Neuroscience in Coaching | The Academies

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Welcome, everyone. We are so excited to be celebrating International Coaching Week this week with you. If you are watching live, I am Jessica Burdett and I am a Professional Certified Coach and I'm the Coaching Curriculum Manager for the Academy's Coach Training. And this livestream today is something I'm super excited about because 3 of my favorite humans are getting together to talk about of my favorite topics, coaching and neuroscience. So I will just intro for you who we've got joining us and then feel free to share comments and questions in the livestream and I'll work them into our conversation as we go. So first of all, we have Susan Britton. If you want to wave your hand, Susan. Susan is calling in from Paris, France today, and I can let her explain a bit more about that if she wants at some point in this conversation. She's doing learning. Diving deeper into neuroscience there. She is also a professional certified coach and the president of the Academies for Coaching. And Susan is a very caring leader who has a vision of changing minds for good through brain-friendly coaching and tools. And then we have Chris Edwards, who is a licensed professional counselor, a neurotherapist, and the director of Neurotherapy of Colorado Springs. Chris is a gatherer of knowledge and a very generous human, one of the most generous with the knowledge he has people that I know, and always has fascinating things to share. So this is going to be a lot of fun. And then Edward MacDonald, a very good friend of mine personally, who is one of the most passionate people I know about whatever he explores. He is a master certified coach and is training to become a neurotherapist and working closely with Chris Edwards. He's also an instructor for the academies. So these are the fantastic humans, and I wanted to start off our conversation today, everyone, with asking you what ignited your passion for neuroscience.

I, I can Who's going to jump in?

I'll start and then hand it off to y'all. So I remember first discovering coaching, and neuroscience wasn't anywhere on the horizon at that point. But I remember thinking, oh my God, this is fantastic. This is what I was put on this planet to do. And just knew that I'd found the thing. And I thought, well, how cool. You work with people's beliefs. And you sort of switch, help them, support them in switching from these disempowered beliefs to empowered beliefs, and then they change their behaviors. And I thought, that's pretty cool, pretty simple, right? There's a little formula. I was a baby coach, I was looking for formulas. And then maybe 10 years into that journey, so this is maybe 10 years ago, I started hearing about neuroscience and I was fascinated by that. I kind of regretted never going the whole route of becoming a doctor when I went to college. It wasn't in my sphere of thinking, but I loved my biology classes and I loved anything that had to do with anatomy and physiology. I hear about neuroscience and I think to myself, oh my gosh, this is the missing piece. Because I was struggling noticing that I want to support people in shifting their disempowered to empowered beliefs so that they have these new behaviors. What I started to discover is that their biology beneath those beliefs and those behaviors was really critical to being able to make a difference and having either the courage, the curiosity to explore different beliefs to get to different behaviors. That's my thumbnail journey of how neuroscience came into my world. I just will profess to be a neuroscience nerd. I love anything about the brain, the biology, the body that supports us to be who we're really meant to be on this planet.

It's beautiful. I know both Chris and I have answers. Go for it, Chris.

So mine, my interest starts a long time ago and And the way that started for me is, um, I, instead of going into traditional mental health field, I actually, I have my master's, my bachelor's in psychology with a bunch of minors in psychology. I have my master's in rehabilitation, and I liked the idea of rehabilitation because it felt like proactive model versus a broken reactive model. This idea that you can fix things, that you can fix the brain, that you can move somebody forward from where they are versus I'm stuck with this diagnosis. My biggest issue has always been I'm a why guy. I always want to get to the bottom of things. And I don't like labels, you know, things like ADHD, depression, and things like that, because all that is is a label on top of a collection of symptoms. It's not a thing, right? And we get stuck in this idea of a diagnosis being a thing, but depression doesn't tell you why you're depressed. ADHD doesn't tell you why you're having a hard time with focus and attention. In that spirit of trying to get to the bottom of things and the why comes neuroscience. What I found early on, I've been in mental health for 29 years, and I found early on in my first practice in New York that I was allowed to bring in biofeedback to work with these inner city kids and families that I was working with and started to get results that nobody else was getting. Then from biofeedback was this short jaunt to neurofeedback and neuroscience, and I started doing neurodevelopmental research at the University of Buffalo and also moved into learning about neurofeedback and starting to combine this idea of rehabilitating the brain. From there it was, you know, pad into the great ocean of neuroscience. And, and, you know, the bottom line too, I mean, I get bored easily, probably my own kind of focus and attention issues. And there's so much to be learned about the brain and the body and integrative healthcare and mental health and all of that. And, and never gonna get bored in neuroscience. And then for me, coaching kind of comes along because even though I'm a licensed professional counselor as well, what I, what I never liked about therapy was that I just felt like we're spending all this time in the past, you know, focusing on what's wrong, what's broken, what's not right, and not spending enough time designing the person that you wanna be. And I found that combining a balanced brain and a balanced body along with a want for or this new person, understanding that this isn't just gonna show up, you're going to have to design this person, the want for some structure around helping somebody figure out designing the person you wanna be, I tended to move more towards a coaching mentality versus that more traditional psychotherapeutic model. How's that?

Nice.

Awesome.

I think I've got a lot of things in common with both of you, and I'm not surprised. It started for me, I think, being raised in a science household. So, dad's a doctor, mom's a nurse practitioner, chem degrees, master's in pharmacology. It was just a science house. I was using science words and thinking scientifically from a very young age and having really unfair science fair projects with, you know, yeah. It was just, it was, was the way I was raised. Um, so I've always loved science. It was like a, a first language for me. Um, and I, I thought I was bucking the trend and going into relational arts, um, instead of science, and here I found myself going full circle. But that is what it is. Coaching was really, I think, where it started to coalesce. So I remember, uh, my first coaching session with a certified ICF coach was a PCC named Gaila Anders. Gaila, if you're watching, thank you. This is all your fault. And I walked away from that session being, I don't know what she just did, but like, that was magical. She wasn't even really in the room. It felt like it was just me reflecting and making new connections and thinking about things differently and changing behavior as a result. And I walked away from that conversation saying, I got to figure out how she did that. Because I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people and that was unique. And that started a journey down the road of coaching and coach training in my MCC eventually. And that journey was what landed me within neuroscience because it was the more I dug into it, this theory of neuroplasticity kept on coming up, right? That the brain, as long as it is alive, has infinite potential to grow, heal, and change. Like, that's why coaching works. And then meeting Chris, experiencing neurofeedback, and really understanding that coaching, when done well, is not dissimilar from neurofeedback. It's conversational neurofeedback. Because in the office, we're using EEGs to help someone see their brain. A coaching conversation is not that different. You're using words, metaphors, active listening, powerful questions. Reframing to help them see their brain. So really, for me, like, coaching is the relational conversational side of, of neuroscience and neurofeedback. And understanding how you're doing what you're doing is always super important to me. Otherwise, you really don't know what you're doing. Um, so yeah, it all goes back to the mind.

Beautiful to hear the journeys, and the thing standing out to me is how much it is a journey for all of you, that the pieces unfold and connect to each other. And even I think about like being in this room with all of you, that I feel very like part of the journey getting to be connected with all of you, because in various ways I'm connected with each of you because of somebody else here. The next question I've got for us is What is currently fascinating you the most at the intersection of neuroscience and coaching?

Who wants to jump in?

I can kind of play around with it and see where it goes. Most questions are always hard for me because it's like, but there's so many things, picking one is hard.

Okay, Edward, what is a thing that is fascinating you today?

Yeah, I'm really very curious about the role that mirror neurons play and the work that we all, all of us do. My wife is also an MCC, and I've talked for years about how what really gets stuck clients stuck in coaching long-term is they start thinking like a coach. And at some point in the conversation, the really stuck clients start thinking like a coach, not a client. And they take the conversational model you're using and have used for months and months and months and apply it to their life, and they get unstuck. And the, the magic bullet for stuck clients really seems to be a combination of coach training and coaching, which to me sounds like mirror neurons. They're seeing it often enough, they're starting to copy it. And the copying of the mindsets, the questions, the behaviors the thoughts and feelings that they see in their coach is what actually gets them unstuck. And like raising two young children, mirror neurons are powerful. One of my favorite things to watch on TikTok or YouTube are the compilations of cross-species mirror neurons, right? Where you see bears waving at the zoo or you see animals using tools like they're copying people. And that ability to like copy things, like I think we have a negative relationship with copying. But it's been said by numerous people that, you know, you stand on the shoulders of giants, right? It's not, it's not a, there's no unique new thoughts. It's all just reiterations of the same thing. So if we can get over the competitive streak of copying. Copying is how we learn everything. In school, you're copying the teacher until you can do it yourself. When you raise kids, they're copying you until they can do it themselves. When I teach a stuck or coach a stuck client, what gets them unstuck is they start copying phrases, thoughts, beliefs, patterns of thinking, feeling, believing, behaving in the world, and they get unstuck. I got to think about how that applies to neurotherapy. Maybe Chris can chime in because I'm thinking through the clients I've seen recently. I really think the culture, as I think about it just in this, in this moment, the culture of the office is what really gets them unstuck. They, they start thinking different thoughts and feeling different feelings and vibrating higher and eating better food and going to sleep earlier. And the culture, like, the neurotherapy is a very small piece of it. It's a very profound piece, but the— they start living like the person they want to be. Because they see people around them that remind them of the person they want to be. I just think that's a profound responsibility to carry through our lives. Like, it's not— coaching is an internal job. It's not— we go into it to help people, but we're really doing it to grow. And I think remembering that— I remember once when someone asked what I did, I said, I'm a life coach. And they kind of scoffed, so you must have life figured out. And I bristled at the comment. It was years ago. I still remember it. I couldn't even tell you who it was, but I remember the comment. And no, we don't have life figured out. But there is a responsibility when you coach others to show up in a way that they can walk away being better for it because you're setting the space.

Yeah.

So Chris and Susan, what would you add to that or where would you expand with what your interests are right now?

Well, Susan, would you like to go?

I do have something that might dovetail off of that, so jump right in.

I'm listening.

And I jump. So I'm like Edward, like one thing, one thing that's interesting me right now. I have so many, and that's part of the reason I'm here in Paris. Is that I'm starting an executive master in change program with INSEAD, which is involving 7, 8, 9 trips over to France over the next year and a half. Many of the concepts that they are starting us off with really get at the roots of what are the hidden forces that prevent change. Many times those hidden forces are very much unconscious within us. We're just not aware of patterns that we've got, or how our compulsion to repeat things. We're not— perhaps we're aware of when we want to make a change coming to a coaching relationship. We want to change something typically, and yet there's an ambivalence about it. So all of those pieces— how do you get at the unconscious or the, the not aware pieces? How do you start looking at really understanding the exploration of ambivalence and being able to be a container as the coach for that unconscious ambivalence, frustration, patterns that people aren't aware of. Change always has some sort of scary piece associated with it. There's a good thing that you want to move towards, but there's also something that's that's just anxiety-provoking around having to leave an old way of thinking or having to leave old patterns. I'm fascinated right now by how do we do that in a way that's aligned with coaching principles and not therapy principles? How do we ourselves learn how to control that biology? We talk about red zone, blue zone at the academies, and the blue zone is simply that state where we're not in a fight-flight sort of reactive state. How do we as coaches deepen our ability to have that blue zone biology that is going to in turn increase our cognitive capacity, increase our relational skills, increase our ability to hold someone else's ambivalence and anxiety and concerns about these things that they want to move towards? Because to me, the, the coach is the instrument. In that process, similarly to what you were saying, Edward, about your modeling some of that. I'm fascinated about how biology combines with those pieces around change.

There's so much connection in there between the mirror neurons and the holding the container for change. I know Edward also mentioned like holding a space and culture space in the neurotherapy office and that being sort of like the container for the work done there. What would you add on to that, Chris? What's fascinating you?

Yeah, well, it's interesting because I was thinking about, man, what isn't interesting, but The thing I would probably jump in that would probably have the most relevance to what you guys are saying, and probably my, one of my biggest passions is I've really been leaning into for the last 10 years quantum physics and this idea that we absolutely are creating our own reality. And, you know, what seemed like kind of woo-woo hippie-dippy stuff back in the '60s and '70s, we're really starting to understand through things like, um, simple things like double slit experiment and stuff like that, this idea that we are absolutely creating the reality out in front of us, right? And, you know, you can bring in mirror neurons, you can bring all of these pieces to it too, because it's this idea that if you really understand that and you take ownership of that idea, that becomes for some people a very overwhelming kind of idea. And I've had people, you know, after a session about talking about how you create your reality a bit, come back and go, man, that's— I don't know that I want that responsibility. I like this idea that life happens to me as opposed to me impacting it. I'd like to hand that ownership over because that's a lot. And then other people come back in and go, whoa, wow, this is really cool. And getting people to understand that the, the mindset that you take, that the, the things that you eat, the thoughts that you have, all of these things actually have a huge impact on what comes at you, the reality of your life, and that you can absolutely get in there and create the life you want. And I think that's For me, where it starts to turn into this idea why coaching becomes such an important idea, what I've been able to do over 29 years of being in this field is start to take bits and pieces of all the things that I've learned that I like and start to create this amalgam of my own kind of way of practicing and Jessica and Eddie know this because they saw me lecture on it once upon a time. The philosophy I use is something I call 10-80-10, which is really good therapy only puts 10% of your time, effort, and energies into looking at your past. There isn't a lot of benefit to doing that, and you have to tread really lightly when you start poking into old stuff for the sake of doing it, because you can reignite old neural pathways and in many ways reinforce some of the things that are back there that are causing interference patterns. So, so you gotta, you gotta be smart and you gotta have a, um, a goal when you do that. And, and that goal is, is what did I learn, what am I going to do different, basically. And, and to be able to name it, you know, that name it to tame it mentality. Other than that, I I don't like to spend a lot of time in the past. There's— it's, it's not productive. And where I like to spend most of my time is this 80/10, which is 10% of your energy as a person, which I don't think a lot of us do, is designing the person you want to be, being mindful of your attitude, being mindful of the thoughts that you have. Being mindful of everything that it is that embodies this person that you wanna be. And that's that ownership of your life and your future and this need to be designing it. And then 80% of your life, your energies and your behaviors needs to be in alignment with the 10 and the 10. What did you learn? What do you wanna do different? And what don't you wanna repeat? That's fair too. Who do you want to be? Which I don't think hardly anybody spends time on. Who do you want to be? How do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning? How do you want things to go? What's the life you want to have? In therapy, when we talk about those kinds of— the way those things land is they go, yeah, 95— and this goes to something Susan was saying— 95% of your brain is running on autopilot. 95. Only 5% of your brain's energy goes to your day, the thing in front of you, this conversation, etc. 95%. Whoa, think about that. Autopilot is born out of repetition. Repetition lives in your past. So we're really all living in the past 95% of the time. That includes emotions, knee-jerk reactions, all of it. And it is so crucial that you understand that most of what you're doing, thinking, and behaving is born in your past. And then when I, you know, by the time they land in my office, it's a fair question to go, so how much do you like your past? And how much of that do you want to bring forward, right? And people go, well, that's why I'm here. And I go, right. So let's design the thing you want to be, right? And what we're starting to learn with quantum physics is that design process is so huge because you literally are in charge of creating your reality. And that, that process, I think, is everything, and it's so important to understand. And then, like what Eddie was saying, you bring in this idea of mirror neurons. Who are you surrounding yourself with? Who do you look at for ideas? Who's, who, who's around you supplying attitude, culture, and all these things? There's such major players in your life, and you have to take charge of those things. It's just, it's crucial. And this idea that life happens to you versus you're, you're creating it, I think is everything. And that's where I just love this idea of neuroscience, quantum physics, and coaching, because I think you put those three things together and you have this massively impactful way of changing people's lives.

And can I just add to that? So that repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, um, Jessica, Edward, you're familiar. We're writing a series of articles on each of the ICF competencies and the neuroscience that undergirds those competencies, because there's a lot of neuroscience that really makes those competencies make sense and make them work so effectively. And one of the things I love about neuroscience is that when you recognize that your cells are addicted to the emotions that you have. They're addicted to this way of thinking. I mean, there's neural pathways that are myelinated to make it easy to do the way of thinking that you may not want to keep doing. And once people recognize that piece of the puzzle, it seems like there's just a lot of forgiveness and self-compassion that enters into the picture. And when you've got the self-compassion happening and an understanding of, oh, No wonder I keep doing that, that which I don't want to keep doing. That in and of itself changes your biology. Now you've got happier neurochemical cocktail, you know, floating through your brain so that you have the ability to be able to change things differently. I'll quote Edward. Edward, I love the way you talk about, yeah, you get this insight, you get this rush of dopamine or whatever those happy chemicals are, and your term. You slingshot into action because of that lift. And once you understand that, you've got this extra edge in coaching and moving forward in life.

Yeah, I just to piggyback off of that, the, in both, both these spheres of work that all three of us are talking about, neurotherapy and coaching, there's an emphasis on awareness. We're helping someone see something they're unaware of, right? But where it really gets magical in both of those things is the awareness of the awareness. Because the brain can be aware of what it has to do in a neurotherapy session to score and to get levels where they should be and to help ratios. But when the client becomes aware that their brain is aware, that's where the magic happens. That's where they get unstuck, and that's where they start phasing out because they're done. And in a coaching session, they have aha moments, hopefully all session long. You can see them. People will, oh, do that in a coaching session. That's an insight, that's awareness. But when you help them become aware of their awareness, that metacognition piece, like, that's where the magic happens. Because there's all kinds of things under the surface that can change with awareness. But the stuff out here, the person, changes when there's awareness of the awareness. And that's the— that's what brings us back, right? Like, that's the drug we're all chasing doing this work. It's a fantastic thing to witness. You can see it on people's faces, like they're different people.

So yeah, and I think part of that too is like as coaches, we've done the work to work on building the awareness of the awareness. I think that's what feels so juicy about getting a group like this together and getting really nerdy together. Um, thanks. What was that, Chris?

Oh, just agreeing. Just agreeing. Yep. Always good to get together with, with amazing people with a common theme and, you know, geek out a little bit. Absolutely.

Yes. Well, I know there's so much more we could talk about, but we're at the end of our time today. Uh, if you're watching this on Facebook, we will put the link to those neuroscience articles that were referenced in the, uh, comments, and feel free to look at that as a place for more information. And there were lots of resources mentioned during this conversation that you can continue to dig into. Thank you, Susan and Chris and Edward, for sharing your insights and sharing this conversation together.

Thank you.

See everyone tomorrow for the next live.

Thank you, everyone. Okay, bye.