I was running my fourth half-marathon that morning. The air was crisp and the euphoria was palpable. St Pete is a gorgeous place - on my left was the Salvador Dali Museum, and on my right peaceful waters of Tampa Bay.

While stretching before the race, I started chatting to a woman warming up next to me. It was her 57th half-marathon. Needless to say, I was amazed. Running 57 half-marathons seemed like such a phenomenal achievement. I asked how she did it, marathon after marathon.

“Just focus on the next step, that’s all you should worry about.”

I got into running half-marathons for several reasons. Obviously, it was a way to keep myself fit. I also appreciated the charitable side of many races (for example, the St. Pete half-marathon I recently ran was raising funds for the St. Petersburg Free Clinic’s Food Bank).

But as I started running, I discovered so much about myself. It gave meaning to everything else I do, not only to the exercise. It gave me a sense of belonging and togetherness with other runners.

No matter how physically prepared we were, regardless if we ran the five-mile race or the full half-marathon, everyone was dealing with same challenges. Everyone was doing their best to overcome doubt, mental fatigue, and tiredness.

We were all there not because of our physical abilities, but thanks to grit and perseverance.

This translated into other areas of my life too - all of a sudden, work challenges or personal crises didn’t seem as insurmountable anymore.

As my fitness level rose, so did my confidence. I was feeling good about myself, not only in front of the mirror or running through the finish line, but also in business meetings or whilst giving a presentation. My friends noticed the new sense of calm and positive attitude I had developed. It became my signature, my recognizable trait.

All of this happened off the track. But my biggest motivation to carry on came from running itself.

While running, I would practice everything I've learned about breath work. I was rejoicing in the thought of all of the neuro-plastic processes happening in my brain while I exposed my body to physical exertion. I was looking at the faces of the people cheering us on, offering refreshments or a high five. I wanted to stop and hug each and every one of them, even though I didn’t know them.

The support and motivation that comes from other runners is invaluable, especially once fatigue sets in. It feels like an energy boost when you need it the most. It makes you feel incredibly grateful and inspired to do the same for other runners who may need help. It starts the chain of giving back that makes the running community so supportive.

When I think of running, I don’t think about muscle aches, blisters on my feet, or catching my breath. I recall the feeling of my feet hitting the tarmac, the sound of other runners around me, the breeze on my face taking away any intruding thoughts, leaving me with reassuring mental clarity, cognitive agility, higher optimism, more confidence, and increased desire and flow.

Most of all, I recall the feeling of living my life to the maximum.

If you'd like to learn more about how mental fitness can help you, get in touch - I will be happy to help.

Jessica Godshall is a solutions-oriented professional with a proven track record of leadership success in launching a startup business, serving on leadership committees, promoting engagement, and advancing philanthropic campaigns.

We often hear but fail to listen.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but it happens to all of us, whether we are the ones listening or the ones being listened to. By being only partially focused on what we are hearing, we are missing out on valuable opportunities to learn useful information and build stronger relationships.

Active Listening is a vital skill both in workplaces and in personal life. It involves a conscious effort to understand the message being delivered to us, without thinking about what we are going to say next. This can feel counter-intuitive, as our initial instinct in professional discussions is often to argue our point. However, by actively listening, we improve our chances of learning or finding a compromise that will suit all parties.

The benefits of Active Listening

Active listening can help you become a better leader, better friend, and better family member.

• It builds trust and strengthens relationships.
• It encourages people around you to be open and share their concerns.
• It allows you to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and find a resolution to a conflict.
• It helps you absorb information in its entirety, without missing important details.
• It enables you to better evaluate the situation, identify the problem, and start developing a solution.

Finally, it provides you with the confidence of understanding what drives your team, what their challenges are, and what they need from you as a leader. In other words, it is a key skill of effective leadership.

Practicing Active Listening

There are five stages to the active listening process. By working on them one at a time, you can become a better listener and a better communicator overall.

The receiving stage

Your first task is to receive the message by ignoring all other distractions - background noise, screens and movement around you, your own interpretations of what is being said, and so on. Focus on what is being said - and nothing else.

The understanding stage

Try to understand what was being said. If you need more information or if anything is unclear, ask the speaker to clarify. You could also repeat and paraphrase what they said, to confirm that you heard them correctly.

The evaluating stage

In this stage, you evaluate the message you have received. Is it valid? Is it loaded with the speaker’s subjective opinion, or is it based on facts? Review and summarize the message to gain clarity.

The responding stage

Let the speaker know that you heard and understood their message through verbal and non-verbal cues. In a one-on-one conversation, this might mean a smile, a nod, or asking a question.

The remembering stage

If you cannot repeat the message you just heard, it usually means that you weren’t listening carefully. Taking notes can help - but make sure that writing is not distracting you from being present in the moment.

If you're ready to start practicing Active Listening, this page from the NY Times offers three helpful resources you can use to get started.

How to incorporate Active Listening into your company culture

Depending on the size of your team, there are many ways you can introduce and cultivate a culture of Active Listening.

You could start by regularly surveying your team to discover how everyone is feeling. Asking your employees for feedback after a meeting and keeping an open-door policy can also help. When running meetings, make sure that everyone has a chance to speak rather than giving the stage to the loudest person in the room.

Above all else, remember that it is always best to lead by example - by actively listening and encouraging your team to do the same, you will set a benchmark that will guide your team into a more supportive and understanding unit.

Training in Active Listening can benefit your life, and a company's entire culture - If you'd like to learn more about Active Listening can help you, get in touch - I will be happy to help.

Jessica Godshall is a solutions-oriented professional with a proven track record of leadership success in launching a startup business, serving on leadership committees, promoting engagement, and advancing philanthropic campaigns.

Thank you for having me, Tony Wechsler!

Would you be willing to try an experiment that can change your brain and improve your learning? What if I told you that it wouldn’t take any extra time, effort, or expense?

The experiment is very simple: do something you do on an everyday basis, but switch it up a little. 

If you’re right-handed, brush your teeth with your left hand. ✋

What you are doing in this experiment is challenging your brain to adapt to new circumstances, stimulating its neuroplasticity. This term refers to the brain’s fantastic ability to change, regenerate, and create new pathways, resulting in numerous benefits: better learning, improved cognitive abilities, recovery from traumatic injuries to the brain, and so on.

The ability of the brain to adapt and develop has significant implications for anyone seeking to improve their leadership or career development opportunities. Increased neuroplasticity can sharpen a leader's willingness to think outside of the box, for example, or see conflicts from multiple perspectives. It can also increase the effects of learning and development by improving the brain's receptivity to new ideas, concepts, and ways of working. 

How to increase your neuroplasticity

Of course, neuroplasticity isn't limited to tooth-brushing. You can stimulate your neuroplasticity through any number of everyday activities. Here are just a few examples:

• Take a different route to work.
• Walk your dog in a neighborhood you don’t normally visit.
• Go for a run without headphones.

And so on. Just pick an activity you do daily and automatically, without much thought, and then do it differently than you normally would.

Change your thoughts, change your life

With brain plasticity in mind, it becomes clear that we can quite literally change our lives by changing our thoughts. For example, when we do something that makes us happy, our prefrontal cortex gets a spike in activity. If we keep doing activities that cause us to feel happy, the neural pathways in our prefrontal cortex (involved in the feeling of happiness) get stronger, which means that it becomes easier for us to feel happy, and the cycle goes on.

To put it simply, whatever we focus on becomes our reality. If we focus on being happy, we physiologically become more optimistic, fulfilled, and joyful. If we focus on stressful things in our lives, we have more chance of becoming depressed and anxious.

How to improve your brain, one thought at a time

Unfortunately, we humans are highly resistant to change and adopting new practices if they oppose what we already know. In this, we’re far worse than monkeys - a recent study compared monkeys to people, giving them a sequence of steps to complete in order to gain an award. Then, both groups were presented with an alternative that was much more efficient. 70% of the monkeys adopted the new, more strategy straight away. However, only 1.7% of humans did so.

This means that we must make a conscious effort if we wish to change our thoughts, whether they are unproductive, distracting, or even toxic to our well-being.

Simple strategies that can rewire your synapses

There are a number of simple strategies you can use to start increasing your neuroplasticity.

You could enrich your environment both physically (decorating your living space with some new art) or through habits (learning a new language, reading a genre of books that normally doesn’t interest you, or learning to play an instrument).

Incorporating physical activity into your day, even if it’s just a 15-minute walk in the mornings, can bring numerous benefits to your brain, including your memory. The biggest effect on the brain comes from 20 minutes of high-intensity interval training or 25 minutes of continuous moderate aerobic exercise.

Practicing gratitude and meditating for a few minutes a day can also be extremely beneficial, leading to structural changes in the brain. There are many neuro-linguistic rewiring techniques, such as practicing positive affirmations (they can help you perform better in the workplace and have more confidence even in high-pressure situations) or content reframing that can help with handling anxiety (this study showed how efficient this technique is in preserving mental health).

Whichever technique you choose, make sure to turn it into a habit. The more you practice and the more you expose your brain to thoughts of happiness, prosperity and progress, the more of the same will you start seeing in your everyday life.

If you'd like to learn more about how the techniques mentioned in this article can help you, get in touch - I will be happy to help.

Jessica Godshall is a solutions-oriented professional with a proven track record of leadership success in launching a startup business, serving on leadership committees, promoting engagement, and advancing philanthropic campaigns.

Most of us don't know how to breathe correctly.

The quality of our breath affects our lives so much, yet we often pay no attention to it. While shallow breathing will keep you alive, it certainly won't help you perform to the best of your abilities.

Breathing is neither as easy nor as difficult as you might think. While breathing is simple, breathing correctly is difficult and complex; it is also a powerful tool that can be learned and leveraged with practice. 

When you breathe slowly and deeply, your organs are supplied with ample amounts of oxygen, your heartbeat slows down, and your blood pressure stabilizes. You immediately feel calmer, relaxed, and less stressed, with sharper focus and more mental clarity. Yoga breathing techniques have been proven to activate the brain and improve cognitive function, and a study done on a group of students showed that deep breathing also enhances concentration. With this in mind, it's clear that better breathing has a lot to offer a successful leader.

How you breathe affects the kind of leader you are

Suppose you wish to run your team in a productive and empathic way. In that case, you probably already know that new types of leadership models explore creative solutions and question traditional corporate practices. Many of these new leadership models adopt techniques and best practices from all sorts of influences, including those that rely on science-backed breath-work practices (such as mindfulness or meditation). 

As a leader, there are certain expectations about how you conduct yourself in workplace situations, especially in moments of crisis. Nobody feels particularly encouraged by a leader who is visibly shaken when stressful situations occur, doesn't speak up when needed, and suffers from stage fright at big meetings. 

Leadership is about inspiring confidence and showing that you can think strategically, operate at a high capacity in crisis management, and make good decisions in stressful circumstances. This is where breath-work comes into its own. 

Breathing can help you maintain an executive presence in high-stake situations

When you are faced with pressure in the workplace, breath-work can help you maintain your composure and preserve your executive presence. The ample oxygen your body gets from slow, deep breaths supports your voice and prevents sentences from hanging in the air, breathlessly. 

In contrast, shallow breaths leave your body deprived of oxygen, increasing your anxiety levels. This will quickly become apparent in your posture, your voice, and your racing thoughts.

One of the breath-work techniques that can help you maintain your oxygen levels in high-stress workplace situations is pranayama breathing. This ancient yogic practice has been proven to improve executive function and working memory. 

Similarly, interesting findings come from a program held for over 600 high-potential leaders in Microsoft, in which leaders were taught deep diaphragmatic breathing techniques. The goal was to both reduce the impact of stress and increase mental clarity and focus. The participants praised breath-work as the most useful tool for managing stress and productivity, and the majority of them continued to use it after the program ended.

Breath-work can improve your learning and focus

Leadership is not only about taking the forefront during moments of crisis; it is also about the ability to learn from and adapt to changing circumstances, seeing the bigger picture so that you can help your team choose the right path forward.

Diaphragmatic breathing can help with this as well, improving your attention capacity, as well as your overall health, by reducing the amount of stress hormone cortisol, in your bloodstream. Our breath influences our attention. Therefore, you can optimize your learning and mental performance by controlling your breathing. The result? You become a calm, focused leader, and always ready to learn and adapt. 

Breathe slowly for better cognitive flexibility

Slow-paced breathing can also improve your cognitive flexibility.

Cognitive flexibility is the skill of switching from one way of thinking to another, allowing you to adapt quickly and effortlessly. By practicing this skill daily, you can create new neural pathways in your brain, increasing your problem-solving capabilities. 

Being cognitively flexible can help take the stress out of learning and increase your adaptability to new and unforeseen circumstances. The result is a leadership style rooted in adaptability and ready to tackle any challenge.

If you'd like to assess your cognitive flexibility, I highly recommend you read my upcoming article: How to change your brain? Start with brushing your teeth.

The practices described in this article can genuinely bring profound and lasting changes to your workplace and, by extension, to your team. If you'd like to learn more about how they can help you improve your leadership skills, get in touch - I will be happy to help.

Jessica Godshall is a solutions-oriented professional with a proven track record of leadership success in launching a startup business, serving on leadership committees, promoting engagement, and advancing philanthropic campaigns.