think about that. You're never going to improve. You might, in tennis, for example, you, you'll bat the ball back over the net endlessly to someone less good than you.

Guess what happens? It begins to get a little dull, right? So, if the challenge is too low for the skill we have, we move into this place called boredom.

And what we have to do is up the challenge beyond our skill to push it back up. Ideally we want to be in flow, but usually what happens first is it becomes a bit anxious. We feel a bit anxious and.

The trouble is, when we've got too much challenge, when we've got too much stress, when we're too much low on skills, low on knowledge, we get too anxious to then get back into this flow state. Here is our danger zone, guys. It's better to be bored than anxious when you're talking about long term stress, because as soon as we're in anxiety, it becomes harder to uncouple from those chemical floods that we've initiated.

Why? Because newsflash, a large number of you will be, you know, it's not about tennis. It's not about skiing, is it?

It's about trying not to die. It's about trying to keep you and your family safe. It's about trying desperately to communicate with that client that's in your car park with the traffic rushing by, and you can't hear and you can't lip read because of the masks, and they're stressed out cause it's a PTS that you're talking about and you're stressed out cause you don't want them to have to, it's pretty bloody hideous right now, guys.

I get it. I get it. But flow is this path of least resistance.

It's literally like water, when a river just goes around a boulder. It's this balance between challenge and skill. If we can get you back into this flow state, you remember that feeling where, and it's not a tension this state, and Victor Frank.

Talks well about this. He survived a Nazi concentration camp and said, what man actually actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather, the striving and struggling for a goal that's worthy of him. The trouble is you guys have begun to feel the goal is not worthy of you at the moment.

And you can't get this loss of self-consciousness when you're completely absorbed in activity, which is this state of flow. Unless you see, number one, the activity is voluntary and enjoyable, so it's intrinsically motivating, and it requires a skill and be challenging, fit for your skill, but not too challenging, so that you move out of flow. And there must be clear goals towards success.

I get the feeling our industry doesn't know what success looks like at the moment, other than a, trying not to die, and B, just getting through each week. And so we're, we're losing this flow state as an industry. We're missing out on these feelings of that complete loss of self-consciousness, which in retrospect you can say, yeah, I've really enjoyed that.

And we're not getting into flow enough. So I'm gonna urge you, find out what brain type you are, work out what flow is for you, because here we all are. We were in that phase of high anxiety, Jan to June.

We then moved to this phase that we're in now, what we call now. We can call that the disillusionment phase when we're too tired. We've been out of flow for too long.

It's now harder to get back to flow state, to get to that calm. And what happens next? We're moving to this exhaustion, aren't we?

I read a very sad post yesterday that shall remain confidential because they always are in these closed Facebook groups, but of someone just so exhausted, they're just in tears on the way home, and someone else so exhausted that, and I had a couple of p.m.s and thank you guys that reached out to me.

I'm always here for anyone that wants to chat. And, you know, some people are just like, how do I feel better cause I can't keep doing this, and I get it. I really get it.

And so we need to move you from this disillusioned exhaustion, which is where we're hovering now in this current lockdown to recovery. So what does that look like? Well, here comes the good news.

I've promised, I've talked about 30 minutes on, on this piece. I'm now going to give you the good stuff. Let's talk about what we can do, guys, and thank you for listening.

Congratulations on being here cause I'm gonna give you these tools that now you know why you need to use them. I really, really, really hope you will. So, let's go.

Let me introduce you to our Raz. It's our reticular activating system. The Raz is busy filtering your environment based on what you believe to be important.

This is called confirmational bias. So we only see what we're looking for. Epigenetics also shows behaviour can be changed by your environment and therefore the switching on and off of genes.

We touched on this earlier with how cortisol regulates protein control and your nature is created by your nurture. I wish I'd had more time to zoom in on just that bit because it's fascinating. But what you need to know is that you now have so much more experience on this novel wicked problem.

Very soon we will have enough data to move out of the I don't know what to do phase into the having a toolkit of options available to you. So some of you may have built some great coping strategies and habits. Next, you get to actually feel good about them.

The cortisol drops, those spikes level out, and you get back to that dopaminergic system we mentioned earlier and into that parasympathetic. So I'm gonna give you some quick wins, but I've now tolded you up with ways to recognise what you're feeling, because again, newsflash, some people as, as we move into this exhaustion and recovery phase, they're going to have, for example, disrupted grief. I'm speaking to someone who has, had to say goodbye to a family member without a funeral.

And I'm speaking to someone who right now has a mother who went into the hospital with a, with a stroke and then has caught COVID and is now in the ICU. On ventilation. And so I'm talking to someone who understands what it's like.

I'm living this with you guys. There is a risk of PTSD for all of us because we park this when we can't deal with it. I'm a professional.

I'm turning up here to record this because this is what I've agreed to do. So I can't feel those feelings just now. I'll feel those in a bit.

I will deal with those in a bit, but we have to deal with them. We have to know what to feed in, and our reticular activating system is our friend. So, in the meantime, here's my car.

And have you ever had this feeling where you, you buy a new car and then suddenly you're seeing it everywhere on the roads all around you. And was that car there before? Yes.

Did you notice it? No, because it wasn't relevant. Philtres help make sense of your environment because of the volume of data.

We've got 14 billion neurons firing at 450 MPH. It's using up your oxygenated glucose to have firing that you don't need. So our brain chooses for us based on our belief systems.

And your belief systems. Remember we said earlier that your beliefs drive your behaviours which drives your communications. As we turn over this year anniversary.

Your brain is going to have so much more data going saying, oh, well, this appears to just be the way it is then, and we're gonna lose our emotional chimp responses. So a brief summary of the mighty chimp, for those of you that don't know the chimp yet, get on boards, brilliant books, a really good one to read right now, the chimp paradox. And it's a simplified model of the brain.

And it's 3 systems. Some don't like it because it's cartoony. I love it because it's a really easy way of putting it down for people with these ideas that we've got a big clever brain at the front, the prefrontal dorsolateral cortex, and we are very clever and we like to think we use this all the time.

And actually, we don't. What our frontal cortex does is reference our computer, references our human Google. So the computer is our data store, this is where we hold knowledge, this is where we hold facts.

And that thing ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer, yeah, that's because of this. If you go around asking yourself, why am I so rubbish? Why am I so tired?

Your brain will come up with pretty stupid answers. If you ask yourself a more powerful question, and I love getting people to do this in their, in my 1 to 1 work with them, helping them grow their businesses, you know, turn it around, reframe it. Instead of asking that, ask yourself, how can I build more energy?

How can I nurture myself, soul and body and heart to be more present for my kids? How can I find ways to be more productive and proactive so that I'm left with more time to rest and repair? So these are examples of how We can use our neurology so much more healthily than we perhaps do by default.

And then we've got a lovely chimp right in the middle. This is our limbic, and our chimp is hilarious. So, the chimp is 5 times faster and 5 times stronger than our frontal.

It rushes in there. Imagine you going into a supermarket, you probably go with a list of the things you'd like to take off the shelf if they're there. The chimp runs in, heads straight for the chocolate, knocks everything off the shelf, you know, grabs 48 toilet rolls.

The chimp is your base layer behaviour. And there's two pathways. We've got these parallel pathways, we can go down.

In our life. And the chimp acts, it's the law of the jungle. It's an emotional pattern.

It's reactive. It's survival. Whereas our prefrontal cortex is all about logic, evidence-based, fact-driven, but it can only reference what we know, hence our reticular activating system being our friend.

The jungle creates more anxiety because we're using our instincts. Our instincts are designed to put a healthy dose of anxiety in there to cause us to jump one with the other. To cause us to make a decision.

So it's really interesting. Our human, however, wants to follow the law, wants to live under self-control, doesn't want to steal all the toilet rolls from the shelf so that Mrs. Meggins down the road can't get any.

But unfortunately our chimp sometimes takes over, and that's why people were doing that in that first phase. And As we think about this, as we think about societal learning, societal building, our whole society's been through such a pathway, guys, that we're gonna have more evidence base, we're gonna have more fact driven. You're listening to me tonight because you want more facts, you want more ways around it.

You don't want to be that gut reaction, knee jerk pattern that we all did to start with. So, where does learning start? And this is a lovely example of where we get our references from it.

Its Usually our tribal cycle. We watch big people do it when we're little people, and we form our patterns. So, depending on your brain type, you will be more or less governed by your parents leading you to either repeat or reject.

That's what we tend to do. And look at that. It's like, do I do it like this?

Like, like this? I'm bored now. I kill you, I hit you.

And the kitten's got limited attention span for learning, so it has to still figure things out for itself. And it has to Make it up as it goes along, and we're still in that zone, aren't we? Of looking around for a more adulty adult than us and realising we're the adult in the room and we've got to just muscle up.

So as you go through these phases, guys, as we go from this disillusionment to exhaustion to recovery, be kind. Treat yourself like this little kitten, because you are still learning. Be nice to yourself, listen to your voices and understand as you talk to yourself, as you self talk.

Would you say that to a friend? Because we need to be kind to ourselves. So I'm gonna come to a close now, gonna move to this 5 to thrive and give you this toolbox.

Brief warning though. Watch out for this, because this is the one thing that will stop you from succeeding if this phrase pops up as I'm saying any of these next 5 things. This phrase, the biggest danger to you right now is this phrase.

Oh, I know that. Yeah, you might know it, but are you doing it? This phrase puts you deep into fixed mindset.

And what is fixed mindset? Lovely lady called Professor Carol Dweck, look her up. She literally wrote the book called Mindset.

I've got a massive, massive amount of respect for this lady. She's got 20 years of research behind all of her work. Have a look at it.

But the summary of it is in this following slide for you and your viewing pleasure. And pause this, take a screenshot of it, copy it down. This is the response divergence of the different ways that we respond, depending on whether we're in a fixed mindset or growth mindset to, for example, challenge, obstacles, effort, criticism, the success of others.

There is a huge difference in the way you will behave. Remember that beliefs drive your behaviours, drive your communications. If your belief systems are fixed, you will behave.

In a more negative way than if you are a fully in growth mindset. So have a think about reading this, looking up a bit more on this. Unfortunately, I don't have time to do more on that tonight.

Again, give feedback to wear it if you want more material on this, because this is gold dust and it can change an entire practise overnight as soon as you move them into more above the line thinking and more growth mindset. And this is something you can print and put on your wall. You can just Google growth mindset versus fixed mindset and this graphic comes up.

It's freely available. You can put it above the kettle, and it just goes in by osmosis. It's awesome.

And this is something that's really important to remember as we go through these last 5 slides, guys. And that is that the only thing that is the difference between success and power and staying stuck is action. You can, there is a book on everything.

You can buy a book on everything, but if you buy it and it goes on your shelf, how are you gonna learn it? Osmosis, rubbing it on your face. But if you read it and you decide to take action, that is power that moves you forward, and it will help you to get through this next phase without going into PTSD.

It will help you build habits, behavioural changes. It will help you build cognitive understanding of when and where your behaviours need to shift. It will help you build those physical responses that we all need.

So please remember this, guys. So, let's go. Number one, my first top tip is cockpit.

Set up your cockpit. Imagine you are a fighter pilot about to take off. Get clear on who gets to come in your space, what rules there are, and what boundaries there are around that.

So this applies very, very keenly right now as to are we key workers? Are we not? Do we get furloughed?

Do I have the right to be off for my children's being at home because they won't take them at school. You know, you decide your boundaries, you decide your rules, and Lock those down. Get clear on your home space because you're going to need it.

Zone different areas of the house, put rules about who can go in them and when, so that you can move into different states. We've all got these 4 different energies, as we mentioned earlier. I hope you recognised yourself, but to move from your steely energies where you need organisation and control to your tempo energies, where you need timing to be precise.

So things like dinner, bath, and bedtime if you've got kids. To move to your connectivity spaces, your blaze spaces. What are you gonna build into your week?

Get tools for this, guys. Scarcity is mindset. Have an abundance mindset before you start.

Say, OK, everything is possible. So how do I make it happen? It's a slight, it's a slight twist on just going, Oh, God, I feel so disconnected.

What do I do? It's a slight twist, but just changing that language to, OK, so how could I make this happen if I really wanted to? And then Habit manage.

Energy is your currency. Remember that you are, you are that kitten. Be kind as if you are that little fluffy kitten.

You are learning as you go. Your reticular activating system is frantically peddling behind the scenes going, OK, I've got it now. I think I know what's going on.

So be kind to yourself and just remember that you are. Worthy of whatever care you need to get yourself through this next phase. And I say that with love, cause I know it's hard to remember that when it's so exhausting.

I know it's hard, but just zone in on what can you do for you. Number 2, this is one of the things you can do for me right now. Calm the circuits.

There is a huge amount of data on breathwork. I don't know if you're on Clubhouse yet. If you're not coming to my Sisterhood of Entrepreneurs Facebook group because we do invites in there.

Clubhouse is this new app all about sharing knowledge in an audio sense. It's like a, a continually running radio show and podcast. I've listened to some fan Fantastic experts on breath work.

And this is one of the things that, and I'm speaking to someone who's got through childbirth 3 times using just the power of breathing rather than drugs. And if you do this, there is a chemical switch in your brain. So it has a biochemical effect.

If you can breathe 6 breaths in a minute, in a pattern. So the way we do that is a 2 X times, so a longer out breath and a hold in the middle. So if you're breathing in for a count of 2, you then hold it for 4.

And then you breathe out for 8. This tricks your brain. It fools your amygdala into thinking, 00, wait, we appear to have overridden the panic button I just pressed that was racing heartbeat and high reps.

And apparently everything's fine now. OK, guys, stand down. And so a 248 pattern is amazingly powerful.

So even if you just did this the moment you open your eyes in the morning, And before you go to bed at night, it's really good, but you can also just go and lock yourself in the loo at work and do it there because it has a biochemical switching effect moves you from sympathetic to parasympathetic instantly. The other thing that we can do to calm the circuits is gratitude, and I know that sounds very woo. I understand we're all scientists.

Guys, there is science behind this. It is a beautiful thing. But when we move to gratitude, it changes the neurobiochemistry almost instantly.

20 seconds of gratitude has the effect of the same as, I think it's an hour of sleep. It's Huge. It's a huge effect in the rest and repair mechanisms.

And your attitude is really simple. I use a method calledEPeckle, which stands for a series of 8 questions that you can ask yourself. I teach this to all my coaching clients is a really quick fix.

So have a, have a look at that. Movement. Now, this is a biggie.

The effect of exercise is the same as mind altering drugs. Why? Because it creates mind-altering drugs.

It releases the same stimulation pathways into producing a flood of endorphins that are good for pain relief, mood elevation. They, they're hugely powerful in the body. As one of the big 4, they're one of the main ones that we want to learn how to activate.

It also movement also has the effect of changing your state. So they found that if you do movement in the morning, for example, in a fasted state, it is a massive fat burning way to get your metabolism started. But you should do movement that is not high intensity.

So, Something like high intensity training should be done later in the day when your cortisol levels have risen anyway. So cortisol opposes melatonin. Melatonin is the one that helps us sleep.

So we want our melatonin to be pumping away from 10 at night to 7:30 in the morning. From 7:30, we want to Start to move cortisol back up again. Cortisol, crashes at about 10 o'clock at night.

That's why your cough gets worse. If you've got a, a, an infection and then it goes worse all overnight, and then 67 in the morning, it begins to rise again as you get ready for your day. So, when we move, we also do this other amazing benefit, which is lymphatic movement.

Our lymph system is the only one without a pump in the body. It runs on the hydrostatic pressure and the hydrostatic fluid in the capillary bed coming out of the blood vessels at the end of the capillary bed and then moving all of the toxins back in. And therefore, it's driven by blood pressure and the muscular movement around the lymphatic channels.

So the more we move our calf muscles, for example, the better our lymph channels move. And equally hydration, that creates more of the hydrostatic pressure, which is a really easy way to boost your immunity. How cool is that right now?

So, number 3 is move. Just find a way to move every day. And there's been found to be no upper limit for the increase in beneficial effects.

So, and this is where people can do ultra marathons and run a marathon a day, because your body is designed to move. We're not designed to be at a desk. We're not designed to sit there static.

We're designed to move. So whatever you can do to to increase that area is really powerful. Number 4 is, friend, we are not built for social distancing.

Build those relationships, guys, and again, look after you. Particularly if you feel yourself to be ablaze, if you value people more than process, if you hate a spreadsheet, like me, if you're all about lifting other With you, if you're all about, bonding, you know, you're that annoying person in the practise who always wants to chat over the surgery table while the steel is busy stitching up going, why is she still talking? Yeah, that's, that's us.

Join my tribe. We, we need connection. So if you're ablaze, this will be wounding you at a really deep psychological level, equally for dynamos, because you need someone to listen to you.

Tempos are kinesthetics, so they can feel their way through relationships in a totally different way and steals a rather better off in a, in a room by themselves anyway. They're quite happy with their own company, and other people tyre them out, and they've only got a smaller gas tank for it. But if you're ablaze, please listen to this bit and look after your physicality if you aren't able to look after your social networks.

But And again, get on Clubhouse is a great place to connect with people and, and build those relationships and build people around the planet that you can connect with at random times at night, as I found out last night when I was on at 3 in the morning. And my final one for you guys, this is really important, and this is about your interaction with other people. So, particularly for steals, you are the group which are more likely to judge others' behaviours in a way that Fits with your template of the world, you're more likely to perhaps be a bit dismissive of the soft stuff, perhaps not value the people's skills as much as the data side.

And so when you see other people struggling, this is a really great phrase to remember. Behaviour is designed to solve a problem, not be a problem to you. So they're not trying to create.

Stress for you. They're genuinely trying, they're desperate. They're trying to solve their own problems.

So, if someone's bursting into tears, if someone is having an absolute meltdown, have a think about Brain gym. What are they lacking? What of the six human needs are they suffering from?

A lot of clients get angry when They lose their certainty. They get angry when they lose significance. Anger is a great vehicle to get them back to certainty, because they are certain they're right, aren't they?

When they're shouting and table thumping at you down the phone, obviously these days. And so, how can you give that significance to them in other ways? And very Very often you can match a mirror, you can match the volume.

And Mrs. Jones, I understand completely how stressful this is for you. Let me see how we can make this feel better.

I know it's really difficult, blah, blah, blah. So by coming up to their level and then de-escalating with them, you can very often pull them off that high horse they've got themselves on. And think about what you're lacking, and don't believe a thought you think, guys.

Your chimp is in control when we're under stress. It might be just your chimp. You might need to pat it on the head and reframe it.

Because that little chimp is just doing its best. It's just your chimp. Give it a name.

Give it some love, and just understand that it's there for you. It's trying desperately to help you. And think about, am I in aggression or avoidance?

Where am I going? What's my amygdala telling me to do? What, why am I feeling I've just lost something?

What is it I think I've lost and how could I get that another way? So, we need to look at your human needs. Is this crashing my flow?

Has someone just ruined what's really important to me as a blaze, as a dynamo, as a tempo, as a steel? And my final thought for you guys is just remember a plane is off course 98% of its time in the air. And it must course correct all the time, all the time, all the time.

How can it? Because it knows where it's going. Here's the thing, we haven't known where we were going for the majority of the last year.

We've lived without a map. We've lived without a GPS. So your plane has been wavering around in that sky, not knowing where to point its nose.

So we now need to get a, get a map for your nose. As I said earlier, I'm really happy to help with anyone that wants more 1 to 1 attention, please get in touch. My website is really simple.

It's just my ridiculous surname, Kim Karen.com. And I'll happily send you a copy of the slide deck if you want a copy of this, if it's been helpful to you, drop me a line there.

It's Libby at Kimkn.com. And I'd love to connect with you all.

Anyway, you can sign up for my newsletter if you want to stay in touch. I do regular drop in trainings of little bite size neuro hacks to get us all through. So thank you for having me tonight.

This was Disaster Mindset Part two, and I hope you've learned enough about neuroplasticity to have some ideas to get through this zombie apocalypse we're all living in. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Doctor Libby Kim Karen.