The Chimp Paradox with Professor Steve Peters

EPISODE 12:   The Chimp Paradox with Professor Steve Peters

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In this episode, Martin and Jonpaul talk to renowned psychiatrist Professor Steve Peters, who specialises in the functioning of the human mind. They discuss his famous ‘Chimp Model’ and its application in high-stress environments. They explore imposter syndrome and the antecedents of high performance.

Guest, Cast & Crew

Professor Steve Peters is a medical doctor who specializes in mental health and the functioning of the human mind. His work spans education, the national health service, the corporate world, and elite sports. He helps people to understand how the mind works, to gain insight into their own unique mind and situation and then develop the skills to optimise individual performance and quality of life.

Hosted by Martin Jones & Jonpaul Nevin https://www.ophp.co.uk 

Edited by Bess Manley

Produced by WavellRoom https://wavellroom.com/audio/ 

Resources

• Steve’s company: https://chimpmanagement.com 
• Steve’s official website https://profstevepeters.com 
• Steve’s Books including The Chimp Paradox https://chimpmanagement.com/books-by-professor-steve-peters/

If you’re enjoying this content, please like and subscribe so we can keep improving. And remember to visit WavellRoom.com for their latest articles, podcasts and newsletters. 

Chapters

01:47 Steve Peters’ Background and Career Journey

05:03 The Chimp Model Explained

09:29 Imposter Syndrome and Its Implications

17:46 The Neuroscience Behind the Chimp Model

23:28 Values and Team Cohesion in High-Performance Environments

30:32 The Reality of Elite Sports Life

31:45 Psychopaths in Boxing: A Unique Perspective

33:16 Adapting and Learning in High-Stress Jobs

34:42 The Importance of Individualized Training

38:56 Preparing for the Unexpected

40:36 Dealing with Trauma in Psychiatry

46:37 Addressing Moral Injury in Extreme Jobs

51:40 Looking to the Future: Legacy and Personal Projects

55:59 Steve Sets An Emotional Health Challenge

Up Next

This is the final episode of this first series, but all 12 episodes will remain available for you to listen back to. We hope to be bringing you a second series in the very near future. Thanks for listening.

Transcript

[00:00:00] intro: Hello and welcome to the Optimizing Human Performance podcast. I’m Martin Jones, a Human Performance Specialist, Researcher and Educator. And I’m John Paul Nevin, a former Royal Armoury Physical Training Corps Instructor turned academic. Each week we talk to world leading experts about how to unlock the full potential of those who operate in high stress, high stakes environments.

We discuss the latest science, innovative strategies, practical wisdom and inspirational stories in the rapidly evolving world of human performance optimization. The Optimising Human Performance podcast is produced in partnership with the Wavell Room and the Tactical Athlete Performance Centre at Buckinghamshire New University.

In today’s conversation, Professor Steve Peters discusses his work in optimising human performance. Steve is a consultant psychiatrist who specializes in the functioning of the human mind. His work spans education, the national health service, the corporate world, and elite sports. Simply put, he helps people to understand how the mind works, to gain insight into their own unique mind and situation, and then develop the skills to optimize individual performance and quality of life.

JP and I talked to Steve about his famous chimp model. We touch on imposter syndrome and we dive deep into the antecedents of high performance. 

[00:01:24] Martin: Hi, Steve. Welcome to the optimizing human performance podcast. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you join us today. How are you today?

[00:01:31] Steve: I’m very good. Thank you for inviting me.

[00:01:33] Martin: That’s great. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Your work is something that I’ve read about and seen for many years now and I’ve had friends who’ve come to work with you. So I’ve got a good idea of the great work that you’re doing. So I’m really looking forward to it. can you tell us about yourself? Can you give us a bit about your, your background, how you’ve got to where you are today and where you are currently?

[00:01:57] Steve: Okay. I’ll try and keep it succinct. I’m old. It’s a long story. so in a nutshell, I’m a professor of psychiatry, based on my work around neuroscience. I’m with the Royal College I’m also at Sheffield University, where I teach. I’ve been there 30 years as a senior clinical lecturer.

I have a professorship there and I’m with Darby University as a professor. probably people normally better for the work in elite sport. which was an accident. It wasn’t a planned thing. I’m not an overly sports fan. I’m a people fan, but I’ve had the privilege of going to five Olympic games.

So a lot of varied experience. in my clinical work, I worked in the NHS for 20 years. I was a consultant and clinical director of the hospital.so again, management experience. But very varied with clinical work, so I ended up doing forensics, so this was, colloquially speaking, serial killers, psychopaths, under the home office, but initially my training took me to do all branches of psychiatry because I’m an educator, university lecturer, so my main work was in, drugs and alcohol and general adult work.

[00:03:03] Martin: So when you say you’re an accidental, sports professional, how did you accidentally fall into the world of professional sport?

[00:03:11] Steve: I teach, as I said, at Sheffield. One of the students, excellent student, took a job with British Cycling, and called me and said, do you remember me? And I did. And he said, could you do me a favour? I think we’ve got a mental health problem in an elite athlete. And he felt a bit out of depth. So as a favour, I went in and worked with the athlete.

he went on to do fantastic things. And then the head of cycling called me and then said, what did you do? Because this was an incredible turnaround, and asked me to, get to know Chris Hoy, who’s done a lot of work with me publicly.

so I went to Athens with Chris Hoy, and the cycling team to the Olympic games, work very closely with him to help him manage his mind with emotional skills. He got a gold medal. And to be honest, that just opened the door. So, taekwondo came in, British swimming came in. a modern pentathlon, and it was just a snowball of about 30 Olympic sports.

And so I was then becoming known as the sports psychiatrist, which is a bit fraudulent. I’m not just a psychiatrist who’s applying what I know of neuroscience and the human mind into where people want to take me, which in this case was sport. 

[00:04:14] Martin: That’s fantastic. And there’s very few people I think have got that sort of experience in professional sport. I know as a young sport and exercise psychologist that was always the dream, right? These, these young trainees want to go to the Olympic games and you, you happen to, to have a a, a lucky accident, a happy accident where you you managed to, to get all these great experiences.

It’s, it’s a good story,

[00:04:35] Steve: It’s been great and I was always amused by people saying What can you teach us about high performing teams in sport? And I always say to them nothing, because all the work I did came from the NHS and working with teams there in high performing teams that frontline medical care.

And I took those principles into the sports. So really it’s learning from the medical system.

[00:04:56] JP: Steve, I come from a bit of a different background from Martin. So I came from a military background for moving into academia. And I can remember probably about a decade ago I came across your book, The Chimp Paradox. I think it’d been quite recently published or there or thereabouts. So it’d be real interesting for our listeners just to give them an understanding into this chimp model.

What is it and why did you bring it to the fore and obviously develop the model? What was your intent?

[00:05:19] Steve: Well, as is my role of, the lecturer at university, I’m there to teach psychiatry, but it’s based around neuroscience. So I try and teach the students the elements of neuroscience, and as we all know, the brain is extremely complicated. So I tried to simplify this and said there is a really simple way of looking at the brain, which is accurate, but it is a model. So I said to them, if you look at what nature has given us, which is a primitive defense system, you have a decision maker in the brain deciding what we need to do.

So I always use food as an example because most people relate to it. So our food drive is part of this, defense system and survival system. 

. And., it can get overstimulated and we get into a poor habit. It’s not what we want, but we overeat. So this system is a decision making system, which at times we don’t appear to be able to manage or override. And so I looked at why that was and saw that the centre of the brain, which is mainly limbic areas, but actually includes a lot more, became effectively a computer system.

It didn’t actually make decisions, but it stored memories and values. So this gave advice to the chimp system. about 6 million years ago, we deviated in the way we use our cognitions, our beliefs, and, and our logic and rationality.

And we actually joined forces with the chimpanzee, and we both developed this same system. So that primitive system within us is the chimp system. and chimpanzees use an identical system. The problem we have is, we have a secondary system to make decisions, and that’s us. So I called that the human. So this part of the brain is quite separate.

And what it does, it brings in logic and rationality. So it’s us that say, look, I want to eat healthy. I want to do all the right things. and then we have to battle with this primitive system, which starts saying, well, I’d like to eat for pleasure. I’d like to eat because I feel hungry. I go on my decision making, which is emotional.

So you ended up with an emotionally based system and a logically based system. Both have logic and emotion, and I call them human and chimps. So what we see is a bit of a battle in the brain, which most people related to immediately. They can see how they’re trying to do something like, I want to go out and jog and get fit.

And then I sit there and I think, well, why am I sitting here? If I want to do this, why can’t I do it? the crunch for me was looking at the newer science and functional MRI scanners. the decision making by these two systems, human and chimp systems, is dictated by the computer.

So it’s all a bit of a paradox that we program the computer and the chimp programs it, and then it feeds back what we’ve programmed. And then we have to listen to that advice. So what I said in the chimp model was, learn who you are, learn what your chimp is like, because they’re all pretty similar in blueprint, though they vary, as humans do.

And then let’s look deep in the brain and see what are your belief systems, what are your behaviour systems, where are your values, where does perspective lie, how would you bring that to life. So I’m trying to work with the centre of the brain, which then when we get that tidied up and correct, The computer system, it will influence the chimp and human, so we end up doing what we want, rather than what the chimp might say, which we may not agree with. 

[00:08:37] JP: bit of a layman’s question, but when they fire out there it’s do you think there’s a link between one’s educational attainment level or the experience they’ve had and their ability then to dial in human component of this model, which you mentioned obviously given the importance of logic and reason and controlling the sort of the emotional side do you think there’s a link there?

 

[00:08:58] Steve: I think it’s a tenuous link, because if you look at people, and that’s been my life’s work, is, intelligence and managing emotion don’t go together. and rationality and then making decisions, even if you’ve got an intellect behind you, don’t go together. But the probability is if you’re using more of an intellectual brain, you may be able to understand and reason with yourself a little better.

But at the end of the day, it’s a universal experience that we get hijacked. people say, why am I ruminating? For example, when you say about intelligence, if we make an assumption that a lot of intelligent people end up in professional jobs, the commonest problem I imposter syndrome. So there you’ve got people believing that I’m going to get caught out there’s something wrong and this is actually, an emotional experience which isn’t based on fact or information.

It’s based on worry about what other people think or being fraudulent or deceiving. So this is an emotionally based feeling which they don’t manage well at all.

[00:09:58] JP: Interesting.

[00:09:59] Martin: I see imposter syndrome a lot. Seems to be everywhere, From the perspective of the model and like, how do we understand how to change it. should we be doing to try and imposter syndrome?

[00:10:09] Steve: Okay. I’m going to give you what I believe is happening, and back it up with research. if you say, why do we see the eating drive everywhere? You would say that’s an odd question, because we need that for survival.

Imposter syndrome is exactly the same. It’s a survival mechanism, which is universal. So we know this is derived from the orbitofrontal areas, Which are the chimp, area brains I’m talking about with thinking. And what it is is, a chimpanzee necessarily has to stay within a troop. So it’s crucial that the chimpanzee feels valued and secure within the troop.

So if you take a chimpanzee away from the troop, it can have a lot of psychological distress. It belongs in the troop. So we have this primitive drive to stay within the group. So that gives translated in our world is we need approval. We need to make sure that we are genuine, that people won’t find any fault in us and then reject us.

So imposter syndrome, I expect to be fairly universal. I expect it to be a very healthy and positive thing to get provided you use it correctly. It’ll be negative if you mismanage it or misunderstand it. So it’s a very good defense to say, can you make sure that you’re fitting in with everybody else and you’re being genuine and they won’t find anything to evict you on.

So that’s a suggestion from the brain, it’s not saying you are an imposter and people interpret it that often and that’s where the problem comes. Instead of saying, it’s a suggestion to check out Whether you’re actually in the right place and got the right skills and competencies. And if you haven’t, then it’s a call to action to upgrade on them.

It’s not a call to start panicking. We have to let the chimp brain do that. Our job as the human is to come up with answers and calm that down.

[00:11:55] Martin: we talk about like reframing the situation is that the human part of the brain is able to reframe and see it in a different way so that it’s not a threat. It’s more of an opportunity and then provide us with, with opportunities to make some changes.

[00:12:09] Steve: Yeah, I sort of see it as being what nature intends, the chimp makes suggestions. And I think often people buy into the suggestion. I often joke with people saying it’s a bit like having a child that says there’s a monster under the bed. You know, your job is to say, look, there’s no monsters.

What you don’t do is go, well, we better seal the windows. and that’s what people are doing when they’ve got imposter syndrome and they start to get these terrible feelings. They engage with the chimp’s suggestion and say, I must be an imposter, so I feel terrible now. and then start looking for evidence they’re an imposter.

instead what the brain is intending us to do is the chimp suggests the human acts. So we intend that the human then says, right, well, let’s look at what imposter syndrome is, questioning and let me check on my competence and skills. And it may be as a human, we can get perspective and say, maybe I’m not in the right position and maybe I don’t have these skills and competencies, but that’s not a disaster.

That’s just telling me I need to acquire them or I need to move on and do something different.

[00:13:08] Martin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. which comes, comes into my next question around, you know, the saying that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Now I’ve, seen a lot of people who’ve, who’ve read a book, I’ve seen your TED talk, maybe listen to a podcast, and they’re now trying to do the same thing. I even heard of someone talking through the bonobo model that even they gave a nice new name, probably so they didn’t get 

sued. Yeah, I thought very creative, but I think what I’m getting at is, can anyone teach this stuff? I mean, it? 

seems to me like it’s a beautifully simple model. And I mean that as an absolute compliment that people buy into it because it’s so clear. It’s, it’s easy to understand. It’s easy to, recognize in ourselves, these different characters, I guess, 

[00:13:51] Steve: Yes. 

[00:13:51] Martin: Is it that simple? So we can just say, you know, I’ll go to the fridge and I eat that bar of chocolate. I know it’s just my chimp. Don’t worry about it. Or is I mean, it sounds like there’s a real science behind this. It’s part of psychiatric training. It requires a lot of knowledge to deliver this sort of treatment or practice.

[00:14:08] Steve: Yeah. I think.

It’s simple to understand, so I work a lot with children and the children pick this up very quickly and use it very appropriately they then start to manage their emotions. The devil’s in the detail. You’re absolutely right, Martin. When it comes to the depth of the model, it actually goes more and more and more into the nuances.

so although it’s a simple model , to teach or to understand, I think people can be unstuck if they don’t understand the nuances of the model and what the neuroscience is telling us. So, Simplistically, yes, but there are certain things, for example, it sounds like semantics, but if you reflect on it, it makes sense, that we cannot control the mind.

We can’t do that. It doesn’t allow us. Neuroscience teaches very clearly that the chimp is in charge. Very clearly. We have to work with that and manage the chimp. Which means we won’t always be successful and there are reasons why because this is a primitive defense so if we were able to overrule it we’d be in risk of danger because the chimp functions by doing a lot of things such as vigilance awareness that we as the human brain don’t have.

So if we’d lost our chimp brain, we would lose that. We can’t read body language from the human brain. The system doesn’t allow. The chimp system reads micro expression. It communicates before we’ve even spoken. It reads people. So I think the depth of the model, which I know some of my mentors who’ve with me 10 years say, you never taught us this bit before.

And we’re just still going through neuroscience and research. And there’s such a depth to it.

[00:15:43] Martin: Now, neuroscience is a fast moving field, right? It’s come along at pace. 

Your, has the model evolved as we learn more and more about the brain? have things changed from when you originally proposed this idea?

[00:15:55] Steve: I think when I gave the model out, as I said earlier, it was to just give people access to their mind in a very simplistic way. And as you say, Marta, if you go into too much detail, you get lost again and you can’t apply it. but then what has happened with the model is, As things like imposter syndrome appear and say, can you explain this?

And then I look back to the neuroscience and the research and think, okay, this is what’s going on. So the more that I’ve worked with this, the more depth I’ve seen in the model. And obviously research keeps moving our perceptions as neuroscientists, wherever my hats are neuroscientists, we’re shifting our beliefs around on this.

So even as early as, 2000 area, we had the limbic system, which we thought was this emotionally based system, and then we suddenly started to realize that actually it runs most of the cognitive work as well in us. It’s not emotionally based. There are specific areas. We also recognize that, one area will have multiple functions.

we then started realizing that the cortex, that’s the outer part of the brain, which we didn’t traditionally see as the limbic system. The bit that I’m calling the chimp thinking bit is part of the limbic system. So neuroscientists changed their mind on what research was coming through. So it’s like anything,

you’re constantly reading up on the research that’s coming through and saying, how does this apply? through the eyes of the model. So it’s not for everyone, the model, it’s for those who relate to it and think, yes, I could recognize this and then want the depth of it. So it is ongoing.

Yes, I don’t think it’s developed much more than the chimp human and computer. I taught it at the Sheffield Medical School and the students wanted more and more and I stopped. There’s not a cult. We’ll stop with six symbols because that’s keeping it simple. That’s what was only introduced to do but it’s been a great journey with it.

[00:17:39] JP: Steve, it’d be really interesting just to maybe go into a bit more depth on the model or just to understand some of the mechanisms coming at this as a layman. So what’s the roles of structures such as the amygdala and hippocampus? How do they sort of modulate the chimp? What’s the sort of interplay with those structures and their inherent role and then that interplay with the human side and the computer obviously those memories and those schemas which you already have in the back of your head.

How does it all interplay? I’m just fascinated to understand.

[00:18:06] Steve: This is going to be complicated, and you’re probably going to regret asking that, and the people are going to say, cut this bit out. the first particle from the orbital frontal chimp brain, above your eyes, and just behind them, is the amygdala. But it’s only there because it’s got to do fight, flight, freeze as a rapid response and that’s what it offers.

It has many other functions apart from that. It stores a lot of emotional memory for example. But keep it simple, it’s fight, flight, freeze. However, at exactly the same time as the system is feeding back what to do in the situation, it gets modified in the pathway that goes from the amygdala back to the orbitofrontal cortex.

And that pathway, we don’t fully understand why, gives us a moral compass, and it gives us conscience. So, we know that in my previous existence working with what we colloquially call psychopaths, we know that that does not function in them. Whereas most of us are.

When we pass that message back to fight, it modifies it with values now depends what your values are and whether you’ve actually worked them out. So now we’re saying it’s going to be very unique the way those two bits work. But alongside the amygdala come in a lot of others. so the anterior cingulate gyrus is a part of the brain on the cortex, which feeds back about whether something’s dangerous, whether it’s a good thing, whether it’s a bad thing, the magnitude of it, the amygdala can’t do that.

I’ve given you two, there are about ten that come in very quickly to this system. and they all give it different aspects. So I teach it almost like an orchestra. and the chimp brain conducts the orchestra and it will listen to some of it very clearly because it’s saying emotional memory tells me this is really relevant.

it does use cognitions, but as a secondary thing. So we often make an impression emotionally, by the amygdala, the anterior cingulate gyrus, and other areas. Then there’s just two I’m mentioning. and then finally we come to the cognitive areas that come in. But now we work those cognitions based on what we feel.

So once we start with the chimp side of the brain, unless we change to human, we will start with feelings, gut feelings that come in from the medial prefrontal cortex. And these all give the chimp some information and say, what do you want to do with it? And then it acts. If you come in with a human and a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is on the top of your head, and if that lights up and the chimp says, I don’t sense danger, so I’ll let you go, then we go now to where you’ve just mentioned, the hippocampal formation.

So we know this is quite a crucial area. It stores a lot of factual memory, it stores values, it stores beliefs in there. It also puts context to things, it has different kinds of cells that connect experiences with places we’ve been. So it puts it together in a much more rational way and it calls on other areas of the brain which work with logic and rationality and self reflection.

And this happens within fifth of a second, so if we start with the human part of the brain we have a very different perspective of what’s happening. So let me try and give it really simple.I’ll go back to food. let’s say that your chimp brain is moving first, and you’re on a diet, and you’ve been given a menu.

The chimp brain will now say, How do I feel? What am I going to feel like when I eat this? it’ll anticipate the pleasure, it’ll grab the reward system, and it will order what it wants. and that will not be the chimp brain. wise if you’re on a diet, but it’s what the chimp feels is good for you at the time.

And it will use cognition now to rationalize that by saying I’m going to train twice as far tomorrow. So now it brings in logic, but the logic is based on I’m going to eat it anyway, because it’s good for me. It makes me happy. If you now go to the human and the human picks the menu up, say we’re now in human mode, so it’s lighting up, it will start with the facts.

And that’s more likely to be I’m not going to run this off. The amount of food I’m about to eat would take me weeks. I’ll probably never get around to it, so I’m not going to do that. I’m going to look at what’s wise to eat, so I’ll feel good in another half an hour. And eventually, as the brain works through the system, it will come to the emotional bit, but now it’s based on fact.

So your chimp will now probably agree and say, Yeah, I’ll only feel bad in another hour, so we’ll go with the salad or whatever it is you’re ordering. So, Depending on which part of the brain you allow to go first, it will decide on whether we go with rationality and logic and facts, or whether we go with feelings and emotions, and then the rest of brain will base it on that.

So, the question I got when I did this 30 years ago is, can you switch from human to chimp, chimp to human? How do you do it? Because if we could switch to human, we’re probably going to come in on a much more sound basis. and the answer is you can do it. It’s an emotional skill to do it. And to do that, we’re getting so complex here.

[00:22:49] JP: That’s good. 

[00:22:50] Steve: you have to use the computer. because the chimp can’t be controlled. It can be managed via the computer. So if we work on a computer system, when the chimp takes advice, which it must do, then we can program the computer system to give it sound advice, to do what we want.

And then what people experience is when you start doing that, it becomes natural that I’m actually in a good place. I’m starting to feel okay about things. So it’s a learnt skill and the brain starts to learn to prioritise the human. And then we see myelination of tracks, which means you preferentially start going much more rationally.

It’s a learnt behaviour.

[00:23:27] JP: Fascinating. You mentioned values a number of times there, and it’s It’s really interesting because the importance of values and standards of value beliefs within some of the high stress, high risk organizations who we work with is team cohesion is so important in these organizations and the team cohesion is underpinned fundamentally by the culture of many of these organizations and that culture is underpinned by the values and beliefs which have sort of developed over time.

Do you feel that if you and again, this is probably more leaning into your experience in high performance sport where I appreciate various sports and various national government bodies. have their inherent high performance cultures. Do you feel the culture which you immerse someone within and obviously the values in which they adopt Does that then allow them to control their chimp in that environment? But if you take them out of the environment and put them somewhere else, it’s total novel where there isn’t no sort of in terms of values and beliefs. can they go rogue for want better

word? 

[00:24:29] Steve: I’m going to come at this at a different angle from what you’re asking. Because sometimes the question, may not be the one that’s going to give us the right answer. first of all, I just want to correct you, for people listening, we can’t control the chimp. So, whatever you do, you’re not going to control it.

And the reason I’m really being pedantic with that is, This model, if you’re not careful, can make people feel worse if they believe that they can control the chimp, because then they feel they’re failing, and there is no way you’re failing, it’s a skill. Just like in sport, some days your body works, and some days it doesn’t.

And that’s why we watch sport, because it is unpredictable. so I think the mind can be managed, but some days, with the best will in the world, we don’t manage it well. Something will happen that wrong foots us. So that was just a technical one. So going back on values.from my perspective.

The question is not about high performing team and values and culture. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but I feel it’s the wrong way to go about it. It’s far better to look at the values people possess and help them to clarify what we mean by a value and what values are and what do they hold. So they can reflect and establish their values.

And start to measure, which I do with people, how do you measure your values in action? Because if you start with that basis, and you have a lot of people who have values and are now living them out, you’re going to create a high performing team regardless of the process, regardless of what the team say.

Because you’re now selecting people on those values when you’re admitting them into teams. Not necessarily on what skills they’ve got, which we need for the team, but we’re looking who’s going to be the best team player. So. I think if, again, I take an extreme, if you get a very dysfunctional person who does not possess these values, and you plant them in a team and say what we’re all going to do is have these very altruistic, values, they’re not going to abide by that because they don’t go in with that.

So the people entering the team will make the high performing team. The high performing team won’t make anything on the people entering. Because if they’re not going to shift, then you’re going to have a lot of people kicking against the process, which is what I find often when I’m asked to go in and board meetings for corporates or I’m asked to be going to sports teams, select your people carefully.

Your problem is in a board meeting, you can select. because usually there’s a competition, when it comes to elite sport, we have to adapt these principles because if you’re a gold medalist, but you’re actually an extremely difficult man to work with, who doesn’t possess many values, we have to somehow manage that because you’re going to give us that gold medal.

And so we can’t pick a second rate person who can’t do that job. So again, there’s devil in the detail and . I like to work with specifics because each team is very different.

[00:27:09] Martin: I’m going to come back to something you said, select your people carefully. in some of the, the organizations work with, I’m asked to help with selecting people. you’ve got tons of experiences, these high performing teams in, like you said, frontline medical, working in government, in businesses, not to mention sport, you know, across all these very different, but equally high stress, high performing organizations. Are there any universals that we can say, like, we, should be selecting for this trait, that experience, that value system?

Is it, is there anything that we can, we can look for, or is it just, random? 

[00:27:50] Steve: it’s a difficult one. I’ve seen high performing teams where you get one or two people who are destroying the team, but they feel they need to keep them because of the expertise they’ve got.

and my experience has been when they actually get to a point that the team is becoming so dysfunctional, they remove these people, the team actually excels. So sometimes we cling on to people with experience that are actually quite destructive. Clearly, if you’ve got someone who has experience and expertise which we can’t replace, then, as I said earlier in this talk, you have to learn how to contain that without least damage.

but if you want to go right to square one, And so what’s the evidence base of how we select teams? I would go to the work done on who are successful people in general outside of the team. and we know that intellectual intelligence, has a big boost factor to success.

And I know it’s being quoted as being about 25%. So someone who’s got high intelligence, whatever they turn the hand to, including relationships, relationships. including teamwork, including individuality, they will have this boost of around 25%. And there are different forms of intelligence. So it depends what the team is doing.

If it’s an artistic group, then there is an artistic intelligence. It may not be an intellectual intelligence, but if you step back and say, what’s the biggest factor that’s going to give a boost. And I know in one study, I saw it was quoted as 75 percent boost miles ahead of anything else.

And that was emotional skills. And that makes sense to me. So if I try and define what I mean by that, simply speaking, emotional skills is a person who knows how to understand and manage themselves. So they manage their thinking, their behaviours, their emotions. And on top of that, they understand and get people and they know how to manage people.

So they look at people and understand the person and their emotions, their behaviours and their thinking, and can work with that. So people skills, emotional skills of managing yourself and others in situations is the biggest factor. To me, it’s so self evident and common sense. These people are streets ahead, they just manage themselves and others to get the best out of them.

So you’re looking at selecting. However, however, in 2012. I had the privilege of being asked to give some advice, before the Olympics came. we were looking at something called girls for gold, it was a great initiative and I was asked, can you give some comments?

How do we select girls who are a certain height? And we’re going to train them in sports where they might have more chance, where competition is not as severe and you don’t need as much experience. So we were targeting potential medals and they asked me to do a talk and then try and assess which girls would be suitable.

And I declined. what I did do is I said that for this particular situation, I wouldn’t go on particularly motion intelligence, but we know that the life of an elite sports person is extremely difficult. You’re on the road a lot. Your relationship struggle. There’s no guarantee of success at the end.

So you have to have an attitude of it’s an opportunity I don’t regret. it’s going to be a very big commitment and it’s tough. So what I did is got three very successful Olympians that I worked with and I asked the three girls to come in and tell them what it’s like and what the lifestyle is like and something like a quarter of the girls dropped out immediately.

the reason I did that was for me, the critical factor, it’s only my experience working late sport is the people who make it get what they have to do and get on with it. The people who struggle and don’t always keep feeling I can’t live in this environment. So they struggle too much. So for me to get someone to say, what’s it really like, is more important than me going now down the route about emotional skills or values.

so I changed horses. And that’s why I’m saying for me, when he asked about the chimp model, I think the devil’s in the detail and you’ve got to apply to unique situations realize what’s critical and what isn’t critical. And again, amusing to me was, um, I was asked by, a boxing coach at a highest level, about getting in psychopaths to box.

Because he said, one of the problems we have with boxers, which sounds strange, is they don’t like to hurt people. and he said, and that can actually cause a problem. So, I said, okay, shall I say, well, you can’t do that. Cause he said, well, they won’t have any conscience.

I said, well, they won’t, but they won’t train either. You know, they’ll do things the way they do things. So you’ll find that they don’t commit to things. They’re not complicit. They won’t discuss. They’ll do things the way they want. And they’ll be devious. That’s part of the character. So, again, it’s like you can’t just go on surface level with some things.

You’ve got to start digging down and have the experience to know the kind of people you’re working with. And then it comes down to uniqueness of assessing a unique individual. 

[00:32:34] Martin: that’s ringing a lot of bells especially that idea of, You know, let people know the reality of what they’re trying to do. There’s books, TV shows, people think they understand what the life is, or the job.

I mean, it is a life, it’s a lifestyle. And I think When people enter these, selection pathways, these arduous courses, I think it becomes a little bit of a, a shock to them when they realize what it is they’re actually, what they’re actually going to do. And you get these high attrition rates.

I think, it sounds like great advice, just, the horse’s mouth, this is the job, this is the lifestyle. It sounds like, eminently sensible thing to do, sure people do that in other organizations.

[00:33:16] Steve: I temper it with the idea that you can learn as well. So let’s say somebody says I’m struggling with x, y, z of being an elite athlete or anything in a job. You have a look and see is this person able to use some process, some techniques, some beliefs, change their mindset so that actually we can contain the negative bits for as long as we need to do the job.

if it’s containable, then we can still go ahead. Yeah. And also, I’d like to see what capacity has this person to learn. What capacity have they got to be flexible? If we look at that, you’ll get some people who’ll just be so good at adapting. and then they’ll pick it up and run with it. So, some people may start, with a skill base of 90 percent emotionally savvy. And they need to get that extra 10 if they want to be in a great place, elite level place. Where some people I’ve found can start as low as 10 or 20 percent if we look at how we could measure it.

But they can get to 100. Our evidence shows if we want to learn emotional skills we can do so and we will therefore change the way we present and the way we feel about ourselves.

[00:34:21] Martin: fantastic. I’ve seen those people that ultimately they get to where they need to be because they’re able to demonstrate, coach ability, the selection. is not about finding someone who’s the end product. It’s finding someone who’s able to become the finished product over a period of time that they are adaptable.

I think that seems to be

a key thing in lots of high stress jobs. 

[00:34:42] Steve: Can I pick that up Martin? I don’t want to miss this point because I think it’s quite a crucial one. It’s something I often have a battle with with some of the coaches when people come in and they’re saying I’m willing to learn and be flexible this is basically what he’s like. young athletes, where we need necessarily to have a teacher for us and someone who’s going to tell us what to do.

But as the relationship develops, that teacher needs to start to come alongside their student as an equal. And eventually, particularly in sport and other examples, coach needs to step back and be an advisor and sounding board. The person needs to learn then to take responsibility.

So my experience has been that we can start with people who are great and adaptable and flexible, but they have to also learn to mature where they start doing joint decisions. And finally, depending on what setting we’re in, they need to take responsibility and accountability and use people appropriately as advisors.

Otherwise, you end up in a situation where they’re not actually developing. And if we’re not careful about the coaches, may inadvertently keep them in an immature state in the role they’re in. 

[00:35:47] JP: It’s quite an interesting point there because it’s already, it’s beginning to highlight the differences between the, what we’d call your, your sport athlete and arguably the tactical athlete. Those who have to operate in these extremist contexts, because in those realms we have a word called Vika volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

And indeed, if you look at it from a military standpoint, it’s about being able to deliver violence to your enemy. That that’s the bottom line. And that in itself is didactic. Obviously you’re up against an opponent competition and it’s a zero sum game. You can’t afford to lose. And if you are not adaptive, if you do not demonstrate adaptability nor resilience, you’re going to get pinned in very, very quickly and potentially in a bad position.

And not only for yourself, but also for those alongside you, because it’s very much a team endeavor. But then you start to think, task demands are so Different. That’s where we see the divergence, I would argue. And obviously, I think a lot can come from sport into the military or into the sort of tactical realms, broader speaking, but it’s also appreciating that contextual difference and what’s required to be successful.

Because I think there is a differential there.

[00:36:51] Steve: Yeah. And again, it’s that uniqueness. I had the privilege many years ago of working with the police who were working frontline with very serious situations, where it was life threatening. and I’m going to take extremes. One police officer would say, if I know who the enemy is, I get hyped up.

I now contain that hype and now go process driven. And he needs that hype in order to get into the process driven. However, the next guy says, don’t let me look at the enemy. Just let me go process driven because I remain calm. I don’t want to be ruffled because I can’t contain that. So I can’t go in with one process.

I have to say, let’s look at the options. of what you could do, which one do you think you resonate with, and then test the water. and then some people get insights to say, oh, it wasn’t how I thought I’d react. whereas others say, yeah, exactly as I thought. So again, I apply that within sport. It’s very individual.

So for some, again, I’m taking extremes. they go to the Olympic games and I’ll say, go outside and have a look at the crowd and that gets them in such a heightened state. They’re ready now. And now we get them to focus on process, whereas others, I wouldn’t dream of doing that because you won’t get them up the dressing room, you know, but we work on this for years before.

It isn’t on the day. I do emotional skill building, for two, three years before an Olympics.

[00:38:12] Martin: So in the world of defense, let’s say, we never know when the next conflict is going to come, it’s not like an Olympic cycle, we can’t say in four years time, we’re going to deploy you,

we have to remain ready, there has to be a physical readiness has to be a psychological readiness. Is it possible to train you? these people in a similar way to you train an athlete with the predictability of a tournament or a date. if I’m working with a group of soldiers or sailors or, or aviators where the end point is unknown, can we train them in the same way?

Or does it have to be fundamentally different because of nature of the contest that they’re entering?

[00:38:48] Steve: Right. I first have to confess because I’ve not been in this situation, I don’t want to say, Oh, I would do this because I don’t know. This is new. so I’m going to have to make some generic responses to that to say, when I work with sports people, sometimes, something will happen that’s completely unexpected.

So, a referee makes a very poor decision. someone from the crowd comes out and sabotages. a competitor breaks the rules. So, can you predict what’s going to happen? The answer is not really no. But can you actually prepare for the unexpected? Yes. so I, I get athletes and we prepare for the knowns And then I go through and say, right, let’s go for some unexpecteds. And we then have generic responses that say, if the unexpected happens, we need to default to plan B. And this is how we’re going to function in the event of something unpredictable. Because again, in my experience, There’s always some kind of conflict at the Olympics, always some injustice, always something that goes wrong.

So we need to prepare athletes to say, I don’t know what it’s going to be, but when it happens, how do you want to be? So I’m guessing I would go down that route to say, we don’t know, but we do know we can prepare ourselves for the unknown and for the unpredictable. We can actually do a plan for that.

[00:40:05] Martin: That’s great to hear. That’s great to hear. Because that’s the that is the kind of the approach that the I personally taken and a lot of the people that I’ve worked with is the what if planning, I guess, is kind of what we try and call it.

[00:40:16] Steve: Yeah.

[00:40:17] JP: Suppose it’s that quote, isn’t it? You don’t rise to the challenge, but you sink to the level of your training. And if you’re training, whatever discipline it’s been in physiology, psychology, however you’ve ever done it. So you get to a real high level when things start going awry, you’re going to drop down to it, but hopefully it’s at quite a high level.

It’ll give you the skills and tools to adapt quickly to the situation.

[00:40:35] Steve: Yes. Yeah.

[00:40:36] Martin: So when you’re working in psychiatry, when you’re training psychiatrists, I imagine, There’s very, very unwell people and they might be violent and they might reveal some, some pretty traumatic experiences. How do you train young psychiatrists to deal with the things that. They might be hearing about a horrific crime or, or something like that.

how do you help these young doctors to deal with that sort of trauma?

[00:41:04] Steve: Okay, first of all, most of them will not be subjected to that. clearly tragedies happen, tragedies happen. but if you take, 100 people with schizophrenia for example, 99 percent are no risk ever to the public, ever. So only 1 percent of people with schizophrenia are likely to be violent. and usually it’s against themselves.

It’s not against the public. So I think we need a little bit of perspective. But that doesn’t eliminate that point. Potential for the 1%. for doctors they wouldn’t normally meet this at all because I worked in forensics which is where you’ve got people who have transgressed the law or are extremely ill, and therefore we’ve got to contain them in special hospitals.

Most of psychiatry is people with depressive illness, bipolar disorders, obsessive compulsive. They’re standard mental illnesses which are no threat to people. They may be a threat to themselves because of mood states. and potential self harm. So I think just a reassurance first. They will get probably more trauma doing A& E.

Where you’ll get somebody who’s coming from a car accident. This is more traumatic. So yes, we have to expose them to that. and I personally do some work with the students on that. again, it’s experience and then debriefing afterwards to say, right, you know, what could happen?

How do you feel about that? That we try to do that with students. I don’t personally, I probably get shot for saying this. I don’t think we do a good job with doctors. I think we’re just left to our devices. You just go through the system. So I think most doctors would probably say to me, I’ve never, ever had any support advice on dealing with something traumatic that I’ve actually seen or dealt with.

Yeah,

[00:42:41] Martin: magic wand, or you had unlimited budget and you had the power to change that, that you could say, I’m going to go to paramedics, frontline medical, military, these jobs that are likely to experience some pretty nasty things, and you’re able to create a training program. to help these people.

So when they do experience trauma, we’ve have supported them and there’s a structure and there’s, you know, there’s money behind it. It’s a hand grenade of a question. So is it, you know, a difficult one to answer? but would you do

[00:43:11] Steve: I think the first thing to say is there probably are these courses out there, I’m just not aware. So there’s somebody going to be fuming thinking I do this for a living and we do a brilliant course and we’ve evidence

based it. 

[00:43:21] Martin: if you’re listening, come

on 

[00:43:22] Steve: exactly. So I apologize to those people if I had a magic wand, I think I’d go down the route, which it’s always been the way I’ve worked and I’ve alluded to all the way through this. I’d start with the individual, understand yourself. Understand your reactions, rather than go to the external world and say right, if you see somebody who’s been hit by a car and they’re in a mess, or you see someone with a severe delusional disorder that is becoming violent, I wouldn’t start with that, because if you get someone in a great place with themselves so they actually feel, I can take on the world, I understand I’m an adult, I’ve got to learn to live with whatever life throws at me, that I think is where my magic wand would be, is courses on people understanding themselves, Understanding their thinking, their behaviours, their emotions, and learning to get those skills to manage them.

And then, when you’ve got that, most people then cope with the world and cope with things like break up of relationships, changing of jobs, moving house. But if you haven’t got those skill base, then all of these things can be very traumatic.

[00:44:25] JP: So Steve, expanding upon you’ve got the concept of stress inoculation training. Obviously got a lot of traction in the extremist populations and the whole concept is you give someone an exposure to a stressor so they’ve got something to reflect upon. You step back from that stressor, you develop the mental skills, whatever they may be, then you re expose the stressor.

The whole concept is the same as how you develop the body. That’s how you do it psychologically but do you think that would be an appropriate thing to do to give them a degree of exposure to a stressor first so that they’ve got something to reflect upon before you build those skills or go the other way, get that understanding.

So they develop an understanding of themselves and how to utilize those skills to regulate themselves before exposing the stressor. Um, 

[00:45:16] Steve: then you know what’s going to happen your experience I would have thought that’s much easier to deal with than saying right turn the corner and by the way we’re going to throw this at you and then we’ll talk about it.

I’m not sure that’s a wise thing to do, but maybe people have found it works. personally I would start with the person, get them in a good place. What you’re doing for me is bringing reality in, and perspective. So it’s a bit like talking to a teenager who’s setting off at 13 and they’re going to fall in love.

It’s quite nice to sit down and say it’s going to be traumatic, you know, you’re going to kiss a lot of toads before you find your prince or princess. when they go through it, it’s going to hurt, but that could be the seed that actually stabilizes them.

They’ll come and they go, nobody gets the first bite of the cherry and stops there. that may not apply in some circumstances, but I would prepare people first. it’s very similar to where we traditionally treat obsessive compulsive disorder. you can either do it systematic desensitize, which is like kind of way of saying we’ll, we’ll step up the, expose you to what you’re fearing and we’ll work very steadily till you overcome it.

[00:46:20] Martin: Or we can do flooding. We just take you and throw you in the deep end and then you learn to swim. And either one have been shown to work. Personally, I think it’s much nicer to go steady and get them to work through it. Can we loop back to something we talked about earlier? You talk about beliefs and values and things like that. a concept that is becoming more and more visible in the military predominantly, but it appears in many other areas. called moral injury and the nuts and bolts of a moral injury is when people have a value system or a belief system and then they’re asked to do something that doesn’t meet those values.

So, for example. Thou shalt not kill could be a belief, it could be a value. And then they have to kill somebody. if they’re in the military, if they’re, you know, they’re protecting the people, they have to potentially violent act. And sometimes consequence of that can be quite, unsettling for them.

 a core belief they’ve been asked to do something that doesn’t meet that belief. Equally, it could be that they fail to do something that means that they’ve, again, they’ve been pulled away from their value system, that maybe their value is about protecting the people around them not able to do that when they need to. So my question is, how do we, help people when value systems that we teach each other as young people, are pushed to the extremes because of the world in which we live in, because there’s some of these extreme jobs that people have to do. how do we help those people?

[00:47:45] Steve: this is a tough one and again, I can only be generic because it depends on the individual. So I’m going to just be, again, very black and white. the values that we possess and work with give us peace of mind because effectively what we’re saying is I did the right thing. And when we do that, whatever situation we’re going to, as long as we stuck to our values, we will find our mind is settled.

It was the right thing to do. So let’s take, it’s a bit of a gruesome example, that you’ve chosen, but I’ll go with it. It’s reality. So if you’ve got someone in the army who’s being told we’re going to battle and you have to kill the enemy, they have to look at their value system, but then they’ve got to temper that with.

The reality of is my value to not kill someone as strong as another value Which is I need to protect people that I love So if for example, it’s an uncomfortable example of me this but let’s say I wouldn’t kill somebody. However Let’s say I had my child and someone that I couldn’t overpower strangling them And I had a knife in my hand.

Would I attack them with the knife? Yes Would I know that could kill them? Yes Would I feel comfortable having done it? No. But in debrief I’d say there wasn’t an option here. This is something I had necessarily to do. So I may need some support to come to that but the bottom line is I haven’t lost my values what I’ve said in this particular circumstance.

It was a necessity because I need to protect my child. And my child’s life is more important to me and the value I hold to being a parent and protecting and belief is more important. So, I don’t know individually what particular soldiers might feel in this situation. I have dealt with this, in clinical practice.

So, I, when I first started, I’m very old, it was World War II. So I had World War II veterans that I actually worked with and did some abreaction to get information from them. Abreaction, is where, I actually used an anaesthetist to knock them out. I didn’t find using the sodium amytal, which is like the truth drug as it was known, worked unless I knocked them out.

So I would ask the anaesthetist to knock them out, and then when they’re coming round, they talked. And then I would get unconscious memory that they found too painful. I would record that. Then take it to therapy sessions and bring them back with it. And then I dealt with some lads who’d been in the Argentine war as well.

Personally I found that a small number that worked and that would remove what they were experiencing with this trauma of conflict of value against action. So it’s contextualizing it before and after it happens. I do think even if you do it before, You still have to do it after, because it’s one thing, to imagine it, it’s another to go through it.

 And if we don’t process it in a correct way, I think this does lead to a lot of PTSD. 

[00:50:32] Martin: That’s what we’re trying to 

avoid ultimately. You know, we’re trying to help people in these difficult situations that ultimately nobody wants to be in these situations if, if they’re healthy minded, but they’re unfortunately necessary in some respects.

[00:50:48] Steve: Yeah, the, the PTSD one’s an interesting one because, there’s a lot of body research from, well back to 40 years plus now, and it’s progressed into more detail. But, there is a strong body of evidence which we alluding to earlier, that if you actually prepare somebody, they’re less likely to have PTSD.

It’s when somebody is not in a good place to begin with or hasn’t reconciled this. that they’re more likely then to struggle to process it afterwards. So PTSD appears to be very strongly correlated to the person going in and the state of mind they’re going into whatever they experience.

[00:51:25] Martin: Yeah, it comes back to what you’ve been saying. It’s individual, right? You’ve got to, talk to the person. You’ve got to talk to the individual. Let’s get a bit more optimistic. We’ve gone, we’ve gone a bit dark. We’ve gone, we’ve gone into a, not the happiest of places.

So let’s be a bit more optimistic. Let’s look to the future. does the future hold? For you and, and the work that you’re doing.

[00:51:44] Steve: that’s a big question because, 70s and you think, you know, you can’t go 

on forever. Huh? 

[00:51:50] Martin: going strong, Steve. You’re still going 

[00:51:52] Steve: I’m not going to intend not to, but, realism is I’ve got to leave a legacy. I’m trying to do as much as I can. We’re doing a lot of online stuff. I’m trying to do some courses to share this knowledge on my experience, and then people can take or leave it.

I’ve got a massive interest in animal rescue and people rescue. I have actually got a farm, which I do animal rescue, and we’re using that as a mental health retreat, and I’m trying to get that in place now, but also for Neurodiverse people because I did four years working with neurodiversity in the NHS system.

alongside that I’m renovating, , a big ex, period house. and that’s been given approval to turn it into a, a residential center for people who are struggling with mental health. and I’m hoping to get that as a legacy before I, pass on or stop and retire.

So that’s my remit is to share as much as I can, of the experience I’ve had and the knowledge I’ve built up in the hope that I can leave that to my mentors who are working with me, and they can run these two venues if we ever get them up and running. So I’ll keep working till I’ve done that. 

[00:52:54] Martin: fantastic. That’s a good legacy. Now, one, one of the things, Steve, I know not mentioned it, but I know you used to be quite recently a decent athlete yourself, 

[00:53:03] Steve: dear. I’ll keep this secret. I, this is just very brief. What happened is that it is a bizarre story. I did run for a club, from the late twenties. It could be somebody took in and they gimme a pair of shorts and said, can you do a relay run? And then they said, you’re very fast. So I started doing the a hundred meters, 200 and 400 for the club, but I never trained.

I got to 40 and said, I’m really old now. I’m gonna retire. And they sold this a master’s in athletics. So I went to the swan song, but I actually won the British title. And they said, you’re faster than you think. So I actually trained there. This is bizarre. For four years, I hit the gym, I hit the track. I really really tried and, uh, I got third in the East of England for all the ages in the 200 meters, I ran down at 21 seconds and, they put me in the Olympic training camp and I had to decline it, they put as an up and coming young man and I had to write back and say, I’m 44.

so I kept going. I always said, I just don’t want to get over weight. I love being fit. It’s great fun. I’ve made a lot of friends. It’s great to compete. It’s all fun. so I’ve held a lot of world records and, world titles. so I’m still running.

but I’m struggling now. What I run now, I did, 12. 4 last year for a hundred meters. And I would have jogged that as a younger man, but I was an 

[00:54:13] Martin: Yeah. 

[00:54:14] Steve: man when I started. So, 

[00:54:15] Martin: Well, I apologize for embarrassing you, Steve, but it’s an impressive, part of your, your CV, I

[00:54:20] Steve: Well, what’s good about it is, but not in just that field, you know, as a, an athlete, obviously it’s not a serious. it’s fun, but your training is serious. You understand what other athletes go through, and I think this is true of life experiences. If you can use your life experiences, even as a psychiatrist, you can help others because you really understand what they’re going through.

And then if you can’t get those life experiences, you’ve gotta really use your imagination and talk through them to get a feel of those emotions. And it’s possible to do it with what we call theory of mind. Anyway, I’m gonna stop. I’ll stop there. 

[00:54:52] Martin: That’s good. So if, if we see you break in an over 80s, 200 meter world record, we shouldn’t be surprised.

You might, you might come back to 

1. No, 

[00:55:01] Steve: will do,

[00:55:02] Martin: that’s great. Steve, I appreciate your time. And I know you’re a very, very busy man.

[00:55:06] Steve: Thank you, no, thank you for inviting me.

[00:55:08] Martin: If people want to, follow your work or see what you’re doing, what, what’s the best way the listeners to, to reach you or to see your work?

[00:55:16] Steve: I have a, a company, it’s a very small group because I wanted it to be a of friends and we base it on charities. it’s under chimpmanagement. com, so if they go on the website, we do retreats,and we do work over a weekend relaxed with small groups of people.

I do a lot of charity conferences. I’m running one at Christmas with education conferences, business conferences. So if people relate to this if they go on chimpmanagement. com once a month, I go on camera and do what I call the troop. which is free. and I just suggest something that we can focus on to move our emotional skills up.

Nice and simple. Try it. And we have a discussion board. So if they relate to this, then come and join the troop.

[00:55:54] Martin: That’s great. We’ll make sure that goes into the show notes so people can, find that, website. The final thing that we, like to end on is giving you the opportunity to give the final words. So this is usually just something for you to either reiterate that you feel is particularly important or use this opportunity to give us something you haven’t talked about yet.

So for the final words of the episode, again, I’ll just say, thank you, Steve. It’s been fantastic, over to you.

[00:56:19] Steve: Well, thank you. I guess my final words would be a challenge to people listening. one of the things that always amazes me is when I ask people, how important is your emotional health and psychological health? Everybody says it’s crucial to everything around me, relationships and my business, everything.

And then I ask them, how much time do you spend each day working on that? And they always answer nothing, which is just incredible. They usually come back saying, I don’t know what to do. And I’m saying, well, you know, you don’t have to work with my model, but there’s a lot of work out there that you can turn to.

so that’s why, when people said that to me, I wrote A Path Through The Jungle, to give them that. But there’s so many other alternatives, like mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapies, anything people relate to. So my final word is, ask yourself what you’re doing about your emotional health, if you think it’s important.

Do something, even five minutes a day.

[00:57:10] Martin: That’s a great, great way to end. Thank you very much

[00:57:13] JP: Thank you, Steve. Great session.

[00:57:15] Steve: Thank you so much.

[00:57:16] Outro: Thank you for joining us on the Optimizing Human Performance podcast, a Wavell Room production. If you’re enjoying this content, don’t forget to like and subscribe so that we can keep improving. And remember to visit wavelroom. com to find their latest articles, podcasts, and newsletters. If you know someone who could benefit from our discussions, please refer them to our show.

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