Claire Hayek: Neuroscience of Decisions Under Fire or Why Smart Leaders Break Under Pressure.

Hi everybody. Today we will meet with extraordinary woman who built amazing business around team performance and motivation. And we know that team performance and motivation has a tremendous impact on organizations and organizations' profitability. Each year, companies invest billion dollars in training and team building activities And AI will not change it much. So this effort to improve productivity will continue to grow and to attract a lot of interest. So today we meet Claire Haag. Claire was wearing different hats, wearing different hats, and has walked in different shoes as an engineer team manager, project director, and even singer-songwriter, to name a few. The challenge she faced just brought her to understanding that something should be changed, and changed specifically in, in a team management, employees, and leadership. So she created so-called Mind-Soul-Purpose team building methodology, just simply MSP. And this methodology enabled her to train big and middle corporation and CEO to improve productivity and manage the team in the best way. Please meet Clear. Hi Claire, I'm so happy to have you on my podcast. Thank you for coming.

Lovely to be here. Lovely to be here with you, Leon. How are you today?

I'm okay. Very nice. Thank you very much. How are you? You?

I'm good.

I like your smile. That's amazing. You made my day.

Yeah. Well, that's important nowadays. We got to smile, right? There's a lot going on. So yeah, keep up the good mood. Keep up the good mood.

So tell me more about your background. Yeah, well, that's a very general question, but I could, I could, uh, each background is different, you know, so you have something unique that brought you to this success. Actually, any success is based or built on the shoulders of, uh, some background story. I don't know, wins, everything.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I joke about it because when people ask me that question, I mean, I can go on for hours. And not because my life is so interesting, it's just because I've done so many things and I've made different decisions in my life and here that brought me here. And in a nutshell, I was, you know, I start by my childhood because that really shaped who I am today. So bear with me as I explain this. I was born and raised in Beirut amidst the war back in the '70s and '80s. So I was pretty much forged under pressure. Then my family and I moved to Montreal, to Canada, again in the late '80s. And you know, life moved on, life goes on. And I studied engineering. I chose to study engineering, which is a very high-stakes, high-pressure environment. And I'll get to it in a second why I keep mentioning pressure. And then while I was doing engineering, I had also a career in music, very high pressure when you're performing in front of an audience, right? And then I chose to move on to entrepreneurship. Again, if it's not high pressure, it's triple high pressure. When you're an entrepreneur, you're wearing all the hats and you have no security whatsoever. You're taking all the risk on your own shoulders. And this really taught me a thing or two about pressure and what it does to our brain, what it does to our performance, our productivity, how we show up, the decisions we make, how aligned we are, how focused we are. And that became an obsession of mine. And I moved on to study the, the brain and neuroscience and understand why we behave a certain way, when pressure hits. Now, most organizations and most schools, and I'm sure you know this, Leon Eisen, we are trained in calm conditions. This is what we were trained for. This is calm environments. And here's the, in theory, the situations. This is how you behave. We put on these skills. We take on these skills. But nobody really trained us to understand what happens to us and our behavior and our skills when pressure hits, because now the brain is no longer functioning the same way. It's in its survival brain and no longer in the, in the, in the wise brain CEO, the prefrontal cortex. So this really is what I do now, mainly is leadership training and development, but not just a workshop or two, but really make an impact on long-term impact on behavior when it comes to senior leaders, leaders making very important decisions daily, where alignment, focus, and calm authority is not, um, is, is not a given. And it's a trainable skill under pressure. That's where you train it, right?

That's, that's amazing. So after you train, like, engineer, what what driven you to move to some— you told about it, but let's elaborate a little bit more because, you know, engineering is totally different from psychology and it's a different understanding of the world. And when I deal with my employees, engineers as well, sometimes I'm engineer, but I am for 20 years entrepreneur and sometimes we don't understand each other. So what driven you to understand How to move from engineer to psychology and to understand finally psychology, psychological part of the business?

That's such a good question, Leon. Um, you, you know, I've always been kind of, I felt like I was a double agent in my own life. Yeah. I, um, the analytical side in engineering, but also the very human side. That I, I got to practice and really tap into my right brain. So the left brain, the analytical, and the right brain as a career, you know, during my career as a music— sorry, as a musician. And so having tapped into both these equally, into both these brains, it really opened me up, opened me up to being able to relate connect to a whole different level with people. And I think that's why I was very successful in my engineering career. They put me on crazy projects where there was so much at stake, where, you know, lives could be lost or millions of dollars down the way with the wrong decisions at the wrong time. And I excelled because I had that— developed that, I guess, that's skill where I, I was able to connect with people at a whole different level. And I believe now, it's now that I understand the brain science, is because I was able to tap full, as much as possible, in my left and right brain, not just in one side more than the other. Now, what really pushed me into wanting to understand all this, I hit a wall like we all do, right? When I turned, you know, in the year before I turned 50, something happens, I think, in your brain and your consciousness when you hit the 50. You know, some people hit the 40 and freak out. I hit the 50, I didn't freak out per se, but I was— I started questioning things and I felt like I hit a wall and I wanted to understand. I said, well, I'm going to be 50 this year. I mean, that was like almost 3 years ago. What am I doing with my life? What have I done? What have I achieved? And I had achieved a lot, but I didn't feel like I was ready for the next phase of my life. So I start really questioning my behavior. I started wanting to understand a bit more how I acted, uh, what, what my projection was, why I was shrinking and not taking up space and not playing at the level I was built for with all the talent I had Why was I holding myself back? Why was I standing in my own way? I felt truly like I was standing in my own way because I felt that I could achieve way more, not just for the sake of achieving, Leon, but more that I felt like I can make way more impact in the next 20, 30 years of my life. And, and then this is when I started really— I didn't just land on brain science and decided I want to learn about psychology and how that works. It's just one thing. You know, when you put your intention out there and you start digging deep, things open up. You know, I truly believe in that. You put your intention out there and the whole thing, just life pushes you and opens things up for you. And only if you act on it, then you will receive this information. And I acted. God, I acted like crazy that year. That was back in 2023. So I read a lot of books. I started— I got really curious. And then I went to conferences. I went to empower— motivational conferences. I've traveled a lot in my life, but now that year was travel to go and study and learn. I felt like I had to refresh everything I've learned so far. And this pretty much brought me to everything that I did that year, brought me into brain science, into neuroscience. And I'm like, you know what? This is— it's all pointing there. I guess I should follow it. And that's literally what I did. And I got a certification in, in coaching, in neuroscience, just so I can coach myself, Leon, not anybody else. I was not interested in coaching anybody else. I wanted to understand me. Because how are you able to coach anybody and change anybody or help somebody transform if you do not transform yourself and understand yourself? Inside out, right? And that's how it all began. And this, this became a passion of mine to try to help other people again that come to me and, and say, wow, you discovered XYZ, help me here because I am struggling and I'm totally standing in my own way and I'm breaking down under pressure. And this is my life. This is 24/7 for me, whether I'm at work, whether I'm at home. And I'm done and I'm fed up and I feel like I'm playing small. You know, I need this to change.

So actually, it happened in response of people who were looking for some help from you, right?

I mean, leaders that were struggling with their teams. All to realize that they were struggling with themselves as well. Because sometimes we see it in others.

Unless they change themselves. Yeah. Unless they change themselves, they cannot change or influence it. Exactly.

You can only change who you— I mean, change is a big word, right? If you want to improve or transform yourself or learn, grow as a leader, You need to do the work, and then by doing the work, that inspires people around you to do the work as well, right? That's the best way to motivate people to grow and model your behavior. But if you're acting all toxic and, you know, you're imposing growth on others, yet you are not looking at yourself, and you see yourself as, wow, I'm perfect, yet you're really making all the mistakes in front of everybody— mistakes meaning behaviorally, you know, you're not showing up at the top level, at where you really play big, then people will feel it. People feel it. People know. And then they feel that, you know what, why should I care? He or she doesn't care, right?

All right. Let's deep dive into your methodology, MSP, right? So you wrote the book around it. It's called Engage and Mobilize Your Team. So what's the core of your methodology that really makes a difference for the team?

Yeah, my first book, Engage and Mobilize Your Team, it was really, it's a simple book about culture and how to build culture and get people to be motivated in order to really collaborate, work well together. So it's a book about team building and how to really team build from the bottom up as opposed to impose it on people and how to come up with initiatives inside the organizations and delegate. It's kind of put in the hands of your people and you trust your people with it in order to really build that culture from the bottom up and top down. And it really gives very specific tools and ideas on how to do that, how to plan an activity per se, how to build it yourself, not always get somebody from the outside. But I'll summarize this very quickly. The book is all about being aware of the yo-yo effect. The yo-yo effect is when you do an initiative where you bring people together, wow, it's a big kumbaya. Everybody's happy. Everybody's getting along. Example, you do a team building or anything like that or training. And you connect. Now, you know, you're really getting along. So that's the curve going up. Yay, you know, we built it. We got that spike in motivation, performance, productivity. Wow, we love each other. Culture is great. And then life gets in the way, and then it plateaus, and then it starts going down. People are stressed. People are demotivated. Now they are really getting on each other's nerves. It's inevitable. And then what do we do? We inject more money, and then we do another team building, and then we go back up, and so on and so forth. So that's the yo-yo effect. The book shows you how to build on an initiative, and even if it plateaus, how to boost it, go back up. So the curve is probably oscillating, but it's still— the trend is still going up. You're building on what you've done before, and this has to be sustainable. It needs to be in the hands of your people. So that's what the book is about, and it gives you really the tools. Now, my upcoming book in September, is really focused on the framework that I work on a lot today, which is pressure-proof leadership. And the book is called The Leadership Skill Nobody Taught You: Calm Under Fire in the Age of Disruption, which is pretty much right now. And that's coming up September 9th. And this is really where I'm focused right now when it comes to working with senior leaders and their teams on how do we navigate the next 10, 20 years and how do we train for it, how do we prep for it, and how do we show up and play at the level we were built for.

Yeah, you know, enterprises, I meet a lot of enterprise management and they all travel with not AI onboarding. They understand now they have some companies how to onboard AI, how to use AI. The problem, what to do with the team, how to configure their team in a new way, whom to remove, whom to keep, whom to hire. And again, the culture, because culture, it happens a huge transformation for the culture, of the culture of the team, and specifically in big corporation trying to adapt transformation today, AI and all this stuff. And what, what kind of very specific, uh, element, accompaniments of your methodology that helps to do it? Maybe you can try on me.

Yeah, I mean, um, the way the Pressure Proof Leadership System works is, is literally a tailored approach to every organization. This is not a one-day workshop where I come in and I talk about performance and give tools for people to be able to use and have the awareness of pressure is doing something to me and who am I becoming under pressure and is it really helping me? Is it helping me serve my organization, serve myself? This is the foundation, but the real work is in that we do before we even get together. And it's really all about we do a whole bunch of assessments. We figure out what pressure archetype you have. For instance, some people under pressure, they become more controlling. Some people go silent. Some people become more compliant. There's so many. There's about 5 that actually I pinpointed because we can go on forever, right? And these are archetypes that we take on under pressure that sometimes they serve us, but sometimes they don't. And most of the time, I'll tell you, they're not really serving us. So that's one of the assessments that we do. There's a whole bunch that I do as well. The idea is to map where are we individually and where are we as a team and map the gap. Where are we really falling short when it comes to high-stakes conditions, high pressure, where we need to make decisions, where misalignment can creep in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We also can map the cost of what's really costing us right now. So this is our base measurement baseline. I guess that's the engineering side of me. I have to measure everything. But how do you know you're improving if you're not measuring, right? So this is where we start. So we start with the self-awareness, understanding, oh my God, I've been doing this for this long and it's really not helping me and it's not helping my team. And everybody, not one person, not the CEO, everybody is involved. In this work. And then when we get together, we do usually do half a day or a full day. We are already done the work prior to. So when we get together now, we really dive into the solution. We take the half day or the full day to design a framework that's going to work for us under pressure. Work for us, meaning our organization, because I cannot fit everybody in a box, Leon. Every organization has different challenges, and they need to have a framework and a way of behavior and understanding what's really going to help us moving forward into this project or into this high-stakes environment. And one analogy that I use, sometimes it's very ambiguous for people and go, yeah, but what do you really do? So the framework is important because if you think of an organization as a structure, a building, The building is designed for a certain load. Once you start adding, you know, new loads because that were not really accounted for when it was designed, what happens is there's little fracture lines start to form. And sometimes if we don't look for these and inspect for these and do something about it, the whole structure falls apart, right? Well, we don't want to get there. My work, think of it as the engineer that comes in and puts reinforcement bars knowing the load is coming to make sure that the organization and the leadership team can hold under all these new initiatives and all these maybe uncertain times or growth or M&As or transformation in AI, so on and so forth. So we work on designing the framework that will serve this specific structure, enabling the leadership team to, no matter what's happening, to still show up aligned, to still show up focused, and be able to tap into their prefrontal cortex, their brain CEO, and not go to their survival brain that is a random behavior that is not going to serve them. But be focused enough and aligned enough and have the tools and the tricks and the resets to be able to show up with calm authority no matter what is at stake. And that is the foundation of the success of a business because a business is run by people. And if your people are not running in their right mind, then you are— your organization is being run by a survival brain, which is not a thinking brain, which is not the strategic brain. And that is very underestimated nowadays.

Uh, yeah, thank you very much, Claire. That, that totally understandable how it works. The question, how are you dealing with tough situation when, uh, really, uh, survival mind just, uh, conquer all the organization? How you solve this problem?

Yeah, I mean, uh, there's a lot of tools, and this is what I, I teach in the, in the framework, and I, uh, we practice this. Um, some of the tools are, first, you need to recognize what are you defaulting to. So if, let's say, you become more controlling, knowing that you become more controlling, then there's certain tools, things you could do. For instance, you can ask yourself the question, maybe pause learn or practice to pause before replying, have that self-awareness and go, "Wow, I'm being really controlling right now. I'm looking into everything. Is this really necessary? Is this what my team needs?" So having that self-awareness and practicing these tools where you're able to pause, observe, and go, "Whoa." When I talk pause, we're not talking a day. We're talking 5 to 10 seconds. Just practicing pausing for 5 to 10 seconds before you jump and answer a question, or you make a decision, that can literally save you a million-dollar mistake of a decision that, that was, that was made in the survival brain. Because when you pause and you take a deep breath, you're really literally bringing all the blood flow into your strategic mind, who's able to make a much better decision. So these are like— this is just a simple example of things that people practice when I work with them. And the feedback, Leon Eisen, is amazing because they said, I never even thought of pausing. What does— like, I didn't even know there was a pause. That's even an option. But you can literally just, as somebody's talking to you and freaking out, you can take a deep breath and just calm yourself down. Now, because you're aware, you're going to jump into the control and make the decision, right? And just kind of, you can simply say, I see that I need to make the decision right now. Give me 5 minutes. I need to gather my thoughts because right now there's a lot going on. There's a lot of noise. I need to get rid of the noise. I need 5 minutes. I'm gonna— give me 5 minutes. I'm gonna call you right back. There's nothing wrong with that. Modeling that models real control, self-control, models real growth, and models really a wise behavior, calm authority. That is the leader that you want in your organization. And that 5 minutes, like I said, can save you a mistake that can cost you millions of dollars. And trust me, I say millions because I've measured this. I've done pressure diagnostics with clients where we've gone back on certain decisions that they took under pressure and how much it really cost them at the end of the day. And that's one decision per quarter. Imagine how many decisions are being taken per quarter and what is the number at the end of the year. It's actually— you don't want to go there because you'll lose your mind. And that number, that cost, is not on any financial statement, Leon. Nobody puts it on a financial statement, you know, the cost of making the wrong decision because I was in my survival brain.

It puts company in bankruptcy. Yeah, finally.

Exactly, exactly. So I mean, again, I can't take a long time explaining, but this is just a small example that is so powerful. Just taking a pause, learning to practice to pause and breathe before you answer a question. And if you look at the amazing minds out there, that's what they do. Next time you watch a very successful leader speak, They pause before they answer, especially a high-stakes question from the journalist or something really that triggers them. You feel like they're really triggered and they're being attacked. They take their time. Steve Jobs is one of them, actually. I don't know if you've seen that video.

Modern example is Karamozi. When Karamozi asked the question, sometimes I just observed he's thinking about 1 minute to answer. So exactly, it's very important to understand that you're thinking not out of the fear, but out of the reality and what happens around. So, and this is the most difficult for people who are managers with high ego. To separate their fear, ego. The fear is ego, actually. And what really they have to answer without some performance, I would say. Yeah, thank you, Claire. That's very interesting. Thank you very much. And my last question, what kind of recommendation or advice you can give to early entrepreneurs who are building some unicorn and when they have to think about and behave like unicorn despite the fact they are not yet?

Yes, great question. You ask really good questions, Leon.

Thank you very much.

I'm really enjoying this podcast.

I prepare it, I prepare it. Thank you. I love it.

I love the questions. They're so pertinent and so impactful. It shows that you really, you take it to heart serving your listeners and the people watching your podcast. For entrepreneurs out there, I see you, I feel you, I hear you. My advice to you is to be self-aware. Understand your self-behavior. Understand what you are defaulting to when pressure hits, or who are you being? Who are you showing up as during the day in front of your people or in front of investors? Who are you? Who are you showing up as? Is this the version of you that is serving you, or is this the version of you that is taking away from your power?— and I'm talking about power over people, I'm talking about empowerment, self-empowerment. Ask yourself the question: Am I playing at the level I was built for? Am I happy with how I'm, I'm performing, how I'm showing up? Is this the version of me that my future self, when I'm 80 years old, is going to look back at and say, wow, 'You really, really played at that level. Congratulations.' Or is your 80-year-old gonna go, 'Man, you really played small. You could have done so much more. You are so great. You're greater than you think.' So aim high. Aim— I'm not talking about money. I'm talking about self, self-growth, how you see yourself and how, you know, how you see your abilities., and what is achievable, and what is your purpose, your impact? What do you want to leave behind? Think about these things. Take the time to write this down, and only then you can transform and become the person that you envision. And always have that crazy dream, a crazy achieving dream, that, you know, level that you're aiming for, because it's achievable. The brain is neuroplastic. You can rewire your brain to design the performance, the productivity, the life, the success that you want. We all have that power, entrepreneurs or not. Don't waste time into self-remorse and spiraling down. Pick it up and aim for that and do, act. Take action because nothing changes until you take action. And take action even if you're scared, even if you feel that you have no idea what you're doing. Just take action and eventually you'll figure it out. You need to trust the process, but you need to have that vision, that the vision of your future self, and live that vision of your future self every day. Act as if you are already that version, and before you know it, Boom, it happens, it works.

Yeah, that's invaluable advice. I just suggest everybody to, to take and, and try to implement. Wow, thank you very much, Claire. I'm really happy to have you on my podcast. It was amazing and very productive conversation. So just remind our audience that today we met with the wise, very wise a very bright, uh, person, Claire Haag, who transformed herself from being engineer to newer, newer scientist and newer psychologist, and today helping big corporations to transform their culture. And she wrote two books about it and developed unique method how to transform the culture of corporation. Thank you, Clara, for coming. Subscribe, uh, like this, uh, podcast, and we will meet next week. Thank you very much.

Thank you.