First Time Facilitator podcast transcript (Episode 6)
We need more mindful leaders (and we need them right now) with Rachel Grace (Episode 6)
Leanne: Welcome to the First Time Facilitator Podcast. My friend and fellow facilitator, Rachel Grace.
Rachel: Good day.
Leanne: Hey Rachel, we spent 2003 in a group together studying statistics. I know you were probably the brains of the group and the hardest working of all of us.
Rachel: That's a big accusation, mate. I don't know about that.
[laughter]
Leanne: Hopefully the other two aren't listening into this.
Rachel: Yes.
[laughs]
Leanne: [chuckles] Tell us, we haven't seen each other for 15 years. What has happened and what brings you in this room now talking to me about the world of facilitation?
Rachel: Yes, cool, good question. Good to see you too, mate. After I lost track of you, we lost track of each other, around that time I finished up with psych a few years later. Then after that, I went and I did research in social psychology. That's about trying to understand behaviour, what drives behaviour at a group level and trying to look for good ways to intervene to change behaviour. For example, the first job I got at a uni was for the Red Cross looking at how to understand and increase blood donation behaviour. That's an example of what social psychs do. I worked in a team there then I went from there to CSIRO and worked with a team looking to decrease water use because it was at the time of the drought so it was about how do we understand the way humans relate to environmental stuff including water. That was good.
I wanted to get more from the research side of things more into the people stuff. I started to tour with the idea of being a therapist so I went to London and I worked for the National Health Service there at a big hospital in London in a sexual health clinic.Where part of my week was about looking at compassion in nursing, how to understand, what drives it, and how to increase it. Also, in using mindfulness as a tool to help people with anxiety, relationship problems, sexual dysfunction, and pain. It was really interesting but then I got a bit disillusioned with how little impact you could have in big organizations sometimes.
I got a bit frustrated so I bailed on it, left London, came back, and found myself in the hills of Byron Bay, doing permaculture and organic farming for a long time as a way to reconnect with Earth and look at actually doing stuff that felt really tangible and pragmatic. I'd also realise that as much as I knew how to do a T-test and even trickier stats things after I left you.It was like I didn't know how to grow a carrot and I didn't know how to connect with Earth. I felt that there was something wrong with that so I rectified that by doing years, doing farming and permaculture. Because I don't muck around, so I got used to it. It was really great. After that, I realised that as much as I loved working with the Earth and working on farms, it wasn't really my calling because I like talking too much and I was a bit slow, I was probably better off working with people which is my real gift and passion.
I returned to the city and started to work with people again. This time it took a different shape. I wasn't researching about stuff or researching how to design interventions to change behaviour. I started working directly with people. I think that bridged the gap between the world of understanding psychology and human behaviour and seeking to have a practical impact, which is what I was looking for through doing farming. I got to bring those things together when I started to do coaching and mindfulness training and that kind of stuff.
Leanne: When you actually moved back from London and to Byron Bay, did anyone say, "Hey Rach, what are you doing? You're throwing your career away?"
Rachel: Yes, for sure. People were like that but there's something in people these days where they get the desire to live a simpler life and to connect to the Earth. Maybe it's a function of the type of friends I have. There was an understanding of that. There was definite concern about why would you walk away from an amazing trajectory. When I went to London, I wanted to go to Oxford and I got the prerequisite job for that and was months away from going for the interview to go to Oxford, doesn't mean I would have got in. It was looking quite good because I got the job at the hospital in London out of 650 applicants. It was at the peak of a global financial crisis. To go to Oxford, you had to get this prerequisite job so I was on an amazing trajectory from one standpoint but I knew in my heart I needed to do other things and I'm glad I did.
The people around me also were concerned, they also accepted that in some ways, our world's a little bit upside down with what we prioritize. We've lost the connection with the Earth, we've lost our connection with a lot of connections to nature even and the seasons. How to do some of these fundamental things that we need to have a fulfilling life like have time in our day to reflect after sweating and grow our own food and understand how to take care of our own waste and a whole lot of things. Sometimes people do that when they've retired. They go and have the tree changed or they buy a hobby farm. Well, I did it mid-career and I did it for many years and I'm really glad.
Leanne: It's really interesting. I think with all these inventions and gadgets and things out now, which are meant to save us time, now we can connect not only via email, via phone but there's Whatsapp. If you're off that, then there's Messenger and all these different tools.
Rachel: Yes,
Leanne: Just moving straight over to mindfulness, what are you noticing about society? Do you think the problem's getting worse or, like you said, you recognize that some people are now going, "Hey, it's okay to step back." Where do you see it heading?
Rachel: That's a good question. The thing I noticed about myself and I noticed in others too is it's one thing to go, "Look, I need to create a gap in my life because the pressures of modern life with its non-stop demands through apps and emails and work pressures and all this." It's great to go and have a weekend away. It's great to have a holiday. It's great to take four years, five, six years out to go and do farming. That's great but it's not always functional to leave the coalface of life to almost have that gap. It's really necessary to have a tool on hand as life unfolds to create a little internal gap, like a little internal holiday.
Mindfulness really is a tool that allows us to notice just how demanding stuff is. Notice how we're reacting to it. Through practice and knowing what to do with your mind, you can actually start to create a little gap where through being present and observing yourself, you're able to not take on the pressures of life. Therefore, you don't need to necessarily rely on leaving the situation or waiting for the holiday before you can feel relaxed because otherwise, it's a long time between drinks. If people are waiting for retirement before they can chill out, well that's a pretty sad circumstance really. It's also pretty sad when people only get to chill out on their holidays a few times a year. Mindfulness is a tool that helps us to chill out in the midst. There's a part of us that can chill out even in the midst of life being full of pressure, so that's one of the main benefits of it. I see just an enormous need for it particularly as you race with the amount of the apps, the intensity of the accessibility and stimulus from those. Like they call it the "attention deficit economy" where there's so much demands on our attention, it wears us thin. It's really important more than ever to have the internal tools to manage that.
It's about having a number of tools in the repertoire and I don't think society has, up to this point, equipped us with the tools to manage our minds well so that we know how to do that and yet it's a learnable skill. In our modern day and age where the economy and our productivity and our income, for most of us relying on our minds and the quality of our minds, the quality of our thinking, the quality of managing our stress and our emotions, it's like the time has come for us to not just let our minds operate on default. In the hope that we'll get through a career that's so demanding. It's time for us to, as a society, step up to recognizing that our minds are a tool that we can actually sharpen and have them performing optimally if we take the time to train them.
Leanne: When people have deficiencies in, say, technical skill, "I can't run this report in Excel. I'm going to need to do an Excel training course." we go straight to a training course. When it comes to mindfulness, people are a little bit vulnerable or don’t really talk about things like, "I actually need to work on how I'm going to cope or deal with this." In saying that in the last couple of years, there's been more discussion around mindfulness. It's coming out but there's still these connotations of, "I'm weak." if I do the meditation, it's a bit woo woo-ey" What do you say to that when you hear that?
Rachel: I understand that. There's a lot of misconceptions about what mindfulness is, yet at the same time, mindfulness has become such a buzzword so it can easily be discounted as being a fad. The way I deal with that is I try to educate people about what mindfulness is. Mindfulness, for example, we're talking about, would be it's about bringing our full attention into this moment and accepting this moment as it is. There's these two components to the definition of mindfulness as I use it, which is drawn from the literature. It's about being present, having your mind where your body is, which is not as easy as it sounds of course, but to be fully present here and now, just to accept that whatever's currently going on in the environment around you or within you, this is the reality right now. That's the definition of mindfulness. That's really important for me anyway. I clear that up as quickly as I can with people because a lot of times people have the misconception that mindfulness is about having a blank mind and no thoughts. I hear this all the time, "No Rachel. That's fine. You're into mindfulness, but I couldn't do it because you don't understand my mind. I'm a thinker." This is the way it goes.
[laughter]
Rachel: "I'm a thinker and because I've got one of those minds that races." This is the way people always say and I'm like, "Okay. Cool. I hear that," I can see you're laughing because you're relating. The reality is that in truth everyone has a mind that races all the time. Everyone has a mind that is swinging wildly between thinking about the past, thinking about the future, evaluating what's currently happening. Everyone's mind pretty much, I think.
If you're listening and that's not you, then no offence intended, but for the majority of people, their minds are all over the shop. That's nothing to be ashamed of, but we need to face up to that and acknowledge and call the elephant in the room, that we're all wondering around with a mind like that. I just say to people, "Look, mindfulness is not about having a blank mind."
If you hold that misconception, you'll automatically think it's not for you because you'll think it's unobtainable. That's a real shame because in fact, mindfulness is exactly for the people who find that they're getting kicked around by their minds, that are worrying about the past, worrying about the future, judging stuff about themselves and others that are around them and just giving them no peace really. I also do try to share that. My own journey was one of thinking that mindfulness was rubbish. When I was 20, I got chronic fatigue and I went to a GP who was a western medical doctor but also trained in traditional Chinese medicine. Then I came to understand he was a meditation master. I didn't know. In my first consult with him, he examined me and I thought he was going to give me drugs to get me better. That's what I wanted, but what he did was after examining me he said, "If you don't learn to focus your mind, you're never going to recover your health."
I was shocked, then I was angry and then I was disappointed because I was, "What's my mind got to do with it mate? I don't know where you're from, but just give me the drugs."
[laughs]
"Hust give it to me. I didn't come here to tell you all I need to calm my mind. I've got a physical problem. Give me something to--" I was desperate right? He actually wrote on a prescription slip. He wrote on the prescription slip the pattern to Meditation Center which is not there anymore, but he sat across the table to me. He said, "You need to go there and you need to learn to meditate," and I thought, "What does he know?"
I went because I was desperate. When I sat down in that first class and I paid attention to my mind like they instructed me to, I quickly found out that he had a point. That my mind was not focused. It was all over the shop. It was racing, reliving stuff from the past, worrying about stuff from the future. To be honest, I thought, "No wonder I'm tired."
That's not a clinical diagnosis for anyone out there with chronic fatigue, but that was just my recognition and I stuck with it. I did get better and I ended up getting instruction from him personally on how to do all different kinds of mindfulness and meditation techniques over the course of over a decade. Studied Psychology during that time where I met you hon and increasingly got to see the benefit of it.
I've gone from thinking it was rubbish to not only having a personal journey that tells me that it's not only helpful, it's probably helped save my life. It's actually transformed me as a person. Then as I got more into Psychology and I understood the way the brain works, I could get how the structural function of the brain operates, I could see why mindfulness has an impact.
Over the last six years is there's been enhancements in technology in studying the brain. The Neuroscience literature has given rise to over 6,500 peer-review general articles on mindfulness. It's like my personal journey for 20 years of mindfulness has paralleled the technological enhancements that has allowed the peer-reviewed literature to increase, which has given an evidence-based mindfulness, which means that I now have the benefit of not only being able to speak for my own personal journey, but I have the scientific literacy thanks to the side training to understand what the peer-review literature says.
It's like it's all come together now. Now, I can stand in front of people. I have a talk, a signature talk I call it, which is “Mindfulness is not just hippy, fluffy stuff.” It's a one-hour talk and I do it sometimes out in the public, but generally, it's in corporate situations where I basically take people on that journey. I share a little bit of my personal journey thinking it was hippy, fluffy stuff. Then I speak to the peer-reviewed literature, the evidence base for how we now know that mindfulness absolutely is transformational and changes people for the better. Then I guide everyone in that process for a 15-minute practice.
That's the cool way. I've delivered this talk so many times now that at the end of guiding people through a 15-minute practice, I always ask, "Can I see an honest raise of hands who's got benefit from that practice?" I say, "You don't need to do it to stroke my ego. I can get that done in other ways, but can I see an honest raise of hands?" Every time, every hand in the room maybe by one or two goes up.
I've done this full of rooms of people up to a hundred and not just the people who you think would be into it. This is a corporate situation in the middle of a workday, with a lot of alpha males in the room. Yet it's undeniable, time after time, that mindfulness practice that's based on what the evidence says is a good mindfulness practice, because mindfulness can mean lots of different types of techniques, but I do one that's based on what the bulk of the literature says is useful and has impact, it works.
Leanne: Great. What do you cover in the 15 minutes?
Rachel: Yes. The way I train people in mindfulness is what gets called an embodied practice. That just means that the training is about training our awareness to be present in the here and now by virtue of getting it to pay attention to sensations in the body a bit. Specifically, for example, I start the practice by asking people to pay attention to the sensations in their feet. I'll get you to do that right now. If you push your feet into the ground and create a bit of pressure, can you feel any physical sensations in your feet like warmth or coolness or tickliness or hotness or pressure or?
Leanne: Yes, I feel pressure. I feel warmth.
Rachel: Yes, okay so they're physical sensations, right? The moment that you do that, you are drawing a part of your attention in from maybe whatever it was before. Perhaps it was preparing for the next question or whatever. From where you've drawn part of your attention, from wherever it's traveling, right into the here and now by doing something very specific. If you say to people, "Bring your attention into the here and now," it's a little bit abstract. There's nothing to anchor it to, right? It's like saying, "Tie down the tarp over there." It's kind of, "Where?"
Leanne: Where is it? Yes.
Rachel: Unless you can see where you're going to peg that thing down, it's really hard to actually pull down a tarp, especially if it's flapping in the breeze. You're going to know exactly where to tie it down. That' the first thing. I just get people to pay attention to the sensations in their feet. That has the effect, is I can see maybe it's unfolding on your face, of just drawing a bit of our attention into now. Then as the 15 minutes unfold, I essentially use that same practice of guiding people to feel sensations in their feet and sensations in their hands.
Then we get to the destination place, if you like, of focusing on sensations connected to the breath. In doing that, then I start to use the instruction of, "If you notice that your mind has wandered, the moment that you notice that it's wandered, just bring it back." I often use the analogy of a puppy. It's like training a puppy. A little puppy, when we put it on the mat and we ask it to sit, no sooner have we asked the puppy to stay than it's wandered off.
[laughs]
Right? Hasn't it? It's wandered off the mat. It's like," It's wandered off the mat." But we don't yell at the puppy. We don't beat the puppy. We don't get disappointed, frustrated at the puppy. We just know that for this moment the puppy has yet to be trained to stay where we want it to be, but with every moment that we notice that and we bring our attention back and we come, "Yes, attention you've wandered off, but now come back and be with your sensation in the body."
Every time we do that, we're building our mindfulness muscle to return from wandering off out of this moment to returning to being in this moment. It confers benefits for the nervous system and of course, once we're in this moment then we can pay better attention to what's going on around us. It doesn't take that long until one day we start to notice that, "Hey, I'm able to actually listen to my partner better. I'm able to stay focused on this task without getting distracted as much. I'm a bit calmer when stuff happens."
I've trained a lot of people in mindfulness and these type of benefits, they start to happen pretty quickly. It's after the first few weeks of training. The benefits of mindfulness are accumulative. The more you practice is a direct relationship. You practice a lot, you get a lot of benefit, but it's a little bit like exercise. You don't have to have run for six months before you get benefit. You get benefit the moment you start to go for your first walk.
Leanne: That's right.
Rachel: Do you get more benefit if you've walked every day for six months than if you did one month? Yes. You can't trick it. That's what I like about it. It's an honest-
Leanne: Yes, I was going to ask you, are there any hacks, but it's basically-
Rachel: Yes, but the hack is to focus on feeling a physical sensation in the body. Give that a go yourself. If you have a mind that wanders, you find it difficult to be present. Berating yourself cognitively or going into battle with that and going, "Come on just focus." It doesn't always suggest it doesn't work. Check it out within yourself. If you go into a language-based battle, "Don't wander" or "Be now" or "Come back" or "Focus", it is tiring and it's like hacking at the leaves of a weed. Whereas, if you can get your attention to come into the physical sensations in your body, it gets to the root of the thing. Gets your attention back here and now without going into battle, it just goes all around that system. It calms you down, brings your attention into the moment and then you're halfway there.
Leanne: Yes, that's right.
Rachel: It's always with you, and you can do it when you're talking to someone. You don't need to go, as I often say in my classes, I draw this story where I say, the reason I teach the way I teach is using the physical sensations we're talking about and not a coloring book or an app. I've got a coloring book for mindfulness, fantastic, but if you and I start to have argy-bargy, Leanne it gets heated. The night before the assignment's due for stats and everyone's getting a bit tired and grumpy, it's no good if I know that I'm starting to act like a pork chop because I'm starting to get low on resources. I might be starting to get snappy with you and we're having a tense conversation about which stats test to do, it's no good for me to go, "Mate, just hang on. I got to do my mindfulness practice. I just got to get my coloring book out." Hold on. It doesn't work.
Leanne: No.
Rachel: You haven't empowered yourself to know how to use mindfulness in day-to-day life-
Leanne: When you need it.
Rachel: -when you need it. We need this as things are going on.
Leanne: It's funny, you're talking about apps on mindfulness. I've actually got this new Apple Watch which I love, but it's got a breathe app. It basically forces you for a minute to breathe, in and out. It vibrates and things like that.
Rachel: To a certain regular rhythm or something?
Leanne: Yes.
Rachel: Is it working?
Leanne: Sometimes I look at that and I say, "I don't have time to breathe."
Rachel: Yes.
Leanne: I'm probably a key candidate for your mindfulness training.
Rachel: Yes. You're welcome to do it. We can do it for sure. I've done yoga teacher training. In yoga there's a practice, it gets called pranayama.
Pranayama is about controlling your breathing to bring stillness to your mind and calm your nervous system. It's a brilliant practice. Mindfulness, as I teach, is different from that. Mindfulness, as I teach it in terms of noticing the sensations that come with your breath, is very much about just leaving your breath as it is. Sometimes if we're stressed that will mean it's fast. Sometimes if you're really tired or sleepy will mean it's slow. Again, it's not to disparage the app or to control your breathing using pranayama techniques, or whatever or apps in general, they can be useful. The question I would encourage people to ask themselves is the thing that I'm training myself to do when I'm dedicating time to try and do a mindfulness practice or whatever, is what I'm learning to do readily applicable? Can I do it in my day-to-day life?
We don't have very much time. If we're dedicating resources to engage in mindfulness practice, I'm of the perspective anyway, we need that to give us absolute maximum benefit. It needs to have the highest leverage possible for influencing and impacting our lives in a positive way. That's why I'm pretty passionate about teaching what's called in-body practice.
I follow on, or stand on the shoulders of many giants who do this. Jack Kornfield is one of my favorite authors on mindfulness. He points people towards feeling physical sensations in their body as does Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. These are leaders in the field who do this. Essentially, it stems from a very ancient practice, but it's born out through the modern day research that says tuning our attention to a fixed thing that's related to a sensation, does have a lot of benefit. That's my hack.
Leanne: Thank you.
Rachel: Yes, no worries.
Leanne: Let's talk about, you had a career and you were researching, doing a lot of your work, not having that direct impact with people. Then you make a pivot through to farming and then pivot again through to teaching other people. You spoke about creating actual tips that people can implement straight away. I also want to talk about your progress from behind a computer screen, or behind the research and now in front of a workshop, in front of people. Was that something that came natural to you presenting in front of people or was it something that you've had to work out?
Rachel: To be honest, I think it came naturally speaking in front of people. I've always loved talking, as you can probably tell, you know me well enough. I love speaking in front of people. Actually, while we were still at uni, I started to do tutoring and fill in lecturing sometimes. I remember, I was still a third or fourth year at uni, and I filled in for a lecturer, and I did a lecture to 400 people. That was the largest group I'd ever spoken to at that point. I remember that day feeling very, it's a flow experience, but feeling absolutely grounded and present in an effortless way.
It was a sign to me that that's where I belonged, was up in front of people conveying information, looking for those Aha moments, and really seeking to turn academic knowledge into digestible stuff that lands with people that they can use. I got it that day. It was brilliant. I recognized in that moment that that's why I belong. I felt very calm. I know a lot of people find public speaking or training a lit bit stressful.
[crosstalk]
I loved it and I felt like I was in my power when I did that. To be honest, it was a bit of a relief when I went from being behind the scenes, researching, crunching the numbers, writing the articles all that stuff, to actually coming into a place where I truly belong. Which is to be able to turn that stuff into stories that impact people and practices that people can use? Essentially, that's what I do. Even I was doing it this morning before we came, and I'll do it this afternoon too. I'm looking at the literature. I'm turning that into stories to convey information because stories is how we learn. It's always been that way, and always will be. Turn it into stories that land, and practices that arise from that, that people can do.
It was a joyful transition. I wish I had recognized it earlier. Now, I look back on that and I think, I didn't expect it, but inadvertently I think having had that background as a researcher in psychology, now gives me a credibility that I wouldn't have had. I understand statistics, I understand science, I understand psychology. It's not pretend, it's real and I've been on the research side of that. Now when I talk about things it does have that benefit that people think, "Well, she hasn't just washed down the river and read a self-help book. She's actually got some-"
Leanne: Credibility, validity.
Rachel: Yes.
Leanne: Throwing in a statistical term there.
Rachel: Yes, nice.
Leanne: Thank you.
What kind of workshops and services do you offer now? How have you seen what the problems are in society? I was on your website, rachelgrace.com.au. I think your name as well, just sounds like it belongs to a famous speaker - Rachel Grace. You see what's happening in society and we're going through something that's a VUCA. Do you want to explain what the VUCA environment is?
Rachel: Yes, sure. VUCA is a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. I'm glad. I felt like that was a little test then. Good, nailed it. [laughs]
This is an expression, an acronym because business loves acronyms and that's cool. That's a way of saying in a nutshell, "Hey, things are changing really quickly now." What that means is, as conditions, largely because of technology, as conditions in business and organizations change rapidly, it means that it's no longer okay for organizations to operate like a huge ship that takes ages to adapt and change direction. It's not working. Organizations that don't know how to adapt quickly, even if they're big, they will quickly start to struggle because disruptive technologies like Uber and Airtask and all that, it's changing the way our whole economy is, right? The marketplace is characterized by this VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The thing that strikes me is that it's one thing to expect our organizations to adapt to that kind of marketplace, but unless we have people in those organizations who have the psychological internal capacity to adapt quickly to change, it's not going to work. There's going to be a lack of validity if you like, between how we are as humans and what the marketplace is demanding of us.
One of the key things that I am very passionate about which comes into the neuro-agility work that I do, which is a little bit of a jargony term. Basically, it relates to the fact that if we're to be agile as organizations, if we're to have agile businesses, then we have to have agile minds. Agile minds are minds who can notice change, deal with that reality quickly and make a value-based, strategic decision based on their values and where they want go, without having to resist the change. Without having to get caught it, "It shouldn't be this way. I don't want it. It wasn't like this yesterday."
I'm not the only one who's singing from that songbook. There's a Harvard researcher called Susan David, who's written a book called Emotional Agility, which is all about the same thing. She calls it emotional agility, I call it neuro-agility. Russ Harris, who's a very famous trainer in ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. It's the same body of work. It gets called by different names, but it's all about creating, the internal skill set for humans to have, so that they are well-equipped to deal with this VUCA world does that make sense?
Leanne: Yes and then how do we just drop that and become more agile? What do you cover in that coaching space that helps people adapt?
Rachel: That's a question because evolutionary-wise if you like, there's a part of our biology that's attuned to recognizing threat with change. That's our amygdala will go off like a firecracker anytime it detects a rapid change in the environment. That was historically designed to ruffle in the bushes to the left, get prepared right now to fight, flight or freeze. It's highly attuned, it is designed to pick up emotionally salient information from the environment to protect us, really important.
But the thing in modern day and age is that part of our brain is going off like a firecracker to changes that aren't biological threats. There's a lot of literature now that talks about how the constant notifications on our phone are stimulating that response at some level because it's an emotionally salient stimulus that triggers a response from the amygdala and if we're not mindful, to come back to mindfulness for a minute. If we're not mindful enough to notice that that's unfolding to be present with it.
If we unconsciously and habitually react to notifications on our phone we will constantly potentially be getting almost like under a threat response.
Leanne: If we don't check.
Rachel: If we're not aware enough to notice that it's not a threat, it's like we have to be present enough to know what's a threat. In the workplace, I had this classic one not long ago I was working with some people and he yelled at colleagues which isn't a cool thing to do right? You can't be yelling at your colleagues and losing your stuff although we both would know that happens in organizations all the time, right? Now, what had happened to him was he'd got negative feedback about something he'd written. Now, why did he respond like that?
Well, one way to look at that or work with that or one perspective one is that he interpreted that negative feedback about what he'd written as a threat because when people lash out with fright, flight, or freeze it's a signal that something in their system has perceived that as like a threat to their very capacity to survive. I know it sounds funny but we're complex human beings and we have the prefrontal cortex and all that that's rational and gets things and is aware and can work through. "Just because I got negative feedback about that report doesn't mean I'm biologically a threat."
But if we're not present enough to notice all of our internal habitual reactions sometimes we can come out swinging because we've actually come under threat if that makes sense. The thing is that to the extent that we're able to be aware of our biological predisposition to perceive threat through emotionally salient information but to then, and this comes back to what we're saying before. To have trained our awareness to be present and observe and go, "Hey I'm not under threat I know that this is Hard Yakka, but I can sit in the center of this and I can actually respond to this criticism in a way that leaves me feeling good, leaves me outside of a performance review process [chuckles] and it's like values-based."
Leanne: Yes. I'm thinking of so many examples here, when people receive an email they don't like. The first response is you can physically get your back up and then reply and then bash out an equally not as useful email. But then strategy is a"I'll just wait overnight, wait 10 minutes," and that's all the space that you need to really reflect and think, "I don't need to respond in this way."
Rachel: The waiting can help, it depends what you do in the waiting. If in the waiting you bail you made up at work at the water cooler and relive it with them and it escalates and you get angry and then you wake up at three o'clock in the morning you think it through and you think about. It depends what you do with the waiting so I just kind of push back against that. The concept of pause and have a considered response is valid but I would say that it depends on what people do in that pause.
I'm an advocate for the pause don't get me wrong[laughs] but I just think not all pauses are created equal and the habit pattern of your mind will come into play in the pause. You'll either blame yourself a lot or you'll blame others, your habit pattern of getting angry and blaming others and wanting to discharge your pain onto others will come up, or you'll internalize it and you'll get down in the dumps and feel depleted and disempowered and like a victim. People have their habit patterns and so use the pause but use the pause in a self-kind way.
I often encourage people to take that with them mindfully out into the workplace because that will have an impact on those around them. Just like when someone's really angry intense it affects those around us. We're empathic social beings that feel what's going on and I don't think there's anything wrong at all with sharing what's going on because that's part of how we do. We want to share stuff but there's a quality to what we share and is it relaying what's happened in a way that's truly trying to work through it and taking responsibility or is it maybe a toxic way of dealing with it. Where you're spraying venom about the person or the situation or you're overly blaming yourself.
It's a fine line and this is the practice and the path of mindfulness. It's about not disowning those things that are less than optimal about ourselves. It's about having a healthy relationship with whom we're able to observe them while still taking full responsibility for how we are, understanding that we impact ourselves and not others by our choices. It's this nuance thing.
Leanne: What kind of workshops and services are you offering people in the public?
Rachel: Well, at the moment I'm doing a public program which is at Sanford as it would turn out that's an eight-week mindfulness training program, it's booked out and that's underway. That's going really well. I also have mindfulness training programs that operate in the corporate space which I've done for a while now but I've got those running in a few organizations around the place. They're eight-week programs that are an hour session every week and they comprise of a 20-minute intro talk which is about a little bit of storytelling, a little bit of philosophical framework and a little bit of neuroscience literature about mindfulness to give the intellectual part of ourselves something to hang all this off.
The important core of it is a practice and then I guide people through a practice that varies a little bit each week and we build up the mindfulness skill because there's a number of different micro skills in the mindfulness practice. There's a 20-minute guided practice and then there's a 20-minute debrief. Those hour-long sessions fit into an eight-week program I'm doing those both publicly and in organizations at the moment. But once we're aware we also need to be able to manage our conversations and our thinking in a way that's really optimal and going to get great performance and so that's where neuro-agility and performance coaching and strategic storytelling which are the other things I do really come into play.
It's almost like from the inside out work, so mindfulness about working on the inner landscape being present in the here and now. Neuro-agility is the next level up which is about how to observe the internal stuck loops of our mind. You know how an internal stuck loop it might be, "I'm not good enough so I won't speak up in this meeting." That gives rise to the behaviour of always shutting down your voice in a meeting, that's one example.
If someone does that over the course of their career they will probably get really frustrated themselves and they won't have had professional impact because they'll have kept their ideas for themselves and they'll probably be disempowered. Often when I work with people around neuro-agility stuff in the coaching process it's about going. Why haven't you reached this goal that you want to attain, what is getting in the road of you achieving that in your thinking pattern?
They get called stuck loops because typically when people have professional aspirations that they haven't been able to achieve or personal aspirations once they're getting to their late 20s early 30s range and you know that it's actually not the external stuff all the time anymore. It's something in you that keeps coming with you everywhere.
Then it can be really useful to go, "What is it that I'm telling myself?" I shied away from doing this kind of people work for a really long time because I told myself that I was worthless. That's really honest that was an internal stuck loop I had for a variety of reasons. But the work that I do doesn't get into why you might have those stuck loops, it goes well, what are you telling yourself?
Why do you shy away from shining brightly? Well for me, it was worried that I was worthless or that I'd be laughed at. It would stop me from using the training that I had in psychology to help people, it would stop me from speaking up and sharing my stories, it would stop me from being who and what I wanted to be in the world.
Neuro-agility is about from a basis of mindfulness being able to notice those and notice the content of them, "I'm worthless, not right now, I might lose my job," or if it's a fear pattern or whatever it is that stops you because when those stuck loops, those internal thoughts come up typically it will drive behaviour in a direction that takes you away from who and what you want to be in the world.
Leanne: Because it keeps looking for reinforcement and you feed that assumption that you've got in your own head.
Rachel: Yes, well thoughts drive behaviour, so you behave in alignment with your thoughts. But if you're not present to the thought, if it's operating on autopilot you're not even in the game which is why people's lives unfold and they don't get to reach the goals that they want because they haven't actually been able to hack that weed out at the root system because it's been unfolding outside their conscious awareness if that makes sense.
Leanne: Yes.
Rachel: Neuro-agility is about being able to spot those things and know what to do with them. I see you thank you very much in a voice that says," You're useless," or whatever the stuck loop might be.
I see the way that's affecting my behaviour. I see the way I shut myself down and I don't speak up and that's why no one respects me and I never get my plans through at work because I actually don't speak up about them. If I'm going to do something different I'm going to have to first of all notice that thought pattern and then I'm going to have to have the resources within me from that place of awareness to choose a different thought pattern and a different way of behaving. That's neuro-agility.
Then performance coaching is really about working with people to identify a goal that they want to achieve. Help them break that goal down into meaningful steps and then hold them accountable to that. Then strategic storytelling which is the fourth part is once you have had impact how are you going to share that with people in two minutes to basically go, "This is what I stand for, this is the challenge I faced, this is what I achieved will you follow me?" It's like a leadership tool.
For too long we have relied on people having content knowledge and technical skills expecting that to be enough for them to be good leaders and it doesn't work. If it does work it's by accident. But leadership is a people-based skill and it requires enormous emotional intelligence to manage ourselves, to manage our relationships well, to manage our communication well. I think that this is the time when emotionally intelligent leadership is not just optional it's absolutely necessary to deal with this VUCA world that you talked about because that requires an enormous emotional capacity for change, for agility, for noticing your habitual reaction patterns that get in the way of you being a great leader.
The truth is that people who are exceptional at managing themselves, and exceptional at managing their relationships and are exceptional at managing their communication, if they've got that on a basis of having their technical skills nailed, they're going to be the most amazing leaders. They're the leaders that the world needs. They're the leaders that we are crying out for, leaders who are authentic and who can manage themselves beautifully and they manage their relationships beautifully.
My work is largely with people who have their professional skill set down. I work with a whole range of professions from lawyers and medical people and policy officers, rangers, salespeople. To me, I don't really care what the profession is. I rely on people you've done your degree, you've done your stuff you've got experience. But I work with people where they start to recognize that unless they learn to manage themselves, handle their teams better that they're not going to achieve their goals because as I go around the place the single most common thing I find where teams or organizations aren't achieving their goals it's because they're leaking resources, time, capacity, energy, talent to people stuff.
Leanne: Through all your workshops and coaching you must experience moments where your participants had that lightbulb moment where they finally realise, "This has been losing my career and my personal life for so long." How does it feel as a facilitator when you see that experience?
Rachel: Well, it's really moving actually. It's interesting, it's probably I would respond to that in two ways. One is, typically at the end of the first mindfulness practice I do with people which sometimes comes through this one-hour talk. Mindfulness it's not just hippy fluffy stuff or it might come in the first week of the mindfulness program, my week program. At the end of that session what most people describe is they almost look a little bit shocked.
It's like they've actually sat for a moment and seen what their mind is like in terms of its inability to stay focused. It's like they actually get to see it rather than being in it, they're watching it. For me, that's a really mixed thing to unfold. On the one hand, I'm really happy because I know that once you can see stuff you can start to change it that's the first step on the path. But I also I feel compassion because I know I almost feel the pain of that because I know what it's like when you sit and you watch your mind and you go, "Oh my goodness, this thing is all over the place."
It's shocking and I see that in people's face. I just had someone who gave me feedback from the class last week they said that they felt like facing their own mind was like realizing that it was harder to get it to stay still than trying to stuff an octopus in an onion bag.[laughs] I thought that was a classic. This humor something in that that's some pain, right?
For example, the second week of training in the mindfulness program is about acceptance. How can we accept that this is the reality as it is? There's this sense of joy in seeing that they've got to see something, but it's a little bit like if your weigh-in at Weight Watchers and you watch someone weigh in and they're 20 kilos overweight, that's hard. It's a mixed feeling.
Leanne: Reality is dawning.
Rachel: Yes, but then when I also see that in people's eyes at the end of that first class obviously something [unintelligible 00:45:33] and when I ask them did they get benefited and they put their hands up, the room is qualitatively different. The hands going up is evidence that impact occurred and there's something different in their eyes where they look a little bit lighter and that's so heartwarming. Then at the end of the program well once we've done a few sessions together people's eyes it's like they're happier. They start to report how they're managing themselves better, they're not reacting as bad or as quickly, they're more present.
It's like this weight is lifted off them and it makes me so happy, it's really moving because people's weight of pressure that they feel is so evident on so many people's faces and to just see that lift, I'm so glad that I was called to do this work because that's what it feels like. I feel like this path of mindfulness and coaching it picked me I don't feel like I picked it. I was reluctant about it for a long time so I feel very grateful because I know that when I guide people on the journey of mindfulness and I work with them in coaching they're not as stuck in the stuff that's been weighing them down. That's an enormous privilege to have.
Yes. It makes me really really happy all of it.
Leanne: I know that we've focused on the now but I'm interested in hearing do you have any grand plans for the short-term future, long-term future in taking this message and where do you see it going?
Rachel: The path ahead will definitely be one characterized by speaking to large groups. I see speaking as a way for me to get the message out there to thousands of people. Interestingly enough I was only reflecting two weeks ago I think it was, that I'd learned some stuff that would help me to get my message out from hundreds as it is right now to thousands and the next day someone booked me in to do a talk to 1,500 people.
I'm very keen to speak in front of large groups of people and to use technology if I can learn how to use it properly to start to leverage that. Speaking is a powerful presentation as per TED Talks right? If you can nail a message from the stage you can influence a lot of people and I'd love to refine my presentation skills to be able to influence people positively through speaking. I see myself continuing to train people in mindfulness and turning that into a digital or a recorded training program so that I can share that with more and more people because at the moment it's reliant on me physically being present in the room.
I think that's probably always going to be the best way I don't want to depersonalize it but the reality is the appetite for the work outstrips my capacity to be in the room every time and continuing to work one-on-one with people in coaching because it keeps the skill sharp. I get to like see how mindfulness and these other tools actually apply to individuals who are making changes. I'll write a book at some point for sure because that's always been in me to do but not just yet.
Leanne: Sounds like you'll be really busy.
Rachel: Yes flat out.
Leanne: Super exciting. Where can people find you, Rachel?
Rachel: If you want to check out what I'm up to you can go to my website, it's my name so it's just www.rachelgrace.com that I use. It's R-A-C-H-E-L-G-R-A-C-E.com.au. I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. I don't have a lot of presence on there because I'm still learning to do that. At the moment all the way from doing is relied on word of mouth and all that kind of thing. I was in the hills farming when social media and smartphones took off so I'm behind the eight-ball on that stuff but I'm trying to catch up.
Leanne: It's been so great reconnecting and hearing about the last 15 years and now your exciting plans for now and the future. I've certainly learned a lot that I can share with people, even if I share this podcast it's one step in building up that awareness of being mindful. Thank you so much, Rachel.
Rachel: My pleasure.
Leanne: It's been awesome hearing from you.
Rachel: Thanks.