Where Science & Spirituality Meet: Does The Law of Attraction Work? with Dr. Tara Swart
Have you always wondered if the “Law of Attraction” is real? In this episode we dig into the science behind visualization, manifesting and much more to find out what really works and what doesn’t. We share strategies for access your intuition and aligning your emotions, your intuition and your rational thought process to supercharge your brain, show you how to beat imposter syndrome, and much more with our guest Dr. Tara Swart.
Dr. Tara Swart is a neuroscientist and former psychiatric doctor. She is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and visiting senior lecturer at Kings College London, and an executive advisor to some of the world's most respected leaders in media and business. In 2016 she was named the world's first Neuroscientist-in-Residence at Corinthia Hotel, London. She is the author of the award-winning Neuroscience for Leadership, co-author of An Attitude for Acting, and lead author of her soon to be released third book, The Source.
Can we merge science and spirituality?
Is there science that actually explains the “law of attraction?"
“The way that you think determines your life"
Because of the way that you think you attract certain things into your life.
The concept of abundant thinking
The mental model “loss aversion” and why losses are more painful than gains
Mastering your emotions, cultivating intuition, they are all very similar to learning a new language
Raising your awareness is the first step
Focused attention - look for opportunities where you can behave differently
Look back at the past or journal now
Notice where you’re not doing it an think differently
Deliberate practice - committing to intentional abundant thinking even if that’s not your natural default
Accountability - make a commitment to a friend or someone else
Replace any negative thought with a positive thought immediately - an ancient Buddhist lesson that is supported by the neuroscience of neuroplasticity
What should you do if you can’t dislodge a negative thought from your brain?
If you have a repetitive negative thought or a theme to a negative narrative in your brain - distill it down to the basic underlying belief that drives that negative thought - create an opposite state and use that as your positive affirmation or mantra (check out limiting belief episodes for more)
Use laughter and oxytocin to powerfully encode or recode beliefs
How do you deal with imposter syndrome?
Strategies for overcoming imposter syndrome
Positive affirmations
Journaling on accomplishments/achievements
If your fear is founded in a fact, then go and fix that fact (i.e. get training, etc)
Realize that everyone experiences imposter syndrome
Does visualization work? Visualization makes things more certain for the brain.
How creating a vision board can powerfully improve your brain’s focus on your goals
Value tagging and selective attention - by visualizing your future you start to prime the brain to focus on the things that you want to be important.
“The Tetris Effect” - Do your visualization board as the last thing you do before you go to bed to prime and feed information into your subconscious.
The period of time that you’re about to fall asleep is the period where your subconscious can be the MOST influenced.
Visualization is an umbrella that three big things fall under
Creating a vision board (or an Action Board)
Neuroplasticity is the ability to change your brain. What you think and how you live can actually change physical things in your body.
What you say and what you do changes your body and your physiology.
Brain Agility
Mastering Emotions
Trusting Intuition
Brain-Body Connection
Logic & Decision Making
Motivated & Resilience
Creativity & Designing Your Future
Journaling is the “single best way” to access your intuition and align your emotions, your intuition and your rational thought process.
You can avoid repeating the same mistakes if you start to tap into and access your intuition
There’s a large neuronal connection between the gut neurons and the limbic system
If you take a high-quality probiotic it can reduce negative thinking in your life
There’s a deep connection between your gut and your brain
Probiotics, prebiotics, and fermented foods can improve your brain, your happiness, and your performance
Meta-cognition - thinking about your thinking. Stepping back and asking yourself if your thought processes are healthy and helpful
Is there something you believe is a barrier to your success?
Could someone else point of view be helpful and better for you?
The beliefs that have been there the longest are the hardest to see - the early ones from childhood are so much a part of us that we can’t see them
An awesome exercise you can use to improve your meta-cognition and reframe your thinking
Make an ideal statement that you want in your life
In column one - write down every single barrier to that statement. Come up with as many reasons as you can. Pull out every barrier you possibly can.
I don’t have the money
I don’t have the time
I don’t have control
There are other people, etc
In column two - write the opposite statement to all the barriers even if they couldn’t possibly be true
In column three - write as if the second column is now true - what do you do differently?
Not what you would do, “what I do differently” not “what I WOULD do differently”
Don’t put it into the future - create it for you NOW.
Group those answers by themes.
Usually, a bunch of those are things you could already start doing right away.
Homework: Create an action board. The structure of the board is important. Don’t use words - that go down the logical/rational pathway.
Look out for opportunities in your life to execute and take action towards these goals.
Annually is the cadence
Goals for the next year or lifetime goals, leave a bit of room for magic
Thank you so much for listening!
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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research
General
Media
Fast Company - “What brain supplements can and can’t do, according to a neuroscientist” by Tara Swart
“These Are The 5 Brain Skills You’ll Need In The Future Of Work”
“This is how you train your brain to be more creative” by Tara Swart
[Faculty Profile] MIT Sloan - Dr. Tara Swart
[Book Review] Books In My Opinion - The Source - Dr Tara Swart
The Evening Standard - “Brain gain: The Source is a mind manual that might just change your life” by Alix O'Neill
Business Insider - “A neuroscientist explains the 5 most effective methods to keep your brain healthy” by David Ibekwe
Thrive Global - “3 Tips for Building Your Best Brain: Your brain will thank you.” By Rachel Palekar
Yahoo Finance - “Why neuroscientist Tara Swart recommends 12 minutes of mindfulness a day” by Lara O'Reilly
Peter Fisk - “Neuroplasticity: The Secret of “The Source” … Tara Swart’s new book on how to change your brain to live a better life”
Daily Mail - “How to train your brain to make your dreams come true: Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart reveals the simple mind tricks that could turn your life around” by Dr. Tara Swart
Luxury Travel Advisor - “Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart Shares Top 10 Tips On How To Beat Jetlag”
The Telegraph - “She Wears It Well: Neuroscientist Tara Swart knows how to dress to ease brain strain” by Olivia Buxton Smith
Whitney Johnson - “How Your Brain Processes Disruption: Interview with Dr. Tara Swart”
Financial Times - “Women in Business — Tara Swart” by Charlotte Clarke
[Podcast] Stellar's Podcast Series with Shaun McCambridge: 9: Dr. Tara Swart – Debunking Neuroscience - Part 1 (posted 9 days ago)
[Podcast] Dr. Chatterjee - How to Open Your Mind and Change Your Life with Dr Tara Swart
[Podcast] How to Be Awesome at Your Job - 494: How to Train Your Brain for Maximum Growth with Dr. Tara Swart
Videos
Sporting Edge - Tara Swart explains reasons why your brain needs sleep
MIT Sloan Executive Education - Neuroscience for Leadership
Brand Learning - View from neuroscience: Dr Tara Swart on how to excel at leadership in an AI World
Books
Neuroscience for Leadership: Harnessing the Brain Gain Advantage (The Neuroscience of Business) by T. Swart, Kitty Chisholm, and Paul Brown
An Attitude for Acting: How to Survive (and Thrive) as an Actor (Paperback) - Common by Dr. Tara Swart and Andrew Tidmarsh
Misc
[SoS Episodes] Limiting Beliefs
[App] HabitShare
[Academic Article] “Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy” by Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.
[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than four million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.
Have you always wondered if the law of attraction is real? In this episode, we dig into the science behind visualization, manifesting and much more to find out what really works and what doesn't. We share strategies for accessing your intuition and aligning your emotions, your intuition and your rational thought process to supercharge your brain. We talk about beating impostor syndrome and much more with our guest, Dr. Tara Swart.
Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life.
If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.
In our previous episode, we looked at how one of the greatest geniuses of all time lost his life savings overnight. We talked about despite our illusions of rationality, even the most brilliant humans are not rational at all. We tell ourselves that it's always the other person who's irrational, envious and aggressive and that it's never us. Science shows that all of our brains are remarkably similar, sculpted by evolution to have baked in biases and bad habits. No one is exempted from the laws of human nature.
In our previous episode, we explored the path that all of the world's greatest strategists have used to master their own irrationality and achieve mastery with our legendary guest, Robert Greene. If you want to take control of your life, listen to our previous episode.
Now, for our interview with Tara.
[0:02:23.0] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Tara Swart. Tara is a neuroscientist and former psychiatric doctor. She's a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and visiting senior lecturer at Kings College London and an executive advisor to some of the world's most respected leaders in media and business.
In 2016, she was named the world's first neuroscientist in residence at Corinthia Hotel London. She is the lead author the award-winning Neuroscience for Leadership, co-author of An Attitude for Acting and the author of the newly released book The Source. Tara, welcome to the Science of Success.
[0:03:00.0] TS: Thank you so much. I'm just actually loving the fact that the strapline of the book is the secrets of the universe, the science of the brain, so we're already aligned.
[0:03:08.1] MB: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I love some of the stuff you talk about in the book and it's such an interesting, maybe even serendipitous time to interview you. One of the things that's always been so fascinating and interesting for me, and I've read voraciously around this intersection between science and spirituality. Your book, you're obviously a scientist, doctor very rooted and scientifically-driven, evidence-focused. Tell me about how you came to write this book and how you started approaching merging those two ideas?
[0:03:40.8] TS: Yeah, thank you. I think that's what everybody sees on the surface, isn't it? That I'm an MD and I have a PhD in neuroscience. I've always said, I'm also a person and I have things that I'm interested in. To some extent, you do feel you can't really talk about it if you're an MD and a scientist. For example, the spiritual side of things.
As I grew up in London with Indian parents, I felt a real conflict between the life that I had at home and the life that I had at school and with my friends. I learnt from an early age how to keep things separate. Then I went to medical school and studied neuroscience and became a doctor. I was practicing in psychiatry for seven years and spirituality doesn't really come into to those things. I would still do yoga sometimes, but I think that those things really drifted apart.
When I changed career and started applying neuroscience to mental health and mental performance, those things naturally started to come back together. The idea for writing a book that really brought those things together was a little germinating seed in my mind, for I think probably a couple of years, if not more.
I'll give you an example of the things that you don't talk about. Quite a few years ago, now maybe five, seven years ago, I went on a yoga retreat in Ibiza and I had some Reiki. When the book came out, the Reiki person contacted me on Instagram and said, “You told me you were going to write this book, remember?” I didn't remember. I think the idea had been there for a very long time, deeply hidden in my brain. When the opportunity arose to write it, I jumped at the chance and actually writing it really brought those two sides of my life together for me.
[0:05:35.8] MB: Such a great way to start that journey. I'm curious getting into the specifics of it a little bit more, what did you find, or how did you start to combine those two things? Because many people and I certainly count myself in some either previous iterations, or even today in some ways, really struggle to combine or marry science and spirituality. How did you think about the disconnects, the distances and how do you bridge that gap?
[0:06:04.8] TS: Well actually, because I am interested in things, like the law of attraction and vision boards, I wanted to know if they could be backed up by cognitive science. I'd been doing them and learning about it at the same time. What I hear from people who have read the book is that the science compels us to take action on things that we might think well, that's just a – it's a new age thing, or it's a spiritual thing.
I had been doing vision boards for quite a few years and we can talk about that later. Where I started was with the area that I was most skeptical about, which was the law of attraction. I googled it and there's 12, but actually when you research it, there isn't really agreement about what the 12 are. I had to start by distilling it down to the 12 most acknowledged ones. Then I started looking into the science behind them. Immediately, 10 of the 12 I could explain by neuroscience.
That's when I thought, “Okay, this is going to be really interesting.” I've been really honest in the book and said the one or two, I can't give you an explanation for how these work, but it's probably not going to harm you. If you're doing the other 10, you may as well do them as well, or if you want to leave them out, you can leave them out.
[0:07:18.3] MB: Let's dig into that a little bit more. Tell me about what even is the law of attraction and why, or how does the science support it?
[0:07:29.4] TS: There's many ways to describe it, but I think it's really summed up very nicely in this phrase, the way that we think determines our life. That because of the way that you think, you attract certain things into your life. Wherever this has been written about before, it's been explained by quantum science and vibrations and field energy. I think that's why it's received so much criticism. It always struck me that if it's to do with the way you think, then it should be explained by psychology and neuroscience, because those are the sciences of thinking.
Yeah, so I started looking into it. The one that I have picked out is number one and because I think it's the most important one is abundant thinking. The science behind that is a term called ‘loss aversion’, which is the fact that our brain is geared for survival reasons. To avoid loss more than it seeks reward. The psychological effect of this gearing is two to two and a half times stronger for loss avoidance than for gaining reward.
The easiest way to bring that to your mind is if you parked your car in the parking lot this morning and you walked to your office and you realize that you dropped $50 out of your pocket, you'd be really annoyed. You'd probably go back and check the parking lot a couple of times. You'd still be thinking about that for several hours, if not still thinking about it last thing at night before you go to sleep. If instead of that, you walked from your car to the office and you found $50 dollars lying on the ground in the parking lot, you would be pleasantly surprised. You might keep it. You might give it to charity, but you wouldn't be thinking about that even an hour later.
The equivalent loss or gain, the loss has a more psychologically powerful effect. That served us when we lived in the cave and it allowed us to survive as a species. In the modern world, it's not as helpful. In a safe scenario, cultivating abundant thinking where you believe there's enough out there for everyone you believe that good things will happen, you're generous because you don't feel you're in competition for resources. That's a way of thinking that actually changes what happens in the real world, because it changes what you do, it changes who you hang out with, it changes the perspectives and filters that you have about how the world works.
[0:09:54.5] MB: I want to come back to something you touched on a minute ago. I want to explore this more further, but you touch briefly on this notion of vibrations. That's one that as somebody who considers myself somewhat of a rational skeptic about many things, when I hear vibrations it almost sets off alarm bells like, “Oh, this can't be scientifically validated. This can't be reason.”
It just seems a little bit too woo-woo for me. How do you start to integrate that into – as somebody who comes out of the hard sciences, how do you integrate that into your perspective of things, like the law of attraction, things like personal development, etc.?
[0:10:31.4] TS: I mean, my first reaction is to say I don't. I believe that the law of attraction and that your thought process should be explained by cognitive science, not by a vibrational science, if you like. I’d put that in quote marks, “being very skeptical.”
However, there are a few things about social and emotional contagion that that feeling of when you go into a certain person's home or office that you just feel so drained and negative after spending time with them. There are some chemical and endocrine explanations for why that happens. Basically, if people are suppressing large amounts of stress and they've got high levels of cortisol, that can actually increase your cortisol levels, which then makes you feel stressed and negative.
There are some things like that, but I think basically that when I talk about the laws of attraction, all the personal development exercises that I've included in the book, I don't talk about vibrations.
[0:11:32.5] MB: Fair enough. I think that that, what you – you made a really good point that underscores a lot of this, which you said earlier, though there might be some pieces of this that are not supported by science, a huge amount of it is really robustly supported and has not only evidence backing into the science, but also really tangible results in the real world of positive outcomes that they've created for people.
[0:11:56.4] TS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned the vision boards and I've done them for about 10 years now and I've got great stories for my own, about how the things on my vision boards have come true. You hear these stories. Now that the book is out, I'm actually getting messages on Instagram from people I don't know. When I hear the stories from my friends, I think, “Yeah. Yeah. I told you it would work.” When I get messages from strangers saying, “I arrived at this vacation destination and oh, my goodness. Look, the picture’s exactly the same as what was on my board.”
Or I get messages from people saying, “My boyfriend proposed to me.” I've had messages about being engaged, being married, getting pregnant, going freelance, this travel stuff. They come up a lot. It's actually just making me believe it even more.
[0:12:45.7] MB: Let's go back to the notion of abundance thinking. How do we start to cultivate a mindset of abundance and what happens to us and our lives and our thinking patterns when we do?
[0:12:58.3] TS: I think the first step is to decide that that's what you want to do. Actually, I talk about a four-step process for any behavior change. I make the analogy that anything you want to do, whether it's cultivating abundant thinking, whether it's mastering your emotions, whether it's accessing your intuition, it's exactly the same physiological process in the brain as learning a new language.
It starts with raising awareness, which is that basically asking yourself is my life exactly how I always dreamed it would be. If it's not, then would thinking in different ways potentially help me to achieve the life that I would like to have? Then once you're aware of what you need to do, we'll use the example of abundant thinking.
The next step is called focused attention and it's about looking for opportunities, where you could behave differently. Either looking back at the past, or journaling now and saying, “Okay, so there was this opportunity to travel for work, but I didn't take it because I thought that if I left the office, my team would manage fine without me and I'd basically not be needed anymore.” That thing. You start to notice where you're not doing it and you potentially could think differently.
The third stage is deliberate practice. It's committing to intentionally thinking abundantly, even if that's not your natural default. There's an ancient Buddhist philosophy that says you should replace any negative thought with a positive thought immediately. I write about this in the book. It's a Buddhist philosophy, but it's very much backed up by the science of neuroplasticity, which is how the brain changes, either itself or in response to things that we expose it to.
Every time we recall a thought, or a memory, or we have this narrative in our mind about something negative, it reinforces the neural pathway that supports that thought. As soon as you start thinking, “Oh, I'd never be able to start up my own business,” you immediately replace that with, “One day, I'll start up my own business.” You're reducing the number of negative thoughts and overwriting them with a new positive thought.
The way that neuroplasticity works, or brain pathways develop, or wither with disuse, you can't really undo something that's already a pathway in the brain, so you need to overwrite it with the new desired behavior. The final key to this whole process is about accountability. If you said, “After this podcast, I'd like to think more abundantly,” but then you didn't really do much about it and I caught up with you in six months’ time and you said, “Oh, yeah. I tried for a few weeks and then life got in the way.” That's basically because you're missing the key part of accountability.
You would either make a commitment to me or a friend or write it in your journal, but a bit more than that. Make a commitment so that you're held accountable. Or use technology. I like this app called HabitShare and I have at any one time 10 habits that I'm trying to cultivate. I shared the exercise, one with a colleague, I keep something private. You can share some of them with family. You can use technology to hold yourself accountable, but I always feel that for example with my coaching clients, they know that in a month's time, I'm going to come back and say, “Did you do that thing that we talked about?” That they're much more likely to do it, because they know that I'm going to ask.
[0:16:21.3] MB: That's a really important point about having accountability, because it's such a great way to create adherence to any new behavior pattern. I want to circle back and dig in a little bit deeper around this idea of neuroplasticity. I think it's such a critical strategy. I have two questions, which are interrelated; one is what would you say to somebody who either can't or feels they can't dislodge a negative thought from their head and it keeps repeating itself, keeps pinging around in there?
The second thing which is a corollary of that is how do you start to at a very practical and implementable level in your life, start to actually proactively use the science of neuroplasticity to overwrite thoughts and behavior patterns and brain infrastructure that you want to change?
[0:17:10.5] TS: Okay. You might have to remind me of the second part of the question again.
[0:17:13.7] MB: Fair enough.
[0:17:14.5] TS: Because I have quite a lot to say about the first part. Actually, I'm just going a little bit back to what we were saying before about replacing a negative thought with a positive one, what I encourage people to do is that if you have a repetitive negative thought, or a theme to your negative narrative, then you try to distill it down to the basic underlying belief that drives that negative thought.
Then what you do is you create an opposite statement and then you use that as your positive affirmation, or your mantra, whichever word you like to use. Again, that struggle between the spiritual world and the more scientific world.
A lot of people say, think, “I can't do something, or that will never happen for me.” You simply change it to, “I can do X, or one day that will happen for me.” I ask people to really use their own words and their own voice, something that's going resonate with them. It's quite difficult to choose that for someone. I sometimes make suggestions, but it's really important that you go where and think about it and think okay, what's really underneath all of this? Then create your personal statement that opposes that.
It really is a case of immediately replacing the thought. I used to have a list in my journal of things I'd accomplished, or compliments that I'd been given, new things that was proud of in my career. That if I started having negative thoughts, I could immediately go to the journal and they were already there. Because sometimes once you get into a spiral, it's very difficult to reverse it.
I started off like that and then it became a habit for me and I didn't have to go to the written down statements anymore. Actually, I have a few examples of thought for myself. I think we all have these negative thoughts and they've probably been there since we were children and that's why they're so entrenched, because they've been there for so long, they've been repeated so many times. It's a repetition and emotional intensity that embeds thoughts and behaviors more.
When I wrote my PhD, it was the hardest thing I've ever done. It's the only time in my life I'd wanted to give up at something. My PhD professor, I mean, I have a lot of love for the guy, but his management style was basically to say, “If you don't get on with this, then you're going to be seen as a failure for the rest of your life.” It was not very motivational. There are lots of negative emotions associated for me with that time.
When I met Andrew, who I co-wrote An Attitude for Acting with, we were actually going to do some workshops with that name, but I said to him that sounds like a book title. He said, “Let's write a book.” I thought, “Oh, no. I don't like writing. I'm not good at it. I don't want to do it.” He came back the next day with 12 chapter headings. I really liked him and I really wanted to work with him, so I did it. Basically, I practically had PTSD from it, because it reminded me of writing up my PhD. I definitely at that point said, I'm never going to write a book again.
Then Paul Brown, who I wrote Neuroscience for Leadership with, suggested that we write 12 short blogs basically and then make them into a book. I fell into that without thinking about it too much. In both those cases, because I really liked the person and I wouldn't let them down, I managed to complete the writing, but I found it very difficult and stressful. Again, I said I'll never write a book again.
Then the opportunity to write about science and spirituality was just too tempting for me. Of course, I knew that I had this secret fear deep down that I couldn't write a book by myself. It got to the point where I wanted to prove to myself that I could. The book came out in the UK about six months ago and it was immediately a UK bestseller. It actually in the first week was ranked just above The Secret in the non-fiction hardback chart, so that was a exciting moment.
My publisher actually said, “You couldn't make this up.” It was a really positive experience. One morning a few months after that, I was doing my makeup in the mirror in my bathroom and I was obviously having a little story going around in my head and I thought, “Yes, because I'm not a writer.” It was good I was in front of a mirror, because I stopped. I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, “Tara, Neuroscience for Leadership is an award-winning book. The Source is a best-seller. You are a writer.”
I came to that and now whenever that thought creeps in, I just laugh about it, because I have that little story. It relates to impostor syndrome, which I think so many people have, because I've blogged about that and got just so many e-mails from people saying they really resonated with it. One of my things is that I don't look like a typical MIT professor. This is a thought at the back of my mind and one day, I flew into San Francisco Airport, because I was giving a guest lecture at Stanford.
The immigration officer asked me what business I was coming into the country on. I said, Associate Professor at Stanford. I just flown from London overnight. I was wearing a hoodie and sneakers and had my hair scraped up and he actually looked at me and said, “You're a professor at Stanford?” I had this moment where I thought, “Yeah, I don't look like one.” Then I thought, “No, no, no. I do this to myself all the time. I'm not going to let somebody reinforce that thought.” I said, “Yeah, I am.” He asked me what I teach and I said neuroscience. He said, “Okay then.”
I think sometimes maybe, because both of those stories end with humor that's changed it for me. I think when we laugh about something, we release that bonding hormone oxytocin. That actually does – it trumps unconscious and conscious biases, for example. We know that. I think for me, I had a bias. When I laughed about it, it dissolved away.
[0:23:09.9] MB: That's a great point about using oxytocin to potentially re-encode some of those memories or experiences or beliefs. There's so many themes from The Source I want to explore. Before we do, you touched on something that is such a great topic and I'd love to hear you extrapolate on it a little bit. Tell me more about imposter syndrome and how people can overcome it.
[0:23:34.1] TS: I've just realized as well that we didn't really go into the neuroplasticity second part of the question, but we will. I'll try to weave them in together. Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you feel like a bit of a fraud, you feel you'll be found out. It often happens because people get promoted on their technical skills, but either aren't taught the managerial or leadership skills that they need, or they just don't have the experience, or take to it naturally.
Neuroplasticity is actually relevant here, in terms of either learning the behaviors that you need formally, or just practicing them over and over again, until you feel that it's more natural for you to behave as a leader. I want to say that when I first blogged about impostor syndrome, it was because the person that said to me, “One day someone's going to come into this corner office and tell me that I should never have been here,” was a hedge fund billionaire. That was the last – a male. I just thought, you are the stereotype at the last person that anybody would ever think has impostor syndrome.
I have to say that when he said it, I was thinking, okay, what exercises can I deal with him, or how can I explain it to him to help him move through this? There was definitely a part me that thought, “Thank, goodness. I'm not the only person that feels like that.” That's why I started asking all my clients, every industry, every age and gender, every continent of the world if they ever experienced it. I don't think there's been anybody that said no.
[0:25:05.1] MB: That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I know that I have personally experienced impostor syndrome many times in my life. I remember when I was first hired at Goldman Sachs and I was a young analyst and I was in the training class, I felt like a total imposter. It's amazing how universal of an experience it is. What are some of the strategies or solutions for dealing with it?
[0:25:29.6] TS: One of them actually is what we talked about earlier, which is creating a positive statement that you use when you get those feelings. Other ones are in journaling to like I said before actually as well, have a list of things that you've accomplished, golden moments in your career, things you're proud of in your life. That's just reinforcing through writing and through what you think and what you say that this fear, or this uncertainty is not founded in a fact.
If it is founded in a fact, if it is, I've never been trained to manage people. I'm good at being an analyst, but I've never been trained to manage people, then to go and get the training. Go and read or get the formal training, whatever it is that you need to feel – to get over that feeling of I shouldn't be here, or I can't do this.
I think the reason that I – so I've actually wrote subsequently written about it again, because I think it's so important for people to realize that pretty much everybody has it. I think that normalizes it and it reduces the fair about it as well, because then it's not just you. Because all of us think it's just us and this makes you realize that it's not.
What I think is interesting is that people – often in my class at MIT, or just when I'm giving a talk somewhere, quote this statistic that women experience impostor syndrome more than men. Now I have to say that my case studies are biased by the fact that about 90% of the people I coach are men, simply because that's a reflection of who's at the level that I tend to coach. I can't say whether it's more in women or not, but I can say that there are an awful lot of men out there that you wouldn't think have it, but they do.
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[0:28:27.1] MB: I want to come back to some of the other themes we’ve talked about earlier. Tell me a little bit more about visualization, because that’s something that I’ve seen a lot of contradictory science on, both saying that visualization is good, it empowers you and also that it can even disempower you or make you feel you've already achieved your goals and demotivate you. What does the science say around visualization and what are some of the most effective strategies for visualization?
[0:28:53.6] TS: I haven't heard those negative ones before actually. I mean, it made me smile the last one about it makes you feel you've already achieved your goals and demotivates you. Because what I say is that visualizing something makes it less threatening for the brain, because in the brain, anything new, or any uncertainty is very threatening. If you visualize going to an important meeting or an interview, then to some extent it prepares your brain by making it feel it's not a completely unknown scenario.
However, I don't have any evidence to show you that visualizing success makes you feel you've already achieved everything. That would probably be taking things a little bit too far. However, I will say that one of the studies I quote in the book is that in three groups of people, a control group and then a group that lifted certain numbers of weights and repeated it a certain number of times over the time period of the study, compared to the group that just visualized lifting the same weights for the same time period.
The increase in muscle mass for the actual group was 30 something percent. The increase in muscle mass for the visualization group was 12% to 15%. It's not the same, but it's quite stunning that it has any effect at all.
Visualization, I think of it as three things. It's an umbrella that three main things fall under. One is actually creating a vision board, which by science I call it an action board, because it’s a collage that you create with metaphorical representations of what you would like your life to look like, or what you would like to achieve in your life, but it has to be backed up by actions. You can't just make the board and look at it and hope that everything comes true.
If you make the board and you look at it regularly and you visualize it coming true and you do something every day to move yourself closer to those goals, then it's much more likely that some things, or everything on it will eventually become real. The reason for that is that because we're bombarded with so much information all the time, everything we see, everything we hear, everyone we meet, all the things on our mind, the brain naturally filters out things that aren't deemed relevant to our success, or reaching our goals.
There's selective filtering of the data that we're bombarded with. Then there's selective attention to the things that are the most important. There's a another concept in the brain called value tagging, which is that everything that's prioritized is tagged in order of importance. Actually, when you make a vision board and you look at it regularly and you visualize the success, you are priming your brain with those images more at the front of your mind to potentially grasp opportunities that might otherwise have passed you by, because you're busy doing the day job, you're busy looking after the kids. It's not urgent enough to try to start your own business, or try redecorate your home, or go traveling.
You know that you want it, but it gets keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list. The visual priming has a very strong effect in the brain in terms of raising up that list of what's tagged as important. Did you ever play Tetris when you're a kid?
[0:32:14.4] MB: Yeah, for sure.
[0:32:15.6] TS: Do you remember that if you played it last thing at night that when you closed your eyes to go to sleep, you would see the metal blocks falling down in front of your eyes?
[0:32:23.2] MB: Of course. Yeah, I've had that experience with several different games.
[0:32:26.4] TS: Yeah. It's a psychological phenomenon called the Tetris effect. That's why I recommend either looking at your vision board, or doing your visualization last thing at night, because the state of consciousness that's associated with going from being awake to falling asleep, the hypnagogic state is where your subconscious is most suggestible. That works.
Then I don't know if you would categorize this under visualization, but to me it's part of it and it's about the dramatic effect of the brain on the body. My favorite study on that is three groups of people in their 80s; one group, the controlled group asked to live not normally for a week, one group were asked to reminisce about what it was to be like in your 60s and one group were actually moved into homes that looked like their home did 20 years ago. They had their visual aids and their mobility aids taken away for a week. They had photos of themselves when they were in their 60s in the place that they lived for a week.
The group that lived like that, they had improved visual acuity and musculoskeletal coordination after a week. The reminiscing group had some improvements, but not as much. Just to tie this all up to everything that we've been speaking about, neuroplasticity is the ability to change your brain. If you know that what you think and how you live and what you see can actually change physical things in your body, then you're going to be much more careful about what you look at and who you talk to and how you behave.
Just a really small story, but just an example, because you asked for examples of how people can use neuroplasticity, is that when I went for my annual eye check up when I was turning 40, the optician said, “You look younger than 40, but you are 40, and so you're going to need reading glasses soon. You could take them now, or you might be able to manage for another year.” I immediately thought, “Well, reading glasses to me is associated with being old, so I don't want them.” I said, “No, I don't want them and I'm not going to have them next year either.” He said, “Well, we'll see.”
All I did was say no to that. Then whenever I needed to look at my phone or read a book and I felt it would be a bit easier if I moved it further away, I just didn't do that. That's what I did for a year. When I came back for my test, he said, “How have you been?” I said, “Fine.” He said, “Well, we'll see the numbers on your test.” Halfway through the test, he spun around in his chair and said, “What have you been doing?” I said, “Why? Is it still the same?” He said, “No, it's better than last year.” I told him and he said – I said, “I did a neuroplasticity experiment on myself.” He said, “Okay, that's great. Obviously, you haven't actually done that much, so I think you'll probably need them next year.” It’s now six years later and I still don't need them.
For me, knowing how the brain works has made me able to make that choice and actually make something different in the real world, because of it. That's why I wrote the book, because with what I know about neuroplasticity and brain agility, I just thought everybody needs to know this.
[0:35:46.1] MB: That's a fascinating story. I'm very curious about it. Tell me a little bit more about the – I understand how neuroplasticity works, but tell me about how the brain mechanism of either the belief of refusing to that you need glasses, or the actual activity of looking at things, tell me how that specifically interacted with neuroplasticity to create the brain state, or the physical changes in your brain, so that you wouldn't need to wear reading glasses?
[0:36:16.4] TS: It's based on the fact that we have these unconscious primers in our brain that dictate what goes on in our body through the interaction of nerves and hormones, so the neuro-endocrine system. For example, a study that was done on Harvard medical students, so young, healthy, smart people, they were asked to walk between five rooms. In the rooms, there were pieces of paper on a table that they had to string a sentence out of. They thought that was the whole experiment. One of the rooms had the words Florida, bungalow, walk, sunshine, beach.
These associations prime us to think about retirement. No matter what order they entered the rooms, 85% of the students walked out of that room more slowly than the other rooms, because they thought about retirement and that slowed them down. I think being aware of the fact that what you say and what you do changes your body, because it changes your physiology is the start. It really brings us back to the four-step process that I talked about earlier, that being aware, the focusing attention, the deliberate practice and the accountability.
If we take that backwards, I know that I'm going to have an eye test every year. I deliberately didn't change my behavior to accommodate my worsening vision and I focused attention on the things that I needed to do or not do to allow that to happen. Basically with that intention and those actions, the brain pathways that would have got lazier and lazier, especially if I took the glasses and then just could read without even thinking about it, actually physiologically I would say that I don't think I grew any new neurons, but I think that I made connections between neurons that already exist maybe myelinated some of the pathways to make that optic nerve pathway more efficient, or at least remain robust.
[0:38:20.7] MB: It's so fascinating. It's such a great example. I don't want to waste too much more time on it, but I'm just quite curious about it. Frankly, I wear glasses and have a really bad prescription, so I'm just trying to reverse engineer if I could apply that in some way. This is the last quick thing that I'll ask about this. Isn't the eye itself to some degree the lens, the shape of the eye, I mean, those are all things that are outside of the scope of neuroplasticity, right? If your eye lens is changing, you can't really do much about that just by thinking about it.
[0:38:49.1] TS: I agree. I think this example is really just an analogy for other things that we can change. For example, if we talk about brain agility, there are six things in the model that I describe, which are mastering your emotions, trusting your intuition, understanding your brain-body connection, making good decisions, staying motivated and resilient to reach your goals and creating the real-world outcomes that you desire. Those are all things that are pathways in the brain that you can do something about. That's I think more important than necessarily not getting really close.
[0:39:25.1] MB: Yes, that's right. Okay, perfect. Let's dig into that a little bit. Tell me about intuition. I'm very curious, how do we access our intuition and how do we align our intuition with our emotions, with our rational thought to create even more powerful brains?
[0:39:40.6] TS: That's a really good question, because they don't always align do they? That's the issue. I have found journaling to be the single, best way of raising my awareness about my intuition and the decisions that I make based on intuition and the decisions that I make based on logic. Obviously, if they naturally align that's no problem. If they don't and this comes up quite a lot in fire and hire situations, or well, I'll stick with fire – I was going to say in relationships as well.
I mean, well no, I'll talk about both, because the hire and fire situation is that if you've got similar resumes, similar qualifications and experience, sometimes you just get that gut feeling that this is the right person to choose. You must always double-check that through your logical system, or with somebody else. Intuition is basically, because we can't remember everything that we have experienced in our life, but it's the wisdom and life experiences that we've picked up, which are stored in our nervous system. It's accessing those.
What I find is reading back over the journal and seeing the times that I've said, “Oh, I don't think this is working. I think I need to change what I'm doing,” but then you don't do it and a few more months pass. Then you look back and you either see, “I'm in the same position I was in six months ago and I haven't done anything differently, but I'm expecting a different outcome,” or use and/or, you see the real positivity and benefit of the times that you have listened to your intuition.
The reason I said there's something else that's a bit more contentious, but I have so many cases of people saying, “I know I need to leave this relationship, but I don't want to be single again, or I don't know if I'll find somebody better, or time's running out and I want to have a family.” Every single time, that nagging doubt has started, it's ended at some point down the line.
Then if you'd listened to your intuition, you probably could have done that quicker. Obviously, you learn through mistakes, or near misses as well and that adds to your intuition. Everything probably comes out in the washer at the end of the day, but repeating the same mistakes is something you can avoid by listening to your intuition. I was going to say one other thing. Sorry, it's left me.
[0:41:58.7] MB: It's all good. Yeah, that's a great point about journaling. It's such a powerful strategy. You make a really good connection that journaling is how we can align our rational thinking with our intuition and with our emotions.
[0:42:16.1] TS: Exactly. I've remembered what I wanted to say. Can I add it on, because it's –
[0:42:20.1] MB: Please. Add it.
[0:42:22.5] TS: Thank you. What we know about how memories, or information gets stored in the brain is that in the outer cortex, we have what's called our working memory, which is everything we need to do our job and live our life. Deeper in the limbic system, we have the habits and behavior patterns that we’ve picked up over life. Since we've been able to scan brains and bodies, we've seen that there's a large neuronal connection between the gut neurons and the limbic part of the brain. This is believed to underlie intuition.
What's absolutely fascinating is that if you take a good quality probiotic, which improves your gut bacteria, or the diversity of your gut bacteria, if you take a good quality one for a month, you get less negative thinking. Actually, the health of your gut physically also clouds, or contributes to your intuition. There's a three-way connection between the gut bacteria themselves, the neurons in the gut and the brain. The gut neurons in the brain communicate through the neural pathways. The gut bacteria through cytokine transmission, which is chemical signaling through the blood, signal to the gut neurons and to the brain separately.
If you've been stressed, you've taken antibiotics, you've drunk alcohol, then your gut bacteria becomes depleted. Either the quality or the quantity goes down, or both. If you eat prebiotic foods, like onions, garlic, artichokes, if you eat fermented foods and you take probiotics, especially when you travel and depending on the strain that you take, it can actually contribute to improving mental health, mental performance and trust in your intuition.
[0:44:08.1] MB: Such a great point about gut health and probiotics. I think we're going to see some tremendous strides in that field, in science and research and action around that in the coming years. I want to jump around a little bit. There's a couple other concepts that I found really fascinating that I want to touch on. One of them that you talk about is the importance of the concept of metacognition. Can you talk about what that is and why it's so important?
[0:44:33.5] TS: Metacognition is basically thinking about your thinking. Because this age-old phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” we completely align ourselves with our thoughts. We think that everything we think is true, basically. Then there's the whole element of we don't know what we don't know. Metacognition is basically about stepping back and asking yourself, “Are your thought processes healthy? Is there something that you believe that is a barrier to your success? Could you reframe the way that you think? Could somebody else's point of view actually be helpful or better for you?”
Because of the way our brain develops from the womb and through childhood, the things that have been there for the longest are the ones that we’re the least aware of. These automatic reactions that we have to things, the thoughts that we have over and over again, they're so much part of who we are, but we can't separate ourselves from them.
It's just a really good practice and there are some exercises in the book and out there, about just stepping back and actually looking at your thinking and looking at and starting afresh what's working, what's not. There are many exercises in the book to exactly to help you reframe your thinking based on the understanding of that metacognition is an important thing to do.
[0:45:54.5] MB: I want to just really briefly check in. I know we're coming up on the hour. Do you have a hard stop, or do you have the ability to go just one or two minutes over?
[0:46:01.7] TS: Yeah, I can go one or two minutes over.
[0:46:03.4] MB: Okay, perfect. I would love it if you could give me an example of one of those concrete exercises that someone could use to improve metacognition, or to reframe their thinking.
[0:46:14.8] TS: Okay, there are several, but one’s really jumping to mind. It's a three column exercise. I have a couple of three column exercises in the book. It's a cultivating abundant thinking. Come full circle. You start by making an ideal statement, so something that you would like to have in your life, something you would like to do and it could be anything, like start my own business, or have a balanced life, something like that.
In the first column, you write down every single barrier to you being able to achieve that statement. When I work with people to do it, I really encourage them to think of more, to dig deeper, to keep coming up with the reasons, because it works best if you pretty much manage to come up with every single barrier that you believe exists between you and this ideal outcome.
Then in the second, so it can be – usually it's things like, “I don't have enough money. I don't have enough time. There are things that I can't control. There are other people involved,” and so on and so on. Then in the second column, you write the opposite statement to all of the barriers, even if they couldn't possibly be true. You might say, “I have unlimited resources. I spend 24 hours a day on this. I control the final outcome. I'm not dependent on other people for what I need to get done.”
Then once you've done an opposite statement for every single barrier, in the third column you write as if the second column is now true, you write what I do differently now that I have unlimited resources, I have total control over the situation, I'm not dependent on anyone else. The wording is very important. It's not what I would do, it's what I do now that this is true. You tend to get some repeat answers here from – the opposite statements can lead some of the same things that you actually do in the real world.
I get people to put those answers into themes. Usually, I'm not going to say half, but close to half of them are things that you could already do differently. You basically reframed your thinking, you've found some things that you could actually do already that would move you towards that goal and you basically have to start doing them.
[0:48:33.0] MB: I want to clarify one thing really quickly. You said a really important point, which is this idea that it's not what you would do differently, it's – frame that again, because I wasn't sure I fully understood it, or heard it correctly. I think it's a really important piece. In column three, what are you writing?
[0:48:48.6] TS: You're writing what I do differently now that I fully believe that column two is true. For example, if you said, “Well, I can't do it because I don't have enough money.” You write in column two, “I have unlimited financial resources for this project.” Then you write down, “Okay, now that I've got unlimited financial resources, what will I actually do?”
[0:49:09.8] MB: Got it. That totally makes sense. Now what you do?
[0:49:12.8] TS: Yeah, it's a subtle difference. I mean, I'm sure it also works if you say what I would to do, but that's putting it into the future and it separates creating an area of separation between you now and being able to do that thing. I specifically get people to say, what I do now that column two is true? Very often, there are almost half the things, the things that you could already do. Then the other ones might take you acting on the first half, to allow the other ones to be doable in the future.
[0:49:41.7] MB: That's a fantastic exercise. Thank you so much for sharing. I think that'll really be able to create some instant breakthroughs for the listeners. You may have just answered it with that, or you might have a different answer, but for somebody who's listening to this, what would be one action step, or a piece of homework that you would give them to implement some of the themes, or ideas that we've talked about today in their lives starting right away, based on what we've talked about today?
[0:50:12.3] TS: Oh, I know the answer to that immediately and that is to create an action board.
[0:50:16.1] MB: Tell me 30 seconds how would you go about creating an action board.
[0:50:20.4] TS: If you want to do it old-school, then you get a stack of magazines from various genres, like travel, lifestyle, fitness and you have an idea of what you want in your life obviously and you look for images that match that. As you leave through the magazines, you also – if you feel very struck by a certain image, but you can't explain why, then you cut that image out too. Then you place the images on the board and the whole board is important.
If you want a full life, then the board will be quite cluttered. If you want to have space and you want things balanced and in their own little niche, then you would have things in sections, you'd have space between them. Even things whether the images are touching each other or not can be important.
I advise people not to use words, because that tracks more to the logical pathways and the visual and creative and emotive pathways. You can use numbers, because a lot of people put the amount of money that they'd like to earn on the board. Then you either keep it in a prominent position, or take a photograph of it and look at it regularly. Sometimes the images of things that you know you want, they just don't feel right on the board, so you should get rid of them, because we're trying – it's accessing intuition. Then sometimes images that you didn't know you wanted might really just feel right on the board, so you'd include them.
You can do this using digitally, instead of actually creating the collage by hand. There's something about that whole tactile color, process that I think contributes to it really. Having said that, this year my one is actually done digitally, because I couldn't find the images that I thought I wanted. For a good seven years, I would make them like that. Like I said, it's an action board, not just a vision board, because you also do the visualization and you do things, you look out for opportunities to do things that will move you closer to those goals.
[0:52:15.7] MB: At what cadence do you typically recreate your action boards?
[0:52:20.3] TS: I do mine annually. I do mine in December for the next year, but there's no rule about that. You can do it on your birthday, you can do it at the start of the school year. To be honest, the best time to do it is now.
[0:52:33.4] MB: From a goal standpoint, are these goals for the next year, or are these lifetime goals?
[0:52:39.4] TS: It can be both. I feel – I like to leave a bit of room for magic. Lifetime just seems very far away and very big and so many things could change. In the meantime, that mine tends to be annual. Sometimes it takes 18 months for everything on the board to materialize. It may be that you can reuse some of it, or you can overlay some of it. I think, it feels more approachable if you start off with a shorter term goal, but then it's totally people's choice if they want to do one for their whole life.
[0:53:12.4] MB: Awesome. Well Tara, where can listeners find you, all of your work and the book online?
[0:53:19.9] TS: Thank you. My website, TaraSwart.com has a book page on it and it's got several retailers on there online and book stores throughout the US. Obviously, the book can be found on Amazon. I'm very active on social media. I'm DrTaraSwart on Instagram, D-RTaraSwart. I'm Tara Swart on Twitter. I regularly blog through my Forbes leadership channel.
[0:53:44.7] MB: Well Tara, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom and some really great practical action steps and ways to implement all of these fascinating ideas.
[0:53:54.7] TS: Thank you so much. It's been a really fun conversation. I feel you led me down the path of making it very practical and actionable for your listeners.
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