Conversation Reimagined

It is impossible to not communicate. As Dr. Andrea regularly says, with every conversation – verbal, intentional, conscious or not – you pull others to you or you push them away. The challenge is staying conscious and intentional, at all times, in the presence of others. Most of us are only able to do so for brief periods before being interrupted by our inner speech. Today Dr. Andrea is joined by Andrew Newberg, MD, the primary neuroscientist behind her NeuroLeadership consulting and coaching practice. We'll discuss her favorite book of his, Words can change your brain: 12 conversational strategies to build trust, resolve conflict and increase intimacy. Newberg's brain imaging research provides dozens of evidence-based techniques that can be performed anywhere, in mere minutes, with powerful effects that positively change the brains' neurochemicals and structure, and create real connection and build trust in any relationship.#ConversationReimagined #NeuroLeadership#EnhancingTrust

Ever stop to consider you may be sabotaging your motivation, success or productivity? Today Dr. Andrea is joined by Dr. Kristin Neff, trailblazer, and expert in self-compassion. Its likely self-compassion is not what you think it is! We'll discuss the physiological problems of self-criticism that tap into the body's protect and defend system, releasing cortisol and adrenaline. Rather than a sabretooth tiger today's threats are a hit to our self-concept; and our body doesn't know the difference when we confuse our actual selves with our thoughts about ourselves. So, a negative work eval, snarkey comment from a friend, or self-criticism all threaten self-concept and drive us into protect and defend behaviors. We attack the problem, the problem being ourselves. We are both attacker and attacked. Hear from this pioneering expert how self-compassion can stop this behavior and make the difference in helping us thrive!#ConversationReimagined #NeuroLeadership#SelfCompassion

Got anxiety or stress? In 2020, who doesn't?! Listen in as Dr. Andrea explains how we cause our own brains' anxiety by the way we speak! And wait until you hear the insights regarding what we do to our listener's brains! Today Dr. Andrea is joined by Dr. Chris Manning, a pioneer in the emerging discipline of NeuroLeadership. He helped move NeuroLeadership beyond theory by validating the strategies and techniques that take mere minutes to learn and practice, with executives and corporate leaders. We must be taught how to and practice a different way of thinking. You don't have to feel as if you're spinning or going nowhere like a mouse on a wheel. Together they will share the game changing, life altering results of NeuroLeadership needed for optimal functioning, in a way you didn't realize possible, for you and your team.#ConversationReimagined#NeuroLeadership#60SecondsToOptimization

All relationships have an emotional component. How many companies have we decided to stop doing business with after watching how they treat their employees and customers? Leaders face an urgent need for increased empathy and emotional understanding of their customers and employees, yet these concepts are often not emphasized or neglected. Our understanding and approach to emotions must be altered. Emotions are the drivers of everything we do, are necessary for making decisions, and important to understand because they are linked to stock price. Today, Dr. Andrea talks with Beth Aarons from the Dorchester Collection Academy. Listen for tips from how this company gets customer and employee care and service right, to lead rather than follow the competition.#ConversationReimagined#ConnectingEmotionsToService#CustomerCare

People keep telling me they feel they're reliving the same day over and over again. That's because in times of uncertainty we tend to fall back to the past and do what we've known. The question is, how do we stop going backward and switch gears to move forward, toward resilience and thriving, when everything around us feels so out of sorts? Today's guest, Dr. Srini Pillay is an expert in resilience and understanding how to work with our brain in ways that lead us toward the thriving we desire, while avoiding our habitual traps and backward slides. When we understand how to engage with our brain and keep it at optimal functioning, the opportunity to thrive is much more within our grasp.

We're living through challenging and uncertain times of a pandemic and civil unrest. Interestingly, we can learn to manage our anxiety and stress through play. Play is not frivolous or an after thought to squeeze in once our work is done. Today's guest, Dr. Ian Bogost, is an expert in play, game design and contemporary literature. Together he and Dr. Andrea will reimagine conversation through play. Play functions to build our social brain so we know how to interact positively with others. Play helps us maintain our social well-being. Playing is how we connect. Not playing has serious consequences. Play has even been discovered as an innate emotional process, necessary for social bonding and a way to understand when to approach or avoid, for survival.

Connection. Maslow overlooked the most important human need – more important than food or shelter. Being together is the most important aspect to health and thriving. It is only through others that we co-regulate our nervous system. Feeling anxious or stressed? The best way to calm is through connection with another. Today, Dr. Andrea reimagines conversation with Canadian kindred spirit and soul sister Kim Barthel. Together they provide insights into the underlying impacts of how conversation goes wrong and share tips for reimagining and recreating positive conversations, no matter how broken they may seem. Conversations heal - they calm our nervous system. In safe conversations our brains literally sync with one another, and brain-to-brain connection, you might call it telepathy - actually happens!

Conversation Reimagined through the game-changing discipline of NeuroCoach with Guest, Linda Cassell, NeuroLeadership Coach, Trainer, Facilitator

Have you ever thought about what you do with you voice? You talk, sing, express emotions like love, and surprise, and fear, and anger. You call for direction and you call for help. Think about the many different meanings and required emotional tone differences and levels of required response immediacy with the word "help". How different your tone is when requesting asking assistance on a project, versus needing to escape a flash flood or burning building. Same word, different meanings, multiple different reactions required of the tone at which it's expressed. My guest today is an expert on voice, what it does, and how it can be used to improve our lives. Dr. Vaughn Cook is the Founder and Chairman of ZYTO, a Utah based company, that develops technology using voice in a process called Perception Reframing. Though developing this technology for 25 years, it may be a cutting-edge idea you need to hear about, explore and investigate what it can do for you!

Why is it so we are so often cruel to the ones we love? I once heard, if you want to have a nice holiday dinner, invite a friend, as you'll never say to an acquaintance the nasty things, you'll say to a loved one? How do we learn to stop ourselves? Today's guest, Dr. Sue Johnson, creator of Emotional Focused Therapy, is continuing to build a science of intimate relationships and mapping how our conversations and actions reflect our deepest needs and fears and either build up or tear down our most precious connections. She speaks to this in couples therapy, and you'll hear her express that an intimate relationship is a unique and different bond. I agree! Listen in as you'll see her work parallels and is of relevance for any relationship or any conversation. Her book, Hold me tight, is THE BEST book on relationships I've ever read!

We all anxiously await returning to society – to life - post-pandemic lockdown. Key word is anxiously. Some are bursting to go play, interact, smile, have fun, and dare I suggest ... hug?! While the others are entrenched in deep anxiousness, trepidation, and fear. I worry ... will nasty reactions to social distancing continue post-lockdown? Will we continue to see extreme reactions? How will we respond? And how might we come to understand these extreme differences? On this week's episode, Dr. Andrea converses with behavioral neuroscientist, Dr. Stephen Porges, who is the creator of the Polyvagal Theory and is an expert on how the brain and body respond to threats of safety, whether in society, the workplace, at home, or conversation. Listen in as Dr. Porges discusses how our nervous system is simultaneously being onslaught by the incompatible demands of avoiding others and connecting with them, and that the resources of human contact we intuitively use to calm, may now signal threat.

What company isn't thirsting as if parched in desert conditions, for real leaders? Leaders already trained in team building, who already know how to lead and manage teams ... who understand relationship management ... have managed career development in others ... carried out transparent decision making and have strong statistical analysis and documentation skills. They exist! The men and woman who've served in the U.S. military! Thank you for serving!Unfortunately, conversation problems also exist. Veterans and civilian colleagues often don't know how to speak to the other. Today Dr. Andrea reimagines conversation with veterans with her guest, Michael Hofrath, an expert in understanding the Veteran population, their unique challenges resulting from trauma, and together they present ideas for having better conversations to have better relationships with Veterans, and bring them to thrive in our corporate and organizational workplaces.

All companies seek ways to encourage and support their employees to deliver peak performance. We often borrow methods, analogies, and terminology from the world of sport and equate it into our businesses. This week, Dr. Andrea talks with an expert in this area, Keith Hatter, founder of U.K. and Australia-based, PlanetK2. Together they will explore the likes of conversations that drive to an outcome, conversations as tools and weapons, conversations with individuals that bring them to deliver peak performance, and the conversations with teams that we aren't having enough of, in order to achieve desired performance.

Dr. Andrea reimagines impossible conversations with guests: Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay. You know those conversations that are emotionally charged, seem completely one-sided, or have an extreme ideological bent? Dr. Andrea reimagines them and others with the aid of Dr. Peter Boghossian and Dr. James Lindsay, who've just written what may be the best how-to book, How to have impossible conversations: A very practical guide. Among the tips shared through their extreme research and contexts of multiple disciplines and difficult environments, they'll get to what's really going on in conversation and how to navigate it effectively.

The statistics on those who have experienced trauma are sobering! For reimagining conversation this means we must understand that every person we encounter may have experienced serious trauma. We don't need to question people's experiences; instead we must assume they may have this history, understand what it may mean, and act and speak accordingly. Today Dr. Andrea reimagines trauma through conversation with guest, Dr. Ronald Ruden, creator of the Havening technique, which uses the sensory input of touch to eliminate the consequences resulting from stressful or traumatic events.

This week, Dr. Andrea challenges that employee engagement is not a thing. In the 30 years we've been measuring engagement, the number of employees who are engaged is still strongly overshadowed by those who are not. Perhaps we've been focusing on the wrong areas, asking the wrong questions and setting the wrong goals? Just like our incorrect primary focus has been on financials, when it is through our employees that we hit our financial targets. Tune in to find out what employees need to truly be engaged.

Change-Uncertainty-Comfort Zone: Opens us up or closes us down. Which will you accept?This week, Dr. Andrea implores you to stop trying to change and become more of who you are. She presents the positives and challenges of 'uncertainty', 'change' and our 'comfort zone', and depending on how you look at these concepts and even their semantics will open us up or close us down. Tune in to hear the neuroscience of why gradual incremental alterations in behavior go a lot farther than change in helping us sustainably become more of who we are or for learning.

This holiday season, give to yourself - and others - the gift of better conversations to have better relationships. Explore how to navigate those critical, judgmental, and difficult exchanges sometimes experienced at family gatherings or compounded with year-end pressures, into better conversations ... and reimagine those conversations into better relationships. Join Dr. Andrea as she shares ways to have an enjoyable holiday season and end the year on a high note.

This week, Dr. Andrea speaks with guest Richard C. Schwartz, founding developer of Internal Family Systems therapy, which views people as being whole, underneath their collection of "Parts". The coordinating 'Self' embodies the qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion, and acts as a center around which the various "Parts" constellate. Reimagine how to maintain communication to repair the inevitable rifts that occur between you and the significant people in your life.This holiday season, give yourself and others, the gift of better conversations to have better relationships. Reimagine those tense, awkward, sometimes demeaning exchanges experienced at family gatherings into better conversations ... and reimagine that those conversations can indeed make for better relationships.

This week, Dr. Andrea reimagines conversations through music with guest Martha Reeves. Martha is the lead singer of the Motown girl group, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and she has created conversation and connection with audiences around the world for 60 years. Martha is going to bring us into the reality of reimagining conversation through music, that spans the emotions, with audiences and individuals.

This week, Dr. Andrea reimagines uncertainty and fear with Hope. She looks at Hope, not as a word many of us misuse in daily language, but in terms of the Science of Hope (yes there is such a thing), and it boasts over 2,000 evidence-based studies. She also investigates what most get wrong about goal setting and how they turn it into a demoralizing process with the opposite effect of that which is intended.

On this episode, Dr. Andrea talks with Dr. Steven C. Hayes. Dr. Hayes calls the voice in the head, the "Dictator Within", and he will share methods for how to co-exist rather than fight with or run from the Dictator. Dr. Hayes is the developer Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) which has fantastic tools for immediate use by anyone to "pivot ward what matters", the sub-title of his current book, "A liberated mind: How to pivot toward what matters."

This week, Dr. Andrea talks with Mark Waldman, Mark is a world-leading expert and prolific writer on communication, the brain, consciousness and spirituality. Mark teaches on the Executive MBA faculty at Loyola Marymount University and at the Holmes Institute. His research has been published in journals throughout the world and his work has been featured in Time Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Oprah Magazine.

This week, Dr. Andrea talks about the 5 personalities of people according to Taoist Thought with her guest Michael Leone, Head Medical Chi-gong Director, Zen Wellness, Arizona, where Michael has over 34 years of martial art and healing art experience.

This week, Dr. Andrea talks about cultures of fear in the workplace with her guest Kevin Denning, CTO CEO Builder, Utah ... and he successfully works to eliminate cultures of fear.

This week, Dr. Andrea talks about how we all need to reimagine, rethink and relearn about the conversations we have, because with every conversation - verbal -intentional - conscious - or not - you pull people toward you or push them away.