Ep. 19 | The Mental System Shaping Your Leadership — Unseen

Have you ever given clear feedback — and still not seen real change?

This can be one of the most frustrating parts of leadership, especially in high-stakes environments where performance, trust, and results matter.

In Episode 19 of Game Changer, Amanda Escobedo explores what might actually be happening in those moments — and why pushing harder often misses the real issue.

This episode introduces a leadership distinction most people were never taught: the difference between conscious and unconscious leadership — and how behavior, decisions, and reactions are often driven outside of awareness, particularly under pressure.

You’ll explore:

• Why behavior doesn’t always change even when feedback is understood and agreed upon
• How the brain defaults to familiar patterns when stakes are high
• Why what looks like resistance may actually be a lack of awareness
• How leaders slip into autopilot — and what creates choice again

This conversation isn’t about being softer.
 It’s about being more effective.

Because leadership isn’t tested when things are calm —
 it’s revealed when plans don’t go as expected and the pressure is real.

Transcript

Amanda Escobedo (00:03.296)
Welcome to the Game Changer by Empower House Coaching. Welcome to the Game Changer by Empower House Coaching, your podcast to master the mental game, elevate your brilliance and build a legacy of progress and impact. My name is Amanda Escobedo. I'm your host and inner game coach here to help you change the game.

Welcome to episode 19. Wow, I cannot believe it has been 19 weeks that I've been doing this so far. We're gonna just dive right into our topic today. A little recap of what you have been introduced to in the last couple of weeks. We have previously introduced you to what I consider and call the results model. And the results model, just as a reminder, is how our outcomes, your results are created.

a little bit of the formula. We have our circumstances. Circumstances are something that has occurred. Circumstances, a lot of the time, trigger our thoughts. They trigger a narrative. And it's that narrative, those thoughts that create feelings, vibrations in the body, those good vibes or those low vibes. And that feeling, those feelings are what drive our action or our inaction.

And those actions or inactions are what produce our results. And the core takeaway, I really want you to take away from the results model, super simple, but very powerful. Your circumstances do not determine your outcomes. Let me repeat that one more time. Your circumstances do not determine your outcomes. It's the meaning, the narrative, the story that you're telling yourself, the story that you assign to that circumstance.

that determines your results, your outcome. Then in our most recent episode, we went through a layer deeper and we talked a little bit about this concept called paradigms and the belief systems that really quietly shape how we interpret the world. Belief systems are a little deeper than our thoughts. And so how your belief system drives this automatic narrative. so when I say your belief systems are a little deeper than your thoughts,

Amanda Escobedo (02:20.246)
Whatever you fundamentally believe, the belief systems that are what I like to say wired into your brain, they can be changed, but it's the belief systems, what you fundamentally believe, it's what starts to shape those narratives that we apply to circumstances. And today we're gonna continue with building this foundation for you, the foundation of the mind, giving you some basics so you understand how the mind works. Because...

If thoughts are what drive our outcomes, right? The stories that we tell ourselves and beliefs, they really shape our thoughts, they shape how we see the world, then it's really worth asking a question. You know, I love my powerful questions. Why do certain actions, so why do certain actions or responses to circumstances feel sometimes so automatic? Like we're not really thinking about every like triggering thought.

How do I reframe this? A lot of our thoughts are just automatic, right? Especially under pressure or even when we know better, right? We know what we should be doing a lot of the time. Even those habits or behaviors feel so automatic and they feel hard to change. Why do leaders, even the leaders with the best intentions, still default to behaviors that they themselves do not want to model?

Now, the goal here is not to judge yourself. The goal here is not to use this information to fix people. What we're going to be introducing to you today is new concepts that are gonna give you a little more clarity. And so this episode today is really about understanding the conscious and the subconscious mind and how they shape your leadership, how they shape your performance, how they shape your influence.

even how they shape your parenting, your relationships in your marriage, you know, and why awareness is the foundation of intentional leadership. There's a reason why there's a whole curriculum, fad, a whole concept, books and series around conscious leadership, because we're talking and differentiating today in today's episodes.

Amanda Escobedo (04:34.306)
the difference between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. And again, the goal with bringing this to you is not to have you judge yourself and your behaviors or to use this as a tool to fix people. Rather, the goal is for you to lead, lead yourself and lead others with more clarity, with more precision and more choice is really the goal. So let's ground ourselves in a framework first. So you may have heard of the term neuro-linguistic

programming or NLP. And at its core, NLP really explores the relationship between how we process information, so the language we use to make meaning, and the behavior patterns that we repeat. So it's a way of understanding how certain neural pathways become reinforced over time. So every habit, every belief, every default reaction

that we have is supported by patterns in the brain that have been practiced repeatedly over and over and over again. And when some experience what we talked about in last episode, a paradigm shift when a belief genuinely changes and that starts to reshape how they see the world, when that belief genuinely changes, what starts to happen is a new neural pathway is now being born, is being

activated is being strengthened while old ones are now starting to lose their dominance and that's neuroplasticity. Why can't I say this? Neuroplasticity. Little tongue twister for me to ask a bit apparently.

Over time, let's move on. Over time with awareness and repetition, the brain literally becomes more efficient and running the new pattern instead of the old one. And here's the simplest way to kind of think about all this. We don't experience reality directly. We experience a filtered version of reality. Your brain is constantly interpreting what's happening. It's deciding for you. What does this mean? Is it safe?

Amanda Escobedo (06:46.354)
Is this a threat? What should I do next? And those interpretations are shaped by past experiences. They're shaped by emotional associations that we've had. They're shaped by your beliefs. They're shaped by your identity and the stories we've repeated for ourselves to ourselves over time, which starts to shape two people experiencing the same thing, the exact same situation.

yet they have different ways of interpreting that circumstances. So if you've ever been in the same situation and walked away with a completely different perspective or had a different emotional response or reaction or behavior to a friend or someone else, that's what we're talking about here. And as a personal example, I remember being in a meeting. I remember being in an executive meeting and this is...

kind of me working in my HR days and I'm sitting in this meeting and after this meeting, I could feel tension between two employees is what I'll say in this meeting. It's like, you can tell those two people don't like each other. Definitely got that note. So you could notice that energy for sure. But I got a ping afterwards and it was like, Amanda, can I talk to you? And it was, and.

one employee just started going off. cannot believe that she was yelling at me. Did you hear her yelling? She was yelling at me and all of these things. And I was like, whoa, did I miss it? Did I zone out? Did I tap out with somebody yelling? And I just was like, wow, how did I miss a whole thing? Where was my brain at? And so I kind of had to start connecting with people and be like, hey, did you notice any escalations in that meeting? And everyone was like, no. And I was like, did you notice anyone yelling? No, no, Two.

Different people, she had one experience, I had another, many other people had another experience. Nobody experienced yelling. And when I talk about going back to our brains do not experience reality, we are creating our own interpretation of reality. There's something that your brain does, it hallucinates. So we have to be careful with some of these hallucinations by some of the stories that we tell ourselves it starts to hallucinate. And I'll give you two examples right now of.

Amanda Escobedo (08:58.594)
hallucination. Number one, when you drink water and you feel like, wow, my thirst is now quenched after drinking that water. That's a hallucination. You've trained your body over time that when I drink water, I will be less thirsty. It takes like 20 minutes for your body to absorb that and actually take in the fruits of that water, right? But you have trained your body over and over and it starts to create a hallucination that, wow, I am less thirsty.

On the other side with this same example of this meeting, there is a hallucination that one person is literally happening. I believe that she experienced somebody yelling in that room and that is the story that she has turned on this person. The person that she doesn't like, she has villainized this person so much that the behaviors are a lot more escalated than I'll say what

the average person in that meeting experience was not yelling. And so that was a hallucination moment for that person where once she's identified this person as a bad person, is a negative person, has bad intentions, the brain starts to hallucinate, trying to protect you. At the end of the day, it's really trying to protect you. So I don't wanna ding the brain on this stuff, but again, the goal here is awareness. And I think the more you can understand what is happening in the mind, how it's operating,

What's its purpose? Why does the brain operate this way? Then we can start to increase our awareness on how to take control of it. So this brings us to a very distinction, an important distinction of today's episode. So in today's episode, you know, we're going to be talking about two distinctions of what we call the conscious and the subconscious mind. And this is really core to your leadership.

to performance and to how you get to influence others, which is exactly what leadership is. So both of these two concepts or these distinctions of the mind, we've got the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, both are actually essential for us. They both serve and have a purpose. The challenge isn't that we have a subconscious mind, right? And so when I say a subconscious mind, sometimes this is where we are not aware and the brain is just operating and we are in auto mode.

Amanda Escobedo (11:18.86)
The challenge is not the fact that we have a subconscious mind. The challenge is when we don't realize our subconscious mind is running the show. Now, the conscious mind is part of us being capable of intention. It's where we have that opportunity to reflect, where we pause, where we choose the actions or the inactions we want to take. It's part of us that can say, you know, this is how I want to lead.

This is the standard I wanna set. This is how I want to respond even when it's uncomfortable for us. The conscious mind gives us access to choices, to awareness, to deliberate leadership. But that doesn't mean it's always the system in charge. The subconscious mind serves and has a different purpose.

It's designed for efficiency. It automates. It repeats what's familiar. And this is where our habits live. This is where our emotional memory lives. This is where our beliefs lives. This is where our identity lives. And this system is incredibly helpful. Without the subconscious, we'd be exhausted all day. We'd have to consciously think through every single interaction, every decision, every response.

we wouldn't be able to function well in complex, fast moving environments. So this isn't a flaw of the human experience, it's really a feature. But there's also a consequence under pressure, which is where our leadership actually shows up in those pressure moments, the pressure cooker moments, the subconscious will likely default to what's known, not necessarily to what's optimal.

not necessarily to what's in alignment, but it will default to what's familiar. And so that includes how we make decisions, give feedback, respond to conflict, how we interpret behavior, how we lead others. And this isn't because we're careless, right? It's not because we lack skills.

Amanda Escobedo (13:34.114)
but it's because the brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do to conserve energy and rely on patterns that have worked before. Now this is why conscious leadership really matters. Not because the subconscious is bad, not because it's bad, but because leadership requires knowing when it's driving, knowing when your subconscious is driving versus your conscious, and knowing when to step back

into intention, that conscious moment. So the subconscious gives us the speed. If you're looking for speed, that's where that subconscious is gonna come in. But conscious gives us choice. And leadership lives in knowing when to slow down just enough to choose. So if you have ever experienced this, here's an example. Let's say you have an employee where you're giving direct feedback.

So you have an employee, let's say that's not meeting expectations, whether it's in their technical abilities, whether it's in their behaviors, their communications, maybe they're talking over people, maybe they're not asking enough questions, whatever the feedback is, let's say you've given that feedback, the employee acknowledges the feedback, agrees, you both have an agreement on the feedback given, but the behavior...

after that feedback you provided does not change or has not consistently changed. If this is something that you've experienced, there may be a number of reasons why this is happening, but one possibility I want to invite you to that's often overlooked. The person may understand the feedback consciously, right? But the behavior may be being driven subconsciously, meaning

They're not aware in the moment when this behavior is showing up. It's automatic for them. It's familiar. It's protective. It's tied to something deeper. It's tied to a belief. It's tied to an emotional association. It's tied to their identity. A learned pattern from a past experience. And this is incredibly common. And what this means is that in the moment the behavior shows up,

Amanda Escobedo (15:54.882)
There isn't a deliberate choice for them that's being made. There's no pause, there's no reflection, and there's no awareness because their subconscious has taken over doing what it's always done, even though the person genuinely wants to change. Now, this is why you'll sometimes see inconsistent performance progress, inconsistent performance and expectations.

They respond maybe well in one meeting and then they might fall back to the same pattern in the next. And let's say they respond well in one meeting. Let's say it's a neutral meeting. It's not tense, but maybe under those pressure like moments, they fall back into old patterns. That's especially where it's harder to access that consciousness. Not because again, they don't care. Not because that they're resistance.

Again, those might be possibilities of why you're not seeing change, but what I'm trying to open up is a possibility. If they're in agreement, if they're in alignment on that feedback, they wanna change, they wanna take that feedback, and you're not seeing the pivot that you want to see. It may be because the habit of being themselves is running faster than the conscious intention. Now, the habit of being themselves is running faster than the conscious intention.

And here's where it becomes leadership as an opportunity, not just something to diagnose in others, because the same dynamics we've been talking about don't just stop with your team. They show up in how you lead and how you respond under pressure and how you react to things that don't go as planned and what you default to when stakes are high. Here's something important I want you to understand.

The brain is wired for threat detection, energy conservation, and pattern recognition. So under pressure, put that brain under pressure. We don't default to our best intentions. We default again to what is familiar, what's efficient, what's worked well.

Amanda Escobedo (18:04.374)
What's familiar, what's efficient and what worked well is what's going to help you detect a threat, is what's going to help you conserve energy, is what's going to help you recognize a pattern. And that's why leadership under pressure is what actually unveils your leadership style. So some leaders default to control, some leaders default to urgency, avoidance, micromanagement, not because they want to.

but because that's the pattern their system knows. And this is where conscious leadership comes in. Conscious leadership isn't about being calm all the time. That's not a reality. It's not about never reacting, right? At the end of the day, we are experiencing the human experience, but it's really about noticing that at its core is conscious leadership. And when I say noticing,

It's about noticing that you're actually in autopilot mode, noticing, wow, I have a bunch of assumptions here. There's a bunch of assumptions and a story here. Noticing the story that you're telling yourself in the moment. And then asking, what else could be true here? Is there another narrative that is possible that can be applied here? It's that pause. Even for a brief moment, this is where your influence and your choice begins.

Now, let's make this a little personal for a moment, just a moment, and not from my own experience, because I'm going to bring in a parenting example, but this is from what I consistently see in working with some of my clients. When I'm coaching leaders, one thing that becomes very clear very quickly is work does not stay at work. I think we all know that, right? What happens at work, it shows up in the home environment. And what happens in our home environment,

generally tends to creep into our work environment, especially in a season of pressure. And I hear versions of stories all the time. A leader has had a long day, high stakes meeting, tight deadlines, decisions that carry all of this weight, and then they get home. They're already mentally and emotionally spent. And then the kids.

Amanda Escobedo (20:24.834)
The kids don't wanna eat their vegetables, they're arguing over toys, someone's having a meltdown, and suddenly that patience, our fuse has gone real short. And the reactions come in real fast. Voices get raised, rules get reinforced harder, and our responses look like, enough, everyone off to bed, no more toys.

whatever that emotional response is, not because this is how you want to lead as a parent, not because this reflects your values, but because they're at the end of their capacity and the subconscious has really taken over in that moment. Now, what I notice, especially with leaders in high pressure roles, is how closely this mirrors what happens at work as well. When the stakes are high, timelines are tight.

Visibility is elevated. The same patterns show up in many other places. Short fuses, less curiosity, more control. Not because again, leaders don't care, but because their systems are overloaded. And this is where conscious leadership and conscious living really comes into play. And it's not about being calm all the time. Again, I wanna reinforce that. It's not about never re...

Reacting, it's about noticing. Noticing I'm depleted, noticing I'm reacting from my stress, my nervous system is running the show right now, and sometimes that awareness alone creates a pause. And a pause sounds like, let me just take a breath. This isn't an emergency. You know what? I can respond, not just react. Same situation, different awareness is what.

is gonna give you the opportunity to drive different outcomes. And this is the part I really wanna underline, cultivating stronger leadership isn't just about performance at work. It's really about cultivating more conscious humans, more awareness, more intentionality, more connection to yourself and to others. Because when you learn to notice your internal patterns, you don't just lead teams.

Amanda Escobedo (22:48.322)
differently. You show up differently in your relationships, in your home, and everyday moments that matter. Leadership at its core is a human practice and awareness is where it all begins everywhere. Now before I kind of go into a reflection moment, one of the things I want to say is, you know, today is really, this episode is really just about

introducing you to these concepts. We're eventually gonna lead you into tools that help you solve for the mind, right? So, you today I'm introducing you to the conscious and the unconscious mind, and you might be sitting and thinking, okay, how do I increase my awareness that my brain is being hijacked by the unconscious mind? Like, this is nice information, Amanda, but what do I do about it? Well, you gotta tune in.

You gotta tune in for the next few episodes because we're gonna give you some practical tools to solve all of this. And the other thing I wanna say is, you know, I just talked about how the conscious mind, that's gonna give you power of choice, right? That's gonna help you lead with intentionality, but the unconscious mind is really there as a benefit as well. It's there for efficiency. That's one of the things to conserve energy.

And we need that as leaders, we need energy. We can't have you be conscious all the time. And so if you've got a lot of patterns and behaviors and let's say your job is full of stress, so how are you operating in a more conscious moment? And is that sustainable for you to just be conscious all the time? And the reality is your world is just high stakes, high pressure. Well, the real truth with all of this is what I would like to say is changing there's neural.

Neural pathways and that's where that paradigm shift will come into play. The more we can unpack what you think and really dive into your belief system, the big game changer, the first step is awareness, right? That's the first step of this process that's gonna get you somewhere is just noticing your trigger moments, is noticing how you're responding in these trigger moments. That's a first step, but it's not sustainable for you to be acting conscious all the time. And so what we really wanna do is have

Amanda Escobedo (25:03.246)
paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts are going to completely change how you see the world. And if you completely change how you see the world, then you'll completely start to change your habits and your behaviors. That will be the trick. And that is a creative process. So we're gonna dive into a lot of creativity on how to have those paradigm shifts, on how to have an internal transformation.

Because changing behaviors, and I want to reinforce this because I see this time and time and time again with leaders, when they're giving feedback, they're so frustrated, they're ready to just get rid of people, they're getting ready to just pit people because I gave them feedback, I set the expectations and they're not changing. Well, I need you to fundamentally understand why they may not be changing rather than the assumptions. Here's the other piece that we're talking about here. The assumptions that they're just resistant to change, right? They don't...

That may be a possibility, but all the assumptions that you have, we wanna lead with curiosity and we wanna validate that data. Because once we validate that data, whatever the assumption is, are you wrong, are you right? We wanna validate what is actually happening and then solve for that. But one possibility that I'm inviting you to, one data point that might be,

is if they really do understand the feedback, if they really do want to change and you're not seeing the pivot, it may be because their subconscious is taking over. Which then leads me into some self-reflections. So here's what I want you to sit with this week. If you're a leader, think about a moment where you have given feedback. And again, maybe this person has acknowledged the feedback.

and yet the behavior hasn't really changed. In those moments, instead of pushing harder, instead of saying, already had this conversation, we cannot have this conversation again, I want you to ask yourself, is there an opportunity here to get more curious? Is it possible this behavior is happening outside of their awareness?

Amanda Escobedo (27:15.104)
showing up automatically in the moment without intention. And if that might be true, the opportunity is not more pressure, it's awareness. What might help this person notice what's happening as it's happening? How could you partner with them creatively, collaboratively to increase their awareness in those moments?

That's where leadership shifts from managing behavior to developing people. Now let's turn the lens on you. I want you to think about a moment for yourself when things didn't go as planned. Let's say a deal fell through, a client walked away, revenue fell uncertain, cashflow was tight, the weight of responsibility was heavy. And in those moments, pressure isn't theoretical, it's real. And when you look back,

Are there moments you're proud of on how you showed up? If so, what has helped you stay aware in that moment? What did you notice internally in your thoughts, your body, your reactions? What allowed you to respond with intention instead of reacting from stress? And if there are moments you wish you had handled things differently, and I want you to judge yourself, this is not a judging moment, but to learn

and to ask what was happening in my system then? What signs did I miss that I was moving into autopilot, the subconscious? Because the more familiar you become with how pressure shows up for you, the faster you can recognize it next time. This is the work. It's not forcing change. It's not demanding better behavior, but it's increasing our awareness.

in yourself and in others. Because awareness is what creates choice. And choice is where intentionality leadership lives. All right, folks, I'm Amanda Escobedo and you've been listening to Game Changer. If today sparked insights, ah-hahs, new appreciations, new perspectives, I'd be so grateful if you subscribed.

Amanda Escobedo (29:37.516)
Left a review, shared this episode with three people in your network who are ready to master the inner game and unlock their full potential. Your support helps others discover this resource and invites them to be the next game changer. Join me next time for another conversation on leadership, culture, and creating impact that lasts. Thanks for listening.