Episode 148: Joy That Sticks: Coaching With Neuroscience with guest, Paul Zak

Want proof that coaching works beyond a feel-good survey? We dig into the neuroscience of immersion—how the brain’s one-second signals of attention plus emotion predict what people remember and do next—and translate it into a practical playbook for coaches and leaders. With Professor Paul Zak, we unpack why joy is the byproduct of investing energy, not avoiding stress, and how the right level of challenge drives durable behavior change.

We share field-tested stories that show immersion’s “contagion” effect in action, from luxury retail associates whose engagement predicted purchases to healthcare teams that improved patient care by empowering nurses within clear boundaries. You’ll hear why opening hot sets stakes, how human-scale stories outperform abstract models, and what happens when leaders delegate for real. The result is deviation you can learn from—some mistakes, yes, but also the positive deviations that become innovations when you recognize and codify them.

Measurement ties it together. We talk about simple, wearable-driven ways to see which moments land, spot weekly energy dead zones (like that dreaded Thursday meeting), and design sessions that stick. Four levers matter: start with stakes, tell vivid stories, keep moderate pressure through participation, and end with one concrete action. Over time, those choices raise the number of daily “key moments,” a leading indicator of joy, energy, and follow-through that spreads from executives to teams and even into family life.

If you’re ready to coach for thriving, not just insight, this conversation gives you the science, the tactics, and a free tool to start today. Subscribe for more brain-savvy coaching insights, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review to tell us the next challenge you want us to tackle.

Watch the full interview by clicking here. 

Find the full article here.

Learn more about Paul here. 

Free gift from Paul: your6.com

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Author Intro

Garry Schleifer 0:07

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where bring you amazing insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into the latest article, have a chat with this brilliant author behind it, and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. When you get a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques, and make a real difference in our clients' lives and ours as well. Remember, this is your go-to resource for all things coaching. In the meantime, let's dive into today's episode. Today I'm speaking with Professor Paul Zack, who's the author of an article in our latest issue, Coaching to Unlock Joy. The article he contributed is called Coaching to Thrive, Tapping Into the Neuroscience of Joy. And I can't wait to tap into that conversation. A little bit about Paul. He's a distinguished university professor at Claremont Graduate University as in the top 0.3% of most cited scientists. His three decades of research extending the boundaries of behavioral neuroscience has taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rainforest of Papua New Guinea. In 2017, he founded Immersion Neuroscience, a software platform that allows anyone to measure what the brain loves in real time, which is used to improve outcomes in entertainment, education, advertising, and emotional health, and I'm sure many more areas by now. He's a regular TED speaker and a media source. Paul, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Beyond the Page.

Paul Zak 1:54

Thanks, Garry. This will be fun.

Garry Schleifer 1:56

Yes. So how did you connect immersion and thriving with joy and come up with this article? What was your inspiration?

Paul Zak 2:04

Yeah, that's a great question. So immersion is this one-second frequency set of neurologic signals that my research uncovered that accurately predicts what people will do. So this was funded initially by US Department of Defense that tasked us with identifying combinations of signals of the brain that effectively identified persuasion. So they wanted to give war fighters this new tool using words like let's try network, right? And so we did all this research, millions of dollars of research, and identified this network of multiple signals that I had to give a name to. So I called it immersion because these peak immersion experiences are super valuable. We kind of get lost in the experience. And once we did this work, as you said in your we started a software company that lets anybody measure this immersion state, this one-second frequency signal that one of our early subscribers platform called immersion the give a shh measure, give a crap measure because the the brain, you know, wants to kind of just idle most of the time. It's so energy hungry. So we see this big metabolic investment in processing the experience you're having. You really brain goes, oh, this is really important to me. And because it's important, it influences behavior, that information is saved in memory in a very particular way, which makes it more easily recalled. So we did this work where that, hey, the world should use this and so we launched the software platform. But most of my professional work has focused on developing knowledge and technologies so that people can live longer, happier, and healthier lives. And so in the last five years or so, we started asking this, I think very interesting and relevant question for coaching. How much social emotional interaction do you need to really thrive? So, what does it mean to thrive neurologically? And I think that's a really interesting and different question. We we sort of think of thriving as very subjective, based on self-report, people really don't know what it means. And so what we found is that when people have enough of these peak immersion experiences per day, in particular six or more per day, they have high energy, they have positive mood, and so they're experiencing joy in these kind of big moments. I think what's interesting for coaching, though, is you have to actually expend that energy. This is not like I'm so happy because I'm avoiding stress. You're actually investing metabolic resources in doing interesting things in your life.

Garry Schleifer 4:34

Well, and there's something you said in the article too that you just spurred. A key question for coaches is how to sustain immersion during coaching sessions in order to facilitate behavioral change.

Coaching Needs Productive Stress

Paul Zak 4:48

So just like with warfighters, right, when we're talking to people, we need to have that information be fully processed if we're gonna be effective as coaches. And I think the difficulty is that we are getting this kind of lagging indicator. Did my coachee have an improvement in this particular set of behaviors he or she is kind of working on? And so what we've done is shown that neurologic immersion strongly predicts behaviors after the experience. I'll give you concrete examples of that. But one of our publicly, one of our longest-term subscribers of the platform is Accenture. Accenture spends about a billion dollars a year upskilling their employees. And prior to seven years ago, when they started using our tech, their metric of success of their training was that after training survey that we've all done, right? How did you like the keynote? What was the room okay for you? What do you think of lunch? I don't care about any of that, right? I'm a behavioral neuroscientist. I want to know did that information you get in your brain stick in there. When you come to the office Monday, you have a new set of skills or behaviors that you can use to create value. So I think again, the same thing for coaching. We really want to make sure that this experience is sufficiently valuable so that we can actually reinforce these new behaviors. And so I think the first thing to think about this from a coaching perspective is I want to really make this experience, this coaching experience, moderately stressful. So almost everything in biology has this inverted U curve, known as the Yerkes Dodson law, which is my performance is better on multiple dimensions if I have some level of physiologic arousal, right? If I'm just too relaxed, like I'm hanging out with my friend Garry, and right, or if I'm too stressed out, also that inhibits behavior. But if I'm kind of in the middle where, okay, this is on, I'm doing something, this is participatory, then I actually get much better outcomes. So I think the first takeaway for readers of choice is I do want this coaching session to be hard, moderately hard.

Garry Schleifer 7:00

I was always taught to coach to risk being fired.

Paul Zak 7:04

Oh, I love that so much. So tell me how you do that.

Garry Schleifer 7:09

Exactly what you're saying. It's I'm not here to be your friend, I'm here to ask the tough questions, right? And friends will ask questions that they can be feel comfortable asking. Coaches, as me as a coach, I ask questions that I'm uncomfortable asking. Right?

Paul Zak 7:28

So that's why you hire a coach and not just talk to your friends.

Garry Schleifer 7:31

Right. And I've heard people say, Oh, well, I can use ChatGT to coach. I'm like, yeah, don't think so. You're gonna get a lot of advice, but I don't think you're really gonna get the coaching experience.

Paul Zak 7:44

Now the coaching experience also has higher bandwidth. So just back to the neuroscience. If I'm seeing you, if I'm in the room with you, I'm getting so much bandwidth. But we found even in this kind of video conference world, which I'm sure a lot of coaching now has done, I'm getting facial expressions, I'm getting hand movements, I'm getting energy. So neurologic immersion, again, the value that your brain gets from that experience is contagious. If I'm excited about coaching you, if I'm putting energy into this, you're going to absorb that energy as the coachee, and you're gonna have much better outcomes. That is, that information will be processed more fully and is more likely to affect your behavior than some Chat GPT that I'm typing or talking to. It's just not the same.

Garry Schleifer 8:25

No, not at all. Not at all. Well, you were offering some concrete examples of your work.

Beyond Chatbots: Human Bandwidth

Contagion Of Engagement In Practice

Paul Zak 8:32

Yeah, so a couple things. First of all, on the contagion effects. So we have , and this is published scientific research, people can Google this and find it. It's all open access. We had a luxury retail company that I'm NDA from from mentioning, but people would know the name, that wanted to try to understand the 80-20 rule. Why do 20% of their sales associates sell 80% of the merchandise? And so because this is luxury retail, you can't, so we're getting signals from smartwatches and fitness wearables. So that's the magic of our technology. So I don't have to have to put you in an MRI scanner or have you wear a weird helmet. We can get the signals in the cranial nerves, some of which pass through your heart. So I can take heart rate and transform that a time series of heart rate and transform that into this neurologic immersion factor, which has, I should say, two components. To have a great experience, I've got to be present. And the experience has to generate emotional resonance for me. Emotions are how the brain tags experiences as valuable. So again, from a coaching perspective, I need that coachee to be present and to be focused. I got to create value for him or her emotionally, right? That's where it comes from. It's not just a cognitive factor, it's that emotional factor that makes this important. So, anyway, you can't, you know, walk into a luxury retail store and go, hello, customer, we're doing a study today. We want you to put on this smartwatch. So, you know, because that would inhibit the sales opportunity. But because of the contagion effect of immersion, they measured the neurologic immersion of sales associates, and they were able to show, or we will able to show with analysis, that they could predict with 80% accuracy which customers would buy based on the interaction with the sales associate. In other words, the sales associate's brain was more engaged, was putting more energy into those customers that bought. And in fact, there was a linear relationship between immersion and the amount of money spent. In this study, the maximum spend was over $2,500. The average was $323. This is real money, right? And so the more I'm engaging with you, the better the outcome, I guess, for the store. But also that client's having a hell of a good time, right? So from a coaching perspective, if I'm into it, if I'm like, I am on as a coach, that coachee is going to absorb that energy. Go, oh, this coach really cares about me, cares about my outcomes. He or she is committed to helping me resolve some of these issues that I'm struggling with. That's really powerful. And I love what you said, Garry, about asking those difficult questions. It doesn't come from, oh, you're wonderful, Mr. or Ms. CEO. You're the best. No, like why are you failing? So I remember reading an article in Harvard Business Review, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago, about Michael Dell getting coaching. And that the reason for that was his senior staff had very high turnover, like they couldn't last less than a year more than a year, sorry. And he couldn't figure out why he's at a board meeting. And finally, one of his board members, because Dell is like a genius guy, said, like, Michael, no one wants to work with you. And they're like, oh, holy crap, that's not good. And so I think one of the articles, one of the things I said in the article, excuse me, was that not only can coaching help you resolve some of these behaviors that are inhibiting your ability to be an effective executive, but they can carry over into your personal life. And that's what Michael Dell found is that once he focused on listening better, not interrupting individuals, slowing down, even though his brain is spinning fast, maybe people are not going as fast as him. They need more time. That his personal life also improved. Win-win.

Garry Schleifer 12:08

Right. I just had flashes of my past where I was kind of the same way as a boss and some people interjected, and uh they told me basically quit hovering around us, watching us do our job, go do yours. You're supposed to meet with clients. And after that, their performance went up, my performance went up, and the company did a heck of a lot better. So I can relate to that very much.

Paul Zak 12:37

But also let's dig into that just a little bit, Garry, if I may. First of all, what a wonderful employee or employees who said that to you. But also, you create an environment where they could push back on the boss, right? So I think part of this coaching situation is creating that psychological safety so that you as the boss now can absorb that information. I think if if you're a leader, you're an information aggregator. And so I want to be able to have the people around me be open enough to call me out on things that are not working so well, so that the whole organization flourishes. And then guess what? When people have that psychological safety around you as a leader, then that company flourishes as well. Those people understand what they're doing better. They're more committed to the outcome that we all share as part of an organization. And so I think, again, sometimes we work so hard, we're under stress, we're trying to try to get stuff done that we forget that this is a human endeavor. And those humans are essential to creating value for the organization and the organization's clients.

Psychological Safety And Leadership

Garry Schleifer 13:38

Yeah, they're human beings, after all. And I flash forward to Choice Magazine, and I've hired the best people that I that I can for the magazine, and they're always on my case to get stuff done. So I've hired another good group of people that'll push back and say, Um, how are you doing on that blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, choice thoughts or whatever's my next task. Because, we have a great system, but I don't tend to follow it too well. And that's why I have people that are in my corner pushing. But I do have to ask about this neurological immersion. So, how can I, as a coach, create these high neurologic immersion experiences during sessions?

Paul Zak 14:20

Yeah, so as I said in the article, we've measured over 50,000 brains, and so we have a lot of information in my book in 2022 called Immersion. People can find it. So because it's a couple years old now, you know, it's very cheap. So I'm not gonna get rich selling books, but there's lots of information on training and education in there. But a couple things. One is open hot. I think sometimes you know we want to kind of ease into things. And what we find from a brain perspective is that again, because the brain is so energy hungry, just wants to idle most of the time, that if I start out softly and slowly, then you never get that kick in, right? So I've got to go, okay, Bob, we've got an hour today. Let's hit it hard. And like, oh, oh, holy crap, things are happening. So I do actually want to open hot. And that, again, is sort of counter, I think, to a lot of coaches' approaches. So, number one, open hot. Number two, we have found that the most effective way to sustain neurologic immersion is to tell a story. So that story in which I have characters in an unusual situation often have authentic emotions, there's some kind of crisis. If I want to communicate an effective new strategy, then if I tell a story, a really a human-scale story, not there are people that I've heard about, but hey, I had a former client named Sue, and this is the problem she had, which is the same problem you have. Let me tell you what we do with Sue. Like, okay, well, I know a Sue or a person like Sue. I can understand that. But that story has got to have that emotional component, right? Sue's business was failing. And she was failing because she could not delegate to her direct reports. And so Sue ended up working 20 hours a day. She never slept, she became unpleasant to be around, and her whole business was falling apart because she wanted everything to be perfect, but perfect means that you never get anything done, right? It's the enemy of the good. And so, you know, so I'm going to tell that story to my client to illustrate that if he or she does not learn to delegate, right? So that's a human-scale story. It's got real emotion. Seuss business was going under before she hired me. And let me tell you what we did. Okay, and I get that, right? That's a human scale story, as opposed to, I read a research paper or I wrote a research paper which we surveyed 300 coaches and we are sorry, 300 executives, and we found that blah, blah, blah. I don't care. My brain can't process 300 executives in a research study with a p-value of 0.05. I mean, that means nothing to me. But if you tell me about Sue, whose business was going under before she started getting coaching, that I get, or the Michael Dell story I just told. Again, think about that. I read that HBR article years ago. And it's still because it's compelling. So really kind of have that compelling story. And then once you've really had this peak emerging experience for your coachee, then have a clear call to action. So once you've kind of captured them neurologically, give them something to do that's active, right? I think it's really important that you have super clear goals. I know that for the coaches I've talked to and the trainings that I've listened to on coaching, that's an important part of coaching, which is you need to do this new thing, right? So we're not just talking about in general. Yeah. And then, okay, what you need to do is tomorrow or today, have two things that you typically do and delegate it to someone on your team. Oh, oh, holy crap. Okay. So just try that. Just try it for today.

Garry Schleifer 17:56

Yeah.

Creating High-Immersion Sessions

Paul Zak 17:56

Delegate two things that you like to do that you feel like you can only do. And one of the reasons to do this that we found, and Accenture has found in particular, using our tech is that once I, as an executive, give up that I can only do it perfectly, you also get a variation from what that person would do. So direct my report is going to do this task a little bit differently. Now we call a negative deviation from that task a mistake, but we call a positive deviation an innovation. So if I want innovation, I actually have to allow for some mistakes, learning by mistakes. I'm an executive, my goal is risk mitigation. I don't want, you know, to bring the company down because you did something differently. But there's so many examples we have found in which once you delegate and you see these little variations, because every every time you do this task is gonna be a little different because you have a different client or you have a different piece of software or whatever. I want those positive deviations. I want that innovation. And once I have innovation, now my direct reports own that space. I'm gonna recognize him or her, go, oh, Karen did this amazing innovation, right? We used to do our accounting at the end of every month. And what what Karen found is that if we do at the end of the week, we actually stay on top of our accounts receivable and we're getting paid sooner. And like, oh, holy crap! Like I only did it once a month because I'm super damn busy. I didn't have time. But Karen set up a system and you go, oh, that's that's a great deviation. Now back to our early conversation, Garry. Sorry for the long answer, but I as an executive want to create that space, that psychological safety, where Karen doesn't have to ask for permission to make these changes. If your direct reports have to ask you to do something, you're still micromanaging them. And then they're just gonna be automatons and they're not gonna really, they'll just do what you're gonna do. But if you create this space to go, look, you know what you're doing, you're a pro, you've been trained. If you're gonna improve what we're doing, please do that, right? We want you to do that, and that means we're gonna have a couple of mistakes. So, for example, I worked with a hospital group here in California in which patient care was suffering because if you've been in the hospital, right? Physicians have so little time now to see patients that basically there was no care being done or no changes in care. And so we worked in a program where we empowered nurses to make more clinical decisions within a defined network, right? So you could within the define, not network, but defined, you know, kind of a set of parameters. So outside those parameters, check with a physician. And what happened was you see deviations. So those nurses actually did things slightly different than the physicians would have, but you had improvements in patient care. So innovations, you know, on the positive side are happening, and you had greater job satisfaction from the nurses because they were doing more what they were trained to do. They weren't just being micromanaged by some MDs that they saw at 10 minutes a day.

Garry Schleifer 20:56

Oh boy. You must know about our healthcare system here in Ontario because they've recently allowed pharmacists to have that extra deviation so that people have more opportunity to go to their local pharmacist who probably knows them really well, knows their whole medication history and all that. And so they're allowed to do a few more things without having to go to a doctor. So that was yeah, that's happening in here in Ontario.

Paul Zak 21:26

That's awesome.

Garry Schleifer 21:27

Yeah.

Paul Zak 21:28

And the pharmacists, I'm sure, love it, right? Because they are trained healthcare professionals. So they give you a flu shot, they can do, you know, with again within those set of parameters, those things. So I think of coaching as flowing, you know, kind of top to bottom, right? If one once that executive gets coaching and he or she is performing better, the people below him or her also perform better, get better buy in. So that's the sense in which coming back to the article, measuring thriving, I think is a great way to think about how to quantify. The impact of coaching. So it's not just on that single executive or small group of executives, it's the entire organization. And I think that's actually worth measuring. And as I said in the article, in your personal life too, right? Is your family life better? Do you listen more to your spouse? Gosh, every spouse on the planet would love to have their husband or a wife.

Garry Schleifer 22:20

You mentioned that a few times that that would be good.

Paul Zak 22:23

Yeah, yeah. I think my wife has said that a couple of times to me.

Garry Schleifer 22:27

Yeah. Well, um, I would be remiss if it didn't ask about the little black box in the corner of your screen and talk about the SIX app. Tell us about that and coaching.

Delegation, Deviation, Innovation

Paul Zak 22:38

So the SIX app is what we have a whole group of coaches using to quantify those two things. One is is the coaching session that I'm holding for my coachee, is it creating sufficiently high value for him or her? I can do that by measuring my person I'm coaching, my coachee, and getting that data again from my from my phone directly. So I want to measure that experience. And what it means is I'm holding myself as a coach accountable. If my last coaching session had low immersion, let's talk about that. Hey, coachee Karen, it looks like last coaching session, I didn't make a lot of progress on that. So that means that what we talked about really didn't get fully processed in your brain. Let's go back and discover that. So I think that's the first use. And think how valuable that is from the coaches perspective. Oh, my coach actually is measuring whether these coaching sessions are effective or not. And we're not gonna skip over things that maybe my brain just didn't fully process because I was distracted or I was stressed or the dog was barking or whatever. So I think that's the first. And the second is in the SIX app,by the way, which is free. People can download it from the QR code there. If you have your coaches share their number of key moments with you, so again, the app is called SIX, because we've shown you need six or more of these key moments to really thrive. And thriving is positive mood, joy, and high energy. That's what I would love to have my coachee have, right? Like, I love what I'm doing and I'm putting a lot of power energy into it. This is I'm kicking ass. When you share the number of key moments, then that coach can actually see the temporal effect of that, right? So we find often uh at um probably NDA, but anyway, some some big tech companies that use the six app with their employees as an employee benefit is that there will be nice temporal variations. So if you see that your your uh coach is getting three or four high value moments Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then every Thursday, he or she only gets one key moment or zero. You can, as a coach, you know, talk about that. Hey, you know what? So I've you shared your day with me the last three weeks, and you're you're doing good. You're getting you know three, four key moments. We're working on getting six. Every Thursday, kind of a sucky day for you. What's going on Thursday? Oh, well, Thursday is when I meet with my sales meeting, and we've got to talk about our sales goals, and it's a really stressful meeting. Okay, so let's focus on that, right? That seems to be an area that wouldn't have come up had we not had this app. But let's talk about your sales meeting. Why is all your other meetings you seem like you're kicking butt? That's really stressful for you. Let's talk about some strategies you might use so that you can both motivate these sales sales per people, but at the same time create an environment where they can flourish and you're not losing sleep the day before that meeting. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you know that that kind of uh precision is only really available technology. I mean, maybe that executive will say, I hate my sales meeting. Great, let's talk about you know some strategies there. I think by having that objective data and then going, I don't know, a month into coaching or two months into coaching, hey, you remember before we really focus on your sales meeting, you were getting one key moment. Now you're getting three on Thursdays. So let's talk about what you're doing differently. Let's talk about how to reinforce those behaviors. Hey, let's talk to your sales. Could I talk to one of your sales folks and just talk about those meetings from their perspective? So in the article, I do talk about having this sort of 360 view. I don't only want to get feedback from my coachee, but if possible, talk to the people there who he or she directs their self-reports and see if that coaching really is inducing thriving in a broader sense so that the organization is creating value. So I think, Garry, that the the SIX app is for the CFO, this skeptical CFO is gonna write a check for some coaching and he goes, ah, come on, what do we need? Why the hell do we need this? He's like, look, here's the ROI, right?

Garry Schleifer 26:48

That's amazing. Thank you. And thank you for making it free and for everything that you do for through your neuroscience lens and all the other stuff that you do. Thank you.

Paul Zak 27:00

Sure. It's it's my passion, actually. So, you know, it's only 25 years in my life, Garry, so no big deal.

Garry Schleifer 27:07

The 25 years of my coaching is the second week of January when I, 25 years ago, started in Denver, Colorado with coach training. Yeah, long story. Paul, thanks again. What would you like our audience to do as a result of the article and this conversation?

Empowerment In Healthcare

Paul Zak 27:24

I think really two things. I mean, one the app, it's free, right? And there's, you know, there's a premium version with extra features. But honestly, I don't care that much about it, about the money. I care about improving the experiences people have. So the first is try the app. It's free, it can't hurt you, right? You can always turn it off. But the second is really think about creating these extraordinary experiences, having coaching being so valuable neurologically that it does change the way your brain works and change behavior. And I think if we think of that in that lens, then the ability to really affect coaching for thriving, for human transformation is being quantified. And it means it's going to be difficult that your coaching is going to struggle. Yeah. Right. So that's okay.

Garry Schleifer 28:07

I don't see that that's a problem.

Paul Zak 28:12

So I mean, lean into the struggle. I think that's that's the key takeaway.

Garry Schleifer 28:16

Wow, that's amazing. And best way to reach you, and for those that are listening only mode, the where would they find the app?

Paul Zak 28:24

Oh, yes, thank you. So you can find all this information and a lot tons of free stuff at your6.com, yourandumbersix.com. And if you're listening to this, you must be an awesome human being. So if you have questions, you can email me there.

Garry Schleifer 28:37

Awesome. Thanks again, Paul, for both for writing for us and taking the time be in this episode of Beyond the Page.

Garry Schleifer 28:47

That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app, most likely the one that got you here. If you're not a subscriber to Choice Magazine, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning our QR code in the top right hand corner of our screen. If you're listening only mode, then go to Choice- Online.com and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.