Change Your Brain Every Day - The Brain at Work –Personal Development in Company Culture - Part 4 of an Interview with Dave Asprey

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

If you’re running your own business, your company is an extension of your habits and energy. However, you don’t need to be a CEO to see the effects of brain health on the workplace. In the last episode of this series with Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey, Dr. Amen and Tana discuss ways to increase performance at work.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics. Amen Clinics represents a true paradigm shift in mental health, utilizing SPECT imaging technology for assessing brain function. Amen Clinics focuses on personalized treatment plans and has an 85% proven outcome rate for patients. For more information, visit amenclinics.com or call at 1-888-288-9834. Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond and welcome to the Brain Warriors Way hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health

is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen. Welcome back, everybody. We're here at the Brain Warriors Way. I'm here with Tana and our good friend, Dave Asprey, author of Headstrong, which is now available for pre-order, orderheadstrong.com. Dave is the founder and CEO of Bulletproof. He's the creator of Bulletproof Coffee.

He's the host of the number one health podcast, Bulletproof Radio, the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet. And he's an entrepreneur. He's the CEO of a fast-growing company. I know you believe in brain health. You have it go throughout your company. In this podcast, I actually want to talk about the brain at work. And the CEO's brain, obviously, if it's not right, the business is probably not going to be right. But your best asset at Bulletproof is the collective brain health of the people who serve with you in the mission that you have. As you set up Bulletproof, how did you think about the brain at work? I believe, based on my experience as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, as well as at

Bulletproof, people often don't know this. The company that held Google's first server when they were just one server, I was a co-founder of the consulting part of that company. So multiple times in Silicon Valley, I've seen companies just whoosh, whoosh, and take off. Even today, some of the infrastructures that we're talking over is stuff that 15 years ago I was working on, which is just the coolest thing ever.

So I look at how a company culture forms and how a company grows and presents itself to the world is a direct reflection of the CEO's energy and thus the CEO's brain. So if you are calm and grounded and focused and able to be the calm in a storm and to be non-reactive to things that are not worthy of reaction,

that are worthy of thought, and then strategic movements, your company will grow, your culture will flourish, and your people will trust you. And if you are instead a reactive CEO with ADD tendencies, who yells at people and throws people around all the time without meaning to, by the way, you're not going to have the

level of success that you're capable of, but more importantly, you're not going to have fun along the way. It'll be painful. That struggle we talked about earlier, you'll struggle all the time versus being able to make it happen effortlessly. I succeeded in my early career out of a fear of failure. It was like running away from these automatic negative thoughts that you write about in your books.

And fear can be a powerful motivator. It just sucks. So when you can turn that off and get your brain working right, what happens is the struggle goes away. And that's why I'm not just the CEO of Bulletproof. I'm also a CEO five-day intensive neurofeedback thing called 40 Years of Zen that for me has helped me. Once I got my biology in gear with your scans and even with some of the recommendations in your huge number of books, that really helped me. And then eventually there was like fine performance tuning with neurofeedback has been really meaningful to me to the point that I wanted the world's best

neurofeedback that I could find. And we ended up making custom hardware and software in order to tweak my brain and to do it with a few other CEOs. And what I find over and over is all of us have mitochondrial dysfunction. We have brains that aren't working very well. And by the way, I said to everyone I talked to, Daniel, to your clinic to get a brain scan, because what's the point of trying to train your brain or even going to a meditation retreat if your hardware is running at half level? Any personal development you do as a CEO, as a business person, will not be effective

if your brain is simply not on. And that's what you're seeing. So the advice that CEOs get when they go to the Amen Clinics is priceless because they get their hardware working. And you talk to them about breathing exercise, and you talk to them about heart rate variability and all this. And then if they're going to go do some performance tweaking or tuning or go meditate or do any kind of personal growth that reflects inside a company culture, it's just easier to do that work when they've turned on their hardware and they've been able to see what's going on in a spec scan. Oh, it's so true. It's interesting that you say that, Dave. One thing that I've noticed, and I don't know if you experienced this, I certainly did, before I got my scan, I was a little bit nervous. I was like, I don't know if I want to see what's inside my brain,

right? Because I'm this perfectionist and whatever it was, I was like afraid to see it. But the truth is, it's only good news. Because if you are an executive or you are an entrepreneur, whatever it is, you're already as successful as you are. The only thing you're going to get is information on how to make it better. So you just want to go in with that attitude that I'm going to learn information

that's going to help me be more successful. I was kind of terrified because I'm sitting here at business school and my brain isn't working very well. I'm concerned I'm not going to graduate. I'm thinking I'm dumber than all my friends. And I'm like, what if this test validates all that? That's actually not what it does at all. No, not at all. And it came out.

I was like, oh, look, there's a harder problem, and I could do something. So what I do in the business, in Bulletproof, is we have a heart rate variability. Almost everyone in the company has a heart rate variability monitor. And this is kind of a low-end type of feedback that when you change the space between your heartbeats, you take yourself out of fight or flight mode and into rest and recover mode so that everyone who does the training I recommend in the company will be able to feel when they go into fight or flight mode and know how to take themselves out so we can have meetings where people don't yell at each other. And then 15 of my top people have been through the full 40 years as in $15,000 executive

experience, which is a huge investment for a small company. We also have onsite clinical-grade neurofeedback at our headquarters. People can sit down. We do a custom brain scan. Here's the deal. I encourage everyone to do breathing exercises in the company and people who read bulletproof content or listen to the radio show and all that.

Breathing exercises, meditation, anything that's going to make you more of what you are, it's important for far more than company performance, but it does help employee performance. And if we can add those tools in so that if an employee is going to spend an hour of their precious life doing meditation, you might as well do it with some feedback so that you get more out of that hour. The return per hour spent is higher. So I'm totally fine if someone schedules an hour in the middle of their workday, they go into the neurofeedback room and they put the 24-channel thing on their head and they

run custom protocols to address the parts of their brain connectivity that's most effective for them. That's the best investment I could make. But they get to keep those changes for the rest of their life, whether or not they keep working the Bulletproof. So it feels like it's a effective for them. That's the best investment I could make, but they get to keep those changes for the rest of their life, whether or not they keep working for Bulletproof. So it feels like it's a really good thing. More return on their time for them, more return on their time for Bulletproof. And that's not normal, but yes, I believe it's not only ethical, it's a moral imperative

to hack your employees' brains. I don't pick the settings. They get to decide what their brains are going to do, but I'll help them get the most out of their brain that they want to get out. That's brilliant. And do you have a story of how that has helped one of your employees or how that has helped Bulletproof? One of my top employees who actually just transitioned on,

but has been an integral part of our growth, he actually started reading Bulletproof content. He got on Bulletproof Coffee and he had been dealing with PTSD from his time as a veteran. And he actually came to the company and said, you know, my brain is better now because of these things. And once he started, we got hooked up with the neurofeedback. And he just had profound changes in his brain to the point that it shifted his relationships at home, his ability as a leader in the company. And you see these just profound changes where people come in with procrastination, which

is an unconscious fear. Or they come in with sort of a passive-aggressive attitude, or they like to send angry emails late at night, which is something I used to be very guilty of. And all of these behaviors, they realize at some point, oh, they just naturally melted. Or if they're doing the full reset protocol that's in 40 Years of Zen, they actually go back and find a root trauma. And then they go through and then they sort of reprogram that. And what we're finding is that people can't do much meditation or brain training because they run out of energy. So when we do mitochondrial enhancement strategies from Headstrong, we get two or three times more intensive brain training before someone just hits

the wall and they're just too tired so the idea is fuel the brain and then do the work instead of do the work and use willpower to make the brain go when there's not enough fuel and that was a mistake that i used to make when i do my own brain training or meditation was i didn't pay attention to my energy first and and so in in the case of this guy um that combination was was was transformative on a personal level as well as on a on a company level i love that so just to um add some more validation to what you're saying i actually have done uh heart rate variability training for a long time but i've used it for a different purpose it's been for athletic performance and actually there's now you know olymp Olympic athletes use this,

professional sports teams use it. Actually, a lot of them use it now. And it's really interesting the way they use it. So you can use it to actually train and work on your heart rate variability in the moment. You can also use it to see where you're at so that you know how to train so you don't get hurt. I'm sure you know this already,

but I use it to see where I'm at, how should I train to get the most out of it. But then also if I notice that, say one day, it's showing that I'm way down in endurance, then you have a plan that you can use to start to build that back up to affect your parasympathetic system versus your sympathetic, which is probably on overdrive

And you start to learn How to manipulate it Through being able to monitor it You can see how to change it And how to work with it And it's just fascinating And I did that for my black belt test I used it a lot

So we are running out of time Congratulations on that by the way Thank you Dave is just a wealth of information And you can listen to his podcast, Bulletproof Radio. You can get his New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet, or pre-order his new book, Headstrong, at orderheadstrong.com. Dave, I hope you'll come back. It's just been great fun

to spend time with you. And we are proud that you're our friend and excited for your success and wish you all the best. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Tana. And for people listening, if you haven't had a spec scan yet

to know what areas of performance improvement is possible for your brain, especially if you haven't had a spec scan yet to know what areas of performance improvement is possible for your brain especially if you're interested in being a ceo or a leader or or just a really high performance business person or in some other part of your life a musician actor whatever you owe it to yourself to get your brain scanned at one of dr amos clinics it is it is one of the biggest things that that put me on the path I'm on now. And I honestly would not be sitting here in front of all of you today if it wasn't for this body of work.

So thank you for your kind words about Headstrong, but for people listening, I truly don't know of something more important than understanding what's going on in your head. And you are the man for that. Well, that's awesome. Thank you, my friend. Thanks for listening to today's show,

The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.