Why Are You Like This?!

https://vimeo.com/1201275581

Ever wondered why you think and behave the way you do? Are you exhausted by the idea that you need to be more disciplined and organised to succeed?

If you cannot stop overthinking, regularly get stressed by the same things or feel anxious, it is time to look at what is really going on. You might also wonder how recommendations like exercising, meditating, journaling or manifesting even work.

In this session, Kylie Davis, who has led The Rise Initiative for the past six years, shares the latest insights into how our brains function. With extensive experience of ‘positive stress’, Kylie is a proptech entrepreneur, commentator and expert on innovation and human-centric real estate. In addition to her work with Rise, she is the founder and president of Proptech Australia, the Chief Executive Officer of the Proptech Gurus and host of the Proptech Podcast.

Watch this insightful webinar as Kylie shares the key steps to stop the spiral and discover easy ways to reset by working with your thoughts and behaviour rather than against them.

In this session, you’ll gain:

• the latest insights into how your brain functions

• key steps to stop the overthinking and anxiety spiral

• easy ways to reset your thoughts and behaviour

• a way to work with your mind and not against it

This is about understanding your brain so you can finally succeed without exhaustion.

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Kylie Davis, of Rise Initiative and Proptech Gurus, is the speaker of the webinar.

Kylie:

Hello! It's Kylie Davis from the Rise Initiative. It's great to see we had a lot of RSVPs today for this one, which is lovely. So, just giving everyone a few moments to jump on the call. If you are jumping on, the weird thing about today's webinar is that I didn't have anyone to talk to, because it's just… it's just me. So, please say hello on the chat and make this interactive so I don't feel like I'm talking into the void.

I'm coming to you today on Wangal land in Sydney, part of the Gadigal Nation, and we are on the very beautiful Parramatta River, and I'm coming to you from our brand new apartment. So having gone through all that trauma, it's great to be finally settled.

And the Rise Initiative, recognises the importance of place, and we welcome, we welcome elders and acknowledge elders and traditional people, past, present, and emerging. And, we would like to thank our sponsors, our partners at Rise who make our wellness webinars possible, the very fabulous MRI software, where this is our second year of doing the wellness webinars, and they are becoming more and more popular, and it's been wonderful to bring so many fabulous coaches and trainers to the real estate market, regardless of where you are around the country, and as we can see from our chats today already, that there's people dialing in from everywhere across Australia in the industry.

So look, let's kick off. If you are just joining the call, I'm here on my own. I've got Jamie in the background, but I'm here on my own. Normally, I'm the person that the guest is bouncing off, so I'm relying on you guys to help me not feel like I'm talking into the void. But we're going to… I'm going to share my screen, and we're going to kick off with, “Why Are You Like This!?”

Now, I love this… I love this headline for this speech, because I cannot tell you how many times I've been asked in my life, why are you like this? And I thought it would really resonate. And so, what we're going to do today is unpack why we are like we are, and I hope that that really brings, some clarity, or some help, or just a bit of perspective, and what I wanted to do, too, is give, is to do a bit of a summary of all of the things that I've learned through the Rise Initiative over the last 5 or 6 years, because I've been extraordinarily privileged to be part of this initiative.

And, and to have access and conversations with some of the most amazing people in the business and the collective wisdom of us in the real estate sector. So, I wanted to share what that has looked like, in the hope that sharing that philosophy might also help people out there.

But I also really wanted to start to pull it together, because over the last couple of years, it's been really coming together for me as a bit of a philosophy around how I'm trying to live my life. So look, there's absolutely no doubt, and I'm the data girl, so I'm from the background, so I always like to kick off with some data. But we are living in times of overwhelm, and our RISE research is getting a little bit out of date at the moment. We've got some new stuff coming.

So, I've used these figures from Beyond Blue, but what we see is that 1 out of 2 Australians are experiencing workplace burnout. This isn't just for real estate, this is everywhere across the country. 60% of employees feel the negative impacts from work-related stress.

44% of us are feeling physical fatigue from this overwhelm they're experiencing, and I love this term, well, love is kind of probably the wrong word, but it really resonates, this idea of cognitive weariness.

Isn't that a fantastic word? Cognitive weariness. Like, I'm tired of thinking. I'm overwhelmed by how much thinking my poor old brain's having to do, and we're going to explore why that is as part of today.

And then 26% of us, you know, just over a quarter, are identifying with reduced interest, motivation, and energy. So look, this is the depressing bit of the presentation, just to sort of ground us on where we're coming from, but let's… we're going to explore why that is, and what we can do to start to bring ourselves out of it.

Now, one of the most powerful things I ever have heard as part of my time at RISE, and it wasn't the first thing I ever learned, but it was something that just really brought everything home to me around choices I've made in my life in the past, and

thing, and how I wanted to live my life going further and future. Because I work in the tech space, and I'm always working with founders who are very externally goal-driven, and we work in the real estate sector, and we are very externally goal-driven. But what Shantelle Thompson said at Rise Thrive in 2020… thought was that purpose in Western culture is always a North Star. It's always this thing that is outside ourselves. But in First Nations cultures, purpose is something we are born with. The world takes us away from it. The storytelling that happens in First Nations culture recognises that when we're born, we are kind of removed from our purpose. And so our goal in life, and our journey in life, is to learn about and come back to our purpose. And we don't do that by looking outside, we do that by looking inside.

And that, to me, was like, oh my goodness, we need to look inwards, not outwards, when we're trying to find purpose.

And so I was reflecting on some of the really big moments that have happened in my life, and you're gonna have to indulge me for a little bit here, but I'm gonna give you the Carly Davis explainer in sort of 4 quick photos.

But when I was 16, I was selected by the local Rotary Club of Kew to be an exchange student to Denmark.

So, at the very raw age of 16, I was the youngest to go in that year. I came out of Year 10, I had finished Year 10, I took a break between Year 10 and 11, and I went to Denmark for 12 months. I landed in a family that told me they did not speak English, and so I learned to speak Danish com… I learned to speak Danish as a second language. It was both the bravest thing I've ever done, the craziest thing I've ever done, and as a 16-year-old, what it taught me is that I can take myself out of very secure, familiar situations and put myself into very difficult situations that are very hard on my brain and my head, and I'll be okay.

I'll survive. I made some fantastic friends over there, I learned to speak Danish, which I always really loved. I've got an affinity with Denmark still, although I haven't been back for far too long. But the idea that we can move ourselves, we can choose to move ourselves out of things that are safe, and put ourselves into things that are completely unknown and utterly foreign, and this is before the internet, so, you know, I couldn't… had to make… you know, write to my mum and tell her what day I was going to call her on, and I think I had 4 phone calls home for the whole year.

But we can really be isolated as well, and it taught me an enormous amount about my resilience. When I came home from Denmark, you know, at the ripe old age of 17, I made this decision. I was very clear on this idea that I was going to be a journalist. And so I spent all of my two senior years – remaining two senior years in high school focused on the things that were going give me the best chance of being a journalist. And I got offered on the same day the opportunity to either be a cadet at the Australian newspaper, or to study at RMIT in its new journalism course. And I remember saying to the editor of the Australian at the time, oh, you know, I got offered one of the first positions at uni as well, and he said to me, “Well, I guess you'll have to decide if you want to study to be a journalist, or if you actually want to be a journalist.” And so I took the job immediately.

But having come from a place where I had dealt with some pretty dark days and some isolation when I had been away, and then realigning myself back into normal life, at school. I kind of understood what happened when I was under a lot of stress. And it's interesting. Media was a really interesting place in the late 80s and early 90s. It was certainly a hotbed of mental ill health.

And so, I found that being a journalist… I loved the job, but I hated the culture. I absolutely hated the culture.

And so it was pretty clear that I was never going to crack it as a career journalist, because while I loved writing, and I loved exploring my thoughts, and I loved meeting people and making sense of what I was seeing, I couldn't… I couldn't…

I knew that it wasn't healthy to stay in a big media environment.

So what I did when I was 24 is I left as a junior journalist, and I set up a local newspaper called The Village Voice.

I'd moved up to Sydney, Mark and I were living together, we'd had a little baby, and over the next 10 years, I created an independent newspaper with the new desktop publishing, and again, threw myself into something that I had completely no idea what I was doing. I just really internally knew that this was the right thing to do, that this is what the market needed.

Built that up to 3 newspapers, and in the end sold it out, ironically, to a company that ended up getting bought by News Corp. But some of the most helpful people to me in that time, and remembering, I was 24 years old, I had no business experience, I had no, I was still a fairly junior reporter.

But…

Over the next 10 years, I built up to 3 newspapers. I employed about 14 people. I had my own distribution business as part of that, and the people who were some of the most helpful people to me, and informative and instructional during that time were the real estate agents in the area.

And some of the things I did, they didn't want me to do. We went… we courted our own path but Sarah Lawton, in the Hunter, don't know if you're on the call, Sarah, but thank you.

I can think of Raine and Horne, in Balmain, Neville, Reg Window at Richardson and Wrench. These people are all extraordinarily helpful. Danny Cobden from Cobden Hayes, who went on to do Cobden Hasten, these guys all kind of helped, helped, helped me in the business, just by being someone to talk to and have a coffee with sometimes.

And then, after going back to media, after I had sold the business, I ended up having a choice one day. I went back to News Corp after time at Fairfax, and was looking after the real estate sections with Tom Panos, so I was the editorial equivalent to Tom, and I looked after all the teams in editorial, taught them about this thing called RP Data, and taught them all a lot of, around how to become data journos. And as part of that, they offered me a job at CoreLogic, and at the time, when media was on the decline, it was like, well, where do I think the future is? Do I think it's in the media, or do I think it's in big data? And obviously, that was pretty self-explanatory.

Now, during all of my times across all of these four things, of these four key roles, these are words that have been leveled at me. As, all of them have been used to try and insult or make me feel bad about myself. And I was thinking about all of these things, like, why are you too much… like, too much was a really big one, especially when I was in my teenage years, like, why are you just too much? You're too clever for, you know, too clever by half, you're overthinking it, like, oh gosh, you're independent, aren't you? All of these things, they were always levelled as an insult. Very determined, willful. She's fierce. It's not, you know, fierce is a very unattractive thing in a woman, apparently.

Especially in media environments. But here's the thing, whenever it was levelled at me, I never really believed it. I mean, I believed the word, but I never believed the meaning that they put on it. So to me, it was always a choice of, is this kryptonite, or is this my superpower? And I always made the decision when I was being told that I was too much.

My favourite one was when I was in my 20s, getting told that I was very ferocious or independent… I mean, I run a newspaper company, for God's sake, of course you're gonna be pretty, you know, pretty turned on to do that sort of stuff.

So, after all of these things, after my time at CoreLogic, when I went back out on my own, I then met this group of people who said, you know, John Cunningham, Chris Hanley, Nick West, Crackers, all of the team who basically said, we want you to come and work with us at the Rise Initiative.

And this has been an amazing journey over the last 5-6 years, because it has given me so much language for the stuff that I kind of knew in my heart, but actually didn't always have the words for. And I think if there's always been one goal and one desire that I've had for the Rise Initiative, it's that it's our mission to put the tools in the hands of the industry to thrive, to perform better, and to understand what's going on in our own heads. And sometimes just having the words and the language around that is so important.

Oop! Room 1. So here are some of the key learnings that I've gotten out of Rise, and the people that have taught them to me. And the structure of this is in the hope that people find it valuable.

So, there are 3 key parts to our brain. There's a lot of parts of our brains, but here are the 3 ones that are the most helpful to understand what they do, and how they work, and what they mean to us.

We have our amygdala, which its job is to just constantly scan our environment for danger and that is connected to our hypothalamus, that when it scans for danger, the hypothalamus sends off little chemical impulses down to our body to generate chemicals and those two things behave very differently to our cerebral cortex, which is when we think about our brains and what thinking feels and looks like, we think about it as, you know, being logical.

This is our amygdala. So, our lizard brain over here is designed to basically keep us safe and scan for danger, whereas our conscious thought is where we do a lot of our logical thinking. And, well, all of our logical thinking, and our prefrontal cortex is like the capital city of the country. That is a sensible thought.

And when we think about how our brains work, we usually are thinking about that cerebral cortex. We're thinking about, you know, making the connections, or joining the dots, or, you know, the neurons connecting together but our brains are extraordinary. Organs that have multiple ways of functioning, and there are literally different ways of thinking. And for me, one of the biggest revelations from RISE and learning about all of this has been just how much of a role this left-hand side of our brain plays, and the tricks that it can play on our cerebral cortex, and our logical thought.

And how hard it is to be logical when we're in the middle of a stress response. So what happens when we're stressed? You probably know this if it regularises but two things happen when we have a stress response. First of all, adrenaline. Boom! It hits… increases our blood pressure, the blood flow to our limbs, and we breathe a lot faster.

And then the second after that, it then comes the cortisol. So, that increases the sugars in our bloodstream, it curbs our non-essential functions, so starts to shut down our prefrontal cortex, or our cerebral cortex. We find it harder to think.

And all of that goes down into our body in all sorts of different ways, and depending on how bad the stress is, we start to… we might hear ringing in our ears, our fingers will go cold, we start to breathe fast, we usually bring our shoulders straight up and stop doing that, our heart beats faster. In shaking hands, we might need to go to the loo. All of these things happen when we're having a moment of stress.

And you know all about the fight or flight, you know, this is what happens. But we also know what has been extraordinarily important to us at learning from RISE, is that there are two other completely normal responses in a major stress, or in a stress environment.

Well, not only is there flight where we want to run away, or fight where we want to stand and punch someone or the thing that is attacking us. But it is perfectly normal to freeze, and to actually try to be invisible, hope that it goes away, or that maybe the danger will pass over you, or to camouflage yourself.

And equally, it's completely normal to want to take action, even if with your brain having shut down a bit because of all the cortisol in your system, that action actually isn't particularly helpful. It feels good to kind of get out there and be doing something, anything. And these are four completely normal responses to stress. So what I'd really like to do is just take a moment to breathe for myself, and hear, like, what's everybody's default

We all kind of have a bit of a default response, usually, when it comes to stress, and in a split second, our brains, when we're scanning for danger, decide what our stress response is going to be based on how big we perceive the danger. But I know that my favourite responses are either freeze or frantic.

Anyone wanna chuck any into the chat? My friends have gone very quiet. Okay, phrase and fatigue from Catherine. Thanks, Catherine. And I think sometimes this is pretty gendered, right? I think?I think, sort of, I know a lot of women, we do tend to freeze and go, “Oop! Wait and see what's happening?” You know, when we're frantic, what are we doing? We're normally… Oh, apparently I'm clicking on slides, hang on. Cool.

Okay, let's dive back in. So, one of the best speakers that I've heard on what life is like at the moment was at the last leadership event, and Dr. Christy Goodwin presented, and she did that under extraordinary personal stress because, well, she presented to us, I think on Tuesday. Over that weekend, her EA had actually passed away completely unexpectedly, and she gave the most amazing presentation and her presentation basically showed us how our primitive brains have not evolved yet for digital life.

So, basically, that side of us that is going into our stress response, our amygdala and our hypothalamus that are scanning for danger and acting on danger, our lizard part of our brains, they were designed to protect us from getting eaten. They are the parts of our brains that have allowed us to evolve. But there's this… and I work in tech, so I find this hard to say, but basically, we have tech that is being developed right now that is literally exploiting that. 

Like, that's the basis of it, right? Our lizard brains don't recognise the difference in that startle response. And when we're startled, we immediately, you know, have the cortisol and the adrenaline reaction. And in fact, our digital devices are designed to steal our attention, and to steal with startle responses. This is how they keep us engaged.

And so, we are working at the moment in a space of addiction. Not intentionally, but basically, we are becoming addicted to our phones because our brains are literally microdosing constantly on the adrenaline and the cortisol that is feeding through. But here was another one of the really big learnings that I got when… and Mitch Wallace, I've heard him speak so many, 3 or 4 times, and each time I learned something new from him.

But our brains are hardwired to keep us safe. You know, this is the single most important thing that our brains do, that lizard part of our brain. It's designed to keep us safe but our brains don't actually understand the concept of safe terribly well. Our lizard brains define safety by what feels familiar. And sometimes, familiarity can be really risky.

It can be really counterintuitive, and it can be really self-sabotaging. But it is always super compelling. So when we're under that stress response, when our lizard brains have taken control of our body, and the hormones are flooding our body, and our prefrontal cortex is completely shut down. Our brains basically take us back to the cave, or take us back to the place where we were last safe.

And sometimes, being safe is, might be, doing something that we did that was really risky. It can, you know, drinking can feel really safe at the end of a day, or a really stressful day. Gambling can feel really safe. Going back to your phone, even though you feel like your eyes are bleeding, might feel really safe. We don't go to the gym because it doesn't feel safe to go, even though we know that we want to lose weight or improve our fitness.

So we can actually, or we might not decide to put the house on the market, because even though we know we have to sell, or even though we know the divorce is coming and we can't take action anymore.

We're so shut down… we're so overwhelmed with all of the stuff going on in our bodies and our brains from the cortisol, that it becomes impossible to make a quality decision, and so we want to go back to something familiar. We want to just stay home, and we might sabotage our future goals and dreams.

And I've seen Milo Wilkinson speak 3 or 4 times, and I've watched her video a couple of times since then, too. And so I'm going to summarise some of the thinking, some of the things that, you know, this woman is extraordinarily clever. She's a criminologist, she's a psychologist, she's a neuroscientist, she's done all of the work in this space.

And I'm going to overlay them onto each other to come up with the Kylie Davis take on them, but familiarity and safety are our deepest survival instincts. We know that from everything we've just talked about. But our brains at the same time, and this is the paradox, they crave novelty.

So, a little bit like me, when I was an exchange student, as a 15-year-old making the decision that I wanted to try something different, even though it was absolutely terrifying. We crave novelty, and we learn through play. From the time we're born, we learn… we learn most easily when we're having fun, and through novelty, and, you know, experiencing things.

And play is a great way to do that.

Our brains are also great at taking shortcuts, and they do that by recognising patterns and looking for patterns. So when we put these three things together, we see that it breaks down, or it can emerge a couple of different ways, right?

So, if we're craving novelty through play, and our brain is looking for shortcuts and patterns that indicate something is going to be fun and something is definitely worth exploring, we find that our responses are really motivated. We lean towards them, we want to do them. We enjoy that if our brain's looking for shortcuts but something feels threatening.

It may jump to conclusions on things that are not necessarily threatening but it may create a triggered response. So when we're in survival mode, and we see something that our brain says, oh gosh, the last time that happened, that was dangerous, so we're just going to respond that way again without thinking it through, we react before we've actually had any time to think about it properly. I can see a few things going on in the background. Are we all good, Jamie?

And then, if we're in survival mode but we're still craving novelty, we can indulge in some really risky behaviour that can get really dangerous. And then if we're craving novelty through play but, and we're in risky behaviour, or we're having a triggered response and survival, then basically that's when we're seeing patterns and basically, this is when a lot of stress can come in but not all stress is negative. Some of it can be triggering and we can react to it but we can also use it to be activating. Therefore, we can use it to motivate ourselves to do the action that we really want to take.

And here's having just been through moving for the last 2 years, because we decided to buy a property off the plan back on April 24, and we wanted to, and so, since September last year, we have been downsizing, and then in February we sold.

And things like, losing family members and things like that. Big events require scaffolding because when we are in those times that we are under unavoidable stress, like moving home, or making it, you know, deciding to do a big move, or losing someone, or a relationship breakup.

It's our natural response to want to do something familiar, to feel safe and sometimes that's work.

And so, one of the things that we do in work is often we send people home when we think that they're very stressed out because they can't cope, because they're not making rational decisions or when they're going through something hard, we want them to isolate themselves and take them away so that they can calm down or, you know, deal with it. But these are often the times when actually doing something familiar and comforting is the most important thing to us.

And so, because it's harder to do things cognitively when we're in this space, this is where kindness sits, and this has been one of the really important things I've learned from Rise.

We need to be kind to ourselves when we know that we're undergoing extraordinary pressure, and we need to be kind to people around us that we know are undergoing extraordinary pressure, and we need to build a scaffold around them. So if they are at work, if they are asking to work while they're going through something quite difficult at home then basically having a conversation with them that says, “This is hard. We know this is hard for you. So we are going to create this scaffold around you to protect you or to create some guardrails around you making a bad decision or doing something or stepping in if we think that there's an issue because here's the thing: Who's driving you?”

The fabulous Tanja Lee, I've been to a couple of her courses as well. Part of being human is to learn that all of us, no matter how fabulous our upbringing was or how balanced our childhood was, we learn at around the age of 2 or 3 that we are separate from our parents, especially to our mums and no matter our inner child bears a bit of a scar or a break from that, that can impact our decision making. This becomes one of the shortcuts. However, the meaning that we gave that when we were little, tiny children basically then becomes a lens that we look through our lives and the stories that we tell ourselves going forward.

As adults, we get to choose though if we want a 3-year-old driving our decisions or whether we want to heal. And look, we've all worked with people who feel like toddlers, right? And that's because their 3-year-old is driving so much of their decision-making. There comes a time in all of our lives when we need to basically do the work and hug our inner child, and say, “Okay, you're not driving anymore. You can sit in the car seat behind, and we'll sing songs together.”

Here's the other thing. This is another part of Dr. Kristy’s presentation. So, our brains are addicted to the dopamine of our devices. Our bodies are constantly in a state of cortisol overload. Our lifestyles are becoming largely sedentary, and we're living in this constant state of distraction.

And so, here's where we need to be kind to ourselves and recognise that our 3-year-old finds this really compelling to do. But willpower alone and discipline isn't enough to counteract a lot of the pressure that we're under environmentally at the moment and so we have to have our own scaffold for ourselves and our own guardrails to help protect us from that environmental pressure as well because life is pretty much a balancing act at the moment. We're constantly dealing with the adrenaline and the cortisol, but what we need to do is to balance it up with dopamine, which is our pleasure response, serotonin, our oxytocin, which is our love drug, and then endorphins, which, you know, you get with exercise and things to make us feel really good.

So, here are some of the first things to check whenever you're having a stress response because physically, the state of your person can amplify the state of what's going on in your head. Have you eaten recently? Did you have breakfast? Or are you at 1 o'clock in the afternoon and you've been running on coffee alone? When was the last time that you had a glass of water? Are you drinking a couple of litres a day, or are you just having a sip here and there? Because when your brain is dehydrated, it's like you're being drunk. This is something that Milo taught us, that we absolutely need a hydrated brain to think clearly. And sometimes just the process of stepping away from the desk, pouring a glass of water, going outside for a minute or into the kitchen, and mindfully drinking it can actually really make a difference.

What's your sleep been like lately? Because sleep deprivation is absolutely a form of torture, and if you've got kids, or someone in the house is not well, or you've got a lot of stress on, or you're perimenopausal, these things can all be affecting your sleep and that can make it really hard to deal with the environmental stuff that is going on around you too.

And when was the last time that you were outside? Because it is really easy to get up in the early morning, in the dark, get dressed, jump in the car, go to work, sit inside under the flu rows all day, and then come home in the dark, especially in winter. But our ability to just go for a walk… and look, we don't need to do meetings all the time at a board table, this is something that I've learnt too, is that you can do a meeting with an internal meeting as a walk around the block, as a walk and a chat. You don't have to go to the cafe and sit under lights in the cafe. You can just get outside and do a quick meeting or you can take the dog for a walk every day. Just something that gets you outside in the sunshine.

And this is our framework for thriving at Rise and it's based on social cognitive theory by Albert Bandura, the psychologist. He proposed that human learning is shaped by the continuous two-way interaction of three factors. How we think, how we feel, and that then impacts on our performance. And I love this framework, I think it's one of the most powerful things ever because it can work both negatively, and it can work both positively. And when we understand it as a framework, it means that we're able to break the nexus of whatever is going on in our head. And here's a really good example.

If someone cuts you off in traffic, you're driving to work, you're a bit stressed, you've been thinking about a problem all day, all night, you haven't slept terribly well, you jump in the car to race to work, someone cuts you off in traffic. You basically, you feel really, really angry.

You think things about, like, you think about, God, now I'm gonna be really running late, you know, you think that you want to, you know, show that person what for, and then you get to work, and you behave, and you turn up, and someone says hello to you, hey, how you going? And you bite their, you know, you bite their head off. And then, you feel terrible because they didn't deserve that, and the whole thing becomes a bit of a spiral.

We know this as well from when you have had a bad day at work, you come home, you grump at everybody the minute you walk in the door, then you feel bad about it, and then everybody wants to know what's wrong with you and you've got to get yourself together.

So, we can get into a really negative spiral. But for all of us, at different times, one of these, whether you're feeling, thinking, or performing, one of these things will be stronger for you than the other two. And the trick is to identify which one, if I can't stop overthinking right now, what can I do? What can I change in my performance or my behavior to actually feel differently? And this is where we see that, okay, if my brain is going at 100 miles an hour, how can I feel better? Well, maybe if I go for a walk, or maybe if I phone a friend, or what if I sit down with my boss and talk through the things that's really bothering me? Then, I will start to feel better. If I start to feel better, I'll start to perform better and then my thinking will start to calm down again.

So, we can recognise when it's happening to us, it can be a really powerful tool to help us understand what's going on in our heads when we are having a negative spiral, and then we can use the knowledge of that to break the nexus of the three to then actually start to improve the cycle and it's at the heart of everything that we do at Rise.

So how do we break that cycle when we are in a negative spiral?

First of all, we recognise that something's going on. Like, actually, that was a completely irrational response to someone who's just being a bit of a d*ck, you know, as I drive to work. Like, do I really need to amplify this? But where's it happening in my body? Are my shoulders under my ears? Do I feel like my stomach is churning? Where's it going on in my body? And then taking some breaths to slow down, and taking a couple more because it just feels good and then slowly your shoulders start to come down.

The really important thing at that point, after you've taken a couple of breaths, is to start to be curious. How do you want to act? How do you want to feel? And why are you having trouble with that at the moment? And how can you be curious about it rather than be judgmental? How can you be kind to yourself about it and curious, and start to explore some alternatives? Like, can you put on some music to pump yourself back up? Can you invent rude words based on their number plate, you know, whatever you need to do to get yourself out of that mood. And then the other thing to recognise is that this stuff takes practice. Like, it's… and we've got a whole lifetime for it. So, every time something happens and you feel, I should have handled that better or differently, be kind to yourself and recognise that you're going to get another go at it.

Anyone got any thoughts around thinking, feeling, and performing or making meaning out of things?

Here's what I'm going to introduce you to next. That's your vagus nerve and I love the vagus nerve. It's our information superhighway. So, we talked before about our hypothalamus and our amygdala and how that's basically sending information or chemical information, down from our brains into our bodies and it does all of this through the vagus nerve. It is our information superhighway and it's connected to every single major organ in our body which is why we have stress responses in every single major organ in our body and why stress over a really long period of time can also basically start to make us unwell.

Like our brains, it can get a little bit overused. It can really, really start to feel exhausted but we can reset it and you can use it to hack your system. The fabulous Jen Cudmore, who I met when I first left CoreLogic at a Michael Sheargold conference, is one of my mentors on this. And I love the idea of just tapping to start to calm it down but I have a much more favourite way of resetting your vagus nerve, because here's the best way to do it ever.

You should never underestimate the power of a bloody good hug.

And what happens when we hug, what happens when we lie with our special human, or dog, it works with animals too is that, if you do it for 10 seconds, you see a noticeable surge of oxytocin and serotonin in the brain, so when you're gonna hug someone, don't just sort of air hug them; bring it in properly, consensually obviously, but bring it in properly and count to 10. Now, if they are someone that you know a bit better than that, then you can go a bit longer. 20 seconds will lower your stress level by starting to decrease the cortisol in your body.

And it creates a feeling of safety and trust.

And if you can go for 30 to 60 seconds, which is why, you know, a morning cuddle is a fantastic way to start your day. You can reset your nervous system and start to regulate your blood pressure. So, you might think that you're madly in love, you know, you're really into each other and that's just when we lie together and we breathe. It's amazing, but actually what's going on is that you're resetting your nervous system through your vagus nerve.

Isn't that awesome?

And what we need to do in our lives is, like I talked before about having a scaffold, so when we're going through something that is extraordinarily stressful, we need guardrails, we need protection, we need something to keep the building up, right? And we also need scaffolding in place to actually keep us in place across our, you know, everyday lives.

And this scientific theory of wellness is, “Perma”

So, positive emotions. When we've got all of these six things going on in our lives or to a degree, we start to feel and live really well. When we are engaged in what we're doing, whether it's work, whether it's play, whether it's hobbies, it doesn't matter what we're engaged in, as long as there's something that is novel and really entertaining us.

The relationships in our lives, when we've got them, you know, we've got important relationships happening, when we're able to make meaning out of our lives, and this is often what the purpose of work is, right? We make meaning through the work that we do, through the impact that we're having on the people around us and then from that, we feel a sense of accomplishment. And when we can feel accomplished, it can be something as small as, I made the bed today. When you've got a brand new baby, one of the biggest accomplishments you can have with a newborn is to, I had a shower today. I have showered, and I am dressed, I'm out of my PJs. It doesn't matter how big the sense of accomplishment is, as long as you feel it.

And health; keeping our health strong and healthy. You don't have to be the skinniest person in the room. You don't have to be a muscle man but as long as your body, your amazing machine that is your body, is getting you through all the things that you are doing to it every day. And our micro habits deliver big outcomes over time, so we don't have to have enormous goals.

This is the Atomic Habits.

My dog's doing something very strange in the background. We don't have to have huge habits that, you know, big, hairy-ass goals that we have to deliver on, just micro habits and doing a couple of them every single day over time starts to yield really big results.

So, for me, my favourite one is a walk in nature, or sitting in the sunshine, at least once a day, taking the dog for a walk. Exercise, not my favourite one but whether it's stretching, or, or boxing, or gym, whatever floats your boat, or it gets your adrenaline going in a positive way. Daily gratitude, this is where this stuff all starts to, like, deciding what your mindset is that you want to be. Setting goals, setting a great goal, and you know, creating a list, and having a list to tick off, or a checklist to tick off can be a great way to give yourself a little dopamine hint.

Doing some breath work, every day. If you find yourself waking up at 3 in the morning with the 3 AM wake-ups, instead of panicking about it or lying in bed, trying to reset by doing some 4-5-7 breathing, or whatever numbers that float your boat. But just taking some really deep breaths.

Waking up in the morning and journaling, first thing before you jump on the phone to try and set your thoughts and get clear on the day. Time out with friends, absolutely essential, for belly laughs, wine and chocolate. Naps or meditation, because sometimes, really, you do just need a good sleep. And if you can't do that, then a little meditation break might be a more socially acceptable thing to do at work.

Good food, so that we're nurturing our bodies well, and massages and self-care, because, like, what's not to love about someone just, stroking your body without any obligations?

And this is, Nick West, president, chair of Rise. I loved his presentation at the last leadership event too, that he gave with Crackers Keenan, where he basically has his scorecard that he runs. And both he and Crackers meet regularly every week and Nick's a very big one for accountability through a calendar invite, so I love that he's using the technology to say if it's in the calendar, it gets done. But also, the accountability of a friend just asking you the question, like, “What's your score this week on relationships, mate? How are you going with that?” And if your score's a bit low because you've been churning it out on the other ones. Having someone to talk through, like, well, what have you got to do to get that score higher this month… this week, or this month? And this ties back too, to that idea of cruising altitude.

Like, what's our cruising altitude that we're happy with for all of these, these 6 different options, 7 different options? What do we feel comfortable with? When do we feel like we're dipping low? And what sort of things do we have to do? And it's impossible to keep them all in perfect balance all the time. But by tracking them, I guess you're being mindful of when things need attention and having a time in the calendar and a friend to talk to, that you have a really safe and trusted relationship with to talk through them. It creates this really powerful way to start to move the needle.

And I think too, just going back to that ability, that mindfulness of choosing your story, we all get to decide the meaning that we give to moments. We can go through something extremely stressful, and we can decide that it's the worst thing that's ever going to happen to us, and that we are a victim the whole way through it. Or we can decide that we're not gonna let it mean that.

A little bit, is it gonna be our kryptonite, or is it gonna be our superpower? And we create our reality through our vision and our perspective. And… My dog's digging in our new carpet, I'm not sure what that's about. But we create our vision through our vision and our perspective. So, where do we want to be? And how are we viewing the steps that we're going through and how do we… as these things happen, do we choose the lens that we're going to see them through as evidence? Going back to that idea or that concept that Milo explained to us that our brains look for shortcuts, our brains look for patterns, and they look for shortcuts. When we see something happen, and it seems to happen regularly, are we going to describe it to ourselves as positive or are we going to describe it to ourselves as negative? And that if we can focus on the positive, we will start to see more positives. If we focus on the negative, we will start to see more negatives.

So we actually get a real choice here on how we want to perceive the world that's going on around us and the choices that we're going to make around it. We get to choose our own adventure.

And just to start to wrap up, I think we all need to start to rethink how we use our brain, and this is something that Milo said that was absolutely revelatory for me.

Our brains are not storage units; they're processing units.

And at the moment, because we're, you know, got our phones with us 24x7, and our computers with us 24x7, we're assuming that our brains are behaving exactly like our computers in both storing things and processing. So, if we agree that they are processing units, this lets us off the hook for a whole lot of things that we are currently beating ourselves up about.

We don't have to know and remember everything that we've ever been told perfectly, and we don't have to execute it perfectly. We are in the messy middle of our lives, and being messy is part of the processing. So, what we need to focus on is not what's happening, and not what it means, or whether it's okay for whatever it is.

We just need frameworks, we need language, and we need friends and safety, a sense of safety, to talk about what's going on in our heads, and to feel supported about the conversations. And to feel supported to screw up from time to time, so that we can then course-correct with people around us who are acting as our scaffold.

Because here's the reality: the stress is real, we're all-time poor, balance can be a real challenge, we've all got pressures of career and home. We've all got relationship pressures going on in the background, and life is a real emotional rollercoaster. And we can choose whether we see this as part of the adventure, or we see this as part of the problem.

And at Rise, I personally choose to see it as part of the adventure, that I am always there learning to get new skills to handle differently or better, and I get lots and lots of practice. So while we can't control our external environment, we can always choose how we respond to it. We can notice it, we can practice it, we can create scaffolds around ourselves, and we can forgive ourselves when we get it wrong.

And always trust your tummy compass. This is my other last piece of advice. And absolutely, it would not be a Rise presentation without a little bit of a word from our sponsor, which is to use the tools that are available to you with the Real Care app.

And the Rise Initiative is a charity, so if you're interested in making a donation, we would love your support. You can go onto the website and make it at any time. So I'm gonna finish up there.

I'd love, if anyone's got any questions or any comments, I would love… yeah. Normally, this is where I ask questions of the guests, so I'm kind of relying on someone to step in and jump in and ask a couple of questions, or say what you loved, say what you found useful. That would be great.

And Kylie, you mentioned daily gratitude. Another Kylie, not me. I think it's such an easy way. Thank you, Janice. I would like to thank Jen on my team, who pulled a bit of an all-nighter on my visuals, because I might have left some of the messaging a bit late.

Well, look, thank you everybody!

We're coming up on time, so I'm going to… Yes, micro habits. Like, you can stack habits like, I take the dog for a walk and I go and ring a friend. Like, you can do two things at once, like, we can do that. You can stack them, put your gym shoes next to the door. That's the atomic habit thing, so that you know that you have to get out and go to bed, like, just recognise that our brains are overloaded and placed into rude words.

Yes and that's good, you know, that's really fun! That's really fun. All right, look, thank you everybody!

We're coming up to time, so I would like to thank again our supporters at MRI Software for making it possible for us to host the wellness webinars. I'd like to thank Nick and the board at the Rise Initiative. It's absolutely wonderful to be part of this initiative.

It was great to see so many people at AREC. And we've got our wellness webinars on the first Wednesday of every month. Anyway, we will be sharing, and if you need access to the Real Care app or go to the website, we also have playbooks for dealing with stress as a property manager, and some great tools for principals.

So, thank you everybody! I'm going to sign off. Thanks for coming along! See you next time.