Nicky Lowe [00:00:07]:

Hi, I’m Nikki Lowe, and welcome to The Wisdom for Working Mums podcast show, where I share insights and interviews that support women to combine their family, work and life in a more successful and sustainable way. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I love book. And in today’s episode, I’m speaking with the author of a new leadership book and you’re going to want to listen to this interview because it is packed with so many insights and latest research that has huge implications for how we live and work. We hear all too often these days that we’re living in unprecedented times what the military describes as VUCA environments volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And the Collins English Dictionary made the word perma cris their word of the year in 2022, particularly the last decade has shown us that the world we’re navigating has become less stable and predictable. As a result, more of the challenges we’re encountering in our lives and work can’t be solved using the same approaches or based on the same assumptions as what worked in the past. That’s a huge challenge. So what can we do about it? Well, my guest today is John Gomes, and he’s here to share with us his finding as he explores the latest research on how we can lead in a nonlinear world, building well being, strategic and innovation mindsets for the future. John is a New York Times bestselling author and trusted advisor to CEOs and leaders. His research and practice center on creating more human organizations, harnessing the latest findings in neuroscience and experimental psychology. In his most recent book, Leading in a Nonlinear World, he explores a new approach to embracing uncertainty by building mindsets for the future. His team at his research based consultancy Outside works with a community of scientists to develop simple and powerful strategies to transform well being, leadership and organizational agility. And he’s also the co host of the popular podcast The Evolving Leader. And when you listen to what John has got to share in this episode, you’re going to see how this latest research can really impact us in our lives and work. John has lectured at Syed Business School, the University of Oxford Instead’s Leadership Program and the Henley Business School. And his inclinations include a very impressive array such as Google, Nike, Coca Cola, Microsoft, Sony, bank of England, Alexander McQueen, BMW, TikTok and Toyota, to name but a few. With over 30 years experience, John has coached over 100 CEOs and senior leaders, but he’s also worked extensively in elite sports, including being a performance coach to the board of the Women’s Tennis Association. And he’s also helped create a new leadership strategy for the British Olympic community over the last two Olympic cycles. And he coaches the leadership of the Lawn Tennis Association. And in 2020, he worked with the leadership of the Wimbledon Championships to develop their future strategy. And other sports. Clients include various Olympic teams. Manchester City Football Club, and in 1997, John cofounded the think tank Human Int, A-U-K charity that advised government and NGOs on the issues of social exclusion and technology. John has already co authored one of my all time favorite books, the Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. So I had high expectations for his new one and he doesn’t disappoint. I can’t wait for you to dive into this conversation with John. I know it’s going to be full of so much wisdom and insights, so I won’t keep you waking any longer. Let’s welcome John. So welcome, John. I’m really delighted to have you on the podcast because, as I’ve said in the introduction, I’ve followed your work for quite a few years now and your previous book is in my kind of top five, I would say, books that I’ve got on my ever growing bookshelf. So when you launched your new book, it was kind of a goal to get you on the podcast. So I’m delighted to have you here.

Jean Gomes [00:04:15]:

I’m similarly delighted. I really love your show and I hope I’ve got something that’s useful.

Nicky Lowe [00:04:21]:

I think you will. I think there’s so much kind of wisdom that you’re going to be sharing. I think it’s going to be jam packed. For those that may not know you and your work, could you kind of give us an overview of what work you do and how you came to do this work? Because I think that journey is really interesting.

Jean Gomes [00:04:38]:

Sure. Well, I started studying neuroscience and then I moved into consultancy and for the last 36 years it sounds horrible when I say that I’ve worked on change in two ends of the spectrum helping individuals to adapt in very demanding situations and helping organizations to transform and change as well. And sort of midway in my career, I really focused into the science of high performance and I can unpack that. But essentially that led me ten years ago to really look at a number of different strands of neuroscience and experimental psychology that were all working towards a similar aim, which is to help us understand how we make sense of ourselves in the world. So this science of self awareness led me to rethinking our definition of mindset and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years, really helping organizations to build mindsets for their future, which is really exciting.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:46]:

Yeah. Particularly at this point in time as well. So what inspired you to write a book? Because it’s a huge undertaking and as you said before we hit record, there was a huge kind of input that was needed to do that. So what led you to want to do this?

Jean Gomes [00:06:05]:

A couple of things. One, the purpose of my business, which is called Outside and is to be a driving force of human evolution. And that sounds very grandiose, but I was put on the spot by one of your previous guests, James Glover, and I’ve worked with James for a long time now, nearly ten years, and he and I and a few other members of the team were having this conversation about our purpose. And that when they asked me what it was. That’s what I spat out in the moment, and then they helped me to account on it. So we keep on asking ourselves, like, how are we fulfilling our purpose? Not how are we making profit and how are we doing great work for clients? And when I think of my children, I have two daughters who are just embarking into the wide world. One’s a neuroscientist, the other is an artist. I want them to be able to make sense of this crazy world in a way that helps them to manage their well being, to manage their choices, and to be able to navigate what is increasingly a very chaotic and nonlinear environment.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:16]:

So true. So your book is really about the mindsets of how we navigate that, and that’s probably going to form the basis of our conversation today. So would you mind just sharing what you mean by mindset and some kind of concepts around that, please?

Jean Gomes [00:07:33]:

So I’ve asked this question about what is mindset mean to you? Because everybody uses this term now, and probably for the last 15 so years, particularly my work with Silicon Valley companies, everybody uses the word mindset. And so I started asking people what did they actually mean by this and what you get in terms of a superficial response, because most people don’t have a clue what they really mean by it. They have a kind of intent behind it, but they don’t really know what they mean. When they ask for a definition, it falls into two categories. One category is sort of like a derivation of the dictionary meaning, which is your attitudes and beliefs that inform how you approach a situation. So that could be something like a fixed mindset, growth mindset idea, or an abundance mindset or an open mindset. But then there’s a second category of ways in which the word is used, which is to convey an idea or a mental model of the world. So that could be like a brexit mindset or like a financial mindset or a mum mindset. It’s not you, it’s the idea that you hold about the world. So people clearly have this kind of varied and fuzzy meaning of it. And so I then started diving into it and going, so what do you really mean by it? And when I had deep conversations, what they really meant by was how I make sense of the world or how somebody else makes sense of the world. And at the same time, I’ve been doing all of this research into how we make sense of the world. And so it seemed to me that we needed to take this word which people intuitively meaning, how I navigate the world, how I make sense of it, and ally that to this new science of self awareness about how we feel, think and see. So that’s my definition of mindset. How we feel, think and see and how that leads us to kind of like this ongoing interpretation of what we know to be true, what we feel certain, what we doubt, where we have kind of a sense of understanding.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:49]:

Yes. Thank you. Because I think that’s really important. And in your book, you then cover a number of different areas. So you talk about I mean, one of the chapters that I really loved was on what your body is telling you and the depth of research that was in there just blew my mind. So there was a number of different pieces. And part of the premise that you talk about in there is that in our kind of current world we’ve kind of lost connection to our bodies and we’ve lost connection to that as a data source and been able to pick up on the signals and then accurately interpret them. Would you mind sharing how that informs our mindsets? Because I think often people think about the mind as kind of the head and don’t think about it as the body.

Jean Gomes [00:10:46]:

Yeah, well, it’s worth just quoting Christopher Hitchens. Obviously he died of cancer. And one of the things he said or one of the realizations that struck him was up until that point he’d seen the fact that he had a body and then he realized, I am a body. And most of what this research, which is absolutely fascinating about how the body makes sense of the world, what it basically tells us is that when we tune into how our body is feeling and I don’t mean our emotions at this stage I’m talking about the kind of metabolic state of our body is it fully fueled? Is it positive? Is it negative? That provides you with some invaluable information because all of the information within our body is making sense of ourselves in the environment and completely counterintuitively. When you tune into that, you build parts of your brain that enable you to make sense of risk and uncertainty and what other people are feeling and thinking as well. So this is the kind of gateway through to building a mindset. And it’s very counterintuitive in a world where it’s all about intellectual thinking.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:10]:

And there was a concept of interception and about being able to actually monitor your vital organs and your heart rate and really tuning in. And it was the first time I’d come across that term. And the research around that in terms of I think there were traders on the stock exchange and how they could tune into their heart rate around risk and uncertainty, as you say. Would you mind sharing a bit more about how that informs perhaps how we show up in our work and in our world?

Jean Gomes [00:12:40]:

So interception, sometimes called the 8th sense is the pool of all that information within your body. So you have sensors inside your body and all your organs and your skin, and that information gets pulled into the heart and then relayed via the vagus nerve into the insular cortex in the brain. And so what you have, therefore, is a vast amount of information that’s coming from your body and being interpreted by your brain. And what that does is it allows you to know things before your mind does. And one of the interesting pieces of research that kind of unlocked this revolution into interception and we will hear more and more about this, and particularly for children as well, it’s vastly important is Antonio Dimazio, a neuroscientist, was getting people to perform this gambling task. We have four decks of cards, and you basically assess them by tapping on them. You were given the pot of money, and after a period of time, you consciously become aware that two decks are good. You’ll make money when you turn them over, and two decks are bad. What he found was that people with high interception could note when the decks were good and bad long before they knew. And the way they measured it was through skin resistance. When you interpret any form of risk or uncertainty, you produce tiny, tiny quantities of sweat on your fingertips. So combine that with a EEG monitor on the brain to understand brain patterns. He was able to tell that people’s hands moving across the bad decks could see that they were bad before they knew they were. That’s essentially what their traders were doing. In London Stock Exchange, where Hugo Critchley and Sarah Garfinkle, two interception neuroscientists, were basically able to see that when they had high levels of interreceptive accuracy, in other words, they’re tuned into these signals, they are 20, 30% more profitable, and their careers lasted significantly longer than their peers in what is a very, very stressful environment. So this skill of being able to read what’s going on inside your body, I think, is going to be regarded as phenomenally important in the future. And if you look at Sarah Garfinkle’s research in particular, she’s showing that this is unlocking all sorts of solutions in different problems, particularly in autistic children.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:22]:

Yes.

Jean Gomes [00:15:23]:

So when you teach children how to tune into interception and become more aware of it, they don’t get overwhelmed by emotional responses, because there’s a causal chain between your physical feelings lead to emotional feelings. And if you’re not tuned into these physical feelings, you misread your emotions. And we all do this because you.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:43]:

Talk about people sometimes with high anxiety, the signals, you’re not able to correctly identify them, and that kind of creates that uncertainty within you. And I think, though, you talked also about is it allostasis about managing the body’s budget? And again, my mind was blown with that. So can you tell me a little bit more about that as a concept?

Jean Gomes [00:16:09]:

Yeah. So this is our brain’s principal mission in life is not to think. It’s not to write poetry or to solve business problems. It’s to keep us alive. That’s the brain’s principal mission. And aesthetics is the dynamic way in which all of our metabolic functions are constantly being managed by the brain to make this happen. So what you have, and this is a kind of re understanding of how the brain and body work together. In the past, the brain was seen more like a metaphor, as a computer. So it’s taking in this perfect set of information about the world, processing it, and that’s informing our behavior. What’s actually happening is our brain, for efficiency sake, is constantly making a series of assumptions about what’s going to happen. These are millions of assumptions every minute that largely proved to be true. But what they met with is they describe it as top down assumptions met by bottom up sensory information. And so when you experience something that you’re not expecting, that creates a moment of consciousness, your aliastasis, your metabolism gets interrupted and your behavior way in which you respond to this is trying to reestablish that. And so that constant process shows again the importance of why our bodies know more than necessarily our minds do about what’s happening in the world.

Nicky Lowe [00:17:36]:

Yeah, and I think that piece that you put that the brain’s principal mission is to regulate your body’s budget and I literally that challenged my assumptions because when I read that, my brain kind of went, no, I don’t get that. I don’t get that. And I had to really sit with it and kind of go, wow, that is profound because that shifts so much of the way that we look at the brain and as you say, what that means for the future. We will go on to explore some more of this. But if mindset is so important, how do we go about building a mindset about well being and performance, which is really what your book is about whilst navigating the challenges of work and life?

Jean Gomes [00:18:20]:

Well, I think there are a few moves. The first is to understand it and understand a little bit more about it and understand the relationship between physical feeling and emotion. For example, how you frame the world and then the assumptions that drive your thinking. So if we look at the feel part of it and you just described, there something around misinterpreting our physical feelings. And we all know what it’s like to be angry when our blood sugar drops and we haven’t seen it happening. And then all of a sudden we become irrational because what the emotion is telling us, it’s not that we’re angry, it’s that a core need in us isn’t being met. And that’s a really powerful way of thinking about emotions rather than the motions being hardwired responses to external stimulus. No, emotions are something we construct to make sense of the world. So if you’re feeling something, it’s telling you one of a very small number of core needs aren’t being met. One is a core need for sustainability. I’m not getting what I need in order to maintain my metabolism. And often that is what’s going on. It’s all that’s going on. And if you can defer judgment and actually tackle that core need, you’ll solve many problems. The second is the core need to feel valued in the eyes of other people, because that is our core emotional need to feel valued in the eyes of other people. And when we don’t feel like that, we act out, we get defensive and judgmental and so on. But we then start to build a story about why we’re feeling like that. So that story might be you’re doing something to me. It might be, this is not fair, this is injust, and so on and so forth. So when we actually look at it and go, well, if the core need is to feel valued, is my value really at stake here? It’s a reinterpretation of the assumption that I’m making. There’s a core need for a social connection. So this is kind of like over and above, just individually feeling valued, but to be part of something, to feel included in a situation, in a meeting, in a community, in an environment, a family, whatever, there’s a core need for clarity. Do I understand what’s happening in this situation? And then the final one is a core need for purpose, for meaning. Does this matter to me? So when you think about every emotion, there are hundreds of them. Those core needs not being met are generally what creates the emotional response in you. And so that’s a really powerful, simple way of navigating the world through your emotions.

Nicky Lowe [00:21:05]:

Yeah, and I love in your book that you break that down. You’ve got some great graphics that break down that and also talk about the difference between your physical sensations and your emotions because, again, often we misconstrue those or we don’t separate them out. And I also loved your cycle where you’d got actually, if we are depleted, so we’re not meeting those needs, we can get into. There was the 3D, it wasn’t there. It’s depleted and we lead to disconnection. I’m just trying to remember defensive and disconnection. And actually, I thought that that is a cycle that I think so many people can relate to, and particularly people within my audience, because often we are over giving and not meeting our fundamental needs and can get caught up into that cycle. And I loved how that was such a simple model to think about and think, actually, yeah, can I go back and track it back to my core need and what actually do I need here? And looking at it from that physical and as you talked about, all of the different social purpose, we’re talking about this in the concept of a nonlinear world. Why is that so important when we think about this in the nonlinear world. And what do we mean by nonlinear world?

Jean Gomes [00:22:23]:

Well, nonlinear is really referring to the fact that if you think about somewhere in the past, I mean, there’s always been an uncertain world. Just not say that we’re living in some sort of completely different environment right now. Although sometimes it feels like that. Is that a linear kind of situation is you can see the problem, you can see the solution, and you can see how to get to A, to B. You know what to put into this, you know, likely what you’re going to get out of it. More of the things that face us now have a nonlinear nature in that we don’t know where we’re going to end up, and we don’t know whether this input is going to get that output. And so you see this, I guess, in lots and lots of different ways, which is that we’re going to have more and more long, linear careers, whatever our children study at school, maybe at university, and whatever jobs they they go into, they might be in a completely different field within ten years. And by the end of their life, they may be doing jobs that we could never even conceive of. So if you’re going to be able to navigate a nonlinear world, how do you do that? And my argument is that our mindset is the most fundamental way in which we make sense of the world. And by doing that so I give you an example here. If you think about Chat GBT, we’re three months into this thing hitting the world. Nobody knew about this, or very few people knew about this six months ago. Now, Radio Four has got a program in the morning which is going to be completely written by Chat GBT. And people are creating millions and millions of pounds worth of businesses using this free platform to generate content to produce code. So that’s an example of nonlinearity. Nobody could have predicted that and what the implications of that would be, because even the people who invented it don’t know what it’s going to do, as.

Nicky Lowe [00:24:30]:

You say, and then the ripple effects of that and how we navigate it. And I think that’s where you talk about the assumptions piece. And you write brilliantly on actually distinguishing between an assumption and an objective truth. And often we’re so caught up in our assumptions that we assume that they’re the truth and they’re actually not. And how our assumptions alter our objective reality. I wonder if you could just speak to that.

Jean Gomes [00:25:00]:

So we’ve talked in this feel think model. We’ve talked about the feel part of it a bit. Now we get onto the think part of it. When we consider the brain is fundamentally an assumption machine. It’s constantly making a series of predictions based on assumptions about the past in relation to the present. What that means is that most of what’s happening to us is based most of reality is a set of beliefs and assumptions. In other words, it feels that they’re real and sometimes they are and sometimes they’re not. But it’s very difficult to make the distinction between what’s real and what’s an assumption about what’s going to happen. And you know, those kind of situations where you are absolutely adamant, you know what someone’s about to say or why they’re saying what they’re saying, their motivation because that assumption feels so powerful. And that in part is because you’ve seen it before, you’re making a prediction it’s going to happen. And also you feel something. And that feeling that’s associated with that means the assumption now is a story that you’re telling yourself. And because we’re meaning making animals and we constantly create stories, those stories feel real. And so when it comes to the process of growth and it comes to the process of seeing more in what’s going on in the world, part of the skill set of building a mindset is assumption busting is to be able to surface those assumptions and ask yourself is that true? Could the alternative or the opposite be true? And so on. And that’s really hard for us to do. But the more you do it, the more you practice it, the more you create breakthroughs.

Nicky Lowe [00:26:40]:

Yeah, because you talk about how do we prevent our stories from betraying us? And in your book you do these four levels of risk and uncertainty. Is it where you talked about informed assumptions and you break down the assumptions? I don’t know if you can share those four levels but I thought that was really useful to think about assumptions actually on that scale because we might just kind of talk about globally assumptions but actually there’s granularity within that.

Jean Gomes [00:27:04]:

Yeah. So without getting too kind of like into the weeds around this one, I think there are assumptions that we can pretty quickly surface and go I’m making this assumption about what you think. Then there are assumptions where I don’t really know. I’m making that assumption, it’s just hidden to me. And then there are things that are completely at the extreme which I don’t know, I even can see the world like this. And there is a process I outlined in the book be able to surface that and be able to break it down. And I think whenever we encounter something incredibly novel so if your child comes to you and you come from a background where there’s been a very homogeneous, very traditional kind of upbringing, and your child comes to you and says, I think I’m trans, that’s going to bring about a massive physical disturbance in most people, a metabolic load. Their assumptions about what the outcomes look like there, what the future holds and so on will be pretty definitive for many people in that situation. And the process of surfacing all those assumptions and ranging from the things that I can see to the things I can’t see will help you rapidly to be able to embrace the uncertainty that provokes. And that’s really the key assumption. Busting is about embracing uncertainty.

Nicky Lowe [00:28:37]:

And you talk about how blowing up assumptions is actually quite an indispensable asset navigating a nonlinear world. So we’ve talked about some of the theory around this, but I’m intrigued as when you were going through writing this book, what were some of the things that you learned in your research and what has that meant in terms of how you’re now walking in the world? Whether that’s what you’re taking into your business life or what you’re taking into your personal life? What kind of things are you taking from this book?

Jean Gomes [00:29:11]:

So I think of the process of researching. I mean, the research took ten years, so it’s not something that I did quickly. And I talked to an awful lot of scientists and psychologists and others that got interesting takes on this aspect of ourselves. And I can pick lots of things, but two that really stood out for me that were really profound. The first was a conversation I had a long time ago with a neuroscientist called Lisa Felman Barrett. And she had taken on 2000 years of received wisdom about what emotions are and dismantled it. And a lot of people whose vested interest in maintaining the status quo about the classical view of emotions didn’t like that. So she’s a very brave, courageous and feisty woman and I love her for her pursuit of that. In fact, she had one colleague who threatened to punch her for holding these views wow. Like a very elite kind of academic environment. But anyway, what her thought process was is that the classical view of emotions came right back to Aristotle and Plato and so on, and held up through various different sort of more modern research was that emotions are hardwired in parts of the brain and they are triggered or stimulated by external things, factors. So somebody’s rude to you, you get triggered. The fear central, the amygdala gets hijacked. And we can’t think what she showed was there was absolutely no evidence for that whatsoever. There’s like no evidence for it. It was based on science that was wrong and faulty and defended because it just seems inherently right. When I describe what I’ve just described, that’s how I thought for a very long period of time. So for me, this was I remember when I first read her papers, it was really difficult to break apart 25 years of belief around how emotion intelligence works, for example, and how that there are these fundamental facial responses to emotions. None of that’s true. So what that meant was I started to interpret, as I said about earlier on, how my emotions, what they’re telling me. And one of the stories I tell in the book was about something that happened to me as I was writing the book, where I was on. A call, and it was a video call with the CEO and the board of a client. And I made a fairly punchy statement, and the CEO didn’t like it and reacted really badly and went, Now, I don’t agree with that. And at that moment, I felt the world falling apart. This was a very important client, had them for a very long time, they really like each other, et cetera. And I got massively triggered. And what I paid attention to, and this was Lisa actually saying, this is what you need to do. You need to defer judgment. You need to focus in on the metabolic reaction your body. Just focus on that. Forget everything else. I know this is kind of talked about in certain ancient traditions, but I did it. And in that moment, I got the biggest object lesson, because normally my rational brain would go, I need to defend myself here. I need to explain why I said what I just said. I need to argue for it. I need to reinterpret it so that everybody knows that I’m okay and that I’m adding value. I didn’t do any of that. I just focused on myself. And by deferring judgment, what actually happened was two or three of his colleagues went, no, actually, I think I agree with John, and by the end of the call, he changed his mind and thanked me for it. Now, that would never have happened if I’d done what I’d normally done in terms of interpreting my emotions as the fact that I just hadn’t explained myself well. That’s not what had happened.

Nicky Lowe [00:33:36]:

So for somebody listening, what were you actually doing in those moments then? Because you were on a call with a client, so you’re on video, but you’re also tuning into yourself. So if we were kind of a fly on the wall watching you, what would we have seen? Or if we were inside you, what would we have noticed you doing?

Jean Gomes [00:33:55]:

Well, hopefully, if you were a fly on the wall, you wouldn’t have noticed very much, because I think if I had responded to what my emotions were encouraging me to do, or misreading of emotions would be I would have probably interrupted. I probably would have said something like, I’m not sure I’m making myself clear, or Let me have another go at this, or I would have said something that might have sounded okay, but its intent would have been aggressive or defensive, and that would have made everybody else feel like that as well. What actually happened inside me was I felt awful. I had a sort of feeling of almost like a traumatic, irrational response to defend myself. And what I did in that situation was I separated the emotion and the physical feeling, and I tried to push the emotional feeling, which is an interpretation of what my body is doing, and go, no, I’m not going to think about that. I’m not going to interpret that I’m not going to try and act on, that I’m going to do is just focus on lowering my physical response. So I just breathed a bit more deeply, but focused on just letting myself calm down. And it took a longer than perhaps I would be comfortable around. So it probably took three or four minutes where I didn’t say anything. But actually what that did was just give the space for what I had said for other people to consider it.

Nicky Lowe [00:35:34]:

Such a powerful example. And what has that meant that you’ve continued to do then? So have you taken that forward?

Jean Gomes [00:35:41]:

Well, the other thing that Lisa talked to me about, which I thought was really powerful, was that when we wake up in the morning, we have this brief moment of consciousness. It’s the rarest forum consciousness. And the way you can kind of tune into this is the sense of you don’t actually know where you are. It’s a wonderful feeling of, I don’t know how old I am. I don’t know who I’m next to.

Nicky Lowe [00:36:08]:

I’ve got young kids, and I’m like, whose bed am I in? Which bed have I woken up in? Yeah.

Jean Gomes [00:36:13]:

Consciousness. In the book, I outline these different layers of self awareness, and consciousness is at the base. And it’s simply the sense of self. It’s not anything else. It’s not who I am. It’s not identity. It’s just a sense of physical presence. And if you tune into that, and it may only last a few seconds or it may last a minute if you tune into that, what you’re doing is you’re able to make the cleanest, clearest assessment of your metabolism. You can, because the rest of the day, you’re building layers and layers of other forms of consciousness about your physical, emotional, mental, and relational self. So it’s clouded. It’s difficult to get a clean signal on it. So by doing this first thing in the morning, there’s a number of things that happen as a result that really helped me in the kind of situations that we talked about. The first is that I can take a reading on what’s going on. And why this is important is because the minute you step into the shower and you start thinking about the day ahead, you are interpreting what’s happening to you based on your state of your metabolism. So if I hadn’t slept well or had two glasses too many to drink, or had an argument before I went to bed or didn’t process something and it was sitting in my mind and then I didn’t sleep well, I wake up in a depleted state. If I didn’t go into the shower and start thinking about the day ahead, the journey is going to be bad. The meeting first thing in the morning is going to be a pain. I don’t want to write that report. I don’t want to do this. Everything is now framed through resentment.

Nicky Lowe [00:37:54]:

Yeah. And that defensive mindset as you talk about.

Jean Gomes [00:37:57]:

Yeah. And you don’t even know this because what you’re doing is you’re interpreting the day ahead based on your body budget. So if you do this consciousness, and I call it body scan, you just kind of pay your attention through the top of your head, through to the bottom of your toes and just linger intervals in your body. What that does is it allows you to go, yeah, I’m not resourced today. And you can reinterpret it the day ahead. It means that it’s not about the day, it’s not about the challenges, it’s not about the demands. It’s just you’re under resourced so you can be more kind on yourself. You can say, what do I need? I might need to be less demanding of myself, I might need to take a different pace, but longer term I need to take care of myself. And the way I’m currently doing that means I’m under resourced, which I don’t want to feel resentment in any part of my life. So that’s the first big thing. The second big thing was I ran this experiment for 441 days during COVID where I did that body scan virtually every day and I measured a whole bunch of stuff, including my interception, which you can measure really easily. And it’s basically the difference between your actual heart rate and your estimate over a minute. The closer is, the better your interceptive accuracy within doing the body scan, within two weeks, it went from average to excellent. So it’s trainable, it’s maneable, you can train your interception. What that means is that you interpret the world more accurately and particularly when it comes to risk and uncertainty, you make better decisions and it gives you a really powerful sense of being in control.

Nicky Lowe [00:39:37]:

Yeah, and that really came through in that story. I mean, one, I was like the commitment to do it for 400 plus days, I was like, wow, you really applied yourself. And in really interesting circumstances, you say the start of the pandemic and navigating that and how empowering that is about giving you that choice control and empowering your story, the assumptions that you’re layering onto it because you’re almost cleaning the slate before you step into that. I thought that was incredibly powerful. So what’s next for you with this work? Because as I say, it is continuing to blow my mind as I continue to kind of process it. And I can only think, even begin to imagine the areas that this could influence. So what’s next with this?

Jean Gomes [00:40:30]:

Part of it is continue because we’re at the foothills of discovering what mindset actually is. So part of it is building out our greater human network of neuroscientists and experimental psychologists and talking to them, working with them, and trying to establish field trials to take their work out into the business and social world because most of it’s done in the lab. And when you do it in real environments, you get so much rich data back and people get to see for themselves the possibility of training some of these things. The other thing that I’m really keen is to create more of these mindset hacks like the Body Scan, and we’ve got several dozen of them, which we work with our clients. But I want to share those with the wider world because I think they’re incredibly powerful for kids, for adults, obviously, as well. And also in relationships. I think they’re incredibly powerful because they give you a way of having a shared experience of something that both sides can build, because we build mindsets together as well. Yeah. So alongside our client work, more outreach, more working I’m talking to lots of women’s groups at the moment. I’m doing a big keynote for a big association with several thousand women in the spring. Just bringing these ideas to a wider audience is what we’re keen to do.

Nicky Lowe [00:42:05]:

And what’s the impact that you’re hoping with that? Because as the book goes takes you on this journey, you’re talking about the strategic mindset and about kind of future. So what is the hope with that that will enable?

Jean Gomes [00:42:19]:

Well, if you think about the challenges facing us right now, they’ve never been in the history of mankind, they’ve never been bigger and climate change is right at the top of that list. What we have in many of our institutions is an ingrained, reactive, binary kind of either or thinking. And one of our ambitions is to give people a way of balancing the interest of today and tomorrow. This kind of future now idea where not seeing it as an either or it’s either make profit and survive in the short term or do good by the world, create a better world, it’s do both at the same time and that’s incredibly difficult if you’ve been taught to choose upsides, to have binary kind of mindset. So that’s one ambition for us is to share more of this future now mindset where you’re able to balance those two things and mindset is the only way in which you can do it. It’s not a logical, rational set of tools. It’s like literally you have to be able to capacity to do both.

Nicky Lowe [00:43:24]:

Fantastic. So if there was just one thing that you hope somebody listening to this conversation would take away, what would you want that to be?

Jean Gomes [00:43:33]:

Well, I would ask them to close their eyes and imagine walking out into a field and finding somebody sitting on a park bench and sit next to them and find that that was them, but at 80. And ask that their 80 year old self for one piece of advice about how they’re currently living their life. And write it down.

Nicky Lowe [00:44:00]:

That’s a good one, John. I’m going to do that after we finish recording so I know people are going to want to find out more about you, your book, your organization. So where would you point people towards and I’ll put all the links in the show notes.

Jean Gomes [00:44:16]:

Yeah, well, either my LinkedIn profile because I do publish quite a lot of articles and videos and so on, about this, or go to our website, which is we are outside.

Nicky Lowe [00:44:28]:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining me and sharing the insights that you have. I know that People Listening will be kind of wanting to discover more and dive into the book because it is jampacked with so much. So thank you for putting this work out into the world, John.

Jean Gomes [00:44:46]:

Thank you, Nikki. It’s a delight.

Nicky Lowe [00:44:50]:

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