104: Wired to Connect -- The Neuroscience of Team Leadership with Dr. Britt Andreatta

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Ep104 Wired to Connect -- The Neuroscience of Team Leadership Britt Andreatta TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

What differentiates high-performing teams from the rest? With the latest research in neuroscience at her disposal, Dr. Britt Andreatta provides a new and comprehensive model that analyzes and synthesizes the motivations, skills, and dynamics that make peak team performance possible: The Four Gates to Peak Team Performance.

What differentiates high-performing teams from the rest? With the latest research in neuroscience at her disposal, Dr. Britt Andreatta provides a new and comprehensive model that analyzes and synthesizes the motivations, skills, and dynamics that make peak team performance possible: The Four Gates to Peak Team Performance. In this episode of The TalentGrow Show, Dr. Andreatta shares the facts and research behind her groundbreaking model and digs into fascinating topics such as ‘neural synchrony’ and what basic human needs and motivations drive us towards teamwork. Learn the significant differences between cooperation and collaboration, discover what skills you need to hone to successfully collaborate with others, and get Dr. Andreatta’s take on some cutting-edge research on the development of human consciousness that is making waves in the leadership space. Don’t miss this exciting episode and be sure to share it with others!

ABOUT DR. BRITT ANDREATTA:

Dr. Britt Andreatta is an internationally recognized thought leader who uses her unique background in leadership, neuroscience, psychology, and learning, to create groundbreaking solutions for today’s workplace challenges. Britt is the former Chief Learning Officer for Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) and she has over 9 million views worldwide of her courses. She regularly consults with businesses (e.g., Comcast, Microsoft, Franklin Covey, Ernst&Young), universities (e.g., University of California, Dartmouth) and nonprofit organizations (e.g., YMCA and Norton Healthcare) on learning strategy and leadership development. Winner of several international awards, Britt is the author of several books and trademarked models.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • Dr. Andreatta talks about what she calls the ‘three zones’ in which teams operate: coordination, cooperation and collaboration (5:11)
  • Dr. Andreatta hones in on cooperation: what it means and what skills it requires (6:28)
  • The important differences between cooperation and collaboration, and what skills you need to collaborate successfully with others (7:08)
  • Halelly asks whether real collaboration is actually seen significantly less than cooperation, and why that might be (8:19)
  • Dr. Andreatta shares an overview of the new model she proposes in her book, which she calls “The Four Gates to Peak Team Performance” (10:05)
  • All the trust-building happens in your first few interactions with someone (11:02)
  • The recent advances in neuroscience that allow us to understand workplace dynamics and leadership better (11:33)
  • What is neural synchrony and how can teams leverage it? (13:06)
  • Dr. Andreatta explains what neural signatures are and what they show (14:10)
  • Halelly brings up the measurable effects of hormones like oxytocin on the brain and on workplace performance (14:48)
  • There are conditions you need to have in place in order to achieve neural synchrony (16:13)
  • How we are psychologically and biologically tuned to bring value to our group, and how our brain measures inclusion and exclusion (16:28)
  • Connecting the Four Gates to basic human needs (17:36)
  • Peak performance is not a sustainable state: drastic changes to the team or the project will result in dropping out of peak performance (18:50)
  • The importance of re-building after dropping out of peak performance (19:34)
  • Contrary to the saying “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’” according to Dr. Andreatta a team is all about the ‘I’ (20:05)
  • Dr. Andreatta shares a few remarks on the neuroscience of purpose and meaning (20:24)
  • Research from Dr. Frederic Laloux on the development of human consciousness that has important significance for teamwork and leadership (20:52)
  • What’s new and exciting on Dr. Andreatta’s horizon? (26:04)
  • One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership skills (27:21)

RESOURCES:

Transcript:

Episode 104 Britt Andreatta

TEASER CLIP: Britt: One of the things that I’ve found is if a member of the team is not at full capacity, the team cannot be at its full capacity. So, the intro to my book is I always thought there was no “I” in team – actually, it’s all about the I’s. All the individuals have to feel those things and then collectively they can make magic together.

Halelly: And they are each unique and different and so they need different things.

Britt: Yes.

[MUSIC] Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Hey there TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, and if you’ve listened to my show before, you probably know that I geek out on neuroscience and I love to invite neuroscientists on the show. But I especially invite neuroscientists who can translate neuroscience to lay people’s terms. So I have a great guest for you today. She is so good at connecting the dots and finding insights from a lot of different fields including neuroscience, and translating them to actionable insights for you as leaders, as employees, as team members. That is Dr. Britt Andreatta. She is going to talk with me about the neuroscience of teams and how we can develop better teams, how we can improve our ability to collaborate, and we even talk a little bit about this idea of purpose. Purpose in an organization, purpose for us as individuals and on teams, and of course she shares not one but two actionable tips for you at the very end. As always, we want to make sure you can take action right away. So, without further ado, let’s take a listen.

This week Dr. Britt Andreatta is on the show to share with us a lot of really juicy information about her research from the world of neuroscience – psychology, learning in leadership. She is an internationally recognized thought leader. She has created the groundbreaking solutions for today’s workplace challenges. She’s the former chief learning officer for Linda.com – now LinkedIn Learning – and she has over nine million views worldwide of her courses there. She regularly consults with businesses like Comcast, Microsoft, Franklin Covey, Ernst and Young, cities and nonprofit organizations on learning strategy and leadership development. She’s the winner of several international awards and author of several books and trademarked models. May I call you Britt?

Britt: Of course. I’m excited to talk to you today.

Halelly: Britt, I’m really happy that you’re here, and you have so much to share. I was so happy when I saw you recently. I actually have seen you for a couple of years at a conference that we both were speakers at. In fact, they put us as next-door neighbors on their marketing pictures of some of the speakers and that was really fun for me. Before we get to dig into some of that information that you have to share with my audience, tell us a brief description of your professional journey. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are today?

Britt: if you look at my whole career, it looks like it’s taken a few turns, but really the golden thread through all of it is I’ve always been about helping people rise to their potential. I started that within higher education. I worked for many years helping new students really step into their university experience and then I worked with seniors getting ready to go out into the job market and really developing their leadership skills. I wrote a book for the university market and I ended up doing a lot of consulting with universities and I found that I was more and more spending my time on leadership development with these orgs I was working with. So there was an opportunity at one point to leave “the university” and move into a different kind of learning and that’s when I became the Chief Learning Officer at Linda.com. I always have been about the intersection of leadership and learning. Those things to me are always linked because they feed each other. That’s when my love of neuroscience started and weaving in what we are we learning about the brain and what does that teach us about how we learn, how we deal with change, how we build teams and so now I have three books out on the brain science of success. The most recent one is on teams. The last one was on change and the first one was on learning. That’s kind of my passion and now what I do with that research is I help people turn it into real actionable things they can do right away that they can implement in their organization the very next day.

Halelly: That’s so important. That’s one of the goals of this show as well, to make it super actionable. Otherwise, most people in organizations just don’t have time just for hypothetical theorizing and things like that, like maybe they do in the university setting. I was really glad to read your books and your latest book, Wired to Connect, is definitely as you said about teams and how we can use the findings from neuroscience and the research that’s going on in that field to help teams collaborate and perform better. There are so many case studies that you’ve collected in your book from people on real teams and both successful and less successful stories. I think that helps a lot. There’s so much in that book, but one of the things I thought would be valuable to talk about here with our listeners learning from you is about how there are, you say, three different zones in which teams operate. You call them coordinate, cooperation and collaboration. Can you give us a brief overview of what each of these means and what do leaders and teams need to change to become more effective?

Britt: It’s really a continuum, so if you think of kind of the left-hand side of this continuum us really simple tasks – that’s where coordination would live – the right-hand side of the continuum is where the complex and innovative tasks live – that’s collaboration – and then in the middle is cooperation. That’s kind of where complicated stuff is that’s kind of between the two. I’m going to hone in a little bit on cooperation and collaboration, because we use these words all the time in our daily lives at work, but often we really don’t set teams up to do it well. Cooperation is really where you’ve got the coordinated efforts of two or more people, but they have their distinct portion of this process or task to do. So you can imagine, this person is going part of the project and then they hand it off to their colleague or Team A is working on it and they hand it off to Team B, and they are co-operating. They are each doing their thing, but they have to come together to complete the whole task. The skills that you need for this kind of operation is you really need to be good at planning, aligning your work, communicating and having a clear process for executing that task, whatever it is. That’s very different than collaboration.

Collaboration is a whole other animal, and collaboration is really this mutual engagement of two or more people trying to achieve some kind of common goal, but they both contribute to it in new and unexpected ways. It’s really an act of creation. As the folks are working together, whatever it is they’re building gets changed and tweaked because of their input, because of their contributions to it. No one can predict how it’s going to turn out because it gets built as they’re working together. This is a very different process. There’s a lot of creative tension and innovation. What you need here, the skills you need for collaboration, you have to have trust in place, respect, you need to be able to respond to each other. You need to also have a very mindful process for conflict, because it’s going to come up as you tussle with those ideas or opinions about what it is you’re creating.

I really like to help people understand that teams move back and forth on this continuum, but we have to make sure they have the skillsets to do each part of the continuum. What I find is a lot of teams are great a cooperation, but they don’t necessarily have the skill or the support to collaborate, even though they’re asked to do it. So that’s why a lot of projects fail.

Halelly: I have a couple of follow-up questions I’d love to ask you, but first, when you described cooperation I was like, “Yup, yup, check.” That’s what happens in most organizations on teams. Everybody kind of feels like they’re in charge of a distinct, separate part of whatever the final product is, and they are interdependent in the sense that they can’t deliver on whatever their promise is without the other people. But the collaboration – and it sounds very much like you’re describing synergy in there – is something that we talk about a lot and maybe we aspire to, but do most teams have even an opportunity or are free to truly collaborate in that way? What do you find?

Britt: You know, I think what we have is a good chunk of teams are really in the cooperation space, but we label it collaboration. People know what they’re supposed to do – they’re supposed to crank it out, they’re supposed to work and play nicely with others and get it done. But collaboration is this real different animal, and I would say you see collaboration more in teams that are asked to innovate, problem solve, respond to some kind of challenge, because they have to create it in the process. Often times, we ask cooperating teams to move over to collaboration, but we don’t really support them in doing it, or they don’t have the skillset to do it well. Then what they do is they devolve back to the kind of their portion and the real problem doesn’t get the great solution it could have had if they knew how to collaborate with each other.

Halelly: In your book you describe a lot about how teams can collaborate, and you also talk a lot about the stuff that goes on on teams, in terms of the neuroscience backend of it, and how building trust – you mentioned trust – how building trust is such an important part of it, being able to communicate in a certain way is such an important part of it. What would you say maybe in a short form that can help a leader actually foster collaboration? To teach it?

Britt: There are a lot of elements to it, and in the book I ultimately take all these findings from brain science and I propose this new model, which I call the four gates to peak team performance. What I’ve found is that neurologically, there are steps that our brain has to go through as we form relationships with these new people and as we understand our flow and our value in accomplishing whatever it is we’ve been asked to accomplish together. And that certain things need to be checked off and handled, or else we cannot progress to the next gate. You only get peak performing teams, teams that are really operating at that high level of collaboration and productivity and effectiveness if they successfully made it through the other three gates. My experience is that most teams get hobbled early on because we don’t set them up right from the beginning. All the trust building or loss happens in the first few interactions together. People’s assessment of how much they can contribute and how much they’ll be valued in the group is determined early on, and then that determines how much they lean in and really commit to it. So what I’m finding is that neurologically, we have to kind of pay attention to what the brain is doing and what it needs in place to keep moving forward in a really productive way, and if you do it right you can consistently get teams to that peak performing level. You get them through all four gates. Most of us get it wrong. So it was really kind of exciting to bring that hidden neurological process that we can now measure. I mean, neuroscience has progressed to the point where we can measure what’s happening in several people’s brains simultaneously. That is a new thing. We couldn’t do that a decade ago. The research on teams is super, super fresh and still evolving, but what it showed to me is now we can actually see what’s happening when people work together and when they engage with each other in a way that’s aggressive or supportive. All these kinds of things that make up kind of that secret sauce that differentiates the best teams we’ve ever been a part of – and I know we’ve all been part of some awesome teams – and the ones that sucked. There’s really a differentiator and it has to do with what’s going on in the brain.

Halelly: I’m so happy to hear you say that it’s a progression. You can’t really skip steps, and the groundwork has to be laid carefully, methodically, intentionally, and also I too geek out on the fact that there’s neuroscience now that backs up or sometimes actually contests a lot of what we’ve been telling people to do, based on observation or just based on our best guess. One of the things that comes out of neuroscience – I know you wrote about it in your book, just one of so many – is this idea of neural synchrony. I know you’re going to explain that because it’s just hard to say and hard to spell, but in your book you have these great explanations of the neuroscience aspect of it in ways that are understandable for lay people and you have graphs that show brain activity and why we say all these findings are informative for leaders. So, what’s this thing about neural synchrony and how can teams leverage it to improve communication and performance?

Britt: What’s cool is neural synchrony is something that neuroscientists have seen, now that we can hook up several people’s brains simultaneously and have them in a room doing some work together and we can timestamp it, exactly what happened when, and how did it relate to what they were working on. Before, we only had people’s either self reports of what they were thinking and feeling, and/or what people could observe from the outside. We had no way to see what was really going on, and what scientists have found is that there absolutely is this thing called neural synchrony and that our brains, when we start working together, and we have particularly positive relationships with each other, we move into this place where not only are the regions of our brain firing at the same time, but our actual brainwaves move into sync. Before it happens, if you had several people on a graph and each person was a different color, these brainwaves would be kind of all over the place. When you achieve neural synchrony, they’re almost tracing each other. They’re that aligned. We can now also see that there are neural signatures for problem solving, conflict, listening to each other, kind of deciding on an idea that we can see that there are neural signatures of different kinds of group work that we do together.

Halelly: What do you mean by neural signatures?

Britt: That it looks a certain way. The brainwave pattern for problem solving is different than the brainwave pattern for working through conflict. Now that scientists are starting to see them, you could almost go back and just look at the brainwaves and say, “Oh, this group is in this phase of their project together, or this group is moving through this particular action right now.”

Halelly: Oh, it’s so amazing! Not only that, but now we can also measure other things, right? Like hormone secretions. I know that you talk about the work of Dr. Paul Zak. He’s also been on the show before. And how he shows that our secretion of oxytocin is what can predict or enhance trust on teams and in general in communication, and you can measure that by taking people’s blood.

Britt: Yes. I highlight some of his work in this book too. One of the things that I do is I read very widely. I look at a lot of different researchers from a lot of different disciplines, and then what I do is look at where they’re all aligning in a place that I know is happening in real workplaces. I’m always comparing, what are the things we’re seeing in our real workplaces everyday, and then what are these different fields of science saying? Often times, scientists don’t talk to each other. We definitely don’t, the fields don’t talk to each other, but even within the fields, sometimes those scientists don’t connect their work. I’m really kind of finding those hotspots where everything aligns and then bringing those to the surface in a way that we can all understand.

Halelly: That’s a huge value. That is something that’s necessary, not just that deep dive like they do, but also people who connect the dots like you. So there’s so much we can talk about. Is there anything else you want to tell us about the neuroscience of teams, while we’re on that topic? We talked about neural synchrony, we talked a tiny bit about oxytocin and trust. What else should we know?

Britt: Two things. Neural synchrony is the state you want to achieve, but there are conditions that people need to have in order to achieve it. The good news is we’re biologically wired to have neural synchrony. The bad news is we do a lot to mess it up everyday. What I’ve found, and the second major finding was all about inclusion and exclusion. Our bodies, our biology, is acutely tuned to where we are in any group that we’re part of. It’s always kind of making sure that we’re okay with the group. That doesn’t mean that we’re popular or loved or liked, but it does mean that we feel like we can contribute and be of value to the group. If you go back to our hunter/gatherer days, if we were ousted from the group, it meant certain death. And so biologically, we’re always tuned – am I on the margins? Am I in danger, or am I okay with this group? They don’t have to love me, but they have to find that I’m contributing. I have to feel like I’m bringing value here, or I’m in danger. What we’ve found is that the brain measures any kind of active exclusion in the same way it measures physical pain. It’s as dramatic, neurologically, as getting your hand cut off, is feeling excluded by the group. Inclusion is really, really important, and how we create it happens in those early interactions with people.

So there are lots of findings, but when they all came down to it, the four gates in my model, the first one is all about safety. Physical safety and psychological safety. I feel like I’m included in this group. I feel like no one is going to hurt me. The second gate is all about purpose, which is I know what I’m supposed to do, the task or the project is clear, and I see that I can contribute to it and we’re likely to be successful. If you think about it, so many of us sign up for teams or are put on teams and we can tell right from the get go this is never going to happen, or we don’t have the resources to pull it off or whatever, and then people don’t lean in. They don’t bring their A game if they feel like they’re set up to fail.

The third gate is around moving to true belonging, and that’s where that whole neural synchrony comes in. That’s where trust really gets, you really start dialing up the trust. It’s where people feel good enough about the relationships and their contributions and they’re really starting to dig into the project and really start to harness their relationships to produce good work. And then finally the final gate is peak performance, where that team is just a well-honed machine. They can drop into neural synchrony at the drop of a hat. Conflict or challenges don’t throw them out of it. They can kind of work through it and keep producing things well. And the thing about that fourth gate is it’s not a sustainable state. Teams can get there and hang out for a while, but if you change one member of that team or you give that team a new boss or you drastically change the project that they’re working on, they will drop out of the fourth gate and have to rework their way back up to it. Another lesson here is when you’ve got a peak performing team, the leaders and the managers should be doing everything they can to protect that team and let it run that run as long as they can.

Halelly: For teams to not become discouraged if one thing changes and they feel like they’ve lost that special magic because you can probably rebuild faster once you’ve reached it, but you do need to scale back sometimes.

Britt: A lot of teams don’t do the work of going back and rebuilding. So they’ll lose a member of the team and get a new person – just think about turnover in any organization – and people want to just keep going like they were. Unless that new person is brought in through the four gates and feel safe and feel included, they feel like they can contribute, they won’t then be operating at their full capacity. One of the things that I’ve found is if a member of the team is not at full capacity, the team cannot be at its full capacity. So, the intro to my book is I always thought there was no “I” in team – actually, it’s all about the I’s. All the individuals have to feel those things and then collectively they can make magic together.

Halelly: And they are each unique and different and so they need different things.

Britt: Yes.

Halelly: Which makes it all the more tricky. You mentioned purpose as your second gate, and one of the presentations I saw you give to a huge audience at the ATD conference where we both spoke was about the neuroscience of purpose. You gave a fabulous presentation and talk about it.

Britt: Thank you.

Halelly: You’re welcome. I enjoyed it. There was so much that you shared – what’s maybe one nugget you can share with us about the neuroscience of purpose here?

Britt: If you know my work, I’ve been kind of building the story. I started off with Wired to Grow, which is all about how we learn, and then I went to Wired to Resist, which is kind of how we deal with change, which is we don’t deal with it well, biologically. This last book was Wired to Connect and the next one is going to be all about Wired to Become. We’re really biologically wired to seek purpose and have a sense of meaning in our lives. That’s different for each of us, but a meaningful life, a purposeful life, is really a biological core need, and so I was introducing people to all the initial research I’ve done in that area and I bring together a lot of different studies. Some of the work that I highlighted and I think you’ve had him on your show as Aaron Hurst and Arthur Woods, they’re the co-founders of Imperative. They’re doing a lot of great research on purpose and how we measure purpose and how we find people’s purpose profiles. There’s also the connection between people’s individual sense of purpose and what the organization does. Because every organization has a purpose, too, and if there’s good alignment and people can see how they contribute to that bigger mission or vision, they usually are much more committed to their work. A lot of orgs and/or leaders/managers in those orgs don’t do a great job of connecting the dots. Really looking at how we’re wired for purpose. In fact, purpose and having a kind of meaningful sense in your life is different than happiness. It actually shows up in a different part of the brain. Happiness is awesome. We should shoot for happiness and that’s a sense of pleasure, but purpose is really about having a sense of impact and it’s deeply meaningful. It’s not always happy. Sometimes there’s hard work or even discomfort when you’re fulfilling your purpose, but it drives you because you know you’re following the path in your head to your North Star.

Halelly: To judge just by the number of guests that are pitching me about doing something with purpose, related to purpose, people are hungry for it and people are interested in it. We’ve had several episodes about that. I’ll link to them in the show notes.

Britt: Actually, there’s research on that too, which is Fredrick Laloux, wrote a great book called Reinventing Organizations, and he has identified that humans go through levels of consciousness. There are actually people that study consciousness, and organizationally we’re shifting, because human consciousness is increasing. We’re hitting higher levels of consciousness. As we do, we see the org consciousness changing too. Human consciousness is measured in colors. We’re kind of hanging out in the orange to green category, but Laloux is identifying several orgs that are coming online now that are exhibiting teal consciousness, and that’s really all about hungering for more purpose and meaning. What I love is all these very, very different researchers, there’s alignment in everything we’re finding. It’s just that Laloux doesn’t really talk to brain scientists but I do and I’m like, “Oh my God, this is totally connected.” It’s kind of fun to see it all be aligned. We are shifting as a society. We are becoming more conscious. We’re caring more about each other. We’re feeling more connected. Yes, there’s pockets where that’s not happening, but it is a direction we’re moving, and one of the things I talk to organizations about is teal is right here, and right around the corner after that is the next color, indigo, and so what are you doing now to be preparing for this shift that’s happening in society? That drives what people are looking for in their work and how happy they feel in their jobs.

Halelly: And you know, people that are stuck in the Industrial Age of business are probably listening to this and rolling their eyes in their socket like, “Oh my God, can people stop asking for purpose and just be happy that you have a paycheck and come to work,” and it’s like we’re done with that. Those days are done.

Britt: They are. I mean, we still see vestiges of them, but the thing is, society is pushing it. They can keep rolling their eyes and staying stuck, but what I can tell you will happen is their organization will ultimately fail, because they’re not shifting and evolving while society is.

Halelly: Do you have something that we can add a link, that people can see those colors? Because of course in our audio medium here it’s just so frustratingly blind.

Britt: I would just send you to Laloux’s website, Reinventing Organizations.

Halelly: We’ll add that to the resources.

Britt: He’s great. He shares a ton of his stuff and he’s got great talks, so go check him out. His book blew my mind. It changed how I thought about a lot of things.

Halelly: Interesting. Is this related to singularity at all?

Britt: It’s related to holacracy, so moving to this idea of connected space. You may have heard about this work, because Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, read Laloux’s work and said, “I want to intentionally make my organization teal,” and so he’s actually trying to shove his organization into the teal status and he’s had some great successes. He’s also had some kind of lumps along the way. But holacracy and there’s some consultants that work in holacracy work, that’s kind of what the conversation is.

Halelly: Great. Well, Britt, I’m sorry that our time is almost up and I want to make sure that we leave our listeners with that one specific action, plus how to stay in touch with you, but before we do, what’s new and exciting on your horizon?

Britt: I’m building out the teams training right now. Every time I write a book I also build a learning solution that organizations can get certified in and roll it out to their members. So I’m building the one out for the neuroscience of teams and inclusion collaboration. That’s going to be out in late fall. My change training is already out there. Lots of orgs are using it. It’s based on the brain science of how we help people adapt to change better, and organizations are getting phenomenal results on it. I’m excited that I’m working on a new manager training. It’s kind of the brain-based manager, and that’s going to be out in spring. So if you want to hear when those things are out, you can go to my website, BrittAndreatta.com, and subscribe or follow me on LinkedIn or you can go to BrittAndreattaTraining.com and that’s where you’ll see the courses show up. I actually want to offer a special gift to your listeners. I have a coupon code – TalentGrow – that they can use at BrittAndreattaTraining.com and you’ll get 20 percent off. Right now I’ve got a facilitator training out, but I’m about to have an individual e-course come out in the next two weeks, so they can use it on either of those.

Halelly: Exciting. Thank you! Cool. We love to get gifts. Now that we also know how to stay in touch and learn more from and about you – and we’ll link to all of that in the show notes – let’s leave everyone with something really specific that they can do today, tomorrow, this week, to upgrade their leadership skills.

Britt: This is all based on brain science, but here you go – start telling people what you value about them. Whether it’s a specific task they’re doing today or a general quality that you really appreciate, it does a lot to boost their sense of safety and inclusion and belonging, so that’s going to help them. But in addition, you get a neurological benefit too. Because your gratitude shifts us in very positive and enduring ways. So I think of it as kind of doing the flashlight challenge – you want to shine the light on the good things and keep bringing attention to what people are doing great, what you appreciate about them, what they contribute to your lives. Speak it to others. If you just make a point of doing that everyday, at least once a day to someone, and also you know a great practice at the end of the day is right before you’re falling asleep, just list three things that were good in your day or that you’re grateful for. You’ll get much better sleep too.

Halelly: Excellent. I really believe in the power of that, and I know I’ve seen it myself. I love those suggestions. Thank you so much, Dr. Britt Andreatta. We really appreciate you coming on the TalentGrow Show and sharing some of your insights and research and writing with us.

Britt: Thank you. It’s been so great to be part of your talk today and I’m excited to get to know your audience better when they connect with me, and have a wonderful week.

Halelly: A thousand times, yes! Show what you value in others and appreciate and show gratitude about things that are going on with you that you appreciate. That will increase your happiness. It will increase your sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. It will allow you to feel more value, feel more gratitude, and it will absolutely help other people feel good in your presence and in working with you. So it has this beautiful, positive, upward spiral affect that is nothing but good news. There’s so much research that actually backs this up, coming from the world of positive psychology and now neuroscience that makes this undeniably a very good practice. And I’ll link in the show notes to another place where I talk about the idea of a gratitude journal, which Britt mentioned right there at the end.

You know I want to know what you appreciate about this show, but also ways to improve, because I am on a learning journey. Never feel shy to send me a note. I am always open to hearing from you. Thank you for taking the time to listen to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I am Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, and until the next time, make today great.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.

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Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta

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