Episode 6

Josie Thomson: How to manage your mind to make smart decisions

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How do you make difficult decisions under pressure? How do you avoid being ‘triggered’ by some bad behaviour, choice words or a surprising event? These are important questions for any executive, professional or entrepreneur, daily. Managing your mind is critical.

In practice, this means developing greater consciousness of what you’re thinking, what you’re paying attention to, how you’re feeling. Tapping into your inner voice — and an imaginary third party (you in the future or a person you respect) — in order to work out the best course of action.

My guest, Josie Thomson, master coach, author and speaker, talks about how to tap into your wise advocate. She describes what it takes to coach somebody effectively — deep care, listening, attention and using your intuition as to what you observe, feel and sense in the moment. This is a wide-ranging, deep conversation about the human condition — our frailties, strengths, potential — and how we can nurture it, informed by a greater appreciation, understanding and application of neuroscience.

The best bits of these conversations are captured in my newsletter Flashes+Sparks.

Further resources

Josie’s website.
Take Josie’s resilience test.
Her book (with Dr Jeffrey Schwartz and Art Kleiner): The Wise Advocate: The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE

“The capacity to put the brakes on your brain’s impulse to react requires mindfulness, being aware of what’s going on, without absorbing it, just observing it.”

Josie Thomson, Master Coach

VIEW RUNNING ORDER

03.30	What she realised when she found out about neuroscience in 2006.
04.25	State of maturity of neuroscience in business.
06.08	The benefits of applying neuroscience.
07.42	How trauma gets hardwired into your brain and your cells.
11.20	How to respond to things that freak you out.
13.30	How to deal with high octane individuals.
14.36	The power of being the smiling assassin.
16.20	Being called feminine by Sir John Whitmore.
18.53	What you would do to coach people to be more compassionate.
21.09	How do you protect yourself in coaching — playing the role of a servant.
22.00	The importance of creating a space of absolute trust and safety.
26.27	The power of focusing on what you want.
29.25	How to create a safe space and trusting bond in coaching conversations.
32.32	How resilience is about ‘bouncing forward’.
33.44	Using distance as a strategy for building resilience.
35.10	Talking about what’s really going on in meetings.
37.50	What Josie is most excited about, and hopeful for, in 2021.