Conversations on Healing

Introduction Welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. My name is Shay Beider, and I’m so happy to have you joining us today. Our guest is Distinguished University Professor, scholarly researcher and practitioner, Dr. Richard Boyatzis. His areas of expertise examine sustained desired change, emotional intelligence and neuroscience, all of which have qualified him to be ranked in the top 2% of scientists worldwide by the Public Library of Science. Accumulating 58 years of research on intentional change theory, Dr. Boyatzis has written a new book titled “The Science of Change- Discovering Sustained Desired Change from Individuals to Organizations and Communities”. Today, Dr. Boyatzis and I discuss the key principles that promote sustained desired change, including his theory, which is called Intentional Change Theory. We touch on the five phases of emergence that are experienced when sustained desired change occurs, and we also talk about the importance of envisioning the ideal self and creating a personal vision, which as it turns out, is much more effective than setting specific goals too early on.

So for those of you listening that want to create change in your own life or that work in the helping professions, you’ll be very interested to hear how Dr. Boyatzis emphasizes caring for yourself and creating parasympathetic state activation to positively impact your life, and also the communities that you serve. So, I’m really excited to share some of the most important ideas that are out there currently on how we actually do create sustained desired change in this particular episode, and it’s based on more than a half century of science backed to research. So let’s dive in.
All right. Well, first and foremost, I’m really delighted to have you joining us for the Conversations on Healing Podcast. So thank you so much for being on the show.

Richard Boyatzis Thank you.

Shay Good. Well, my heart is delighted to have this conversation because, really, what I have the opportunity to do here today is to speak with someone who has been a leader and in the field of academia, really a change maker in the field of how we make change. And I think your new book that you’ve written, called “The Science of Change” does an extraordinary job of summarizing not only your own work, but a lot of other work in the field about really how change is created. And you look at that both at the individual level, but also at the collective level. And the book really aims to articulate both this theory of sustained change, which you talk about, it’s called Intentional Change Theory, or ICT, which we’ll get into. And so, I’m thinking, actually, maybe as a starting point for our listeners that are interested themselves in learning about how we actually change, that you share a little bit about ICT, or Intentional Change Theory, and then also then we can maybe go into the five phases of emergence that are experienced when people are working to create a sustained desired change.

Richard Sure. My quest, since I left the field of aerospace and designing control systems for interplanetary vehicles in spring of 1967, was the puzzle about how do people change. And actually, my work started with being puzzled why managers didn’t help their subordinates learn or change. And then I quickly became enthralled with, well, why don’t professors and teachers do that better? Why don’t therapists do it? So I was very struck by, for the amount of energy and the consequences that we put into the importance of change, of innovation, of learning, of adaptation, how little evidence we had that A) it worked, and that in the rare times it does work, how or why. So, that’s really driven my quest. And although initially I started out thinking about these more dyadic relationships of manager to subordinate or direct report, of teacher to student, of therapist to patient, of doctor, a physician, or nurse to patient, quickly, I began thinking about how do individuals pursue change on themselves if and when they really want to?

And then it was also expanded to teams and organizations. And I didn’t stop there. I was working in the seventies at Community Change, and even then, I started to think about country level change. So that’s what Intentional Change Theory is: is the integration of 58 years of research on all these different levels and the research, and I don’t use that term lightly. I’m a scientist. I’m, first and foremost a scientist, and I was pleased to be recognized that way in a big review of all scientists in all fields in Nature, and PLOS One rather is biology I think it was. That I was listed in the top one to 2% of all scientists in the world. And the reason that’s important is that a lot of consultants come up with “models of change”, and then they get some anecdotes and some testimonials, and then they go ahead to proselytize to their clients the best way.

Now, I don’t think these consultants are wrong minded or change agents; professors do it all the time as well. But I do think we, as people who are consumers of this, have to be a little more thoughtful about the intellectual integrity. And that’s where the science comes in. I mean, if somebody isn’t really studying, can it fail? Can it succeed? What’s the difference? So, that’s been key, and I’ve been studying that from, you know, doing psychotherapy with patients in the seventies that were alcoholics and drug addicts, to being one of the people who started the competency movement in human resources, all the way to trying to figure out why do some bands, music groups, why do some adventure teams, some sports teams succeed and others don’t? Why do some organizations adapt continuously and others don’t? Same thing with communities. How can some communities address homelessness in a very constructive way?

And most communities fail at it miserably. So, that’s been my quest. And what’s very clear from all of that is that to understand human change, individual ought up to the collectives of countries, you have to embrace what currently is called complexity theory, which means that the change process is nonlinear and discontinuous. So, for anybody listening who has been volume-challenged at any point in their life and wanted to lose weight or get more fit, they know that they didn’t lose a half a pound a day. Some days they gained a pound, some days they lost a pound, some days nothing happened. The same thing for those people who are real nerds and want to become more empathic, they don’t do five minutes more eye contact a day. So, this nature of this discontinuity is very, very elusive because we have this notion that things in life are normally distributed- this old normal distribution thing.

So, if three bad things happen, three good things will happen. Well, that’s not true. It just is not true. So, if you actually study change, it’s almost never distributed in a normal distribution. It’s always distributed in what often is called a power curve, which means that, at best, 20% of the time, an effort to change or learn something succeeds. So, what I’ve done is I’ve spent a lot of time studying what happens in those top 10% or 20% versus in all the others. Because if you only study the positive, you run into what in science is called type two errors. And if you only study the negative, not only is it depressing, but you’re really studying what not to do or how to be a jerk. So, that’s been my pursuit, ,and what I and the students and colleagues working with me over the years in all the different countries continue to discover is that there are certain moments of emergence where something pops into your consciousness that always seem to happen when you get sustained, desired change.

So, I’m studying desired change, not episodic, or all of a sudden- it surprised us- and I’m looking at sustained because most changes, whether it’s somebody saying, “I want to be more fit and healthy, I want to lose weight” on New Year’s Eve, holiday time, and they go to the health club two or three times, and that’s it. By February, they’re back to their old habits. Or, all the examples of that we have, for the 125 billion spent every year on leadership and management training in industry and government, there is very little evidence to say it does any good. The studies that have been done have said there’s about 11% increase in the desired behavior in the first three weeks to three months, and then it evaporates almost. So, it’s called the honeymoon effect. So part of the challenge is- oh, and look, because this is a holistic health oriented podcast, let me point out that treatment adherence.

Do people after a disease, or after surgery, do what their physicians and nurses tell them to do to continue healing or to recover? That’s called treatment adherence. If you’re doing it. Well, treatment adherence is, at best, 50% on every malady studied, in every country studied. So, it’s not just the United States- same statistics in Pakistan or Italia. And in some cases, I mean, my cardiothoracic surgeon students tell me that for coronary bypass surgery, very often treatment adherence is 20%. So, what is it about people who have made it through to a certain point in a disease process and don’t do what they should do to complete the healing? What is it about people who don’t take the medicine and do the physical therapy after surgery? And when we worry about the rampant cost of healthcare, it’s almost always because of this. And then you start to realize that when people don’t do a sufficient amount of the treatment adherence, they’re reinfecting themselves with other things because it doesn’t take much. I mean, that’s why gum disease is so important. Minor inflammations will throw off your immune system.

Shay Right.

Richard And what happens is most people just don’t know how to handle what we get dosed with every day, which is a tremendous amount of stress. And the people who think that you can do better by reducing the stress are idiots. You can’t, because if you reduce the stress in your life, all you have is mild impairment instead of major impairment, but you still have impairment. So, the issue- I’m speaking to the choir here, you certainly know this in all of your practices and material, and as we’ve talked about it before- but it’s the activation of what’s called, technically, the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s the only antidote to stress. So, part of what I discovered 30 years into the work on this theory is through a series of fMRI studies and then hormonal studies, is that the actual internal mechanism is a person hitting a tipping point into what I call the positive emotional attractor.

And that state allows you to be open to a new idea, or behavior, or another person. So, now all of a sudden you’re more open to a guide, a coach, cleric, whomever. And that’s this tipping point of PEA is pivotal because every day we are bombarded with the opposite. The tipping point into the NEA, and the negative emotional attractor, isn’t just the stress, but what our research has shown, which is a little counterintuitive, is that every time you try to analyze things, anytime you try to use abstractions, whether it’s money or numbers, you go into the stress response. You hit a neural network that suppresses the one you need to be open, and then it activates the sympathetic nervous system, which suppresses the parasympathetic. So, quite literally, the processes that enable you to be open and to sustain a change effort, to keep energizing yourself about it, are antagonistic with the everyday activities that stress you.

And that’s life. I mean, we need both. So, what my research in all these years in theory helps us to understand is: how do we best deal with that? And just for a little snippet, we showed in a series of studies that was published three years ago now, I think, that in a normal week, a person who does more 15-minute episodes of what we call renewal each day is more engaged, has more satisfaction, more sense of wellbeing, more resilient, more empathic, less anxious, less depressed, et cetera, all these good things. So, it’s not like you have to cut out an hour and a half a day to meditate or to exercise or to pray or to spend time volunteering. The real magic is how do you introduce multiple moments, 15-minute moments, during a day? And then in the same set of studies, we discovered something that I had contended when I was training therapists in the seventies: that if you only do the same thing that is healthy and renewing for you, but you repeatedly go to that- so, to the alcoholic patients I used to have- if they stopped drinking, but now they started exercising six hours a day, what my point was is you’re just trading addiction, and in the habituation, it loses the power.

Well, we now have the evidence to prove that the variety of things you use during a typical week that are this more PEA (positive emotional attractor) renewing state actually is just as predictive of sense of wellbeing, engagement, satisfaction, resilience, empathy, et cetera, as the amount of it. Now, also in the theory, I have gone on to, because I’m looking at all collectives- how does this function at team, organization, community and country level? And then, when you have a multilevel theory, the question is: what moves information? And I would contending motion across levels. To date, my theory is the only fractal theory of change out there. I’ve seen none other that has any research at all. I mean, somebody might’ve written one, but unless they’re actually doing some form of empirical research, I don’t even bother with it.

And it doesn’t have to be quantitative; it can be qualitative research.

But unless there’s the testing of it, then from my perspective, there’s no sense me wasting too much time on it. But this fractal means that the change process is identical at the organization level, at the community level. And a couple highlights: for example, one of the things our series of fMRI studies nailed is actually a reversal. I published a study in 1970 with David Kolb in which we showed that setting goals helped change. Well, by 2000, I began to suspect that we were wrong, and that by 2008, we had the data to show that we were wrong.

So, we now know that goal setting inhibits change because when you do it early in the change process- and by early, I mean if you have a time span of a change process or learning process, the first two-thirds of it should not include goal setting- because as soon as you set specific goals, or as soon as you focus on a problem, you activate this negative emotional attractor, which instead of energizing you, deflates you. And we now have shown that 30 minutes of talking about your dream- how you would love your life to be in 10 to 15 years- not predicting, not forecasting, but dreaming, gets you in touch with a sense of purpose and meaning, and it elicits a very core primal emotion called hope.

Shay Yeah. And this is such a key part of your work. For some of our listeners that are tuning in that are thinking, “Gosh, I have something in my life that I really want to change,” maybe one of the first things that they can hear from what your research and work has revealed is that do not start with goals. Absolutely do not start with goals until you’re at least two thirds of the way through. And instead, you call it basically starting with the formation of an ideal self or a personal vision. And you’ve come up with some really interesting questions around that idea of, “What would the ideal life for you be in 10 to 15 years?” And then, I’ve also heard you kind of modify a little bit that question for someone who has severe PTSD because it might be too difficult for them to visualize what an ideal life would look like. And so, I know you modify the question to be something more along the lines of, “If you won the lottery and got 80 million after taxes, what would you do?” And so, you’ve basically found ways to keep the mind in that kind of ideal visioning state so that people stay with that sort of PEA framework and stay really open to the possibilities. Is that correct?

Richard That is exactly right. And the important issue, Shay, is not that you stay in it, because you can’t, because there’s too many things that happen in life that keeps bringing you back to the body’s need to defend itself against any threat. But the issue is: what keeps you returning to it?

So the maintaining it isn’t maintaining the constant state, because if you maintaining what I call a positive emotional attractive state all the time, you’d be levitating. What it does mean, though, is what helps you to bring it back. So you opened this session with a good 30-second dose of quiet, in which you were practicing some deep breathing. One of my former doctoral students, whose done a lot of research and wrote a book on somatic coaching, Mandy Blake- Amanda Blake- she opens all of her coaching sessions with deep breathing exercises. I open, when I’m still doing the coaching, I open each meeting with the client by asking them to update me on their vision. I don’t, very often, it’s two or three weeks in between our sessions, they haven’t changed their vision, but I want them to be having the context of their dream in their head, because then that’s my way of getting them into that same state.

So there are variety of techniques you can use. Even getting ready for this podcast, I was worried because I couldn’t find a URL. Meanwhile, I’m trying to work out all the addresses to send copies of my new book to people and thinking about why my printer isn’t working right. And there are all these myriad things that happen in life that have to do with either mild to extreme annoying stress. I’m not even talking about acute stressors like COVID or losing jobs or things like that, which are horrible, even the ones that are every day annoying ones. And so it’s, how do we combat that? And then, when you start to amp it up and you say, “Okay, what about in our dyads?” So in our couple relationships, whether it’s parent-child, boss-direct report, or two partners, and then you ask, “How do you do it in small groups? How do you do it in families? How do you introduce these periodic moments of PEA (positive emotional attractor) renewing in a family?”

And you stop and realize that so many of the ways we interact with each other do the opposite. And it’s not that we’re bad people; some are, but most of us aren’t. That there’s a difference between our intentions and how it comes across. So, I’ve been coaching under the label of coaching, executive coaching, since 1969. I’ve been doing it a long time, and teaching, coaching, and studying, and researching. And our last book was on all the research we’ve been doing on coaching, with Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Ton and myself. Well, one of the things that Melvin Smith and I started talking about in 2003 is that if you coach people to the positive emotional attractor- not that you’ll always get there, but to bring them into it on a regular rhythm- we called it “coaching with compassion”. We used the Confucian approach of being open.
Well, when you do that, you quickly realize that most “coaching” is coaching for compliance. So, most of the time, when you’re even a professional coach, you’re trying to get somebody to improve their performance. How do you know they want to? How do you really know they want to? And then you look at when people are using a coaching process as a parent, as a manager, as a physician, as a cleric, as a nurse. So, they’re not formally coaching, but they’re using coaching. How do they come across? Well, our observation is that since most of the efforts are well-intended efforts to tell somebody how they should act, or behave, or be thinking or feeling, the person comes across to the client or the recipient as a coaching bully. Now, you may not feel negative about it because you love your parents, or you might love your parents.

If you love your parents and they’re saying something, you don’t want to think it’s nasty unless you’re a teenager, in which case it’s automatic. But the idea is, it’s not really experienced as a gesture about you; is experienced as some kind of- it sounds big- but imperialism, you’re getting pushed around. So, that’s part of the challenge that we have: is that it’s very hard, because when we’re in a position of wanting to inspire somebody else to learn or change, if we see things that they could or should be doing to do better, interestingly, our tendency- if we’re a professional helper- is to try to give them feedback or advice. Our research has also shown that is horrible.

Most of the time, feedback is not only not useful- even positive feedback- but it closes the person down, because as soon as a person feels they’re being evaluated or assessed, you activate the task-positive network, which activates the sympathetic nervous system, which starts all the stress hormones, which causes you to lower and close, as I’m motioning with my hands, narrowing like you’re putting blinders on. In one study showed just one little squirt of epinephrine, or adrenaline, into your nostril will move your peripheral vision from 180 degrees down to 30. So now, all of a sudden, you’re missing most of the stuff going on around you.

Shay And in your work, I’ve read where you’ve said getting people into the default mode network is what keeps them more expansive and empathetic. Is that correct?

Richard That’s right. Well, it’s a combination. The positive emotional attractor and the negative emotional attractor are two psychophysiological states that we go into when we kind of revolve around. And the positive emotional attractor is having your hormonal system aroused in the parasympathetic of a system, and your neural activation is technically the default mode network. But Professor Tony Jack, my colleague and guide on all things neuroimaging, he calls it the empathic network. And feeling positive about things. And that’s very different than the opposite, which is a stress arousal and being analytic or focusing on the task positive or just thinking critically about things. And what it turns out is that whether we’re looking at the hormones, or the affect, or the neural networks, they’re antagonistic. So as soon as you activate one, you suppress the other.

Shay Suppress the other. It’s fascinating. And I wonder, for some of our listeners that might not know how they elicit in themselves, that parasympathetic state or a state of renewal, what are some of the techniques that you discuss in terms of- just practically- how do you elicit that?

Richard Right. Well, first of all, I’m only going to mention the ones that have a minimum of five or more published medical studies in high-quality journals. We know that meditation helps, even if it’s only three times a week, 20 minutes. We know that yoga helps. We know that tai chi helps, but it’s the centering part of the tai chi, not the “kick ass”, that activates the stress system. We know that prayer helps. There’s a caveat, if you’re praying to a loving God, if you’re praying to a vengeful God or you’re being exposed to a cleric who’s talking about having to seek revenge on the disbelievers or the heathens, that activates the opposite. We know that modest exercise does not to the point where you feel the burn, because that is calling for cortisol, but modest exercise helps. We know that feeling hopeful about the future helps.

That’s why my recommendation is do not watch the news on television. If you want to stay in touch and the news, read it; reading is not as high impact on your system. It doesn’t put into as defensive immediately as watching it on television. Helping others who are less fortunate in your community helps; helping the elderly helps. I tell my graduate students all the time- being 78 years old- that helping your elderly professors will get you closer to heaven. Being in a loving relationship helps and having a dog, cat, horse, or monkey helps. Actually, that’s the one we’ve known since the seventies, that when you pet- when I pet one of my golden retrievers, she goes into a parasympathetic response. And that, because of the limbic resonance that we have with other mammals, certainly with other humans, where we get direct brain-to-brain stimulation in eight to 40 thousandths of a second, deeply unconscious, I start to feel parasympathetic renewal.

Then she feels it more, and we’re going back and forth. A few other things, laughter and playfulness helps. Now, here I have to be a little careful. It’s every one of the things I’m talking about work for men and women, every race, and every culture of the world and every faith, because they happen to be with how your body works. When we talk about laughter and playfulness, we have to be a little careful because there are cultures in the world where men and women don’t have equal permission to be playful in social settings. So, in those cultures- very often, Middle Eastern, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, to some extent Indian- where women aren’t allowed to be as expressive and as playful as men are, that one doesn’t work, and it’s more restricted. But another one that has now mounting evidence is playing music. Not just listening to music, but actually playing it or singing in a choir, or dancing.

Now, listening to music may do it, but the data is not as clear because it’s not always the same type of music. It depends on your preferences, your past experiences, and even your mood. So, on some days, if it’s a cloudy day and it looks really dreary, I always play music in my offices, whether at home or at the university. I’ll put on The Wailers, and I’m basically listening to reggae music or certain forms of rock that are uplifting. And especially if what I’m able to do is think about Caribbean music- if there isn’t any sun out, it puts me right back into being on a warm beach and smelling Coppertone or other stuff people are smoking. But there’s another day in which I might go into my office and feel mellow and put on Pavarotti, singing parts of Turandot, Rigoletto, or whatever. But anyway, the other thing that is very clear now is a walk in nature. Again, it fits that notion of it helps us, if you will, center like deep breathing. I mean, the part of meditation and yoga that works the fastest in terms of closing down the sympathetic and allowing for the parasympathetic is the actual deep breathing exercise.

Shay Yeah. I think, as people start to learn through this conversation about your work and the formation of that ideal self or that personal vision, the understanding of how important it is to go into that state of renewal, or the parasympathetic nervous system response, there’s a few other points that you talk about that I just want to give our listeners an opportunity to understand. You talk about the realization of the real self, and at the individual level, this is basically one’s strengths and weaknesses relative to that ideal self. And then, you also talk about what you call the learning agenda- so that plan to actually move closer to that ideal self, and how do you actually get there? And then, this process of repeated experimentation, where you’re experimenting with the new feelings, the thoughts, the attitudes, the behaviors, and then moving into a repeated practice so that you gain a sense of mastery. And then, I also want to talk about resonant relationships because I think you have some really interesting ideas around that and what you’ve identified as the three core components that are essential to successful relationships, which I’ve heard you describe as shared vision, shared compassion and shared energy. I want you to talk a little bit more about each of those parts because I think it’s so fascinating.

Richard Okay, so let me give just some real headlines. The real self- the real self is not, in my theory, what you think of yourself, because, on the whole, that’s delusional. I mean, there are all sorts of social desirability, or some of us believe our reviews, or we believe the sycophants who praise us all the time, especially if we’re in a power position. The real self, in my theory, is: how do other people experience you? In other words, how are you actually acting with others? Now, in dyads, couple relationships, and teams, organizations, communities- this is the norms. How do people act together? The learning agenda, as you said, Shay, is doing things that are joyful to get you closer to the ideal and your vision. The vision I use synonymous with the ideal self. And a part of that is your deep sense of purpose, sense of meaning, and that’s where too many people pursue a change because they should do it or they ought to do it.
And those two things, to me, are flags that it’s engaging not your ideal self, but your ought self. It’s the person that others have told you you should be. And while you may do that for a while, it’s going to take its toll because it’s exhausting, and it’s very hard to sustain the effort. So the learning agenda is what is something you really would love to be trying out, working on. The experimentation and practice- you said it very accurately. People have to try it, play with it, and then once you discover something, you have to practice and practice and practice. Again, individual team, organization- doesn’t matter. But the fifth discovery, it turns out in our neural imaging studies and our hormonal studies, the only other aspect of the change process which is motivating and sustaining change, besides the vision, is the quality of these resonant relationships.

And to capture it is, what we’re talking about are relationships in which you feel in tune with or in sync with the other person. This does not have to do with hierarchy, and as soon as it has to do with obligatory role relationships- oh, well I should be doing this because I’m a father, I’m a mother, I’m a wife, I’m a husband- that kills it. And I say in my new book that relationships are the agar agar and the Petri dish of life. I mean, it is the context for everything. Our relationships are the things that reinforce either good things or bad things. They’re the things that give us a clue as to what we could be doing. They give us a reality testing. There’s a lot of aspects, and they give us love and support, or the opposite. So, if our relationships are what we call resonant, and we’ve been able to measure three parts of that.
There are others, I’m sure, but the three I started focusing on when I started working with my doctoral students on this in 2007, are the three properties that we know stimulate this parasympathetic renewal. One is shared vision. Do you have the same sense of purpose- not goals, but purpose- and every study, whether we’re talking about R and D, or we’re talking about professors and students, or we’re talking about physicians and patients, every study, even when you’re talking about research and development teams or consulting teams where people are relatively peers: is there a shared sense of purpose? And when there is, it’s amazing how much more effective and innovative people are, how much more it pulls. In almost every industrialized country right now, as Gallup has shown us, the engagement crisis- if 80% of the people with full-time jobs aren’t engaged in their work- that’s a motivation crisis.

We’re not using talent. Well, a motivation crisis means people don’t want to. So it comes back to this issue about what would make you want to. Well, we know that incentives work for a short period of time, but change- not just repeated performance, but change or innovation- requires doing something different. It requires diversity of thought. So you have to be open to diversity of thought, and as soon as diversity of thought is thrown in your face or imposed on you, it becomes negative and goes the opposite way. But you can’t have new ideas unless you have diversity of thought. So what we’ve discovered is that’s, again, where the relationships come in. Do you have the quality of relationships where you can talk about the differences? That’s when people have the ability, even if they have different opinions or views, to actually start to understand each other. So they have a chance of being in sync or in tune with each other. But it turns out that being in tune around your sense of purpose is the big picture, and very often that’s much more important than the day-to-day activities. Caring for each other- you mentioned shared compassion.

And again, we are talking about caring for people in pain, but also caring for people who want to grow- caring for each other. And this idea of being in tune in terms of energy- I mean, you probably have friends, a couple that you might know where between the two partners, one likes to go out and have dinner and occasionally go dancing or go to concerts, and the other just likes to stay home with a book and some music, and that relationship is in trouble. I mean, I can’t say they’re doomed, although I think they are. They’ll keep it up for as long as they can tolerate it, but what’s happening is maintaining that relationship is using up a lot of energy because they’re not in sync around energy. And it’s like why playfulness helps so much. Again, whether it’s in couple relationships or teams or organizations, there is nothing that gives us a momentary break in stress or the sympathetic nervous system- then being in a meeting where somebody says something funny and everybody laughs, it’s just boom.

Shay Another piece that I’m curious about is Dr. Herbert Benson’s work around meditation and eliciting the relaxation response. When you talk about the parasympathetic state, the first answer that you gave was meditation, right? Are you basing that on some of his findings over the years? I’m curious about just some of your work there.

Richard He and my thesis advisor, Dave McClellan, were both faculty at Harvard, and they ended up gravitating to each other because when Herb was working on the relaxation response, Dave was working on the unconscious drives of power that would lead some people to be alcoholics, and some people to start wars, and other people to be healthy and start pro-social activities. And when Herbert published the book, which I think was 1978, as you are mentioning, it was a major thing, and it was tough for him. Here he is, this prominent cardiologist at Harvard Medical School and working at MGH, Mass General Hospital, and a really serious scientist. Now he comes out with what a lot of people at the time were seeing his fluff. Now, meanwhile, Dave McClellan was over literally on the other side of campus at Harvard, at William James Hall, and he had brought Tim Leary back because he was a good psychologist for a while, till Tim started experimenting with progressive drugs to get altered states of consciousness. But he was instrumental and then was open to Ram Dass, Dick Alpert, who was also a faculty colleague. So you’ve got in McClellan’s world, people exploring alternate states and trying to sort out which ones were helping and not, and that in Herb’s world, people were trying to do the same thing medically. But he opened the doors. So his work was absolutely groundbreaking.

And it still is a guide. He emphasized things that today we would call meditation, yoga, and all these other things. But to be clear, what he was doing was using early studies of the markers of parasympathetic activation.

Now that did not develop- I mean, even Robert Spolsky, the kind of doyen of stress research, he would devote half of one chapter in any of his books on stress to renewal. So what was happening is a lot of people studying stress, even working on it, kept focusing on the stress. Well, that’s like always focusing on the problem, and guess what? You just sink like in quicksand, deeper and deeper into the negative state. So Herb comes along and says, “Hey, there’s an alternative.” Meanwhile, a few years later, Dan Goldman is working. He was a good friend of mine, and we were in our doctoral program together and both hung around with Dave McClellan, but he was trying to look at some of the more positive things. And because he’d done his thesis, his doctoral dissertation on different neural networks and had spent a lot of time in India, it was fascinating that he ended up gravitating towards the Dalai Lama and having all of these regular conversations with him.

Meanwhile, one of the fellows who got his doctorate in the same program as Dan and I did a few years later, Richie Davidson, he graduates and becomes a very prominent neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, who has really helped to establish the medical benefits of meditation through his PET scans and fMRI studies.

Well, what’s clear when you add all these things together is they were right. So unlike many of the tenets proposed or advocated by people doing NLP in the nineties, where about half of them had turned out to be right, half weren’t because they weren’t based on any research. This part of it was based on very careful research, and it has stood the test of time. So yes. Now, it was interesting that when Herb was doing these things, I remember he was in my office a number of times. I was running a research consulting company that Dave McClelland had started, and we had decided by 1982-81 to create programs for stress management for executives, and we used work that I had been developed on the basis of work that Dave McClelland and some others and I were doing on what causes alcoholism.
I developed a therapy program. Well, we just tweaked part of that because part of it was I was teaching meditation, simple forms of it, and how to approach arguments with win-win rather than win-lose, things like that. We took that and took Herb’s data, and we developed a really nice three-to-five day program, and we thought we would do fantastic business with this thing. Well, we spent time talking to a number of our corporate clients, Fortune 100 companies, and every one of them didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And in fact, one said to us, “Reduce stress? I want to increase stress!”

I think it was not till after the nineties when people started being a little more conscious about holistic approaches that we started seeing wellness programs. And for most of the last 25 years, the wellness programs have been present in hospitals and community mental health centers and certain of the more innovative organizations, but it’s still not as embraced as it normally would be. And we’re still doing things in every industrialized country that are the opposite to wellness. I mean, and that’s the obesity epidemic in all of our countries. The fact that there’s anybody that’s still smoking cigarettes- I mean, oh my God. I mean, that’s like a no brainer. And the problem is that most of the time the cancers don’t occur for another 30 years. So especially for teenagers or people in their twenties, they think they’re immortal. They’re not worrying about how they’re going to die when they’re 50, if they see 35 as really old. So we know that how people are eating and obesity, we know that smoking cigarettes, we know that the more time we spend on electronic things like this instead of physically moving, all of those things are literally deadly, and yet we still do it.

Shay And yet we are tempted very often because I know you’ve mentioned in the podcast today working with people who are alcoholics, and I know that your approach is very much not only to work at the individual level, but to work at the family level and the community level. That you’ve seen that the way that you’re able to make the most impact is you have to have that sort of systematic, broader lens and approach- that just treating the individual is not a sufficient strategy. Do you want to talk about that in terms of your theory or why do you think it’s so important not just to treat the individual in isolation, but the family, the community?

Richard Well, again, my theory helps us to predict why that doesn’t happen. Even in the seventies, I developed this new therapy program. We had some tremendously positive results at the Brockton VA Hospital in their early studies, and it was kicking off in 1970, and just then the drunk driver programs were starting. What was happening is they were identifying legions of people who were at least alcohol abusers, if not outright alcoholics. What do you do with them? And the only options people had was to force them into medical treatment and to send them to AA. Well, not everybody took to those things, and those things didn’t always help with enough people. So they were searching. My therapy program that I built on the work that McClellan and I and others have been doing was seen as a real strong positive. So all of a sudden, I’m paid by the feds to train therapists in five cities, then 10 cities, then 15 cities.

Now, a certain number of those therapists were working in VA hospitals because we had a lot of returning veterans from Vietnam, but also in general hospitals and in mental health clinics. When I had somebody in the group, and even if they had gotten sober, I knew they had to get sober. They had to stop drinking, or if they were using drugs, they had to stop. And then it wasn’t cocaine, then it was heroin. They had to stop using it. Well, even if they stopped, I knew the percentage was likely that within six months they’d be back. Because even if you got the individual to think that he or she, or we’d now say they, wanted to stop and change their life, they had usually by that point burned some bridges or at least pissed off an awful lot of people in their families. So it became very clear that we had to not only help the individual because when all of a sudden done, if the individual didn’t want to change, nothing was going to happen.

But as soon as the individual was engaged, we had to help them intervene in their families. And if their families didn’t want them back or didn’t trust them, then we had to help them find new families. Then you realized, boy, folks were going to have a tough time unless they could get back to work. Now, the very things that caused the behavior that led to the addiction were parts of what very often were heralded as normal behavior in organizations. Well, what we had to start to do is to try to say, you can’t just help the individual, because this individual going back to their family or going back to a work organization is not going to convince anybody because they’ve blown all their credibility over the past 15 or 20 years of abusive behavior. So the question was how do we intervene in these kind of overlapping systems?

And that’s where I think even in the seventies, the people doing family systems therapy were making great strides. I had by the late seventies contended that unless we helped people work with their- what I call social identity groups now, but then I call them reference groups- we weren’t going to have any sustainable effect because if people were doing something abusive, even if they stopped, if they went back to hanging out with the same people they were hanging out with before, guess what?

They’re going to get back to doing the abusive behavior, whether it’s self-abuse or hurting others. So this multi-level notion- which I now call fractals- tells us that if we really want sustained change at any level, we have to work with multiple levels at the same time. Now, here’s the problem. I ran into this starting in the seventies, nobody knew how to do multiple level interventions at the same time, and even if some people did- but the people in family systems therapy really were way ahead of others- nobody wanted to pay for it. So you had this thing where if they were professional helpers, but nobody was going to pay for it, then nobody in the organization is going to endorse them if they were consultants. I mean, I could see this in the work we were doing with executives. If we didn’t work in their groups, in their teams, and in the organization, we might help 10% of the people, and then the rest is just really wasting time and money.

Shay Yeah, it’s so complex. We haven’t built our systems this way. So as an example, within the work that I’ve done with Integrative Touch, when we worked with patients in the hospital, it was always very clear to me, especially in a pediatric hospital, you never just work with a patient. We would work with the patient and with their parents or other primary caregivers, and we worked with the medical staff that was taking care of them. You needed to do every single level to really create change and impact. But as you discuss that kind of thinking and approach with hospital administrators, the first reaction is like, no, no, no, no, no, just the patient. Only the patient. The patient is who we isolate in this model because that’s how we’ve developed that whole system.

Richard There are pockets in most of the major medical systems or medical centers that see there are programs at the Mayo Clinic, at the Cleveland Clinic, at MGH. But I’ve got to say the one healthcare system that I think is the most advanced on this, is MD Anderson. And part of it was championed by the current CEO, who’s been CEO, I don’t know for 10 years or something, but a noted oncologist, surgeon, researcher. But when he walked into the job, he knew the organization was hurting because the prior CEO had done a lot of damage focusing on numbers and money, and he emphasized of course, numbers and money and research, but he talked just as much about emotional intelligence and relationships, and it changed the culture.

And they have programs and processes that help people develop from secretaries and janitors up to heads of surgery. And they’re an example of what we talked about in chapter eight of our 2019 book when Melvin, Ellen, and I were talking about the fact that because of these antagonistic natures of the PEA and NEA in organizations, our aspiration should be to develop a culture of development to compliment the culture of performance. Look, you have to have a culture of performance because if you don’t, the organization doesn’t survive. But even if you have a culture of performance, if you don’t have development as something that everybody- from the lowest person on the totem pole to the highest executive- feels that they’re being developed and invested in, you get a motivation crisis, which is what we have now. And I remember back in the sixties, people had developed all sorts of methods that say, well, let’s get these together. Let’s do the task and the people at the same time. Well, it turns out you can’t, you can’t do it at the same time with the same approach. So the challenge is how do we value it? And don’t say, the only reason you’re doing development is because you want more performance, then you’re not valuing it as equal. If you truly think your human capital is at the heart of your performance and innovation, then you want the culture of development to be on an equal potency footing as the culture of performance.

You’re not sacrificing performance, never. I’m not talking about that. You’re not compromising it. You’re not turning the organization into a social work agency. What you’re saying is these are two cultures that we need to coexist. And the challenge is for individuals as well as systems to figure out ways of doing both. Now, you can’t do both at the same time. So the question ends up being: how do you- as we call it in the neurological networks business- how do you toggle back and forth? How do you switch? And we all know people, we’ve been around people who are really effective leaders at sustaining an effort of development. They’re not always serious. Sometimes they’re playful, sometimes they make jokes, sometimes they act silly, but other times they’re really serious and focused. So that’s an example of, I think, of what this kind of seesaw can look like.

Shay Yeah. I’m curious, since this podcast, we focus on the way people heal. And healing in and of itself is kind of an interesting word, and even I think in the context of your work, the relationship between change and healing, I’d be curious what you see as the relationship between those two. But I like to always ask every guest kind of how they would define, describe, or put into words what they think healing is.

Richard For me, that’s fairly easy. I mean, because having been in these therapeutic fields for many years, healing is a sustained desired change. Now, the purpose isn’t healing. Healing is the path. So even if somebody says, “I am a healer, that’s my identity,” my immediate question to them would be: To what end? And that’s where I think for us as the providers, as well as the people around us, as well as the clients, patients, students, subordinates, children, when we think about healing, it’s a good thing because we’re talking about something that would be desired and we want to help sustain it. But we also have to think about, again, the big picture, why? Healing to what end?

And that’s where we start to create the positive vision. One of my good friends, I don’t want to mention the name because that wouldn’t be fair, but was having some persistent physical problems, and some were fairly complicated kind of neural-hormonal interactions. And he had gotten remarried and had children, and he was worried about what was happening to his system. And as he was working with a really insightful internist who was helping guide him through the various visits to specialists and trying to help integrate it all, at one point she said to him, “Why do you want to be healthy?” And he said, “I’d like to see my children get married.” And she looked at him and smiled and said, “How about going skiing with your grandchildren?” And he said it was like fireworks going off in his head, positively. Oh my God. It was literally a game changer.

Shay Yeah, that vision is definitely critical to change and also to health, right? That we have to have a reason to want to live. We have to have a reason, a purpose, as you’ve said.

Richard As you and I talked about in a conversation a number of weeks ago, one of the biggest challenges we have right now is those of us in the helping field, because we not only have the usual sources of chronic stress, but we’ve got what McCullen called power stress because we feel responsible. We’re trying to help others. Well, right away, that flags the first priority in this sustainability quest, which is ourselves. I mean, I was giving a keynote on Saturday morning, the National OD meeting, and I said- because the people in the audience were a wide range of therapists, consultants, nurses, but people who were now in organizational change as their main activity. And I said, “Look, what we do is exhausting. So are you still excited? Are you still feeling the music of life? Are you still wanting to lead your own parade?” I said, “Until we make sure that we’re doing that, we become infectious the wrong way. We are always going to infect our students, our clients, our subordinates, our patients. Are we infecting them with hope and renewal and love and caring, or are we infecting them with depression, fear, and pessimism?”

I said, “So if you want to have this lasting effect, first and foremost, it’s not egocentric. It’s not narcissistic. You have to make sure that you are living the life that you value, that you believe in, that you feel inspired.” And I said, “When you push yourself…”- because I use this example when I talk to people who are professional coaches- “When you push yourself to coach five people a day, it’s not clear me that you can even remember what you’re talking about with five people a day.”

Now, prior to the positive effect of COVID, which is teaching us how to do this online, prior to that, people were lucky if they could coach two people a day because you had to travel to wherever they were, and then one a day if you had to fly there. But today, you can ostensibly, you could coach eight people in a day if you’re coaching an hour at a time. But I guarantee you after the fifth, you’re not going to remember what’s going on. So I said, “First you have to tend to your own renewal, your own vision, your own caring environment, which is why spending time with your family, with your loved ones, and if you don’t have a nuclear family, then your extended family. You don’t have an extended family, you create one with a group of close friends. But that’s doing things individually and with others that help us to renew and help us keep on that path is holistic.” That’s the real magic touch for the Integrative Touch.

Shay Right? Exactly. Yeah. I want to thank you so much, Richard, for the care with which you’ve taken to integrate all the different aspects of your life into your present work, because it’s no accident that you started with MIT, and science, and NASA, and that whole side of your story, that you’ve brought that in a very cross-disciplinary way. You’ve brought the math and science side into the field of psychology, with I think such a beautiful force. And a lot of key change makers, in my view, are people who are cross-disciplinary in that way, who bring sometimes seemingly divergent fields together to help us better understand what’s going on. And I think the mark that you’ve made with your most recent book on “The Science of Change”, it’s really significant because it is looking at all the empirical research. It is summarizing really a lifetime of work and leaving behind a very clear framework that people can pursue if they want sustained change over the course of their life. And what a beautiful gift and legacy to offer to humanity, right? It’s like, here’s- based on what we know from the research and the science- here’s a framework for actually how you create sustained change in your life, and in any area that you want to pursue.

Richard And I just want to say the book is not just focused on my research and my ideas.

Shay No it’s not.

Richard As I mentioned to you, when I turned the manuscript into the publisher at Oxford University Press, the editor on February 2nd, he was blown away because I had a hundred pages of references.

I’m literally integrating the work of several thousand researchers into this. But I think it’s starting to show us not just pieces to go to- the theme of your work and your podcast of integrative work- is it’s starting to show that there is a synthesis. There are ways that these things come together. And while we could practice parts of it, it’s good that we have the bigger picture of how they come together.

Shay It really is. So I appreciate that very much, and I’m delighted that we have had an opportunity to have you on the show.

Richard Thank you, Shay.

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