And welcome to the session, Mindset Matters, the Neuroscience of Change and Transformation. My name is Maria Luisa Angus. I am a neuro change solution consultant and a hard math resilience trainer.And I'm gonna start sharing my screen and I will tell you in a moment what we are going to see in the next 20 minutes. Um I'm going to show you some of the scientific facts about your inner technology. We is so much focus on the outside technology and new developments, but we don't take time to understand how our body and our brain work together and this information is important for us because this determines in greater amount the way we respond to changes and challenges. And this is one of the things that we need most now. So take notes if you want pay attention. And I hope that by the end of the session, you get some valuable information that can help you to become more aware uh about the changes you need to make and the changes you wanna make too. So I'm gonna say that uh briefly inducting myself and you should note I have a background of 20 years in a corporation. And um some years ago I decided to create my own consultancy companies.

Um What I do is I help people to change by using neuroscience and using uh principles based on physiology. So I teach emotional intelligence, I teach to understand your emotions and your threads and I teach you to change your emotional state and also how to make the changes you want to make. But now let's uh take a look to the current situation. Uh We live in a world of change and I think it's quite obvious, I don't have to talk much about it. And especially in the area of technology, we have seen that the pandemic has been acting like a catalyst for technological development and change. And we have seen developments that happen much faster than if we wouldn't have the pandemic. Now, it makes obvious that we need to adapt. If we need to change, the changes are speeding up and this is not gonna stop after the pandemic. So we need to know how to change. We need to know how to adapt whatever reason you are joining this conference this week and whatever part of the world it doesn't matter. It can be that you're looking for a, a new direction in your career or your company hiring new talents for the future or you're already working on new technologies. When you're studying something related with technology, it doesn't matter.

We are all humans, we all operate basically the same way and everything starts on the individual level because every organization, every team, every project, it's made of the people and this project and team. And that's why when we change the way we operate individually, also the team changes.

And this is the way we can create real, truly change from the inside out. And that's why it's so important to understand this. Now, what are the challenges that we are experiencing right now? Today, everybody has to handle multiple tasks and we have also a lot of distractions, think about the technological distractions, our devices. Now, this is one how to handle those things. The second one is how to set the right priorities. Another one is how to stay focused with all distractions. Everything seems to be so important, how to manage uncertainty. This triggers our stress response and how to prepare for an unpredictable future. This is one of the things that it's really difficult to do because we don't know what the future will look like. Now, all these questions are not that easy to answer right now and this creates a lot of stress. Now, I wanna talk a some a little bit about stress because stress and the ability to change are not best friends, especially when we experience high levels of stress. That's why I wanna settle a definition for stress and what it does to the body and to the brain performance. So sometimes when I ask somebody um why do you look so tense?

Um This person tells me, you know, I'm like this because I have financial problems or I'm working from home all because I have so much to do and this things happening outside, right? These are not really stress, these are stressors, these are the things happening on your environment that triggers your stress response. But stress is something that always happens within you. It it's also called the stress response and it's nothing else like the way your body tries to go back to balance, to go back to omeo stasis. This is the biological physiological term. Now, you should know that all organisms in nature have a stress response because everybody, all organists want to go back to balance and this is a really good thing. Um It's an evolutionary gift from nature. It has served us very well to evolve as a species through the many, many millions of many, many thousands of years that we are here on this planet. Now, it's very good in the short term. Meaning after the stress response is over, after the danger of the threat is over, we go to rest, we regenerate. Now. What is the problem right now? The problem is when the stress response becomes chronic. Why?

Because when we are under this stress response, our body changes, we have a chemical response. We create some chemicals like cortisol or adrenaline with our typical stress hormones. And these chemicals are telling your body to use energy. What does it mean when you're using energy?

You are not regenerating energy. Right now. The problem today in modern societies is that we have a prolonged or chronic stress response. And there are two reasons for that. The number one reason is what you see here in this slide, we have so many different stressors. It doesn't stop right now. We have to focus from one thing to the other. It's like a firefighter. We really don't have any break to uh ST say stop and to regenerate for a moment or at least many people don't know how to do that. The second reason why the stress response has become chronic uh yield in human nature. This is something that only humans do. I gonna give you an example. Um It doesn't matter if you're a person. If you're experiencing a real threat, I can lie on chasing you quite um not really very uh probable uh today, but just to give you the feeling a real threat or something, you're imagining like, you know, you're late with your report and your boss is gonna become angry because you know how she is.

So both things create in your body. Exactly the same stress response. What does this mean? It means that your body doesn't know the difference between the stress that it's created by a real threat or stress that you created just because you are thinking about the takeaway here is your thoughts can create stress and people have a lot of negative thoughts that are responsible for a lot of stress.

Now, think about what does this mean for you every time you're worrying about something that you cannot fix anyway because you did maybe already everything that you could have done and every this uh this um supplementary worry, it's not helping you at all because it's creating that chemistry of stress in your body.

And it's telling the body to use energy unnecessarily. So one thing is to understand, when are you having a stress response unnecessarily? Now I'm gonna show you how the brain and the body work together and how your thoughts can create stress. Pay attention to this because it may sound familiar to you. Now, imagine we have here. One person having some negative thoughts like nobody hires me. Maybe it's the case of some of you uh looking for a new job or I'm overworked or I'm fed up with being at home. I uh listen to this quite often. Now, this person I say is selling is telling, I'm frustrated. Now, the moment this person thinks I'm frustrated, um Something happens in your brain. There is a part of the brain which is called the emotional brain and it creates some chemicals. Now the vomit, they create some chemicals as the body and the brain are talking to each other all the time. There is a signal going down your spinal cord and reaches the adrenal glands. And there is a release of adrenaline at the moment you start, you have that release of adrenaline. You start feeling differently because there is the alteration in the chemistry of your body. When you start feeling differently, you start thinking about the way you feel because you notice it.

So there is another signal going up from the body to the brain and look what happens. Now you start thinking about the way you feel. So you start creating more thoughts like I should quit my job or I am surrounded by idiots or I can't stand my partner and these thoughts, they don't even have to be true necessarily, but it just created by your mind too much. Exactly. The way you are feeling correspondingly, the cycle starts all over again, your emotional brain gets activated, you produce more of those chemicals, you release more adrenaline, you uh become more and more frustrated and this cycle perpetrates sometimes for many months or, or years even.

And you don't, you're not become, you don't become aware of that because when you're doing something for such a long time, you get used to that. It's familiar to you. So you, you even don't know that you're doing that. And this is one of the reasons why change is sometimes so difficult to make because there is a continuity between body and brain. Now everybody knows that stress can make you sick, can make the body sick. In the course of some years, you can have a elevated heart rate. You have muscle pain or back pain. Uh You may have uh um um high blood pressure and many other issues. But what not everybody knows are the implications for your brain performance. And this is something I wanna talk to you about this. Now, when we experience a stress response, um there are some emotions associated that are not that nice and you have here, some of them. Um The way we respond to stress and the emotions we experience when we are under the stress response may be different from person to person. However, there is a common denominator whenever we experience those emotions as the body and the brain are talking to each other all the time.

As I just showed you before, there is a signal again, going from the body to the brain and um especially the negative emotions interfere with the ability of the brain to synchronize as a result. There is an impairment in brain performance, meaning the different parts of the brain, stop talking to each other. It's like they close the doors of the different rooms of the brain, especially there is one really important part of the brain which is in charge of the so-called brain executive functions. I'm talking about this yellow part of the brain, the frontal lobe and this is in charge of these high executive functions that you see here. Planning decision making long and short term memory, impulse control, foresight, ability to see the consequences of your actions in the future, critical and abstract thinking, creativity and innovation, goal setting. And guess what? When you have those negative emotions going on, these brain executive functions are the first ones that stop working, they go offline first. And we need those to change. We really need those to find new solutions to adapt, to restrain our impulses. What does this mean?

And this is really important when we are under high stress, we cannot change. And this is a paradox. Why? Because we're in times of a lot of stress and we need to change at the same time. Now, I'm gonna show you that this is true for you because we all have experienced this. Now, imagine a situation that you just recently had or maybe you had this in the past um where somebody did something that really bother you a lot and then you reacted emotionally to the person. You said something to the person, you did something you wrote a mail, you did something to that person. Now, the day after or maybe on the same day or the week after you regretted what you did and what you said you said to yourself. I shouldn't have said that I shouldn't have done that. Where was my brain at that time? This is an example that when you are experiencing those emotions of stress, this functions doesn't work. And only after the effect of that emotional reaction has passed by, only then you can see what could have been a more appropriate response. Yeah. And that's why it's important to understand how this works.

And this is important to understand how you can, most of the time have those functions act activated. Or if you are out of balance, how you can move fast again, back to activated functions. And now I'm gonna talk about perception. Why? Because sometimes uh different people respond differently to the same stressor, same situation to people, even twins and they respond differently. So let's understand why this is. So and for this, I want to talk a little bit about your brain and how the brain forms perception.

And there is a principle in neuroscience which is called neuroplasticity. What is this neuroplasticity? Um or the plasticity of the brain means that your brain is able to learn and learn and relearn at any age. Now, what does this mean? Every time you learn something new? Maybe like now you're making new connections in the brain, you're making neurons fire together. And when you review what you learned the information, you're making that connection stronger. Now, think about how we learn the process of from childhood to adulthood and this is a process that never stops.

Now we start watching what we see around us. We start with our family, with our parents and we go to school, we have some friends. Then we go to university, we study something we work, we interact, we grow in a third culture. So we do what we often see, we repeat and replicate. And in doing this, we're making certain neurons fire and wire together in a very specific way. So we can say that when we are adults by the age of 35 approximately, um we have created a very, very finite mapping in our brain, a very finite signature. And you can say almost that everything that you have experienced in your life and everything you have learned is mapped neurologically in your brain. And this is what conditions the way you respond to events in life, your resilience and your ability to change and to adapt. And that's why different people with different experiences respond differently. So the takeaway here is that we create familiar baselines through repetition. Now, let's understand how this links to the stress response. I was made men mentioned to you before. Now, um I have said that we create familiar baselines through repetition. Now, these familiar baselines become subconscious because we have done it so many times and we don't have to consciously think about doing them all the time.

It's like driving your car first time, first lesson, you're tense, you're totally focused on what you're doing. After 10 years of driving experience, you don't have to focus that much. Your body is driving, but you can be mentally somewhere else. Now, you have a lot of familiar baselines.

Now imagine you have an external event happening. What does your brain do in that situation? Your brain compares if there is a familiar baseline and compares that event with that familiar baseline. And your brain says, do I know this with what is happening outside? If the answer is yes, then what the next question is it is, is, is this a threat for me? Is something good or bad for me? If it's not a threat? No worries. You don't have to do anything. If it is a threat because you experienced this before then automatically you have the stress response activated. Now, if by comparing to the baseline, the external event is not familiar is totally new, then automatically the stress response gets activated right now, having said that and having known how we operate, what can we do and what is the goal? Now, the goal is to be able to move from stress from the higher stress. I'm talking about a high stress which represents that we feel that we have a threat. And because of this, we overreact, we cannot communicate, we cannot see different options. That's why we cannot take the best decisions. It's not a time for creativity, for empathy or collaboration. It's a time for survival. It's a time for selfishness to be selfish.

Now, this is the situation that many people are experiencing and this is the situation where change is not possible. This is something I do in my trainings. Now, what is the goal to move to creation, to move to a place where we feel safe, independent of the conditions of your environment? Why? Because only when we feel safe, we can connect, we can communicate, we can take better decisions, we can be empathetic goal setting and collaborate within our teams or whatever we want to collaborate. How do we move from stress to creation? How do we learn to do that? Now, this is, as I say, one of the things I teach in the training, a change of micro neuroscience based on the work of Dr Jody Penza. Um you need to do two things. You need to become aware and you need to be able to change your emotional state to be able to self regulate. Why? Because these are the emotions of stress, the ones that disable this brain executive functions. Now this is a three step process to do this. I'm gonna show you the three steps. So how can you move back to the driver's seat? Number one, you have to become aware, know your frets and reactions start taking inventory. When do you react with the stress response? What is your reaction? What do you do?

What do you say? What do you think? Use your head, put attention there, become aware. Number two, use your heart, start changing your emotional state. There are a lot of tools that you can learn to change your emotional state and start creating a vision. This is something that not many people can do because they did we never learn those things at school. So start imagining how would it be to have the new job, how would it be to make it kind of work or to have that project done and attach an emotion to that? So create a vision and put a heart on that vision, put an emotion on that vision. And finally, you want this to become a reality, right? So you have to use your hands, take action, create a strategy, implement and repeat over and over. Why? Because this is the way our brain operates through repetition, you want this to become a habit so that it becomes automatic and this is the way it operates. Now, when you're mastering those three steps, you're able to make any change you wanna make in your life. And what happens is um two things. First thing is you become automatically more resilient, you become independent of the environment and are more adaptable. Why?

Because the change you are, you're you're uh holding on your vision and um whatever happens outside, you will be much able to adapt and to refine your strategy. The second thing is you have an ego view, you can see different options and you can question the market trends. Um You don't have to go for every market trend. You will be able to distinguish what is for you and what is not for you, right? So not because everybody is doing it, it has to be for you. And finally, I wanna throw a question about the role of technological innovation. When you learn to do those things, uh when you learn to be independent of your environment, you can be much more critical on the whole technological development. Um This would be a who a whole topic for a whole workshop. So, but to be able to be aware and create a vision and implemented vision helps you also to learn to identify when technology becomes a purpose by itself or an instrument. So distinguish, learn to distinguish when it's your the project, you're working an instrument or it's a purpose by itself. We have to become more aware that it has to be an instrument that itself as well to develop and to make our lives easier and the lives of others. Thank you very much. Please contact me on linkedin uh for uh more information on any kind of questions you wanna ask and I help you in this process of change. If you're interested, you find me on Linkedin on the Maria Luisa and thank you so much. Bye.