SUMMARY KEYWORDS

brain, people, emotions, feel, feelings, mental health, science, angry, world, emotional, create, body, organizations, javier, understand, predictions, work, plasticity, important, very strong connection

SPEAKERS

Javier Santos, Lindsay Recknell

Lindsay Recknell  00:01

You are a people leader or an HR professional, working hard to create an amazing employee experience for your team and your organization. But between the operational tasks of your job managing emotions and politics both up and down the corporate ladder, and trying to find some semblance of work life integration in your own life, I suspect you are also overwhelmed and burnt out. If even the thought of navigating the complicated world of mental health at work probably seems like too much to handle.

Lindsay Recknell  00:30

Let this podcast be your not so secret weapon to help fix that. I’m your host Lindsay Recknell. And my mission is to help great leaders like you feel less awkward and more confident talking about mental health at work. So you can stress less, take more action and continue to make a valuable difference in your job as a leader positively impacting the lives of your I’ll be bringing you the experts insights and actions that will give you the skills you need to navigate mental health in the workplace and foster a workplace where everyone’s mental health can thrive.

Lindsay Recknell  01:05

Looking forward to introducing you to today’s guest, another fabulous SHRM conference speaker, Javier Santos, Javier is a fellow Canadian, a diverse entrepreneur and international speaker on mental and emotional health at work. Javier redefines what is possible by using our emotional capital to become happier and more productive at work. He founded the House of Purpose to help companies improve the human and subjective side of work affected today by burnout, unresolved conflicts and prejudices. Our conversation is all about science and emotional technology. And I’m excited for you to hear more.

Lindsay Recknell  01:39

Before we get started, I want your time to be valuable here. So in order to get the most from this podcast, head to my website at https://mentalhealthforleaders.com. And download the  Guide to Influence & Impact at Work, which has the step by step action plan, you’ll need to embed a focus on mental health into the employee experience of your workplace, it’s totally free. And it’ll give you the start to your action plan steps to follow to create engagement to build a budget and a method to measure the value influence and impact that you are going to be making as you lead this transformational change in your organization. We haven’t been taught the mental health skills we need to truly lead our organizations into the future. So let this guide and this podcast be the advantage you need to elevate your career, your leadership skills and the positive impact you’ll bring to your organization, head to https://mentalhealthforleaders.com and download the free  Guide to Influence & Impact at Work now. The opportunity is yours, and I cannot wait to see what you’ll do.

Lindsay Recknell  02:37

All right. Now let’s get to our guest. Hello, welcome to the show.

Javier Santos  02:42

Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here.

Lindsay Recknell  02:45

If I just remember from our initial conversation, how well the conversation flowed. I just feel like we’re so well aligned in how we think and some of the things we’re passionate about. So I just even can’t even wait for this conversation either. Why don’t we start by you sharing who you are, what you do and who you serve.

Javier Santos  03:01

Perfect. So my name is Javier Santos. I am Mexican Canadian intrapreneur. I do emotions at work. And that takes many, many different shapes. And we serve companies, we will serve actually all types of organizations because we work with government and private nonprofit. But that’s basically in a nutshell, who I am.

Lindsay Recknell  03:24

Amazing. And a Canadian. I don’t get a lot of Canadians on this show these days. That’s amazing. Just like myself, which is excellent. Wonderful. And we got connected because you are going to be one of the fabulous speakers at the SHRM conference coming up in New Orleans in June. Tell us a little bit about your talk there. What can we expect to hear from you?

Javier Santos  03:45

Well, this is obviously my favorite topic. And I am thrilled that we got this session approved because it’s about mental health and inclusion. And people don’t usually put those two together. But let me tell you, they have a lot to do. Because mental health is about how you feel at work. And being inclusive is how do your people feel at work? So now we’re dealing with this subject, they were dealing with emotions. So as you can see, there is a very strong connection between mental health and inclusion. And what I’m going to do during the talk is well basically draw that parallel and build some synergies How can you build a program, that it’s also good, it’s good for mental health, but also it’s good for inclusion.

Lindsay Recknell  04:28

I love that, um, who likes to talk about feelings and emotions at work?

Javier Santos  04:37

You know, once you get started, and I think that is a little bit of what we do is we create spaces where people feel safe to start talking about it. Now we’re not going to go and drill into your, you know, first childhood memory and try to uncover the trauma and we’re not going to blame everything on your mom. But you know, there is a big distance with When doing that and doing nothing, and that’s a little bit of what we have our mission at the house of purpose is to try to try to start bringing this language and to create spaces. Because this is not about me telling you anything, although we’re going to talk a lot about things that are important to say. But when you talk about mental health and inclusion at work, we will talk about emotions is I want to hear what people are feeling.

Lindsay Recknell  05:26

And how do you find their response to that I liked what you said about how there’s a there’s a great distance between, you know, emotional trauma, and you know, just how we’re feeling in the moment. So what, how do organizations and the humans in the organizations receive this work?

Javier Santos  05:46

Well, there is a little bit of, you know, help them understand how our brain works. And that creates a lot of, you know, no ideas to talk about. And you and I are going to talk about some of these things today. But one of it is just opening up their eyes to how important emotions are. And I think the biggest misconception that there is in the business world is that you can your pay to be rational not to be emotional. And we’ll talk a little bit later, that’s impossible. So people don’t, they say they don’t want to talk about it. Because sometimes they don’t know how it feels to talk about emotions. It’s not about just bursting into pee into tears. It’s about just, you know, saying how you feel. And this is this part of us that all is always present, that we don’t talk about, formally, but that we enact, without really knowing, right, our feelings cannot go away. So if you don’t pay attention to them, they’ll show up anyway.

Lindsay Recknell  06:44

It’s so beautiful, what you say, it aligns so well to the mission than the work that we do with the language of mental health, like it is all about getting to understand the words that you can use to express yourself. And so often, we just don’t know, we don’t understand that language. And so we won’t say anything at all, because our confidence isn’t high, we’re afraid we’re going to sound like a fool, or we’re not gonna get it right. And people are gonna misunderstand us. And it truly comes down to that language of mental health and recognizing those emotions and being able to express ourselves in a way that feels real and authentic, and, and approachable and all of those things. And it’s so beautiful, what you say. You also mentioned about science and evidence, which are two of my magic words. I would love to hear about the science of emotions, please.

Javier Santos  07:34

Yes, well, this is one of the reasons I started in this business, because this is my second career, as you and I talked and is because now we have the science that can show us objectively, without any doubt, how does our brain and minds work. And this is what we call emotional technology. And in the last 20 years, you know, the availability of technology that allows scientists to map the brain, you know, through CAT scans, and through, you know, putting things in your bloodstream and measuring the electricity and measuring imaging and so many different technologies that we have right now, we’ve been able to uncover the inner workings of the brain. And there is the scientists that have been working not only in neuroscience, because now we have affective neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. But these are things that are also coming out of biology and medicine and even psychoanalysis, believe it or not, turns out that a lot of the things that psychologists have been talking about, from their experience of watching their patients are now being corroborated, and in some cases adjusted, but it’s pretty much you know, along the same lines, as what neuroscientists are discovering, so now there is this field, which is my favorite subject. That is called neuro psychoanalysis, where people who understand the brain as an organ, and the functioning of the brain, meet with this people who have been working for almost 100 years in understanding how does the mind work, and they’re matching it, and they’re discovering some amazing ideas I can’t wait to tell you about.

Lindsay Recknell  09:12

Please tell me this is so exciting to me. And for anybody who’s listening, they know what a science geek I am. So please share what we know from this field of science.

Javier Santos  09:24

Well, I have a few points that I have prepared for you. And they’ve been number one thing and this is the most important thing you want to know about your brain is that the brains job, of course, is to keep you alive. And of course, it’s to help you reproduce and find all these things in the world. But the way it’s it’s physiologically built is to reduce prices. So as you grow up, you start creating these ideas about the world these mental maps that help you make predictions. So these are like stereotypes or algorithms. See, that we have in our brain, that tells us a lot about how reality works. Like, if I throw a ball, it’s gonna fall again, because you know, there is gravity, or if I bite an apple, I’m gonna have this experience this flavor, you know, it’s gonna look like this is gonna feel like that. And all these ideas about the world that we create in our brain are going to use that our brain is going to use them to make predictions about the future. So in a way, our brain is always anticipating what’s going to happen. And you know, and with experience, the brain is also always testing these predictions, and updating them. So this is what we call learning. So in a way, it’s important that we know that our brain does this because you tend to repeat the past. So your past experiences are going to inform your brain about the world that is going to find in the future.

Lindsay Recknell  10:56

Which is something that aligns to what I knew about energy management and your brain designed to be as efficient as possible. It brings to mind the idea that if we have ever learned these habits, if we can predict what’s going to happen next, is there something to be said for the efficiencies gained when we don’t have to think about what’s coming next, because it’s already habitual, or it’s already predicted?

Javier Santos  11:28

Absolutely. And this is the number one reason why, you know, this is an evolutionary innovation. And thanks to that, we were able to save energy in the brain, so that we could think about other things. So the brain consumes around 20% in adults of the energy that we that we consume, and thinking is metabolically very expensive. So when I have to bring something to consciousness, right, when I have to think about it, because my brain cannot automatically do it, I spend very valuable resources. So the brain wants to optimize that. So the brain wants to know how to go to work without thinking about it, how to open a can of beans without thinking about it, how to relate to my boss without having to think about it. So all these things are going to start creating this, you know, efficiencies, but it does in a way that when things change a lot, it becomes cumbersome. Because if the person that you are the apple that you’re gonna see every time to Steve pace differently, then they’re going to create a lot of errors of prediction. Right. So it’s easier to jump into conclusions, if that makes sense.

Lindsay Recknell  12:35

It makes a ton of sense. And this is, it must be why we’re exhausted at the end of a day where we had to make a ton of new decisions.

Javier Santos  12:44

Well just think about how we evolved and how we live today. The average person not only live a lot less years, but met a lot of less new people like you normally would be, you know, born in the country. And you would see, you know, meet your family and the people that live in the town and you were always, you know, very little exposure with strangers, right, and strangers became a bad thing. That’s why when we meet people, we don’t know, we tend to be so prejudiced about them, you know, whether they’re female, or how, or the tall person or it’s a big person, or, you know, colors of eyes or the accent. Because our brain was designed by evolution, not to have to encounter a lot of novelty, which is not what happens today.

Lindsay Recknell  13:30

That is for certain. And so, back to what we were we started this conversation around inclusion, how can we use the brain to better for inclusivity?

Javier Santos  13:44

Well, the first thing is understand that we’re all different. We all come from different places. And so our experience is going to be based on how we understand the world. So in terms of, of inclusion, is to understand that what makes me feel safe is not the same thing that makes someone else feel safe. How I am resilient is not the same way, or someone else’s resilience. So if for example, I want to take a nap, because that’s my way to restore my brain like I did when I’m studying, right, like, I know, it’s gonna be 20 minutes. You know, that’s, that should be, you know, understood as my way of being resilient and not perceived as I’m just lazy. You know, just a simple example on how culture can sort of like sometimes offer very few possibilities at one way of being when in reality, we’re all different. So just understanding how subjective are experiences, it’s a very good way to start to being to become inclusive.

Lindsay Recknell  14:46

It feels so practical to just even consider alternative ways of thinking around something like a nap. I mean, if I can stereotype you fantastic Mexicans siestas are a thing You know, for, for me, this born and raised Canadian napping in the middle of the day is something I also enjoy, but experience a lot of pushback culturally from as an adult, napping in the middle of the day, it’s not something that you’re supposed to do. But if we can come from a place of recognizing those differences, and maybe being curious about them to learn more, that helps to build connection and also has a really great benefit in our brain. Yeah, is what I’m hearing you say?

Javier Santos  15:31

Yeah, I have another one of this, you know, findings from emotional technology for you. And and I love this one. And this is a big one. So it’s okay, we don’t get any further. But it’s important because people understand emotions, usually as a different capacity. So you hear people say, IQ, or EQ, right? So, oh, he has a very high IQ, but not a very, you know, high EQ, or vice versa, as if they were like two engines, right that you have, and you can have one or the other, or both. It’s actually not like that at all. And I love this quote, and this is from an actor who lived 100 years ago, so had nothing to do with psychology, you know, per se, but of course, being an actor a lot with feelings. And he said, a thought was the feeling long before he was a thought. And this is actually neuro scientifically correct. Because thought emerges as a way for the brain to respond to an effect. So I get hungry, I need to find food, I’ve started thinking, Where can I get food, I get angry, you know, I need to find a way to resolve this anger. So I’m gonna think about it. Right. And the same with all the things that we are impelled to do by emotional drives. So it’s important to know that you have to learn about how you feeling so that you can think before you act, right. So understanding how you’re feeling is going to help you think better. And that’s something that is not out there. In the culture, people think that if you’re very good, rationally, you know, you can be a very strong rational, CO and have no emotion at all. It’s like, that’s not the way it works. It’s impossible, you’re probably going to act. Right? Yeah. No, no, no, it’s so that’s, you know, some of the things that we it’s important to understand, for example, our emotional needs, so our need to, you know, go out in the world in the world and look for things that means something and our, you know, now need to attach emotionally and our need to our sexual needs. All these things are emotional drives, and actually behave in the brain like, like biological needs. So being angry is as difficult to forget sometimes as being hungry is until you resolve the anger or until you resolve the hunger that that those goes goes away. So pushing your emotions down, does nothing but just kind of make it worse for the future. Right. And, and that’s how you get sick.

Lindsay Recknell  18:07

So can we can we talk about the physical implications of crashing our emotions into our body? Because, yeah, it’s a relatively new concept as well, or like relatively new in the common vernacular is the impact that the detrimental impact of negative emotion over long periods of time on our body.

Javier Santos  18:29

Yeah, and I think this is something that happened this, this division between body and mind started happening culturally, I think, with science because we totally created doctors that look after the body. And then the mind was difficult to understand. So that was not really a science until right now that psychology is now you know, starting to become more of a natural science. And so what happened is that we lost the connection between body mind, but this has existed for many, many years. This is not new. We just forgot about it, right? Because it’s ancient wisdom that you know, corpore sano meant Asana, which is from Latin, like healthy body, healthy mind. So there is we actually store a lot of our feelings in our body. And that’s where we get this, you know, expressions like gut feeling, and you know, how you’re heartbroken and all these things. And that’s why we get stressed at work. And then it reflects in our back, it reflects in our inability to sleep, it reflects on, you know, how we’re feeling our bodies. There’s a very strong connection, and I would invite the audience to start feeling your feelings in your body. How does it feel when you get happy, you know, how does it feel in your stomach started getting those connections back again, because it tells us a lot about what’s happening.

Lindsay Recknell  19:50

And so, before I started doing this work five years ago, I was very skeptical. I was very anti, you know, don’t talk to people in my feelings, any of these things. But when people smart people, like you have started to talk to me about the science of it, the, the connection between mind and body and had me recognize the impact of the emotions, like joy and sadness, and what it actually felt like in my body. I mean, I’m a believer, and it also feels like, it’s something that I can control a little bit. You know, like, if I’m, as an example, if I’m feeling angry, and I have done the work to recognize what what anger feels like in my body, and what a potential solution to working through that emotion looks like and feels like in my body, I can be, I can take control of that, and be active and take some action towards resolution and dealing through that emotion, which feels quite powerful actually. And I wonder if, if that’s something that you see in your work, when you are teaching this to maybe some skeptical people like me.

Javier Santos  21:12

You know, there is a lot of things that happen, and you just mentioned, you know, one of the some of the main ones, but it starts with understanding or knowing when you’re angry, a lot of people don’t feel angry, because they confuse anger with something else. The same with sadness, a lot of people don’t feel sadness, they just get mad, but it’s actually, you know, is that they’re, they’re not recognizing some some of their feelings, or there is something that tells them that is not okay to feel sad. So they just feel anger. So there’s a lot of, you know, not knowing really what your body’s telling you that people are starting to discover. There is a lot that misunderstanding, for example, you’re not responsible for being angry, you’re not responsible for being afraid, is what you do with it, I can be very angry at you, and that there’s nothing I can do, I just get angry. And, you know, that’s not anyone’s fault. That’s just who I am. Now, what I do with it is a different thing. If I scream at you, if I leave the room, if I throw something, that’s, that’s what I’m responsible for. So that little bit, for example, tells a lot of people you have freedom to feel your feelings, don’t feel guilty for or don’t feel like you’re a bad person, because you’re angry. That anger is telling you about your state about what’s happening in the world that you need to pay attention to. Another another big thing with emotions that people don’t sometimes don’t understand is conflict, because we can feel different things at the same time. So it’s very common for Bob, for people to have conflict, you know, I want that cake. But I know that’s your cake. And I want to keep your friendship. So if I want to have my friend, I’ll have a you know, full stomach. But you won’t be my friend anymore. So I choose to keep your friendship, right. That’s how you resolve a conflict felt like, Okay, I’m gonna let go of the idea of the cake, because that’s less his cake. And I want her to stay my friend. So this is how, you know, sometimes people feel bad about having conflict, or they don’t kind of think about why am I feeling conflicted, and they just stay at, I don’t want to feel the conflict. So we have to learn to feel our feelings, not only emotionally, but also in our bodies as we were talking about.

Lindsay Recknell  23:26

Yeah, don’t take my cake. Just kidding. All comes back to that language and recognizing the recognizing and being able to name those feelings. So how, I mean, short of fine folks listening to smart people like you, in a podcast like this, how do we learn the accurate name for some of the things that we’re feeling?

Javier Santos  23:50

Well, you know, every everyone has a different experience. And, you know, some people because of, you know, the words, the way they were taught, they might be confusing some feelings, I think it’s important to this is a little bit like getting into wine, you’re not going to pick up a glass of wine and be an expert the first time you have to kind of read a little bit and then maybe get together with some friends and, and pay attention, you know, what is the flavor of the wine, you know, and some people say, Oh, I taste some banana and some apple, right. So after a lot of glasses of tasting, you know, you know, just bringing them, you know, happy example, you’ll start noticing these things. So it’s the same with feelings, you start asking yourself, How do I feel right now? Right? And then, you know, when you think about it again, how do I feel right now? And then maybe the first couple of times, like, I feel the same, I don’t feel nothing. This guy in the podcast is crazy. But then before you know it, you’re gonna start seeing like, oh, I hadn’t noticed this feeling. Why do I feel like this? And then once you start asking yourself, that’s when the growth happens, right? Because you’re like, I think I’m still angry at something that happened yesterday. What’s up with that? Right? And then you can start learning about yourself.

Lindsay Recknell  25:00

It’s okay, if you’re wrong, right?

Javier Santos  25:05

It’s okay if you’re wrong, because this is like, you know, riding a bicycle and expecting never to fall, I don’t know anyone who bicycle I never fail, you have to assume the fact that you’re gonna get hurt a little bit, you know, otherwise, you’re going to be very anxious Lee provoked, you know, anxiously feel process. So it’s okay to be wrong. And I think we all have to understand that we all have our own way or feeling our feelings, but the way we are right now doesn’t have to be the way we are for the rest of our lives because our brains change our brains are plastic. And that’s, you know, another one of these properties and these great things that we’ve learned from emotional technology is that, how and how much we can change?

Lindsay Recknell  25:49

Tell me about that.

Javier Santos  25:50

So this, this is called neuroplasticity, right? And is the ability for the brain to change on its own. So it’s actually, you know, it’s something that when you were born, we are full with plasticity, every our brain is a work in progress. So the first few months, and then the first few years of your life, you’re basically you know, a matter that is creating, so everything is no so very, very plastic. And it decreases as we age, but it never ends. And that is a very important thing to say. Because you can always change your brain and I say what I hate when people say like, oh, no, he cannot change, because that’s the way he is, well, there is always something you can change, right. Now, another interesting thing is that we are always more plastic in some areas than in others. So for example, if you are born with parents that speak two different languages, and your race speak in two or three different languages is going to be easier for you to pick up more, because that area of your brain brain is still plastic, because that’s something that you use a lot. If you play a lot of different sports, and you’ll learn how to ski and snowboard and play golf, your brain will keep that area more plastic. So it’ll be easier for you to learn new things. So it’s important that we know you know, where is my brain more plastic? And where would I like it also to become to become more plastic? Right? So it really depends on your experience. And as I was telling you, we the brain makes six predictions and it’s always adjusting them. So that’s the essence of plasticity, right? It’s it’s adjusting the model of reality, how do i pronounce this word. So it’s important that we know that this is an ability that we have, and that we make the most of it, right that we become the better version of ourselves. Or if you don’t believe in self improvement, at least become more adaptable, because reality around us is changing. So if you don’t want to change, that’s okay. But you still have to adapt.

Lindsay Recknell  27:55

Do we ever lose that plasticity? I mean, I feel like it must decline. But can you teach an old dog new tricks?

Javier Santos  28:04

Yes, definitely. Because we have different areas of the brain that are plastic and, and you can always regain some plasticity, right? It’s, it’s hard. It’s, it’s a little bit more like jello, not like concrete, but you can always soft, make it a little bit softer. You know if that analogy helps. But definitely, you know, the idea of if you don’t use it, you lose it still there. So if you’re, you know, if you go a lot of years without using certain abilities, you’ll lose them. So it’s harder for them to come back. So I would say don’t worry about how non plastic it is. Just do something about it.

Lindsay Recknell  28:45

Yeah, it’s still possible, it just might be harder than it would have been had you kept that up before.

Javier Santos  28:50

Oh, yeah. But you know, hopefully, your audience will be young enough to do something with this information.

Lindsay Recknell  28:57

Well, and I like what you said about you know, if you if if a person doesn’t have a growth mindset, and they’re not interested in changing themselves, cool, I mean, you get to choose, but that you that you do still need to adapt as the world changes around you. I think that’s really important to call out as well.

Javier Santos  29:16

Well, if you’re going to change jobs, you have to adjust to the new relationships, if you’re gonna get married, well, you know, there’s a big learning curve there if you having a child if you’re getting older, because now you can do the same things you used to do so you have to change your interest. You cannot be you know, having the same high degree of interest for you know, climbing mountains when you’re 60 Maybe you just read about them. So, you know, it can be as passionate as right it’s like it’s not about having a less quality of life or or having less passions is about finding new passions, finding new ways of relating, as you go through life and just encounter it right. And and I think there is also something to say At about how much our world is changing, right, with just climate change, you know, the level of the sea is going to rise. And that has never happened before. So there’s just one little thing that is new.

Lindsay Recknell  30:13

It’s April 22. And we have four inches of snow. So climate change is definitely a thing.

Lindsay Recknell  30:25

I can’t even believe that we’re coming to the end of our time together. Do you have some final parting wisdom that you want to make sure that all of the listeners take away from this episode today?

Javier Santos  30:35

Yes, I would say if there’s one thing that you want to take away from this is remember that you have to learn to feel so that you can think before you act.

Lindsay Recknell  30:45

Yes. Feel. So you can think before you act and get to understand the language of those feelings, so that you can express yourself and make those connections with other people.

Javier Santos  30:58

 Exactly.

Lindsay Recknell  30:59

Wonderful. So beautiful. So beautiful, Javier, how can people get a hold of you when they want to learn more?

Javier Santos  31:06

Well, my company is called the House of Purpose. So if you go to the https://houseofpurpose.com, you’ll see who we are. And you know, you’ll see my picture and we have a contact info so you can find those there. Yeah, so hopefully we’ll find some people that are interested. But if you don’t want to call us, that’s okay. Just start feeling your feelings.

Lindsay Recknell  31:27

Absolutely fair. We will put the link to your company on the website, we will promote this like crazy because everybody needs to know this information. Everybody needs to know that feelings are okay. And that it’s actually the place that we start with our interactions and behavior. This has been so so wonderful. I can’t wait to see you at the conference and hear your talk. Share in more of your wisdom. It has been such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

Javier Santos  31:53

Thanks so much.

Lindsay Recknell  31:55

Thanks for joining me for another awesome episode of the mental health for leaders podcast. To make sure you don’t miss any future episodes, please go to https://mentalhealthforleaders.com and subscribe to have these episodes delivered right to your inbox each week. You’ll also find all the show notes, links and resources that my guest mentioned on the show and the link to the Guide to Influence and Impact at Work freebie I mentioned at the beginning of this episode.  You’re listening to this podcast because you know our people need us more than ever. But being a people leader and an HR professional is especially hard right now. If the thought of figuring out how to best support your people and yourself feels overwhelming and impossibly hard. Let’s talk. I don’t promise I can make it easy, but I can make it simple. So let’s do that together. Go to https://mentalhealthforleaders.com and download the Guide to Influence and Impact at Work now. Until next time, take good care. And as always, call me if you need me.