Hello, I’m Jean-Philippe Courtois. Welcome
to another edition of Positive Leadership, the podcast that helps you grow as an individual,
as a leader, and ultimately as a global citizen. While data driven analysis and logical reasoning
are important for business decision making, intuition also plays a vital role, from enabling
leaders to open up and explore new and exciting avenues to challenging conventional wisdom
and generating fresh ideas, that can drive business growth. My next guest, through
scientific analysis, explores the importance and efficacy of trusting your gut instinct and
using your intuition in harmony with rational thinking. With a background in psychiatry, she’s
convinced of our ability to alter how our brains work and transform our lives by thinking in a more
integrated way. Dr. Tara Swart has many strings to her bow. She’s a neuroscientist, medical doctor,
executive coach, author, and I believe many other things that she will share with us. In her
influential book, The Source, she explores ways in which we can take control of our greatest assets,
our brain, and harness its incredible power to live a healthy, happy, and fulfilling life.
With tips and strategies to not only cope but thrive in our ever increasingly fast-paced life,
it’s an essential toolkit backed up by scientific analysis and research. Tara, it’s a huge pleasure
to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. And that was a
wonderful summary, Jean-Philippe. So, Tara, I’d love to start at the very beginning,
if I may. You know, you grew up with a real clash of cultures, I think, it looks like, at least,
from remote. Your home life centered on practices that your parents brought over to the UK from
India, such as yoga, mindfulness, and a belief in reincarnation as well. How did your values and
beliefs shape who you’ve become, and later on, how much of a conflict, if any,
did you have to resolve between your scientific studies and Indian
tradition, beliefs, and rituals? Great question. So I would say
that their values and practices shaped me in both a push and a pull way,
so, for example, things like the fact that I became a medical doctor and did my PhD. They
were things that my parents very much wanted, and which set me up with a great foundation,
obviously. But also led to the fact that in my mid-30s, I woke up one day and thought I didn’t
really choose those things, and, if I could do whatever I want to do, and, you know, a lot of the
reason I did medicine and did the PhD was because people said you’re smart, you could do this.
So I thought, okay, if I’m really that smart, what could I do that I actually want to do? So it
sort of set me up really well, but then also made me question things. And then certainly as a child
and again up until my mid-30s, so, in my mid-30s, I changed career and I got divorced from mu
first marriage And so that’s when, in fact, all the kind of practices I tried to keep really
separate, because I just wanted to be a normal kid growing up in London, you know, and all my friends
were British, and that’s when I thought, okay, I need to do something different, I need to work out
how to come out of this better and stronger, and what really appealed to me then was both Jungian
psychology, but also a lot of Buddhist practices and beliefs, so things started to come together
for the first time then, I would say, and also by then yoga had become quite mainstream, so I’d gone
from sort of feeling really embarrassed if I came home from school and my mother was in a headstand
to thinking yoga was really cool. So it started there and obviously it culminated in me writing
my book, which I know we’re going to come to. Yes, super. So it looks like, I mean, along
the years of your different steps in your life, you’ve been reconciling yourself with some of
your Indian traditions and rituals and roots while you decide as well on the path that you
wanted to take yourself. So it’s interesting to see this nuanced approach of taking aboard when
needed, the traditions from your roots and take your own path as well I believe you felt either an
implied or very real sense of pressure to pursue a course in medicine. This is what you said, I think
you implied in your—I was also interested to read that at school at one point you were told certain
things that really defined how you identify yourself. One of your teachers I think told you
that you are not very creative, which I’m sure has been like a huge shock for you. At a young age,
like all the statements that we get from teachers, sometimes parents or so-called good friends in
early age, which can be devastating. I think most of us can relate to feeling that the character
abilities and weaknesses were not only assessed but quite often declared as facts. And at such a
tender age by very influential people, and I think it’s not easy, but it’s actually vital, just to
not accept to be defined, but what others have to say about you, about ourselves, so that again is
the reason why you moved into psychiatry and then describe actually feeling worn down at the time
and questioning of the job and the role that you played with your patients’ overall wellbeing. So
my question is really about the journey you went on questioning your life and career choices, Tara.
It must have been, you know, daunting, living on one end a very comfortable and well defined
career path, the psychiatrist, to get onto a very unknown road and path for the future, right?
Tell us more about that reinvention of yourself. Wow, so I mean there’s so much there, because
I—yes, I had an enormous amount of pressure to become a medical doctor. It was almost predestined
for me, since before I was even really conscious. But, when I look back, I think, you know, I was
good at languages, I loved history and geography, but I was told that those things wouldn’t give
me a secure career, so I wasn’t to pursue those things. And also the creativity comment came from
the fact that I wasn’t good at drawing in art, and so the specific point was you’re not good at
art, that means you’re not creative. And I think I was about 15 at the time, so I believed
that to be true. So I made my decisions on the basis that you can’t get a proper job if you
study languages or humanities. I’m not creative, and I was good at science and math,
so I thought I’d better do that. And then, interestingly, it was quite
disappointing for my parents, I chose to become a psychiatrist and not a neurologist or a surgeon,
because it wasn’t seen as like proper medicine. But it did give me a massive insight into the way
that people think or the way that your brain can change what you believe, your mood, how you
perceive things. And ultimately where I was working in the government hospitals, it was
the lowest socioeconomic classes of people, and there was nothing proactive, there was nothing
to do with wellbeing. It was just about fixing really big problems. And that’s probably
what became demotivating for me in the end. Because did you feel unequipped actually in terms
of what you bring to these people, given, again, the depths of the issues, where it came from? What
was the challenge for you at the time, actually? No, no, I mean, it was I felt very equipped to
diagnose mental illnesses and prescribe the right medication. But I felt like my impact ended with
that person. Often they’ve been like abandoned by their families, they don’t have a job, and I
just started to think, well, basically, if I could work with someone like you, then I know you have a
family, you have a big team, you’re part of a huge business that has corporate social responsibility.
I felt like my impact could be much bigger if I was working—and also working with healthy
brains that could be even better and have this big influence on the world and not just constantly
trying to solve problems that were just recurring. I mean, I love my job, and I was good at it, but
I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new, and it was just a very negative view of the world, and
I didn’t really even understand then as much as I do now that what you feed your brain every day
through the news, through social media, through the people that you interact with, that has a
really big impact on your brain and your life. So but medicine is a vocational degree, so I didn’t
really know what else I could do, if anything. And then a friend of mine who had also done a
PhD in neuroscience but had gone to work for one of the big consulting firms, she said to me you
know there’s an overlap between what you do and what I do, and it’s called executive coaching.
So I started looking into that, and it really seemed to fit the sort of, you know, I was very
driven and goal-orientated but also quite Zen, and it had lots of psychological skills in it, so
that became really interesting. And she and I were going to sort of set something up together, but
then her circumstances changed, and she couldn’t. But, by that point, I’d got to the place in my
brain where I thought I’m going to do this anyway, and that was quite crazy for me at the time,
because, like you said, I’d only ever had a stable job. I’d become quite senior in my job, and
I literally had to start again from the bottom. I did a coaching course. I started working as an
office manager, and, you know, the skills that I had, they weren’t very transferrable for being
an office manager. So it was a hard six months, but I had that mixture of
being nervous and excited, which I’ve learned now is a really good
sign that you’re on the right path. It’s a good formula, yeah. I think we’ll come
back later on in our dialogue. I’d like to come back later on the impact and the way you define
impact in your life, because I think it’s a very important question that we ask ourselves in
this podcast pretty often, if people change career paths or missions in their lives, because
that—also want to come back to this moment where, on the one hand, professionally, you decide
to take a very different path, as you just described, but, at the same time I think you
also—it was a time where you had a breakdown, of course, a very important relationship
that you alluded to as well. Then it took obviously some great courage, wisdom, and
also a lot of positivity in your brain, I think, for sure at the time, to make
that bold move. So can you tell us about taking the drastic step, both personally
and professionally at the same time. It looks like wow, you know, very few of us
would take both challenges at the same time, and how did you weather the storm? What did you
do on your brain and yourself, yoga, meditation, or something else, to give you the confidence
that you could actually tackle both challenges? So obviously I didn’t choose for both of those
things to happen at the same time, but they did. And I’m sure there was some interrelation between
the decision to change career and how that changed my relationship. And some of my friends said like
how many things do you want to change at once? Because I also moved countries. I was living and
working in Bermuda, but, as a result of the two other things changing, I decided to return home
to London, which helped. So being back in my territory with my friends, my family, familiar,
you know, language and places and everything, that helped. And, like I said, I did start reading
a lot about Buddhism and Jungian psychology, and then I discovered a book called, well, this
book had come into my life five years earlier when I was happily married and doing my career, so I’d
read it, but I hadn’t done any of the exercises. And it was a book from 1926 that originally came
out weekly in the newspaper, each chapter, and you had to do a certain exercise each week. And it was
kind of mind and body, but ultimately it was to be able to optimize your mind and have the largest
extent of control over it that anyone can have. So, eventually, I came around to thinking,
okay, I need to do this, and I did it, because it took me six months of solid, regular
practice, and it was really life-changing for me. And did you do it by yourself
or were you supported, mentored, coached by someone else to
help you on the practice? So I did that by myself, but, in the
meantime, I had had both therapy and coaching, so I believe in asking for help,
but I also really believe that, at some point, you’ve got to take
responsibility for your own—yeah. It’s pretty amazing to hear that actually
this content was published in 1926, you said, right? Like a century ago. I know. Yeah, it’s almost a century now. It’s really interesting, yeah, to think about what
is life today versus a century ago. Wow, that’s very interesting, I find. But actually, if you think about it, so,
for example, if you go back to my roots, to the Vedic texts, they were the first books
that, you know, a lot of other kind of spiritual beliefs had come from, but then, you know, if you
think of the Greek philosophers, the Bible, this kind of thing has been around for a really long
time, and I think either as an individual or as a community, we go through ups and downs where we
need to reach out for those sorts of things more, again. You know, I think COVID is an example
post which, you know, there’s a lot of mental suffering going on, and so I think the popularity
of those sorts of things is on the rise again. Absolutely, it’s very interesting to see, in a
way, the search for more spirituality, I think, for most people, and, hence, coming back to some
very old traditions actually from our ancestors. I’d like to come back and get a bit deeper, Tara,
basically on the way you’ve been working on your identity, and the chance to have I think a common
friend of both of us, Herminia Ibarra, that I hosted on my podcast. So people who have
not heard about Herminia Ibarra’s book, she wrote this book called Working Identity. In
this book, she explored the process of creating a more fulfilling future, reinventing oneself, and
finding the confidence to make characterizations. I had the pleasure to speak to her. In her
book, she talks about a few unconventional strategies for reinventing your career, such
as start changing what you do and don’t try to discover yourself by introspection, which sounds
like counterintuitive, or stop trying to find your true self, which is, well, something I heard
many of my guests talking about in my podcast, to be honest. And focus on your attention
on which of your many possible selves you want to test and learn more about. In other
words, it’s about practicing some different side of yourself by being an entrepreneur of
your life, my words, not Herminia’s words. So I’d love to hear about the way maybe or not
her book influenced yourself and the kind of change it helped you implement at the time
you made all those big changes in your life. Yeah, so I agree with you, it sounds
counterintuitive, but actually I agree that you can spend a lot of time, like I said, you know,
I’d read that book, but never done the exercises. And even when I speak about vision boards, I call
them action boards, because you can’t just sit at home and create a fantasy of the life that you
want and not do anything, so I get what she’s saying, which is go out there and do something
differently and see what works and what doesn’t work. I think we do need to do some introspection,
but you could introspect for the rest of your life and never change anything, so I agree with that.
For me, the impact that her book had was that it gave me examples of people that had made really
massive career changes, because I didn’t have any, I think, or certainly not many examples of
that in my own life, and especially not out of medicine. I know a lot more doctors now who’ve
changed career, but, at the time that I did, I didn’t know anyone, so just her case studies
that showed that people did it, but also the process that they went through, that just made
me believe that I could, and that’s actually really important in your brain, so the most
famous example of that is when Roger Bannister ran the four minute mile. Before that, we didn’t
think it was possible for a human to do it, but, as soon as he did sub four minutes, in the next
two or three months, seven or eight other people did it too, so knowing that it’s possible, that’s
what Herminia’s book gave for me personally. I love it, and just to keep building on that,
you know, I‘d love to talk about the way you move from introspection to action, and the way
you have to actually, in a way, starting to set your own goals, you know, big and small, and
your intentions. And I know that’s something very important for you as well, Tara, we discuss
about the tools and the ways you advise people to do that. You know, we all have learned at least
in business and in different business circles that you need to define your smart goals, right,
so specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bounded. I’ve learned that myself for
decades. I recently exchanged with a friend of mine who was on my podcast called Michael Bungay
Stanier about his latest book, How to Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters. That’s the
name of the book. And in his books, Michael provides practical tools to define your what he
calls your worthy goals, a goal that should be thrilling, important, and daunting. And he has
defined a three steps process. Number one, set your worthy goal. And of course there’s a lot of
meat around the bone on that. Number two, commit, and, number three, cross the threshold, so, Tara,
you’re obviously doing a lot of that differently, offering your own approach that you detail in
your best seller book, which is a wonderful book I would advise to all listeners, The Source, and
you say what is key to remember is that intention focus are at their strongest when our goals align
with our deepest life choices and values. This really resonated a lot with me, and your proposing
methodology, which is very visual, pictorial, and has different steps, so can you share with us the
next stepping stones, journaling, action boards, visualization, and unpack them a little to
make the process of making goals intentions a more actionable reality for us? And, if
I may add, I know it’s a long question, why don’t—because I heard you talking about that,
it was funny. Why don’t you start telling us what your first visualization board would
look like in your bathroom, I understand, so, if I was invited in your home, understand,
maybe asking where’s the bathroom, Tara, or I could have bumped into a very interesting
picture. Can you tell us about the picture, and then you can unpack me the
whole process, if you don’t mind? Yeah, well, Jean-Philippe, because it
was such an amazing but long question, I’ve actually got four points
that I don’t want to forget. Let’s go through them one by one. So the first one is it’s interesting what you
said about Michael’s three steps, because, when I changed career, because I also got divorced
at the same time, I was so poor at one point that I didn’t even know if I could pay my rent or my
bills, and people said to me, you could go and just do like one weekend as a doctor, and you
wouldn’t have to worry about money for the next few months, but, for me, I had to burn my bridges.
If I went backwards to being a doctor, I would feel like I had failed. I had to give myself that
no option but succeed. So that’s what happened, and now obviously I’m not in that position, but I
kind of recreate that for myself every so often. If things start to plateau, I’m like, okay, what
can I do that’s new and different? Because I can’t just keep doing the same thing, so I’ll actually
set myself almost like I have to do something different to survive, but now it’s, luckily, not
so much about survival. It’s more about thriving. You said 100% different. You didn’t make
any compromise, say I’m going to do some medical practice on one end
and do something else as well. No. To hedge my bets. Actually, you decided just to go all the way into
the unknown, which was very courageous. Yeah. And, you know, that’s not right for
everyone. I know people who’ve successfully kept a part time job, also starting up a
business, but that was instinctive to me, and now I’ve understood that, if I don’t keep
making myself do that, then I’m just going to sort of not start—basically stop growing. So,
oh yeah, and then I wanted to pick up on what you said about intention. So you used a really
nice quote, but I just want to add to that that, for reasons we don’t fully understand,
but have huge implications in business, your intention behind any action completely
changes the impact of that action on your brain and therefore in your life. So, for example, I
do time restricted eating, which means I don’t eat breakfast, I only eat between 12:00 noon and
8:00 PM. And that has a very positive effect not just on your physicality, but also on your mental
resilience. If let’s say you, just for example, you’re so busy that sometimes you just forget
to eat breakfast. So, you know, usually you do eat three meals a day, but sometimes you’re so
stressed, you’re traveling, you just skip a meal, that has completely the opposite effect on
your brain and your body. So it’s essentially the same action, which is I’m eating two meals
a day or I’m eating less than I used to eat, but the impact on your mental and physical power
is opposite. And it’s also the same with the difference between daydreaming, which is where
you sat at your desk and you’re supposed to be focusing on a task, but you find that for 15
minutes you’ve been thinking about something else. So that’s not good for your brain, but, if
you do intentional mind wandering, so if you say, okay, I’m going to put the laptop lid down,
and I’m going to give myself 20 minutes to just think, like maybe come up with some ideas, but
just let my mind wander, that’s really positive for the brain, so I think that’s a very actionable
point for your listeners, which is related to what I was actually saying in the quote was that your
head, your heart, and your guts, so your logic, your emotions, and your intuition have to be
aligned. If logic’s telling you to do something but in your gut it feels wrong, it’s not going
to work. Yeah. Okay, so onto vision boards. Onto the bathroom, yes. The bathroom. So that was the first year when I
had started up my executive coaching practice, and I was living alone for the first time, and
because it was a period of transition for me, I was probably more mindful than I would be now,
let’s say, of who I actually allowed into my home, so it was really only close, old friends. And
there was only one bathroom, so, if they needed to go to the bathroom, they would definitely see my
vision board. And I’m a strong believer in that, because, when people make these boards, they often
hide them away, because they don’t want anybody else to see them, but then, if I was coaching an
executive, I would say what is it about what’s on the board that you don’t want people to see
and what does that mean about your sense of worthiness and deserving of what’s on the board?
So on that board I actually had the specific sum of money that I wanted to earn in that next
year, and I don’t know what it’s like in France, but in Britain, we don’t really talk about
how much we earn, or how much we want to earn. Oh. Even worse in France, actually. Yeah. So, you know, it’s not something I would
go around telling people, but, like I said, I knew that if they went to the bathroom, they
would see that. It also had some elements of travel but related to business, because I
wanted to grow, not just work in England, and then because at the time I was renting,
I was actually still living in the apartment that I had lived with my first husband in,
it had some homes that I would want to buy, pictures of homes. So that was on the first—pretty
much that was quite simple, the first one. And, sorry, was there a special positioning
in the painting where the money’s somewhere on the painting versus where home
is, is there a technique for people? So it has to mean something to you. I tend to
group things together, so I would have the home things in one section and then business things
in a different section. And then I would decide if they might actually be touching or completely
separate. So, for example, now, the way that I work, I work for myself, I largely work for home.
Home and work would definitely be overlapping, but, at times, that wasn’t the case. Something
I’ve learned over time is to not completely fill the board, and leave space, because that’s
waiting for opportunities that you haven’t, you know, thought of yet, which I quite like.
And then later I would put certain things, so on the left hand side—so anything
at the top was probably top priority. Anything at the bottom was quite like
foundational to how I want my life to be. Anything on the left hand side would be
more to do with like love and family, but that’s just what I decided. It’s not the rules
for everyone. It’s just what’s right for you. It’s your choice, okay. Yeah, as long as you know what
it means and why it’s there. No, quite amazing. You made a couple of comments,
Tara, about the fact you kept some open spaces, right, so that you can update, in a way, your
vision, or are you repainting or redesigning the whole actually picture every year, every
couple of years? What is the practice for encouraging people to do? And I’d love you
to talk about the fact, the way you actually move from the picture, the painting,
to action. How do you do that? Yeah, great question. So I would advise people
to do a new one every year. I would say in the last 15 years there’s been one or two where
pretty much I’ve just wanted more of the same, so I’ve maybe kept it and just removed a
few things and stuck some new things on. But mostly I change it every year. As with
any kind of behavior change or goal setting, there are always some things that are quicker wins
and some things that take longer. And occasionally something would go from this year into next year,
because it wasn’t completed yet, and that’s okay. And then so the reason for doing the board and
having it somewhere visible is that you are continually priming your brain to remember
that these are the things that you want. Every day in the bathroom. Exactly. So, you know, at least twice a day, but
maybe more than that as well. So because we’re very busy. We have tasks that absolutely have to
be done in the real world, which mean that the places I’d love to travel to or the dream client
that I’d love to get in the next year might not be my top priority every single day, if I’m trying
to just get my life sort of under control. And so your brain naturally will filter out the things
that it doesn’t consider to be important, and it will direct your attention to the things that it
does consider crucial to your survival, and it will tag them in order of importance. Your brain
does that without you even realizing. All the time. I mean, so this is the reason that you’re
not feeling your clothes on your body all day, because you don’t need to. But actually something
is touching your skin, most of your skin, all day. We were talking about that book that was written
a century ago. Well, if you read one newspaper today, today’s newspaper, you would receive as
much information as somebody would in their entire life 100 years ago. And even then the brain was
naturally filtering and selecting and tagging. So by repeatedly putting this imagery in front
of your eyes, you’re changing the order of the tagging, so you’re bringing those things
to the top of the tagging, and that means that compared to me on a really busy day, where
I’m just running from meeting to meeting and I don’t really have time to notice things,
it might be that I pass you in the corridor, and actually I do have something to ask you, which
I’m going to ask you at the end of the podcast. And I would think why not just ask him, you
know, the worst thing he can do is say no. So if there’s something on my mind that I
would like to achieve and I see you and I think that you could help me with it, it
would make me much more likely to think, okay, this is a person that could
help me, let me ask him for help. Super. What’s really interesting in your approach,
Tara, is the way you said the visuals, right? Obviously influence your brains every
single day. To keep you prioritizing the key things that matter the most, short
term, midterm, and long term, as well, because you have different horizons on the
painting, things that absolutely matter, like every day of your life you got to do it.
Ideals are super critical for the future that you may have to plan for at one point in your
days, and the fact that you’re confronted with that every day is obviously a great way I guess
to shape your action board as well, which was the connection point between the visualization
board and the action board. So, in my podcast, Tara, I have the opportunity to learn a lot about
the power of positive psychology, and I know you know so much about it. Had wonderful guests like
Kim Cameron, Barbara Frederickson, Ilona Boniwell or Dr Guila Clara Kessous, and, you know, and
they shared, of course, not just their passion, their studies, but how they apply it to their
careers and what they do in their lives. So I’d like you now to get deeper into the neurosciences.
Because you obviously are a practitioner. I’d love to hear the scientific background behind the law
of attraction that you define in your book again, The Source. So can you walk us through the
principles of that law? How does it work? Okay, so the laws of attraction are very
longstanding, mostly seen as spiritual, even maybe a bit woo-woo, which kind of means
not really backed up by anything that people find very solid or they can understand,
or certainly not backed by empirical data. And which for a long time was
explained by quantum science. And often explained using quantum science
language by people that weren’t actually quantum scientists, and I think this led to
some misunderstandings, like, you know, let’s say an obvious possible explanation of the law of
attraction is that, if you think good thoughts, you attract good things into your life, but then
there was a huge backlash which was, well, if I get a disease or I lose a loved one or a war
happens in my country, does that mean it’s because I was thinking bad things, you know? And
we don’t want people to feel like that at all, because there’s no basis for that being
true. And so I just started to think that I liked some of these ideas that you
can attract good things into your life, but, as a cognitive scientist, I wanted to be able
to explain it with psychology and neuroscience, but I also wanted to feel like I had agency and
responsibility and it’s not just something in the universe that makes these things happen. Because
I felt like that was just much more empowering as well. So one summer in France actually I
just thought let me just, you know, just out of curiosity, see what these laws are and see if I
can align them to anything from cognitive science. And I was amazed that sort of 80, 90% of it was
just very obvious to me how that was explained by the power of your brain, and then there were
maybe, like I said, 10, 20% I couldn’t really fully explain, but I thought it’s definitely
not going to harm you. You know, in medicine, you go on this principle do no harm, so I sort
of thought, okay, I don’t feel like there’s a fact behind those things, but it’s not going to
harm me to include it, so people can include it or not include it. But, if I distilled it down to
the parts that were explained by science, then the first part was having an abundant mindset. So if
you go through life saying things like that never happen to me or that’s not going to work out to
me, then that’s probably going to become true. If you can regulate your emotions so that you’re
spending less time feeling fear or shame or anger and more time feeling joy and excitement and
trust, then you’re actually shifting the balance of hormones that are going around your brain and
your body. So you’re moving away from the stress hormone cortisol, and you’re moving more towards
the bonding hormone, oxytocin. When you have high levels of cortisol, which in the modern world it’s
just so easy for us to have like all the time, your brain will actually reroute the blood flow
around your brain and move it away from the higher functions like creativity and problem solving and
flexible thinking, because you don’t need those to survive. To survive, you’ve got to wake up in
the morning and come and sit at your desk and do a minimal amount on your job so you don’t get fired.
But so at the time that you need it the most, your blood flow can actually really go against
you and make it very hard to think outside of the box or solve a problem. If you’re at the
other end of the spectrum, you’ve got more of this trust and bonding hormone going around your
brain body system, then you’re more likely to take healthy risks. You’re more likely to lower
your guard. You’re more likely to collaborate and think creatively, so you can already see
how that’s going to lead to a better outcome. Secondly is what I call magnetic desire, and it
goes back to what we mentioned already, which is the alignment of your head, your heart, and your
gut, so the magnetic desire is an emotion that is so strong that even if it feels like things aren’t
working out, you maintain your motivation. So, you know, you can see the difference between people
that go through a struggle for something, and some people give up, and it was almost just around the
corner, and some people keep going, and then they become hugely successful, so that’s the second
part. The third part is manifestation, which sounds like a very woo-woo word, but it actually
basically is goal setting. It’s saying these are the things I want in my life, this is what I’m
going to do to bring those things into my life and actually going out there and doing them, and these
are things like asking for a pay rise, trying to get a promotion, trying to get more travel
opportunities, learning opportunities. If you just sit at your desk and you never ask, you’re
probably not going to get those things, but yeah. They never happen, for sure. Then it goes into a slightly different mode
for the last three, which next comes patience, and the reason I’ve included that is because
when you are making changes in your life, you’re physically creating new and different pathways or
overwriting existing pathways in your brain, and before we had brain scanning, we would just think
of that as psychological work and not understand that it’s actually physically laying down
pathways. It’s like building a brick wall. So what happens is there’s a tipping point, where you’re
trying to change, and it feels like nothing’s changing, and suddenly it’s like, oh, this is, you
know, this is how I operate now. This feels more natural and comfortable. And it’s because it takes
time for those neurons to connect up together, and so you’ve got to keep going until you get to
that point, where this becomes your more natural behavior, but, up until then, it’s quite a
struggle. And then there’s harmony which is both about the harmony between—well, I talked
to you about head, heart, and gut. But there’s actually six ways of thinking, so I define them
as logical, emotional, motivation, physicality, which is the brain body connection, intuition, and
creativity. So it’s about those being integrated as much as possible, but it’s also about harmony
like within yourself, between yourself and other people, let’s say in a team, and then also
in a broader way, that you’re not trying to do something that’s actually going to have a
negative impact on society or something like that. And that’s kind of very closely related
to universal connection, which is the fact that in some ways that we understand
scientifically and in some ways that we don’t yet, we’re much more connected than we believe,
so we mostly communicate with other through articulated language, because we’ve evolved in
that way, and it’s the easiest way. You know, if I say Jean-Louis, do you want to be on
my podcast, if you say yes, I think that’s the truth. But, if you say yes and you’re
shaking your head like this at the same time, I might think, oh, he’s just saying yes to
me, but he’s not going to come back to me. And then, if we were in the same room together
and you had high levels of the stress hormone, because you’re trying to get me out of the door so
that I can’t ask you to be on my podcast anymore, then I would actually physiologically be
aware of that on a subconscious level. So, at minimum, we communicate through speech,
through body language, and through hormones. And then there’s other things
that we can’t explain, like, in the first lockdown, a journalist called
me up and said there’s a global phenomenon of vivid dreaming, people having dreams
that seem like they’re completely real, and they’re sort of anxiety-based. And I actually
was so surprised, because it had happened to me, and I didn’t realize it was a global phenomenon.
So I did my research to help her with the article, and it turns out that the last time that happened
was during the world wars. So when everybody in the world, no matter what country, how rich you
are, you know, what your life circumstances are, is faced with this common threat,
same things happen in the brain, yeah. No, really fascinating the way
you articulated all the steps, Tara. I’d like to come back a little bit
more actually on the abundance mindset. And we had a number of guests where we discuss of
course the cross mindset as well. And I think particularly I’d love to hear from you the way
everyone, whatever your age is, it’s not just a question of being a kid, because I know there’s
a lot of things happening when you’re a child, but actually you still have some hops when
you’re 60, you’re senior. There’s a lot of challenges for mixing generation of people
these days across nations. So what would be your kind of practical advice for people of
any generation to start working again on the plasticity of their brains and show them that they
can actually do it, they can learn new languages, as easily as you did yourself. I understand
you speak five or six languages, including some French, [Jean Philippe Courtois speaks to
Tara briefly in French]. So can you give us some strong, nice, kind encouragement about, hey, you
can learn new things tomorrow. How do you do that? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that’s probably
one of the most exciting things that’s come out of neuroscience research in the last 20
years. This ability, well, so neuroplasticity, which is the ability to change your
brain, but the fact that it doesn’t stop, like we used to think, around the age
of 18, when you stop physically growing, in fact, so it’s very, very pronounced
in the first two years of life. You know, if you think a baby goes from being completely
helpless and vulnerable to walking, talking, managing their bowels and their bladder and
potentially talking up to five languages, and then there’s another—it’s different, because
it’s more about neural pruning, but there’s another big change in the teenage years. And then
this process is actually very active until the age of 25, so later than we thought. Which is
interesting because what we thought of as the adolescent brain actually is the adolescent brain
whilst people are much older, and I think what a lot of people of our generation have seen is
that our children tend to become now financially dependent on us for longer as well, and that
actually makes sense with the neuroscience, because before it was like you’re 18, go to war
or go out and get a job, but actually that’s not matching up with how the brain’s working. So then
from 25 to at least 65, and I have definitely got examples of people even over the age of 65 that
are harnessing neuroplasticity. It’s there, but you have to essentially use it or not lose
it, but kind of it slows down, and the main way to keep inducing neuroplasticity in your brain
throughout adulthood or throughout working life, specifically, is by learning new things. Now,
something like a language or a musical instrument is such an intense learning that it actually,
you know, it visibly changes peoples’ brains, and you wouldn’t just get the benefits of let’s
say somebody learned French later in life, you wouldn’t just get the benefit of you can go
to France on holiday and you can order your meal, because it changes your brain globally, you would
get benefits like better emotional regulation, better flexibility of thinking, better
problem solving skills, better ability to override your biases, super important at
work. But those are quite big things, you know, and a lot of people with a busy job are going to
say I don’t have time to learn a new language, so but try to do something new and different
as frequently as you can. Go to a country that you’ve never been to before. Cook a meal that
you’ve never cooked before. Talk to somebody that comes from a completely different background
to you, just constantly be doing what I would call micro learnings, which is just doing things
differently to what you’ve always done before. No, I love it, because I know there’s also a
lot of writings on the 10,000 hours you need, right, to get to your craft and a new skill
and a new capability, but if you said, well, of course that’s probably true, and it’s been
proven, actually, in many different ways, but you don’t necessarily need to apply
10,000 hours to everything that you want to discover in life. I think that’s in
essence what you’re sharing with us. I actually do something which I think people
would almost call cheating, but I will learn something until I can tell that I’ve gone past
that tipping point of neuroplasticity, so, for example, the last language that I tried to
learn was Danish, and it was really difficult, and I did it for about six months. I went to
Denmark in the summer, and then I came back, because I used to have these 90 minute
lessons, but because it was such hard work, I would get really, really hungry and tired,
usually about after an hour, and after about six months, I had the lesson after I’d been
away for the summer, and then she said, okay, well, we’re done for today. And I was just amazed
that it had been one and a half hours, because it just seemed easy. And so then I thought, okay, I’m
not really enjoying Danish, I have to be honest, but it’s obviously changed my brain, so, with
that one, I stopped there, and then with tennis, like probably everybody else, I started playing
tennis again in the lockdowns, and once I got to the point where I realized all of that muscle
memory from being a teenager had come back, I kind of felt like, okay, I don’t really need to
do it anymore. But there are other things that I have kept doing. I’d like to make that very clear.
But there’s a couple of things that I found more challenging. I just did it until I felt like it
had had the neuroplasticity impact that I wanted. Yeah, no, excellent, actually, to share
that experience, Tara, with our listeners, because I think we got a lot of feedback
on that and the way you reinvent yourself. You know, shifting gears a little bit, I mean, in
your professional perhaps personal life as well, I’m sure you’ve encountered many people
that needed your help to manage stress every day of their lives, different types of
stress, actually. And I know that you believe that mental wellbeing, you know, which keeps
growing after COVID-19 is today the number one issue people have to deal with in their lives.
So can you share with our listeners some very practical recommendations on how to take care
of yourself, your mental wellness? You mentioned already a couple of things before, you know, in
the previous question, but what else would you do? I have so many things here, Jean-Philippe, and
they fall under the five pillars that I have been speaking about for many years, which are
rest, fuel, hydrate, oxygenate, and simplify, but I’ll give you some like, you know, particular
facts about each one of those that are quite easy to incorporate into your routine. So, with sleep,
the ideal length for the norm in the population is eight hours and 15 minutes. More than that
can actually reduce your mental wellness, so oversleeping is not good, but we
say at least seven to eight hours, and that’s to do with the time that it takes for
the brain to clean itself overnight, but there’s another quick tip that really makes a difference
which is, if you have a regular sleeping time and waking time within a one hour window, that
seems to have a really beneficial effect as well. And then with fuel, that’s basically your diet,
so I’d just like to preface that by saying that even though your brain is very small in your
body, it’s the hungriest organ in your body, so it’s using up 20 to 30% of what you eat. So
to fuel your brain as effectively as possible, it’s ideal to be mostly plant-based and make
sure that you’re trying to eat a variety of 30 different plants per week, but that’s
not just vegetables. It includes coffee, dark chocolate, all the grains like rice,
lentils, quinoa, spices, black pepper, but also— Oil as well? No. No oil? Okay, no olive oil. No. So olives rather than olive oil,
yeah, actually. But I mean the good oils are good for you too, but I don’t think
they count in the 30 different plants, and then eating fermented food is also very good
for your brain, so kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, etcetera. There’s so much evidence
coming out now about like I think we’re on the tip of the iceberg, but I’ve become
obsessed with eating mushrooms, so yeah. Mushrooms, okay. Particular
mushrooms? I mean, do you have a specific selection of mushrooms you take? I mean, I think the more exotic ones are better, but even just eating regular mushrooms, you
know, champignon, the average champignon is fine. Okay, champignon de Paris, okay, very good. Yeah, so things like reishi
and shiitake and oyster, but really just eating two cupfuls
of mushrooms per week, and so, yeah, I think for dietary things, that’s probably quite
a lot. And then hydration is really important, because it’s important for the obvious reasons,
but also the chemical and electrical messages that pass between neurons, there needs to be
enough lubrication for that to happen properly. As you can see, I keep drinking all
the time in my podcast, all the time. I know, same. Yeah, me too. So we should be
drinking half a liter of water for every 15 kilos of our body weight per day. And, if you drink a
lot of coffee or you live in a really hot place, then you probably need to drink more.
Oxygenation, this used to be very much about doing 150 minutes of aerobic exercise
per week and doing some strength training, but actually post-COVID what we’ve learned is
that if your exercise is too high intensity, it becomes counterproductive, because it’s
producing stress hormones, so now it’s become more about—especially because a lot more people
work from home, don’t be sedentary, make sure you’re getting up and walking around. Make sure
you’re trying to get 5,000 to 10,000 steps a day. And outside and in the natural, if
you can, right? In the greens as well? Well, that’s a whole separate point, which is
so beneficial, yeah, in nature, absolutely, and outside but not in a polluted area, because,
if there’s pollution in your area, which you can check using apps, then it actually reduces the
growth factors that help your nerve cells to grow, so outside as long as it’s near a large body of
water or lots of large trees. But just separate from exercise, just time and nature is just
showing like massive benefits for mental health. And then apart from just movement, making
sure we’re breathing deeply, because when we’re stressed, we do shallow breathing. There’s
actually shocking statistics about how much people hold their breath when they’re reading emails
or they’re looking at social media. So becoming conscious of that, yeah, and then the last thing
I was going to say was time in nature, so yeah. Wow, we have our work cut out for the days, Tara. Just pick two or three. Pick two or three of
those things and start incorporating them. No, it’s wonderful, actually. It’s
really connecting real nice with many episodes we had between
Arianna Huffington and others, talking about the same things again
and again about the importance of that. You know, you share many incredible exercises,
again, in your book, for all of you who want to learn more about. There’s so much in the book.
I’d love you to share one with the listeners about how you can process both negative and positive
events using your different senses. I think you asked the reader to write down four quadrants
and label them. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. So could you share one exercise,
actually, how to do that in a more integrated way? Yeah, so let’s just start by defining those,
so people know what they would be writing into each quadrant. So physical is literally what you
feel in your body. Mental is about your thought processes. Emotional is about your feelings, and
then spiritual is either something that’s not described by those three or for people that have
spiritual beliefs, it’s something in your spirit or, if you don’t, then it’s something in your
values, and so what I ask people to do is think of a time that life, you know, whether it was—usually
I ask them to think of a work example, that things were not going well, it was difficult. Things
weren’t in flow, team wasn’t pulling together, results weren’t good, and we always start with the
negative one, because, remember, about abundance, we don’t want to start with positive and end up
negative, because that will have an effect on the brain. I ask people to close their eyes and
immerse themselves in that memory for one minute, and then, at the end of the minute, to write down
how it felt in your body, what was going on in your thoughts, your feelings, and your spirit. And
then I actually do say like take 10 deep breaths or just jump up and down five times to just get
rid of that negativity and then repeat, so draw another quadrant labeled the same, and think of a
time that things were going really well, you were at your best, you know, people were collaborating,
results were great. Close your eyes and immerse yourself in that memory for a minute, and then,
at the end of the minute, write down how that felt in the four quadrants, and there’s literally
no right or wrong answer. I’ve heard people say that it was exactly the same in all the quadrants
or that there’s one quadrant that’s different, or, you know, for me, what I learned, is that
the biggest difference between those two is my physicality, so my posture changes, my eye contact
changes, my how much I smile, and that’s kind of a little bit easier to force yourself to turn that
around. A negative spiral in your thoughts is very difficult to turn that around at the time,
but sitting up straighter, giving eye contact, smiling, that helps me to then move through
the other quadrants over maybe a day or two. Super, super helpful framework, super helpful
exercise, I think, Tara. You know, thinking about what you just said, we had a great dialogue again
with Barbara Frederickson, and I think it was—you know better than I do, there’s been a lot of
research on the fact that I think it takes three times more positive events in your daily life
than to compensate one negative thing happening to you every day, and so it means as well that,
in a way, I think you’re responsible for creating more positive moments in your life as well. That’s
my deep belief. In a way, maybe something else you would add to your arsenal of tips and tools is
make sure you also avoid people with toxicity, meaning people who are actually propagating
negative ideas, negative thoughts all the time, and you know those people, because you met
with them, and every time you met with them, you feel so depressed or sad, so it’s not
about not having empathy with these people. I love all the people I can meet with, but,
when some of the people get in that spiral, of course we can help them somehow, maybe with
some other support, psychology and psychiatry as well, sometimes. But I think you should be a
master in your life of avoiding as much as you can to not get into that spiral of negativity.
I don’t know what you think about that as well. I completely agree with you. I think it’s
at least three positive things for one negative. It might be—I’ve heard
seven sometimes, and that makes— Five is—wow. Yeah, and, you know, the brain is geared for
survival, so that makes sense, so we do have to, in the modern day, kind of be very conscious
of overriding that. And something that I’ve learned in relation to like toxicity from other
people is it’s very easy to take it personally, but, actually, almost 100% of the time it’s
saying a lot more about what’s going on for that person than you. And, if we can remember
that, then we don’t take on the toxicity, and maybe we can actually help the
person, or maybe we realize that it’s not right for us to put our energy in that place.
But, no, I completely agree with you, that’s—I almost—it’s so obvious to me that I didn’t
say it, if you know what I mean, yeah. I know, it’s natural for you, because you’ve been
already on this path for a number of years, Tara. So the last couple of questions, unfortunately
because the time is flying very fast, you’ve done a lot of work, love to come back to that, coaching
growing leaders from the business community now for a number of years, and from other circles,
which is very different from where you started, as you say, right, in terms of your professional
career. And the way you move from having an impact one patient at a time as a psychiatrist,
super hard job, by the way, and I’ve got a lot of admiration myself for people doing that
job every day, and you’ve been moving to a place where it had an impact hopefully on millions
of people, through your books, your podcasts, you know, videos and more, and so my question is
do you have any regrets changing, in a way, the course of your life now? And, if I may, in a way,
not applying your strengths to the people who may need the most from you, maybe, I’m just provoking
you on purpose, right, compared to people who I’m not saying they don’t need you, they all
need you as well. So what’s your take on that? I have absolutely no regrets. I don’t believe
in having regrets. I believe in, you know, if you make a mistake, learning from it and maybe
changing something, but, yeah, I agree with you, the reason that I’ve started doing so much, well,
the reason I wrote the book in the first place, but then also that I’ve started doing so much
more free things on social media is so that I’m having the widest impact possible, and through
the podcast, you know, that’s obviously free, so, yeah, I guess I went from focusing on a very
like narrow group of people that have big impact, but then continuing to do that and then just
doing much broader sort of higher volume, further reach things as well,
because that feels right as well. No regrets, like me. No regrets at all on the
life we had and we keep having and defining. So very last question, Tara, in a way
maybe back to the bathroom, who knows. I’m told that you’re supposed to be the
reincarnation of your late grandmother, and that you more than accomplish your dreams with
your studies and PhD. So as you plan a new visual board every year, this is the point, did you see
the need for you to climb your second mountain, you know, this is this wonderful book from
David Brooks, The Second Mountain, and, if that’s the case, what will you find at the
top of this second mountaintop? What’s for you? Well, I’ve already started the climb, because
actually I was a guest on another podcast, and I was getting this repeated question,
are you going to write another book? And, you know, in my mind, I’ve done that, I’ve
written the book that I wanted to write, and I wanted to have my own podcast, which,
as you know, I’ve now released season one of the podcast, and it charted to number
one in the UK and the US in life sciences. Which is a wonderful podcast, by
the way, for our listeners here. Thank you. And so, at the top of the
mountain, to address what you said about reaching as many people as possible, is
a TV show. So, yeah, working towards that now. That’s next, okay, TV show. Well, Tara,
looking forward to watch this TV show, absolutely, on top of the podcast. It’s been
a delight to have you again on the podcast, and it’s been wonderful to get all
your practices and actually all your wisdom of neuroscience applied to
all of us. So thank you so much. Thank you.
