The Science of Happiness at Work: How Brain Chemistry Impacts Agile Teams

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Convergence Podcast. I'm your host, Ashok Sivanand. We're biologically wired to perform better in what we would call like an agile environment and then perform worse in an autocratic or command and control. On this show, we'll deconstruct the best practices, principles, and the underlying philosophies behind the most engaged product teams who ship the most successful products.

[00:00:36] This is what teams are made of. Hey folks! Welcome back to another episode of Convergence.fm, where we deconstruct the most successful products and the engaged teams who build them. Today, our guest Brad Nelson and I explore something that I think is foundational to all of us, happiness. And we'll discuss how it impacts our work and fuels high-performing teams that sustain innovation and delight their customers.

[00:01:03] Brad is an expert at applying neuroscience in workplace productivity. He's also an experienced technologist and a specialist in agile and lean software delivery. He's been invited to speak at numerous technology conferences about the fascinating connections between brain science, human motivation, and team wellbeing, and how a combination of them lead to better, more profitable products and outcomes for your business and your company.

[00:01:32] As many of you know by now, I am passionate about designing delivery practices that account for how our brains actually work. Embracing our differences and incorporating these insights into team disciplines that drive better team delivery and better products. What I find makes Brad's perspective especially valuable is his practical background.

[00:01:53] And I'm also a little biased because similar to myself, he learned about lean principles not from agile software, but on the manufacturing floor before bringing those principles to digital product development. Early in his career, he worked on factory production lines where he instinctively applied lean thinking, experimenting, optimizing workflows, and even doubling his team's output.

[00:02:16] And from there, he built a career leading agile transformations at companies like Meijer, Insight, and now Ford Credit, where he helps shape digital products and platforms that power one of the world's most iconic automotive brands. In addition to working in lean software and delivery, he spent years studying positive psychology and neuroscience, exploring how the brain chemistry works, things like dopamine, serotonin, cortisol,

[00:02:42] and how they directly impact your performance and your team's performance. So today, we get to break down why happy teams build better products, what leaders like yourself can do to reduce stress for yourself and your team, and how simple small shifts in mindset can drive massive improvements in productivity and your team's outcome. Bonus for agile and extreme programming fans, at the end of the episode, we do a rapid fire round, something we've never done before,

[00:03:09] where Brad talks about the neuroscience behind why certain agile practices, well implemented, tend to get your teams very engaged. Now it's important to note, while Brad and I are enthusiasts who've studied and applied these concepts, we're not neuroscientists or medical professionals here. The insights that we share here are based on our personal research, our practical experience, and our experimentation.

[00:03:33] So please consult your appropriate professionals and do your own research before making significant changes to your work or your personal habits. With that said, here is Brad. Subscribe to the podcast to get future episodes as soon as they're published. If you find this helpful, give the podcast a five star rating on your podcast app or hit that like button on YouTube. Thank you so much for making the time.

[00:04:03] And I'm excited to talk about a lot of the factors that lead into happiness in some of the things going on inside us, our brains, the chemicals and everything else. And especially excited because you're someone who's also worked in factories like I have and learned lean from the production floor, maybe as opposed to from an agile training or certification. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[00:04:30] And then you've spent a bunch of time on agile software teams, right? So maybe let's get started on what drove your curiosity in the study of happiness that has led to so many insights that you have. As you mentioned, I've been into agile for quite a while. And to me, agile is a culture and as uncle Bob calls it, it's a culture of learning.

[00:04:56] And one of the things that I learned early on is it's not these practices like we've taken these practices and we've installed them elsewhere. And it wasn't enough to help teams to be agile or to see these benefits that we were promising. And so culture was something that as an agile list, you tend to research a lot. You know, Dan Pink comes to mind as someone that I think most people are aware of, autonomy, mastery, purpose.

[00:05:23] But Dan Pink, his whole thing is he's repackaging psychology. And this is psychology that existed for decades before him. And his findings were from DC and Ryan. And my mom was a psych major. So psychology has always been kind of in my, I'll say my wheelhouse. I don't agree as we're talking today, right? Like I want to make sure this is informational. I'm not a doctor. But so I was always really interested in psychology and evidence-based therapy.

[00:05:53] And so as I was researching that sort of stuff, this new thing called positive psychology started to kind of filter into my feeds. And there's a very prominent figure in it. There's multiple, but this one guy by the name of Sean Aker. Mm-hmm. And Sean has a TED talk that I absolutely love. It's my favorite. I kind of want to be him when I grow up as far as how I present because I love how he mixes knowledge and comedy into his stuff. A little bit like Dan Pink.

[00:06:25] And so I was going through this. And what's funny is it resonated with me and it resonated with other people. And so I started sharing it. And then someone was like, hey, my wife works at this local hospital. Would you mind sharing this there? I was like, sweet. I'd gladly do that. And I shared it and they were quiet through the whole thing. And at the end, I kind of got ripped apart a little bit by a bunch of doctors.

[00:06:50] Like, cause I didn't have the science behind it or like, you know, I cited studies, but it was still just kind of a little bit high level wishy-washy. And so I started digging into it more and more as more and more studies were popping up in that. And then I found this guy, the name of Dr. Alex Korb, who has this book called The Upward Spiral.

[00:07:12] And in it, he explains in depth how our brain from a biological level responds to the things that Sean was talking about. That links all the way back to the things that Edward Deasy and Ryan or Dan Pink were talking about.

[00:07:32] And so I was really able to start building this case for these things that we've known for like a hundred years now, all the way back to the Hawthorne studies at Bell Labs that we as Agilists talk about, but have maybe come across this kind of like wishy-washy where they're like, oh, you're just the fun hippie guy that wants to have fun at work. Well, now we actually have science and psychology saying that's not the case.

[00:08:00] And so I'm really interested in it. And before we start to get into the details of those, maybe let's set us up with some maybe base knowledge or primers around parts of the brain, maybe the chemicals in the brain that are most relevant to what motivates us, what gives us happiness. So start us off there. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So Sean Acres thing is that we have the equation backwards.

[00:08:28] We think that if I achieve the thing, then I'll be happy. And the reality is if you achieve the thing, you just move the goalpost. I got the job. Now I need the promotion. I got that promotion. Now I need the next promotion. I got the degree. Now I need the next degree. There's always something else. And that's the way our brains work. And so his thing is, if you're if you're happy first, though, you're more likely to be successful. And it's because of these brain chemicals.

[00:08:57] And it's how our brain responds. So there's four main hormones called well, they're not really hormones. They're neurotransmitters. But we call them the feel good hormones. They act like a hormone. Once again, I'm not a doctor. So all I have is, you know, this cursory information. And I'm not a doctor. But most of them we've heard of. You have oxytocin, the love hormone. You have serotonin, the mood booster. You have your endorphins, which is the body's natural painkillers.

[00:09:26] And then you have dopamine, which we think of as like the reward center. And these chemicals are produced all the time. And there's two in particular. I mean, all of them are important, but there's two in particular that really stood out to me. And it's dopamine, which helps with our attention and focus, our learning and our memory. So it allows us to access our memory and it allows us to store new memories. And then there's serotonin, which your body produces in the morning to wake you up.

[00:09:54] And it's what creates alertness and wakefulness in our bodies. It also helps with our motivation, our willpower, and it helps to regulate our anxiety. And what I didn't realize is it's also a precursor to melatonin, which is what puts us to sleep at night. So if you don't have enough serotonin, you don't have enough melatonin. And so those are the two main chemicals that I talk about. However, oxytocin also has similar receptors to serotonin. And so it can give you the same feelings.

[00:10:23] And oxytocin is what's produced when you interact with people. And it makes you better at interacting with people. It's your feeling of empathy and all of those sorts of things. So it's kind of double bonus there. You get some of the benefits of serotonin, plus you get the added benefits of networking and communication. Especially folks maybe that are knowledge workers like us, that are on agile teams or leading technology organizations.

[00:10:53] What are some common things that come to mind for you or that the literature you've studied says in terms of what we could be doing every day to optimize for these four chemicals that play a huge part? I read this study that showed that the most stressful thing universally for people at work, stress is a personal thing. If you feel stressed by it, like that's your truth. Nobody can argue that.

[00:11:19] But universally everyone is kind of stressed by this one thing the most at work and it's a lack of control. And the reason why this matters is, and I didn't touch on this yet, is there's a hormone that your body produces called cortisol when you're stressed. And the thing about cortisol is that it actually makes it so that you can't produce dopamine and you consume your serotonin twice as fast.

[00:11:43] And so if those chemicals, the dopamine and serotonin are the two chemicals that optimize us for performance, we don't want cortisol while we're trying to be productive at work.

[00:11:57] And so if a lack of control produces the most stress and the most cortisol and counteracts our productivity, it's kind of like we're biologically wired to perform better in what we would call like an agile environment or a democratic servant leader, transformational lead type environment.

[00:12:16] And then perform worse in an autocratic or command and control, Tayloristic, scientific management, whatever you want to call it type environment. Our bodies naturally are going to perform worse. And the thing that I love about it is that the things that help us perform the best are the things that make us the healthiest as individuals as well.

[00:12:42] Which makes sense if you really think about it logically, like, yeah, if I'm healthy, I should perform the best. But that's not something that we tend to think about in the workplace. It's not something that they tend to teach. It's not something that HR tends to focus on. It's to me, it's a huge gap. As an Agilist, we focus on process. It feels like mostly these days. And I often say that, you know, agile is promoted through product. And then it's realized through development.

[00:13:12] But even if we look at it that way, like product thinking and our XP or DevOps practices, we're still missing the human element. And so to me, this is really, really crucial and kind of the missing piece when we look at these agile organizations. And there's many things we can do to produce these chemicals in our body. And we can definitely talk about those until we're blue in the face. And I'm sure we'll talk about some throughout this episode.

[00:13:38] But the biggest thing that I am really trying to advocate for is leadership that's aware of the importance of these chemicals and their effect on the workplace. And this feeling of a lack of control. That is super fascinating about the lack of control being a key part of stress. Not surprising.

[00:14:06] You know, there's we've heard about FUDs in most boardrooms, I'm sure, in terms of fears, uncertainties, doubts. And I can argue some way for each of those to be a lack of control in some form. And so what does having control feel like? Or tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah. So when we're talking about control, what we're really talking about is what is my motivation to do this thing? And when we talk about motivation, there's two motivations.

[00:14:35] There's extrinsic or external or controlled motivations. And there's intrinsic or autonomous motivations. And so when we look at an extrinsic motivation, these are things outside of ourselves, like a reward or a punishment that we're likely to receive if we do a good job. Research has shown that these are really not that effective, period.

[00:15:02] And the ones that are effective stop being effective as time goes on and can actually backfire because you expect to feel happier when you achieve them and you don't. And so then you're kind of upset that you're not as happy as you thought you would be. Mm hmm. And, you know, there's a lot of like asterisks we're talking, right?

[00:15:23] There's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, as our Dan Pink fans talk about, you know, once you hit a certain threshold of monetary value, then it stops being effective. If I can't afford to eat, that's going to make me pretty unhappy. But once we've addressed that, these extrinsic factors stop really being effective. And so really we're talking about intrinsic. What are the things that motivate us intrinsically?

[00:15:46] And if we go back to DC, he would say that it is control again. It is competence and it is connectedness. Or in his words, relatedness. And it probably sounds very familiar to Dan Pink, Autonomy and Mastery Purpose. But DC's thing is that when you feel like you're in control of your destiny, you're going to be more motivated to do the things.

[00:16:15] So this feeds directly into this dress thing as well. And then mastery is the reason why we play the guitar. Or, you know, we play video games or we do puzzles. Any of these sorts of things that we do that don't make us money, but are difficult. We have to keep practicing even better at. It helps with mastery. And then connectedness is like, do we, are we tribal animals? Do we have a tribe?

[00:16:43] Am I connected to the purpose of the thing that I'm working on? Do I understand why I'm doing these things? You know, a connection to the people you're helping as well. And so once we start analyzing those things in our workplace, it really kind of feeds into like product thinking. Like, why am I doing the thing that I'm doing? What is the value we're delivering?

[00:17:06] It also feeds into some of the teamwork, agile practices that we teach as far as the connectedness, making time to practice for mastery, letting, you know, decentralized decision making. Letting people make decisions where it makes sense, let the experts be experts. And then the things that need leadership to decide, then they're the ones that decide it. Absolutely.

[00:17:33] And when you mentioned control, especially, I think there, I think there's some overlap of another common management or leadership hot topic around micromanagement. And I'm curious if you've seen a tie back between micromanagement and intrinsic motivators before. Definitely. Micromanagement goes against control. So that's definitely going to produce cortisol. It's definitely going to make your people less productive.

[00:18:01] But we tend to think of the opposite as empowerment. And that's something that we talk about a lot in autonomy and in agile is you're empowered to do something. Empowerment can create stress as well, though, if you don't have the two key factors to empowerment, which is authority to actually be empowered, to actually make decisions. And then the ability. And when we talk about ability, it's the ability to do the work as part of it. You know, the ability to like to have the right tools.

[00:18:28] I can't ask you to code for me if you don't have a laptop, for example. Like that's part of it. But also what tends to get overlooked is the ability to self manage the ability to know what I need to do next. And this is something that I definitely learned the hard way as a consultant and an agile coach. I was always challenged by my teammates to to coach. Don't tell. Don't teach. Don't mentor. Be a coach. And so I'd go into these low maturity organizations and I'd be like, you're empowered.

[00:18:57] Do whatever you think is best and you'll experiment and you'll fail and you'll learn what works for you. And part of being a consultant is like, well, you've done this before. Tell me what's worked for you. It'd be like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't apply everywhere. Like just try something. And nothing would happen. And I would check in with them again. I'm like, hey, what did you try? We didn't do anything. And what I started to realize is they didn't have the ability. They didn't know where to even start. And they're not used to experimentation and trying.

[00:19:26] So they didn't have that ability either. And when you're put in that situation then where it's like, I'm now suddenly accountable, fully accountable for my results, but I don't have the ability to achieve them from a management of my work and the management of myself and my team standpoint, that introduces stress as well. And that's, I would say like the dark side of empowerment that we don't tend to talk about a whole lot.

[00:19:59] Fostering an engaged product organization and aligning them with the principles around lean, human centered design, and agile will more than likely lead to successful business outcomes for your organization. But getting started or getting unblocked can be hard. This podcast is brought to you by the player coaches over at integral.

[00:20:20] They help ambitious companies like you build amazing product teams and ship products in artificial intelligence, cloud, web, and mobile. Listeners to the podcast can head on over to integral.io slash convergence and get a free product success lab.

[00:20:40] During this session, the integral team will facilitate a problem solving exercise that gives you clarity and confidence to solve a product design or engineering problem. That's integral.io slash convergence. Now back to the show. I want to talk a little bit more into what you're already saying going into with respect to product thinking and leading lean teams.

[00:21:04] That being said, you mentioned a number of authors and books that helped you arrive here and want to make sure we'll get those in the show notes. Was there any other resources for the folks who want to kind of go deeper on the brain regions or neurochemistry or any of those things that you tend to follow? One of the first kind of big names in this space is a guy by the name of Mike Viking. Mike Viking. And he has the coolest name ever. What a cool name. Coolest name ever.

[00:21:34] Yeah. It's spelled M-E-I-K and then W-I-K-A-N-G. And he created like the first happiness institute in the world. And so he's another prominent figure. But Yale and Harvard and a lot of other colleges offer happiness programs now. And they have professors that are really fantastic. I actually took a course on Harvard X. So their online course on happiness leadership.

[00:22:06] And I was surprised some of the stuff that they brought up in it were things written by the Dalai Lama on like the art of happiness and things that I had read when I was like 20 that I didn't really expect to tie back in to this sort of stuff today, which is kind of like the story of lean as well with me. Like with lean, it was like, I can't wait to get out of the factory. And there's even maybe like a little bit of embarrassment.

[00:22:30] I would say that I worked in the factory to later like Kanban and agile and being like, oh, full circle. All this makes sense now. Same thing with I felt like with the Dalai Lama and some of these older happiness stoicism, all those sorts of things kind of play into this area from a more like philosophical, psychological standpoint. But Alex Corb is really the main one for me that talks about the science behind it.

[00:22:58] There's a few people on Ted that talk about the mute, like how music affects us in a similar way that I was watching over the weekend that were pretty cool. Mel Robbins doesn't have a degree, a medical degree either. She's very much like me where she's big into evidence based research and she does her own research and she's her own scholar. And she had a book that came out a few years ago called the High Five Rule or something like that.

[00:23:28] And she was the one that was the first person to really highlight for me the reticular activating system, the RAS. RAS, not super familiar with it. What does it do? What's it for? Yeah. So RAS, the name is less important to know, but really it's understanding that it's the system in our brain that helps us to focus. It gives us our direction because our body is constantly bombarded with our senses.

[00:23:59] There's a reason why every second of the day you're not thinking about how your teeth taste or you're not noticing. I am now. You are now. Yeah. I gave attention to it now. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, or why you're able to focus on your screen and not see the things around you. Or they did a study a while ago where they had somebody tracking a ball like on a screen and they didn't even notice that like this guy in a full gorilla suit walked in behind it and was like banging his chest and walked off screen.

[00:24:29] Because we're very, very good at focusing. And that's what this RAS does. Uh, also think about if you're in a crowd and it's very noisy and you're hearing people yell and all these things. And then somebody yells your name and you immediately hear it and you start looking around like, Hey, someone say my name. Um, that's your RAS kicking in. Mm. That is. That is super informative in terms of all of the wonderful, beautiful things going on in our brains.

[00:24:58] And so a lot of our audience tends to be folks who are leading technology teams or working on product teams. So they have similar sort of lifestyles. You can imagine at least from a work perspective to us. Um, some of, some of us may or may not have standing desks, but we're tend to be more or less stationary, maybe sedentary.

[00:25:19] And the work tends to carry some level of pressure and requires urgency and speed and things can get pretty overwhelming. So based on the research and your experimentation, what are some things that we could be doing today to get started? And maybe why tying it back to the stuff we've learned so far.

[00:25:42] Well, as we were just talking about the RAS, one of the things that does, one of the things that does naturally is it looks for dangers. It looks for the negative things. It's really easy for us as humans to always see what is going on wrong in the world. And I have kind of like this in the back of my head, I don't know, blog or something where like agilists are the biggest pessimists because we're always looking for improvement areas. And that's our RAS in action.

[00:26:11] We've trained it to do that. And so one of the things that we can do is we can actually retrain our RAS to look for the things that are good in our life that are already there. And so it's not gaslighting. It's not saying completely ignore the bad things, but it's understanding that there are good things in our life today. And we're just not seeing them because we haven't trained ourselves to notice those things.

[00:26:33] And there's also like a weight scale where like, you know, we need more positives than negatives type thing with the way that our emotions respond to things. But you can test this yourself just by coming up with something. It doesn't matter what it is. Mel Robbins teaches hearts. So she looks for hearts everywhere and she looks for leaves in the shape of hearts and rocks in the shape of hearts. And she's basically able to train her brain to look for this symbol all around her. And then she sees it.

[00:27:03] Well, that's something that we can do is kind of fun. And but when it comes to happiness in our own life and producing more dopamine and serotonin, we really want to focus on things that we're grateful for. And happiness is one of those words that maybe we should have started by defining, but there's not like a great definition of it. A lot of people tend to think of joy like in my joyful in the moment. Well, joy is a temporary state. Most people who are happy are more content. They're in like the state of content. Our contentment.

[00:27:34] And the way to get there is is gratitude, being thankful for the things that you have today and appreciating the things that you have today. And so what we want to do is actually want to retrain our RAS to notice those things. And to be like, wow, you know, I'm I forget the story exactly now, but they tell the story of like a guy that's a bank and the banks getting robbed and he gets shot in the arm. And ends up in the hospital. And, you know, he kind of has two point of views at that point.

[00:28:03] He can say, wow, how horrible that I happened to be in the bank when it got robbed and I got shot. Or he can say, wow, I was in this bank and I got shot. But thankfully it only hit me in the arm and I still have my life. And it's really all how we look at it. And and so you could things they both can be true. It both can be true that yes, I really wish I wasn't in that bank, but I can't control that now.

[00:28:32] So the thing that I can troll is appreciating that, you know, hopefully that person has minor surgery and they're better. One of the stories that I'm reminded of, I think it was. Naval Ravikant and he mentioned an anecdote in service of this where he said he was in Thailand or some kind of beach vacation. And he, you know, every day go down to the beach and he noticed the sky that would just seem like he was in the best mood.

[00:28:58] And you had to know him and he's like, you know, he's fairly well to do financially, but not by any means like the folks that Naval typically hangs out with that are like, you know, multi billionaires. And so, you know, how's it that there was obviously something confounding or curious about this man who had done OK financially, but was just disproportionately content or happy. And when he went and asked the guy, he had kind of a profound answer that I think is in service of what you said around control.

[00:29:28] And he said, hey, you know, at any given moment, there is one person on the Earth that is the happiest person on Earth. And why not it be me? And that was kind of this, you know, his his answer. And it's that that anecdote from Naval, something that I tend to remember a fair amount.

[00:29:49] And it reminds and your story about the guy who gets shot in the bank and how you look at it is something that's entirely in your control compared to whether you're going to get shot in the arm today or not, which is hopefully not. But we tend to live in a non deterministic world where, you know, the only way you can maybe avoid this is not going into the bank where you might get shot somewhere else. But nevertheless, I'm curious.

[00:30:17] So one of the things you mentioned, I think, is gratitude and journaling is an obvious way to do that. I think how we can foster it on teams, we'll get to next because I feel like there's a lot of ways that that shows up in agile. What are some of the other things in terms of sort of self management that you think can really help optimize for the chemicals in our brains? Yeah, I do want to touch on I love that story of the guy like the I could be the happiest person in the world.

[00:30:46] I want to make sure that we call out that you can't just will yourself to be happy if we look at like the cognitive or the behavior triangle from CBT. Human beings are essentially like three components, your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors. And that's something that I've even applied to organizational change management. Right. We change behaviors to change thoughts. So you can't you can't really just will yourself to be happy.

[00:31:13] And what we're talking about is training yourself to be happier. It's nuanced, but it's slightly different. And and help clarify the difference from your perspective in terms of when you're training yourself to be happy. I assume there's some kind of practice or discipline that you arrive at the exercise compared to sort of deciding to it, which would be way more convenient without having to do the exercise. But that's not how the world tends to work. So what is some of that exercise or discipline?

[00:31:42] Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head is like the number one go to is usually journaling. If you journal it, what are things that I'm grateful for today that were different from yesterday? Don't just journal the same thing every single day. I'm happy to be alive, happy for my family. Like, what are some actual things? And what's really interesting, too, with the way our brain works is when they take scans of our brain, when we're doing something like playing music or thinking about playing music,

[00:32:08] they can't actually tell a difference physiologically between the two scans of the brain. It's the same thing with happiness. We're thinking about a real memory of that day when we're happy. We get the same chemicals again. And so what you're doing is we haven't really touched on it yet, but behavioral design is where you take advantage of dopamine to introduce new habits. And so when you're doing this journaling, you're introducing the dopamine again,

[00:32:37] and it's building on this habit. It's making it so that you want to do it more and more. But doing that consistently will train your brain to look for the things throughout your day that you're going to journal about. What are these grateful things that I have in my life? Another thing you can do is just talk to someone. You know, if you have a loved one or a friend or a dog, just someone that you can retell the story. It has all the same effects in your brain.

[00:33:05] What is one thing in detail that you're grateful for that day? There's a lot of little things too with it, like meditation. And so meditation has been shown to actually reduce the part of your brain that holds on the stress, the amygdala, and allows you to process stress more. And meditation helps you with the parts of your brains that regulate emotions, which makes it easier for you to feel gratitude and see the things you're grateful for.

[00:33:37] Another recommendation is to send a note to someone. Like every day, just take two minutes and send a note to someone saying that you're grateful that they're in your life or you're thinking of them and thank them. And this is a double whammy as well, or has twice the impact because you're building your network too. You're making someone else feel better. So you're spreading happiness, which is awesome. But you're also building your network.

[00:34:03] And one of the key indicators of happiness as well as longevity is your social network. It doesn't have to be a huge social network, but you need to have one that's unique to you to consistently interact with other people. And it's going to help you in your career. If you know people, they like you, like it, it just really compounds. So those are the main things that I would recommend when it comes to how do you have more gratitude in your life? Another thing that has helped me out a lot is exercise.

[00:34:34] I kind of grew up playing sports and got by with, I think, a fair amount of maybe talent or luck without necessarily a ton of discipline compared to some of my teammates. And it wasn't until like my late thirties that I developed more of a discipline. And I took a very simple approach of just a notes app checklist. And I put in every single day of the year and I would write down what my workout was.

[00:35:03] And if I missed a workout, that was fine. There'd be other days that I made up with it by doing multiple workouts. And there was a very specific need. I signed up for a race and my teammate and I were underprepared when I had only 30 days left. And sort of talking like you did, I realized that it wasn't within my control to go back in time and have more room to train for this race. The only thing within my control that felt reasonable was like, well, hey, you have 30 days in September.

[00:35:32] What if we did a workout and trained once a day? And that's all we can do. And it feels reasonable. And if we do it, what ended up happening was not only was it quite achievable, the makeup days I found in my case one way better than streaks. Because it had some level of grace inbuilt. And I was able to maintain that for over two and a half years of just a workout a day.

[00:35:59] And my brain over time, like you talked about, kind of ended up forming a habit where if there was a day that I it wasn't obvious when I would be working out during the day, maybe had a full work day leading into a work dinner. There would be a sense of sort of caution or maybe even pseudo anxiety that presented that forced me to move something around. Maybe it was go to bed early the night before, because, hey, the only time you can work out is by waking up at 5 a.m.

[00:36:29] So you're going to have to get a good night's sleep and work out. And it ended up sort of perpetuating itself really well. And I don't necessarily know what it did in my brain, but I was a way more approachable, tolerable person to work with as well. And a lot of my ideas and discipline at work tend to be a lot better when I had more discipline at the gym.

[00:36:56] And I know that's something that it's easy for us to forget to do. And even a 20 minute walk would would tend to do the trick a lot of the time without a very intense workout. And I'm curious if you know how that kind of plays back into the chemicals that you mentioned and how it perpetuates good work. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That is the second biggest thing that I tend to talk about is mobility. As you touched on, we're very stationary.

[00:37:25] A sedentary lifestyle is, I think, increases all rate mortality by like 30 percent. It's really bad for us. And moving releases these chemicals as well. The endorphins, the oxytocins, even serotonin, dopamine. And so it's really important that we get up and we move throughout the day. The key is consistency, which is what you found as well.

[00:37:51] And I also think about this research that Microsoft did during the pandemic where they put people in meetings all day long and they put this really cool looking cap with a bunch of wires coming off of it on them. And they scanned their brains and they saw that stress compounds over the day. But when they introduced just 10 minute breaks every 60 to 90 minutes throughout the day, the stress levels were baseline. And so they stayed the same throughout the day.

[00:38:18] So taking a break, regardless of what you're doing, is so crucial. But it's a really great time to just go for a quick walk. When I'm feeling drained, when I'm feeling like that brain fuzz in the middle of the day, I go outside and I go for a walk. Nature is another thing that affects our brains in a positive way. Sunlight. You need sunlight to produce serotonin. So, you know, you want to get out ideally midday at some point to get as much sun as you can for a short period of time.

[00:38:48] And so there's so many things there that can help you. But research is showing more and more and I'm drawing a blank on her last name. I believe her first name is Susan is a doctor that has a whole book and stuff out there that talks about how exercise is the most important thing for a healthy brain.

[00:39:11] A note for the audience that Brad was kind enough to send a follow up to us and a correction here that the doctor he's referring to is Dr. Wendy Suzuki. And we've got a link in the show notes to her TED talk about the brain changing benefits of exercise. Back to the show. You hear ping pong tables being sort of almost like a butt of jokes. And I think it's more in the context of culture.

[00:39:39] And there are folks who are kind of that we could take this on a tangent and maybe we don't have to about adding a ping pong table and expecting the culture to improve. That's not what we're talking about here. I think my qualm is that that takes away from the benefits of what something like a ping pong table does for an agile team or a product team or folks who tend to be sitting and working a lot is amongst the thing you said. It's it's a it's a communal thing, so I can't play by myself.

[00:40:07] There's someone else and I'm connecting with it's forcing me to take a break like what comes from the IBM study. And then and then it's also a form of movement, which is different from the desks that I'm sitting at. And so there's a little bit more validation here of like it's not going to fix your culture, but having access to it does provide a lot of benefits to the folks who who take advantage of it.

[00:40:34] Right. Definitely. Yeah. In some of my first talks about culture, I used to make the joke about how you become agile just by adding foosball tables and buying Nerf guns. And it really was a poke at that because I do feel like some people think that's enough. Mm hmm. But to your point, it's a really great point. I even think about when I joined Insight, which was Cardinal at the time, I was brand new there. I didn't really know anybody and I had a client my first day and then I was on the bench.

[00:41:05] And so I spent all day like studying and learning and trying to improve myself while I waited for my next engagement to start. And I would see the engineers there come out and play ping pong every once in a while or play the switch. They did a couch with a switch. They would play that. And one of the times when the guys even invited me over. And so I took a break from my studies and I came and I played with them and I'm absolutely awful at Smash Bros.

[00:41:31] They completely dunked on me. But at that after that, I always remembered that I always remember those two guys that came and grabbed me and we're friends to this day. And so it had a huge impact on me as an individual and in the community of that company. But also to your point, it shows that they took a break. And anyone that I've seen that do these things at work, they don't abuse it.

[00:41:57] Like, I think that's the fear is like, oh, they're going to be playing video games all day or they're going to be playing ping pong all day and not working. And almost inevitably, it always only happens for a few minutes and people go back. And a lot of times it's because the chemicals are going again in their brain and the solution suddenly is gnawing at them like, oh, yeah, that's where I left off. I got to go do this thing.

[00:42:20] And they get pulled back in because they now have the chemicals they were missing to activate their memory and their learning and all those parts of the brain. I love it. So we've got journaling and gratitude. Meditation is part of the gratitude exercise, sending a note to someone that you're thankful for.

[00:42:45] Actually, it reminds me as a side tangent, someone who's way deeper in their religious and spiritual practice told me that when someone pops into your head, there is some deeper reason for it. And just use that as the reminder, maybe to send folks a text or an email saying, hey, checking on how you're doing. Wanted to thank you for ABC and establishing the next point, which is having a sense of community. And this isn't a solo sport.

[00:43:14] We also talked about the importance of breaks and how we can have give ourselves really good alleviance to our stress. And instead of having a compound maintain at a base level by taking breaks, it can feel really counterintuitive when you're really stressed trying to meet a deadline or something. But it actually helps. Anything else that you wanted to talk about in terms of how we manage ourselves before we transition into how we lead teams?

[00:43:45] Well, I'd say the other thing that we touched on was exercise. Of course. Yes. Movement and exercise. Yeah. It's really important of movement for health. Right. Like if you're not feeling well because you're out of shape or your body's not designed to be a statue, that's going to be distracting on top of these chemicals that help you be successful as well.

[00:44:06] And now if we switch hats from managing ourselves to we are anywhere from on the C-suite of a technology or product company over to I'm recently a tech lead and I have a little bit more accountability over the long term sustained productivity of my team.

[00:44:31] Depending on the type of leader you are, you might care a little bit more on the productivity team and the wellness of your team. And maintaining the sustainably is hard compared to having really spiky sort of super stressful sprints before the launch. And then everyone's just sort of in recovery mode, not necessarily in structured wellness mode.

[00:44:57] So for leaders out there, how can we take advantage of what is now way more prominent science to help create culture habits behaviors on our teams? Yeah, definitely.

[00:45:14] I, I want to point out what we touched on earlier is that even if you are someone that doesn't care about your team and I hope you are, but even if you're someone that only cares about performance, the way people are successful and have the best performance is when you care about them. So you're kind of like forced if you want to be successful to consider these things and do these things. If you don't want to be successful, then keep cracking the whip. You know, that's on you. But to me, it's, it's a win-win.

[00:45:44] It's like I get to help people and I get to be successful. Like that is awesome. Uh, and so when we're thinking about that topic before, you know, you bring this up, right? And I think on, on various topics there, like diversity is another one that sometimes comes up, uh, team happiness.

[00:46:02] These are all sort of polarizing topics in terms of, uh, leadership principles or things that, um, we as leaders could be thinking about to not just foster better teams and long-term studies tend to show that they end up being higher performance teams. Mm-hmm . Mm-hmm . And I'm assuming there's some kind of, you know, J curve of investment that you got to traverse a valley of death and come up on the other side with some level of conviction to it.

[00:46:32] Um, that is the reason that not more folks are adopting something that also seems to be commonly known. So I'm curious if you've gotten the observations. I know you've worked on small companies, big companies, and I'm sure you've seen some leaders tend to this stuff really quickly and others that tend to be a little bit more hesitant. And you've got any opinions on why that tends to be? Yeah.

[00:46:56] I think the thing to remember is from my experience, there are no like real villains in the world. There's no like super villains. There's no like the Joker. There's no, um, there's no Lex Luthor. If you're into comics, like people inherently think of themselves as good and that they don't see it from that way. And maybe that's an emotional maturity thing.

[00:47:22] Um, we can speculate, you know, later, but the, that's the thing to keep in mind with leaders is none of these people are just inherently being controlling because they want to be controlling. Really it's, you know, what's in it for them. Uh, if we're talking about organizational change management. And so a lot of times they either think they have to be this way because that's the evidence that they have in their life.

[00:47:52] I did this thing and I was successful, but I think even more it's that they're not taught these things and they don't think about them. And so they have their own priorities. Their leadership is doing this to them. You know, at the very top of the company, if you're a publicly traded company, and even if you're a smaller startup where you're trying to get investors, you're thinking about stocks. You're thinking about, you know, what are these levers that sell, um, sell my stocks, right?

[00:48:21] It's, it's stock marketing is what I call it. Like I'm marketing my stock to say like, why should you buy it? And so they tend to really be focused on the monetary thing. And when you're looking at money, it's really easy to view this sort of stuff as a cost. Mm-hmm . But with all business aspects of business, there's an investment piece to it. You have to invest in order to, to earn money. And the thing that is really great about this is I feel like the investment's rather minor.

[00:48:51] Maybe you have to invest in education, but you know, if you listen to this podcast, you have some tools that you can do yourself and some things that you can start integrating into your teams at very low cost. Things like gratitude, showing gratitude to your teammates, right? Like what is your recognition program at your work? It doesn't have to be some tool that you bought. In fact, sometimes those become cheesy and a whole nother thing to manage. You know, just how are you showing people when they're doing a good job?

[00:49:21] You're reinforcing the behavior by in the moment, say calling it out, and you're producing that dopamine. You know, we talk about diversity, right? What are we doing to help people feel like they belong there? And what are we doing to, for that connectedness, right? To, to help people have friends at work. People who have friends at work tend to be more engaged.

[00:49:46] Um, I forget the exact percentage is like 30% more engaged or something like that per the Gallup studies. And if they're more engaged, they're more successful. So what are you doing to allow people to connect? Right? Are you giving them time to go play at the ping pong table? Because that's their opportunity to connect. Um, are you giving them time to work on the things that they want to improve there?

[00:50:12] If you work with engineers, you know, there are things that bug them every single day that if they were given the opportunity, they would fix. And so one of the things that we did with one of our teams is we had a Trello board where we just, everything that was like, what is something that annoys me? Every time I go into the code base and we would document it. And then as a team, we would vote on them. And then we would try to pull one of those in to each sprint. We're working in sprints. Um, but I've seen other teams.

[00:50:41] Say like every Friday afternoon, you can work on whatever you want as long as it's benefiting the company. So like those are little things that you can do that promote the autonomous part of it that don't cost you a lot. And I would argue after you do it, you will actually make, it'll be more profitable for you than costly. Yeah.

[00:51:05] I think one of the pieces that maybe ties into a lot of this is long-term thinking and it, and it comes in a few ways. One of them you already mentioned, right? There's an investment involved and with your core business, maybe you already have a business model in terms of how the investment turns into return. And this kind of falls onto the experimentation side of the house where you don't know exactly what the business model is or the machine looks like in terms of how does this return come back.

[00:51:34] And there's needs to be some level of long-term thinking in order to not cut the initiative short too soon before you see the long-term thinking. I mean, I know that if I didn't have to going back to the gym example, I was forced to go for 30 days because of that commitment I made as a result of the, the, the race that I signed up for. And that was beyond the window of which I needed to get feedback that this was useful. Right.

[00:52:03] And otherwise I might kind of do it for two weeks and I needed to do it for two weeks and one day and I'd quit before. Um, and I think the second piece around long-term thinking that I'd love to hear your opinion around reminds me of the control and the connectedness piece is that as leaders, once we have. In future vision of where we want to take this business, if you're a chief technology officer, chief product officer and where you want to take the product, where you want to take this team.

[00:52:32] Um, it's really important to document that in some kind of artifact that is changeable where you're not etching it in stone, but at the same time is, is permanent enough that people take it seriously. And, uh, I spoke to one of my ex colleagues today who was comparing another workplace.

[00:52:56] And he mentioned that he could, he even like the aspirational things that we talked about at integral that we were transparent about, Hey, we're not there yet, but this is where we want to get to. Cause they could start to see their growth inside the company's growth. And it was really vulnerable to share that we're, especially for a company called integral that we weren't whole ourselves that. And, um, that was this interesting anecdote that came back.

[00:53:24] And I think it comes back to, um, how far in the future you're thinking as leaders. And there's, once you kind of form that opinion, once you get that, you know, call it a vision, whether you arrive at it through strategy, smaller companies and founders, maybe rely on a little bit more, more instinct than having access to data. The more you share that in terms of where we're headed, who we're serving, what problem we're solving.

[00:53:50] I think there's a lot more connectedness, not just to your team, but also to the work that, uh, that teammates tend to have. And then maybe also some sense of control where you, you see a bigger picture in terms of what the toil is for that arrives at a bigger picture.

[00:54:10] And, um, these are sort of despair thoughts and I have a hunch that you might have thought about this or read about this before in terms of how it plays back into what we've been talking about. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, you hit on a lot of good things there. I think of Simon Sinek's book, The Infinite Game, and where he talks about how business isn't your typical game. It's not like chess or checkers or soccer or football, right?

[00:54:36] In those sorts of games, as he calls finite games, there's rules to the game and there's ways to win. And you get a goal or you take all the pieces and there's usually a time limit. Mm-hmm. When we look at the business world, we, we don't have, like, you can't win business. You can be up, you can be down, but you can't win all of business. Just like you can't win all of life. It's, it's what we would call an infinite game.

[00:55:05] And so, you know, to speak a little bit generically here, because I'm sure that there's people out there that their whole goal is just to sell their company. And I just need to grow X amount, get the right buyer in, and maybe they're thinking more finite. But I would like to believe a lot of companies aren't in that situation or the enterprises I'm working for. And so it's looking out and saying, where do I want this company to be in a year from now, in two years now, from five, in five years from now?

[00:55:34] Um, and what are those steps that I need to take to get there? Because a lot of times the short term steps are actually hindering our long-term achievements. You know, you talked about going for a run. After you completed that, you were probably really happy and really glad you did and you felt better and all of those things. Well, the short term win probably would have been to not go running and to just eat a bunch of Oreos.

[00:56:02] And you felt great in the moment, but that's only hurting you in the long run. And I really think about this over the last few years where we're seeing more and more of these quarterly layoffs. It's a very, uh, Welchian approach to business to look at the short term gains. I'm not hitting my quarterly goals. So I'm going to lay off a bunch of people and then it looks like I hit my goals and my stock market doesn't take a hit.

[00:56:30] Well, research and like SHRM have shown that layoffs hurt you more in the long term. It hurts your culture or its vulnerability. Uh, but also your top performers then leave. Because they're the ones that are able to leave the easiest. Now, like, well, I don't want to be here if they're doing this. And so now you've lost your maybe worst performers if that's how you did your cut and your top performers and you're left with kind of that middle layer.

[00:56:57] Uh, and so, yeah, thinking about what is my long term goal. Understanding that sometimes I'll take a hit. Sometimes I'll be up top. But overall research has shown with companies like Unilever that the companies that focus on these long term goals and focus on their people and their customers first tend to have more stable stock prices over time. Even when there's ups and downs in the market.

[00:57:26] I love that. Any other thoughts that come to mind in terms of things that leaders can do to take a little bit more of a neuroscience informed approach to building more engaged teams? And my hunch is if you, if you build more engaged teams and give them clarity and vision, they will go out and ship more delightful products. And so focusing on the route tends to be more long term and sustainable. Anything else that comes to mind?

[00:57:56] Yeah, I think there's you touched on it like product thinking. Why are we here? Why are we doing this? Um, Peter Senge talks about a learning organization and all the elements of those. We won't go into those cause I can soapbox all day. Uh, but you, the things that we need to be thinking about are those, those three factors, you know, is Dan Pink. If that's what I think most people are familiar with in the business world, autonomy, mastery, purpose. How am I building those into my organization? We talk a lot about purpose mastery.

[00:58:26] I feel like is maybe one that we haven't touched on a lot. And so it's sending people to get certifications or sending people to conferences or letting them take lead on a project or asking them, you know, where is it that they want to work? Moving people around your company, not just keeping people in one place because they know that and they're the rock star in that location. Um, which more than just mastery, right? Like we talk about redundancy and technology all the time. You want redundancy in your system.

[00:58:55] You want redundancy in your people as well, cross functional teams and all that. There's many other benefits to it. But, you know, if we're looking just from a neuroscience standpoint, that mastery is absolutely crucial. So we've already done disclaimers at the start of the episode that neither of us are doctors and definitely read the books, consult your own doctors.

[00:59:17] Um, that being said, I've, it's rare that I've met someone who is as studied as you are on the psychology and neuroscience side of things, as well as familiar with a lot of the practices on the product side that tend to be really useful. And so how do you feel about doing a rapid fire round?

[00:59:38] And I'm going to yell things at you that we try to do at work and you try to tell me whatever comes to mind in terms of why it's useful. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Let's start with an easy one pair programming, pair program and oldie, but goldie, you're going to help with mastery, especially if you're doing it well, because you're learning from each other and you're growing together. It's also going to help you with that community piece of it and connectedness because you're actually working together.

[01:00:08] And we've shown research has shown that it actually makes people more productive. They tend to get more work done and the quality tends to be higher. Thin slicing, uh, thin slicing. Yeah. Yeah. So that helps with kind of load. So it helps with the stress, uh, to reduce cortisol and it gives you the dopamine hit because every time you say the word done, you're going to be done. You get a hit of dopamine. And you see that in many steps along the way, I think, right?

[01:00:38] Like when you check in your code, that's a, maybe a mini dopamine hit when your tests pass, when, uh, the CI passes. And then overall, like when you ship a thin slice to the customer and you get to hear what the customer thinks, those are all probably little dopamines that come your way. Right. Definitely. Yeah. Yep. And that's the advice for habits is that you're the things you're trying to change. Cool. Um, feedback loops, feedback loops.

[01:01:07] If you're thinking from a technical standpoint, I check in my code and then I get feedback right away. That's going to help with your mastery because you're getting feedback instantly on, did I do this right or not? The same thing with, uh, if you do peer reviews, uh, if you're pair programming, maybe you don't, uh, or you're getting feedback from your customers. You're immediately learning. Is this the right direction or not?

[01:01:32] I'm going to break the rules and combine the last two. I think, um, thinking about it from a mastery lens, thin slicing combined with feedback loops. Uh, I heard someone say recently that the 10,000 hours is probably better stated as a 10,000 iterations. And I, I think there's now merit to that. And I think we arrived at that together. Uh, let's see, uh, sustainable velocity.

[01:02:00] Sustainable velocity. Uh, velocity is a little bit of a dirty word for me because I feel like it gets abused a lot. Um, it's something that we focus on productivity wise over outcomes. What is the purpose of this that we're working on? So if we go back to connectedness and like, it's not going to help you with that, but the sustainable part is really important. As we talked about the stress, your stress builds up over time. And so if you don't have a sustainable pace, you're going to be more stressed. You're gonna be less productive.

[01:02:32] Retrospectives. We're doing evidence based delivery. We want to be inspecting and adapting what we're doing, but it also builds a sense of culture and community because people are able to be vulnerable. People are able to discuss the things that they need to improve. It releases the oxytocin. You're getting the people interactions. Um, and so I think they're really crucial, whether it's retro or Kaizen or whatever you call it.

[01:02:58] Sure. And I think, uh, some leaders tend to focus only on the sad faces and what can be improved. And I think like, this is great evidence that, Hey, all the happy faces are going to give your team dopamine, probably in this case, making sure we're stopping celebrating wins. Um, the confused face ones in the, in the retro are going to force clarity in making sure that the team feels maybe a higher sense of connectedness of the work or control from feeling less confused.

[01:03:26] Um, and then of course, um, you know, the point that you mentioned there, definitely, um, collective ownership of the code. We're hitting on autonomy here. Um, where you want, if it's something that you can decentralize, you want to people closest to the code understand how it should and shouldn't be the best ideally.

[01:03:50] Um, but it also gives people a little bit of that connectedness as well. If they're communicating with each other and they're working through it together. And the last one, taking breaks. Taking breaks. If, if you don't remember anything from this, that is like the one thing I really want to drive home is taking breaks is so crucial for a baseline, whether it's a break throughout the day or your break at the end of the day.

[01:04:19] Stop working until midnight. I know that's a common thing that us developers tend to do myself included. Breaks are productive. Like if I could just like wave a wand and everyone would believe something different, I would want you to believe breaks are productive because they're helping our brains to recover so that we can be more productive in the moment. Awesome. Thank you so much for humoring the rapid fire around there. That's the first time we've done that here.

[01:04:45] Um, as we close out a couple of things that I like to know from all of my guests. The first one is what is a favorite or inspiring team that comes to mind for you? This can be a team that was real or fictional, a team that you were part of or one that you've known of or heard of. Yeah. Um, I had the benefit of being on a team that I felt like got a lot, right.

[01:05:12] The very first time I was in software development and this was a small little grocer called Meyer. And I was in their loyalty department. Uh, if anyone is outside the Midwest region, they're a fortune 500 company that is located in West Michigan where I'm from. And they're not a company that you would typically think of as being leading edge, but they really were. They were doing DevOps things before I knew the word DevOps. Uh, that's where I learned agile.

[01:05:40] And so I just had this really high functioning team that add all of these things that we talked about today, the autonomy, the mastery, the purpose. And I really set up my career without even realizing it. I didn't realize everything that I had like learned while I was there until it wasn't there. And so I think it's really important for people to seek out those sorts of positions, regardless of the industry. How can I learn from people actually doing the work? Uh, and it's lasted with me until now.

[01:06:08] It's usually the company I still go back to often for examples. I love that. And there's nothing like getting to live it in real life. And I've experienced this myself, whereas you learn more, there's nothing like going back and trying to reverse engineer what these new learnings are to a team where you just knew it worked and you're trying to sort of rationalize it or use it as a base case. Right.

[01:06:30] And then, uh, the other thing that we like to know is what is a product or service that you got to unbox or experience recently that just completely delighted you blew your socks off? You're like, you know what? The team who built this, they were probably having real fun time doing this. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question as well. I think, um, so this last year I built, uh, an Unraid server and stood up a Plex server. I've had a Plex server.

[01:07:00] I moved my Plex server to Unraid and I bought an Nvidia shield as my device to stream it. Mm-hmm . And I'm an Nvidia house. I build gaming PCs. We have way too many. Um, but I, I've used Roku for years and years and years. Um, but I, I've used Roku for years and years and years, and I generally considered them to be kind of the king of the streaming. But once you use a shield, it's like, you didn't realize how much.

[01:07:25] Like inefficiencies and latency and stuff were in all of these other devices. And so it really just feels like, um, feels like what the device should have been to begin with that I was using. And it's years old now, and it's still just a really great, uh, device, both software and hardware wise. And what is the best way for folks to get ahold of you and to listen to the podcast that you co-host?

[01:07:52] Uh, so I am a co-owner and co-host of the agile for agile list podcast. We are at the typical.com www.agileforagilist.com. We are also on Spotify. We're on Apple around just about every streaming service that we could find at the moment. And, uh, it's pushed to all of those. LinkedIn is generally the easiest place to get ahold of me. Um, linkedin.com slash in slash.

[01:08:23] Bradgell. So it's a pun. B R A D G I L E. I love it. Um, feel free to reach out for me on there. There's tons of Brad Nelson's. Um, but if you, if you follow that URL, you'll find me. Awesome. Brad, thanks so much for sharing all of the wealth of knowledge that you've accumulated over the years. And also humoring me in terms of layering this over building really great product teams. I had a lot of fun. I learned a lot.

[01:08:50] And, um, for the listeners on the show, we will be back next Tuesday with an other episode about building great teams who build delightful products. Thanks a lot for listening. Thanks for having me. I hope you all enjoyed that talk with Brad Nelson.

[01:09:12] I found it super insightful to get to talk to someone who's so well read and so well researched, let alone the fact that he's put a lot of this research into play and experimentation to give us insights in the combination of a lot of the neuroscience research combined with how we can apply it to software teams.

[01:09:31] Something that this reminds me of that I'd love to share as advice through personal experience is that this journey started with me sort of by luck, where thanks to some close friends and partners who had had a lot of benefit from therapy. I tried it out. I went on psychology today.com found a therapist.

[01:09:51] Um, I took the advice and actually scheduled three different appointments with three different therapists knowing that, um, the adage went similar to dating where you have to go on a few dates with a few different people before you find someone that you can relate to and find it easier to trust. I was lucky that the first therapist that I met out of the three was someone that I related with tremendously. And I still continue to see them four or five years later.

[01:10:14] And the journey for me about learning about myself a lot more was accelerated through the practice of therapy in my case, cognitive behavioral therapy. So I highly recommend that you try it out yourself as well. And integral we gave everyone a stipend, um, beyond what's available through their healthcare just to try it out.

[01:10:34] So go on psychology today.com or check out some of the other more modern options available, like better help that can provide you with an opportunity to try therapy out. And don't forget that you may need to try a few different therapists, just like you would try a few different coaches before you find someone that you can really trust and relate to and get the benefit out of something that's helping tons of people every day.

[01:10:59] The other thing that I want to mention in my journey of self-awareness and getting to understand the various elements within myself that tend to impact how I show up, whether it's showing up really well and really motivated and really engaged and doing my best work or showing up really anxious and frustrated or maybe even depressed and not getting to have the most fulfilling days is something that I got to do with a company called Mindbloom.

[01:11:26] Mindbloom that provides psychedelic assisted therapy. And, um, I let you go to mindbloom.com and check it out for themselves, um, or other psychedelic or ketamine based therapies that, um, you can consult your doctor with and see if you qualify and you can get prescribed for.

[01:11:44] It's something that helped really illuminate a lot about what's going on in my own subconscious and helped me bring those learnings to applying in daily life where I want to motivate myself or help overcome things. So we'll have links in the show notes to those as well. Thank you so much for listening. We might do a deeper dive about these things, um, as the more, okay, I'm just going to rerecord the end. Thank you so much for listening to this episode with Brad and myself.

[01:12:13] We will certainly have more experts on neuroscience, especially when it comes to having a more enjoying, having a more enjoyable, more fulfilling workplace and how learning more about how our brains work can give us insights that we can put into practice and create behaviors and actions that lead to building more engaged teams that build more delightful products and make the world a better place. Until then, we will see you next week on another episode of convergence.

[01:12:42] Thank you for joining me on the convergence podcast today. Subscribe to the convergence podcast on Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your content. If you're listening and found this helpful, please give us a five-star review. And if you're watching on YouTube, hit that like button and tell me what you think about what you heard today.