Season 2, Episode 2: Attention & Awareness

Episode Description:

Sometimes it seems our focus is everywhere except where we need it to be, and with the many demands on our attention in the office and at home, it can be difficult to decide where and how to direct our limited energies. How do we hone our attention skills to improve productivity and relish the present moment — all at once?

In this episode, Kendall Kazor, part of Google’s People Development team, interviews Dr. Amishi Jha, a psychology professor and director of the Contemplative Neuroscience UMindfulness Initiative at the University of Miami and a leading expert on focus and attention.  They’re joined by mental performance coach Lauren Johnson. Together, they discuss key takeaways from Jha’s bestselling book “Peak Mind,” and teach us how to train our awareness for peak performance.

Follow Amishi on Twitter @amishijha and get a copy of her book Peak Mind. Also check out the UMindfulness Center at the University of Miami.

Follow Lauren on Twitter @_laurenjohnson_ and sign up for her Mid-Week Mindset Newsletter.

DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions expressed by the guest speakers are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Google, Inc. Google does not endorse any products or technology presented by the guest speakers.

Host:

• Kendall Kazor, People Development Team at Google

Guests:

• Dr. Amishi Jha, Director of Contemplative Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology, University of Miami
• Lauren Johnson, Mental Performance Coach and Consultant, Lauren Johnson & Co.

Episode Summary:

Transcription:

Introduction:

KENDALL KAZOR: Attention is the boss of our brain. It’s a powerful tool. It directs our energy and our focus. But it’s also fragile, and it can be difficult to control. How often do we try so hard to direct our attention where we want it whether that’s our work, our family, our hobbies? And how often does it slip away to another target, without us even realizing? We tend to overload our brains with too many tasks and priorities that require our attention, and that prevents us from performing and feeling our best. Luckily, our brain is like a muscle, and just like the rest of our body, we can train it. This is what we’re talking about in today’s episode of the Resilience at Google podcast.

I’m Kendall Kazor, part of Google’s People Development team. We have two experts here to teach us about how we can hone our attention and awareness to reach our maximum productivity and wellbeing. Amishi Jha is a psychology professor and a neuroscientist at the University of Miami, and author of the best-selling book “Peak Mind.”

AMISH JHA: A peak mind is a mind that has access to the brain’s full capacity to pay attention, and that doesn’t always mean we’re going to be performing at our best. But it does mean we’re fully aware and capable of using our cognitive resources to do what is best for us in the moment.

KK: We also have Lauren Johnson returning to the podcast. She’s a mental performance coach using mindfulness to help leaders and individuals stay sharp and remain resilient.

LAUREN JOHNSON: If you’re in a place where your thinking is a default setting, and maybe you don’t like it, or you’re noticing it’s not eliciting the response that you want, there are ways and there are means to train it so that we can operate at a higher level.

KK: This is our next episode, Attention and Awareness.

Conversation:

KK: Thank you both for being here. Before we start, I want to learn more about your work in the mindfulness space and the resilience space and how you started here. So Amishi, let's start with you. You’re an author, a neuroscientist, a psychologist and you run a lab specifically on mindfulness. Why did you decide to focus your attention on the topic of attention?

AJ: Initially, my interest, just going back to undergrad days, was in just how the brain works. And that really grew out of some of my very early experiences, volunteering at a brain injury unit at a hospital, seeing that people that had brain injury were able to engage in physical therapy and other kinds of therapy to improve their functioning and really recover from the injuries that they had. To me, that was amazing. So when I went to graduate school, I decided I wanted to study a brain system that really allowed everything else in the brain to change, and that ended up being the human brain’s attention system. What we’ve realized in some of our early days of studying this in my own lab is that even though it’s powerful, it’s actually pretty fragile and can fall apart pretty easily. So, I was on a hunt to find a solution of how we might train attention and strengthen it. That’s how mindfulness ended up coming into my lab, as a brain training tool to strengthen attention so that it was stress proof and performance optimizing.

KK:  It’s so interesting to think of our brain as something we can train for optimization, just like a muscle. Lauren, how did you discover the importance of attention in the sports psychology world?

LJ: I didn’t know this is where I was going to be. I didn’t know I was going to study performance psychology. I thought I was going to be a physical therapist, and so when I found sports psychology, I realized I was the person that needed it the most. Man, talk about needing to train my attention. And once I started to begin to notice where my attention was going, that’s when I started to see the power of our attention, and how a lot of that power can lie within us if it’s trained. It got me so excited about the changes that not only I could make for myself, but how I could help others make similar changes in their own lives, whether it’s performance on a court, on a field or, you know, in a boardroom. I think these things apply no matter the type of performer that you actually are.

KKL: Amishi, you call this heightened state of awareness the peak mind. How would you define what the peak mind is and how do we get there?

AJ: To me, a peak mind is a mind that has access to the brain’s full capacity, in particular, our capacity to pay attention. And that doesn’t always mean we’re going to be performing at our best. Sometimes a peak mind means knowing I am vulnerable right now. I’m either too sad, too reactive, too uncertain to make a consequential decision. It doesn’t mean that we feel our best or that we’re at some kind of pivotal moment, but it does mean we’re fully aware and capable of using our awareness and our cognitive resources to do what is best for us in the moment. The trick is, though, how do you get it there, right? How do you cultivate a peak mind?

KK: It's particularly difficult now in a period of so much change. And Amishi, in your book you use the term VUCA, which I love. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and that certainly can describe the time we’ve been living in the past two years and continue to live in. But even in the best of circumstances, attention is so hard to control. I loved the very first line in your book that tells us just how much we are missing in our daily lives. Can you share that with us a little bit?

AJ: So, we’re only present for 50% of our waking moments. So, you’re having a conversation with somebody, and they’re really only there for half of it. I mean, that’s not a fun wake-up call. But it is a wake-up call, because it makes you realize so much of our mental life is not with our mind where we think it is. In some sense, it’s a very uncomfortable awakening.

LJ: And I think it leads to like some of the ways that we can refocus and I wonder if it has to do with each individual person, you know, what works best for them, right, and their own personal puzzle. For instance, I have some hitters that when they focus on what their hands are doing, versus just focusing on what pitch they’re going to hit, they struggle. And so, certain attention, doesn’t mean you’re not paying attention, but it’s almost like sorting through and organizing what attention elicits the best results.

AJ:  You’re right. There’s a whole way in which we’re going to nuance and cater this to our own conditions and our own personality and our own circumstances. We use the acronym WIN, “What’s Important Now.” So if what’s important now is hitting the ball or making the pitch, have that be the focus of your attention. If you are preoccupied about how it’s being received, or am I saying this right, or what’s going on right now with that person sitting in the corner, or what about my sick child at home, or the world’s climate crisis, like whatever it is that is not what is important right now — now, in some sense, all of those things can be important — but the now is the key. Through practices like mindfulness meditation, we can get better and cultivate the ability to make that the most salient content, and then have that be where our attention is laser focused, and we can train for that. What we can train for is not so much about how to hold certain content in our mind, per se, but how do we hold attention to be where we want it to be? And we can do that as simply as taking 12 minutes a day and focusing your attention on your breath, and practicing this skill of what I call finding your flashlight and directing it willfully.

KK: Can you explain the difference between what you call the flashlight and the floodlight in your book?

AJ: I’ve really liked the flashlight metaphor, and, you know, frankly, it just comes from trying to explain to my kids what I study in my lab, and I’m like, I study attention. It’s like a flashlight, a darkened room, and literally, like, all getting in a dark room and turning on the flashlight and saying, what do you see wherever the flashlight’s pointing? Well, that’s crisp, clear. Everything else is darkened around it. Well, that’s the way attention works in our mind. Whatever it is that we direct our attention toward, we get privileged access to that information. It’s the content that becomes relevant and privileged. The floodlight is not so much about privileging some content over other content. It’s actually about privileging the moment now. It’s formally called the alerting system. The alerting system’s job is not so much to care about the content, but to be ready in this moment for whatever may come up that may need me to point my flashlight somewhere. So it is broad; that’s why it’s the floodlight, but the key is that it’s what’s going on right now. And just like a floodlight doesn’t care about what happened yesterday or tomorrow, it’s really what’s shining, and what’s within its purview in this moment.

LJ: You know, the floodlight and the flashlight, it reminds me actually, of, I was listening to a podcast a little bit ago, and it was of a secret service agent, and he was talking about how they protect the president. And they said that there’s two roles: you’re either a shift or a rover. And he said, when you’re a shift, you have an assignment. You are paying attention to one aspect of either the room or wherever you’re going. And then there are rovers, and you’ll notice, they’re not really laser focused on anything. They’re just keeping themselves available to take in whatever happens in the moment. And so it just reminds me of what you were talking about. Our attention is like being a shift and a rover and being able to understand when we need to be a shift and when we need to be a rover.

AJ: Absolutely, I think that that’s such a great example of how these things are done, and, you know, this is true, probably in the athletic context as well. Different positions on teams have these different roles, and in different moments any particular player might have to step into one or another.

LJ: Yeah, and same with leaders. As a leader, sometimes you have to step into the shift. Sometimes you have to be more of a rover, and not only does that show up in terms of performance, but also in terms of teaching, and in terms of being an example, and in terms of showing and modeling.

AJ: Yeah, and I think the leadership piece is so important, because it brings in another aspect of attention that we all have to deal with, but in particular, I think leaders really must do this well, which is to apply all three of these types of attention to different domains of information. There are things like cognitive functioning, our ability to think, our social functioning, our ability to connect, and then our emotional life, our feelings, and what we see is that when attention is functioning well, all of those functions function well. So we can see that the cognitive functioning, we’re better at decision making. We’re better at logical and rational thinking. We’re not prone to distractibility. Our eye is on the ball, and we’re able to kind of keep it there. And when it comes to the social domain, we’re more connected and empathetic. And then of course, within the emotional domain, when we are attentionally fueled up we are emotionally regulated. We are able to acknowledge the emotions we have. We are emotionally intelligent, because we have access to our attention in this way.

KK: You say, you can’t be immersed in emotion, but then also be paying attention and be that third-party perspective as well. And it brings me to think about our leaders. In what circumstances is this type of awareness most needed, and why is it so critical for our leaders to train for this?

AJ: The kinds of circumstances in which leadership is key, are the exact circumstances where the capacity to become aware of what’s going on in you is compromised. So, not only is attention compromised, meta awareness is also compromised under high-stress circumstances. Just knowing that is helpful. Even if I’m the most attentive person and the most meta aware person and the most thoughtful person, the most emotionally regulated person, I too, will be vulnerable when the stakes are high. So, to have that humility, that there is a sense of vulnerability that you could experience and watch for it — watch for the signs that you are too narrow, too broad, or that executive control is falling apart. So, all of this is easy to say, very hard to actually enact, right, and that’s why we practice for it. So, part of the reason we want to take time aside every day, when things are not crazy and we’re not in the middle of a crisis, to practice, finding our flashlight, broadening our attention, cultivating meta awareness, becoming aware of executive control — the notion of, of having a goal, and keeping that goal front and center, but very importantly, ensuring that any actions taken are aligned with the goal — is that we’re cultivating the core circuitry in our brain that is stronger and better coordinated, so that in these kinds of moments of crisis those are more present to us. But, you know, I think the question that you’re asking is like, well, how do leaders do this and how do they cultivate it in their teams? The first thing I would say is leaders can begin by having an impact on their team by doing it themselves and then promoting that others do that as well.

KK: That demonstration of awareness by leaders is so important especially now that we’re in this hybrid workspace and we’re all looking for some sense of direction during this time of transition. How else can leaders increase their teams performance by leveraging mindfulness, whether it’s in-person or dispersed and remote?

AJ: I think that being vocal is key. But there’s another way that you can do it, which is by having meta awareness and by being focused, we have a better chance of having a shared mental representation or mental model of what’s going on. If you think about the team setting, right, the individual team members for a particular problem all have their version of what this problem is, and when we say we’re on the same page, essentially what we’re saying is, the mental map I have, the mental picture I’ve got of what’s going on, aligns with the picture that you have. And we’re better able to do that first when we have clarity about what our mental concept is, but also checking in to see if we’re aligned or not. And so it’s not just about attention to myself, but it’s my capacity to direct that attention to the other members of my team that will facilitate more cohesion.

LJ: What you said just reminded me a lot of the mental model the map is not the territory, which is this idea that, you know, the map of like, maybe a previous success or somebody else, doesn’t match our current reality, and sometimes we can make the assumption that it does. Understanding our attention is also understanding, does my understanding of this align with what’s in front of me? And especially as it pertains to teams, is my understanding, is my map in alignment with yours and the reality of what we’re actually facing? And if not, what adjustments should we be making?

AJ: One of the things that mindfulness training in particular can help us do is see that there is a framework, where we didn’t even know that there was a framework we were operating within. You might not even be aware that you are operating with a particular framework. It may be fuzzy. It may be emerging. So, what I think mindfulness helps us do is, with that same sort of capacity to distance ourselves, to see oh, this is the framing I’m using for this problem. And it allows us to do something called de-framing, like you can actually just tear down the structure. When you do that, then all of a sudden you can play. You can kind of see, oh, if there’s nothing that I’m going to hold as the way I want to see this problem space. I just have the data of what’s going on. We can rebuild the framework in a different way.

KK: Amishi that reminds me of something we say at Google, which is resilience is dynamic. It’s not constant. The framework of yesterday won’t always match up with the challenges of tomorrow, because our environment is constantly changing. I’d love to shift a little bit more now and talk about the tactical level. What works and what doesn’t work to hone our attention? And Amishi, one of the big questions I have is about multitasking. We used to consider multitasking as an important skill. It would be on job descriptions: “you must be a good multitasker.” There’s so many demands on our attention in different modes of communication coming at us throughout the day: pings on our phones, on Google Chat. We’re on video calls, emails are coming in, tasks are being added to our lists, and we find ourselves working on my things, on many tabs, and many windows and screens all at once. People have alluded to multitasking as not effective, and in your book, you actually advise against it and have a ton of research backing this up. Could you share a little bit more about that with us?

AJ:  It goes back to what we were saying about these different modes of paying attention. We cannot do multiple attentionally demanding things at once. We don’t multitask. What we do is task switching. So, we engage in the task, and then we disengage in the task. We move to another task, and we come back. So, even if we’re on a screen and we’re typing away at a report or an email, and then a text message comes in from a colleague, like it’s related to work,  you’re engaging, disengaging, moving. Those are not done in a multitasking way. There’s costs to doing that, and, you know, that’s true in the office space versus the home space as well.

KK: I feel that for sure, and all these little instances of task switching really add up and can actually be a time sink that prevents us from being truly engaged with the work that’s right in front of us and that requires our full attention. But your research shows that there’s some types of interruptions that could be beneficial, that some types of activity after a really strenuous task could be helpful?

AJ: Let’s just focus in on the hybrid environment situation. What we think of as a waste of time during the day or intervening or distracting tasks may actually keep a sharper, more engaged, and happier to conduct our days more productively. For example, when we’re at home and we have these things that actually are not all that engaging: taking your dog for a walk, folding the laundry, maybe get the dishes done. Those are not highly attentionally demanding, and actually, they give our executive control functions and our sort of conscious cognitive processes a break. They actually put us in a more open mindset, because we’re not having to focus a lot. So, interleaving very concentrated tasks that require a lot of dedicated and devoted attention with tasks that are very low on attentional demands can be beneficial to us.

KK: What I’m hearing here is utilizing the concept of active rest. While we’re still doing something, but our mind isn’t necessarily on. I do this by going for a walk or sitting in my backyard. It’s still active, but it’s a way I can mentally reset and recover to refocus for that next demanding meeting on my calendar.

AJ: Absolutely, but there’s one other real win that we get over interleaving activities. It’s not just about giving that very focused brain system a break. But what it allows us to do when there’s not something that’s attentionally demanding, and we loosen the reins on our attentional control, is that we really get back in the space of spontaneous thought, this thought pump that we have in our mind. There’s a constant bubbling and emergence of different ideas. Usually, when we’re in control processes, we’re damping that down and constraining where our focus goes, so that the random bubbling is reduced. When we loosen that rein, and spontaneous thoughts are allowed to happen, you get that sudden burst of insight. It’s because those reins on our attention, when we loosen them, actually allow for the emergence of a confluence of thought and, you know, ideas that can actually serve us.

LJ: It’s almost like we’re taking a mental pitstop, but the point of the pitstop is not to stop entirely but it’s actually to access these certain parts of our brain that you just mentioned, these certain functions. And I love putting a term to it, spontaneous thought, because I think we can all relate to that because we’ve all been there.

AJ: Yeah, and I think that we can even take it a step further to think about all the times where we don’t allow for spontaneous thought to emerge. So, if you’re on the couch at night, you’ve had a long day, and you’re like, I’m just going to curl up and scroll. You’ve just removed spontaneous thought, because it may seem like a mindless activity you’re doing, but where is the focus of your attention? On whatever content you’re viewing. It is not unconstrained. The platforms themselves are often built to capture our attention and keep it there, and that will deplete our ability to use it for other purposes. So, that’s probably what you shouldn’t do. What you want to do is, are activities that are, do not require a lot of concentration or that require concentration, like I think of my friends that like to rock climb or do something that’s so incredibly different than the way in which you focus during your day job. It does refresh the networks to kind of give them space to do something else.

KK: Amishi, that reminds me of our focus days at Google. Typically teams will do these on Mondays or Fridays, and avoid meetings as much as possible. We’re still working, but without the distractions of the back-to-back meetings, all the pings, all the emails, and we really try to engage in brainstorming, productive thinking, and innovation time blocks and also those restorative activities like that rock climbing. Is it possible to apply these same tactics of mentally resetting and recharging but in our normal work days where we are in meetings stacked nine to five?

AJ: Yeah, definitely. The benefit of practicing mindfulness is that it allows us to see, even in the absence of external distraction, how our mind functions, that there are those terrains that can suck us in and distract us in unproductive ways. Once we empower ourselves by cultivating knowledge that this is occurring, then we can make different choices, like knowing that, you know, the tenth text message, I’m having a really hard time focusing on this report. Turn off the text messaging, right? It’s like the same thing for our own mind. That thought that keeps coming up over and over and over again, it’s not productive. I’m not taking it anywhere. I’m not problem solving based on it. I’m not innovating, and it’s an energy sink. So, to truly think about having creativity, productivity, wellness, buoyancy of mind, mental agility even, we’ve got to address those other internal sources that suck up potential bandwidth.

KK: This is all so great, but I can kind of hear some of our listeners and Googlers say this is overwhelming, I don’t even know where to start. How, how can one get the ball rolling? What’s the easiest, most practical thing we can all do to inject mindfulness into our daily lives?

LJ: One of the things, especially with younger athletes I’ve worked with or people just starting in the work, that I found that was really helpful in helping them to get to a point where they’re actually noticing where their attention is, is starting by paying attention to actually how they’re feeling, because we’re a lot more likely to be aware of, like, I’m feeling anxious, I’m feeling frustrated, or I’m just not feeling right. Thoughts drive our feelings and those feelings drive our physiology, and that drives, you know, our performance. If we can even start in the middle and work backwards and go, okay, well, if that’s how I’m feeling, what am I thinking? What’s causing this thing that I’m feeling? Where is my attention?

AJ: Just to kind of touch back on Lauren’s comment. Our physiologic responses, sensory experiences, our emotions, our thoughts, all of these are ways in which we can get data about what’s going on, right? The way that I think about mindfulness is actually that we are paying attention to our present moment experience, but we’re doing it in a very particular way. We’re doing it without what I call conceptual elaboration or emotional reactivity. So it is about being in the here and the now, that present-centeredness is key. But it’s not being in it, it’s like watching it. So, part of the way we do this is by picking something innocuous like the breath. That can’t happen in the past or the future. The breath can only happen right now. So, it’s a very handy thing to kind of anchor us on this concept of present-centeredness, and it’s a way to support our mind being able to be nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, nonreactive and present- centered. But if, you know, some people don’t want to deal with the breath, fine. Pay attention to the sensations of walking or pick a phrase and repeat it over and over. Choose your anchor. It doesn’t matter to me. Just choose something that promotes that kind of mental mode. And then what we’ve done, as you were kind of alluding to, Kendall, in my lab is, we’ve looked to see what is the minimum effective dose. You know, because people have been meditating and practicing mindfulness meditation for millennia. That was the orientation we took with our research projects. If I can’t do the thing in the way that the traditions suggest optimizes it for my benefit, how can I bring that knowledge and framework and then test out through empirical methods how much I can do that’s the least amount that could still be beneficial? And the prescription we came up with was very, very helpful, which is that it’s not that you only get beneficial effects for high-stress, high-demand groups if you spend a lot of time. We could go as low as about four weeks and two hours a week of meeting with the trainer and practicing about 12 minutes a day, and when people did that they found that they could benefit. Now, if they did more, they benefited more. But if they did less, we didn’t see beneficial effects. So, now we’re in a zone where it’s like, I think I could do 12 minutes a day. That seems reasonable, and the evidence suggests that achieving that sort of minimum benchmark is a good thing to have as a goal. And this is where the analogy to physical fitness is so helpful, because, again, if you asked, you know, elite athletes, well, how much should I do to be at my peak physical shape? They’ll give you some answer that you’re like, I can’t do that, sorry, no. But if it was more like, what can I do so that I’m not sedentary anymore? Okay, do couch to 5k, walk a half marathon, whatever it is, and that becomes very practical for people now.

KK: As so many of us go through the days and the motions of our day-to-day meetings that fill up our calendar, it’s almost protecting that time. I am blocking off 12 minutes and sending it as a repeating daily reminder, because if it’s not on my calendar, it does not exist, and so just creating that space and holding that space and having the flexibility if it doesn’t happen.

AJ: Absolutely, I would encourage people to do that, but the other thing you can do is infuse these moments multiple times a day. Don't miss those moments to practice. So, when you're walking from one meeting to the next, do it mindfully. Do not be thinking about the meeting you just had or the meeting you're about to have. Really feel your feet touching the ground. Feel every single step. Fee if you can feel every single step and experience it. When you drink a glass of water, experience having a sip. Feel it go down your throat. Feel the coolness it can bring. Like, just give yourself that gift to return back to your direct experience: nonconceptual, nonelaborative — can't really elaborate the experience of sipping a glass of water — and nonemotional. And that is a really handy in the moment reset that we can do for ourselves, and I know all of us can do that.

KK: I love that you’re bringing it back to the physiology. That’s such a great practical tip for individuals to bring it back to, how does it feel to be centered, to be present? For our managers and leaders, what’s one thing they can do to facilitate an environment that embodies attentive mindfulness? In your book, you talk about active listening as so powerful. Would you mind talking about that a bit?

AJ: To really have this become embodied and benefited in a very palpable and contagious way, is to do something like the listening practice, where now it's not paying attention to the sensations of the breath, but pay attention to the person who is speaking. Listen with that same mindful orientation. You're not going to be nonconceptual. You want to understand the concepts that are being said, but you do want to be nonelaborative. What you don't want to do is understand the concepts and then think about your response to them or argue against it while the person is speaking. Allow what is being said to be fully understood.

LJ: There's such a difference between somebody coming up to you and going like, hey, how you doing, versus, like, how are you and being present to it. I mean, it's so powerful, and it creates such a connection. It's definitely one of those things I feel that not always can be heard but are definitely felt. And it goes to that, you know, age-old saying is like, people don't remember necessarily what you say. They'll remember how you made them feel. Listening really tunes into that. It makes people feel important. It makes people feel like what they have to say is important, and that you value their presence in that moment.

AJ: The person will feel heard in a very visceral way that many of us don't get to experience often, and by not requiring yourself to elaborate, problem solve, give the answer immediately, you're actually preserving your own attentional capacity, because that's another form of task switching. I’m listening, and I'm forming my response. I'm listening, I’m forming my response. Just listen, and then take a pause, and then give your response. And that is a better approach, and very hard to do. It's not our default.

KK: I love that, Lauren and Amishi, and I think it's going to happen, our attention is going to be pulled away. But the more you can train that muscle to be present and to be listening, it's going to strengthen that connection. And it's obvious when a leader is in a conversation with you and they're pinging on the side. It's pretty obvious, and it's easy to fall into that. But to refocus and recenter on the conversation and strengthen that muscle, I love that. Internally at Google we have this little metric on the side of my Google Meets screen and it tells me how much I’ve been talking and listening in this call. It's such a great mental reminder to pause and listen.

LJ: Kendall, we say this a lot as it pertains to Google Resilience is, you know, doing things by design, not by default, and that requires intentionality. That requires our attention, and these things don’t just happen by accident. And so I love that you said that, because I do agree. I just think you know, it’s so cool that the science has shown us that if you’re in a place where your thinking is a default setting and maybe you don’t like it, or you’re noticing it’s not eliciting the response that you want, that there are ways and there are means to train it so that we can operate at a higher level, not only in what you do, but also as an individual.

KK: Mental practice, 12 minutes a day or more if you can, can help us build those protective factors against these stressful and critical moments. This has just been such a fun and exciting and energizing conversation, so thank you both for joining us. Hope you have also walked away with something new today.

LJ: Oh, thank you so much for having us.

AJ: Yeah, thank you so much.

Closing Credits:

Thank you for listening to the Resilience at Google podcast. Make sure to check out Amishi’s book “Peak Mind!” and to learn more about how to train your attention and focus, you can visit the links in our show notes. Until our next episode, we hope that what you’ve just heard gives you the ideas and the tools to meet the moments that matter the most to you.

This has been a production by Google’s People Development Team. A special thank you to our People Innovation Lab, or PiLab, led by Aiwa Shirako, for providing us with the data to inform this conversation. And we’d like to thank our partners over at Long Story Short Media — Executive Producers Jessica Stuart and Bob Yule, Producers Emily Russell and Josh Hall, and Editor Andy Strasel — for producing this podcast, recorded remotely on Google Meet. If you are interested in other conversations hosted by Google, check out our Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. Talks at Google brings the world’s most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place, and can be found wherever you find your favorite shows.

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