Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Wisdom Chat.

My wonderful guest today is Doctor Delia McCabe.

Welcome, Delia. Thank you, Philip.

I'm so looking forward to this conversation.

Thanks for inviting me.

It's an absolute pleasure.

And I'm looking forward to it too.

Just to say,

Delia, I know that you work with cognitive health in conscious companies.

That's on your LinkedIn page.

But also I'm intrigued by that sort

of intersection of neuroscience, psychology and nutrition that you work

around, just sort of so that we understand what that is and that intersection.

Just tell us a little bit about it, if you would.

Well, it's interesting because I've got to step back nearly three decades because

I was busy doing my masters in clinical psychology, and I had asked a random

question on one of the questionnaires that I'd developed for my group

of students who were very smart but were really underperforming at school.

And when I looked at the results

of this question that I asked, I was really blown away.

And I really had to take a different path

in terms of my career because I had asked the children,

all of the children in my experimental group and my control group,

what their favourite food was, and the results were astonishing.

All the children in the experimental group basically loved factory food,

that's highly processed food, and all the children in my control group didn't.

And I was just about to have my first

child and I thought, I'll take a little bit of time and I'll

examine whether what we eat impacts the brain, whether it impacts mood

and focus and concentration and how the brain develops.

And as they say, the rest is history,

because I really became enamoured with the research that was available.

And today there's a lot more robust

research available to show that there's an enormous impact of what we eat on brain

function and development, simply because every single thing

that happens within the brain depends on nutrients, because the nutrients are

the information that make the neurotransmitters that,

you know, inform the structure and therefore the function of the neurons.

So for me, it was a kind of like a no brainer, excuse the pun.

You know, I didn't want to try and talk

people better when their brains were malnourished.

And that's really where the intersection lies, right?

That, I mean, that's wonderful the way that you explain that.

And I'm just thinking as well,

in terms of development, we often say that the emotional side

of human beings doesn't really develop until sort of the early mid twenties.

And we talk a lot about being emotionally intelligent.

But when we're not, we don't realise the impact that our

emotional reactions are having on life around us.

And one of the areas, obviously, I specialise in is around money.

And I often say to people,

please don't make important decisions when you are in an emotional state,

because it's very difficult to think rationally and to consider all the facts

that surround that decision making process.

So it's interesting that nutrition also

has that direct impact on our ability to function and perform.

Absolutely. Philip, you've touched on a very,

very critical point here, because you see, the prefrontal cortex,

which is the most sophisticated part of the brain, is the part of the brain

that plans, looks at the consequences of our actions, organises data.

It's where our working memory operates.

And it cannot function optimally when we are in a highly emotional state.

So we lose the capacity to see clearly and to plan optimally when we are sitting

and stewing or marinating in an emotional state.

So what you're saying,

there is extremely important for people planning for the future,

because planning for the future requires this prefrontal cortex.

And by the way, it is the greediest part of the brain.

It uses an inordinate amount of energy,

because there's no automaticity involved in the prefrontal cortex, you know,

the connexions we make there are based on new thoughts, new ideas, new input,

and a analysis and projection of various thoughts and ideas.

Whereas in the limbic system, which is our emotional centre,

that there's a much more automaticity involved there.

You know, the tiger, you hear the tiger, you run away from the tiger.

There's an automatic neural habit or

pathway, but the prefrontal cortex, that isn't the case.

So when you work with people,

you actually asking them to access this very sophisticated, very nutrient,

greedy part of their brain to anticipate, because the prefrontal cortex is also

the part of the brain that allows us to use the brain as a time machine.

And one of the things that you do with people is to plant for the future.

So you asking them to anticipate what an end state looks like in terms of their

life and what they're planning and their goals.

Accessing this very, very sophisticated and very sensitive

prefrontal cortex is actually what you're asking them to do.

So there's a whole lot of aspects of brain

function that are involved, but we don't want our emotions involved here.

Obviously, our emotions do get involved

because they related to what we want to feel and sense in the future.

But when we make plans.

We need to be separated from those

emotions because they can derail the plans we're making.

Yeah, certainly.

It's interesting you say that, because in the UK,

less than 50% of the working population have any kind of financial plan.

And when I'm talking about a financial plan, I'm even taught not just the long

term plan, but I'm even referring to a short term plan,

like the point in which a person receives their salary and sits down and plans how

they're going to use that salary throughout the coming months.

There's so many people in a working environment that don't have any plan.

And one of the things that's really struck

me there is the reasoning behind why people don't go there.

And you, again, alluded to it in terms of the amount of energy we use to engage

with that prefrontal cortex, that rational, logical thinking process.

The only way I can think of it and describe it is when you've had a day

of really focused concentration and you come away from that.

I just remember what I feel like.

I'm absolutely shattered.

And I think, yeah, I've not done anything

physical, but the brain has been working so hard.

And so, yeah, it's as if I've done a physical workout, but I haven't.

But I'm absolutely shattered.

And it is what you're saying there.

Well, you see, the thing is, Philip,

that very few people really get to grips with this issue, because there's basically

a neurological limit to how much the prefrontal cortex

can make decisions and continue thinking about the consequences

and different scenarios, because we estimate that it's about three

to 4 hours for most people that they can sustain that concentration.

You have to practise and work really hard to be able to extend that period, because.

And the technical term for this, people use the word decision fatigue.

And although there's, you know, people have argued about what decision

fatigue means and whether it's related to willpower, it's actually not.

It comes down to the neurophysiology and the capacity of the brain to be able

to sustain this very focused, you know, approach.

So what happens is, with this decision fatigue, let's.

Let's stick with that name, because it's actually very apt.

The brain does one of two things when it becomes fatigue.

The prefrontal cortex, the first thing that it reverts to is a habitual response.

And so what I normally say to people is, if they're on a diet and they come

to the end of the day and they're really hungry, they haven't maintained their

blood glucose, they're not aware of optimal nutrition for the brain.

Then what they do,

they'll just grab the first thing they see, so then they'll eat that packet

of brownies or the Tim Tams, because it just feels good and they're

responding to that adrenaline induced hunger response.

So that's a habitual response.

The second thing that the brain does when

it's feeling the sense of decision fatigue, it does nothing.

Just nothing. It won't make any decision.

It will basically tread water, because it's too nearly expensive for it

to now go and look at different options, different scenarios.

Those are two things to keep in mind when people are overwhelmed.

In terms of chronic stress as well.

The brain does a similar thing,

but from a different perspective, because it's really hard for it to make

new neural connexions, to anticipate something new.

So it once again exploits what it knows.

It doesn't try to explore something new.

And this we call the explore exploit right theory.

So people are basically limiting their

capacity to make optimal plans for their own well being if they neglect

the understanding of how they need to actually nourish and nurture this

prefrontal cortex so that you can make optimised decisions.

And I think when you work with people

and they're very stressed, then you probably find this, they say, oh,

let's just do what we've always done, or otherwise they go, I haven't decided.

Let me think about it a bit more.

But all they're doing is treating water, because their brain is actually battling

to make new connexions that will further this.

This planning process.

Something I actually talk about

in the work that I do with companies and employees and

individuals is this thing called heuristic.

It's what you described, and that is that automatic response of the body is

like it's microseconds, where it's actually looking for triggers

of things past to say, oh, it's similar to that.

So it makes the decision making easier.

But we've not considered all the necessary facts at that point.

So we spot on.

Spot on.

So just step back for a moment.

The reason the brain developed heuristics,

or the reason that they exist, is because the brain is the greediest

organ we own, and it loves to save energy, which is why habits formed,

because when you formed a habit, you don't have to think carefully

and expend a lot of neural energy on executing that habit.

So the brain is always looking to conserve energy, and heuristics help it do

that because it's a knee jerk habitual response to something that it has

experienced previously, and it just calls on that.

So there's a real neurophysiological

reason for this saving of energy, because let's think about this really practically.

Where do we save energy in the brain?

There's nowhere to save energy.

You know, we look at our bodies and we know where we save energy.

It's easy to see, but there's nowhere in the brain to save energy.

So the brain really evolved to become a very energy greedy, well,

not energy greedy, energy sustaining or energy conserving

organ, so that you could quickly rely on something that you'd already

anticipate, already experienced before you make a decision.

So it's kind of like a catch 22.

You have to realise that you are engaging in a habitual cognitive process to stop

yourself, which is prefrontal cortex activity, stopping yourself.

It's an inhibitory action to be able to say, hold on a second.

But you see, Philip, just to bring your work back into this,

it's very important for people to realise that when they caught in a cognitive loop,

which can include rumination and can include a lack of creativity,

having somebody outside like you to point these things out

and say, hold on a second, have you thought about this?

Have you thought about that?

That's why your work is so,

so critical to people, because they actually need that outside

prompt to support them in thinking about things differently.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

And.

And it's very important,

oftentimes for individuals to really step back from the situation they're facing,

whatever that may be, and be able to look at it in a rational way.

And often I say to people,

but probably 80, 90% of the time, in terms of the decision making that we're

going through, we will do that emotionally.

And I use various examples where

they're looking for something, they find it, and it's going to special

offer on it, but they've got to make a decision now,

it's got to be today, it's got to be in the next hour.

And so all of a sudden,

the emotions kick in, and rather than a rational thought process

saying, hang on a minute, could I get this cheaper elsewhere?

It's great that it's a special offer now,

but I'm just going to look somewhere else first.

And I said just the everyday sort of examples that probably most of us will

have when we go to, whether it's, we call them supermarkets

here in the states, Walmart and places like that,

you walk in and you're looking for particularly people who walk in without

any shopping list, I'll just go and see what there is.

So they know they need certain things, but whilst they're there,

because they've got no shopping list, he goes, oh, have some of that.

Oh, have some of this.

And you know that the emotions are kicking.

It's the immediate buzz, it's the immediate satisfaction that feel

good factor that they're after at that point in time.

And it's only later on where they look

back and say, did I really spend that much?

Well, yeah, sorry.

Very important point, once again, is that,

you know, you're speaking about the emotions.

Most people don't know that emotions

travel very, very quickly in the brain compared

to thinking at about twice the speed of thought.

Now, the reason this happens is because

we couldn't be having a long cognitive thought about whether there was a tiger.

We felt the emotion of fear, and we responded.

We were running before we really thought, is there really a tiger?

So the fact that our emotions travel, you know, double the speed of our

thinking, really served us from an evolutionary perspective.

But what do clever marketers now do?

They harness that capacity or that productivity that they harness

that natural evolutionary capacity that we have.

They harness that when we walk into the store.

So, you know, buy two for the price of one or get two for 50% of the price of one.

And the emotion is, oh, that's great.

And so people respond to that when they go back later with their cognition,

which takes longer, they go, oh, I shouldn't have done that.

So, you know, the first thing is never go to a supermarket to buy food when you're

hungry, because then you've got the added

challenge of being hungry and thinking, you know, with.

With your gut, not really, you know, with your logic.

So I think once people understand that they primed to make decisions

with their emotions, that it allows them just to sit back

and hold up and say, you know, is this an emotional decision?

Is this a cognitive thought?

And that's just really helpful to know that we've got this inbuilt

challenge in modern society to just go with an emotional response first.

Yeah, I'm just thinking as you would as

you're talking then that there's a number of aspects here where by,

you know, there's the emotional response in terms of what's happening externally

to us, and then there's the internal response.

So we'll look at, for example,

people who've perhaps had a bad day at work, in the office,

wherever it may be, and they just want to feel good and so

they look for things that will make them feel good.

And often we go for the simplest, the easy, accessible thing.

I had a client talk to me one day about, in essence they didn't refer to it as

this, but in essence they were talking about retail therapy.

It's a coping mechanism to deal

with the harsh realities of the day they've had to face.

And this individual would often find themselves the only one in a group

of friends who by the way, earned the most, more than any of their

friends, and yet were always or regularly in debt.

And they didnt understand it.

And its interesting isnt it,

that there are things that we automatically do, but we dont realise were

doing them, we dont see them, and then there are things that we want

to do in order to cope with whatever life is throwing at us.

Just this one example.

I said to the individual, I said, well, when you have a tough day and you know

that this response, now you've become aware of it,

we've talked about it and that response kicks in.

You should be able to recognise it when it's kicking in.

If you find yourself in a department store

and you see something that you like, try walking past it and deciding

for yourself, I'm going to wait a week and if I still feel the same I will go back.

And this person said to me, I can't possibly do that.

And I said why?

Well, what if it's not there when I go back?

And I said, what difference to your life will that make?

And all of a sudden it was like for them, a light bulb moment.

A realisation actually won't make any difference to my life.

And what was lovely in this situation was a week later this person phoned me,

really excited to say, I've done it, I've done it.

I saw something, I had a really rough day.

I went and I found myself in a store and I saw something that was nice and I walked

past it and I decided, I'm not going to buy it now, I'm going to think about it.

And I thought, brilliant.

But that is the importance of that self awareness,

so that the things that we've just spoken about,

people will become aware of the fact that it uses so much energy to think rationally

and logically, and we have that tendency to want to go

to the automation side, the habitual side, absolutely.

But if we're 100%,

yeah, the awareness is very, very important,

but there's something else to consider because basically what the person is

creating, what this client of yours is creating, is a new neural pathway.

So now she started the tentative,

the beginnings of a neural pathway that allows her to walk past the item.

And the more time she does that, the more robust that neural pathway will

become, because her default was always to bias.

So that means that that neural pathway is firmly established.

She's now going to be creating a new

neural pathway, because we never override a neural pathway.

All our neural pathways stay there,

but we have to now create a new one that becomes just as robust,

more robust than the one we trying to now change the behaviour around.

So what she's doing, the more time she does this,

the more locus of control she'll gain, the more she'll believe in her capacity

to separate herself from her immediate emotionally driven activity.

And she will end up feeling a sense

of self esteem and confidence in moving past that.

Something else that she can do, she can actually make a list of every

single time she does that, because in doing that,

what she'll be doing, she'll be releasing dopamine,

because that's a pleasure and motivation and anticipation neurotransmitter.

And as that list gets longer,

she will have a visual manifestation of what she's actually accomplishing.

And then to add the pleasure to that,

she can actually go and start adding up each of those items from a financial

perspective, and she'll see how much money she has saved.

So that will support the robustness

of this new neural pathway that she's trying to establish.

And, you know, anybody can do this around

finances, around anything that we're trying to do.

The brain isn't fussy about what

the neural pathway is, it's just as long as you use the same principles.

And the other thing I'd suggest for her is that if she does find herself in a retail

situation, what she should do towards the end of the day,

if she's had a rough day, is to make sure that her blood glucose is stable.

Because if her blood glucose isn't stable,

she'll have a rise in adrenaline and then a big dip.

And the purchasing of something gives her a feeling of satisfaction and pleasure,

which then, for a brief period of time, will make her feel good.

So keeping her blood glucose stable is another really simple way to make sure

that establishing that habit just becomes a little easier.

So in order to then generate a new habit, we not only have to be self aware,

but we also need to make sure that we're getting the right nutrients so

that that strengthens that change of behaviour and that mindset, 100%.

Because blood glucose ups and downs impact

our mood, it impacts our focus and concentration, it impacts our memory,

it impacts our sleep and our energy levels.

And all of those things work together to allow us the capacity to inhibit

behaviour that we want to stop and also to support behaviour that we want more of,

and to step back and give us that capacity just for a little bit of introspection.

So blood glucose stability,

which relies on the right fats, the right carbohydrates,

the right protein and good gut health, that blood glucose stability is

a critically important aspect of our overall

plan to live a life where we thrive and where we're not responding in knee

jerk ways to situations that are challenging.

Yeah, it's interesting on some of the courses that I deliver around

we call financial wellbeing, but actually I do a lot around money,

psychology and just that alone, people are surprised.

I didn't anticipate that we would be doing

this because they were thinking, I'll go straight into the practicalities

and here's some tips and advice and things like this.

And I say to them, I said, look,

the biggest influencer in your life right now is you.

It's the choices that you make.

And if you don't understand why you're

making those choices, then whatever you decide,

how many among us who actually do plan find that often we

don't stick to our plans or we don't achieve what we'd set out to achieve.

Somewhere along the line we've been sort

of rerouted or we found ourselves down a cul de sac or something like this.

And I said, oftentimes it's because we're

not self aware that when we don't understand the whole decision making

process that we as a human being go through to arrive at what we think is

the best decision for us at the time, we don't understand that process.

Therefore we won't necessarily see

the signs that may lead us down a path that sabotages our future aspirations.

Beautiful, beautiful.

Because what you giving people

the capacity to do is to introspect and then examine their behaviour.

So you stopping them from that knee jerk response, you're stopping them from just

following a path blindly because they've always done it.

You're getting them to stop and reassess.

And part of that, part of the way we respond to money

and to anything in the world is what happens when we, in our childhood,

you know, we learn from the adults around us how they respond.

So specifically in your field, you know,

if you dealt with adults who didn't plan in relation to their finances,

who just went along, you know, with, with the monthly, weekly,

whatever process, then that's what those children learned.

They basically absorb that without thinking about it.

It just becomes part of their financial psychology.

As you, as you, you know, you, what you speak about.

The other thing that's really interesting

is that when the human brain experiences a lack of control,

that is one of the worst stresses that the brain can experience.

And that's one of the reasons COVID had such a negative effect on people's mental

wellbeing, because they couldn't anticipate which.

The brain always wants to predict what the next thing is going to be.

The brain was unable to predict what the next disaster would be,

what the next lockdown would look like, what the next mandate was.

People's brains really battled with that.

So if people are letting their finances basically run, run themselves,

where if they're not consciously making plans around that,

what happens is that their brains actually feel a lack of control.

They might not realise this at the time,

but that actually increases their stress level without them being aware of it.

So they're letting it do its own thing

and just unfold as it unfolds, but they feel a lack of control around it.

When you step in and you give them this framework, when you give them the capacity

to step back, examine, look at the psychology,

look at the planning, you know, look at their role in their finances,

you actually giving them a sense of psychological control,

which is actually felt deep at the neurology of their brain.

And when they stressed, what happens is they make better decisions

because now they can explore different options.

They don't have to stick with the knee jerk responses.

So you give them a gift at a neuronal level

which you may not have realised that you're doing,

and they haven't realised that either, but that's what I'm telling you you're doing.

So it's a fabulous gift that can serve

them and their children and the ongoing, the generations coming up,

because now they have that capacity to take back control and to observe clearly.

Yeah, and I think that city is breaking cycles, isn't it?

So when you think about the fact that as children,

in the early developmental years of our lives, we're very much like sponges,

we just literally absorb what we see, what we experience, what we hear.

And then as we're growing up,

we're sort of beginning to develop our own belief systems.

And we may be trying other people's,

you know, values and principles and whatever they may be.

We may be trying them on like a suit

of clothes just to see if they fit and if we feel comfortable,

yet we're not necessarily developing our own beliefs out of what we know to be

true, that the facts that reside around us.

And it's often I talk with people.

There's so many times I talk with people who, they talk about what they do.

For example, I had a client who said, they're very good at planning,

and they explain to me the process of what they go through.

And I would say to them, yes, you're very good at planning.

However, just because you're very good at planning doesn't mean to say it's

a great plan or it's the right plan, but we're very good at planning.

I said to this person, I said, so how often do you cheque your plan?

Or how often do you cheque your money?

And they thought for a while,

and they were thinking, well, probably once a week, actually.

Probably more every day, several times a day.

And they just burst into tears.

And as we talked further, you talked about

the whole thing of when, particularly the prefrontal cortex

is overloaded, it's almost like the stress level rises.

And you can see this in this person.

All of a sudden, this whole sort of stress was just coming out.

And they began to tell me their backstory.

And it was simply that they had an aunt

in the family who would say to them from a little child, you must save.

It's really important. You must save, you must save.

So every time they saw this member

of the family, they heard this message, you must save.

And this individual, albeit they were very

good at planning, their finances, were saving very well.

A, they really struggled with guilt and anxiety when they spent money,

particularly large amounts of money, which we sometimes have to do in life.

And so that became a very stressful event for them and to the point where they

literally just broke down, I can't do this anymore.

And so we started to look at, well, let's look at what's right for you.

It's all well and good to save, but why are we saving?

What are we saving for?

Do we have a purpose in this?

Because if we've not got a purpose, we're just being blown around by every

wind of idea, teaching, whatever it may be, and it's never our own.

And so we come back to the control thing.

We don't feel like we're in control.

We're living by somebody else's value,

somebody else's standards, somebody else's voice and instructions.

That's a really good example for that, because basically the person was.

It was an anxiety

inducing experience to listen to this family member speak about saving.

So that memory and that neural pathway was

established under those conditions of anxiety and stress.

And then as an adult,

the person was following that, but it was leading to anxiety and stress.

So the whole experience just became a habitual response to anxiety

in an attempt to lower the anxiety, but it was doing the opposite.

So this is where we can basically shoot

ourselves in the knees, you know, because we.

We think we're doing the right thing, but actually it's not the right thing.

And so you pointed out, you know,

what was the right thing for this person now in their life?

And they would now have to make a new plan, because the problem with the child's

brain, as you said, children's brains are like sponges, and for a very good reason.

It's the way that we develop to be able to learn as much as possible

in the shortest amount of time, to be able to optimise survival.

But the challenge is that children year

children see much better than they hear, but they hear pretty well,

as well as that client showed, they were hearing this aunt speak about

this all the time, and it basically imprints on the human brain.

And so this person has carried this now for so long and it's not serving them.

So you give them the perspective to step

back and say, hold on a second, this isn't serving me anymore.

So now they're going to have a very busy prefrontal cortex,

because every time they're going to try and revert back to that behaviour,

their prefrontal cortex is going to say, hold on a second, going to inhibit this

thought process and their behaviour attached to it.

It'll take them a bit of time,

but soon they're going to realise that this is a plan for them,

not based on the past and someone else's fear, because basically what she was

doing, she was making them fearful because of her perspective and experience.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm just thinking about, you know, as we're talking through this

subject, some of the things that we often talk

about is more looking on the positive side of things.

And you.

So you've talked about making sure that we're getting the right nutrition,

because that enhances our ability to use the parts of our brain that we need

to, and given circumstances, problem solved, be creative and so on.

But equally at the same time,

just thinking the whole area of things like gratitude,

which almost forces us to look for the good.

And it's not that you're ignoring

that there are things out there that you're not happy with but you're

picking out the good, so you're focusing on the positives.

So there's that. The thankful.

Gratitude, obviously thankfulness, but also just that.

A different approach to a situation.

But in order to do that, you need to have this self awareness.

Yes. Yeah.

Spot on. Yeah.

We can't get away from the self awareness. We just can't.

And it's a critical part to living a fulfilled life.

One does need to have self awareness,

and the gratefulness is a very important part of this.

And we know that gratefulness actually changes the way the brain perceives

a situation, so it increases what we call our cognitive repertoire.

So when we feel grateful and we're looking at the pluses and the benefits

and the good things in our life, we actually heighten our capacity to look

for new strategies, new positive patterns and new ways of doing things.

And that makes us more capable, from a community perspective

and a personal perspective, in living a good life.

When we negative, we narrow our cognitive

repertoire and we only see a few options, whereas with gratefulness,

we see more options, we actually have more,

we have more resources available to us to be able to make different decisions

and decisions that actually enhance our survival and physiological perspective.

When we grateful, our stress levels drop. Yes.

Whereas when we negative,

we vigilant for the things that are going wrong and our stress levels rise.

So there are a number of different reasons

why being grateful and reframing a negative helps us,

not just from a psychological or neurophysiological perspective,

it actually helps us from a physiological perspective.

So I love that you brought gratefulness into this.

Yeah.

One of the things that I regularly hear from people is they often say, you know,

I'm bad with numbers, I'm bad with money, and I'll ask them about that.

Why do they think that?

And oftentimes it will refer back

to a time where somebody's made a comment to them that's really embedded itself.

Oftentimes when they're in their sort of formative years,

where a teacher, perhaps, or a parent has been highly critical or

has not really believed in them, and so they've grown up with this belief

that, you know, things like maths, I'm no good at.

I have my own family.

There's certain members that will actually say that.

And I've said to them,

I said this reframing that you mentioned, I've often said.

So rather than focus on this belief

that you're bad with numbers, because actually, if we look at the facts,

you go shopping, you go to the department store and so on, you'll add things up,

you'll define things, you'll multiply things,

and eventually I'll say, so who says you're bad with numbers?

But how about this?

Say I'm good with numbers when I use a calculator.

So what we're doing is we're starting to sort of reframe that belief.

But like you said earlier,

it will take time and effort to develop that new mindset and that new behaviour.

And it's not just about positive thinking,

it's about actually engaging with the truth.

That surrounds us, it's about thinking about how we think.

Because once we start thinking about how we think, we can be more critical.

And I say that in a good way.

This is not judgmental,

it's just been critical, as in, you know, I may not be a mathematician,

but I can cope with numbers and do numbers pretty well.

Look, I'm an adult and I've survived,

I've paid my mortgage, I feed myself, I do all these things,

which means that I have to have some basic understanding of how numbers work.

So you basically bolstering

your belief in yourself with numbers and as you say, anybody can use a calculator.

And, you know, not everybody

wants to be a mathematician or needs to be a mathematician to live a good life.

And once again, you are there to help them reframe in terms of their finances.

So you've got a lot of useful things that you do in your line of work, Philip.

Thank you, Delia.

I'm just mindful that, you know, with yourself, here you are.

I mean, our listeners by now, perhaps will have picked up your accent

from Australia, but you're actually in Texas.

I'm in Texas at the moment.

And to add another level of interest is I was born in South Africa, so

my husband jokes and he tells people, we go to places that start with an a.

So, you know, Africa, Australia, Austin, in Texas.

So, yes, I've been doing a bit of travelling and, you know,

the one thing about travelling is you have to be very agile cognitively.

You come to a new place and people are

different, the place is different, you know, there's still the same blue sky.

Yeah, but people think differently.

And it's always interesting to me to come

to a new culture and see how people think and how they behave.

So I always do a little bit of,

kind of like undercover research when I go to a new place and it's always fun.

That's brilliant. That's brilliant.

I was just thinking about story one of my trips over to the states.

I arrived and we were in the arrivals area and we were going through customs

and there was a lovely sign there saying, welcome to America.

And, you know, and there was a list of things of why they were really positive.

And I thought, this is lovely, this is a great start.

And then all of a sudden I heard this

booming security officer's voice across the, you know,

the customs hall at a gentleman who had happened to step into the wrong aisle

and he didn't realise and his heart must have been pounding.

And so I saw this and I thought, hmm,

that, you know, this behaviour doesn't match up with what's being said.

And oftentimes you listen, you hear that in people, don't you?

You hear them talk about things and yet their behaviour is somewhat different.

And, and on a personal note, I remember,

you know, you just saying about the control side.

When I was travelling with my family

through the States, on one occasion we arrived where do we go in Atlanta?

And then we went on to.

Oh, dear me, we went to Disney down in Florida.

And on one of the sort of cheque ins and the custom side, I was just.

I must have been quite sort of on edge

because I wanted to make sure that all my family was safe and were together.

And we got to the security cheques, the scanning machines,

and this security chap stood there and he said, sir, can you take your hat off?

I had a baseball cap on.

Yeah, fine.

He says, can you take your shoes off?

You know, and then he says, can you take your belt off?

And so I just looked at him.

I don't know why I did this.

I just said, do you want me to take my trousers off as well?

And he didn't linch, I thought, hmm, I've just overstepped them out there.

But that was my emotional reaction to, to that situation.

So you talk about that resilience

and that sort of adaptability when you're travelling.

Yeah, it's amazing,

different circumstances, how these little things just kick

in and if you're not aware of them, then you're not able to make

the adjustments you need to have that resilience to take you through.

So.

Absolutely, Philip, absolutely.

And I think even more today because we live in such a complex world where so many

things are in interacting and there's a confluence of so many different factors

on each other that I think the capacity to step back and take a deep breath

and just analyse the situation carefully is a really very underrated

and unfortunately not learned, not easily learned skill.

No.

Should I say it's easily learned, but it's not taught.

And I think we should really start

teaching children how to do this in kindergarten.

Because once you get that capacity

to bring your physiology back into line and to actually feel

your nervous system recalibrate, then you have the capacity to think more

clearly and you avoid that emotional reaction.

But a lot of people don't know how to do that.

And, you know, there's a whole field of science now called

proprioception, which speaks to this whole process

of being able to see what your internal state is.

Because what a lot of people don't know,

Philip, is that, you know, we have the sympathetic nervous

system, which is our stress nervous system, and we have the parasympathetic

nervous system, which is our rest and digest nervous system.

And today the SNS is on a lot more than the rest and digest.

But what a lot of people don't know is that the.

The PNS is actually more robust from a connectivity perspective, versus the SNS.

Because the PNS is supposed to be used more frequently than the SNS.

The SNS is only supposed to be switched on for between 30 to 60 seconds.

Because in that period of time,

the target either caught you and you didn't need it anymore

because you were the lunch, or otherwise you escaped and you didn't need it.

So 30 to 60 seconds is how long it is supposed to be activated for.

And not frequently today it's on so much.

And so the PNS doesn't get much of a look in.

But when people learn how to use their

neuroception, which is part of this proprioception, the process of assessing

your internal states, then what happens is we access our PNS

more and then we start recalibrating our nervous system.

And that allows us the capacity to step

back, observe, analyse and make a decision based on, you know, the.

The current situation, not what we imagining with our time travel brain.

And that is a very, very important skill.

And with what you do and the way you help people, you are helping them do that about

a very, very critically important aspect of their lives.

So you.

You may not realise you're doing that, but you helping them recalibrate their

nervous system, you know, with what you do.

Yeah, I think with the. With what?

25 years in the finance industry,

working in both investment management and money and debt advice,

I've seen everything from the most to the least and everything in between.

And the very thing that really struck me, and hence why I speak with people like

yourself, is the fact that this area we're talking about is so vital if we are

to help people improve their financial wellbeing.

And so this is why education alone just isn't enough.

We have to have that inner sort of self

awareness and learn what that is and how to adapt it according to our circumstances

and engage with those aspects of our, our mind, our brain that enables us

to make those good conscious decisions rather than reacting out of our emotions

and also just experiencing those heightened levels of stress and anxiety.

Like you say, society today we are being bombarded with so much from social media

messages to news outlets to just everything that's going on,

even at a local level, to the point whereby we're not able

to engage with that sort of, that rest side, that ability to just step

back and sort of analyse things for ourselves.

Delia, this has been wonderful chatting with you.

I'm unconscious about time, but I really wanted to ask you about

the work that you do because again, it is so vital, even what you're doing.

It's raising

the awareness based on the research and the decades of work that's gone

on to really help us understand ourselves as human beings.

Tell us a little bit more about what you do in your day to day life in a sense.

Well, my primary goal when I work

with organisations, and I call them conscious organisations

because these are organisations that understand that the cognitive

wealth that they have in their employees is the most valuable asset that they hold.

So I teach them about how to optimise

that and how to make sure that their staff understands what stress does to creativity

and innovation, to understand that keeping their nervous

system in cheque will allow them to make really good decisions.

Because we make poor decisions when we stressed.

A lot of companies are very concerned with engagement.

And so I speak about modern burnout,

which is different to just burnout related to only work.

Because as you said,

this onslaught of information leaves people feeling a lack of control

and a lack of capacity to make any difference.

And, you know, in a brain that feels

overwhelmed and uncertain once again cannot be creative and innovative.

So I teach people about how the brain

functions so they can optimise it and get the best out of their teams and themselves

as leaders, but not just for the organization's success.

Because, you know, when people are healthy, when they're thinking clearly,

when they mood, their focus, their concentration,

their memory is optimal, they live their best lives,

then they don't feel like they go to work and it's a drudge and it's hard and it's

a pain and then they just go home for a little respite and then have to go

back to work, whether it's at home or, you know, in an office,

when we allow people to thrive holistically, everybody benefits.

And there's a beautiful positive effect

in families, in communities and in society as a whole.

Now, I think more and more companies,

I'm discovering, are becoming conscious of the fact that their employees burnout,

disengagement, you know, presenteeism, absenteeism, stress levels,

all of those things are negatively affecting their bottom line.

And the ones that truly care about their

employees, about their teams, are the ones that find me and that I love working with.

Because then I look at what their current

stress level is, I look at what their resilience levels

are, I look at whether some of them are feeling depressed and anxious because

depression and anxiety has been rising because of this lack of control.

It's one of the things that the brain does.

Affective disorders rise when the brain

feels it doesn't have any control over the circumstances it finds itself in.

So I assess all of that and then I say, okay, this is how we're going to fix this.

Yeah. And the effects are long reaching,

you know, as I said, it affects the person in station, the family.

Yeah.

By helping people work optimally.

I think we lost you for a few seconds there, Delia.

I think obviously it's the connexion, but, yeah,

what you're talking about is so relevant and it's really encouraging employers,

business leaders, entrepreneurs to recognise

some of these things as being really valuable to them in the sort of future

success of their organisation, the resilience of their organisation.

I think the pandemic COVID really demonstrated where there was a lack

of resilience, how businesses have really struggled through that time and as you

rightly say, individuals struggle because of that sort of taking away

or providing the uncertainty which we don't like as human beings.

We like to be in control,

we like to know what's going on and when that's taken away from you,

it does have a profound impact, but equally on businesses.

Just talking earlier with my wife about the,

the sorry state of many businesses failing during that time, because it's not to say

they were wrong in running their business, however, they didn't have that resilience

to see them through what was for many of us, a very, very difficult time.

Dealy, it's been, been wonderful talking with you.

Thank you so much and my pleasure.

You've got the rest of your day, haven't you?

So all the very best.

I do have a great day and,

yeah, just thank you very much for coming and talking with us today.

An absolute pleasure, Philip.

And thank you for the wonderful work that you do.

I think you are helping people

do what they need to do to be able to live a fulfilled and to thrive.

So well done on what you're doing.

It was a pleasure meeting you and enjoy the rest of your Friday afternoon.

I will do. Thank you very much.

You take care.

Thank you for the bye.