Bill Crawford - Life from the Top of the Mind

Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Welcome to the Exit Coach radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions. So you can be well planned and don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach, Bill Black. Thanks very much for joining us today. Really pleased that you're here. We have a great speaker ahead. And his name is Dr. Bill Crawford, and in addition to holding a doctorate to counseling psychology from the University of Houston, Dr. Crawford is a licensed psychologist, an author of 4 books, and an organizational consultant and speaker. And over the last 27 years, he's created over 3300 presentations for organizations like Sprint, Shell, the American Medical Association, PBS, and many other organizations and professional associations. Both nationally and internationally, and in addition, his two PBS specials have been seen by over 15 million people, and he's been quoted as an expert in such diverse publications as The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Working Mother, the Chicago Tribune, Investors Business Daily, the Dallas Morning News, and Cosmopolitan, just to name a few. We're very pleased to introduce Dr. Crawford, and we're going to talk about life from the top of the mind. Dr. Crawford, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this. Well, it's it's my pleasure. Uh, we really uh enjoy giving our listeners fresh perspectives on a lot of different topics. And tell us a little bit about this uh life from the top of the mind philosophy of yours. Uh, what's it about and how is it unique? Sure. It's something I discovered when I was getting my PhD, you know, you're going through all these trainings and these classes and learning all this material, and I kept asking myself the question, OK, how can I help in a unique way? Because a lot of people are stressed out there, but there's a lot of information about stress out there. So it's, you know, to go out there and tell people to take a deep breath or eat better or get more rest or go to the gym, that's all helpful, but people already know that. So I was asking myself, OK, what can I bring new, what new can I bring to the table? And I took a class called the Biological Basis of Behavior. And I learned that everything we think and feel and do and say, how we react to others, how others react to, to us, all has to do with how the brain processes information. And we got these three parts of the brain, the lower 20%, the brain stem is where fight or flight responses are located. That middle part kind of right between the ears is called a limbic system that acts like as a gatekeeper or a scanner and a processor and a router. And then we have the upper 80% of the brain, the neocortex that I call the top of the mind, where we have access to our interpersonal skills, our problem solving skills, our clarity, confidence, creativity, etc. And so in taking this course, I found a way to train this middle part of the brain, the limbic system, to interpret data in such a way that it sends it up to the neocortex where we can access our skills versus down to the brain stem where we trigger stress and frustration and anxiety and all the things that get in the way of. That's fascinating. So it's a matter of where your actual thought process is happening in a lot of the cases, whether it's an emotional thought or a rational kind of a well thought out type of a thought, and the limbic system is the gatekeeper that determines which at which level of the brain that's happening. Yeah, because the limbic system's job throughout the survival of the species has been to watch out for anything that is dangerous. In the past it's been saber toothed tigers. So it's kind of hypersensitive to anything that it feels is some sort of threat. That's why unfortunately, the news today isn't the news. It's not what's new, it's what you should be afraid of, you know, if it bleeds it leads. People have learned that if they can capture your what you worry about, they can influence how you think. So this limbic system is kind of hyper vigilant, kind of scanning the environment for things we should be afraid of, and it overinterprets situations in terms of worry and fear and stress and frustration. So it'll take a situation, say, traffic. It's really just a whole bunch of folks going the same direction. We're going slower maybe than I would like to, but it makes it, oh my God, I'm going to be late. What am I gonna do? People are going to be upset with me. I got to get around this car. And all of a sudden that kind of reaction becomes something that is more driven by this lower brain than the upper brain. And what's fascinating is it's not just an intellectual process in the upper brain, it's also a positive emotional process. So when I do my training and my coaching, I bring a lot of emotion to what I do, as you can kind of hear in my voice. It's just very purposeful emotion. It's more excitement and enthusiasm and a more positive perspective than that stress, worry, and fear that is so prevalent out there. It is a fascinating topic. I've heard a little bit about this. Some of the things that I've heard is that you can't, you would have empathy for someone in the neocortex and you would have hatred for someone in the, in the brain stem area and I've heard, I'd like to hear your em that you can't have both at the same time. Right, it's because they're, they're, they actually produce different chemicals. When you're down in that brainstem producing anger, frustration, hatred, resentment, annoyance, you're producing stress-related chemicals, mostly adrenaline, no adrenaline, and the big one being cortisol. That throws your body into a fight or flight response. You get more tense, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, and that's a chemical response from that lower 20% of the brain that is designed to move us into a state of fight or flight, which is great in a fight or flight situation. When you want to have empathy for someone, when you really want to understand them, so you can either help them or influence them in some way or be a good leader for them, then that comes from that upper 80% of the brain where your awareness, your purposefulness, your skills are located, and the chemicals that you're triggering up there are serotonin and endorphins, the chemicals that help us think clearer and feel better. And what I've heard also is that it's a key tactic of negotiators, especially highly skilled negotiators, to move people from the brainstem thought process up to the neocortex, and they do that by a certain line of questioning and questions. But the key to diffusing a situation is to move that thinking up to the upper brain, as you're mentioning. Absolutely. And in my book Life from the Top of the Mind, I've got basically, it's divided into three parts. The first part is, let's recognize when we're in that lower 20% of the brain, and I give them a model for how to shift from the brain stem to the neocortex, change the chemical makeup of your body from adrenaline, nor adrenaline and cortisol to serotonin and endorphins, and access all those good qualities and characteristics. Once you're there, the second part of the book is, how do you stay there? So you don't just keep finding yourself falling back into that lower 20% of the brain. And the third part of the book, which you're speaking of is when you're talking with someone who's either upset with you or resistant to you, or in some ways kind of in that, you know, that lower resistant part of the brain, how do you engage them in a way where they do indeed shift from the brain stem to the neocortex? Very fascinating. So, uh, uh, you've applied, you've said that this system can be applied to any aspect of life. Can you give some examples? Sure, in business, what I do is I go in in an organization and I will do like a 2 or 3 hour training ostensibly on stress. We could call it all stressed up and nowhere to go just because most people, hey, hey man, I'm really stressed. I kind of speak to that. But what I do is quickly move from talking about stress to really defining who we are. Rather than being defined by other situations like traffic stresses me out or difficult people make me nervous or whatever, rather than being defined by those trigger situations, let's take hold of that process and define who we are from this upper 80% of the brain in a way that we would recommend to someone we love. As if our kids were watching us and taking notes, what would we want them to see and learn. So I get everybody in the organization thinking this way, and what that does is it has everyone in the organization now taking way more personal responsibility for the qualities and characteristics they bring to the job. So it's not so much about blaming other people or blaming the organization. This is like, I wouldn't teach my kids to do that. How do I want to take more responsibility for that? Once that's done or in in about the same kind of time frame, what I do is I work with the leaders to get them to a place where when they talk to people about how to improve their work performance or their life, they're doing it in a way where the person they're talking to sees them as an ally and not an adversary. Because if you go in and start telling people what's wrong with them or how they're screwing up, you'll actually drive them deeper into that resistant brain and they will stop listening to or certainly stop believing and responding positively to anything you're saying. So you want to go in as someone who wants to bring out their best, not stop their worst. One of the things I talk about, yeah. One of the things I talk about when I'm, uh, when I'm helping leaders be more effective is you want to know two things when you go into a conversation. Number one, what do you want to bring? What are the qualities and characteristics you want to bring to this situation? So you're not going in with frustration or resentment or anger or annoyance or any of those lower brain responses. So what do you want to bring, and what do you want to bring out? Don't try to stop them from being one way. They will hear that as criticism and will go into shame or blame, both lower brain responses. What you want them to do is think differently and be differently in the future. So what you want to do is go in with the qualities and characteristics you want to bring out in them, and then at some point in the conversation, you wanna ask them what I call neocortex questions. Cause here's what most people do. They go in and they talk to people about what they've done wrong and why did you do it and what have you learned, that kind of thing. Well, again, the problem is the potential of the person hearing that is valuable is low. They're going to hear it as criticism, they're gonna go to shame or blame, and it's not gonna be good. What I like to say is, OK, knowing what you know now, how would you do that differently in the future? Cause there's no shame in the future. There's no blame in the future. It allows them to take what they've learned and apply it to the future. By the way, this works great with kids as well. One of my four books is how to get kids to do what you want. And it's really all about getting kids to think from this upper 80% of the brain versus this lower resistance. What can I get away with part of the brain. And, and when they make a mistake, which of course is inevitable because kids will make mistakes, asking that question, OK. Knowing what you know now, how would you do that differently in the future? I just heard parents tell me over and over how their kids have gone well. I guess, you know, I think I do this, and that's exactly what you're about to tell them, but now they said it. So whether it's from your kids or whether it's from your employees, being an influential person in someone's life, whether you're a leader or a project manager or a parent, you gotta know how to engage people in that way and you gotta know how to make sure you're in that upper 80% of the brain as well. And just as importantly as the fact that they said it, they, they had to think about it instead of just reacting in the lower in the lower brain and uh and then, you know, just creating an emotional situation. Now, now I've heard another thing and that is that you can tell if people are moving into that upstairs brain, they'll usually look up towards that section of their their forehead. Is that right? It's possible. What they will do is pause because most people when they come into some sort of intense conversation are worried about something frustrated, stressed, anxious, and so they're partly in that lower 20% of the brain. So once you get really clear what is driving that frustration, what belief or perspective or interpretation, What, what, um, expectation, they may be expecting you to criticize them or fire them or punish them or whatever. You want to learn what is driving that lower brain experience and then you wanna ask them this neocor. Once you do, what will happen is because they're in the brain stem, it will take a moment for them to actually answer. So you'll, you'll see them pause and they may look up. But they may just kind of, they may look around, they may just, who knows what they're gonna do, but they will pause, and that's your, that's your clue that something has changed, and then depending on how, on how they answer the question, you'll know whether they've shifted or not. Yeah, one last myth to dispel as I spew out my myths and what I've heard. I'm not the expert that you are, but I've heard that the, the neocortex, because of its relative size, it's smaller and it's, it gets tired easily at about somewhere around 40 minutes or 45 minutes. If you're in discussions using creating thoughts out of that part of your brain that you should take frequent breaks at that point. Is that, is that true? It depends. If that 30 to 45 minutes has been fraught with some disagreement or some stress or some frustration, and what is happening is your body is getting tired from the stress hormones that you're secreting. If you're in an engaging conversation where you're excited and you're bouncing off ideas, you're probably gonna get energized. And after 30 or 40 minutes, you're probably gonna be OK to go. Now, there is something called a 90-minute bio cycle, they say we dream in 90 minute cycles. So you do want to pay attention, and that's one of the reasons why we get sleepy about the middle of the afternoon is because we've been going through these up and down cycles all day long, but we haven't rested yet. And so each time we go down, we go down a little bit lower. So that's why naps are a good idea or just taking a rest is a good idea or taking a walk outside is a good idea. But to answer your question, that 40 minute cycle depends on whether or not the conversation has been stimulating and exciting, and you're jazzed about it or whether it's been somewhat of a struggle. Fascinating information. I'm talking with Dr. Bill Crawford of Crawford Performance Solutions, and Dr. Crawford, I understand you're a fan of great quotes. Do you use them in your seminars and your books? I do. I love that, you know, when there's been some wisdom that someone says out there, one of my quotes that I love when I start off with is from Albert Einstein that says problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created it. I think that speaks to how often we find ourselves trapped in a cycle of stress because we see the cause of our stress as the person or the situation that is triggering the stress. We don't see it as a trigger, we see it as a cause. And so when we get stressed, worries, frustrated, whatever, we go over there and try to change the cause, which of course is often not not uh possible. plus we're coming from that stressed part of the brain, so we don't have all of our skills available to us. So this is where I bring in my new knowledge about the brain. Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. Let's raise our level of awareness, what's truly going on here so that we can reinforce that. And people love my quotes. So one of the things that I have is I have a services absolutely free for each week I send out one of my favorite quotes along with 2 or 3 paragraphs about how to apply that quote in our life. I got about 5000 people on my mailing list list that receive these each week. And now I'm including a short 3 to 5 minute video that I'm also posting on YouTube. Got about 170 of these short videos on YouTube. So it's a way of giving people kind of bite-size information, you know, cause we're all really busy. So bite-size information they can take, think about real quickly, apply, and then move back into whatever they were doing, but maybe with a new level of awareness. That's fantastic. And so how can our listeners find that information and get on your, your list? You can go to my website. Uh, there's several ways to get there. The easiest ways to Google Bill Crawford PhD. I'll come up on the first page. Uh, the one of the, one of the uh addresses of the website is Bill Crawford PhD.com. That'll also take you there. On the first page you'll see a little thing that says subscribe. Hit that button and goes, and you can subscribe to the newsletter. It's free. There's also a thing on the first page that says, Hey, would you like some information about this life from the top of the mind philosophy and 4 questions you can ask yourself anywhere, anytime that will help you shift from the brainstem to the neocortex. And all you got to do is put your first name in there, put your email address in there, hit yes, and I will send you a PDF that will explain this philosophy to you and give you those four questions. And there's there's a store, oh go ahead. I, I was gonna say, listeners, I can't tell you how valuable that information is, especially talking with co-workers and, and children, and, and it's just amazing information. So keep going, you have a store? Yeah, there's a store on the website. It has my books on my 4 books. It's got videos. I've got the 2 PBS specials on there. It's got a 10 session audio series. There's a lot. There's how to get kids to Do What You Want. It's an ebook, as a paperback, it's an audiobook. There is an ebook on how to eat anything you want anytime you want, never gain weight. It has to do with not only kind of thinking differently about food, but producing less cortisol, because cortisol triggers glucose, glucose is sugar, sugar when it's not burned off, turns to fat. So just dealing with all of this begins to help you kind of change your relationship with food and weight and there's a lot of resources on there, basically. Tons of great information, Dr. Crawford, I'm sorry we're out of time. I'm really fascinated by our conversation. I think I, I blew it with a few of my questions, but I learned a lot from you and I hope our listeners did too, and I hope you'll come back and share some more information with us because there's there's so, so much information that you have to, to help our listeners with in their negotiation and their discussions and living from the top of the mind. So thanks very much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure, Bill, and your questions were great, no problem at all. I love it when that spontaneity happens in an interview, so don't worry about that. All right, well, thanks very much. We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back with another guest, so please stay tuned. Just thinking about what will happen to your business if you're gone keep you awake at night? Will you get the price you need from your business to carry you through retirement? The BEI network of exit planning professionals is the world's leading advisor network with the power to help business owners transition out of business on their own timeline and terms. Ask your most trusted adviser to create a BEI plan for you or visit us at exit planning.com. That's exit planning.com. You're listening to Exit Coachradio.com, the information station for age 50 plus business owners, where we're interviewing top advisors for their best tips, ideas, and precautions so you can be well planned. We upload new one minute tips every day. Exitcoachradio.com. Come listen for a minute. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.