The Neuroscience Behind Making Changes with Natalie McVeigh

Foreign hi, I'm Susan Drummond. Welcome to the Enlightened Executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. This episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we strengthen teams and empower leaders to achieve high performance. Go to meritageleadership.com to learn more. Are you curious about your own development path to enlightened leadership? Take our free 5 minute quiz@susandrum.com to discover your superpower and the roadblocks that could get in the way of effective leadership. Today we're focusing on the neuroscience of change and I'm excited to introduce my guest, Natalie McVeigh. Natalie is a seasoned executive coach specializing in neuroscience and conversational intelligence. She has expertise in complex conflict resolution with a certificate in mediation from Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation. Natalie is a fellow and faculty of Family Firm Institute specializing in family dynamics and family run companies. She is finishing her PhD at Saybrook University in Applied psychology. So welcome Natalie.

Thanks, Susan. Great to be here.

Very excited about this topic, which is near and dear to my heart as well.

Yeah, for sure. Change is so wonderful a topic and so hard to achieve sometimes.

That is. That is for sure. So tell me a little bit about what does neuroscience have to do with change? Let's start there.

Sure. Depending on whether you're believing Columbia University or Texas A and M, there's a debate about whether 43 to 45% of our waking moments are habitual. But at the end of the day, our brain is so busy keeping us alive.

Right.

It's helping us breathe. We don't even think about that. Right. You're breathing, you're not thinking about. It helps me talk with my hands because I don't know how. It helps me think about facts. And so our brain is a lot on autopilot. And so any habit we want to change we likely learned really early and we encoded some really deep neural pathways about it. And most of the time we want to change the less productive pathways and those are harder to change.

And why would those, the less productive ones, be harder to change?

Because we tend to. You've all heard of don't think about the purple elephant, and you're all thinking about the purple elephant. When we decide to make a change, we tend to punish ourselves for the less productive things. Don't yell, don't yell, don't yell. But every time you're telling your brain not to yell, all your brain hears is yell, yell, yell. And Then you yell, and then you feel bad about yelling.

And then.

And the cycle continues. And so you've gotten five or six different synaptic connections on yelling. Whereas the one time I'm actually in a meeting and instead of yelling, I, I make a measured comment. That's one synaptic change. So there's some research that says those painful pathways, especially when they're early on, never go away. Think about snow. Almost the whole us is getting snow right now, right? So you all know what it's like. And some of your states don't have snowplows, but because they don't have snowplows, you're probably following that pathway in snow that already exists. That's the more painful pathway. It's a lot harder, I'm short too, to go in the high snow on your own. And that's where eventually more snow will come. You will fill that pathway a little bit. But if it's been trodden, you'll probably still see some indents where this one is pretty new.

Yeah, yeah. So what are you suggesting we do about this? I mean, if these neuropathways are grooved in from childhood, as we know, and some of them we really want to change, what are you learning and what are you teaching with regards to how we handle this?

It's really about our goal setting. You know, sometimes we think of it as a chore to change, right? Sometimes we think of it as avoiding a certain behavior. But you really want an approach goal and you want to think of it not as a chore, but as a goal specifically. So I'll use weight loss. We've all at one point in time tried to lose weight, whether we think it's good or bad. But I'm deciding to not eat the cake in the fridge, right? Because I don't want to be what I consider overweight. The research says that that cake is already eaten. It's just a matter of time. So what I should do instead is to define a goal of I want to be healthy, whatever that is. So for an executive who doesn't want to yell, do you want to be more empathetic? Do you want to listen more? Do you want to pause? I adopted a child and he had some trauma in his background. I get really quiet, like stealthily quiet, and I don't yell, but my voice gets serious. And a lot of think it's a little scary. And this little boy had some trauma and he got on this. I hadn't completely proofed kid proofed my house. He got on this glass desk that I loved. And he was leaning over in a way that he was either going to fall off or fall on, and both would have been terrible. And at the time, I'd been working on this kind of severe response that I have, people always call it severe. And all I could do was say his name. I was like, will. And my voice sounded a little severe. And he looked at me and I looked at him and he froze. And we both just stood frozen because I literally didn't know what to do next. I was just starting to recognize the pattern. And so I waited a while and we both just stared at each other. Good thing he was frozen, too. That was his trauma response. So he was safe in that moment. And then I finally said, hey, buddy, that looks really fun. Do you want to, you know, get down in a fun way? And he was like, yeah. And he put his hands out.

Right.

That's the way that I started rectifying my severe response. But the first thing I could do, and there were tons of times in meetings that all I could do was just stop and I would just have to wait. And. And that's part of the hardest part about the change process. We assume, and we've been misinformed a lot by books and articles we read, is that you can automatically substitute something else. In most cases, you can't. You can sandwich some habits, but a lot of time you just look a little silly. And because we're uncomfortable with that, we then go back to that bad behavior.

Right, Right. And so I'm hearing, you know, one key thing is focus on. Don't focus on what you don't want. Focus on what you do want. Right. So if you focus on what you don't want, you're just going to get more of don't want. So don't do this or don't do that. Doesn't work for the brain.

Not at all. In fact, it's telling you to do it again and again.

Yes, yes. And then the other piece of your story was that habitual intensity is probably going to be there, but you were able to shift it pretty quickly after you recognized it. What allowed you to do that versus being swept up and continuing on? I get on the table.

It was his face, it was his trauma response. Understanding that I'd heard people say it was severe, but I was like, they're being babies. We're at work, grown ups. I actually don't yell. I. I don't mistreat people. There was this idea that it didn't matter, and, and so I'd probably still be doing it today if I didn't take in this. This child who had this trauma response. It was seeing his genuine terror. And I didn't actually. I mean, it felt. It probably was only a minute or two, but it felt like an eternity because I was genuinely scared. Right. So I was recognizing that impulse and recognizing the feedback that people said was valid, that I'm severe, and that's no fun to be on the receiving end. And then I had to do something else. I can tell you, most of the time in meetings, I wasn't asking people if they wanted to get off the table very carefully. They weren't excited. It wasn't happy. There was a lot more of that just pausing and. And I still did it sometimes. Sometimes I would still be severe to this day. There may be moments where that happens, but they are less and less. And what happens when they show up is instead of punishing myself about that. You and I both really do a lot of emotional intelligence work. That's my anger. Right. I then check in on how I could have more effectively communicated that anger.

Yes, right, right. I just recently. Speaking of that, one of the things that I've found helpful, and I recently came back from retreat at Hoffman, was taking that anger and expressing it outside of the actual communication with someone to get it out of your system. So I'm curious if you could speak to a little bit about how these patterns show up if we try to stuff them down, like stuffing down anger, which is something that I had done, met for over many, many years, and had to realize that, my gosh, that needs to come out. Come out of my body, but obviously not directed at the person, but in a way that I could release it. So I'm curious to know how this concept impacts then, how it will leak out when we're engaging with others when we don't want it to.

Absolutely. There's not two pathways for emotions in our body. We tend to think that, like, let's have the positive pathway and the less positive one. That's why I'm calling it less positive, because our brain actually needs both all of these emotions. They're essential.

Right.

And so we tend to try to tampen down the less positive ones. We can call them painful, but what we're doing is actually tamping down all of them. And in fact, emotions and behaviors that are unaddressed are still being thought about by our brain. There's these brain waves in the back called theta brain waves. There are eureka moments. They're why we think we're so smart in the shower, they are still constantly preoccupied by that thing you've shoved down. So, in fact, your brain is still focusing on it. So to your point, you do want to get it out. Now, the research is split on this. The. The most research says you should write it out. And if you want to write the expletives, do that. And our brain thinks we've taken action by writing it and by hand. No iPads and stuff. So anything negative you write out, that is the most effective way. You want to be careful how you speak it, because if you're speaking it to yourself, your brain kind of thinks it's happening again. And you could refluster yourself if you're speaking it to your best friend or your work colleague who also doesn't like your boss, they're going to join in on that parade of not liking it. And our stress response and our upset response always involves cortisol, which hangs out for at least 26 hours unless we bring it down. And when we keep dosing ourselves can last. On and on and on.

Yeah, yeah. So why is it that writing is more effective than other types of expression? I hadn't heard that before.

Part of it is our brain thinks we took action because we did. We literally wrote something down. The second is we're synthesizing it. We tend to be iterative when we're writing. So I might say, I'm going to pick on you because we're in this webinar together. I might say, susan cut me off. And then I might actually say, well, Susan was excited to share what she said. So you're actually synthesizing it before, and you're allowing your body to think that you're taking control. There's 3/4 of people get post traumatic growth. One fourth gets post traumatic stress. But one of the big things about post traumatic growth is to feel that something is manageable and in control. And while I'm editing it, it's manageable and in control as well. And sometimes that's all you have to do. For a lot of my coaching clients, I tell them to write it down, and then I tell after to actually rip it up in a bunch of pieces. You can set it on fire, you can throw it on the table. The more you can really get it out, the better. But some people just need to write it, shut it, be done with it. It's not to say that you can never speak it out, but just be careful how you speak it out, that you're not dosing another set of focus, another set of frustration.

Interesting. So of course you and I both know that emotions all have important information for us and they have a gift in the emotion. So you know, you want to be able to feel your anger because the information in that is that a boundary has been crossed. Right. Or a value has been dishonored. And the gift is to allow you to take action to re establish the boundary or make a request. How you do that makes all the difference in the world as we're talking about it. So allowing yourself to, to express it in a way in private if something has built up through writing process will help you get, I believe, help you get clear on what. Is there a request that needs to be made here? Because you're not going to like the. I would not recommend when you're free flow writing like all the explicit, you know, explicit and, and getting that out that you then go read that to someone like not productive. But after doing that it's like is there something, is there a I need to make or is there something I need to address in a more productive way that doesn't cause the other person to go into fight or flight. And then you got two people in fight or flight and nobody's in their right thinking brain at that point.

That's absolutely true. You know I do have people look back at the, the writings that they do. That's the other benefit of having the writing because a lot of us who accommodate there's fight, flight, freeze, appease and associate. So appeasers are accommodating the moment I write it down and I feel okay, I've self sued that I might lose that bound. The interesting thing about not asserting your boundaries over and over again is guaranteeing they're going to be crossed and nobody knows they're crossing you. So I agree we can learn from the anger. What was that boundary? What was that motivation? What was that direction? What was that value? And we can communicate that anger effectively. Anger isn't a bad word. What we do with it is problematic. So I have another coaching client, he has higher anxiety. It's less about anger but anger. Anxiety can look a lot alike and in fact he had undiagnosed anxiety for most of his life and in stress situations he started commanding and controlling people. We did a 360. We have this one because the family company were also surveyed some siblings and his spouse and. And he wasn't surprised to see the numbers from his siblings and his spouse of them saying he's controlling. They've said that since childhood. But when you see it from my employees, they won't say that. Well, interestingly enough, how we do one thing is how we do everything. Every employee, the board, everyone agreed. And they would have described it as an anger issue because it looks like an anger issue, but it was really unaddressed anxiety. He ended up taking some anxiety pills for a couple years, but as we started working through what made him anxious, he was able to actually self soothe effectively. And he's no longer on those anxiety meds. I think medications can be life saving. I'm into whatever anyone's into. And a world in which you think that that might be a crutch for you, if you're able to see that response, hold space for it and choose another response, you may be able to create a different outcome. And so in all of these, you know, you and I are brought in usually, Susan, because everything's rosy. I wish someone who's expressing anxiety or anger and looks the same way, which is these, these poor leadership behaviors, but they're sourced in something. And the more we punish ourselves, the more we hear over and over, stop yelling or stop telling me what to do. Our brain is also saying, don't do that. I'm not going to do. And yet it's just telling us to do that. The biggest lie of neuroscience is that you can't think your way out of a box. Your brain is trying so hard to be smart for you because it thinks it's stupid. I remember getting a Canon DSRL like a digital camera the first time when I used to do I'm older than I look. I used to do old school photos where I adjust it myself and it wouldn't do the cool photography things I was doing. It thought it was smarter than me and was taking pictures of far away when I wanted the detail. Our brain is exactly like that, that it's trying to keep you alive. It thinks interactions between people aren't life and death. So it gives you and it ignores your data. And so we need to be careful what we feed it.

Absolutely. And I think it's the recognition that we, you know, all the perception biases that feed into the meaning that we give events. And as human beings, there's information that the brain will dial up and information that the brain will dial down. And that's where the awareness on a lot of the assessments that you and I both use that helps leaders see what is that information I'm dialing up and maybe, you know, making larger than it really is in reality. And what information am I missing as A result of that. And. And I think it's so eye opening for people to recognize that I am not a chameleon. I don't see 360 degrees method.

Absolutely. And there's not a person out there. Although this executive was surprised that his whole team believed this. He'd been given this feedback his whole life. His family, some of his board members, his wife. So I think the big thing with this, Yes, I think you need to do your work. I think you could probably focus a little more effectively the general you. But I also think there's an amount of grace that's really important. You're not having this maladaptive behavior because you're a monster. Right. It. It worked for you. It was effective. And because your body is saying, this is how I need to stay alive. And your brain is saying that you're following it. And so you need to then engage it differently and you can't monitor your way out of it. Like you just can't.

Tell me a little bit more about. You said you have to hand write the note versus typing. Why is that? That's fascinating.

Well, the hand is physically connected to your body. You know, there was some large percent of veterans in the Vietnam War that were using pretty hardcore drugs because it's terrible to be in war. And a large portion of them went cold turkey coming back to the States, which we don't see at any other time where we have hard time getting people off these drugs. But they were physically removed from that location. Our body and our brain are tied. So right now I'm standing. If you and I have a difficult conversation. If I just go and sit, my body chemistry changes. So you really do want to employ your body to help do something else. Because when it's busy trying to make you stay alive by sitting, by standing, honestly, you need to eat and drink more than you think you do. We behave really poorly when we're hungry or thirsty. We're able to let our brain feel like it's changing just by changing it.

Okay, great. What else do people need to know about the neuroscience of change?

I think that it's harder to make. You know, we've all heard that it takes 21 days to create a new habit. That is categorically incorrect. There's only one habit that happens in 21 days, and every mature adult who has a job has that habit. It's part of a much larger study that says most habit change takes 99 days. At the very least, 66 days. But real neuroplastic change, the change that would make me get up, if I decide to become a runner today and put on my running shoes without thinking about it, that it's just automatic. Takes 18 months. So I mentioned Grace earlier. It's really important if we set up our clients to say you're going to quit smoking in 21 days. You're going to quit yelling in 21 days. And we're still doing it. It's because nothing changes that fast. Nothing. Minimum 33 days. Sorry. Minimum 66 days. Usually 99 days. But real change where it's second nature, 18 months of concerted effort. The, the promise there, though, is you don't lose all of that training. So let's say I start running today and I run for six months and I stop for three months. I still have a shelf life of half, so it still counts as three months of running. And so that's important to know too. So if you're saying I can't do 18 months, you don't have to do it all at once. But I would say if you can start with no less than nine days before you start stopping that habit. And that's just how long it took that yelling you've been doing. I swear, if we surveyed your parents, and I have over the years because I work with families, you've been yelling since you were five. It's not going to go away in 21 days.

Yeah, that is fascinating. So maybe is it. What about like the smaller habits? Right. Yelling is obviously deeply ingrained from childhood, but what about, I don't know, something, something more simple is that. Where did this 21 day thing come from? Like, why did, why do people believe.

That it was a small part of that larger study. And so, you know, I think I'm so glad that we're interested in some of these studies these days. But when you take a small portion and digest it, it's usually inaccurate. So I forget what the habit is. But it's not even brushing your teeth. You know, when everyone did atomic habits, that was an anchor habit. It's something even smaller than that, that 21 days. So they do take a lot longer than we think. But that's okay, you know, because you want to practice those things. I don't know what you would call a smaller habit. Right. You know, most of the things we get called in for people are being aggressive or passive aggressive. Again, those were probably a lifetime. If you are talking about something like wanting to be an athlete. And maybe you were in college and you fell off the last five years and you're Coming back to it, that's probably a smaller habit because you have a baseline. But if saying I used to go right and I want to go left, that's a completely different change. Right. And so that's where people do fall because that's what we tend to want to do. I'm, I'm meek. I would like to be a great public speaker. Well, you may never be great at it, but you might be adequate. You may feel less nervous as you do it. And that's that approach goal. What, what's actionable for you, what's possible and then sticking with it till you get there. Instead of three times you try it and it doesn't work.

Right, right. What about. So that brings up a different topic, but related is say somebody wants to build a habit to be a better speaker. And that usually is a place where many people can feel a lot of fear. How do they get to the point where they're not in as much fear anymore? Standing up and giving a presentation, what does that look like? And what's the expectations?

Yeah, you can't just calm down. That's crazy. Right? But you can move from anxiety to excitement so you can get excited about the topic. There's also some really good research on over preparing and, and underpreparing. And there's a sweet spot there. So if you have a lot of notes that you want to read and you're going to make mistakes reading because your brain is anxious, it's going to go more poorly. So the first time is try it it. Try to get excited, try to really know the material, make it something that you love, and then try to highlight at least three things you did well in it after instead of focusing on the negatives and then go forward from there and you're going to want to try it again enough to make it work. Also really low stakes at first. You don't want it to be your board presentation. You might want it to be. Every local library actually loves educational events for adults and they will sign you up for one and like, you know, five to 15 retired people will show up. They're the best audience. Start there too and take those chunks and go further.

Oh, I love that. Particularly the aspect of find three things that you did well no matter what happened in that experience. Yeah, yeah.

I forget her first name, but it's Frederickson's. It's called her theory on Building Generative. So three. Every day you can just find three, but the next day you're more competent, confident and creative. So find those three positives it's not to say they ignore the negative, but that's just not where we want to start.

So based on what you said, I'm sure some people feel like this feels daunting. You know, if it's actually going to take 18 months, like, is there any hope for me, what's. Maybe you could suggest one thing that a leader could do tomorrow to be able to get on the right path for doing what they know they need to do. They now have awareness. They just can't seem to break that habit.

Yeah, I would pick a leader you aspire to be and pick the trait you want to create. There doesn't have to be the list on your360 or that your coach told you you're terrible at, but what's the thing you'd like to do? That was actually how I got into what I do. And I don't love public speaking, but I do tons of keynotes. But my mentor was great at taking complex ideas and making it useful people. And so I admired that. I wanted to do that first. And that's what actually has made me an effective public speaker. And I think that's the thing. What do you want? What do you aspire to? And then find ways to practice it every day, in every moment back. Most of us who are our age remember having those vocabulary tests you'd have every week in school, as well as writing in cursive and spelling and stuff. And you'd use that sentence the wrong way to your parents sometimes that word in that sentence, but then you figured out how to use it right. That's all it is, is just adding that one thing. And honestly, if it's the biggest thing in your life that everyone's complained about, that's not the thing to start with. But once you start, that thing will get less energy and less attention.

Absolutely. Maybe it's like going around the edges of it. Don't go right for the bullseye of it because that could feel daunting. And, you know, you want to increase the reward, the dopamine, of doing small things really well. And I think that's why your advice around, you know, focus on what you did well, not just, oh, I wish I hadn't done, said this or done that or what was I doing with my hands there.

Right.

All of those types of things.

Yeah, for sure. And honestly, you were probably more effective at the thing you think you're not good at. You're just giving yourself a hard time. When our. You mentioned dopamine when we're anxious we're adding that cortisol, which genuinely cuts off the, the front part of our brain. We, we are genuinely dumber. And so bringing your own anxiety in the room is, is impacting your performance. That's not to say that anxiety will go away, but how do you focus on the parts that you're excellent at and execute those well?

Yeah. So paying attention to your own negative selft talk, number one, I would say. And, and, and that goes for whether you're speaking or anything that you're trying to do. Can you balance that out with some things that you really appreciate about yourself? And I don't see people doing that enough for themselves. So if you really do want to make a change, it sounds like you've got to focus also on the progress that you're making and acknowledge it.

Absolutely. And finding those progress markers, inviting feedback. We find that executives don't get enough feedback. In fact, they're usually the most empathetic, the most agile, a bunch of things until they get into that executive suite and they lose all of that information quickly. And, and in fact, because they're not getting that feedback, tend to take it more poorly. So I think when you start doing this work and you, you say, this is my goal, I want to be a better public speaker or I want to be a better listener in meetings. A lot of my, you know, coaching clients are extroverts. So they do end up interrupting. That's, that's extroversion. Right. And they're excited. And so all of these things, if you state these goals to people, they can also celebrate you doing well, they can share how you're doing well. And they can also keep you on the straight and narrow as you're doing it along this journey. It also then makes it more comfortable for you to give them feedback if you're willing to get feedback yourself too. So it can be. We also say the best way to do a goal is multifinal. Right. You want two or three things. If I'm going to learn how to public speak for my board and I also need to volunteer a lot and I get on a not for profit board, there's two goals, being satisfied there. So it doesn't feel like I'm making all this effort for one thing. And so that's the other thing is when you're picking that aspirational goal, see if it hits a lot of different things. I can tell you that executive who had command and control at home, his marriage is a lot better now too.

Right.

Marriage and business both got worked on that way.

Yep. And seeing the benefits that there's not just one thing but multiple, multiple ways that you can benefit from working on one thing will increase, I'm sure, the motivation to stick with it.

Absolutely.

Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much, Natalie, for sharing some of your wisdom around neuroscience and debunking some myths about change as well. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

Yeah, probably my LinkedIn. It's Natalie McVeigh. I'm also at Eisner Amper. It's just really hard to spell. So either one of those is, is great. And thank you so much, Susan. This was wonderful, really wonderful to have.

You and I'm glad we got a chance to talk more about my passion as well, which is how do people change and change deep seated patterns? So if you like this episode, you're not going to want to miss my interview with Justin Breen, whose sole purpose in life is connecting visionaries to serve humanity. Let's all lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. Content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive.