Hello, I'm Libby Kim Karen Thompson from Kim and Karen Consulting. I teach behaviour and business psychology. I also coach people to peak performance, and I help them get unstuck or survive one of those difficult times and come out the other side.

So guess why I'm here today. I've also trained teams of vets around the country. These are my letters.

I've obviously qualified as a vet to get those letters, but extraordinary things happened along the way, and now I'm here teaching you, because we're in rather extraordinary times, aren't we? And we're all having to take extraordinary measures to survive. And there are currently, as I, as I say this to you right now, there's 3 billion people in lockdown around the globe.

I've been asked to speak to you today just to make sense of what's going on. And some of the things that are happening to you. And I'll be covering why you should really listen to this and why you really need to take heed of this part of your life, because, bluntly, things are never gonna be the same again.

I'm gonna tell you why I'm sharing some vital tools with you today. And we're gonna get super practical about what you can do, because how you feel and what you feel. Directly impacts your quality of life and the lives of those around you, and we all need to feel better in this moment.

There's a reason you're here today listening to this, and before I introduce myself properly, if we were to try a little experiment here and do a virtual hands up in the room. Who's scared right now? And who's feeling a loss of self right now?

Either a loss of your identity, either your work's changed, or your salary might be changing, or you might be feeling a loss of safety, because guess what? There is an actual, for once, challenge that is death, it's mortal threat. This does things to our body.

The biggest thing that we lose as well is a sense of certainty. And I'm gonna talk to you more about that, because what happens when we get scared. I, it changes how we behave.

So who here, virtual hands up again, who's thought about scarcity this last week? Maybe that's, I may not have a job, I don't have enough money. Who's maybe done some panic buying?

Who's got at least one more packet of pasta in the cupboards than you needed to? Admit it. We're all human.

And I'm here to help you feel better about that today. And By way of introducing myself to you, I'm gonna start by introducing you to the title of today, which is Disaster Mindset, which can otherwise be said to be, how to survive the zombie apocalypse, because guess what, guys, there are big things around the world happening that are all making us feel less safe. We're getting this negative threat coming at us from all sides, and our bodies are reacting.

So, here's my cupboard. And actually, it looked like this before all of this happened. I'm usually to be found travelling the country.

I live out of a suitcase and various hotel rooms. Whilst I go around, I'm usually training vets and teams in practise. Or I'm speaking on a stage, big sort of business corporate conferences.

Right now, actually, I should be at BSABA speaking for a whole day, on behalf of the Smith stream, all about sustainability, which is something I'm really passionate about and something that our industry is sort of. Inching towards, but this is all changed. So why does this affect how we behave?

So let me ask you another virtual little game. Just, just tell me, are you sitting comfortably? Just look above your head, just look up at that ceiling, that's no doubt above you.

Would your posture change if at the edge of that ceiling you suddenly saw a crack appear and dust started coming down and there was an ominous creaking sound. Would you change your body? Would your body behave differently?

Yeah, you bet. You bet. Because we all need certainty.

It's one of our six prime human needs. I'll discuss that later, because we are suddenly being challenged so much, so much in the field of certainty, and that on its own, guys, is enough to freak out your brains in a big way. And there's, of course, way more to it than that, right?

And we'll talk a bit more about the different brain types because we're all vets. That means we like data, we like things where we know where we stand. Guess what?

We don't know anything anymore. We don't know how long this is gonna go on. We don't know how do I live in the meantime.

We don't know what it will look like when we come out the other side. We don't know if we've got a job. We don't know if our house will be safe.

These are big challenges for everybody, and particularly For vets and vet nurses and people in this industry, because we tend to rely on these pieces as part of our identity. So this is my cupboard. This is what I did in response to always being on the road and very rarely having time to shop.

I just gradually built it up so that I'd never would run out of anything. Am I ever grateful for that now? So I'm just gonna remind you of the last time the world reacted to a threat of loss.

There was a big event that happened, and we all will probably remember where we were when the Twin Towers went down. I actually was at a business conference. I was, listening to Tony Robbins, an amazing mentor, and someone who has learned a lot about the brain and the way it works.

And this radically changed our life. But this was just one day. We've now been living in lockdown for weeks.

Our bodies are getting tired. I'm gonna help you with that too, because, and again, because your brains, because your bets, you need to know why you should do something before you'll do it. I get that.

I'm gonna help you with the how and the why, so that you know that you should do the what. So perhaps as you're listening to me, you're one of those small businesses, maybe an independent practise needing that bread and butter worth of vaccinations and claw clippings to balance the books. Maybe you're an individual who's been furloughed now looking at living on this ridiculous reduced income, but thank God you've got some income.

Maybe you haven't got income, you're a locum that's suddenly seen all your bookings vanish overnight, cash flow hurts, right? So I'm gonna teach you some pieces about managing through this, not just to survive, but hopefully to thrive, because how we feel affects not only your quality of life, but those around you, and there are people relying on you, probably to hold them safe as well and hold that space for them. So everything I tell you today.

I have lived, I have trialled, I have tested. And I've proved it works. So, I, in 2001, when the Twin Towers went down, I had a business in the city.

I was doing great. I was a managing consultant, which is basically director level. I was aged 26 when I got to that level.

I was really happy. Then 9/11 happened. Everything changed.

Cash flow to a small business is bloody vital. So, it crashed my business overnight. There was no help available.

I had this choice of, do I put up my house? And it's in the moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. And this was one of those pivotal moments for me.

I decided to be a vet. Whilst I was there, I did a degree in behaviour, which included the neural mechanisms of behaviour. And also, as you can see, decided to fit in having a baby there whilst writing that first dissertation on behaviour.

And then she was here when I graduated and the picture on the right as a vet, there she was. But why am I telling you this? It's not to tell you that I think I'm amazing, it's to tell you and to impress upon you that if you manage your mindset.

You can manage whatever happens to you or around you. It's not what happens to you in life. It's the meaning you give it.

And I'm bringing you what I learned and what I teach in this big corporate world into our lovely vetty community, because guys, we've never needed this more. We're so busy, usually just running around, helping others and their animals. And you know what I mean by that, the days where you, you're too busy to remember you last had a wee on Thursday, you know, when you get a sandwich previous week, Tuesday.

And now, It's time to help yourself. It's time to get really specific about what can I do right now, because how you feel directly impacts your quality of life and the lives of those around you, and we all need to feel better in this moment. So there's a reason you're here listening today.

I hope you get a lot from it. Please do grab a pen, because the more you capture of this, the more you're going to do. Grab a pen, grab a piece of paper and get ready to jot some things down.

Does that sound good so far? I hope that's resonating with some of you, and I hope that's making you realise that there are things you can do. You are not helpless in the situation.

Yes, there are huge threats around you, but there are things that we're going to work towards. This stuff really, really works, is my message. So, what do I make of this?

We are about to enter a period of world reboot. It's like when you've got your Mac open, or your laptop open and you've got too many tabs open. It's like, I can't find it.

Where's where's what I was doing, and you're scrolling through and then it freezes up and everything stops. And then you need to reboot. And it's a really powerful analogy because of the overriding truth behind this.

It's not what happens to you in life, it's the meaning you give it. And if you're seeing this disaster that's happening around us. As just the negative, then yeah, you will feel absolutely terrible.

I'm gonna help you reframe some of that today to start looking and start digging it. What can I do when I reboot, because we're all gonna have to. How can I make it better?

How can I change what I'm doing? How can I shift so that when I reopen my Mac, and you know what it's like with that lovely feeling and all the taps are gone and everything's closed cause you had to, that's what's gonna happen. So, I'm gonna give you a slightly bigger analogy around that.

Because this, what do I make of this question is really pivotal to how we process and how our brain works. So I specialise in the neural mechanisms of behaviour in terms of human beings. Why do people do what they do?

It's fascinated me for the last 20 years and I've. Been studying it for, for all of my life because of being in the city where you do have to influence other behaviours around you, not just your own, but you have to be an influence to teams, to boardrooms, to managing director level. And you get good at communication, obviously, but you also get good at frame up.

And frame up is this. So imagine you're at home. Imagine you're sitting on your sofa, so just get that picture in your mind, and I'm gonna explain why I'm asking you to visualise things in a minute.

Pictures, watch your film, glass of wine in hand. You hear some footsteps upstairs and you hear them coming down. Now imagine you're, you're home with your spouse.

It's a normal evening. And if you put a name on those feelings that you're feeling, you'd probably say something like, I feel safe, I feel calm, I feel happy. Well, depending how much they've wound you up in lockdown, obviously.

And those feelings are whatever come to mind based on that. But now, let's just flick that scenario a bit. Just imagine.

Just imagine for a minute you know you left that bathroom window open earlier, wide open, and you believe yourself to be alone in the house as you sit there with your wine and then you hear footsteps, same stimulus, same neural input, but completely different context. Now, how will your behaviour change? What are you gonna do?

Are you likely to sit there, carrying on watching your film, drinking your wine? Probably not. You're gonna grab a baseball bat, right?

So, what meaning have you given to this? How have you framed this? Beliefs are so powerful, guys.

And depending on your belief set, Everything changes. Everything changes. And so if we look at this picture, and this is a an example I use a lot, you might have even seen it.

If you see one of the Betty talks that I do throughout the year. This is an idea of how we sort of frame things. What do you see?

Have a look at that picture. Now look at that picture. Now, what do you see?

Did you see that before? No, of course you didn't, because your brain filled in the gaps. We have a belief about what should be in that cup, and I'll just flick back so you can see it.

It looks completely normal. It fits normal. Guess what's happening right now, guys?

We have lost normal. Even, let's take the most basic example. Tesco's, you walk into Tesco's and you can't, you probably never noticed other people before, but you can't walk around in the same way.

You can't lift the food off the shelf and place it in your basket in the same way. You can't even pay in the same way. You can't actually queue to get in the shop in the same way, because we never had to queue, did we?

So everything we know. Is changed, and this is a huge change in a behavioural sense. So when we look at what we see now, there's blooming forks everywhere.

Everything's forked up. We've got this real situation where we've got forks appearing in places where there shouldn't be forks, and our body is responding to that. And that piece I said earlier about, you know, we're getting tired, it's because you can't live like this.

You cannot, we are biologically wired to not live like this. As humans, we are also biologically wired not to do social distancing. And depending on your brain type, this will hurt some of you around the square more than others, and I'll explain more about that later.

And so, what I'm gonna talk through today is about what we've changed, what we can do about it. Because the overriding truth is this, and it's really simple. It's really simple, guys, but it doesn't change how powerful it is.

Your beliefs. Set your behaviours, which then set your communications. Your beliefs, set your behaviours, which set your communications.

So me being a behaviour specialist, I straddle this between the beliefs and communications part and I train in both. I train in values. I train whole companies, I train leadership teams.

But if what they want is the output of communications, we always, always, always go back to that belief layer. What is it that your people believe about either your team, your, your vision or whatever it is? Because this is the core tenet of the whole of our behavioural industry.

So what are we going to do today? We're gonna talk about the six human needs, which are really basic and, and they're called needs for a reason. They're not wants, it's not desired.

It's not that you can choose to fulfil these, every person on the planet needs to meet these needs. So we're gonna talk through those because when those get taken away, there is a powerful visceral response to that. We're gonna talk about the thing that's happening at the moment around those six human needs, which is twofold.

We've got the mirror neurons in our brain and what they do, and the threat levels coming at us from all sides. We're gonna talk a little bit about these different brain types, and we call it, it's like, it's sort of based around the principle. If anyone's read the chimp paradox, it's the mind management using the analogy of you having these different types of brains residing, and then there's which side of your brain you use most frequently.

We're gonna touch briefly on fixed mindset and growth mindset. I haven't got enough time to cover that in its entirety today, but if you like the material today, please do feedback and I'll happily come back and do that in another session. And then we're gonna change the world as a result, because guess what?

Whatever you do internally is represented externally and by changing your own little pod, especially now, when you're within your four walls, you can change the complete experience of everybody around you. And that means everyone you live with, everyone you contact and The people that you will meet after this. So, briefly, active learning is something that I do.

The reason I asked you to visualise earlier and the reason I say things like, think about your sofa is it triggers an image in your brain, your brain can't help it. Poor dear. It just goes there.

And the reason we do that is it, it's a different construction of your own understanding, and it means you retain more. It means you get more out of this, and you're listening anyway. My goal is not just to sit here flapping my gums for this time, which will be roughly 45 minutes for those of you that are worried about time.

I'm not going to talk to you all day. This is a one stop shop to give you as much as I can. And old learning was designed to train soldiers.

It was one way they stand and talk at you for 90 minutes and hope that 3 months down the line you can remember something. Students talk by traditional learning are 1.5 times more likely to fail than those talk with active learning, and those talk and learning with active learning get really serious increases in exam grades.

And this is something really powerful for your kids that are at home with you right now, if you've got kids. If we also have this human interaction, and I use my voice, I use volume, pitch, pace, and tone to hopefully connect with you, even though we're not in the same room. If you think about what I'm saying, and you can visualise me saying it, even though you can't see me on the screen, you're gonna foster better motivation for yourself to then go and do those.

So I really urge you guys, that pen and paper I told you to get earlier, if you're one of those cheeky ones that didn't get it, go and get it now for me, because I'm gonna say some things that I want you to write down, and I really hope you do, because this stuff can change your experience of what we're living through these historic times, and they can change the experienced people around you. So go on, go and get it. .

Little monkeys, they did this experiment in the days of the wonderful animal experiments. They had . Functional resonance MRIs, and they looked at the brain's firing up.

They looked at the different bits that light up. About 15 years ago, we started doing this on humans too. We got a whole new bank of data from that that we didn't quite understand before quite how wired we are like a monkey.

And the thing is, when one monkey, which is another monkeys banana, the very same neural circuitry lights up. So when I'm talking to you, and when I'm asking you to visualise, It's just going in deeper to your brain because you're actually getting brain activity. And it's like throwing a rope across a ravine.

The more ropes you throw, the stronger the crossing, the bigger the dendritic connections become, the more powerful that neural pathway is, the more frequently it's used. So if you just practise things once with me here today, and then you go out into the world, you've already got a little map that you can then follow. So it's really powerful to do this.

And when we learned this, we changed our views on behaviour quite significantly, and, and we were quite this particular experiments 2009, but over the last 15 years, there's been a huge change. And what I wanted to talk to you today is based on these three response levels that we're seeing in our neural circuitry response to the worldwide crisis. So, The first is that we're all having to, as we said earlier, change our habits.

We're having to change how we work. Had you ever imagined a time when you'd be told as a vet, just go and sit at home for a bit, please? Have you ever imagined a time you'd turn away the chance to neuter an animal or vaccinate an animal?

You know, why this doesn't sit well with us is because it goes against everything we've been told to do behaviorally up to this point. So we're not only working differently, we're Therefore, moving around the world differently. We're not doing a commute to work, wherever that is.

We're suddenly staying in one place. Our children are in different places. They're usually in school or fighting, let's be honest.

And now they're probably more fighting, if yours are anything like mine. We're eating differently. We're eating whatever we've got rather than this glory state we've been able to live in for the last 10 years of just eat what we can buy and throw away what we don't use.

We're probably drinking differently. You're either drinking more. Or you're drinking to sedate yourself because it's uncomfortable.

And guess what? It turns off that car alarm in your brain for a bit, doesn't it, guys? And when we start to drink more, all that happens is we switch that alarm off until the cortisol level subsides at night.

And when we get that cortisol drop, and then we get the 40 a.m. When levels change again, you suddenly wake up, so you begin to have disturbed sleep.

So we're sleeping differently as well. We're also exercising differently. We've got different social patterns.

People are sometimes going to ground or hiding in bed. And this is sometimes around the fear level about the loss of work, but sometimes it's just they don't know what else to do. They haven't got a map for this.

And we'll talk more about mapping in a minute. So we've got this behavioural deep level of change, right? So our responses to this crisis have had to be that way, and sometimes we've been told to, sometimes we've been furloughed.

We've got no choice. We've then got a cognitive level of change. So there's a ranting.

Trend on Facebook, people are suddenly epidemiologists, and they're picking fights, there's arguments going on. Everyone's got a strong opinion on things like PPE. Everyone's getting excited about stuff they never even thought about.

There's worry about people still flying into the country, and we get a range of cognitive and emotional reactions to this. And guess what, you can't run away. It's still there, even when you shut your phone or your laptop, it's still in you, because we're processing this huge amount of info and we're trying to make risk-based decisions.

And there was that horrible two weeks when we were desperate for leadership and some people were still out, but should we still be out or should we be in? Everyone's sending their kids to school, but should I be sending my kids to school? Your brain is screaming at you all this time.

Help, Sabretooth tiger. And you go into this state of overwhelm. And we get a cognitive dysfunction.

So either one of these on their own would be an overwhelm. We've got 2. And we've then got around the cognitive, a lack of the social glue that usually holds society together.

There are online wars going on on social at the moment. There are future threats, you know, we don't know whether we're going to be allowed to have the nights out that we'd planned, the holidays we'd booked. We might be supporting family and friends and protecting them.

And every envelope that comes into the house is now a risk. There's all of these threats coming at us from all sides. The final threat is one which is really primal.

And I just want to talk to you really quickly about this guys, cause I know you know what I'm talking about. And you might have been tearful, you might have had that butterflies in your tummy feeling, you might be having more headaches. You might be getting that sick feeling, physically manifesting as diarrhoea with tummy upsets.

Your heart might be pounding. You might be talking fast. You might be talking louder, and that sometimes prompts more rows, isn't it?

Some people get desperate for information and they're scrolling through Facebook at 2 in the morning, and then they're really restless when they can't get hold of information. These are physical. Threat levels to our brain, where the behaviour is challenging and all of this has the effect of leaving us very, very uncomfortable.

So does this, I hope this is making sense to you guys so far. These are the symptoms, these aren't the causes. There's nothing wrong with you.

You're doing everything right. You're doing everything you should be doing to these very, very deep layers of response mechanisms because they are mechanisms. Because we have to remember, the feeling of trust is lodged in the limbic brain.

It has no language. I'll talk about the brain in a minute. I won't bore you with it because none of us want to do secondary neurology again, do we?

But I'll talk about how the brain is triggered at the moment in the different areas, because it might be useful to you, because when you know more, you can do more. And that's the whole purpose of today, is to help you to feel more comfortable with where you're at, because you can't change it, you can't look for stability, you can't look for that old normal. You have to be the stability now, and you have to hold yourself in a safe space while you then try and help others.

So. We're thinking a little bit here about your emotional quotient, which is what we call EQ, different from IQ, and we call it Think feel do. It's brain plus heart, which gives you your inspiration to act.

So your EQ, again, the beliefs driving your behaviour is the is the message. And your EQ is really important because it's about dealing with situations that come out. You've got a rational Neocortex and the best you can do is look at the data and say, OK, I think this is the right decision.

But then you've got your gut reaction and that is way stronger and it's an older brain and it's much more chimp, this just feels right. And what happens is if we can tap into the power of these different brains and learn when to work with and when to push against, we get much stronger behaviours. So just briefly, Masso's hierarchy of needs, I don't know if you know this, but his original hierarchy for years ago, like years ago.

But it's still used by mainstream psychologists, despite being really ancient. The reason it's still used is because it's actually really logical and The whole principle is that when you've met your base layer needs, so that's breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion, you can then sort of like, like a ladder ascend gloriously to the next level, and that security, that safety of body, employment, of resources, of morality of the family, of health of property. And then once you've done that, then you move to the happy, snuggly bit of friendship, sexual intimacy, family, it's love and belonging.

And then if you're really grand, you go all the way up to when you start thinking about the universe and stuff. But here's the trick, when you lose one of these, you slide back down. It's like snakes and ladders.

So all of our life, we try and make ourselves meet each base layer and then we ascend, and then we meet and then we ascend. Guess what's happening right now? We've cut ourselves off from our societal range.

We've lost our friendship group's contact. We've lost contact with family. We've, I don't know about you, but I've got a mother who needs protecting, so she's not seeing the kids, and that to her is horrific.

She can probably do without me, but, you know, the kids, she misses. And there's all this loss of contact and relationship with people you've maybe booked to go and see. And so we slide down a level and then you look at the next layer, we've lost employment, we've lost resources, and we've lost health, and that is a massive threat, this mortal threat that I talked about earlier.

When was the last time you actually feared death? Because for most of us, it's never. It's never, and then there's cases like a 13 year old died yesterday.

And that, that tells you, you know, the idea of losing someone, either you or someone you love is something we don't often have to face. So guess where we're at, guys? We're in Tesco's panic buying pasta.

Because we've got to that point where we are so challenged, our behaviours are now showing our loss of safety. So I hope, I hope that makes sense because all that you're seeing, and this is where we must remember, behaviour is designed to solve a problem, not be a problem. No one was being mean, no one was being selfish necessarily.

They were protecting self, yes. But they forgot about any grand ideas because they were at the bottom of that pyramid. They were, they were a regression.

They were in pure regression, and we see that a lot in damaged kids, you know, they go back to the last time they felt safe, and you might see this in some of your kids if they feel threatened by the situation. They regress and they start wetting the bed or being afraid of the dark. And, you know, these, these are based on the two fears of number one, I'm not enough, and number 2, therefore, I won't be loved.

And to kids, that's really powerful. So, when we think about anything like this, we're talking about these different regions of the brain, and again, really quickly, I really don't want to bore you with too much of the Brain stuff that gets me really excited. You can do a basic model of the brain by holding up your hand, tucking your thumb in, and then folding the rest of your hand around it, and then laying your other hand over the top.

And this is a really simple model that we use a lot. The, the middle bit, that thumb that's tucked deep inside, is your limbic. This is the bit that's your emotion, but no language.

So we sometimes feel things and then really struggle to say them out loud. We just have a blank space where some words should be. That's because they're, they're coming from this deep.

Emotional centre. Then we've got our prefrontal cortex, and we've got left and right, and they do different jobs, but usually they're our human Google. And we go to those to look for references to what we're facing now.

OK, here's my challenge. Where, where should we go, guys? What, what resources do we have?

The trouble we're in at the moment is our prefrontal cortex. Has nothing on this. It has no resources.

Like, it's frantically scrolling through, and it's rifling through that filing cabinet, and it's going, wait, hang on. I, I, I've got nothing. And so we're coming up with this huge gap of, I don't know what to do.

I don't know how to behave. I don't know how I should live. And some people are just rattling around their houses, going around the same route over and over again, because they don't have the, the map of what we want.

So, here's the thing. When we feel like we don't know what to do, we revert back to what we said earlier, our chimp brain, and our chimp brain is what we can loosely and fondly call our limbic system. Our frontal is like you.

The parietal is like your human Google where we go to for our references. So this is the chimp paradox model, which I love. And you've just got to remember, guys, that your, your chimp is 5 times faster and 5 times stronger.

Than everything else. So what tends to happen is you go into those, the 5F's behaviour. You got, everyone knows about fight or flight.

There's also freeze friend and flop. Those are the things that we can do, that are our quick pathways, our quickfire pathways. And, you know, humans are not built for social distancing.

We haven't got the ability to live on our own quite as much as we like to think we do. And so we are sometimes reverting to these, these behaviours as much as we can. Just briefly, as well, when I talked earlier about the neuroscience of the teacherst interaction about how I use my voice to connect with you, This is a really important pertinent point.

If the teacher's brain is stimulated, so you can't see me, but I'm standing up to deliver this to you. I'm pacing around a little bit and I'm waving my arms around, because the more engaged my neurocircuitry is, the more yours fires up in response. Your brain responds to the way that I'm delivering.

And that's really important. And that's also really important in the world around you. So when you are.

At one, internally, people feel that, people read that. Kids particularly are an amazing barometer of what you're feeling. And here's why I'm just gonna go through these really quickly because I'm just conscious of time.

And these are really important. Again, it's something I'm really happy to come back and spend more time on if you want. So, we, you remember we talked at the beginning about looking up at your ceiling and thinking about what would I do if a crack suddenly appeared and dust started to come down.

We need certainty. Our behaviour relies on being certain about certain things, and we need to know what's gonna happen to a certain extent. We need to know we're not gonna die.

So this is a really primal need. It's something which is very important to us as a species, and a lot of people have this as their top need. By the way, we've always got a hierarchy.

If this is your top need, you're probably someone who Has had a pension from quite early. You're probably someone who always has insurance and can't believe those people that don't. What are they thinking?

You're probably someone who has a plan for your week of meals. You, you've, you've organised your life like that, and again, you, it's unthinkable to you to do it any different way. Then there's the other sort of person.

So these people need variety in their lives a lot more and variety's the other need that we all have. Again, we all have all 6 of these. Variety is about knowing that every day is not gonna be exactly the same, that something's gonna happen today.

And, you know, we, we desperately need some form of, God, what, what thrilling thing can I fall into this week? That film Groundhog Day, where he woke up and every day it was the same. He ended up trying to kill himself because he just couldn't handle this thing of no variety where everything happens.

We need something to change. The number 3 is this need for significance to have been important in some way. It doesn't have to be a title or a badge.

It can be that someone knows that you're really good at something, or it can be that you help them and they say, thank you. Significance is a big strong driver for some people. You see a lot of people in the city who's got significance as their number one value because to them being significant.

Is more important than everything else. Vets don't tend to have a lot of significance at the top layers of the profession in the referral centres are the individuals who perhaps do look for significance, and they're the ones that will bother to do those extended periods of study, those extended letters where the letters after their name or more than the letters in their name. And maybe that is that desire to elevate yourself above the herd.

And to be more important than the other need though is tied in with that, which is one of connection. And sometimes people go after titles because it connects them with more people. Love and connection is a hugely strong driver for some people.

Again, if this is in your top two, you will behave very differently to someone who doesn't care about connecting with other humans. And you know those people I'm talking about, where they can So the entire day without having a chat, these are not your water cooler people, the connection people are your water cooler people, the blazes, as we call them in our psychometric profiling. So connection people are the reason that we're talking today, because there have been communities built.

And obviously, connection is a, is a value that the people who built like VSGD, Ebony, Veterinary Voices, Danny, and, you know, all the other people in the industry that want to build these communities and value connection strongly. Then we've got the other two needs which sort of go together. One is growth, and this is the need to always be more than you were yesterday to do something.

You're either growing or you're dying. You know, it's, it's really powerful. Usually we move on to growth being one of our top two, only when we've lived enough of our life meeting these 1st 4.

The final one as well is contribution. Some people live for that all their lives as mode 1, but sometimes that only kicks in again. At the end of their lives when they've done all the other things and then they just want to give back.

So these are our 6, and have a look at that list, guys, and just pick your top two. What do you think really matters to you? What things are the sorts of things that you do your job for?

Because you will have to, and 2 of those, when they're taken away from you, are really painful. If certainty is one of your big things, guess what? You're really going to be struggling right now.

Because in this time of uncertainty, to not have your primary needs met feels a bit like death. So if connection is one of your top two and you're suddenly cut off from everybody, then that equally is a big wound. If variety is really important and you're feeling stuck inside these walls, that's a real problem as well.

So. Who did you watch when you were growing up? Very often we form our belief systems around watching others.

Sometimes we go away from, as in, God, I'm not gonna be like them. Other times, we copy like this gorgeous little kitten. Just so you know, I've taken in some pregnant cats cause we're already seeing abandoned animals go up, sadly.

And so my strategy for getting through lockdown is entertain my kids with kittens. It's brilliant. They're out there right now, leaving me free to do this because they're all playing with kittens.

It's going very well. So when we model other people, and by modelling, I mean, we copy their behaviours or belief systems, what happens is we then either go towards it or away from it. So I love how this kitten's now got bored and it's just like, yeah, I'm just gonna play.

So, who did you watch when you were growing up? What belief systems might you be subconsciously running now? So, we're currently in a situation where it's like we're learning to drive again.

And here's my car, very proud of old Bess. We had that horrible time where we couldn't drive, and it felt dreadful, and we're sort of jerking around, desperate to do what everybody else was doing, but we kept going because we knew it could be done. The danger zone we're in now is with this removal of certainty, we're feeling like we're learning to drive again, but we don't know if this can be done.

We don't know if we're going to go start staring mad and end up murdering our spouse by the end of this. We don't know if our kids are all gonna finally cause us to break, and we will literally just abandon them outside. So we're in this zone where we've got this uncertainty and we haven't got a map.

And that's where it's feeling. A little rocky at the moment as well. And you probably learned to drive over a period of time.

You had lessons that a test at the end. So I want to introduce you to this little tool that we can use at this time of uncertainty to get more understanding of, as I said at the beginning, how to survive the zombie apocalypse. This is a grid of the different types of brains.

So I mentioned Ebony and Danny earlier, They're around this blaze side of the quadrant. They're about connection. They're about, supporting people rather than things.

And Anthony Chadwick of Webinar Vett, he's like me, he's a star in the top right hand corner. He's a blend of that Blaze energy and the dynamo energy. So he's created something big in Webinar Vett being the platform that we all go to now as our first choice for blooming online learning.

There it is. He's built it already. Brilliant.

So these people are so going to move to the forefront at this time when what we're going to need most is connection and new ways of doing things like learning and working. So, these different brain types are really powerful. And when you know what type, by the way, guys, most of you, probably by the statistics that I've seen over the last 3 years of working mostly with vets.

Probably, you're around the left hand side of more of that steely energy slash creator energy. So you're gonna be really your key words are gonna be, how, how do I do this? How do I fix it?

You're probably asking questions right now of how do I live? How long is this gonna go on for? What will it look like when We come out, you know, those, those questions are really powerful to you.

Equally, the, the dynamo question is usually what? Well, what do I do now? What can I do about being furloughed?

What money's gonna come in each month? You know, they, these are big things and they're right in your sweet spot of the things that matter to you. And depending on your brain type, different things matter in different ways, and the social navigation process that we go through is all about the affiliation level of our brain.

We are not separate. We are a community, we are part of the collective and depending on your brain type that will matter more or less to you in that removal. Hurts more or less.

So these are the different brain types. So this is a color-based system way of thinking of it as well. Blue is that sort of steely energy on a good day.

Those are the things that you are, and red is the, the dynamo at the top and yellow is the blaze on the right, green is the tempos, and depending on which you are, which matters most to you, you will. Be better at some things than others. Equally, you will care about different things.

In leadership, you can make different types of decisions, depending on which side of the grid you are. And then there's the way that you interact with other people as well. So there's not only how you lead, there's how you, feel about other people.

So, for example, For example, if we just take those people whose keywords are like when and where, like, if you book a course, the first thing you're going to do is look at the postcode and map how long it's going to take you. That's these people on the bottom left, these sort of earthy green types, and they're what we call a strong tempo energy, and they're all about rhythm. They're all about that beat of keeping things going.

Whereas the steely energies are a bit more about data and a bit more about OK, let's, let's be really risk averse about this. So there's, there's different ways of processing the same situation. Again, I can talk more to you about this if you want to.

I just want to do one little thing before we wrap this up into the last segment. Just if you answer this question for me, if I asked you to tell me, money is, what is money? What's the first thing that comes into your head?

And if you want to just quickly jot down, money is, fill in the blank. What do you think? Because this is one of our most.

Basic beliefs that we don't even know that we held, and it affects everything you do in the way that you interact around it. And these are some examples of some of the things people have said in the conferences I run where I do this interactively with the audience. Money's a, a belief that, again, it's hidden behind the rational.

It's hidden behind the thinking part. You didn't have to think to think about what you thought about money very hard because it's there already. And most of these are negative.

Some people have very positive associations, but I'm using this as an analogy, because I, I want to know what you think of. This situation we're in, are you running software behind your eyes that's saying, this is a disaster. Everyone's gonna die?

Or are you asking a different question, like, right, how can I make the most of this time that I'm off? How can I enjoy this time of solitude? How can I spend more time with my kids, yeah, without trying to kill them, admittedly.

All of our processing is based on our belief that we have around the situation, like those footsteps on the stairs earlier. And it comes back to this. So, RAS stands for your reticular activating System.

So, have you ever had that situation where you are perhaps in the market for buying a new car, you buy one and suddenly everywhere you go. There is a similar make and model of your car, your car, cause it's now your car on the road around you. This is my beast.

And when I bought it, I suddenly started seeing them every, like, they're everywhere. And I'd never noticed them before. Why?

Because it wasn't important data for my brain, so it just let go of it. So the reticular activating system sieves out the world around you. So if what you're looking for is proof that our current government is incompetent, You will see that everywhere you look, because your reticular activating system is filtering the data coming at you to say, here it is.

If, however, you want to believe passionately that you voted for the right party who won that general election, you will equally be filtering out the data that's coming at you from our social overload at the moment. And this is a really important point because it's based on your belief system. It's not about you being blind.

It's not about you being ignorant. It's just about what you've primed your brain to see. So I'll give you an example.

Look around the room you're sitting in for me. Just turn your head. Find me 3 things, actually, no, that's too easy.

Find me 6 things that are red and just let your eyes scan around, light on them, and then move on. Find me 6 red things. Look back at the screen, close your eyes.

Tell me 6 things that were blue. And if you can't open your eyes and quickly flick around the room and have a good look, because they're there, they were there all along. You just didn't philtre for them.

You were filtering for red. And now look back at those things that are red and see if some of them are actually pink or brown. But you called them red because it was easier to do so.

And this is what our reticular activating system does for us. It saves us time by filtering. The trouble is that does mean that in this situation when there's a deluge of conflicting messages, you get confused.

You get confused and you get hurt at a biochemical level because you then get floods of chemistry which aren't helpful for you. So, Here is a real world picture. This is my daughter that you saw in the first few shots, sitting cutely on my knee.

Here's her new emo self, age 14, and there is a massive spider that I had to throw myself across the room to catch in a whiskey glass late one night. And, some of you will have a belief system around spiders. I certainly do.

I look at that and it makes me feel a bit sick. She is the same. She's following my Tribal cycle and modelling me by unfortunately also having the same pathological fear of something that A can't hurt you, B isn't toxic, C, they're everywhere, get over yourself.

But I've still got that belief system. And here's the thing, unless we choose to rewire our beliefs, they do govern our behaviours. And depending on your brain type, if what you look at is The people side of the world, you will be judging people by their behaviours right now.

And this can be a bit dodgy because we're in dodgy times and there's a warning here, there's a warning. I'm about to go into the things that you can do. Now, there is a danger here.

Some of them are deceptively simple. And you might be listening so far, nodding along going, oh yeah, she knows stuff about the brain. And you might now go, Oh, is that it?

Watch out for, I know that. Because as soon as your brain says to you, yeah, I know that already. Yeah, but are you doing it?

Because there is a massive difference between knowing what to do. And doing what you know. And with love, I would say to you, yeah, you might know that, but please, trust me a little, just do it just for one week, even if all you do is do this for one week and then never do it again, you would have built a neural pathway that you can then access in the future.

There is a lot of schmutter coming at you at the moment, guys. You are going to be overwhelmed whether or not you acknowledge it is irrelevant. It's literally irrelevant.

Your body is going to suffer from the threat level we've been living at, you know, the DEFCO states and how they elevate. Well, guess what? We're pretty close to a point where people are going to start moving into ill health, a bit of breakdown, and we need to look after ourselves mentally, which is why I offered to do this for Anthony.

He and I both met recently at a, Roger Hamilton. Conference in London, and we just had a quick chat and all this broke loose like the next week, and it was just really timely that we'd sort of connected and said that we should do this. This is the point.

You get a stimulus, you match it to something that you know, an attitude or pattern match. You then get a feeling or emotion around it. You then have your thinking then and only then did the behaviour or habits form.

Which gives you your outcome and your performance. So this safe TBO model is a newer model of behavioural psychology that's, that's come out recently. And this is from the lovely people at PSI who are a brilliant consultancy, I've worked with in the past.

And this model is really quite sound because it reminds you that before the point of seeing what your behaviours are, There's all of those stages before, and you can have a different reaction to the same stimulus like those footsteps on the stairs. You know, they mean different things to different people, and they mean different things based on your belief system. So for example, you're in a house in Devon, you hear hoofbeats in the middle of the night.

It's probably not a zebra, probably. It, you know, it's probably more likely to be a horse, isn't it? And so your belief systems are based around what you know, and we're in a state where we don't know at the moment.

And what we have to do is remember that Knowing neocortex is knowing, but it's a different region of the brain from the doing, which is the limbic brain, and the emotional brain learns only through doing. So I'm really hammering the point home here in order to turn your good intentions into habits of behaviour. So healthful habits is something I talk about a lot.

You've got to put them into practise. You've got to use what I'm telling you today, guys. And It's just a question of believing that this matters.

Professor Carol Dweck is the master. She's an absolute goddess to me. She wrote a book called Mindset, literally.

And, it actually affects how intelligent you are based on whether you're fixed or growth mindset. And fixed mindset is when you believe your intelligence is static and you, you plateau earlier and you do your same behaviour. Without changing, I'm asking you to utilise your growth mindset, and we both got both.

They're both really important, but they change how we respond to things. When we're in fixed mindset, challenges are a threat, and they threaten our intelligence. We give up when we get obstacles.

Any putting in of effort is negative, negative feedback is a danger. Whereas growth mindset. We start to embrace, OK, what can I learn from this?

Where am I gonna go? And we need this now. Now more than ever, we need to move into growth mindset.

And when we talk about growth mindset, we're talking about what phrases run through your brain. So if you have just lost all your locum work and you're saying things like, why me? Why does this always happen to me?

This is a nightmare. You will have a very different response in these next 4 weeks than if you're going, right. What can I do instead?

Can I set up a tutoring business from home for all these students that suddenly their mothers are worried they're falling behind in their schoolwork? Can I look at teaching music online? You know, there are other things.

There are going to be other talents that you've got that you can pull on once you move out of fixed mindset because your beliefs set your behaviours, which set your communications. And this is the point, is how you communicate now in these next 4 weeks will dramatically affect your income. So, when we're talking about this, what are we talking about?

It's action. You gotta do something, guys. And so here are my top tips.

We're gonna close after this, these are my top 5 things that you need to do right now. Number 1. You must Make your environment serve you.

You must set up your cockpit. You've got to act as if you are a fighter jet about to take off. You've got to get clear on what space is for what.

Do not take your work to bed. So many people work from their bed, but It's really lovely, but then what it means is you cannot then use that space for a very important thing called sleep. And don't even get me started on sleep.

There's a brilliant book on it called Literally Why We Need Sleep, to read if you're interested in it. But neuro biochemically, it's one of the most important things you can do right now. So get clear on your zones.

You need at least 4 different zones for what different states you need to be in. And each of those should be protected and move into that zone when you do that task and then move out of it, because you've got to start getting clever. And scarcity, by the way, is a mindset problem.

Get the tools for what you need, but if you can't get them, this is the mend and make do phase that we're moving into now. And we must start habit managing. Energy is your new currency.

We're now living in this weird world where we're not spending money on the things that we used to spend money, and we're not going out. We're not taking taxis, we're not eating out. We're not driving places.

My petrol in my car has been on the fuel light for the last 3 weeks. That has never happened in my life. And we are now dealing in a different currency.

Your energy is what you've got to thrive. You are a work in progress. You are the thing you can focus on in this next few weeks.

2, Calm the circuits. You are useless if you are in a triggered fight or flight, there's a saber-toothed tiger over there and I've got a run mode. 6 breaths in pattern has a huge, huge biochemical effect.

I'm a student of the fabulous John Asraf, who runs Neurogym, and I've been following his work for years. He's now a mentor of mine, and he runs this thing called inner sizing, which is about doing within before you then do without. And it's about training your brain in certain ways to be more effective in life.

One of the biggest things that I learned from him is this calm the circuits. 6 rhythmic breaths in a row, and the suggested pattern I'll give to you now is you count 2 as you breathe in, you hold for 4, and then you breathe out for 4. So it's 24 4 is a great pattern to use.

Do that 6 times in a row before you do anything, do this when you wake up in the morning. And the other thing to calm the circuits is making sure that the very first thing you do when you wake up is not get on Facebook. Again, I'm not wishing to patronise you guys.

I'm just saying it has a huge biochemical effect. Do some breathing, do some gratitude. Pick 3 things that you're really blooming grateful for right now in this moment today, and don't think when then, when it's over, and then I can go to Venice.

No, come to now and pick me three things, 3 things you can see, touch, taste, feel, here. It doesn't matter, but, but calm the circuitry, get the circuitry sorted. Number 3.

Movement, exercises, mind altering drugs. It also has the added effect of pumping the one circuit in your body that doesn't have its own pump, which is your lymphatic system. It's driven entirely on hydrostatic fluid pressure in the capillary beds, forcing things through into the lymphatic channels, buy yourself a rebounder, they're brilliant, a little bouncer that sits in the corner of your living room.

Some of the fancy ones either fold in half and slide under your sofa. You can throw yourself on that for 20 minutes, and the endorphin hit you get as a result. Radically changes your brain chemistry.

And they've done studies on this. It's really interesting, but the bouncing effect is also really good for moving your lymph. They use it in NASA for training their astronauts because it's so good for all of your body, your core strength, everything.

Equally, hydration. So when I say move, I mean, all of this, look after your body. It's really, really important right now.

Get a friend. We are not built for social distancing. Build your relationships now with the formats you've got available to you.

We are in my little gang doing pub quizzes where we, we each log in on YouTube. We've got the virtual pub quiz up, and then we're on a separate Zoom group chatting amongst ourselves while we swig wine and gossip and do the answers at the same time. There's ways around it.

There are really ways around it. I had to teach my entire family how to use Zoom the other day. It was a complete disaster, but by the end of it, everyone's killing themselves laughing, but we had a conversation.

So, get creative, build that relationship. Body worship, take the time to self-care. And don't think I'm saying a rude thing there.

You've got filthy minds. I just mean, look after yourself, worship who you are right now and have a long bath. You know, do something for you, even if it's blooming putting on body lotion.

I don't care what form that takes for you, but just look after yourself in this moment. It's really important because there are psychological benefits from doing so. And remember the phrase that I said earlier, behaviour is designed to solve a problem, not be a problem.

Be kind to those around you because if they're acting out. They are lacking in one of their 6 human needs. And when you realise that, it becomes really easy to fix it.

Kids need certainty as well, partners need certainty as well. We all need it. So if you feel you're acting out, if you feel you're having an emotional response, think, what am I lacking?

Which one of the 6 is triggering this for me? How can I get that in other ways? Because we've got to remember, we're talking about vehicles.

These are things, these are vehicles usually to get us things when we're on. Facebook scrolling. It's a vehicle for connection.

It's a vehicle for information. It's a vehicle for significance. If you're someone that likes to make very wordy responses in comments, you know, there are reasons you're doing that.

It's not because you, you want to beat people up, but you sometimes find yourself responding. Have a look at why? Why am I answering that?

What am I trying to get from it? Because if we can stop ourselves getting triggered and we come back to this centred self and we feel That we're solid in ourselves, we start looking at those around us in a very different way. So without being too preachy, just remember that we're trying to solve problems all the time and brain Jim it.

Go on to resources, go on to other things like John that's a great one, I do coaching, if you're struggling, then please do reach out. There's people in the industry that are brilliant at coaching. We've got Carolyn Crowe, we've got Adrian, we've got, there's so many mentors out there for you guys to tap into right now, and people are being really kind with their time and trying to set up things out there in the world.

So use them and don't be afraid to reach out if you need help. There's always that life, there's always places to go. If you are feeling, it's all getting a bit much.

But start with these 5 and be kind to yourself as you do it, and hopefully we'll see you on the other side. Thank you for listening. Been lovely talking to you all, and I hope you've got a lot from that.

My name's Libby Kim Karen Thompson from Kim Karen Consulting, and I will see you anon.