Achieve your optimal state of mind for peak performance as a leader.

By Romie Mushtaq

How do you feel at this moment? Pause. Did your brain start running through your to-do list or replaying a point of conflict from your day? You are not alone; as a brain doctor and chief wellness officer, I work with high-achieving professionals who can’t shut down their busy brains. Mindfulness and mindful leadership exercises can feel unattainable beyond a morning meditation practice or a few quiet minutes in nature. 

I spent the last five years studying the impact of chronic stress, burnout, and busy brains on professionals. I wanted to help find answers to improve workplace cultures. The answer is not in a wellness app or another health perk; it starts with a leader’s state of mind.

Take Responsibility for Your Energy

When daily tasks and overfilled calendars control our day, we can quickly lose sight of our mood. However, not processing our emotions depletes our energy and can send a subtle or overt negative signal to others through our speech, tone of voice, and body language.

After years of teaching mindfulness and mindful leadership in workplaces, I still hear, “Dr. Romie, I feel like something is still wrong with my brain; I can’t shut down my worrying and racing thoughts.”

You are in control of your mind. When we control our minds, we can then control our energy and our schedules.

Busy Brain in a Busy World

Do you also feel like the usual stress-relief techniques have failed you? Do you have difficulty shutting down your racing thoughts at bedtime? Perhaps you wake up needing an extra-large latte to connect with your personality, only to feel depleted in your energy by mid-morning. You might have multiple browser windows open all day on your computer — and what feels like just as many tabs open in your brain — and feel the need to consume additional caffeine or stimulant medications to get through the day. By the end of your workday, if there is one, you might need alcohol or an anti-anxiety pill to take the edge off. That’s how many of us get stuck on the stimulant-sedative cycle: We work all day with faux energy dependent on stimulants and arrive at home in need of a soothing drink or medication to remain calm with our loved ones. 

In my experience studying over 17,000 individuals, a pattern emerged showing that chronic stress causes a particular pattern of inflammation in the brain. The end result is a myriad of symptoms that include difficulty focusing and reduced attention span (adult-onset ADHD), ruminating anxiety with intrusive worrying thoughts occupying your mind (anxiety), and difficulty falling and staying asleep (insomnia busy brain).

Living under chronic stress with a busy brain can lead to burnout, and the result is not only loss of productivity but also can be physical illness. We should not wear stress as a badge of honor or live at the edge of burnout to maximize business profits.

In my book, The Busy Brain Cure, I break down the eight-week process for reducing inflammation in the brain, healing burnout, finding focus, taming anxiety, and finally sleeping again. Each week introduces simple micro habits I call brainSHIFTs.

Giving Your Team a Brain Break

Once we restore our energy by healing our busy brain, it is imperative for us as leaders to help our teams.

Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab has the largest body of research assessing productivity and attention span in the workplace. Sitting down at a computer for more than one hour for back-to-back meetings reduces productivity by raising stress hormones in our brains. Taking a 5-minute break every hour significantly lowers stress levels in the brain and allows us to arrive at our next meeting or home life more relaxed.

In place of another virtual workplace wellness activity, shorten meetings and create meeting-free days at least once a month. End each day by checking in again: How am I feeling? And then ask yourself: What can I do to reset my energy and change the channel of my brain to calm? You are responsible for the energy you bring into the room. Choose calm. 

Tips to Heal Burnout

These key elements surprise most professionals. (It’s always suggested to consult with your doctor.)

• Use 125–250 milligrams of magnesium glycinate at bedtime to regulate your sleep-wake cycle and reduce anxiety.
• Combining sugar (or any high-glycemic food) with caffeine can reduce the ability to focus. Instead, pick one or the other — caffeine or a high-glycemic carbohydrate at 
• each meal.
• Check your lab work, which can reflect chronic burnout and a busy brain. A low vitamin D3 level is a consistent problem. Vitamin D3 is crucial for brain and hormonal health, promoting sleep, focus, and memory.

Know Your Brain Score: Take The Busy Brain Test for free at drromie.com/busy-brain-test. A score above 30 indicates neuroinflammation and a pattern of a busy brain.

Learn how to sort linear from circular thinking — and choose the ideal one for every situation.

By Kim Hudson

Human thinking has a pattern, but how do we access it? 

Many social scientists and neuroscientists agree that we have two ways of knowing — distinctly opposite mindsets built into the human condition. They give them names like the Master and the Emissary (Iain McGilchrist)  — or right and left brain (Jill Bolte Taylor). Daniel Kahneman calls them fast and slow thinking, Jeremy Bentham and Antonio Damasio call them pleasure and pain states, and Daniel Siegel likes attachment and survival modes. Type A/Type B or S1/S2 — you get the idea. I call them linear (left-brain) and circular (right-brain) thinking. 

Think Better, Lead Better: Mastering the Two Faces of Your Mind

We move between these mindsets through our language choices. It’s like having a low-tech version of the machine in the movie Avatar. Activate one of their operating principles, and you are taken into that world. Each mindset has its optimal moment. Being a mindful leader means pausing to sort linear from circular thinking and choosing the ideal one in any given situation. A good starting point is recognizing their unique sources of power.

Linear Power is best for known situations where we need to do things like combat external, physical dangers, achieve goals, build material security, or win competitions. Weber’s definition for this kind of power is to assert your will, even against resistance. That probably sounds familiar, as it is synonymous with control.

Circular power is less familiar, making it our greatest growth area. Reaching back to ancient wisdom, I describe this power as coming from knowing yourself, being yourself, and supporting others in doing the same. This internally focused mindset is optimal for recognizing what is meaningful, building resilience, resolving conflict, being creative, developing talent, finding happiness, and fostering inclusive environments. It cares about connections, disconnections, and reconnections.

From Competition to Collaboration

Some situations need linear and circular thinking as tag teams. Terri Kelly, former CEO of W. L. Gore and Associates, has identified two kinds of people in its innovation-focused business — rainmakers and implementers. The former dreams up creative ideas, and the latter brings them to life. But control tends to gravitate to the implementers if the rainmakers aren’t protected. Kelly says she spends most of her time emphasizing the difference and preventing people from reverting to conventional wisdom.

Once we determine our optimal worldview, there is a triad of operating principles to help us navigate within and between worlds. Knowing the triad means we can ask some illuminating questions. The linear operating principles are to push back against what I don’t want to happen, focus on the external and objective aspects, and use an either/or filter.

With this mental framework, here are the kinds of questions we could ask:

Am I pushing back against what I don’t want to happen (as regulatory systems and budgets do)? Then, I am in linear thinking mode. Automatically, the other operating systems are also activated. I’m being objective and making either/or evaluations. 

This is ideal when there is a heroic need to right a wrong, secure needed resources, and stop evil efforts from doing us harm. My motivation is to assert my will even against resistance. We should also know that all the benefits of circular thinking are now closed off to us. But if we know the operating principles of circular thinking, we can toggle with ease. 

Circular thinking’s triad is: Pull in more of what I want, reflect on my internal/subjective states, and consider where I can say yes to something the other person is offering, how I can add to what they are saying, and where there is overlap between both of our perspectives.  

The circular thinking questions would be: What do I want more of, and why do I want that (why questions get to what really matters to us)? What do they want more of, and how could I contribute to that? What do we both want more of? Circular thinking is relational and generative. We don’t know where it will take us, and we can be sure it will be collectively meaningful. 

Imagine adding a circular feature to a regulatory process that generates new partnerships and supports innovative circular economies. And what if climate change was addressed by each person connecting to what is deeply meaningful to them before making a purchase? These outcomes become possible when we access our circular and linear potential. Another thing I learned about being human is we can read each other’s linear or circular state of mind, and we tend to follow. Leaders who consciously make these shifts will find the people around them spontaneously following them. 

Top 4 Strategies for Bridging Linear and Circular Thinking

Kim Hundson, best-selling author, recently released “The Bridge,” a book about bridging linear and circular thinking. Her background includes 25 years as an exploration geologist, as well as consulting First Nation and Yukon governments.

Have you noticed the pace of change is getting faster and faster?  

Would it surprise you that the ‘pre-historic’ part of our brain is struggling to cope?

Are you wondering why absenteeism caused by mental health illness is rising?

If the answer to all of these questions is ‘yes’ then read on.

I love Ruby Wax and in particular, I personally recommend her podcast appearance on ‘Happy Place’ .  During the podcast,  Ruby talks about the brain and in particular a pesky part of it called the amygdala .  In all seriousness, the amygdala does have an important function, if you are being chased by a bear.  When the amygdala becomes stressed, it sends a distress signal via the hypothalamus to communicate a signal to the rest of the body that it needs energy to fight or flee.  This is handy if you are in real danger.  Due to the modern fast based and aggressively competitive modern day world however, our amygdala is mis-firing and giving out distress signal when there is no imminent danger.  Ruby believes we can temper the amygdala in part by acknowledging that mindfulness based cognitive therapy – which she studied extensively at the university of Oxford-is a practice that teaches you to observe rather than react to your emotions.  In essence you observe the mis-fire as if it is happening to someone else but you can catch it in progress and say ‘aha that is anxiety’. Labelling it is thought to lessen its effect.

How can we try however to avoid the amygdala mis-firing in the first place?

The sheer intensity and impact of the constant contact culture through social media and the ‘I want it now’ amazon culture means our brains are mis-firing faster than we can catch it.  This is literally changing the brain for the worst as MRI scans show.  Mindfulness helps beef up the amygdala to respond but the continuous hyper-vigilant state we end up surrendering to, causes anxiety to become chronic and mental health illness becomes more prevalent. ‘In a world of distraction’ as Ruby describes it, we need to dial down the impact on our amygdala and reduce its signaling.  That way the toxic effects of too much cortisol can’t wreak havoc on the system and cause us to be ill.

Post pandemic, however what do you do though when everyone around you is burning out and we are on the tipping point of a mental health pandemic?

A lot of mental health training focuses on the ‘self’ which whilst effective at building resilience and helping others on the approach to crisis, does not tackle what you do if you are on a burning platform nonetheless, due to your organisational culture.

Compassionate Leadership is not a panacea per se, but the evidence of its success is pretty compelling.  This leadership tool promotes going beyond empathising with each other to taking action by signposting, effective and attentive listening and calling out bad behaviour whilst offering support.  The Harvard Business review undertook research as part of the potential project and found that of 350 CEX and CHROs across 15K leaders and 150K employees in 5K companies across 100 countries including involving some big players such as Netflix, Yahoo, Lego and KPMG and produced these key findings:

Those who exercised compassionate leadership were:

-Promoted faster

-Were double less likely to quit

-14% higher performance

-Greater job engagement 

_{Hougaard, R; Carter J. (2022) Compassionate Leadership, How to do hard things in a Human Way.} 

With this evidence as my momentum, I set about understanding what it meant to be compassionate in a practical way that Middle and Senior management can use.  This lead to the creation of the ELEVATE model.  The model is predicated on the assumption that humans are naturally capable of compassion and therefore this is available to everyone as a bolt on to an existing leadership style.

Before anyone claims this is too time-consuming, think about how many pointless grievance processes or painful tribunals your organisation has attended and think again.  In addition, for anyone who thinks it is too soft and fluffy- This does not avoid the tough stuff.  To the contrary it is engaging with the challenging themes of organisational life in a human way. The beauty is,  it can also be used to look at systemic leadership across the whole employee journey from attraction to exit.  This can be a stress preventative strategy as revisiting policies that often are parental in their nature and re-designing them to focus on the 2% that may underperform rather than the 98% that perform just fine through culture building.  Utilising this tool helps to create a culture of understanding which in turn builds psychological safety, inclusion and a sense of belonging.  Working in environments of safety naturally lowers stress and drives performance so, why would you prefer to do anything else?

Before anyone gets excited though, this takes work. Fear and insecurity often breeds the reverse type of behaviour and that isn’t going to stop people behaving badly. Some persistent perpetrators may even fake it in public but covertly practice the opposite e.g. bullying.  This is a very real issue in the UK press right now.  Creating a compassionate culture however enables people to feel confident to call out this behaviour and therefore dilute its impact.  This may diminish the use of soul-destroying processes like grievances and disciplinaries that are drainers of valuable time.   

So where do you get started?

Compassionate leadership workshops are a really positive way of raising awareness of the need in the first place.  Working through the ELEVATE model and providing business statistics to support its success can help gain the relevant buy in and trust to change culture for the better. This may give you the edge,  rather than cost you time in a competitive and challenging environment as a healthy team is a happy team.

“Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  —   William Shakespeare, Hamlet 

One of the biggest lessons I had to learn as a leader was the value of redundancy. For your people to know what you want, you’re gonna have to keep saying it over and over again. Every time I sent a memo or gave a speech, I was worried that my employees would roll their eyes and say, “Here he goes again.” I thought, “No one wants to listen to a broken record.” I was more concerned with being interesting. 

So what I did was constantly refresh and renew my message. Without my realizing it, what happened was that my desire to be interesting was getting in the way of me being clear. Clarity is what we’re after. That’s what redundant messaging gives us. It gives us the ability to be clear. Once you find out who you are, you have to make sure that everyone who crosses the doorway of your business knows who you are. They shouldn’t have to guess. They’re not mind readers. Redundancy is the key to your mindset. How many of you know for certain that if you wake up in the middle of the night, the hamster of your thoughts will jump on the wheel of your mind and whirl from worry to anxiety to panic as you run disaster scenarios through your head? We run through all the bad things that have happened in our past, and when we’re not doing that, we’re thinking of all the bad things that might happen in the future. It’s our personal version of “doom scrolling.” 

For many of us on our resilience journeys, our misfortunes become like landmarks we visit on the cross-country journey that is our lives. When I was a kid, our family would take a yearly trip through New England, stopping in places like Hyannis, Bethel, and Stockbridge. Thanks to my mother’s gift for being a travel agent, we stayed in beautiful places and created lifelong memories. We forgot about the endless hours in a hot and crowded car. 

And later, as we all got older and we told the story of those same trips, even when we blew out an alternator or something that left us stranded on the side of the road for hours in the middle of the night, we laughed about it. After all, we made it through. We were forged a bit in those moments of trouble together. 

Those are the stories we tell because they make us who we are. It’s the things you never planned for, the times when things went wrong, and the ways in which the trip was just one darn thing after another. The darn things. Those are what we remember and mostly laugh at years later. The darn things don’t appear on Trip Advisor or Kayak. 

But as I get older, I realize that my entire life is a collection of memories that include some darn things despite my best intentions to the contrary. We’re all striving to do good in the world, to be our best in our professional lives and our personal lives. We have plans on top of plans, all created in good faith. Sometimes those plans go to hell in a flaming handcart. 

Many of you have lost your business, your job, or a loved one to the pandemic. The business you planned to give to your children. The job you expected to retire from. The partner you were going to grow old with. There’s no way to assuage the grief of that loss. All the books in all the libraries of the world will not make it different because the painful and unavoidable truth is that it will never be different. It will never be the way you thought it was going to be. 

Our work is about finding your way out of the darkness of darn things and into the light. Out of the valley and back up to the heights. To not just survive the darn things that happen around you, but to alchemize them into the stuff of real growth. The key to mental resilience is realizing that all we can control in life is how we respond to events. We have that choice. We have that power. Mentally we can stop worry and anxiety dead in their tracks. 

Change is guaranteed. How we respond to change is not. That is our task. There’s a quote from renowned acting teacher Sanford Meisner that goes like this: “That which hinders your task is your task.” 

You’re obsessed with something you want, but there’s an obstacle in your way. It’s that thing between you and what you want; that is what you really need. The thing that’s stopping you from accomplishing the things you desire? That’s your genuine desire. You think what you can’t control or don’t know keeps you from performing at your best. You think, “Once everything settles down, then I’ll be better.” 

But that’s not how it works. All over the world, in every culture, those leveraging uncertainty are the people and businesses who don’t resist change when it happens. They develop new relationships. They ride the new situations instead of panicking. You don’t fight the current; you ride the current. Surfers don’t mourn a wave they miss or even when they wipe out (which is often). They just get on the next one. 

You can do this by taking the courageous decision to throw out the old mental maps and make new ones. Mental resilience isn’t a life free from the twin wolves of worry and anxiety. It’s about harnessing our energy in creative ways so we can domesticate them and let them pull our sled. We make friends with change, so we don’t have to worry about it.

As leaders, people entrust us with their most valuable asset — their time — so it is incumbent on all of us in positions of authority and influence to step up to the task and take care of them. That starts by learning how to take care of yourself.

What does being well mean?

First, draw a triangle with three equal sides — your wellness triangle. Next, draw a circle in the center and ensure that the circle touches all three sides.

At the tip of the triangle, write the word Mind. On the bottom left point, write the word Body. On the bottom right point, draw a dollar sign. In the center of the circle inside the triangle, write the word Spirituality.

The outside of the triangle relates directly to our egos: how smart we are, how attractive we are, and how much money we have. It’s the “you” other people see. We all have an ego, and there’s nothing wrong with that — so long as your ego is kept in check with a healthy dose of humility, optimism, and a sense of accountability.

The triangle is one of the strongest geometric shapes, but even so, it collapses if one side fails. That’s why we need the circle of spirituality in the middle, holding everything up. Spirituality is the center of life; it touches all three sides of the triangle.

I’m not speaking strictly in a religious sense. In the philosophy we teach at trauma survivor organization Boulder Crest, we define a healthy spirituality in three ways.

The first element of spirituality is your character. Are you the person you say you are? When you look at yourself in the mirror every morning, are you happy with what you see? Are you a leader who leads by example, or is it “Do as I say, not as I do”?

The second element of spirituality is your relationships with others. Are they based on mutuality? Do you have three to five friends you can turn to when you need help? Remember, as humans, we become the average of the three to five people we spend the most time with. Choose wisely!

The third element of spirituality is service. Are you engaged in service to others outside of your work? What are you doing for your neighbors? Your community? Your nation?

When you lead with a strong sense of spirituality, you become congruent — meaning your thoughts, feelings, and actions are all aligned in a positive way. Others will see that, admire it, and follow your lead.

Think of your circle in the center of your triangle as an exercise ball at the gym. If that ball is properly inflated, you can pretty much sit there and keep your balance for a long time. At its core, your Wellness Triangle is strong. But if that ball begins to deflate? Maybe your character or your relationships aren’t what they should be; maybe your thoughts, feelings, and actions fall out of congruency. That’s when leaders really start to struggle.

Worse yet, what if there’s nothing in the center to begin with? Let’s say you’re an egomaniac, driven by the outside of your wellness triangle. Maybe your only relationships are the ones you buy. Perhaps you do nothing for anybody other than yourself. That’s when pressure on one side or another of the triangle brings your life crashing down around you — and your capacity to lead with it.

The Pressures of Leadership

Put the sides and the circle together, and you’ve got the strongest foundation in the world: the Wellness Triangle. But even the strongest triangle can be weakened under pressure — and the pressures of leadership are real. It’s easy to envision a situation where the points of your Wellness Triangle flatten as a result.

In the eight years that I ran A-T Solutions, I gained 50 pounds. That wasn’t who I’d been in the Navy, where I’d taken EOD trainees on runs so difficult that students remembered me as the guy who made them puke on the golf course run. I was spiritually well, mentally well, and financially well, but I was working 16- and 17-hour days, traveling more than 200 days a year, and just didn’t make time to take care of my body.

Every pound I gained after leaving the service was a measure of the burden I carried in building A-T Solutions — compounded by the burden of hiding the toll from others. I knew that when people see stress in their leader, they start to worry, and I didn’t want anyone else to carry the load or see me becoming less well as a result of it. But who was I to think that 50 pounds could be hidden?

They say the top is a lonely place, and l was living that. But it was a mistake. My style today is much more collaborative. Now l know the power of relationships, openness, and honesty, and I am a better leader because of it. Leadership is really a relationship.

What happens when you’re unwell? Your employees see right through it, and they start to question whether they’re in the right place and working for the right person. Instead of growing your team members into leaders, you lose them.

The Importance of Commitment

Courage requires commitment and seeing things through to the end. Leaders who jump from thing to thing to thing without seeing any of them through, create an organizational culture that emulates that tendency.

That’s why it is so important to define a goal, see it through, check it off, celebrate it — and move on to the next thing.

I’m not saying you can’t do multiple things at once, like walking and chewing gum. What I am saying is that everything your organization takes on needs to be seen through to the end — and your responsibility as a leader is to ensure that happens. Seeing something through to the end does not mean you do so at all costs; recognizing failure or changing circumstances and making a clear decision to stop takes courage too.

A waffling leader is incapable of facing fear, assessing risk, and stepping off; if a leader is willing to step off but doesn’t see things through, that’s another form of waffling leadership. In either case, their behavior is sure to proliferate throughout the organization. Everybody sees it, sees that you’re okay with it, and assumes it’s okay for them too. Courage builds amazing collaborative teams and a capacity for taking risks.

Toxic behavior, including bullying, is rampant in the workplace—with nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers experiencing it and 19 % witnessing it.¹  It’s also a major force behind the ongoing Great Resignation.²  A survey by FlexJobs found that people who have resigned over the past six month cited “toxic company culture” as their number one reason for leaving.³

I, too, have experienced toxicity, including downright bullying. After spending 17 years as a marketing exec at Procter & Gamble, where I helped spearhead some of the world’s most iconic marketing campaigns including Always #LikeAGirl thanks to the wonderfully supportive environment, I was confronted with a toxic environment in my next job. My boss was rude, belittling and treated my team and myself as if we did not know how to do our jobs. Nothing we did was ever good enough. He regularly made humiliating, sarcastic comments. When I teared up in a meeting one day, he gave me a tissue box with a sticker that read “Dalia’s tissue box” and later said to my team: “You think Dalia is such a tough cookie, an Israeli ex-platoon commander? Did you know she has a tissue box in my office with her name on it?”

Eventually, after three years of trying to find ways to end the abuse, I decided to leave. I took up a master’s in organizational psychology at INSEAD business school and dedicated my thesis to issues around handling a toxic environment.

The lessons from this research, combined with my experience in both a toxic environment and at a company with sound policies in place to prevent toxicity (P&G) led me to conclude that the only answer to workplace toxicity and bullying is zero tolerance. This applies on the company side as well as on the employee side.

On the company side, there are three steps I have identified that can—and must—be taken:

1. Enforce the use of leadership assessment tools (LATs).

The only people who can determine if a leader is good are their direct reports, so give them a voice by relying heavily on these tools.  They provide valuable input on how a leader’s direct reports view them and what qualities they show up with. Make LATs a top priority. 

2. Assess and promote leaders as much for their people skills as for their business skills.  

If you want good leaders, reward good leadership!  During talent reviews at P&G, leaders would receive a score for their people skills, based on criteria including assessments by direct reports and a score for their business skills based on things such as KPIs.  They were only promoted if they were top rated in both areas, and the tactic worked very well.  

3. Invest in leadership training.

Many managers want to be good, supportive leaders but simply don’t have the know-how or skills.  It’s not their fault: leadership skills such as identifying people’s strengths and coaching your team must be learned. But too often, as managers move up to leadership positions, companies assume they are prepared and have the skills. These skills are not innate, but even the more nuanced skills such as emotional intelligence and creating a psychologically safe environment are teachable.  That’s why every company should invest in leadership training.

As for employees dealing directly with toxicity, my advice is simple: walk out and complain.   Your company and  / or HR department should have policies in place to support this approach.   Some of the successful policies I advocate for are having an anonymous ethics line, where calls trigger investigations.  Anonymity is key, as is having a neutral, well-qualified HR person in place to help mitigate toxic situations.

(1)   https://www.ishn.com/articles/112088-millions-of-us-employees-affected-by-workplace-bullying

(2)   (2) Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2022). Toxic culture is driving the great resignation. MIT Sloan Management Review, 63(2), 1-9.

(3)   https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/survey-resignation-workers-considering-quitting-jobs/