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Tag Archive for: Tara Swart

Neuroscience for Leadership – Top Tips

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Neuroscience is at the forefront of innovation in leadership. Dr Tara Swart, the  only  leadership  coach  with  a  PhD  in  neuroscience  and  a successful career as medical doctor, offers her top tips for doing more with less, for longer, without burning out!

1.  Simplicity:  We have a limited bucket of cognitive resources, so reducing choices can play an important role in how we decide to spend our cognitive resources. Don’t waste big brain power on small unimportant decisions.

2.  Hydration and oxygenation: We need to drink half a litre of water daily for every 15kg of our body mass – so get drinking! Getting oxygen into our bodies and brains also boosts our ability to think, so take 10 deep breathes before an important meeting – or get exercising.

3.  Nutrition: With our brain using 20-30% of what we eat, be sure to give it the food it needs. Brain-friendly foods include: salmon, avocado, eggs, nuts, olives, dried fruit, and vegetables. As Dr Swart says “I choose what I eat so that I make better decisions”.

4.  Sleep: We all need 7-9 hours a night… at least! The research is staggering around the neural deficits experienced when we sleep for less than this.

5.  Mindfulness: 12 minutes of mindfulness a day is all it takes to improve your resilience and cortisol levels. In a world of overload, are you strong enough to put your smart phone down and DO NOTHING, if it means you’ll live a longer and healthier life?

Dr Tara Swarts unique background and depth of experience creates an uncompromising and holistic approach to performance optimisation, which has been incredibly successful with banks, hedge funds and chief executives, as well as business schools.
Email nicky@brg.co.za or CLICK HERE to find out more about her Workshop Facilitation, Executive Coaching, Keynotes or Taras Leading Sustainable Performance program

From Sluggish Caterpillar to Exquisite Social Butterfly

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FROM SLUGGISH CATERPILLAR TO EXQUISITE SOCIAL BUTTERFLY REQUIRES A RADICAL LEADERSHIP METAMORPHOSIS

A social butterfly can be described as a socially dynamic, obsessive networker with gregarious flare and engaging charisma.

The BIG client question this month: How do I get people in my organisation to engage with my social media channels?

Doctor’s orders! Neuroscience and the rules for engagement.

To determine a solution and offer advice, I err towards rigorous scientific research on how people think. Currently, we’re working with Dr Tara Swart on the Neuroscience for Leadership and her findings on how to apply neuroscience in order to get the most from your people’s hearts and minds. These are a few of her insights;

  • Acknowledge that people have a deep desire to co-operate.
  • People are hard wired for risk/loss avoidance rather than opportunity seeking.
  • Leaders need to show heaps of authentic empathy to give people a safe place to fail forward and learn.
  • Creating a sense of curiosity, plus frequent moments of surprise and delight helps people to become more creative and excited.
  • Neuro-scientifically, medically, emotionally and spiritually, it always comes down to one thing: a sense of meaning.

In particular, the BTB social media space presents its own unique set of challenges. As in the case of a butterfly’s metamorphosis, the “BTB caterpillar” is a content and time hungry medium that requires deep thought, lots of time and most often, does not show up as very “social”.

Another one of BRGs great Guru thinkers, Dave Ulrich, he suggests we no longer hire hands and need to engage the hearts and minds of our people to achieve extraordinary success. Applying respect, empathy, a sense of meaning can unlock the potential and encourage the engagement of the people you work with.

Whilst we have chosen to apply these leadership insights to social media, they can be applied to any leadership or change intervention.

My 10 plus tips to get people in your organisation to use their personal channels and become fanatical, yet responsible, brand ambassadors!

  1. Take the Lead. Make sure all c-suite people use their personal channels to promote content related to your brand, products & services. @MichaelJordaan found the time to do this at a very busy time while he (CEO) was making his bank the most innovative bank in the world. As did Steve Jobs.
  2. Go to their party. Follow them, engage with them and acknowledge their contributions 24/7. As Martin Lindstrom advises, “we are living in a “me-erism’ world”. Care about their causes.
  3. “My space” is not your space. Don’t be a narcissist. A sense of entitlement is narcissistic. Respect that this is their space and acknowledge the privilege for you to access their network and the tribes they belong to.
  4. Sense of pride. Give them a sense of belonging to your organisation – so much so, they want to shout it out from the rooftops. When I embark on a new and exciting project I want to tell the world about it and I do.
  5. Whats In it For Me. Evidence how their contribution adds value to their personal career portfolio and future opportunities. At some point they are going to move on and first impressions really do count. Educate people on their CLM’s.
  6. Trial & Error. Make sure there is absolutely no fear of failure. Allow for a margin of error and even failure. Give them a very safe space to play and coach when necessary.
  7. Freedom of Choice. Recommend they select which of their social media channels they prefer to use for business purposes. My Facebook space is for family and friends… the others reflect my more serious side.
  8. Healthy behaviour is contagious. Celebrate success. Share your social media success and results. Send out your weekly analytics acknowledge the positive.
  9. 24/7 and 365. Most importantly avoid a social media crisis! Track your social media all of the time; the last thing you need is a negative, rampant and viral Domino’s Pizza experience initiated by a bunch of sad and disgruntled employees.
  10. Train, educate, retrain, retrain and retrain them. As Tara says, “learning a new cognitive skill helps build neurons which create new undiscovered pathways in your brain”. Just another plus side to developing their skills.

On the 18th March 2015, Dr Tara Swart, a medical doctor, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, MIT Faculty member and global consultant to C Suite Executives, will present her latest findings in respect of Neuroscience for Leadership at The BRG Progress Conference at The Forum, Campus in Bryanston.

For further information contact Angela Milburn on 0861 247 328 or email angela@brg.co.za

HAVE WE LOST OUR MINDS? Can we maximise our brain power and the brain power of the people we work with?

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Ingrid Ashwin asks a psychiatrist, an academic, a medical doctor, business consultant, coach and a neuroscientist how we can maximise our brain power to perform to our best potential.

Dr Tara Swart says, “In a knowledge economy people are paid to use their brains to face constant change, so learning and adaptability have become synonymous with success.” It is her mission to spread simple, pragmatic neuro-science based messages that change the way people work and to make the world of work a happier place.
Most of our New Year’s resolutions are typically about our physical, social and financial wellbeing. These were identified as the most common personal New Year’s resolutions in 2015?

1. Spend more time at the gym.
2. Spend more time with family & friends.
3. Tame the bulge.
4. Enjoy life more.
5. Quit smoking.
6. Quit drinking.
7. Get out of debt.
8. Learn something new.
9. Help Others
10. Get Organised.

Similarly, we return to work with bold and altruistic ambitions that typically focus on ways to increase sales, reduce costs, improve productivity, grow our customer base and build shareholder value.

What then about our mental and emotional wellbeing? What we do know, is that we pay attention to our bodies, friends and family, career, financial and business performance. However do we fail to consciously take care of our brain power? To establish if we are paying enough attention to maximise our brain power, I sought the advice of a Neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, an Academic and a Medical Doctor.

Q. IA: “How do our New Year’s resolutions typically stack up when it comes to taking sufficient care of our Brain Power?”

This is what she said.

A. TS: “By connecting your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual capital you explore the interplay between nerves, hormones and burnout.

As a medical doctor I place a strong emphasis on things like a good diet and plenty of cardiovascular exercise. I drink lots of green tea and take omega oils to give my neurons a boost. I also strongly recommend you quit or minimise smoking and drinking, or at least ask yourself why you are doing it. For fun social reasons is one thing, but to dull the pain of your work and life issues needs more thought.

As a psychiatrist and business coach, I believe that helping others, having positive rewarding relationships and enjoying life certainly contribute to our sense of meaning and purpose.

And then as a neuroscientist I have shown how learning something new will help you grow new neurons from embryonic nerve cells and is most likely in the case of a new skill which requires cognitive stimulation like a new language or playing a musical instrument, in particular something you don’t have a natural talent for. Getting organised and getting out of debt is about reducing your stress levels. Whether this is financial or social as in loneliness.”

Q: IA “What then is the missing link to develop your brain power?”

A: TS. “It boils down to consciously changing your mindsets and applying focus and attention coupled with deliberate practice to get your brain to look at the way you do things differently. It is only by changing your mindset that you can affect real change to achieve your desired behavioural change and ultimately fulfil your New Years’ Resolutions.
I use applied neuroscience to work with top teams to explore responses for stress and how to stimulate behaviour change to keep the brain agile and resilient in stressful situations. Whether I apply my knowledge of neuroscience, psychiatry or business performance it always boils down to meaning and purpose.”

DR TARA SWART’S LIST OF TOP 10 PRACTISES TO MAXIMISE YOUR BRAIN POWER AND THE BRAIN POWER OF THE PEOPLE IN YOUR ORGANISATION IN 2015.

1. Drink green tea and take omega oils to give your neurons a boost.
2. Get yourself and your people enrolled to learn a new skill which will create new pathways and grow new neurons from embryonic nerve cells.
3. Find meaning and purpose in the work you and your people do.
4. Handle failure with kid gloves to control cortisol levels. To fail is shame inducing and painful. Failure causes the prefrontal cortex to fire off all sorts of pain signals.
5. Celebrate the small wins and achieve frequent aha moments of surprise and delight. Aha moments guide towards step changes in innovation.
6. Empathy is free. Exhibit authentic empathy. This is the neurological basis of personal and professional engagement to build trust. It creates an emotional resonance loop between the two brains on several levels and more importantly transforms the frozen state of threat avoidance into creativity, open communication and high performance.
7. Keep it real. Beware of the fine line between authentic interest and manipulation. The people you interact with have a gut instinct and motivation centres will alert them to the latter.
8. Harness the instinctive tendency for people to co-operate which is deeply embedded in our brains.
9. Pre-tox advice = Sleep + Nutrition + Hydration + Exercise + Mindfulness. To increase your brain power you need sleep. I recommend caffeine free intake from 14h00. Rooibos is a great alternative.
10. Practice makes perfect. With each time you practice a new behaviour new links between neurons and new pathways grow stronger.

And finally advice to manage your stress in a world of cyber clutter.
Check your emails as infrequently as possible and do a digital detox on holiday. If you check your emails too frequently you will, in all probability become unnecessarily stressed. Ask yourself “is someone going to die, or will the world stop turning if I don’t check my email for the tenth time today?

On the 18th March 2015, Dr Tara Swart, a medical doctor, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, MIT Faculty member and global consultant to C Suite Executives, will present her latest findings in respect of Neuroscience for Leadership at The Progress Conference at The Forum, Campus Bryanston.

For further information visit: www.theprogressconference.com or email angela@brg.co.za

APPLYING NEUROSCIENCE TO AFFECT REAL BEHAVIOUR CHANGE IN YOUR ORGANISATION: HOW TO TRANSITION FROM A FIXED MINDSET TO A GROWTH MINDSET | DRAWING PEOPLE TOWARDS A POSSIBLE FUTURE

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January 2015

Can we harness neuroscience to embed sustainable behaviour change in existing organisations?

If you have been involved in any change intervention you will have realised that the biggest obstacle to affecting change is the ability to change people’s mindsets. Management science has introduced many techniques to address this including, incentive programmes, communication techniques, performance measurement and employee engagement techniques. Research has subsequently shown that with these traditional measures only 54% of change interventions succeed.

What do you get when you consult with a Neuroscientist, Psychiatrist, Academic and Medical Doctor to seek out an exact science to affect change? You get Dr Tara Swart. With all of the above competencies in her skill set Tara is at the forefront of applied neuroscience for business performance

Enter a new science for management. She says, “In a knowledge economy people are paid to use their brains to face constant change, so learning and adaptability have become synonymous with success.” This is where the Neuroscience comes in.

In essence she describes the two types of people typically found in organisations without much, if any, overlap.

Type 1: The fixed mind set:  The people that are fearful of making mistakes. (Probably because they know they won’t be supported when they do). To fail for them is shame inducing and painful. These are the people that are wired to avoid risk and as such resist change. They are largely concerned with fear and shame which affects their cortisol levels.

Type 2: The growth mind set: The people that are fearful of losing out on opportunities. Failure for them is not bad and can even be exciting. These people would feel ashamed if they sat on the side lines. They thrive on surprises and are largely driven by joy, excitement, love and trust which affects their oxytocin levels.

So now that we know what makes the two types of people in our organisation tick and neuroscience has evidenced that neuroplasticity can shift people from fixed mind sets to growth mind sets we need to determine how leaders can apply neuroscience to affect required behavioural change. There is little point in changing the brains if they still need to operate in an environment that doesn’t encourage risk taking and innovation.

DR TARA SWART’S ADVICE FOR LEADERS TO STEP CHANGE MINDSETSFOR NEW REQUIRED BEHAVIOUR. WINNING THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF YOUR PEOPLE.

Remember leaders are like the pre-frontal cortex of the people they serve.

  1. Engage empathy from your people for the context of a problem.
  2. Support risk taking and offer support in the face of a poor result.
  3. Cherish the “aha” moments of surprise and delight.
  4. Leverage the instinctive desire of your people to co-operate.
  5. Recognise that our brains are more acutely geared towards loss-avoidance than reward seeking.
  6. Be aware of threats perceived by people in your team and apply empathy to transform the frozen state of threat avoidance into creativity and trust building.
  7. Ensure your empathy is authentic. People can detect when your empathy lacks integrity and sincerity and will mentally and emotionally disengage.
  8. Define each person’s meaning and purpose in respect of your change intervention.
  9. Guard against transmitting your threat states. People perceive them and it destabilises your organisational culture.

On the 18th March 2015, Dr Tara Swart, a medical doctor, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, MIT Faculty member and global consultant to C Suite Executives, will present her latest findings in respect of Neuroscience for Leadership at The Progress Conference at The Forum, Campus Bryanston.

For further information visit: www.theprogressconference.com or email angela@brg.co.za