Break Through Your Own Installed Glass Ceiling: Top 3 Tactics from 3 Brains - Head, Heart, and Gut

Hey, lovely to see you. It's amazing to have you here for this amazing webinar, Breakthrough Your Own Installed Glass Ceiling, the 3 tactics from the 3 brains: your head, your heart, and your gut. Scientifically proven that you have 3 brains and they are responsible for your success, your failure, your new startup, your success leadership, success in personal life. So let's get started for this and really make it amazing for you. We always thought our head is the only one, and maybe we can tilt a little bit that idea and that you have to come over here of the other ones. Who am I? Just a little bit introduction who I am for 30 seconds. I'm executive coach. I'm a visiting professor at the Business School Madrid. I'm a supervisor for coaches and therapists. I'm a clinical psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, 30 years in the field, always helping other people to make them excel worldwide. 10,000 people. As I, born and raised in the Netherlands, as you can hear, I lived 9 years in Australia. So I worked in that whole area, now living in Spain and touching almost the whole world. Founder of the 3 Brains Intelligence Certification Training, how you learn, how you actually learn to coach people, your employees, your clients, people around you using the 3 Brains concept. And I'm a writer or author of the book Relationships: Which Brain Is Talking? A general book about every relationship you have in your life and how you actually can make it better. excel, flourish. That's me. And when we talk about 3 brains, I think we all know it, is it not? But have you ever said or heard, follow your heart? Why don't you just follow your heart? Or why don't you just trust your gut? Why is that actually? Why do you say all those kinds of things? Why did you hear all those kinds of things? Are they true? Do they have truth? Or is it just something like a blah blah we do? And just curious, when you listen to this webinar, who of you had somewhere in their life a moment of regret of a decision and said, I should have followed my heart, or maybe I just sort of followed my gut feeling? It felt like it was not right. Or maybe even, no, I should have thought a little bit longer about it before I really jumped in. Isn't it interesting that in our common life we have already— we already say those things without actually being aware it has an amazing lot of wisdom in us? And many leaders, Successful leaders, politicians, sporters actually always say, you know, I followed my heart or my gut or my head when I made that decision. They actually trusted to achieve. And why are they successful? Because actually they are so aligned that they know they can follow the right decision. Because what's the issue with our 3 brains? Now just imagine you have a compass. I think you all know what a compass is. You have a north, Magnetic north. That's all good. When our 3 brains are the same, you can really trust your decisions. The moment things happened in your life, if the upbringing, limiting beliefs, experiences, etc., it could happen that you have another magnet in your compass and actually goes there. And on that moment, You actually cannot trust on that moment your inner voices. First, you have to get rid of this one so it can go back again and you know, hey, this is what I should follow. And what's the difference between most of us and those extremely successful people? They know when to follow actually their 3 brains. And if you think, okay, what does it mean for us if we don't do it? Who of you ever had issues with procrastination, eating unhealthy, setting boundaries or saying no, communications, hard decisions, bad news you had to share with employees or colleagues, and you really have an eee feeling about it and actually could not do it? Or maybe depression and anxieties. Those are all symptoms our 3 brains are actually not aligned. We don't access all the 3 wisdom centers we have. Because if you ask who's actually in charge of you when you make these decisions of procrastination, eating unhealthy, not setting boundaries, not communication of hard decisions or bad news, or you have depressions, anxieties, who's in charge of that? Because nobody wants that actually, and we all know it's not wise to do so. But if we all know it and we still don't do it, it means somebody else is in charge of us, and that's not your head. What are the main 3 tactics I'm going to share? And we go deeper in that. Oh, sorry, know which brain is leading you. Your compass. Secondly, start listening to all 3 of them. And 3, make an aligned decision for the topic at hand. And why are all those things so important? Then let's just go to a little bit of research we have seen through the world. Everybody knows when you have a company, employee engagement is critical. If you now look at the last 20 years of research of the Gallup organization, You will see that in the US and globally, there's not a massive success rate in that. You can say, oh wow, it went from 12 to 21 or from 26 to 32. Wow, that's massive change. But it's still on the scale from 1 to 10, it's still a 2 or a 3. Now, I don't know how it was with you in school, but if I got a 2 or a 3, but sometimes I got as being dyslexic, you really fail. You really are not good enough. It shows really bad. And only companies who really follow the advices and ideas of the Gallup organization also wrote in the book From Good to Great, somewhere can have a score of 7. And you can actually increase, as you can see. So that's why it's so important also to do the right things. But also you can see many, many, many, many companies don't do so good. That's actually an opportunity for you because that means the competition is not so good. The competition in their companies are actually having a bad company. Opportunities for you. We also know that mental health is a key for success, and especially now after the Zoom period and the COVID time. It's much more in awareness. Now, if you look at that again globally, it's also something that you really should say, oh wow, what's happening here? Only 1 out of 3 employees are thriving. The rest is struggling or suffering. Now, if that's your team, I don't know how it's with you. You don't win. Just imagine this is your soccer or water polo or volleyball team. Or baseball or whatever sport you like to do, you know you would not win. But for companies, it's almost normal. So you have an opportunity because if this is your competition, you can beat them. If it's your company or your team, you have an issue. Why is it so extremely important? The two things I just said: engagement and mental health. Because also research shows of McKinsey. that high performers do 800% more than average performers. So just imagine you have the other 2, right? Boom! What it does for your company— freaking amazing, awesome. Or if you all portray it on yourself, what it would do for you as a person. If your mental health is good, you don't suffer, but you actually thrive. Or when actually you feel engaged in what you do. If it's not your personal life, your relationship, your hobby, whatever, just imagine what kind of success you have. 800% more than before. What's now the issue is many of us and also of leaders are self-awareness. 80% thinks they're doing good. We all think, oh, we're doing, oh, we're doing not so bad. We're doing good. Maybe not perfect, but we're doing good. But if you would ask people around you, especially leaders, only 25% says, well, I got a good leader. There's a massive gap to what we think and how we are perceived. And actually, your 3 brains are actually also a part of that. Self-reflection is not the best of one of your brains, say your gut brain. Self-reflection and gut brain are no friends. It's okay. Let's go back. Which brains are we talking about? Is that the top tech, top one tactic? Know which brain is leading you. So let's do just a little bit of, a little bit of test to come over here. Hey, how's your preference? What do you choose? Just imagine you work for a company. Company is making a severe loss. There's an urgent need to take action. The board decided of your team, that is 10 employees, 5 have to be made redundant. All your 10 employees have the same level of competencies. There's the text. The board actually gives you 4 options just as an idea to give to help you out. The first one, they say, you know, You let go of the 5 older employees. It's the best choice for production as the job is physical. It also means based on their age that these 5 employees will never find a job again. It will have a severe negative effect on their income and their finances and probably also their personal life after that. Second option they gave to you is, hey, you just let go of the 5 younger employees. It's also good. They'll find a job easily. Based on their age and experience, meaning everybody has employment. May only not in your thing. The third one they say, okay, let's go for a well-known management idea: LIFO, last in first out. It's not age-related. Five employees already worked more than 15 years for the company. The five orders entered the last two years based on that idea they had of we're going grow like a hockey stick, what a lot of companies have. Based on that self-awareness that we just discussed, it means your team will have 3 older and 2 younger employees. The 4th option, they say, you can say you don't support any of these options and now start thinking by yourself. What's the best one? What would you choose? Just choose now. A, B, C, D. Thanks. You know what's the funny part? I did this exercise and this test something like almost 2,000 times. 95% of the heart-brain dominant people will choose C or D. 95% of the gut-brain dominant people will choose A. So which brain is leading you is extremely important for actually decisions you make in your company, in your personal life, in all the things that matter. Because if you don't think about it, you choose one and you stay always with one. If you'd like to know what is my dominance, you can. You just take out your phone now, put them on camera, make a little picture of this. You go to my website and you can do a free assessment. It takes you something like 5 minutes, max 10, and you get it sent back. No strings attached, free, it's all good. But to give you an insight, hey, which brain is actually dominant in my normal life? That is extremely important if you like to make decisions. Even all the old books, the I Ching said, know yourself. Okay, say now, say, okay, I know this all, but who can actually— where can I find help? Where can I find support in all my decisions. Say you run a company. The beauty is I did some research. What is the success rate of the externals, of all the advices you get? And there's a difference between success rate and happiness rate. Happiness rate is just after you had an intervention, how happy you are with what they did. Success rate is, is after 6 months or 1 year, you measure What we once wanted to achieve, is it still there? Now, that is rather, I could almost say, shocking if you see the numbers. McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, all those beautiful companies, they'll have a success rate of less than 40%. Based on research from the Gallup organization, IBM, and McKinsey by itself, culture change projects between 26% and 41% success rate. Agile, less than 40%. McKinsey claims up to 75% success rate if you follow their 100% steps. So still, they don't dare to say 100% success rate because we deal with people and we don't know actually, or they don't, but we don't know actually what makes people change or tick. If you go now to psychologists after my story, say I have an issue, The efforts of a psychologist is 35% success rate based on even their own research. And of course, the efforts, it depends which topic you have. Psychophenia, depression, anxiety, it can have a difference. There's a difference between 50% and 15% or 15% and 50%, what you like to say. Business coaches like I am, they say it's something like 50%. It could say Why is it better than psychology? Because the topics are most times easier, lighter. This is about decision-making in your company, what to do, what not to do. You create more an awareness point of it. And the success rate is based off, do we know what's happening? If you go to a life coach, no, you see the numbers, make your own decision. If you go to clinical hypnotherapy, it has a higher success rate. If you go to the simple things like stop smoking, it could even be higher than 65%. Of course, if you go to more stronger points like depression again, it can lower, but still it has a high success rate. Why is that? And we don't go really in depth in this presentation because all the things you learned in your first 7 years of your life You almost learned in hypnotic state. Actually, your heart and gut were totally stuffed with all the things about relationships, dealing with conflict, how to connect with people, how to feel when it is rejected, how to please, how to get your things done, all the basic relationship issues. When we do hypnotherapy, we can access that part again. To do changes. When you do say the other ones we just discussed, it's most times talk therapy. So you stay here. If you, of course, you make it simplified, let's be honest in that. The last one, what I say, all those guru books almost describe and micro habits and all this kind of stuff, they always talk about repetition. This is the idea. Now you have to do it for 3 months every day, half an hour. The success rate is 8%. Why is that? Because it's 9 out of 10 done on willpower, and willpower is coming from here and can almost never overrun this one. Only if you're a gold medalist, a top sporter, uh, Extremely disciplined, he can do it from nature, and that's not a lot. If you'd like to see a little bit more about it, you just Google Strava, the Strava app from the sport app. They come aware they have it called it Quitters Day, the first or second of January. Many people step up; two weeks later, they all crash out again because to change yourself, to create a habit, you need. In 21 and 36 days, according to research of NASA, the guys who sent people up to the moon and into space. So they are extremely curious about what do we need to do to change the habit of those people we sent into orbit. They say it takes 21 to 36 days to change a habit, and you need to be doing it every day, focused 30 minutes. So not having your headphone on listening to music and while you do something, but really a Zen focus to do that. And people don't last because your normal life gets in the way. In the moment you step one, you skip one day, you can almost add an extra couple of days, 3, 4, 5 to overcome it. So if you skip one day, it's not, say, on average 30 days, it becomes 35 days. You skip another day, it becomes 40 days. Skip another day, becomes 50, 55 days. People just fall off the bandwagon. Hence, know your own brains. And if you think about success, we come later to that, what to do with it. Another top one tactic, start listening to all 3 of them. That makes sense, you would say, but what do we really mean with it? Now there are some science facts about the 3 brains. Of course, up to now I say just we have 3 brains, but is it actually true? Now science facts are there. The gut brain has 500 million brain cells. Neurobiologist Michael Gershwin wrote a book about it, The Second Brain, in the '90s after 30 years of research. What does your gut brain want to do? That's a little thing underneath your Diaphragm, that's actually a whole enteric part. Say if I look at a video there, it likes to keep you alive. There's an extremely primal brain that likes to do that by personal success or safety. Being number one in the list helps you to survive better, and it likes to create safety in all the structures it does. How do you notice it when your gut brain is actually communicating with you? You have a fear, anger, rage sensation, lust or desire, because we still need to reproduce and we need sometimes to get something. And the lust to win, the lust to get something, hunger and disgust, of course. Otherwise we would not nurture ourselves, we would not feed ourselves, drink something, and we die on short notice. And this actually research, your gut brain, can act totally independently from the rest of your body. That's researched. If you'd like to know more of it, later in the presentation I give you my link. You can just read about it. You just want to get more information about it. Your other brain, your heart brain, is researched by neurocardiologist Andrea Moore. It has less brain cells, but it is freaking amazing strong. Because besides the neurotransmitters we use for communication, and the gut brain, the heart brain can release neurotransmitters. Your gut brain is responsible for 90% of your autoimmune system, produces all the neurotransmitters to keep you safe and healthy. The heart brain also produces or synthesizes oxytocin, the love hormone for connection. To keep us alive, your heart brain takes care of bonding, takes care that you're being liked. It takes care that other people like you. It takes care that you connect with other people. Why is it so important? When you and I were born, we were totally helpless. Just imagine you were born and your caregivers or parents would say, nope, we're not going to take care of you. How much chance of survival would you have? Zero. Een giraffe, een gnu, zomaar in de savanna, they can run by themselves in half an hour. We take many, many, many, many, many years somewhere to be partly independent, to survive. So bonding is for us the major instinct to stay alive. So that means we can notice it by love, compassion, hate, sadness, guilt, shame. It's also the values of good or wrong. Everything that connects is being connected or protection from connecting. Your heart brain, you already saw it, it was already there. It's the latest invention of evolution, of biology, something 5 million years old. And I talk about the neocortex so that Matter on top of us, what they call the gray matter. That is it, because the reptiles have the same DNA set up to produce actually all the 3 brains in our head. And the old days, oh, everything is done in the head— reptilian brain, mammal brain, and also the neocortex brain. Actually is not true, because a reptilian could theoretically produce the same if the epigenetics The release of how the DNA gets somewhere activated, we do the same. So this one, as we have in total setup, is of is more than 100 million years old when the first dinosaurs came to this Earth. The only thing is, as we have it now, it's five million years old. 100,000 million brain cells. In that layer there. Again, it likes to keep us alive. Why does it take 20% of our energy consumption? And why do we have memories? Only for one thing, make a better prediction of the future. If I know what happened yesterday, if I know what my boss said, if I know what my client said, I can do it next time better. That's why we have such a big brain. Cause and effect analysis. It's also the only part in our body that knows tomorrow and yesterday. What likes to do? How can we come aware this one is active? It likes to learn, to create, to understand, to reason, to predict, but also to judge, to keep it safe. And time and words are unique for this part. So when I communicate, you can even come aware which brain is talking. But if I have sensations from my heart, like, oh, you know, this is not good for, uh, for my relationship, or when I say, you know, I cannot digest this, actually I use words to verbalize my sensations and the thought process of my heart or my gut in that moment. So actually we can become aware which brain is talking, and from which brain is talking, you become aware how can we coach people, how can we coach yourself. What blocks now our change and success rate to really make it happen? If you look at that, and why is it so important to work from your 3 brains if you make a decision? Now, what you just said, your head brain likes to analyze, give a perfect answer, and hates mistakes. That's actually what it likes. It wants to give the right prediction. Your heart likes to take care of others. Of you first and hates rejection. It likes to belong. Your gut likes to win, is me first, hates vulnerability. It's about personal success. Now, if you now see these 3 things, what do you notice? The 3 objectives or responsibilities of our 3 brains are not the same. The highest one, of course, is keep us alive. But the ways how they do it are different. So if you make a decision by one brain, not 2 or 3, you stay reflectively loyal to their biology. So right prediction belong to personal success, or to your first 7 years of life where you learned all your habits and beliefs. I deal with things. Result in a lot of times is pain or failure or regret. There's anything— ah, I should have thought this through. Ah, shit, I should have done it differently. Okay, from there to the last top 1 tactic, because I didn't call them 1, 2, 3, but then it would be like one is more important than the others. They're all 3 equally important. Make an aligned decision from your 3 brains for a topic at hand. Because I said it already, but this is rather important right away. What are the strengths and pitfalls of your 3 brains? As I said, the mindset of the gut is actually winning. If you like to be a gold medalist, if you like to be number one, if you like to achieve, if you like to bite the bullet, if you like to put 100% effort in it, you need your gut. It also releases cortisol. And releases edgeline to put you all the energy in there. What's the pitfall if you only follow your gut brain? It's always me first. You cannot get a gold medal if you say to the other, oh, you also train so hard, maybe you should do one step faster. It doesn't work. In nature, it makes sense. If the lion doesn't get its prey, It will not eat and it will die. So it's only a me first. The gut brain does not think in taking survivors. It always goes for the kill. What's the biggest fear of the gut brain in our human behavior is vulnerability. Why is that? Because if I'm vulnerable, I have to depend on somebody else. I don't know if that somebody else is taking my needs The heart brain, it's all about taking care, taking care so I can bond. What is the pitfall of that behavior? It's always you first. People have a dominance in their heart brain, always say to me, you know, everybody's happy, but in the end of the day, I'm totally depleted. I cannot do my own things. I don't like, I don't have time or energy anymore to do the things I really like. It's always helping somebody else. In research, it also shows that people who have a real high dominant heart brain are much more prone for diseases. What's the biggest fear? Rejection. You cannot get a heart brain more annoyed by rejection. And that also makes sense because our biology, rejection means death. So our biology says, I don't want to be rejected. Now the biology is right. Only now living in the 20th century, life is different, but the biology still rules. The head, I said, loves to analyze. It likes to give a perfect answer. It also really dislikes mistakes. As you can see, if you really want to be successful in whatever you do, if it's in relationships, work, personal life, if you like to have achievements, if you like happiness, if you like to have health, if you like to have wellness, you need your 3 brains all together because you need to think about me first if you think about health. You first, if you like to have a relationship, and if you like to do something, you need to have a perfect answer sometimes. Otherwise, you make mistake. You're not going to build a bridge and think, I know some calculations are not totally perfect, but let's see how it works out. Because then the bridge collapse with all the collateral damage of there. So you need all 3 of them to make it happen. What happens? If you don't listen to me and say, no, I just follow whatever I did, Chris, nice your story, but whatever happens, leaders of one ship, the stars of one ship, one brain leadership, use the words right. I love my own dyslexia sometimes. If you have a one brain leadership and a head brain leadership, I need to know you will find in your company or team micromanagement, perfectionism, and process and system focus. That's not a flexible client-oriented organization most of the times where people really can engage and are being heard. It's a heart-brain dominated leadership. I need to stay connected. What will happen a lot of times, they deliver gold and get paid silver. So your profit and loss and Your figures are not the best. You have a pleasing culture where everybody somewhere is sweet to each other and you avoid the hard topics. That means there's a lot of unproductive people in your company because nobody tells them actually the truth, how they are perceived and how they work and what they do. It also means that conflicts are not discussed because we like to please everybody. So we don't learn from how we can work better or just accept and bend a little bit over. Doesn't work. If you have much more gut-brain leadership, what will happen? Yes, probably you profit in the 3/4 results are better. On the other hand, you'll have toxic leadership. There's pushy leadership. There's really a focus on short term. So we have to get our figures now. And I need my promotion now. But as you could read already in the Good to Great Gallup organization book of 20 years ago, companies like that don't have a long-lasting life cycle. They'll just burn out because people will leave and only some leave and it's extremely power-driven. If you think about your person, because I talk now about leadership, if What happens to you if you only use one brain? You get perfectionist anxiety, insomnia. If you let your head be dominant for you, if you let your heart be dominant for you, you get burnout, depression, chronic diseases sooner or later. If you follow your gut too much, it means nobody will take you back. You'll have anxiety, probably. Trust issues in your control-driven. Just a little example. If you think, ah, Chris, I have issues believing you, etc., etc., etc. Let's make an example of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. I put the whole text in there because it's freaking amazing. On one moment, he made the decision that he wanted to move all the computer servers to another location based on cost. Uh, he steamrolled over all the idea, all the refusal of the employees. He said, I decide this is the best cost has to be done. They refused actually to help him so much. So what he did, he dragged actually family, uh, family, uh, and friends to actually cancel the Christmas, drove them to Sacramento. He personally Disconnected the servers from the cables with a security's pocket knife. It's really there is a real story. He called in a team of employees and let all the servers be moved to the other place. The employees who had threatened actually to fire based on their refusals and other ideas actually had been right. The move cost. Glitches in the Twitter software, or X software, we have to say now. And actually, maybe you know it, the presidential candidate Ron DeSantis from America, he would present his nomination on X or Twitter. It went up and down and it had glitches in his whole presentation. That was one of the results. So a high perceived thing crashed because Elon Musk only followed one brain instead of thinking from, hey, maybe I should connect with my other brains to see what's happening from the outside. There's only gut and head that was actually happening there, or actually only gut that was happening there. What is free brains leadership for yourself and for others? Follow your heart brain, follow your head brain, And follow your gut brain for me, for us, and make most logical decision. If not, you go to one of those three sides. Short term will be maybe amazing. Long term, you will suffer. Thank you so much for all your time, your attention, your following, and etc., etc. If you like to know more, you take a Canon camera, make a little click. You can read about it. I would always say it's the cheapest solution to know more. and make your life much, much, much, much better in all areas. Personal relationship work. If you'd like to stay connected, please do so. You can follow me on LinkedIn or connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram. And of course, you can always go to my website, 3 Brains Intelligence, or connect with me via email, christoffel@3brainsintelligence.com. Love to hear your questions or your ideas or other kind of things. I love to hear also What do you really got out of this presentation webinar and how did it make your life better? Or maybe the life of your people around you, your company. Love to hear that. Have a beautiful day.