00:15 MONIQUE BLOUGH, HOST:
Welcome to Responsible Disruption. I'm your host, Monique Blough. Today's episode explores the intersection of brain science and leadership coaching, understanding how our brains work can unlock new levels of leadership effectiveness. Our special guest today is Crystal Fernando. Crystal is a global leader, changemaker, and founder of What Box Partners, a consultancy that helps leaders and teams build the mindsets, confidence, and skills to thrive in a fast-evolving world. She has advised leaders in over 20 countries on strategy, startup growth, transformation, human-centered innovation, and performance culture. As an expert strategist, coach, speaker, and facilitator, Crystal has worked with senior executives from small private firms to large public corporations, including Fortune 100 companies, startups, board advisory, and government institutions. She also teaches brain-friendly leadership strategies as adjunct faculty at Emory University. Crystal's blend of creative vision and real-world pragmatism comes from her experience leading numerous award-winning innovations and transformations. She is passionate about helping leaders create a better tomorrow. Join us as we delve into her unique insights and experiences. Welcome, Crystal.
01:36 CRYSTAL FERNANDO, GUEST:
Thank you, Monique. So nice to be here and thank you for the introduction.
01:41 MONIQUE: Well, we're excited to have you, and I'm very excited to share so many different facets in this conversation. I hope our listeners can dig in with us. We are really in an era defined by constant evolution and unpredictability, and we know that adapting to change has become one of those critical skills for leaders. I think it’d be great to start off based on your experience and what you've seen around the world. What have you noticed as we think about adapting for change with executives today?
02:21 CRYSTAL: Oh gosh, so much change, so much it's not even noticed. But I would say I have experienced it firsthand. If we think back to the beginning of my career—and certainly most of the people, if not all, that I work with and coach—and I ask them to think back to the beginning of their careers, really, no matter how old they are, unless they just entered the workplace, we've all experienced radical change. I remember a time when I even asked people to close their eyes and think about a time when everything felt in control. I had problems, but I knew I could solve them. It was very tangible. Even when we looked at strategies, sometimes from the hotel business as well, we would just look at your local competitors, the five hotels around you, and that's how you would strategize. Now, it's so much more interconnected, so much more global, so much more exponential—the pace of change. I used to have to tell people all about that, and I don't anymore. We all know, and now with the introduction of AI, there is no doubt about it. Sometimes we don't have the words to put around it.
So, I'll introduce VUCA, which is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. That term comes from the military. After the Cold War, we would send people into these volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous situations, and when we called it that, it was clear that new skills, new thinking, and new tools were needed. Harvard calls it 3D change, which is pervasive, perpetual, and exponential. What I notice is that this change is in all aspects of our life. It's not just at work; it's at school, it's at home. There's so much change and so many demands on our learning muscle and capacity. It's incredible. It's an incredible time to be a leader, but it's not an easy time to be a leader.
So, as I tell this story, sometimes I’ll ask, or when I’m speaking, I’ll say, "Do you ever feel like our generation was plucked off one game board and put on another, and the rules are different and nobody told you?" Recently, I had a client say, "Yes!" So many people identify with that—gosh, it feels different, and I don't know why I can't focus, or why I'm overwhelmed, when I've never been that way in my life. I’ll just say, "You’re on a new game board, and you’re playing with the old rules." It doesn’t have to be hard, but we’re playing a different game. There are different rules, different skills that are needed, and the more you try to use those old skills, the harder it gets and the deeper you get. By and large, that’s what I’ve noticed—it’s an entirely new game. How you think, focus, creativity, adaptability, resilience—that is now the performance imperative. It didn’t use to be. Hard skills and knowing the answer and being able to mentor others was really how I was rewarded at the beginning of my career. You were rewarded for knowing what you do and then teaching someone else what you do. Now, leaders navigating, especially leaders at the top of organizations, are navigating new roads they don’t know. No one's an expert in AI—it hasn’t been around long enough to be an actual expert in what’s going on. So that creates an entirely different environment by which to live, work, play, and lead. It’s interesting, and it’s big. It doesn’t need to be hard, but it can feel really daunting.
05:56 MONIQUE: Yeah. Thank you so much for that. There are so many elements of what you spoke to that I want to dig into, but I'm really curious about the metaphor of a new game board. I agree with you. I mean, I see it. I think we are definitely experiencing that. And for those of us that have been in our careers a little bit longer, had this expectation that we knew how to do things. Like you've said and now we don't. So I'm curious, how do you prepare leaders for those new rules? What can they do to start thinking about that or is it even something they can think about?
06:35 CRYSTAL: Oh, yes, definitely. That’s an interesting conversation. We take people as our coach, but we also have some programming that first asks, "Do you understand the context?" Understanding that there is a new game board with new rules—that context is really important because if we don't talk about it, it feels like we are experiencing it alone. When I bring this up and say, "Did you know that anxiety is at an all-time high? Did you know it’s tough to focus?" What’s separating high performers from those who are struggling is understanding the context—understanding that they don’t have to have the answers anymore—and then getting back into the driver's seat of our choices.
What I typically find is people are overbusy, saying yes to everything, trying to clear their inbox. You can’t do that anymore. It’s more about the discipline to say no to certain things than it is about getting everything done. It’s not about having the answer; it’s about creating the climate and culture where everyone can collaborate, fail safely (using air quotes), fail forward, learn, and adapt together. That’s just a different game.
So, part of it is understanding the context. The second thing we do is work inside out. We have to look at where we are and understand. It’s interesting because I’m not a brain scientist, but I’ve gone deep over the last five to six years into the science of how our brain works and why it doesn’t work at its best if we just leave it on autopilot in this context. Once you understand the context, you realize that you have this operating system we’ve trusted to operate as we needed it to. To some degree, it could. But now, in this very big, beyond-humanity world we’re in—big problems, global interconnected problems, AI, demands on our cognition, demands on our social being—it’s important to get back to humanity. Understand your mechanics, understand your formula, and then bring that to others.
We say, "Think, work, and lead from the inside out." We also say there’s a two-part strategy: understanding performance right here, right now. How do you thrive right here, right now? How do you bring the culture, the climate for creativity to thrive? How do you thrive in this moment versus in the long run? How do you build capacity? It’s interesting because we all recognize going to the gym and building muscle, but we don’t think about our mental muscles. In the long run, we build capacity to access the parts of our brain where creativity, adaptability, and flexibility reside. If you don't access them regularly, they become harder and we can talk about that when we get into like impact of stress on the brain and stuff like that. But what we don't recognize is that it's actually just like a muscle. So if you don't flex it, it gets harder and harder and harder to find it when you need it.
09:32 MONIQUE: So you said you know that of course, you're not a brain scientist, but you've really dug into brain science as a topic. And so I'm curious as to then why do you feel that the brain plays such a unique role in performance today? I know you talked like it's really an operating system, but it'd be great if you could share some of that.
09:54 CRYSTAL: Absolutely. I’ve always been intrigued by the brain. I started out as an artist and creative, then moved into the startup world, and from there into consultancy, and then into big corporate roles for 15 years, including a global innovation and leadership role. I’ve always been intrigued by where ideas come from, how you get them, how you combine ideas, and how you create safety. I may have been a little outside the box in my approaches, as one of the first leaders to bring improv into the workplace—introducing "yes, and" culture and some of those things. I’ve always been interested in it, but I think it really came to life for me when I went back to university for my training in brain-based executive coaching.
That’s when I met our medical neurologist on staff, Eby and Gordon. He was an artist, a neurologist, and an integrated neuroscientist. He was teaching this module, and we struck up a friendship. Here we are five years later—we’ve created a product together. Initially, it was targeted at innovation, aiming to create a high-performance, creative culture. Then, through COVID, we realized he was also very involved in mental health and has one of the world’s largest integrated databases on mental health. We were watching anxiety rates, depression rates, and the impact of stress and uncertainty on the world. We kept thinking that the things we were doing could benefit everybody.
While my focus was on human-centered design, innovation, and strategy, honestly, it’s about getting back to the human basics of our brain and how it works. Maybe because I’ve worked at that scale and I’m a big interconnector, my passion isn’t necessarily in geeking out on the brain stuff—though I have done that for years. What I feel passionate about is simplifying it, making it accessible and applicable to teams and businesses, and connecting the dots between our brain and how we function as individuals, family members, teachers, moms, and in all the different roles we play. Those same mechanics are enduring.
So, in a radically changing world, finding enduring truths—things we know we can count on to thrive—and also creating new options is essential. We’re under the gun to create innovation, creativity, and solutions to problems we don’t even know yet, especially for our children. The idea isn’t necessarily about what you know at this stage of the game. On this game board, it’s about how you navigate, how you find enduring truths, what you know about yourself, and how you bring that to others to create new solutions and opportunities in the world. That’s where I believe the brain plays a vital role.
13:06 MONIQUE: That's great.
13:06 CRYSTAL: Part of it might help if I just say that we have this quick model: the number one rule of the brain, if you understand, is safety. When your brain is safe, calm, and flexible, it’s in a neuroplastic state—we are flexible beings, and our brains are made to reorganize and adapt no matter how old we are. This is accessible to you when you feel safe, calm, and flexible. When you’re not, our brain sends off an alarm system and shuts down parts of our anatomy to save energy. It’s a survival mechanism—we all know fight, flight, freeze—those are common terms, but we don’t always connect them back to creativity. When you’re in fight or flight, you’re not going to stop and ideate about all the creative ways to get out of a situation, right? The mechanics are still the same, but what has happened is that the “cheetah” that was once so obvious is now much more subtle. Our brain reacts to stress in a similar way, whether it’s a cheetah or something more modern and nuanced. If you’re under long-term stress, you may not even understand that parts of your anatomy are shutting down or not accessible to you. In the short term, this leads to binary thinking—my way or the highway. You don’t get optionality; you don’t get possibility. In the long run, it makes it harder and harder to access that flexibility.
When people bring that into the business world—where we’ve already talked about the challenging context—it creates a tough terrain of emotional hijacks and people not feeling safe to share their ideas. Yet, we need ideas and innovation more than ever before. So, I hope that explains it. I know I’m going all over the place, but what’s interesting is this cross-section of where we are. It’s a unique moment in history where it matters to get back to our mechanics and understand them so we can bring what we call “possibility thinking” to navigate, thrive now, and lead confidently into the future, no matter what that brings.
15:18 MONIQUE: And when you're talking about that cross section, Crystal, you're referring to the cross section between capacity and demand, right?
15:24 CRYSTAL: You know, we haven’t gone there, but yeah, we can talk about that. I was really referring to this cross—the world, this context—and how it intersects with our personal being as humans. We have this really changing, complex, technically demanding, capacity-demanding world intersecting with our personal world and our work world in such a way that we need to understand those dynamics. We were having a conversation right before the podcast about stress, and I said it’s an easy mechanic: it’s demand and capacity. We only have so much capacity, and if your demand exceeds your capacity, that’s stress, period. It’s a really simple mechanic, and it’s important to understand as a person, as a team, and as an organization. You only have two levers to work with—your demand and your capacity. So, it’s an easy solve, and we can talk about that.
16:20 MONIQUE: I'm really excited to dig into a framework that you have that helps leaders adapt in the rapidly changing world that we're facing where there's these new rules, this new game board and you did share the S with us just a few moments ago. But why don't you tell us about that frame? And how it's helping leaders but also I'm really also curious as to how you developed out the framework so kind of got two questions in there, let's see how deep we can go.
16:49 CRYSTAL: OK, but yeah, let's go back to the game board. So here we are, playing this new game, and it’s almost like the board is changing constantly. Can you imagine as a child, when we played Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, if the game board was literally changing all the time and the rules were changing? That would be frustrating. It would make me want to just throw the board and walk away. And it’s true—it really is tough to thrive and perform when you’re not sure what success looks like. It’s tough for leaders to cast vision in an unclear world where they’re not sure themselves. So what we do is come in and help people do that—to set strategy on purpose. How do you do that? How do you create what we call possibility leadership, which is stretching what’s comfortable into what’s possible? And then how do we create the culture to thrive?
Over the years, we’ve codified our strategy into a framework called SIMPLE—it’s simple rules for a not-so-simple world. Each of these rules is enduring. They’re not only true now but will be true as you navigate change, whether it’s the 10th change, the 20th change, or beyond. It doesn’t matter how old you are—they are human, enduring truths. You could be a teacher, you could be a leader, and that was our first qualification. We also ensured that each of the rules applies to thinking, working, and leading. It applies to me and my internal climate, my being. It also applies to collaborative settings in teams, and it applies at the systems level, whether organizationally wide or in larger systems like schools. It’s applicable there as well. It spells SIMPLE, which is great for stickiness, but it’s interesting because we did the work first, and the acronym emerged later. It was neat and organic.
The first letter is S, and it stands for Safety First. Each one of these has a mantra, and we can leave this behind on your portal after the podcast. The first is about this new game board—safety, meaning safe, calm, and flexible, is your ticket to play at all in the performance game. If you don’t have that, you go back to the beginning, if that makes sense. When I meet people who are highly stressed and overwhelmed, we don’t jump into team performance. If stress levels are really high, we need to address that first.
If there isn’t psychological safety within the team or culture, we need to address that first. I had a leader call me wanting to discuss high-performance culture and how to dig in. I started asking some questions about her team, and it turned out there wasn’t safety—both in terms of stress levels and psychological safety. I told her, “We can absolutely get you to high performing, but we can’t play the game at all if we don’t address these issues first.” So, we brought the team together to discuss what was safe for each individual. We opened up the conversation, defined what safety meant for everyone, and honored those definitions. This allowed us to continue progressing. Now, a year later, they’re doing really well, but addressing safety was the first step. So, #1 is Safety, which is crucial both personally and within the business team and culture.
The second principle is Intention, which stands for “intention wins.” What we don’t realize about the brain is that we have two modes of thinking: a non-conscious, intuitive mode (System 1) and a more shallow, executive functioning mode (System 2), as described by Daniel Kahneman. We need both, but when we over-rely on autopilot and habitual behaviors, we don’t access the parts of our brain that generate new options, insights, and choices. This new awareness and choice are essential for adaptation. Constantly being busy and on autopilot undermines our best thinking. Safety first is the ticket to play; Intention over busy habits is next. Constantly being on your phone and answering emails depletes cognition. This is a personal issue, so what are your busy habits, and how can you combat them? It’s also a team and culture issue. What do you reward? If the environment rewards activity over outcomes, it can undermine effectiveness. In terms of strategy, focus on meaningful, human-centered outcomes and stay laser-focused on those.
Both individually, team, and organization, so that we can combat manic. Number one: safety first. Number two: intention wins. Number three: mindset matters. And with that, again with limited time, but without going into too many details, mindset does matter. It defines our comfort zone. It defines our reality. It defines our experience. What we believe about change has a physiological reaction in our body. So if you believe change is threatening or you believe that your intelligence is fixed, for example, your experience of a changing world is impacted. And also, your stress levels are impacted. So it's this kind of constant circle. What you believe in your attitudes, and what shared mindsets across your team and shared mindsets across your organization around change and complexity absolutely matters.
So there's the first three: SIM is part of SIMPLE. SIM is really about understanding where you are, understanding what your stress levels are, where you are in this game board. Are you ready to play? Are you in a busy-first mode or an intentional-first mode? And what are your attitudes and beliefs? The PL is really the power skills to navigate this game. Rather than having the answer and all the things that we over-relied on—delegating, mentoring, the things that we relied on in the old game board—no longer work.
So the last three: P is for powerful inquiry, powerful questions. Instead of having the answer, we ask better questions. Within those questions are new answers, but we aren't here, especially as leaders. As an individual, you can ask yourself questions, and that's exactly how we also get underneath: What am I telling myself? What is my mindset around this? Navigating with curiosity as a team, we can begin with questions and we can begin with human-centered questions around what's important to the team, what's important to our customers. As an organization, we can ask radically different questions around our impact, what we're doing, and how might we focus our attention and organize to create a system that supports this impact. The L is for little learning habits. Little habits have a big impact, but we don't often think about the fact that we learn from reflection. We don't necessarily learn from doing. So creating safe places where we can reflect and adapt, creating experiments, having a culture by which we can try something new on with safety, fail a little bit, learn from it, and adapt forward. Typically, I even had a client say we only have one.
One thing we don't have is a rearview mirror. We just have a one-way mode, and it's forward. A lot of people identify with that, but we're not actually learning and adapting, even as individuals. So, creating reflection habits—whether as an individual, as a team, or as an organization—is essential. The last one is E for empathy. I know you could speak volumes on this from a human-centered design point of view. In a world full of noise and overwhelming situations, empathy is truly a signal amidst the noise. Tuning into that when we lose our way and really asking, "What's the human-centered impact?"—looking at our to-do list based on how much of that is activity and how much will have an actual impact on humans in my life or in our organization—is really our guide.
So, the first three are: safety first, intention wins, and mindset matters. Make it work for you, understand where you're going, understand your starting point, and understand where others are in this journey. The last three are your super skills. We are no longer experts; we must ask better questions. Leaders must be coaches, not experts. Asking better questions, creating rhythms and routines that wire into habit (which is also very important in the brain), and we need that repetition. Whatever we can do to create the repetition of learning, reflecting, and adapting is very powerful. And then empathy as your guide. What we do is bring that to individuals, teams, and organizations to help them understand the game they are playing with new rules. We assess where they are and where the organization is. We listen to the organizations, sometimes interviewing to see if they are clear on where they're going or if it seems chaotic. If it seems like chaos, we aren't safe, calm, and flexible, are we? We begin to work with them on strategies.
The last thing I'll say about this, and then I'll turn it back over to you, is that we're not looking to do it all at once. It can feel overwhelming. We're starting with the first three to understand where we are, and then the others come over time. Remember, we need to consider what we can do right now and in the long run. I often ask, "What's your most meaningful move across this framework right now?"
What is your next best move? When we're playing a game, even when we get back to the game board metaphor, we're asking, "What's your next best move?" You're not moving all your chess pieces at once. You're considering the best next move. Then, if you have a habit of reflection, you come back and ask, "What's our next best move?" Did we achieve that move? What was the outcome? Did we achieve what we set out to do—personally, as a team, or as an organization? If we did, what's our next best move? If we didn't, maybe our next best move is to try a new strategy or approach and see what happens. We often create multiple strategies at one time and test those across our life and leadership to see the impact. I would encourage your listeners to check it out, try it, and see what happens. There’s no single right formula; you’ve got to find your way. But it does provide some enduring truths to come back to that will always serve you.
27:37 MONIQUE: What a powerful framework I have to say. We do quite a bit of reflection on our team, like the little learnings, but I have to say I think there's plenty of opportunity to consider how we are in fact using those reflections to guide the next choices, because I think we can come into this habits of, OK, well, we're going to have retrospectives right after you do a project to do a retro. We talk about it, we document it, start, stop, do whatever it is. But I'm not sure if we're really spending the time digesting what that means in the context of how what do we do next versus just an action based. I don't know if I'm making myself clear.
28:18 CRYSTAL: You are. It’s wonderful that you have that habit because that's the hard thing. If you get the habit of reflection, you can adapt what you're doing in that space always. Right now, sometimes we are seduced by activity because it feels productive, and we sometimes lose the plot. So where I would interject empathy is to look and say not just what did we learn and what more activity can we do, but genuinely and deeply, who are we serving with these actions or activities? What did we learn about them? If it was our organization, for example, what are they thinking, feeling, hearing, and saying? At the end of the day, what do they need? If it didn’t work, what did we learn about their needs?
Often, we either stop or become action-oriented before we have an opportunity to really explore what was connected to that and what the motivations were. When working at a system scale, across communities, you might find that what worked in one place didn’t work in another. It's important to understand what was connected to that and why. Inside organizations, I'll often look at motivators and see if certain parts of the organization are designed to create conflict or tension. When introducing a change or new ritual, it's crucial to evaluate if it worked in one area but not in another, and understand why. Bias towards action is not bad as long as that action helps you learn forward and is connected to your outcomes, rather than being just busy for busy's sake.
30:08 MONIQUE: That's what came up for me. Yeah, thanks for that, Crystal. But you're so right. I think an action or part of me, a bias towards action is good. But to the point of action for the sake of action. Right. We really want to be intentional in what we're doing. I want to ask, I'm really curious in the simple framework and you've dealt with a lot of leaders. What is the most challenging element that leaders might have, you know you share the simple framework, you know? Yeah. Where is it most challenging for them to begin? Or what are they challenged with? If they're thinking about trying to implement this within themselves and within their organizations or how they operate?
30:50 CRYSTAL: It's a great question. My instinct tells me to say it depends, but I know that's not what you're asking for, because it depends on where you're meeting them from. But I'll be honest, while I love working at the top end of high-performing teams, it is my joy area to come into a team and help them really throttle up and be more creative and more powerful. In the last five to six years, I'm finding people more in the overwhelmed, stressed, can't focus space, and it's hard for them to get unstuck. That's partially because we have been years over years in this stress mode or have kind of crossed over and have been living in that space so much that it's become normal.
So even the smallest thing, as I'm working with the executives, so C-Suite CEOs and their teams, we'll create three minutes, and nothing more, like three minutes of reflection. They'll say one of two things: "Oh my gosh, that's literally the best work I do in that three minutes," and "It is so powerful and committed," or they'll come back and say, "Wow, that was so wildly uncomfortable. I started doing X, Y, or Z to fill the space before the three minutes."What we do is we are creatures of habit and we have well-worn patterns. We have well-worn patterns that are dopamine-infused with picking up our phone, answering our emails. This activity gives us a kick. So it's tough for people to break through that. Part of that is asking myself, "What are you telling yourself?" and getting underneath that. Are you telling yourself often that busy is my value? So if I'm not busy, I'm not valuable.
I find it interesting. While it's not the same answer for everyone, I find that people, teams, and cultures tend to be busy first right now. Just getting them unstuck from that to intention and impact and outcome-focused is more challenging than you would think because it is well-worn, right? Especially when it's systematic and they're like our hero; we reward people who are super busy, and yet we don't stick around long enough to see if there's impact or outcome. Those are tougher conversations, at which point obviously we need leadership support and we've got to get those things on the table.
But yeah, I think it is not as hard as it feels, if that makes sense. So as I coach individuals and then we begin to work with their teams, little bitty changes, teeny tiny changes, like three minutes in a day, can actually change your brain state. If I change my brain state and I come to a meeting, I bring the weather. I'm the leader; I bring the weather. If I come in late and stressed, we have mirror neurons, and it literally mirrors. Whether you know it or not, your mood is contagious. So just changing one little bitty thing, like pausing, showing up on time, being calm and yourself, being more human, and setting some tricks, can actually change the course of the entire outcome of a meeting. You can create safety within that moment, even if your culture feels daunting or out of your control. For example, we can bring the culture to a conversation. Every conversation we have, we have more control than we think we do, and little bitty choices make a really big difference. It doesn’t have to be hard. It can feel hard, and it is hard when you're working at the system level when those things are fully embedded. But as an individual and as a team, the smallest little changes can make such a big difference. You know that from working with systems; small changes have an underreported impact. Even though we don’t have the right answer, one small change can make a disproportionate impact, as long as we find the right small changes.
34:40 MONIQUE: Yeah, so true and beautifully said. And I love this notion of we are part of that culture. We have the opportunity to form it. Not only that, I plan to practice these three minutes. I think that's something great to implement with my team right away because I want us to grow not only as a team but in the community, right alongside community members. I want to ensure that we are bringing the weather, as you so graciously and beautifully stated. So it sounds like this is also a great tool to think about how we manage stress because stress is such a big topic in today’s world. As we started the conversation, we are in this VUCA world, a rapidly changing environment, and stress plays a big role in how we manage these types of things. I think this three-minute technique, whether it's in the Simple framework or just as a way of reflection, could be one of those techniques that people could bring. But I’m curious if you have other techniques, based on your experience, that you’d recommend to leaders or teams not only to manage stress but also to think about how to increase productivity as a result of that.
35:58 CRYSTAL: That's a great example. Three minutes is such a tiny thing that you can implement. Even three minutes of reflection within a meeting as a best practice creates space to think. We tend to jump into our meetings and talk the whole time. I will recap our actions at the end, but very rarely do we have space just to be and think. Creating that space first for yourself before you enter into the day or a meeting is valuable. We add priming to that, which we can leave some resources with your listeners about resonant reading. There’s a certain breath exercise that you can do for three minutes that literally changes your brain state. We often start coaching sessions or ideation sessions by creating boundaries. First, creating space. Second, creating boundaries or rules of the game. For example, we say yes and only; we will time box this way. This is how we frame the game that we’re playing. Half the time when I walk into meetings, people are playing different games. We’re trying to solve one game while others are trying to solve another. So creating clarity for the brain is crucial. Try not to solve something so big all at once. Break it into smaller pieces and pull complexity apart. Rather than talking about the problem itself, focus on the humans involved in the problem, their experience, and what they need. Avoid talking about everything all at once, as the brain can’t hold all that information, especially in a hybrid setting. Begin by having very focused discussions and creating rules of the game. For example, agree to only support each other’s ideas without negating or shooting them down.
We will consolidate and decide together on the best practices. These are some of the collaborative practices. As an individual, you can create three minutes or micro habits throughout the day to check in with your own state of mind. Ask yourself, "Where is my brain state right now? If it's not flexible, do I need to take a walk to regroup?" Also, consider your being goals for the day. We often jump into our To-Do List and get sucked into activity. But what are the outcomes I'm after today? What am I being in and of this activity? What is not in service of that? From an individual perspective, increasing capacity involves breathing, resting, and making good lifestyle choices. There are many ways to reduce stress. We should also consider what we say no to and what we say yes to. Especially if you're service-oriented, you might say yes to everything, but your activity might not serve your goals. This can create a constant loop where, at the end of the day, we haven’t achieved what we intended. Focus on doubling down on your meaningful goals and your agency to set the climate within yourself at any point in time.
Being able to pause and breathe and then bring that climate to your next conversation in a meaningful way with a meaningful outcome is essential. Start by expressing the outcome from the beginning: "This is what we're doing here. This is the clarity that we seek. Here are the players involved in this game. Here are the rules of this game. Now we have 60 minutes. Here's how we're going to talk by."
Engage with brain-friendly strategies like these. I can leave you some information on resonant breathing, which changes our heart rate and breath to shift our brain state, as well as other techniques we discussed. Start simple—begin with tiny, manageable changes. Implement a 3-minute reflection habit and breathing practice, and see how it works. If you do nothing else, create this habit. As you see the benefits, you can gradually extend it to 5 minutes, then 10 minutes. Starting with just three minutes in your day and in your team’s day can make a difference.
40:21 MONIQUE: That’s brilliant. I have so many notes and I really appreciated this notion of what are my being goals, like my outcomes for the day, and then what is not of service. I think there are so many really clear insights and opportunities you’ve given our listeners to dig in and really think about. Because you’ve worked with so many different organizations, Crystal, on a global scale, and you teach in brain science as well, I’m curious: when we’re thinking about creating safety— we spoke about it a little earlier— but when we’re thinking about how to create space for psychological safety to exist in order for these other things to occur, like managing stress and leading change in this rapidly changing or evolving world, how do we prioritize psychological safety for our team members? What can leaders do? And I know we spoke a little bit about it earlier, but maybe we could just dig into it a little bit.
41:22 CRYSTAL: You know, specifically talking about teams, let’s go there for a moment. As a team and as a leader of the team, one is to know your team’s stress levels and to understand where they are on the game board. So when we said safety first, everyone’s experience of safety is different. Everyone’s experience of stress—what’s interesting about stress is our capacity is different. So you and I might have different capacities for stress. The leader might feel fine, and someone else is feeling stress. From the brain’s perspective, we have the same experience of stress. Once we’ve hit stress, does that make sense? You just might get there faster than me or at a different pace, or have a different capacity. Your experience of stress neurologically and mine will be similar, and then what I believe about stress obviously compounds that experience as well. So one is just knowing where your team is—not as a whole, but knowing individually if you’re able to. Where are people, and having conversations about that openly? If you have a very large team, getting a pulse on where people are tells you whether or not you’re ready to play. If not, unpack that a little bit, ask better questions, and see where they are, what’s driving that, and what you can do to support them and what they need.
From a safety point of view, psychological safety, we have this little framework. I don’t agree to many to think about, but we call them the four freedoms. So we have freedom from, freedom from fear, freedom from chaos, and freedom to choose, and freedom to be. So if you can establish as a leader, for one is freedom from fear. What are you afraid of? Is it OK to fail? A lot of people will say people can share their ideas around here. We’re super safe. We have great relationships. And I will ask what happens when you fail, and they’re like, “Oh no, failure is not an option. We don’t do that.” You’re like, “So what does that mean? And what do you call failure?”
43:14 MONIQUE: Yes, spacious.
43:17 CRYSTAL: And even having conversations about failure, we're not talking about epic failure or, if we're, you know, sometimes I'll work in healthcare, we're not talking about life or death failure. We're talking about fail-safe scenarios, maybe even social failure where I share an idea that wasn’t well received. What if I take social risks in front of my colleagues? If not, why not? What am I afraid of? The second one is freedom from chaos, which often gets left out when we're talking about safety. Our brain does not like chaos. We don’t like change. We’re going to fill in the gap. We’re going to try to find safe ground. When it is perceived as chaos, maybe it's because I don’t know how to be successful. Maybe I haven’t clearly outlined what success looks like. If the end goal is to achieve something and I feel like I haven’t achieved that something because my deadlines are too aggressive or I don’t understand or I don’t feel heard, that can create both fear and chaos in their world. What we can do is signal from noise. At the top of the organization or on the top of the team, have you set really clear, finite shared goals that are human and mean something to people? That creates a little bit less chaos, a little more meaning, a little more purpose, and a little more cohesion and safety amongst the team.
Then the freedom to do and freedom to be and freedom to choose is really about how do I engage and can I, if this is my goal, make this outcome happen? Do I get to choose how we get there? How much freedom do I have within that framework? Conversations, if nothing else, around what people believe, what’s holding them back from sharing their ideas. The last thing I'll mention is how much they believe. So, Monique, if you and I are collaborating and we’re supposed to do something together and you don’t deliver, I now have fear that you're not going to deliver, and therefore, we’re back to square one. So part of psychological safety is creating space to have the conversations that are not just about the work activity but about how we work.
And what we need and honoring that these are a group of humans with varying degrees of stress and also needs, right? If I have a family and I need to leave, what are my human needs? Do I feel seen, heard, and valued within the organization? Can I engage with safety? And if not, why not? We’ve got to unpack that, and most leaders, when they understand that and have the information, would happily be helpful. What they don’t have is the information, and they don’t realize that some of their decisions have impacts on the team. So illuminating that with some level of framework that allows people to talk about it openly.
For example, if we got this team together and they didn’t have psychological safety, and there were some dynamics I won’t get into right now, one example is when someone is moving really fast and sends an email without a subject line. That’s such a tiny thing, but someone on the team had been laid off in that exact scenario. When they get that, their stress levels soar; they’re calling their husband. It could be anything. It was a volatile environment, and even the tiniest little thing like that, when it was on the table, everyone went, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea.” The leader said, “I did that completely unbeknownst to me because I was just moving fast, didn’t realize that it was a day-long focus because this individual had a past and had an emotional reaction to that.” So while that might seem silly, putting that on the table became a norm that we always say what we’re meeting, why we’re meeting. And as she shared that, some of the other team members said, “I get all kinds of invitations to meetings with nothing in them.”
Not knowing what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, and then arriving without understanding what I'm supposed to do or the purpose of the meeting, creates chaos. For our brains, which seek safety, this is unsettling. We wonder, "What am I doing and how can I be successful?" When my time is a commodity, feeling like I've wasted it sets off another issue. Slowing down and really understanding the norms and how to work, and what people need, more than you might naturally think, will actually help you go faster, further later. It makes you more adaptive, creative, and resilient, but it just takes a moment to slow down and establish those norms. I see too many teams just being busy—busy, busy, busy.
48:07 MONIQUE: I have so many takeaways from that and I for me personally and I would suggest, anyone listening to this is. Really, to take a moment to reflect on what our role is in setting the conditions for safety as it relates to the four fears, you know, what am I doing with my team? What am I doing in my family? Because this is not just work related goodness.
48:31 CRYSTAL: Absolutely. And our roles are no longer to have the answer. If I said one thing, Monique, about leadership, it's to be an architect of. Right, to be able to set clarity, to be able to create the environment by which people can thrive today and build the capacity to lead confidently into tomorrow. Leaders are less expert and more coach. Ask better questions. Sometimes I'll say, wait, why am I talking? Hang back. Because as a leader, if you share your opinion first thing, then the ideation stops. Creating climates whereby we can ideate and share ideas and combine ideas and put experiments out there and then learn about them. Your job is to create signal amidst noise as a leader. Create the signal. Where are you going? Why does it matter? Who will it impact and why do we care so that people can find their way? Creating the climate by which people can engage safely, learn, and adapt, and keeping them focused on where you're going is really creating this. The climate and creating signal. Take the journey and that's our, that's honestly, I don't know a single leader I would actually contest. I do not know a single leader right now that is not leading people through change. I don't know. I can't think of one that, in some capacity, right, that is not. We're changing almost everything here and there. Like, there are stable, kind of still different environments that are less innovative or more traditional. There are still places where those old skills are relevant. So I'm not saying they're gone. I'm just saying they're overpowered by this complexity that we're facing and change. But even in those more traditional environments, we're looking at new technologies. We're looking at AI, we're looking at all these different things.
Honestly, are we? That's why we call it possibility leadership: stretching what's comfortable. Because we can't stay in comfort. We have to be able to adapt. And yet, it's filled with so many different dynamics. When you start to stretch what's comfortable and what's possible is the role of the leader. Truly. Yeah. For the individuals on your team, what's possible for them? What's comfortable for them? How do you get them towards their edge comfortably? And how do you stretch what's possible for them as individuals, as a team, as an organization? I think you hit on it entirely when you're like, I don't know if the role, like, really rethinking the role of leadership is huge, absolutely.
50:54 MONIQUE: Right. Yeah. And I think it's important to note that leaders are at every level of the organization; they don't need a title to be a leader, right? And so anyone that's listening to this, you know, that might be saying, "Well, do I see myself as a leader?" You are, in fact, a leader. And so these insights and techniques that you've shared, I think, would be helpful to all of our listeners.
51:21 CRYSTAL: Yeah, I would say you're a leader of yourself. You're a leader of your relationships. You're a leader of your family, and you're a leader of the dynamics in your world. Absolutely. And if you happen to hold the title, you have positional control. That's great, but I absolutely agree. Thank you for clarifying that. You have the power and agency to be a leader of yourself, even to set boundaries and create health and wellness for yourself, and bring that to your family. So the simple principles I would encourage people to think about apply to every aspect of life, whether you're a teacher in your classroom or in any other role, because they are fundamentally human and enduring.
52:01 MONIQUE: Yeah, beautiful, Crystal. I could have many more conversations with you, and I know we will, but they may not all be podcasts. We might have to start a blog. Thank you so much for joining us today. We've covered a lot of ground, from understanding the role of stress and performance to exploring strategies for leading through change. We've talked about psychological safety. You've left our listeners with so many tools and techniques, including the simple principles, the four freedoms, and many others, which we will add to our show notes. I hope our listeners have found the insights and practical tips not only inspiring but also extremely valuable.
52:48 CRYSTAL: Thank you, Monique. It's always a pleasure. And I'm so honored to be here with you and to be getting to know you better. And all of the great work that you're doing in the area really is important. And your podcast is amazing. So thank you for bringing all of this information to people in such a meaningful way. Thank you.
53:04 MONIQUE: Thanks, Crystal. So for our listeners, remember that resiliency and adaptability are key in our dynamic changing world today and I encourage you to check out the resources from WhatBox innovation partners, but we'll also include them in our show notes and these will support you on your leadership journey. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on popular platforms like Apple, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, and follow us on your favorite social media platform so you never miss an episode.
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