Tuesday Apr 28, 2020
"Taking Initiative, Your Brain and Change, and Your Mentors"
2020-04
2020-04
Tuesday Apr 21, 2020
Tuesday Apr 21, 2020
This is episode #56 with Dr. Lori Desautels, a returning guest who I know everyone loves as much as I do. If you want to hear our first interview with Lori, go back and listen to episode 16[i] with Lori and Michael McKnight on “The Future of Educational Neuroscience in our Schools and Communities.” To watch this interview on YouTube, click here.
Welcome to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, my name is Andrea Samadi, I’m a former educator whose been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports and the workplace and created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience research, along with high performing experts who have risen to the top of their field with specific strategies or ideas that you can implement immediately, whether you are a teacher or student in the classroom, or working in the corporate world, to take your results to the next level.
Thanks for tuning into the podcast today! If this is your first time here, I am so grateful that you have taken the time to listen. Today I am thrilled at the opportunity to speak with Dr. Lori Desautels for the second time.
I first found Lori from her TEDx Talk from Indianapolisi when I was searching for anything in the field on educational neuroscience back in 2014 and watched her videos to understand how parts of the brain worked, how they are interconnected and impact learning. In Lori’s Ted Talk, she mentioned that “neuroscience and education have come together” and it’s a huge connection because every day experiences change the brain structurally and functionally—and I thought, this is incredible that we can finally explain how we can accelerate learning with this understanding of the brain. Over the years as I’ve continue my research in this field, each person I speak with points me back to Lori Desaultel as a pioneer in this field. Her work is groundbreaking as she ties the research into these practices that we must all learn to stay at the height of our productivity and achievement.
Welcome Lori, thank you so much for coming back on as a returning guest.
I feel like we are old friends now that I had the chance to see you speak live this past October, and with the fact you are sharing your new book with me in real time as you are writing it. I’ve been reading it as you are sending the chapters and emotions really are contagious. Before we dive into the questions, can you tell me more about why this book is so timely, and maybe a bit about the work you are doing on a day to day basis for the field of education.
1- Your new book “Connections Over Compliance, Rewiring Our Perceptions of Discipline” begins with exploring this new perception of discipline with educator and parent brain state. I wish I knew this when I stood in front of my first class as a new teacher (in Toronto in the late 1990s) wondering why no one was listening, and watched their behavior escalate to where I started to count down the days till the school year was over. I had no idea where to even begin...and never would have thought of—with myself. Can you explain why we must “look under the hood at our own brain state” when we are teaching or relating to others?
Q2-Im so grateful that brain research is helping us to gain a deeper understanding of how to improve our results, achievement and learning and that leaders like you are spear heading the way with this understanding. How can we better understand a regulated vs dysregulated brain state? These are not terms I was taught in my teacher training classes over 20 years ago. In a perfect world, everyone would be able to recognize when they are becoming dysregulated with strategies to get themselves back on course. What work still needs to happen for this awareness?
Q3- I learned about Dr. Bruce Perry from you, and a couple of our most recent podcasts focus on his research. You quote him in the beginning of your book when he states that “The key to the success of any educational experience is the capacity to ‘get to the cortex.’ Yet, each year, nearly one-third of all children attending U.S. public schools will have significantly impaired cortical functioning and behavioral challenges due to abuse, neglect, domestic violence, poverty, and other adversities.”2 How are teachers expected to teach if this is the case? How can we bring more awareness to your work so that teachers can better prepare themselves for these experiences, so they come in with self-regulation strategies that they use like clockwork?
What about these strategies for parents? I can pick out a handful of times that I’ve written a lesson on self-regulation and then in seconds have become dysregulated when my own kids have pushed my buttons. I know these strategies, and with practice (meditation has helped my ability to respond instead of react) but some of these strategies have taken me years of practice. What can we do now immediately to help families in these times of increased stress to bring in the idea that we can be fully regulated, but become dysregulated quickly if we aren’t trained.
According to Nickolas Long, “If the adult is neither trained nor prepared to accept their own counter-aggressive feelings, the adult will act on them, in effect mirroring the student’s behavior.” (Ch 2)
Q4- I was shocked when I heard Dr. Perry[ii] talking about the vulnerability in the population that can occur when we are exposed to prolonged stress response. I first learned about the impact of stress on the brain and learning from you. Dr. Perry brought in the research from families from the Katrina Disaster in 2005 and how the research shows that the offspring of those families exposed to this level of stress response had an increase of substance abuse issues. That made me stop and think of how important and timely your work is right now, not only before we had the COVID-19 outbreak, but what about AFTER this time, for those marginalized families? Can you dive deeper into why an understanding of our brain is so important right now? Do you have thoughts or plans on how to reach families in need of these strategies?
Thank you so much for all you have done to support us here at Achieveit360 to learn about educational neuroscience. If anyone wants to reach Dr. Lori Desautels, please do reach out to via email to ldesaute@butler.edu and via her website at http://revelationsineducation.com/
REFERENCES:
[i] Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast EPISODE #16 with Dr. Lori Desautels and Michael McKnight on “The Future of Educational Neuroscience in our Schools and Communities.” https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/lori-desautels-and-michael-mcknight-on-the-future-of-educational-neuroscience-in-our-schools-and-communities/
[ii] https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
Saturday Apr 18, 2020
Saturday Apr 18, 2020
This is EPISODE #55 with Torsten Nicolini. You can watch this interview on YouTube here.
Welcome to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, my name is Andrea Samadi, I’m a former educator whose been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports and the workplace and created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience research, along with high performing experts who have risen to the top of their field with specific strategies or ideas that you can implement immediately, whether you are a teacher or student in the classroom, or working in the corporate world, to take your results to the next level.
Thanks for tuning into the podcast today!
If this is your first time here, I am so grateful that you have taken the time to listen. I can’t wait to introduce you to our guest today, Torsten Nicolini[i] a Strategy Coach whose joining us today all the way from Germany. who has devoted his life to helping small business owners fulfill their greatest potential by teaching them how to become more successful at work and in life.
I first met Torsten last summer 2019 when he contacted me to review his book called Work Smart in One Day: How to Be More Effective at Work and Get More Out of Your Life by James Barrett [ii] (Torsten's pen name) and I get asked to review a lot of books (I must be on a list somewhere because I do get at least a request each week) and I usually just delete the requests because I don’t have the time, but this time, the title caught my attention because I had launched this podcast and had been researching workplace productivity extensively for the past year. When I read Torsten’s "Work Smart in One Day" it felt like a compilation of the most effective productivity strategies, all in one place. Some history, in the late 1990s, I worked in the motivational speaking industry, and worked closely with some of the leading motivational speakers in the world. Of course I had access to all of their books and content that I read extensively.
As I read through Torsten’s book, the great speakers of the past echoed in my head as I could see who influenced him, and the strategies in his book were spot on. He's organized them in a way that ANYONE can improve their productivity, and I can tell that he must also operate this way, with the detail of his examples. I reviewed his book that day, and I remember exactly where I was at the time, on a family vacation at a local resort, and I refused to leave the room until I finished his book and review, it was that captivating.
A bit about Torsten:
- he is currently working "fulltime" as an engineer at an automotive supplier since 2015 (Yazaki)
- he accomplished an apprenticeship as a toolmaker in 2009, technician in 2013, Bachelor of Engineering in 2018 an currently studying "part-time" Masters of Enginering that I will finish 2021.
- he started to learn about personal development in 2017 (now age of 32) and with this "initiator" I launched a side business in marketing and webdesign, started a blog and different projects for small business owners (website re-design, marketing, etc.)
- Since 2018 I am really loving to create content, to write articles and now publishing books.
As many of us are in the middle of figuring out how to work from home, and might be looking for new ways to work with some key strategies for better productivity, I thought I would ask Torsten to come on the podcast to share more about his website, the books he is reading and strategies for productivity.
Q1: What are Highly Efficient People Doing Better than the Average Person (and how do they manage tasks be increased productivity)
Q2: What are some New Habits That Go a Long Way (making you think about a morning routine, if you've not got one already) Q3: How do you eliminate What's Pulling You Down (identify what is stealing your energy) Q4: What are some Tips for Maintaining Your Success (so that it continues all year)
Q5: Anything else you think is important that I might have missed to help people during this time to be more productive.
If someone wants to contact you, what’s the best place? Email torsten@lastingprinciples.com or through his website https://lastingprinciples.com/
[i] https://lastingprinciples.com/
[ii] https://www.amazon.com/Work-Smart-Day-More-Effective-ebook/dp/B082RWTXQK/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Thursday Apr 16, 2020
Thursday Apr 16, 2020
This is EPISODE #54 with David Adams. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.
Welcome to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, my name is Andrea Samadi, I’m a former educator whose been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports and the workplace and created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience research, along with high performing experts who have risen to the top of their field with specific strategies or ideas that you can implement immediately, whether you are a teacher or student in the classroom, or working in the corporate world, to take your results to the next level.
Thanks for tuning into the podcast today!
If this is your first time here, I am so grateful that you have taken the time to listen. I am so excited about our guest today. His name is David Adams, and I’ve been watching his work, seeing his posts on social media and he’s doing some ground-breaking work. I noticed when he spoke on a panel[i] with former CNN host and educational activist Campbell Brown, Founder, The Seventy Four[ii]; (a phenomenal education focused website that I love learning from) Susan Crown, Founder of the Susan Crown Exchange[iii]; (whose mission is to help people acquire the skills needed to succeed and thrive in a rapidly changing and connected world), Marc Brackett, Director Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence[iv] (who did EPISODE #22 on his book “Permission to Feel”)[v] and Karen Niemi, (Neemi) President & CEO, CASEL[vi]. If we are truly “the sum of the five people we spend the most time with” like Jim Rohn once said, you can only guess how impressive his bio is going to be.
David is The Urban Assembly’s Director of Social and Emotional Learning,[vii] where his team builds schools' capacity to ensure that all staff and students they work with receive relevant experiences and purposeful instruction to develop the social emotional competencies that impact students’ success in school, work, and life. (Everything that we speak about on this podcast). He is on the Board of Directors for CASEL (The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning) which is the trusted source for knowledge about high-quality, evidence-based social and emotional learning and I have to mention that he was also a Civil Affairs Officer in the United States Army, so you know that he is on a serious mission to achieve results.
David, welcome! Thank you so much for being here today.
Q1: I’ve read quite a BIO for you, and it seems that when we are dealing with education that we have a certain expectation of what we are looking for (whether it’s our students learning in the classroom, professional development for teachers, or even choosing the right assessments that measure what we are learning). What does it mean to you for a person to be educated?
Q2: With everything that you see going on in the world today, why do you think our communities are struggling so much to solve problems across differences?
Q3: In your recent article[viii] A New Vision of Education: Reimagining the Social Contract you talk about the fact that nobody is perfect, but we all have a responsibility to strive to live up to the values we want the next generation to embody.
You talked about this phenomenon where education level is negatively correlated to the accuracy of perception of people across the political spectrum. Can you explain what you mean here, and why do you think this is the case?
Q4: Tell me a little bit about the neuroscience behind this and how SEL specifically improving awareness can help us to all move forward.
Q5: What are your final thoughts for how we can use SEL to solve our nation’s most pressing concerns to restore some hope, especially during these uncertain times?
Thank you so much for your time today, and for sharing your insights with us. If anyone wants to reach you to learn more about your programs at the Urban Assembly, what is the best way? You can find David Adams on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-adams-10236721/ or on Twitter https://twitter.com/DAdams_SEL
REFERENCES:
[i] David Adams with Campbell Brown, Founder, The Seventy Four; Susan Crown, Founder of the Susan Crown Exchange; Marc Brackett, Director Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Karen Niemi, President & CEO, CASEL. https://urbanassembly.org/news-press/uas-director-of-social-emotional-learning-david-adams-at-chicago-ideas-week
[ii] The 74 https://www.the74million.org/
[iii] The Susan Crown Exchange http://www.scefdn.org/
[iv] Marc Brackett https://www.marcbrackett.com/
[v] Neuroscience Meets SEL EPISODE #22 Marc Brackett on his book “Permission to Feel” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/yale-center-for-emotional-intelligence-founder-marc/id1469683141?i=1000450933434
[vi] www.casel.org
[vii] https://urbanassembly.org/strategy/social-emotional-learning
[viii] A New Vision of Education: Reimagining the Social Contract by David Adams (March 17, 2020) https://thriveglobal.com/stories/a-new-vision-of-education-re-imagining-the-social-contract/?
Saturday Apr 11, 2020
Saturday Apr 11, 2020
Welcome to EPISODE #53 “Self-Regulation and Your Brain: Strategies to Bounce Back Towards Resilience.” During these strange and different times that we are all living these days, we need to have strategies that we are using on a daily basis to navigate through these challenging times, where we are all feeling the pressure, so we can stay focused on regulating ourselves first, and then in turn, help others around us to stay regulated. You might have had strategies in place before the corona virus pandemic changed our world, but might be noticing that as each day passes, and we recognize more and more stressors and unpredictability facing us, that our baseline is changing, and our resilience levels are not the same. Since we all have a brain, we will all be experiencing this in some way and I’m sure that like me, you will find this information helpful to build your own resilience levels back up to where we are used to having them, so we can resume our day to day life with a feeling of accomplishment, instead of letting the pressures get the best of us.
But First, what is Self-Regulation and Why is it So Important?
I do recommend going back to EPSIODE 14[i] where we covered self-regulation (one the 6 social and emotional learning competencies that we launched this podcast with) as “the foundational learning skill for future success.” This episode covers self-regulation strategies to help our children as well as for ourselves in the workplace. Just a quick review.
Self-regulation is “the ability to manage your emotions and behavior in accordance with the demands of the situation. It includes being able to resist highly emotional reactions to upsetting stimuli, to calm yourself down when you get upset, adjust to a change in expectations and (the ability) to handle frustration”[ii] In other words, it’s the ability to bounce back after a setback or disappointment, and the ability to stay in congruence with your inner value system. These days, this skill takes practice from all of us, and is one of those crucial life skills that I thought was important to cover on a deeper level.
The ability to control one's behavior, emotions, and thoughts is an integral skill to be taught to young children as well, so they can form and maintain healthy relationships and connections later in life.[iii] As an adult, self-regulation is crucial to develop as we all know that life is full of ups and downs (and it seems like more so these days than usual) but we must be able to make our way through challenging situations before we can reach any level of achievement and success. It’s these challenging times that give us our future strength. We all know people who seem to bounce back after adversity. A calm, regulated leader can make others feel safer but it’s not by chance –it’s because they have learned how to self-regulate and intentionally get themselves back on course. This is a learned skill and if we are modeling and teaching this skill well, it will strengthen our students/children/workplace organizations, communities, culture and world, putting us all on the pathway of resilience where we can handle challenge and adversity.
What does self-regulation look like in the brain? This episode will dive deeper into what’s actually happening in our brain when we become dysregulated, so we can learn how to recognize when we are in this place, and get ourselves back to a regulated, calm state.
Image: Dr. Bruce Perry's Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” VIDEO 3 on Emotion Contagion https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
If you have listened to the last episode[iv], you will know that I have been learning from Dr. Bruce Perry (who is an American psychiatrist and senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas) and his online resources that he has created to help everyone (parents, educators, counselors) to navigate these challenging times with more understanding and he ties the brain into each topic that he covers. I’ve watched his Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series[v]” and have taken notes that have given me ideas to share on this podcast that we can all use right away. If you would like to learn more, please do visit his video series that I have included in the show notes (along with images to explain each concept) and have personally reached out to Dr. Perry to see if I could get him on this podcast in person, but this may take some time due to how busy he is right now doing his best to educate those in his close network (and I did see him working with Oprah yesterday) on best practices during these challenging times. Please do stay tuned, and in the meantime, I’ll share with you some concepts that I think are crucial for us to not just understand but be actively practicing on a day to day basis to keep our resilience buckets full.
When we are regulated, and calm, we will have access to the higher levels of thinking in our brain through our neocortex. We can think, make decisions, and carry out our day to day activities, and have learned strategies to help us to self-regulate when stressors come our way. If you have access to the show notes, you will see a diagram of an upside-down triangle showing that when we are regulated, we have access to our neocortex and can make well thought out decisions. What’s happening now is that so many new stressors are coming our way and hitting us in a manner that many of us are now on our way to dysregulation where we do not have access to our higher-level thinking but become more reactive.
I noticed this happening to me when I was working with one my kids on their school work this week (not something new but the whole working from home AND home-schooling is now new for many of us) and my daughter wasn’t happy with the fact she now has to do this either, so she was slouched over, trying to answer her math problems, with a bit of an attitude and was not putting in much effort. This pushed my buttons and before I know it, I’m reacting, and we all need to take a break and breathe. I had to stop and think about something I have been thinking about all week after watching Dr. Perry’s video series, that “a regulated, calm adult can regulate a dysregulated, anxious child, BUT a dysregulated adult can NEVER regulate a dysregulated child”[vi] and had to make some changes. In order for any of us to find our way through these times, we need to stop the minute we notice we are heading towards dysregulation and take a break and return when we are calm. “When a young child is made to feel safer (without a parent yelling at them) they will have access to their thinking brain, but if they are nervous, they will feel the power differentiator and lose the ability to use the higher functions of their brain.”[vii]
This was my experience, but it’s also happening to parents all over the country, educators who are being asked to facilitate these new distance learning courses, front line workers in the health care industry who are now being pushed to their breaking points. Now more than ever we need to recognize when we are at the state of dysregulation and implement strategies to get us back to our baseline and build resiliency.
DID YOU KNOW?
“That when we are dealing with a dysregulated person, we can regulate them by the tone of our voice, how we listen to them, non-verbal signals and they will be able to reflect our calm?”[viii]
Now more than ever we need to find strategies to help us to stay calm, and keep our head, because emotions are contagious. We will never make inroads with our children unless we maintain our calm and we want to avoid where Dr. Perry warned us that “for years to come, there will be a vulnerability in the population and their offspring”[ix] if we don’t take control of our emotions in times of stress.
Tips to Stay Regulated, and Avoid the Traps of Dysregulation:
Once you can get yourself to a place that’s calm, by BYPASSING negativity, you can RELAX, REFUEL and REFLECT/THINK[x] where you will have access to your neocortex/thinking part of your brain. If you can build these steps into your daily routine, you will be filling up your resiliency cup and building strength that you can use for years to come.
BYPASS: Negative media like the news and social media. I’m sure you have heard that watching the news is bad for your brain, but have you ever wondered why? It’s the same reason that hanging out with the wrong crowd affects your results. After a prolonged amount of time, you begin to think and act like those you are spending the most time with. The longer we watch the news, or scroll through social media, the more stress we are exposed to, disconnecting us more from our calm, regulated state. Turn it off and just read the headlines if you want to stay on top of what’s happening.
REFLECT: Give yourself some quiet time to think. Take a 3-5-minute break where you step away from your work and take this time to let your mind wander. It’s during these times of rest that flashes of insight can come our way. We can solve problems in this time, generate new ideas and think deeply.
“We don’t learn from our experiences; we learn from reflecting on our experiences.”
(John Dewey, 1933).
RELAX: Meditation, music, deep breathing, or mental imagery. Research shows meditation improves health, well-being and our ability to deal with stress) but not everyone has the time to add this into their day, especially not right now when we all have more on our plates. Taking a few minutes, throughout your day to think of something that makes you happy is a quick way to relax and self-regulate.
REFUEL: Find what gives you more energy and make it a priority. When you can get the right amount of sleep, exercise and healthy nutrition, your body should naturally feel refueled. Avoid things that drain your energy and keep things that refuel you on your daily schedule. Did you know that Einstein used to walk 2 hours/day to regulate?
Dr. Dan Siegel[xi], clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute reminds us that during this bad and threatening moment in time, we can look towards a vision of the future where there might be an improved/better world. Think of where you can be of service to others and improve your current relationships. Use this time to connect to others, learn new skills, improve and be kind to yourself, and to others. There are many places that you can go to learn new science-based approaches that can be applied to improve resiliency in your own life, or in schools and the workplace. I want to thank you so much for listening and supporting our podcast. When we launched this podcast, last June, I had no idea that we would have the interest we have received for this information. Thank you especially to our Canadian listeners who are keeping us in the Top 100 charts for iTunes for the Education: How-to Category[xii] for our United States listeners who have just got us into the top 100 charts for iTunes for the Education: How-to Category[xiii] and for everyone who listens to the episodes, increasing our visibility. We have just hit the Top 10 Social and Emotional Learning Podcasts to follow in 2020.[xiv] I know it’s important and timely, and I do look forward to bringing on new guests to help you to implement practical neuroscience in your daily life. See you next episode.
RESOURCES:
Relational Contagion Graphic from Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” VIDEO 3 on Emotion Contagion https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
REFERENCES:
[i] Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast EPISODE #14 “Self-Regulation: The Foundational Learning Skill for Future Success.” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/self-regulation-foundational-learning-skill-for-future/id1469683141?i=1000447299318
[ii] How Can We Help Our Kids with Self-Regulation https://childmind.org/article/can-help-kids-self-regulation/amp/
[iii] How to Practice Self-Regulation https://www.verywellmind.com/how-you-can-practice-self-regulation-4163536
[iv] Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast EPISODE #52 “Igniting Your Personal Leadership to Build Resiliency” Inspired by Dr. Bruce Perry https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/igniting-your-personal-leadership-to-build-resiliency/id1469683141?i=1000470528327
[v] Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
[vi] Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” VIDEO 5 on Regulation https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
[vii] Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” VIDEO 3 on Emotion Contagion https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
[viii] Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” VIDEO 3 on Emotion Contagion https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
[ix] Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” VIDEO 1 on Patterns of Stress: Risk and Resilience https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
[x] Kristie Brandt “Reflective Supervision” Training Friday April 10, 2020 https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
[xi] Dr. Dan Siegel Friday April 10, 2020 Crowdcast MWE Gathering https://www.crowdcast.io/drdansiegel https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/clinical-professor-psychiatry-at-ucla-school-medicine/id1469683141?i=1000456048761 and Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast EPISODE #28 "Mindsight: The Basis of Social and Emotional Intelligence"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/clinical-professor-psychiatry-at-ucla-school-medicine/id1469683141?i=1000456048761
[xii] Apple iTunes Charts for Canada Education: How-To Category https://chartable.com/teams/neuroscience-meets-social-and-em/dashboard/charts?chart_id=75897&chart_type=itunes&podcast_id=neuroscience-meets-sel-with-andrea-samadi
[xiii] Apple iTunes Charts for USA Education: How-To Category https://chartable.com/teams/neuroscience-meets-social-and-em/dashboard/charts?chart_id=136377&chart_type=itunes&podcast_id=neuroscience-meets-sel-with-andrea-samadi
[xiv] Top 10 Social and Emotional Learning Podcasts to Follow in 2020 https://blog.feedspot.com/social_emotional_learning_podcasts/
Saturday Apr 04, 2020
Saturday Apr 04, 2020
Now more than ever, we need leaders to emerge and take charge whether it’s you as a parent taking charge of your family’s daily schedule, or you as a worker navigating working from home. The powerful news is that you can use your own personal leadership skills to build resilience in your brain that will propel you and those around you forward. As we navigate the constant change we are all experiencing with the corona virus pandemic, I think it’s crucial that we stop and take some time to think about how we can take our own personal leadership skills to the next level to support those around us- those we work with, our families and our community. Understanding how our brains works during times of stress is more important than ever. I highly recommend listening to Episode 26, Simple Strategies for Overcoming the Pitfalls of the 3 Parts of Your Brain.[i]
Once we have an understanding of how our brain works, we can use the extra energy we have to build our own personal resiliency, model it in our homes with our family and then reach out to others who might be under more extreme stress and could use your help and support. Together we are stronger.
But first, just a reminder of how our brain deals with stress, understanding the 3 levels of stress response. Remember that some stress is good for us. We did cover this in EPSIODE 29 “How to Rewire Your Brain for Happiness and Well-Being to Optimize Learning.”[ii] Here’s a quick review.
The Neuroscience of Anxiety: Calming the Basal Ganglia in Your Brain
Within our Limbic System, our emotional brain, is the Basal Ganglia that when revved high, makes us feel anxious. Do you know the difference between anxiety (our body’s natural response to stress that can become a mental disorder when someone regularly feels unusually high levels of anxiety) or stress (which is our body’s response to a challenge or demand)? Some anxiety is normal, and the same goes for stress.
We know there are 3 levels of stress response.
POSITIVE: Mild stress motivates us to complete our work projects or helps us to find solutions to problems that arise. This type of stress keeps us on our toes in our day to day lives and helps us to build resilience (which is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties). We all want to raise resilient children and model resiliency in our homes, and we are doing this when we can manage this level of stress. We’ve all experienced that brief increase in heart rate when mild elevations in stress hormone levels hit our central nervous system when we need to speak in front of a crowd, play a sport, take a test, or that nervous energy we feel before a job interview.
TOLERABLE: Serious, temporary stress responses, buffered by supportive relationships. The key is to have support systems in place for this type of stress. In the times we are facing today, many people are unable to get out and connect face to face with people to help manage this type of stress. I have seen news articles about the devastating impacts this type of stress is having on people. If you know someone who might be in this category, please keep in contact with them. Do your best to call them, and remember that connecting face to face over technology is much better than not at all.
TOXIC: Prolonged activation of stress response systems in the absence of protective relationships. This is the one we are most concerned about as this type of stress causes the most damage. I recently learned that after the Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in August, 2005, the offspring of people who went through this disaster showed an increase of substance abuse. (Perry, 2020).
We must have strategies in place to help us to reduce anxiety and stress so that they don’t interfere with our day to day life. The more we can keep our stress levels on the tolerable side, the more regulated we become, increasing the resiliency we will have for ourselves, our families, our future children, community and workplaces. A calm, regulated leader can help make others feel safer. (Perry, 2020). We must have strategies in place to regulate ourselves, by using our peers, friends and family to help support us, so we can then go on and extend ourselves to support others in need.
A REMINDER OF STRATEGIES TO REDUCE ANXIETY AND STRESS
Exercise, meditation and deep belly breathing to increase oxygen to the brain. If you want some exercise tips, be sure to check out episode #51 with Kelly Schmidt[iii] and for meditation examples, episode #25 with Mick Neustadt.[iv]
Go for a walk outside-research shows that different brain regions are activated when you’re outside. Getting out into the sunshine increases the production of Vitamin D and serotonin—plus it just feels good. If you can’t go outside, look out a window.
Zone out-let yourself do nothing for a while and just let your mind wander. Research shows that “creative incubation” happens during mind-wandering. You are more likely to problem-solve successfully if you let your mind wander and then come back to the challenge. Flashes of insight and solutions to problems often show up at this time, but we must be willing to allow these breaks.
Don’t watch the news all day—silence is good for the brain.
Mental imagery—warming images (like a cup of hot chocolate) if you are feeling stressed, or a place that makes you happy (the beach).
Dietary supplements like fish oil, magnesium, l theanine (in green tea) and gabba supplements are known to help calm the brain.
For years I have been quoting Dr. Bruce Perry’s work when referring to the fact that the amygdalae (the part of the limbic system in the brain which is responsible for emotions, survival instincts, and memory) are “hyper-responsive (exhibiting an exaggerated response to stimuli) in children coming from hard places” (Perry, 1994) so students, educators, parents and the community must find tools and strategies to manage these more extreme levels of stress.
This past Friday night, I found some quiet time to clean out my email inbox and came across a video I sent myself earlier in the week to watch when I had more time. If you are like me, it’s been a bit crazy with homeschooling emails, online sports emails mixing in with my work emails and I almost deleted this video without watching it. Thank goodness I didn’t. It was Dr. Bruce Perry[v] (an American psychiatrist, currently the senior Fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago) speaking on a zoom training call about the importance of stepping up your leadership skills to help others who might be struggling at this time. This inspired me to create this podcast and send out a tweet about his training. My phone went crazy all night and the entire next day when I was writing this episode, with the activity on this tweet, so I know this message is important and timely. You can see Dr. Perry’s video series here[vi] but I thought I would summarize his main points for this episode and hope to have him on as a guest as soon as possible.
We want to find ways where we can emerge as the calm leader, keep our stress controllable, where we are building resilience. When stress falls into the unpredictable side (where it can be at times these days when we aren’t sure what exactly is happening), sensitization happens where the brain sees everything as a threat. This is where dysregulation happens and is what we want to avoid since this stress causes physical problems in the body. Research shows that this type of stress can have an epigenetic impact (impacting the well-being of our children’s children) beyond just our own, which is beyond scary. Dr. Bruce Perry reminds us that if we don’t find the leadership we need to help regulate our population in these stressful times that “we will have a sensitized population where years to come there will be a vulnerability in the population and their offspring.”[vii] To me this show us of the dire importance of leadership needed and finding the calm within the storm in our own lives, so we can be there to help others and prevent this from happening. I’m not willing to compromise future generations because of this mass hysteria and I hope you agree with me on the importance of helping yourself, so you can reach out and help others.
Dr. Perry Suggests:
Structure Builds Resiliency (so keep your daily routines).
Be physically distant, but not emotionally distant. Be mindful outside of yourself.
Continue the activities that regulate you from the bottom up (brainstem to neocortex) where our thinking and judgments remain sound and clear. Keep calm, and this will prevent you from going to your emotional state of mind where you might not make the best decisions.
If we can all do our part to take leadership in our own families, regulate ourselves and make decisions from a calm place of mind, rather than from fear, we will be on the right path for building the resiliency our world needs at this time.
REFERENCES:
[i]Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast Episode 26 “Simple Strategies for Overcoming the Pitfalls of the 3 Parts of Your Brain” by Andrea Samadi https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/simple-strategies-for-overcoming-pitfalls-3-parts-your/id1469683141?i=1000454366492
[ii] Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast EPISODE #29 “How to Rewire Your Brain for Happiness and Well-Being to Optimize Learning”
[iii] Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast EPISODE #51 with Kelly Schmidt https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/fitness-expert-kelly-schmidt-on-easy-to-implement-fitness-and-nutrition-tips-to-maximize-home-workouts-and-meal-planning/
[iv] Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast EPISODE #25 with Mick Neustadt https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/mindfulness-and-meditation-expert-mick-neustadt-on-how-meditation-and-mindfulness-changes-your-life-results-and-potential/
[v] https://www.neurosequential.com/why-choose-us
[vi] Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network’s “Covid-19 Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources
[vii] Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Network’s “Covid-19 Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources (Find this quote at 25:16)
Thursday Apr 02, 2020
Thursday Apr 02, 2020
This is episode #51, Welcome to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, my name is Andrea Samadi, I’m a former educator whose been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports and the workplace for the past 20 years. Each week we bring you an expert who has risen to the top of their industry with specific strategies that you can implement immediately, whether you are a teacher or student in the classroom, or working in the corporate world, to take your results to the next level. If you are like me, and love to learn, grow, challenge yourself and always are looking for that competitive edge, listen closely to the tips our next guest has to say, and write down the ones that you want to implement immediately. Watch the interview on YouTube here.
Our guest today has been training my husband and I since we were dating back in 2006, and I can honestly say that I would never hire another trainer after working with him. He not only challenges our fitness and nutrition goals, but also wants to know what’s going on with our businesses and family life. Let me tell you more about this incredible entrepreneur.
Kelly Schmidt[i], is one of the leading personal training and fitness experts in Arizona, who has over 20 years of personal training and health development experience all over the world with his online and in person training programs. When Kelly graduated from high school, he was 115 pounds (which is hard to imagine knowing him today) but he says he felt that he was the little guy, which fueled his transformation that took him to 3rd place in his first professional body building show just 5 years ago (in 2015). He now coaches busy professionals all over the world in person at his gym in Glendale, AZ and with his online training programs to help people fit health and fitness into their lifestyle for long term, sustainable results.[ii]
Welcome Kelly! Kelly, the minute I got the notification that all gyms were closing, I thought of you to help people at all different stages of health, with these strange times where we are quarantined inside our homes. You came to my mind immediately because you’ve been working all year with me on workouts, I can do at home so that I spend less time in the gym. I’ve been seeing posts from people all over the place asking questions about the best way to begin an exercise program. I do want to add the disclaimer, that for anyone at the beginning of their health and fitness journey, please do begin with consulting with your healthcare provider before trying anything new.
Kelly, thanks, so much for being here today, and sharing your ideas and tips with us to help those who might be at the start of their fitness journey, to those looking for more challenge with a home workout because with you, that’s exactly what you’ll get.
The first question I have for you is on nutrition, which is such a wide topic. We all have different health goals (some people want to lose weight, others gain weight, add more muscle) what would you suggest are some best practices for ALL of us with our nutrition these days? I know that you taught us meal-prepping, and what we should be eating/not eating. Has anything you are doing changed? Is there any staple food that you used to buy that you can’t get these days? How has your nutrition stayed the same and how has it changed?
I had a doctor years ago get me off sugar when he was researching the impact of sugar on our health and he wrote this book called Sugar Crush: How to Reduce Inflammation, Reverse Nerve Damage, and Reclaim Good Health.[iii] I had some health issues that went away 100% and ever since then, I’ve been wary of even fruits because he had me stop eating anything with sugar, and specifically high glycemic fruits. Do you stay away from any fruits and what do you put in your shakes? What impact do you see sugar having on you?
What are macros? How can people figure out what’s the best combination for them or is even talking about macros over kill? I don’t want to stress people out, so how important do you think it is that people have an idea of the numbers that work best for them with the ratio of fats/proteins/carbs that they should be consuming?
What about Celery Juicing. You started us on this practice a few years ago, since we are on our 2nd celery juicing machine.[iv] Then I started to follow this expert Anthony William who is @medicalmedium on Instagram and he’s been helping millions of people around the world for years with his book Celery Juice: The Powerful Medicine of our Time Healing Millions Worldwide.[v] What benefits have you noticed with this?
I’ve been learning from Dr. Daniel Amen on the best nutraceuticals to take to help improve my health and what sticks out to me is that he mentions that most people are deficient in Omega 3 fatty acids, so I force myself to take fish oil daily. What supplements do you take daily? Have you added more vitamin c lately?
I know what cardio exercise you do daily because we share our activity through the activity app on our watches. I know that people can do this on their Fit Bit as well. Can you share what your daily workouts look like with what you do for cardio, and strength training and what would be 10 exercises that people could do at home that are just as impactful as using machines at the gym?
Besides exercise, what are you doing for your mental health?
How are you balancing your business and fitness goals? What does your daily schedule look like?
Thanks so much Kelly for sharing your thoughts with us. I’m so grateful to have you as a friend, and for all you have done to help support our family, and for the business ideas you’ve shared. It was Kelly who suggested I record my podcasts on video and put them up on YouTube! Great idea, I really appreciate you. For those who want to learn more about your programs, they can visit http://www.lifefuzionfitness.com/programs/ and follow you on social media. If anyone wants to access your FREE home video workouts, they can email you at kelly@lifefuzionfitness.com Keep up the incredible work, and thanks for the decades of health tips and inspiration.
RESOURCES:
Will Fruit Make You Fat? Kelly Schmidt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMz9pOIWO_s
What Are Macros? Kelly Schmidt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VliM09e653A
REFERENCES:
[i] http://www.lifefuzionfitness.com/kelly-schmidt/
[ii] http://www.lifefuzionfitness.com/lifestyle-blueprint/
[iii] Sugar Crush: How to Reduce Inflammation, Reverse Nerve Damage, and Reclaim Good Health by Dr. Richard P. Jacoby and Rachuel Baldelomar https://www.amazon.com/Sugar-Crush-Inflammation-Reverse-Reclaim/dp/0062348221
[iv] Celery Juicing Machine https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DKFH9QM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
[v]Celery Juice: The Powerful Medicine of our Time Healing Millions Worldwide by Medical Medium Anthony William https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Medium-Celery-Juice-Worldwide/dp/140195765X