Olesya Luraschi - How to Make Big Decisions - Stop Overthinking - Agile Lean Ireland Meetup

Every day, we make hundreds of decisions. With that in mind, even a minor improvement in your decision-making abilities can drastically alter your long-term trajectory. Despite this, the majority of people do not bother to develop those abilities.

In this workshop, you will learn how to make better decisions and also feel better more sure in the decisions you make. We will engage in exercises to clarify any current decisions you are struggling with so come with a decision in mind you would like to work on.

Speaker:
Olesya is a Harvard-educated Leadership and High-Performance Coach. Her work lies in helping people achieve their full potential and utilizing psychological science to achieve their goals. Her areas of focus are optimal performance, motivation, neuropsychology, and stress optimization. Her clients are from Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture, as well as entrepreneurs and startup founders. She was previously Head of Marketing at the Institute of Coaching, Harvard Medical School, and continues to serve as an advisor to Seattle area startups.

Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Transcript

Thank you very much everybody again for coming and we looking forward, it's probably a little bit more not typical of the type of meetups we do, but I think something really, really important, we all make lots of decisions every day in our jobs or work completely vital. And we have a really excellent speaker, umm, coming in to talk to us today. It's a lesser Richie. You can frankly less. I can never get.

It right. Like Ludo oski.

The Rusky thank you. And so Leslie is a Harvard educated leadership and High Performance Co. For work lives and helping people achieve their full potential and utilising psychological science to achieve the goals for air to focus our optimal performance, motivation, neuropsychology and stress optimization, and her clients are from Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture as well as entrepreneurs and startup founders. She's previously head of marketing. The Institute of Coaching at Harvard Medical School and continues to serve as an advisor to Seattle area startups, and that's where she's joining us from today. So I'm just going to hand it over to you very much. Thank you very much, Alyssa. So thank you.

OK.

Great. Thank you. Thank you, Anthony. Happy to be here. Happy to speak with you all. As Anthony said, I work with a lot of individuals in it, in tech, that is the majority of my clients and so a lot of my work is about bringing psychological concepts and tools to individuals in this space. And utilising these psychological tools that are typically not associated with the tech world to optimise performance to increase happiness and to increase effective. So I'm sure. A lot of you. Who work in Agile are essentially you have the same mission. You want to create higher motivation. You want to increase efficiency and effectiveness. And so one thing that I've noticed as I work with my tech clients is that there is a very high capacity. For cognition, so we know that in the last few decades, the top paying jobs, they're very much knowledge, jobs and most of you here are I'm guessing. Are knowledge work? And so we have this really interesting phenomenon where we are paid to think. And if you think about it? This has never really happened so much in history. It used to be a very small set of the population that was paid to think, maybe a scholar or someone that was in a religious organisation, but now. A lot of. Us are paid to think, and then we've associated this kind of reward system in our brain. Of thinking. Thinking is good, so more thinking should be more good, right? That might not be the case, and that's what I'm gonna talk about today. So the way I'm gonna lay this out is I'm gonna talk a little bit. About kind of. The premise of this from the psychological perspective, and then I'm gonna open the floor up to you all and see if we can get into kind of a more practical approach and you can all ask questions and I can see if I can offer any insight. Into maybe some things you're struggling with, something you've seen on teams, or maybe individuals that are struggling with this concept of decision making of overthinking and making sure that we are thinking to the optimal capacity but not overdoing it to the point in which it's essentially harming our efficiency. Harming our motivation. OK, so in psychology we have this thing called need for cognition. This is not something I've seen a lot kind of talked about in the popular psychology kind of media. But need for cognition is actually a personality trait and a lot of you here probably might not be able to conceptualise that. Some people have a very low need for cognition, which means that they actually don't like to think because need for cognition is essentially the personality trait that indicates that you enjoy thinking. You just kind of like, you know, going through logic puzzles in your head or you like kind of thinking about future plans and you just enjoy the sensation of thinking and not everybody is like that. But typically, if you work in kind of that knowledge work or sphere you are. And obviously also our jobs kind of increase this need for cognition because we are so very much motivated to think more. We kind of live in a culture and in a sort of cultural bubble in which we all think thinking more is good. Right. So. With all personalities traits, there's a light side and a dark side, so any personality trait can have pros and cons, so obviously need for cognition is a beautiful trait that allows you to really kind of enjoy the intellectual side of life. Maybe even solve problems and create value in your organisations, but at the same time what I've noticed, because typically I work with clients with very high need for cognition. As you can imagine, kind of software managers at Google, Microsoft, Amazon. Needs recognition also has a dark side and it makes you extremely vulnerable to overthinking, and this is something maybe you've seen in yourself. Maybe you actually don't recognise it in a lot of cases, individuals partake in overthinking because they think that. They need to. Oftentimes you have a sensation that something is going to go horribly wrong if you do not spend a significant portion of your day worrying about the future. So if that doesn't resonate with you yet, let me kind of explain a little bit more, because sometimes people don't buy in right away, so essentially overthinking is that constant appraisal and reappraisal of information in your head and it often leads to a bit of a vicious cycle of anxiety and indecision. Well, a lot of people don't know. Is that anxiety actually is a colovian response. So if you all have, if any of you took kind of psych 101 in university or anything like that, you might remember Pavlov and his dogs, right? So he found out that he could condition them to. Respond in a manner after he rings his bell and they start to salivate when previously they did not salivate until he put down the food. So if that sounds confusing, just Google it after and I'm sure Google will give you a much better. Description But anyways, so a Pavlovian response is essentially in which a has been conditioned to B. So if a happens, the brain expects B and what we do is we often feel anxious about the future, right? Like we feel worried. We are typically conditioned to not like. Uncertainty, because especially especially in the kind of environment that all of us work in uncertainty means massive loss like it means profit loss. It means inefficiency and that's. Not great, right? It's not great for the stock price and it's not great for us. And so we do not like any type of uncertainty. And So what we do is we try to make ourselves feel better when we have uncertainty because. We view it. As a huge danger, so because uncertainty is ambiguous and we can't actually really do that much about it. We create these Pavlovian cycles in our minds where we're like, OK, I feel uncertain. That makes me feel stressed. And So what I'm going to do is I'm going to partake in an action that will make me feel better. In this case, the action is thinking it's worrying about the future and worrying about all of the. Potential pitfalls that might occur. And this is obviously a there's a fine line here, just like everything in psychology. This is both. This exists on a. Spectrum. So over here we have pure overthinking and over here we have helpful planning, right. And so if you are engaging in massive overthinking, you probably are creating more harm than you. Need to be. Probably for yourself, and maybe even for. If you're engaging in engaging in only helpful planning. Then you're you're most likely good. You're using your mind and your thoughts to create an optimal, efficient plan. And there's a key difference between overthinking and planning, and that is how.

It makes you feel.

And so you might be thinking like, what do feelings have to do with? Hard work like what does it have to do with tech work or agile or anything like? That well in. Actuality I found with my clients is that. Learning to kind of be more in tune with feelings is actually often a really helpful clue to realise when you've done too much, like when you're going into the realm of overthinking. It's essentially like a Canary in a gold mine, right? So when we start. To really overthink when we start to engage in that cycle that I described previously and which really we're only worrying about the future as a way to make ourselves feel better because we have a lot of fear of uncertainty. And this can also occur. On a team level. So most psychological psychological concepts can occur on an individual and also can occur in the group. And what's an issue with group dynamics is that most things in groups are, psychologically speaking, are contagious. So if your team has a tendency to overthink. And somebody new joins the team. They will probably kind of infect them with their tendency to overthink. So that's something to. Form. OK, so back to the difference between overthinking and planning, and this is something that I think is really helpful to know so that, you know, like when you've edged a little bit too far on that spectrum. So overthinking will always increase your anxiety because it's the only way it can really survive in that cycle, so you feel. Just you worry about the future as a way to make yourself feel. Better, but then. The things that you worry about, like all of the kind of images you create in your head, kind of the movie in your head, are disaster situations typically. So like things you want to avoid. And then you often feel worse or you feel equal. So you kind of perpetuate that anxious cycle. And that's how that anxiety cycle works. So as you overthink and you overthink, you often have the sensation of like it's never enough. Like there's always something that you probably forgot, and there's probably something that is missed and you're just kind of anxious and you're like, OK, I just, I probably need to think a lot about this tomorrow because something horrible might happen. And so it doesn't make you feel great. While planning. Planning will lead to an increase in confidence, which will typically lead to act. So one thing that is very known about anxiety and psychology is that it's one of its functions is kind of the body and the bodies and brains desire to get you to act. So most of our emotions have something what we call action tendencies. There's. An action that's associated with the emotion that is typically is like an expected action of that emotion. And so if you are worried, then the kind of antidote to worry is to create an action that will help you move in the direction that will make you feel more safe or will create more positive results. And so if you are. Engaging in planning. Typically you will actually feel better after the planning session than if you were engaging in overthinking. So planning will make you feel. More confident, more secure. You have planned out your, maybe your Sprint and you feel good. You're like this is great. Let's go into action, right? So if thinking is leading you to feel more anxious rather than more confident, you're typically overthinking. So now you might think none of us want to feel more action. None of us want to feel more anxious, so why would we actually do this to ourselves? Like, why are we doing this? Why are we making ourselves feel more anxiety than? We need to. So overthinking is actually like most things in psychology. It's a coping mechanism. So like I stated previously, one of the reasons we overthink is because we struggle with uncertainty and in my experience, and you might see this as well if you're an engineer or if you work with engineers. Typically that particular profession. Breeds kind of a higher discomfort with uncertainty than what we would see in the general population, because we know from psychology that actually our jobs change our brains. So they did research on London taxi drivers and they know that the structural components. Of the brain and their. Plans for spatial awareness and things like that are actually larger than in the average person, and I would assume that in engineers and in every job, really in actors, there's different structural changes that happen that make that that particular role different psychologically than the. General population and so. In technology and engineering, I do see a higher level of discomfort with uncertainty, so there's a higher level of what we're thinking. So that's one aspect of why we engage in overthinking another two kind of aspects of why we do this is we just. We feel a lot of fear. And so fear can be tricky. It's often good warning signal, but also in psychology we have something called emotional reasoning, which sounds fancier than it is, but essentially emotional reasoning is the concept that most of us use our emotions as like logic points. To kind of interpret our reality, so we think, OK, if I feel this way, then something must be wrong. So if I feel fear, then that means something is gonna go horribly wrong in my. Yeah, but oftentimes emotions are a little bit more subtle than that. And they're. A little bit more. Tricky in neuroscience, we have something called interception, and I'll briefly tell you a story that one of my neuroscientists teachers told me is that when it comes to interception, we can make a lot of mistakes. And interception is essentially our brains analysis of the clues that are happening in our body. So like maybe our temperature rises. Maybe our stomach feels uncomfortable there's there's like. Hundreds of little. Signals that we get from our own state and so. Minor science professor tells a story in which she, as a grad student, had a boy in her class. She didn't really have any attraction to you. She was like he's fine, whatever. But he asked her on a date and she's like, you know, why not? I'll give him a chance. Maybe maybe something will grow. Out of. This and so they go on the date and they're having dinner and all of a sudden she feels super flushed. Her heart is beating fast. She feels kind of hot. And she's like, Oh my gosh. Like maybe maybe I'm falling in love with this boy. Maybe I was wrong. Like, obviously there's something. Sure. And then they say goodbye to each other and agree on a second date and she. Goes home and. When she gets into bed, she realises that she's actually developing a massive cold. She's she's sick like she's not OK, she's having. She's like, sweating. She's starting to. Get like a scratchy throat and she realises that she misinterpreted those signals of getting sick. As falling in love, which is something that happens quite a lot for us, we know from studies that when a man and a woman talk on a like strangers, like a female who's a stranger with a man, when they talk on a bridge, they both interpret interpret each other as. Kind of more attractive because if you talk like on a rickety bridge, your heart typically beats faster. And instead of thinking like I'm on a rickety bridge like I might be perceiving myself to be in danger. You think, like, I'm more attracted to this potential. So there's all kinds of errors we make. So that's I think those kind of two anecdotes are helpful in showing that emotional reasoning might be something to look out for. So whenever you have like a strong sense of fear or anxiety, it might be something else. And so. Proceed with caution. OK so basically I have I discussed two kind of reasons why we overthink. So the first was we struggle with uncertainty. The second was we feel a lot of fear and we engage in emotional reason. And the third is we do not trust ourselves. So this sounds like a little bit kind of like a wishy washy statement, but in actuality most of us are not great at supporting ourselves. So the kind of anecdote that I use in. This case is. That a lot of us treat ourselves like that flaky. Friend that you don't know if they're gonna show up or not like. So we often tell ourselves like, oh, I'm gonna do X, but then we. Don't do it. Or if we don't do well at something, we often beat ourselves up. We're we're really like the. Worst friend to ourselves? Ever. And so there's a lot of distrust that that breathes. And when you have that kind of distrust, it creates a lot of stress and it that typically feeling that stress feeling, that anxiety leads to overthinking. So if we were to create kind of a more consistent relationship with ourselves. Then we would have a lot less overthinking and you can imagine this is also true for a manager relationship like a manager to a team member or a team dynamic. This also applies as well. We actually need quite a bit of trust to make ourselves feel safe. One way that you can think about this is to think about if any of you have children. Is. Oftentimes children need a lot of boundaries and a lot of consistency to really flourish, and our minds are similar in that way. We need that consistency and kind of that encouragement to flourish. But most of us are not great at giving it to ourselves, and it kind of depends what culture you've been raised in. But I personally I'm I'm Ukrainian, so we we do not have that aspect in our culture. We're very much like, suck it up, can be tougher or keep going. So maybe you all who are Irish or from other nations might relate to that. I do think that's a little bit of a more kind of American dynamic. But in psychology, we know that being a support system for yourself, being a support system for your team. Is it's important and it creates a certain type of safety that can then result in more efficiency, more productivity and just a much happier and healthier work environment. So I think that's about all that I wanted to cover here. So I wanted. To open this all up to questions and. So honestly, you can ask questions about this topic or if there's something else that's been troubling you with your work, your life, anything, then I'd be happy to address that as well. Most of my coaching that I do with my clients is holistic, so I tell them you have the same. Brain that you have at work as you do at home. So uh, I'm happy to address any topic that is that is something you'd like to speak about. All right. I'm sure Anthony will let me know if there's any questions from the chats.

I will. No thank you very much. Yeah. Please just put a question in chat or come off mute if you want to ask it directly. But you know Lester, that was very, very good. Lots of things about there, so. You're it's all about listening to emotions is essentially what you're telling us you have. To listen to your emotions and.

Oh oh, it isn't.

You know you're right.

It isn't. It's it's. I mean, it's the. It's like this frustrating thing in which. It applies to almost everything in. Life where it's about moderation, right? It's like all of us really want like a black and white answer. We're like, OK, this is it. Like, I just need to understand this and I'm good, right? But it's actually it's it's a skill to listen to your emotions because at the same time, your emotions can lead you down the wrong path. Like we talked about with my neuroscience professor who thought she was falling in love with that boy, but she was not. So we can misinterpret our emotions, right? So it's more about creating it. The actions you want in life. So oftentimes I actually tell my clients. I we don't actually care what you think. Like you can think whatever you want. You can think that. You're, you know. The the king of the universe, as long as we're creating the actions. That will create the life and the work life that you'd like to elicit. So. Our thoughts this is kind of a model in psychology and obviously each theory has its flaws, but in essence, our thoughts oftentimes create our emotions and our emotions can also create thoughts. But if you conceptualise that, thoughts create emotions, and then those create actions. What you want to be doing, and this is something that's open to anyone, is that you can really kind of change your mindset and change your thinking to elicit a different type of emotion that will that will then elicit the action that. You want. That would create kind of the results you want.

Yes, you can train your emotions to have a certain reaction.

Yeah, yeah. And one one way, I think that's helpful to think about. This is most of us experience something that's called an unwanted intrusive thought, which sounds really scary, but if you've ever been like, so like if you think about like your chopping vegetables and you have that thought pop into your mind, you're like. What if I just stabbed someone with this knife and then you're like, oh, my gosh. Like, why would I think that? Like, it's just like a such a random thought. And like most of us have these where it's like, you have this thought that, like seem so crazy. You're like, why did that pop into my mind? And and what happens there is that most people who are what we call like psychologically normal would dismiss that thought and be like, oh, that was whatever. And so this thing that you're doing that most of you have already done and you're probably already good at, you can do that with any thought and any emotion. But what happens is that. Most of us have a thought about ourselves. We're like, OK, what if I was like preparing for this and I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, I'm gonna completely like, fail at this. Agile meet up and everyone's gonna think like I'm the worst speaker ever. And so, like, there's there's that like tipping point, where I could believe that thought, like, I could dismiss it. Or I could believe it or I could dismiss it like an unwanted, intrusive thought. What most of us do is we believe it. And then we feel bad about ourselves. And then we, like, don't do any speaking engagements because we're like, I'm a horrible speaker. Like this is super embarrassing, right? Does that make sense?

No, it makes an awful lot of sense. Thank you. So there's some questions. I've just came in and on chat there, so I'll just take them in order. So what would you say are the best ways to encourage trust in a work team setting with new leadership?

OK.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. I think the best the first step. Is to be really, really careful of preconceived notions that you might have. So what I often tell all my clients is that with each team, with each role try to come in with as much presence as possible, only focusing on this current moment. And this is the reason why is because our brain actually predicts from previous occurrences. So it's almost like an algorithm. Like it takes in the previous information and then it just creates like a. Regression and it's like, oh, this is what's going to happen next. And this is obviously useful in some cases. And I don't think we would be able to function otherwise because we'd just be taking in too many data points. But it can lead to a lot of mistakes. So if you've been in a toxic environment, if you've struggled in previous roles, if you're coming from being, if you were previously an IC and you became a manager. Those things, a lot of those things are not going to serve you in this new role. So it's all about just like, OK, this is a brand new slate. This is a new kind of point in my life and to just be completely like in this moment, not forecasting into the future, not kind of borrowing from the past.

Yeah, not very mindful.

Yeah, yeah, which I know is a term that's like, really thrown around a lot, but. I think I mean it's there for a reason. And so like I do, I do kind of think of a as a more practical thing rather than like, oh, be healthier, be more mindful. It's like if you think about it, you're missing a lot of information when you're not present, when you're not focused. And so if you're just spending your time kind of an autopilot predicting from the past, or if you're spending your time in autopilot forecasting into typically what we forecast is into, like this horrible future of danger. Then you're not really gonna be the most effective, because the way that you're gonna kind of interact with other people is gonna be very much based on what has happened in your life before or into, like, this psychological movie that you've created into your mind of what it's going to be like. And typically we're not great. Understanding people, unless we actually really, really kind of focus on them and sit with them. And so this is actually also known about anyone who has kind of what we call like a higher than normal communication skills is that typically they're really, really good at just sitting. And only being with that person and shutting off their mind, like shutting off all that, thinking all that stream of thoughts and just taking it in, like taking that person in, really listening to them, it's quite rare.

Yeah. No, that's really good. Thank you very much. Lesser just next question, good if you'll come in great talk. And if you feel off what techniques or tools do you use to check in with yourself?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean. Like like I said, you could feel. Off for a million. Reasons like oftentimes I feel like all down, like right before I get sick and I have like this, like, existential crisis. I'm like, why do I feel so down? Like, what is the meaning of life? And so that's a great question. And so oftentimes it depends what works for you. And I think this whole like self-care movement that you've probably all seen on social media in a way, I think it's really awesome, but in a way, I think it's really annoying because like. For the majority of my clients, like a bubble, bath is not gonna do it like they're they're gonna feel weird. Like it's gonna. It's gonna cause probably more anxiety. Than they had before. And so if you think about it. If you feel. There's two steps that there's kind of two paths you have that you can take, so you might wanna take the path of introspection, so you might want to. Kind of think like, OK, I feel awful. My mind and my body are giving me maybe clues. Of what's going on in the environment and that's the thing like the subconscious is a thing like that could be very Val. And so if that's the case, what I would suggest is just kind of writing like I would set a timer. I would write for 10 minutes and just like literally thought dump. Whatever is in your mind and then you can. Kind of look over it later. Or if you'd like to take the other path and you think like, OK, I feel off. But you know, I think this might be just a passing thing. Like maybe I didn't get as much sleep last night. Maybe I ate something weird. Like maybe, you know, someone said something to me that bothered me. And, you know, it's sticking with me, right. Then I would think like, OK, what are the things that you actually enjoy doing cause most of the thing like most of our hobbies actually are really good kind of indicators of what makes us feel better. And so for some people that's walking. For some people that's running. For some people reading, I don't know, like some people are doing like judo or something. Like there's all kinds of kind of individual differences here. So I would always have a list maybe in my head or. In kind of the physical space of moments that you've actually been at peace been content. Things that bring you joy and then I would go back to one of those things and they can be super individual like maybe it's watching a Twitch streamer play a video game. You know it's completely individual in that case.

Perfect. Thank you. There's some questions. Make sure everybody in. Great talk and thank you very much. Which tips would you give us to create more of a support system out of ourselves?

Sorry, what was the I I didn't understand. The last part.

Great talk. Thank you very much. Which tips would you give us to create a more of a support system out of ourselves?

Oh, OK. Oh oh, for your. Own self. Yes, yes. OK. So someone I highly recommend following her work. Her name is Kristen Ness. So Kristen spelled traditionally. And then N. ESS and she created this concept called Self Compassion and in psychology. And obviously she didn't create it, but what she did was that she created the research and the literature that showed us the actual. Really, being more self compassionate to ourselves actually leads to more productivity, more motivation, increased weight loss like it has all of these things that like typically the high achievers want, but they never engage in self compassion because there's this fear. The minute I start the minute I stop beating myself up. The minute I stop. Kind of like using the stick instead of. The carrot. I will become lazy, fat and stupid. And that's kind of a blunt way of saying it, but essentially it's really having your own back and being there for yourself. When you fall in your thoughts and really reworking those automatic thoughts that the negative automatic thoughts that often come to us, especially when we don't do well. That are highly, highly critical. That really destroy yourself. And if you're someone that engages with this quite a bit during the day, what also happens is that you typically start to feel quite tired, like if the if the at the end of the day you kind of feel beat up and tired. This is a variable that might be good to work on because it's actually quite exhausting. To kind of like, beat yourself up throughout the day, it's almost like if someone followed you around. Around and like they were gonna punch you, but you didn't know when. Throughout the day. Like, you're always like. Oh, no. They might punch me. And like, you can imagine how psychologically stressful that would be. So what I would do is I would just go into YouTube. I would Google Kristen. She has. Wait. Did I say Neff? I think I need enough hold on. Give me a SEC. I'm pretty sure. I mean no, sorry. Hard to remember people's names. I mean though, and EF. Sorry about that. There's another psychological blog thing that's called Nest Labs. Which is also. Good. And So what I would do is I would Google Chris enough and just maybe read. One of her books or. Watch one of her interviews, and she offers a lot of super practical ways to increase. Of compassion. Yep. Kristen Neff. According to Amazon, that's right. Thank you, Jen. And yeah, she has, like, meditations, if that's something you're into or just. I think listening to an interview and kind of just learning how to do this, cuz it's really not taught to us. Is really helpful.

Thank you. Next question, Gus, how about a situation where the person is stressed and already utilising all his or her cognitive power and gets asked to make? Decision my experience that in these situations, rather than overthinking the individual, is overwhelmed with emotions and takes a good decision without much rationale, thought just to move the burden of the feeling of pressure and just the follow up here. What I mean is maybe overthinking is not the only bad way of making decisions. I'd be interested in your. Opinion on this?

Yeah. Yeah. So I actually did a talk for Anthony for one of his classes in which we we spoke about kind of the cognitive biases that occur in our brains when we're trying to make good decisions. And so you're. Exactly on point. There's so many ways it's called kind of cognitive heuristics. There's so many ways that our brains take shortcuts when it comes to decisions, and there's so many ways in which our brains are much less logical than we actually think. We are so like, yeah, let me see. Just I'm trying to. Think ohh here 1A fun one is like this, so typically a lot of the cognitive biases in psychology are named and so one of them is called the IKEA effect. And I'm sure all of you kind of know of IKEA, but essentially the IKEA effect is that in psychological research it's been found that people tend to value. Something more, if they make it them. So this often you've probably seen this in the workplace when you have like a manager and they come up with an idea or they come up with a project and everyone's like, no, that's a horrible idea. But they are just like, so into it, they're like, this is great. This is this is the. This is the way to go. And it's because we have a bias for anything that we create ourselves, we tend to think anything we create is is slightly better than as something someone else creates. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you want to kind of look into these, they're called cognitive heuristics. And it's fascinating.

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. When shooting with us and. It was really good.

Yeah. And I couldn't even. Cover all of them. I just. Just you.

How would you advise someone to train our thoughts? Personally, I always feel fear, anxiety and similar. Feelings before I can think before, I think in any bad outcome possible the bad thoughts and the overthinking, at least for me, are the result of not giving direction to these feelings. How would you advise? I'm I'm asking humbly for a for an advice.

OK, just so I understand. Is so the the question is. That the feelings are kind of clues to the Interstate.

Yet to feel fear, anxiety and similar feelings before they can think, they all kind of kind of ruminate bad outcomes is what I'm thinking before they make a decision. And they build, making themselves anxious.

OK. So what's kind of the ideal scenario here? Like what? What, what? Is what the question answer wants. To achieve.

So how to give direction to the feelings? What would your advice be to give direction to like feeling anxious? How would you give direction to make that anxiety? Maybe something a little bit more positive?

I see. Like. Yeah, maybe something more useful. I see. OK. So yeah, I think what happens, this is really well known in psychology is that most of the suffering we create for ourselves is because of our resistance to the situation, to the motion, to people. To literally everything in our environment. You know, it's kind of that sensation where it's like you're at home and all you wanna do is go on vacation and then you get on vacation and all you wanna do is go home. That's kind of like an extreme case. But like, we have a resistance to, like, what's happening for in our lives. And we have a lot of resistance against emotions. And So what I think is this is something that I we call it meta emotion. It's that concept that when we feel something like anxiety, we often feel bad for feeling anxious. Like, we feel like maybe we're a bad person. Maybe we're doing something wrong. Maybe you know, like this is indicative of our lives not being good. And so the mental emotion creates much more suffering than just. If we were to experience anxiety. And so with that like I think what's really key is to not judge the sensations that come to you. Like I said previously, a lot of this type of, like, emotional kind of state can come for various reasons and you always have a choice whether you would like to introspect or if you'd like to move. On, but I think as long as you kind of like are able to accept that this is happening and the meaning you assign to it. Is really the power that, like the individual has, because if you assign the meaning that this. Was like, you know, something really important and that, like, this means that, you know, you're not living a good life, then that's really hard. And that that can have a really significant impact.

They're just A2 follow-up points here. You said to thoughts lead to feelings and feelings lead to actions, but I don't think.

But they're also they're also bi causal. So if you think about it, like in a triangle, you have thoughts, feelings, actions. But the arrows go both.

Yes, OK. And I, but I don't think before feeling actually my feelings direct my thoughts.

Yeah, yeah. And essentially, yeah. You feel 1st and then you think so, yeah, what will happen then is that you have the option to reframe and that's psychological speak for basically thinking a thought after your thought. So if you think, like, I feel anxious, Oh my gosh. Like, there must be all of these things that I forgot to do then you think. You know, anxiety comes and it's a normal sensation like. You know, I'm gonna just let it be or something like that or like, you know, you have, like, different ways that you can interact with that thought that comes after the anxiety because, yeah, like things happen in our bodies and minds. But the way we react to them is really the decision we have.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. And just there's no more questions at the moment anyway. Just one last comment, is there a practise to help overcome cognitive bias and support critical thinking, EG Red team thinking as used by the military. Don't know if you come. Across the term red.

Yeah. Yeah, there's. Yeah, I think lots of disciplines have various practises to do this. I, like Daniel, can Callahan. Carnahan, I I'm horrible people's names, his book thinking. Fast and slow. It's long, but it's good and it really speaks to kind of how many errors our minds make. And I can, I think I think also just knowing these like I feel like once you label a cognitive bias and you kind of know it, I think like you see it all the time, you're like, look at that like I'm doing the IKEA effect cuz I always think anything I make is better or any of my ideas are better. Than the teams. And so like, it's like it creates almost like a warning system in our minds. So it's like, OK, I I knew to be aware for. That we have, we have, we have another question.

And ohh yeah.

What do you think? The relationship between anxiety that causes overthink. Thinking and the always growing pressure that short deadlines and continued dual change in direction, how do you advise leaders and organisations to work in anxious environments? Yeah, yeah. So this is something that I think has seen a lot. I'm. I'm not sure if you all in Europe remember the concept of trickle down economics.

Yeah. OK, good.

So it reminds me of this, but essentially what I see in organisations is that there's like trickle down stress effects. So there's like the CEO that gets stressed and then they make the lead stressed, or the VP's stressed. And then the VPS make the director. Stressed and then the directors make the senior managers stress and then the senior managers make the ICS stressed. It's like oftentimes you have like a directive that comes from the top and you're like this needs to happen and. That stress is really contagious and oftentimes what we do and we know this really well from like abuse psychology. So like we call it the abuse cycle and abuse doesn't just have to be physical, right. Abuse can be psychological. And just because we're not like. Actively, psychologically abusing someone doesn't mean that we're not kind of using this same cycle to essentially offload stress. And So what happens is that oftentimes and just to note here, we're not doing this consciously. Typically like I think most people, if they could do better, they would do better. It's usually indicative of kind of a lack of psychological safety and psychological growth. And So what? We do like like say say that you were like a VP and you got all of this stress from your CEO and they're like, you need to do this, this, this, this, the board will be unhappy. Like, we're not gonna do. Well, like, we're not gonna meet our Q2 KPIs and you need to make sure we do. And so essentially like you're getting all of this stress and kind of like almost like psychological borderline abuse sometimes. And then you go to, you know, someone under you, you go to the director and you're like, no, we need to do this, this, this, this and like, you kind of offload it on them. And what happens is that essentially like oftentimes. We feel so emotionally stressed by these occurrences that we need to offload. We need to put it on somebody else and what needs to happen. I think in organisations is that we need to be able to hold. Our stress hold our negative emotion. Within ourselves, without offloading it onto another. And I hope that kind of. Help. I hope that answers your question. Augusto, let me know if it doesn't because I think that's what leaders need to do in their organisation. I think they need to recognise when they're essentially psychologically offloading stress. Versus when they're actually issuing a helpful directive to their team. Because in a lot of instances, we're psychologically offloading stress. Oh, yeah, yeah. Anika, I would love to connect. Yeah, just connect with me on LinkedIn and I'm happy to chat with you. I also have a small YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic. So if you enjoy my ramblings, I have many more there.

YouTube channel is excellent. There's another question in the lesson. Could you please share 1 success story from your experience working with changing organisation behaviour?

Yeah. So I can't name names. I have a very strict confidentiality agreement because when I'm sure most of you know when you work in tech, your Ndas are, like really intense. But Tech organisation in Seattle. That's what I'll call them. We worked on the kind of stress and discomfort that managers feel when they report. The the increases in individuals wages throughout the year, so you have like this review cycle and then you meet with your team and you individually and you tell them like OK so you know like this year you did XYZ, you fell in this kind of bucket and because of that. Because of your performance, you receive X increase in salary, so a percentage. And typically in this particular realisation most people just increase. Just get that kind of inflation increase right? So just like that typical. Like couple percent, just from just that kind of lifestyle creep increase and so a lot of managers will feel. Kind of stressed and disappointed that they cannot offer more to their team members, but it's actually typically not the managers decision in this case. They only really reward the very, very, very high performers with a wage increase. And so what's happening is particularly with this one manager was. He spent a lot of time trying to overcompensate for this, so he would lay out to them like, OK, look. You know, I know you're not getting the wage increase that maybe you expected and he didn't actually know this. He was like he was he he thought that he knew that they were unhappy, so he anticipated them being unhappy. So he went straight to crisis prevention mode. He's like, I think they're gonna be unhappy. I am just. Gonna go in there and I'm gonna. Fix this because. Most of my engineers they wanna fix things like. That's why you got into that profession. And so he went into their meetings and he's like, OK, I know you're unhappy. I know you wanted more money. And look, I've laid out this spreadsheet in which I've tracked how much increase the stock has gone through, and this is how much more money you're gonna get because your stocks are gonna invest and he just, like, wants sew into the numbers. And what we found is that this actually led to more anxiety because if you think about it, if someone comes in with that. Kind of attitude. You kind of start thinking about your job. You're like, wait a second. Like he's really anxious. Should I be anxious? Like, is this like, an issue? Like, what's going wrong here? Like, why is he so stressed out? About this and he's essentially overcompensating, right. And So what we found is that and he came to this on his own in this individual case, was he decided to come into these. Meetings and just listen to start the meeting with just purely kind of like listening to where. They're at. What questions they have and psychology, we call this holding, holding the space, right. And so he found that when he did that and he didn't anticipate them being upset or them thinking that he's a poor manager for not offering them these like, wonderful. Wage increases, which he actually didn't have any control over, that it was a much more pleasant interaction. They actually created a stronger bond and he and he found that the team members felt a lot more safe and a lot kind of more happy with their actual with their actual just kind of normal wage increase instead of when he was kind of overcompensating. So yeah, that's just an example that came to mind. I'm not sure if that. Resonates with you all.

Just one other question, I think it's a follow-up. Many orgs are adopted into agile ways of working. Do you think Agile brings a lot of changes in the way how orgs run?

I think it depends on the org. I know in tech most a lot of tech companies adopt quite a few agile principles, even if they don't actually just use age. One aspect of agile that I think is helpful, that and most of my knowledge about Agile comes from my clients, so I don't have any actual direct knowledge. So if anything I say is wrong, we're gonna blame it on them. So one thing I think about it's wonderful about agile is that actually has like a process in which you evaluate like what went wrong and what went right. Is that correct? OK, good. Just making sure and I think that kind of pausing. And having the structure for that pausing. Is really really helpful. And I think if everyone kind of functioned that way, I think we would create better, better organisations in the whole world. And I think the structure is important because from psychology, we know humans are these wonderful creatures, but also we tend to like, have a lot of deficiencies. So if left to our own devices, we just won't pause like we'll. Just keep going.

Yeah. And he said thank you. That makes sense. Yeah, we'll leave it there. So unless so, thank you very much for your time again. And that was really, really good talk really different side of agile. That's something we all really need to consider and take on board. So thank you very much again.

Thank you all.

Thank you. Bye bye bye.