[MUSIC] In this module, we're going to address the physiology of the PEA-NEA. And, in the last module, we talked about one of the dimensions of the state of differentiating these two states is the degree to which a person's sympathetic versus parasympathetic hormonal systems are aroused. In the next module, we'll look at one of the other dimensions of the PEA, the neural network activation, or the default mode, to the task positive network. Now why is this important? Because in a coaching relationship, you're feeding off of each other's emotions and thoughts. And, in fact, the real juice of the coaching is the relationship, because that starts to engender the person's neurological and physiological openness to considering new ideas, to change. And emotional contagion is something that we all do. Except for those small percentage of people with autism or autism spectrum disorder, everybody else is hardwired to pick up on the emotions of others, through which John Disetti calls sympathetic hemodynamic networks. These networks, mostly in the default mode, allow us to link and read the feelings of others. And this happens in 8 to 40 milliseconds, according to Joseph LeDoux and his work. So it's happening at very fast speeds, which means it is way below consciousness. It is one of the reasons why, in being a coach, you have to be very thoughtful about your own feelings, your own state, your own mood. Because you are going to infect the other person, positively or negatively, and vice versa. So as the coaching discussions evolve, you're working back and forth around each other's emotions. We know what this is like. You've been to a party where positive emotions are going, and you're dancing, having a great time. You want it to go all night, and people feed off of each other's excitement. You've been to a meeting at work where somebody says, this is really a horrible piece of work, and everybody wants to get out of here. So emotions are contagious, positively or negatively, and they happen in very fast speeds. Now the reason this is particularly important is because, if you are feeling stressed, and the kind of stress we're talking about is, really, more annoying stress. Cell phone drops your call, somebody cuts you in traffic, and that's the kind of stress that piles up in each day. People who study it say professionals and executives have 8 to 12 on a good day, not, nevertheless, a bad day. And, very often, if you have a lot of family obligations, you're dealing with 7 days a week of this. What happens in one of these annoying stress episodes is, a message comes in through your senses, your thalamus to your amygdala. In eight milliseconds, it's hitting the beginning of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight response. We start to secret epinephrine and norepinephrine into our blood stream, which helps us because it is going to move blood from the extremities. It closes down capillaries to send blood and epinephrine to your large muscles in your arms, norephinephrine in your legs. But the problem is that it raises your blood pressure because your blood is traveling less distance, and you start to breathe more shallowly. What most people don't appreciate is that, when this is happening, it's drawing blood from some of the capillaries in your brain. It's shunting blood to the places that your body feels are the most important for it to defend itself. Besides that, your body starts to secrete a series of corticosteroids, resulting in cortisol entering your bloodstream, which helps. It's your body's natural anti-inflammatory. But cortisol has the effect of turning off your immune system. Within 8 to 12 minutes of the onset of one of these annoying stress episodes, your natural killer T cells and immunoglobulin A, biomarkers of stress, or of the quality of your immune system, are significantly lower, rendering us much more vulnerable to a lot of diseases. But, on top of that, cortisol inhibits neurogenesis, the conversion of stem cells in adults from the hippocampus and olfactory lobe into becoming new neurons. Now all of that's going on, and we are quite literally, perceptually impaired, cognitively impaired, and emotionally impaired as this annoying stress builds up during the day, during the week. And we don't feel good, and somebody says, where's that report that's due Friday? And you say, well you're feeling, what's it to you? Which outside of New York, as I like to joke, is a defensive response. But the real issue here is, we start to see things and experience them as more threatening than they are. And in this day and age of social media, it's all over us! Well, if all this is going on, and you're feeling it, you are contagiously infecting the person you're coaching. And if they're feeling it, you're having to deal with the fact that they are infecting you. Now if all of this is going on, how do we get out of it? Well that's where the body, our body has a second part of the autonomic nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system. When we see a baby laugh, when we see a puppy roll in the grass trying to get a drink of water, or a kitten playing with a toy, we start to laugh in a joyous way. It comes from deep inside. Technically, what's happening to us is our vagal nerve is getting stimulated, which is helping us secrete other hormones which are also endocrine's neurotransmitters. And, in this case, the vagal nerve helps to stimulate, primarily oxytocin in women, primarily vasopressin in men. In contrast to epinephrine and norepinephrine that are vasoconstrictors, at this dosage level, these are vasodilators. They open up our capillaries and our blood vessels in distal parts, and we start to feel warmer. The blood's flowing further, this blood pressure drops, our pulse rate drops, our breathing gets deeper, and this is where our immune system clicks into high gear. It doesn't make up for any compromise in your immune system, but your immune system will operate at its best in this state. You can think the most complex thoughts in this state, you will be the most creative, cognitively, in this state, and neurogenesis occurs in this state. And you feel a sense of being lifted, elated, and one. The dilemma we have is that, even if we're building resonant relationships, even if we're building relationships with others and a person we're coaching. That if we don't have enough of these moments of renewal, this stress from these annoying episodes will drag us down. We start to, in Roy Baumeister's terms, deplete the reservoir of energy that we have, and we become non-sustainable. So we have to replenish this reservoir through moments of activation or arousal of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the renewal moment. We know from published research that meditating helps us do this. We know that yoga helps us do this. We know that tai chi helps us. We know that physical exercise helps. We know that praying, in particular,to a loving God, helps. We know that feeling hopeful about the future helps. And when I say we know, I mean there are published studies in medicine and psychology, multiple studies showing each one of these effects. We know that being in a loving relationship helps. Caring for people in the community who are less fortunate. Having a pet, especially a dog, cat, monkey, or horse, a pet that you can actually stroke. Turns out the stroking behavior sets off the parasympathetic nervous system in both the pet and back to you, and it goes back and forth. And we also know that laughter, joy, and playfulness helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Their are two studies, so far, done that suggest a walk in the woods does. I'm going to be thinking about pursuing other additions to this list as the research evidence becomes clear. I don't know what it would be for you. I mean, each person might have some differences. For me, listening to music that suits my moods, but reminds me of fun places and experiences, often has this effect of making me smile and lifting my spirits up. The challenge that we have is that, if we don't manage our own degree of stress as the coach, we are going to be negatively infecting the person we're coaching. At the same time, the person we're coaching is going to be often struggling with figuring out how to do something. Or sometimes even more extreme, they're in trouble or worried about something. So we have to have enough of these renewal activities built up to help protect us against getting infectiously caught up in their negativity. So this means that for us to be responsible as a coach, to manage the coaching relationship in such a way that we are open to new ideas. We're open to the other person. We're able to care for them and communicate that. We can be playful. We are going to have to have more renewal moments in our life. And we can't just do them outside of work, we also have to find ways to do them in our work so that the moments of renewal are spread out throughout the day and then throughout the week. We can't wait till the weekend to try to binge renew. Because, first of all, you probably mean binge rest and you need rest before you can renew, but they're not the same. So we have to think about the rhythm of a day and how we can have certain practices in our lives, as coaches, that help us to be sustainable. And to that extent that we can learn this, then this becomes a handy set of concepts and tools for us to be able to help others manage themselves. And what this ends up doing for us is this creates a lot more sustainability on our part, but it also creates all of the ingredients for a more resonant relationship. And, after all, that's what we're after in trying to build our coaching. Thank you and I'll see you in the next module. [MUSIC]
