The 60-Second Reset Every Leader Needs: Backed By Neuroscience with Dr. Michael Mannino

Speaker A: This is going to be a great conversation. I've been waiting for this. We're going to talk about the brain and the relationship to pressure. Maybe we start off with just helping us understand leadership is about high stakes, big decisions. What's happening in our brain when we are dealing with pressure?

Speaker B: Well, the first thing that's happening in our brain is we're detecting a threat, right? That pressure is a threat. And so parts of our brain are going off that are detecting those threats and then rerouting systems like our sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight or freeze system, not the parasympathetic system, which is the rest and digest and calming system.

Speaker C: Leadership looks powerful from the outside, but behind closed doors, the pressure is real. The decisions are heavy, and most leaders

Speaker A: have nowhere to talk about it.

Speaker C: The boardroom moments that keep you up at night. The decisions that affect thousands of people. The quiet questions many leaders carry, but rarely say out loud. I'm Melissa Dawn Simpkins edtech, founder of athLeadership, CEO of Velvet Suite and the C Suite, confidant to leaders performing at their highest level as they navigate pressure and change. For more than two decades, I've built global leadership platforms and advised executives and elite performers across business and sport in high stakes environments. If you're here, you're probably someone people count on. That's why I created C Suite Confidential, grounded in neuroscience and the elite athletic mindset. Each episode features candid conversations with CEOs, talent, leaders, athletes, high performers who understand both the demands and the privilege of leadership. Most leadership conversations focus on strategy. This one focuses on conditioning. If you're leading in the arena and you want to do it with strength, clarity and heart, you are in the right place. This is C Suite Confidential, where leaders come to strengthen the mindset required to perform when it matters most.

Speaker A: Dr. Manino, how are you today?

Speaker B: Very good, Melissa. Happy to be here with you. Thank you.

Speaker A: This is going to be a great conversation. I've been waiting for this. We're going to talk about the brain and the relationship to pressure. Maybe we start off with just helping us understand, you know, leadership is about high stakes, big decisions. What's happening in our brain when we are dealing with pressure?

Speaker B: Well, the first thing that's happening in our brain is detecting a threat, right? That pressure is a threat. And so parts of our brain are going off that are detecting those threats and then rerouting systems like our sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight or freeze system, not the parasympathetic system, which is the Rest and digest and calming system. And these two systems kind of work in balance and sort of a teeter totter. But our brains are detecting a threat and raising cortisol levels and, and the hypothalamus is firing off systems to pay more attention and to reduce our cognitive flexibility, keep our attention focused. And if that's not trained in the right way and all of these things that we're going to be talking about, then that can lead to bad decision making, emotional dysregulation, even PTSD and um, trauma as well.

Speaker A: There's so much to unpack here because what I take from that and our audience can take from that, there's so much is happening behind the scenes. And it's more than what we know that is dictating our decisions. It's what we've been built to prepare to lead through these moments of change we talk a lot about. Leaders aren't born, they're built. And what does that building process look like in terms of regulation in our brain?

Speaker B: One of the biggest things that actually happens in our brains is the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. That's the HPA axis. And it's really involved in stress regulation, especially in pressure moments. If there's too much chronic activation of stress, that can really dysregulate the HPA axis and that can throw off all kinds of systems. It can even affect our immune system so we get sick more often. And even autoimmune responses can be triggered by HPA dysregulation with too much chronic stress, too much pressure, too often, too much of the time, that kind of thing. But, uh, when we say leaders are conditioned and cultivated, and leadership is a quality that's cultivated, it's associated with certain personality traits, just like flow. The flow state in psychology, and we'll talk about that, is also associated with some personality traits. But in general it's something that can be conditioned. Just like elite athletes conditioning their body, bodies and minds for those high stakes scenarios. So I think there's a little bit of nature nurture to it in terms of conditioning. Repeated exposure under pressure can rewire neuroplasticity in the brain, sort of predictable responses. And this is like this phrase that we're using, you need to get your reps in, you need to get your reps in for nervous system adaptation. And that's something that is trainable. That's what athletes do. That's what leaders should be doing as well. So yes, personality traits were Born with certain things, internal systems, but nervous system adaptation and training, that comes to mind from William James, who is an American psychologist. This quote is often floated around. Steven Cutler, my friend and colleague, loves to say it as well, that you need to make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy. And that's really what nervous system conditioning is all about. What's what athletes do?

Speaker A: It's fascinating to me because when you study the athlete, and we've talked about this in this athletic approach, this elite athletic mindset, is that why athletes get paid so much is not because they know how to throw a ball, it's because they know how to throw a ball with 10 seconds down and with the defender in their face. Like, it's the pressure, it's the moment that they can show up. And I think leadership in this moment is having to be reframed because it's no longer pressure is an event. It's the environment. It's always around us. So how do leaders listen to our show, our audience begin to get their reps in? What are things that they can do when they feel that stress coming in their nervous system and their amygdala is up? Like what are the things they can do to start conditioning themselves for these moments?

Speaker B: Well, start taking a page from the elite athletes book. And athletes also have a great support system. So I, uh, will start there. Leadership is not a single person thing. You don't do it alone. We are social creatures, so you don't do it alone. And having a strong support system, social aspects of that, social components in play, Even tennis players, right, who just are on the court themselves, it's an individual sport, have a team with them that they always thank after winning and, or losing, right? They thank their team. That's the first thing they pretty much thank. So that's one. I would say one of the biggest things going back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of nervous system adaptation, is doing things to increase your stress tolerance, to increase your resilience, stress inoculation and exposure. So in neuroscience, in performance neuroscience, we call this hormesis, H O R M M E S I s and there are things called hormetic stressors. These are small stressors in the right context, with the right mindset, that can actually increase our ceiling for our ability to tolerate more levels of stress, higher levels of stress. It's called hormesis. Exposing yourself to press pressure environments, that's getting your reps in. And we can do this in a controlled environment. And that's very helpful. So things like fasting in the right context, sauna, uh, cold exposure, different kinds of breath work. So one of the most powerful things here, and this is a physiologic, that's what we're talking about, physiological adaptation, uh, changes to get your body, which then gets your cognition and your mind and your psychology, right. For these high stakes scenarios and decision making scenarios, is something called CO2 tolerance. So carbon dioxide tolerance. And it's been shown because when we are holding our breath, the CO2 in our bodies starts to rise and we start to panic. And um, if you've ever felt that, it's a very uncomfortable thing. And doing breath holds is actually really something very interesting. To grab control of your breath can help you gain control, a top down control to be calmer in those scenarios, because you're building up your CO2 tolerance. Because when you panic while you're holding your breath, that's connected directly to the amygdala and that's also directly connected to parts of your prefrontal cortex. This is well studied phenomenon. So those kinds of things can build up slowly. Your stress tolerance and your stress threshold. Another thing, and this is more cognitive when we talk about emotional regulation. So, so there's different kinds of stress. There's eustress and distress. And eustress is a good stress. And in fact we see that in performance science there's a Goldilocks zone of the right amount of stress, the right kind of stress. The eustress that is correlated with optimal performance looks like an inverted U curve. So over here, not enough stress, not good performance. Over here, on the other side, a lot of stress, too much stress. Too often performance is not good. It's low. Performance is high at the top of the curve. So that's what I meant by the right kind of stress in the right context, with the right kind of mindset, the right kind of cognitive refrain. By the way, that cognitive reframing technique is another technique that athletes do all the time, that leaders can start to do. You're reframing your perceived stress. You're making it from a distress to a eustress. You're saying things like, I don't have to do this, I get to do this. In fact, in tennis, in the French Open, I believe, or maybe into Arthur Ashe stadium in the U.S. open.

Speaker A: Yes, that's our quote. Pressure is a privilege.

Speaker B: Pressure is a privilege that is like the ultimate cognitive reframe. You're reframing pressure from, um, something oh my God, like, uh, I have to go through this. You get to do this. This is a privilege. And when you do that, when you actually internalize that cognitive reframe, you see physiological and neurobiological changes. And through neuroplasticity, that's something that you can actually train yourself to just completely internalize.

Speaker A: I'm smiling here because I'm thinking about when I competed in my first fitness competition and I had a very rigorous training schedule. And one of the things I would tell myself, Michael, is my last phase of my training I looked at as dessert. And I would say, oh, I get to go do dessert, right? Because I love, I had a sweet tooth. But that was me reframing that training experience so that I could then see myself accomplish a goal. And so. It's so true. It's so true. I love this stuff. This is awesome. Talk to us about our audience. They hear you. They understand the U curve. Good. Bad stress, Too little, too much. Give some examples of how that could play out in a day. What would be like too little? What would be too much?

Speaker B: What would be too little? I mean, if the thing that you're doing, the task that you're engaged in, whether that's from mundane tasks like driving to work or washing the dishes or something like that, to these other parts of the day where you're giving a public presentation or you're in the boardroom or you're teaching a class, or your five year old daughter is acting up or something like that. Those are stressful moments. Too stressful moments versus too little. The idea is that in flow science and in flow state, we call this the challenge Skills balance. And this is one of the biggest flow triggers that gets athletes or leaders or whatever in flow, which is this optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we're performing our best, or we're totally immersed in the situation at hand and the task that we're doing, we forget other things. So when the challenge of the activity is too low and your skill set or your capacity to do the thing that you're doing is too high, then you're going to be bored. There's going to be boredom. M right. That's the idea of the inverted U curve. Too little stress, your parasympathetic nervous system is upregulated. So you're too calm.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And performance dips there. We need the right amount of stress. That's the whole point there. And then these other scenarios where it's the challenge is too great and your skill set, let's say, is too low, then there's frustration and anxiety and if it's really challenging, that can lead to like, trauma and ptsd. We write about this in some work that we've actually published. So Steven Kotler, who does this research with me, he has this phrase in one of his books, the Art of Impossible. He says, flow starts when you say yes to the fight. And I love that quote. So that's getting back to your question here is approach versus avoidance. So when, uh, we're in these situations and we can cultivate this ability to lean in and approach versus avoid, our nervous system goes different paths and it can go into flow, or it can go into frustration, it can go into high performance, or it can go into burnout or even trauma. Right. Or PTSD or something like that. And so there's the cascade of events that happens in our nervous systems that will lead to one of these outcomes. Either high performance and flow, state and enjoyment and so on, versus frustration, anxiety, burnout and so on.

Speaker A: What I hear you saying in all of this, which is so fascinating but actually so practical, is that it's a choice. We have the agency to choose how we move through this life and how we activate our neurological system, our nervous system, um, to be our partner for performance. Right, versus our enemy. So you just said.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It's totally a choice. The biggest insight through all of this science, I would say, which is it's tricky, it's a double edged sword, is that the science all says it's trainable and actionable and practically applied and so on, which is so phenomenal. Like, that's why I love studying this field, is because we can take the science out of the lab and apply it in our daily lives to become better people and better leaders and better athletes and so on. But that also means it's so obvious and behavior change is such a difficult thing in humans. Building habits, breaking habits, these kinds of things. People have written books and there's a whole field of it. But that's why it's a double edged sword, because it's really hard to practice what you preach a lot of the time.

Speaker A: I was talking with an executive this week actually, and we were talking about the elite athletic mindset. And he works in and he says, you know, Melissa, everybody doesn't want to do this work. Everybody doesn't want to do the work. And I said, I agree, but I think part of the opportunity we have is the difference between training versus conditioning, because I do believe there's a difference. And conditioning, I believe, gives people an on ramp to practice in real time and become more comfortable with the uncomfortable. Maybe explain to our audience what you think is the difference between training and conditioning.

Speaker B: I think training is more of like an intellectual process, a uh, learning process. Training is more of like knowledge based, I think, whereas conditioning is more of like doing rather than being or learning. Conditioning is doing, conditioning is practicing. Conditioning is like real world. So like I'm an amateur athlete and I do a lot of calisthenics and hand balancing and stuff like that. So here's the difference. Training is you're actually doing the skill. So I'll give you an example, personal example. Um, I'm doing a lot of hand balancing and handstands. That's what I love to do. A very difficult, very long journey.

Speaker A: A lot of patience to do that

Speaker B: I would imagine, because it's a very non linear process. And you're like, oh my God, I'm making so much progress this one session, then the next day it's like I'm starting from day one. I feel like what is happening, it's a neuromuscular skill. It's really a neural skill. And that takes a while to train because that's just how biologically speaking brain cells work is directly applicable and extrapolation to leadership and decision making and so on. So I'm training for the one arm handstand. I'm um, training for the one arm handstand. And training for it is doing the thing, doing the skill, doing the one arm handstand conditioning, which is so necessary. All my hand balancing coaches, all the best people, all on their Instagram reels, you see them talking about conditioning, which means you're doing the drills, you're not doing the skill itself. You're not training that skill. You're doing the drills around it to strengthen your compression, strengthen your muscles. You're conditioning those things that surround the actual skill to be well. Then when uh, you start training it to do it better and make progress on it, same thing. And I think what we're talking about

Speaker A: so powerful because that's not the way leadership's been built. Leadership's been built on training and there hasn't been a, uh, real practice around. How do you condition for these real high stakes moments?

Speaker B: Exactly. So all the workshops, I've talked to so many clients along the way and people and colleagues, they're going to this three day workshop at uh, Harvard, which is great. Like, you know, they're taking this course and all of those are great for training and learning skills and building up skill sets and things like that. But yeah, conditioning is real world Application, getting the reps in, doing the drills, practicing your recovery, all of these things, right?

Speaker A: So yes, I say common knowledge is not common practice. And it's like that's the practice. The knowledge is one thing, it's the practice, it's the other. And that's where we have a gap. But it's the good news is, uh, people like you, leaders like you, who are really breaking down this neurological experience and giving us the tools and then also showing us how we can move and flow in our life, I think as leaders we need to first, first own that and then how do we help others in our circle? So like, if you could say, I'm gonna ask you this question. If a leader has 60 seconds before a high stakes decision, what is one neurological reset they could use immediately?

Speaker B: That has to be the ability to grab control of your breath and slow down your exhale.

Speaker A: I would say 50 seconds of the box breath. Is that an example or what would you say?

Speaker B: Like that's a short time scale. So all of these breathing techniques are so powerful for changing the plasticity in your brain and retraining your physiology to be able to handle those moments offline. I think there's great techniques out there that give you the ability to be more aware of your body and when you're more aware of your body. And I'll get back to the 60 second technique, but in neuroscience there's something called the vagus nerve in our body. And in neuroscience the vagus nerve is very well studied nerve. It's the 10th cranial nerve and it's the nerve that is calming, safety, resting, recovery. So it's the 10th cranial nerve and it goes from the brainstem all the way down. 80% of the fibers actually go from the body to the brain. 20% of the fibers go from the brain to the body. And the vagus nerve is so important for mental health, mental well being. People with higher vagal tone, that is your baseline activity of your vagus nerve, how it's just firing on a daily basis. People with a higher vagal tone, better recovery, better sleep, better emotional regulation, the list goes on and on and on. It's a really well studied nerve and especially in performance neuroscience. And so what you want to do in those 60 seconds or those high stakes scenarios is just grab a hold of your vagus nerve and upregulate it, get it firing, because if you do, it's going to calm things down.

Speaker A: How do you do that?

Speaker B: You do that with long exhalation. And so that's why I'M saying If you have 60 seconds right before a speech, or right before you walk in the boardroom, or right before you walk on court or whatever, for the most part, people want to slow down your exhale, take a breath in and just long exhale, either through pursed lips like, or through your nose. By just slowing down. That exhale will upregulate your vagal activity and your brain will say, hey, my body's actually calm. I can do this. You throw in a little visualization, a little bit of self talk. While you're doing that, you're amplifying that response even more.

Speaker A: Yes, Yes. I love it, I love it, I love it. So you've given us so many great insights. Before we wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about your research and share with us a little bit about how your research is really applicable to what we're talking about today.

Speaker B: I have two aspects of my research. Both of them are very directly applicable to what we're talking about today. The first one is for flow state and what happens in the brain and the body during flow. We've just done a bunch of research on the psychophysiology of flow. So that's your heart rate and your brain waves and all of these other biomarkers that the human body and brain has that are indicative of flow. One study that we looked at tolerance in exercise, some people are high tolerant in their exercise and some people are a little bit more low tolerant in that they don't like physical distress and physical fitness and doing hard things. And, you know, exercise is exhausting and trying to get motivated. And some people are very high tolerant. Right? And we actually showed that that's not really about physical fitness. It's actually a brain issue, It's a brain regulation issue. Actually, people's brains are organized differently in high tolerant individuals versus low tolerant individuals. And so it's something that's also trainable as well. You can learn to build up your tolerance to be able to do harder things. And especially when it comes to, like, physical fitness and exercise, same thing happens in real world. So a lot of the research is in flow. And then the other prong of my research is in team flow and team performance. And a lot of that research, team flow is a team in flow. It's an optimal state of team consciousness where the team is one unified organism with a collective ambition, a shared goals, skills are integrated very well, there's open communication. And in, uh, fact it turns out that there's a mechanism, biologically speaking, that facilitates team performance and that's this idea of human synchrony, team synchrony, interpersonal synchrony. And so synchrony is when we get in sync and we have language for this all the time. We're on the same wavelength, we have team chemistry. We're clicking on the same page. Yeah, on the same page. So it turns out there's a real biological measurement to this. Our brains actually get in sync. Our heartbeats get in sync. All of these other things get in sync too, like our galvanic skin response. All of these things get into sync. And it's a strong predictor. Synchrony is a strong predictor of better team performance, communication, human collaboration. Teams that are in sync biologically make better decisions. They make fewer errors, actually, in problem solving tasks. And humans get in sync all the time in many different scenarios. Right. But in teams, there's also this idea of team synchrony. And our research has shown that team synchrony is a strong predictor of, like, psychological safety and trust and just better team performance. So I have a project that we've launched as, you know, a company that uses artificial intelligence actually to measure that team synchrony and nudge it, give recommendations, give teams activities to increase their communication and empathy and psychological safety and engagement. Yes.

Speaker A: This is such a exciting, um, frontier because again, as you're an AI expert as well, you're applying that in a way that enables teams to perform better together. But it all starts with our brain. It starts with our connection to self and then how we lead others, which is huge.

Speaker B: And, um, I'll make a recommendation of a book from my colleague Michael Platt up at University of Pennsylvania at, ah, Warren Neuroscience Institute. He wrote a book called the Leader's Brain. And it's a great book. And the first two chapters are all about team flow and team synchrony. And there's a phrase in neuroscience, neurons that fire together wire together. That's just this idea of neuroplasticity. But he has this phrase that brains that fire together wire together as well. And so leaders, back to the thing that we were saying in the first part of this conversation is that it's a social enterprise. Leadership is a social thing. You're leading teams. And, um, there's a biology to that as well.

Speaker A: There is. I think what I take from this conversation is that there's a great opportunity for all of us to apply leadership in a real way that we can condition ourselves. If we're not where we want to be, if we're recognizing our triggers, we have the ability to make those changes if we apply and condition ourselves to think differently as leaders.

Speaker B: Yes, 100% agree with you. And I think that's why knowing some of this science and that people are studying this, and now we're studying this connection between athletics, the, the neuro athletics and neuro leadership, which is so phenomenal, which we see those fields are not converging on their result.

Speaker A: Talk a little bit about that because I don't know that audience fully understands how breakthrough the elite athletic mindset is because that's not currently in the uh, discussion.

Speaker B: Yes. So there's a whole field now called sports neuroscience, Sports psychology, and um, there's a field called performance psychology, but now we've published a textbook, really the first of its kind, on performance neuroscience. So in sports neuroscience they're looking at what goes on in the brains of elite athletes and people who play sports and so on because it's directly applicable to performance. And then there's this other field called neuro leadership, which I was just talking about with Michael Platt in his work up at war neuroscience at UPenn. It's about what goes on in the brains of leaders are, uh, their decision making processes at the level of the brain different. Are their ability to regulate their emotions at the level of the brain different than the rest of us folks? And it turns out there is. And it also turns out that there's a commonality in the brains of elite athletes and the brains of leaders.

Speaker A: Yes, leadership kind of sits in that unique space.

Speaker B: Yeah. That intersection, that overlap. And so it's fascinating just from a scientific point of view, but it's also really interesting from an applied, as you were saying, to like a practical application point of view that we can say, hey, if you want to really cultivate these techniques and strategies and habits as a leader, you can take a page from what goes on in the brains of elite athletes and start training and conditioning like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's so much to uncover. Dr. Menino, it's been a privilege to have you on exciting work that you're doing with Synergy AI. I want to continue to follow that work. Uh, we're excited about what we're doing together with athLeadership. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. A fun conversation. As always, great work. Melissa,

Speaker A: thanks for joining us on C Suite Confidential. Every episode is designed to help you condition your leadership for pressure, performance and long term impact. If today's conversation resonated, be sure to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform so you never miss an episode. For more insights on athletic leadership, where elite athletic mindset meets next level leadership conditioning, visit athletershiparena. Com. Until next time. Remember, leaders aren't born, they're built. You've got this.