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[00:00:00] Announcer: This is the Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast, your source for the strategies, systems, and insights you need to turn your dreams into your destiny. Every week we dive into dynamic conversations as our host, Nicole Greer, interviews, leadership, and business experts. They're here to shed light on practical solutions to the challenges of personal and professional development.
[00:00:21] Now, here's your host, a professional speaker, coach, and consultant, Nicole Greer.
[00:00:29] Nicole: Welcome to the Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and they call me the Vibrant Coach and I am here with Lauren Hodges. She is amazing. Let me tell you all about her. Lauren Hodges is an expert in human performance sciences, an award winning learning designer, author and owner of Performance on Purpose. It is a global training and coaching company focused on the intersections of leadership and human performance. She lives in Satellite Beach, Florida with her husband and her two teenage boys. Please welcome to the show Lauren. How are you?
[00:01:07] Lauren Hodges: Thank you for having me on, I really appreciate it.
[00:01:08] Nicole: No problem. I'm excited about your book. How long ago did you release your book?
[00:01:15] Lauren Hodges: It was released... amazingly, actually, I haven't thought about that. It was released in April of 2024, so I can't believe that much time has passed, actually.
[00:01:24] Nicole: I bet you it's been a whirlwind because I bet you people are snatching this off the Barnes and Noble shelf and they are downloading it on the Kindle and buying it on the Amazon and doing all the things.
[00:01:35] And the name of your book is Less Stress, More Calm. Did everybody hear that? Does that sound good to everybody? _Less Stress, More Calm: Discover your unique stress personality and make it your superhero_. So I'd love to jump in and talk about the book and talk about how to have less stress, more calm. In the beginning of her book, everybody, the first little bit's called The Scene, and she talks about, don't miss this, the Great Donut Incident of 1993. So, I would like to know about the Great Donut Incident. Lay the foundation for us with the Great Donut Incident, if you would.
[00:02:09] Lauren Hodges: Yeah, so it's just tongue-in-cheek jokingly talking about how if stress personalities did have an origin story, and we were all really superheroes in disguise, that would have been mine, because I was, Gosh, I would have been 11 years old and we lived in Miami, South Miami, and there was a little donut shop, real famous shop near us. It was maybe not even a mile away. And my father on Sunday mornings would let me roller blade up there and get the donuts. And I thought I was just like the biggest kid ever being able to do that. And long story short I was roller blading, you know, this is the nineties home with a dozen donuts. And I hit a little piece of asphalt and I just went flying and donuts were everywhere and and there's, I'll leave the end of the story, but I did end up putting them back in and taking them home to the family anyway. I was so embarrassed, but I was just talking about how, I wasn't angry. I wasn't like, overwhelmingly worried. My predominant experience very early, I can even remember, was I just wanted to run away and hide. I didn't want to deal with it. And, again, it was a joking, fun story, but the seriousness of it is that has never changed for me. That has been my default when things are difficult. For as long as I can remember, They have literally back to when I was a kid. And so, just talking about how these stress personalities have been around for a really long time for all of us and we could talk about where they come from, but
[00:03:41] Nicole: Yeah. So did I get this right? You put the donuts back in and fed them to your family.
[00:03:47] Lauren Hodges: I did, I did, I did, I did, I did.
[00:03:50] Nicole: Well, hey, I mean, if the icing is still intact and the sprinkles are still there, they won't know. It's the five second rule, right?
[00:03:58] Lauren Hodges: You know what, and years later, my dad, I had written like this essay in college about that same story, and years later I had my dad read it, I think I was 19 or 20. And he said, you know, I knew, obviously, that you had dropped them. We ate them anyway, cause it didn't matter. So, kind of like, oh good, at least you knew that I did that. The guilt was kind of like coming off of me for that bad memory.
[00:04:23] Nicole: That's fantastic. Yeah. And you're just a baby girl, 10 years old. Okay. So you said, there is an origin to these stress personalities. Will you kind of, use your doctor, uh, piece and all your research and tell us all about that. That'd be great.
[00:04:38] Lauren Hodges: Yeah, sure. So, maybe it's helpful if I gave a little bit of the background of how I came into knowing about this stress personality stuff. But I've worked with a company called Thrive Global. A lot of people know them, Ariana Huffington's company. I was a consultant and a curriculum designer for them. And I was kind of like working as a double subject matter expertise and curriculum designer for them because that's my background. And we had a partnership with Stanford Medicine and Accenture to create this beautiful digital course called Thriving Mind. And it was based on some research coming out of Stanford at the time and the Center for Precision Psychiatry. I say all that to say they they were studying the brains of patients with mental illness, specifically depression and anxiety. And there was a woman there by the name of Dr. Leanne Williams. Highly recommend you look up her research. And what she has, I guess, discovered, for lack of a better term, is that there's a detectable biology to mental illness. They could map the neural pathways of stuck emotion and behavior and thought in the brains of patients with depression and anxiety, and they weren't all the same. And she called them biotypes. And we were building a course based on the presumption that if you could get to know those biotypes before they were an issue, then could you prevent a mental illness to begin with? So that was the whole premise of the course. Phenomenal course- get this, it launched in March of 2020. Like the timing was impeccable. Yes, and we launched it with Accenture first and it was a huge instant success. I mean it was featured in People Magazine. It was just, it was telling of the times, but also the research was really interesting.
[00:06:19] I say all that to say I fell very deeply in love with it. So the stress personalities, essentially what they are, are these dominant, persistent patterns or default patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior in our brains. They're neural pathways. We have billions of neural pathways, every thought and emotion and habit and everything is a neural pathway in our brain, even our beliefs. And so, these are just the more persistent, dominant, default, I say that word importantly, default patterns, where we go first and most often. The origin of that comes from a myriad of places. I mean, it's how we were raised. It's a little bit of our genetics. It's our culture, our geography, our race, our religion, our teachers, our upbringing. Everything kind of shapes and molds that. Even our current experiences, work environments, and relationships past and present all sort of inform how we're showing up today. And those patterns are very well worn so they've been there for a long time, hence the donut story. And most of us have one or two that we really experience more of the time. They can be context-dependent, too, so, certain environments or people or even intensities of stress could impact which stress personality shows up at which time.
[00:07:36] Nicole: That's great. And when you told your donut story, I immediately- it's in my neural passageways- but I immediately thought of as a little girl, I lived in Perrysburg, Ohio with my aunt every summer for a couple of three, four summers. And and it was the same thing, I was a big girl, I was on my bicycle, had a basket, but there was a bagel shop. And so I would go down there and I didn't drop bagels cause I had a basket! There's no baskets on the rollerblades. But anyway, that thing of like, I'm a big girl, I'm sure that's influenced the fact that I'm a 58 year old big girl now. I think that's really fun and such good stuff.
[00:08:09] So, In the book, you say that there's a stress personality. And one of the things that I have is a coaching methodology I've put together. And the first part of this is self-assessment. I always feel like the client needs to turn the mirror inward, look for their rollerblading bagel, bicycle riding stories. But you've got a really nice self assessment right in the beginning: _Demands of Life Inventory_. Will you talk about that? Because I think people should pop a squat and sit down and look at the demands that are on their life. They're probably asleep to some of them.
[00:08:43] Lauren Hodges: Yeah, there's several assessments in the beginning of the book. The way it's structured is the first few chapters is some of the science, I think it's important to have that foundation of the science of stress and what a stress personality is and all of that. And then, a bunch of assessments, just awareness builders, to your point. The rest of the book is almost like a choose your own adventure. Once you think you know maybe who, what one or two or maybe three stress personalities you are, I don't recommend reading it cover to cover. It's a lot, it's dense. So, flipping to the chapters that you feel are, More pertinent to you, reading through the science, the recommendations, interventions. And then there is some science to the fact that all of these stress personalities have a little bit of a hidden superpower, a skill that we have brought to the table as a result of that pattern of behavior or whatever. So those assessments there's tons of different ones up front and then there's some in the chapters as well. But that particular one, it is adapted from one of my mentors, Dr. Jim Lehrer, he and another mentor, Dr. Jack Grapple they're co-founders of the Human Performance Institute. It's been around since the early nineties. They were studying professional elite athletes and military and business people. And they have this incredible assessment in one of their books, in one of Jim's books that really opened my eyes. And so I took that assessment, kind of adapted it a little bit more specifically to stress personalities.
[00:10:05] But what it does is ask you about what are the demands that you're facing in your life and what is the importance that you put upon them, if I'm thinking of the right assessment here, and then where might you be a little bit off center on those demands? So, you know, if we say that family is most important to us, if we say that our physical health is very important to us, but our actions and behaviors and our actual investment of time and energy in those are off, there's a bit of a discrepancy there and that can really open your eyes.
[00:10:34] And then another one I have in there, which could be, you know, it could be the other assessment you're thinking of, is all the performance demands that we have in our life. Yeah, work, family, finances, physical health, you name it. Just there's a lot that we're dealing with! Goodness, all these performance demands, things that we expect of ourself, we should be showing up at our best in these different areas or at our highest potential. And then the expectations that are set on us, I have work expectations, et cetera. So you lay out all those performance demands, and then you give yourself a little performance review. How well am I showing up in these areas? And that's another big eye opener... and it's all self assessment so there's a little bit of inherent bias there, but nonetheless, it's a little bit of like a snapshot in time of, I want to be showing up this way in these areas, so which of these areas am I over indexing on that's preventing me from performing at my highest potential in these other areas? And those are the two kind of bigger, to me, more salient assessments up front that really open your eyes to what we're really dealing with.
[00:11:39] Nicole: Yeah. So you can get in there and take those. And it's just like the itty bitty wake up call. Right? All right. And so we want to be like.
[00:11:46] Lauren Hodges: Just an itty bitty one
[00:11:47] Nicole: Hey, and even in the back of the first chapter Lauren has a couple of comments at the end and one of them is, if this book is stressing you out, put it down. Yeah. That's one of her bullet points. And one of her other bullet points is, here's advice: don't ever take donuts from a 10 year old with bloody knees that won't make eye contact. So there's, she's got some of her beautiful humor in here along with all of this, it's fantastic. Yeah. So let's talk about the science. We've talked about your brain a little bit, but there's this thing called the stress response. People, you know, they're just wandering around planet earth going, I'm so stressed out. I'm overwhelmed. I got too much to do. These are the things that come out of our mouths. So will you tell us what's going on when we're saying all those things and experiencing that?
[00:12:30] Lauren Hodges: Yeah, sure. So, stress is it's not a bad word. It's not a four letter word. It is just a biological and psychological and physiological response to a perceived threat in the environment. So good or bad, we all have this default survival mechanism hardwired into us. And when we experience stress, so it can either be an acute stressor, walk into a spiderweb, you know exactly what the acute stressor is, it could be chronic stressors, so these kind of like, low, slow burn, ongoing, things, it could be just regular everyday stressors, it could be the big stuff that happens in life, the sort of crises or big storms, and then it could be good stressors. There's good stress. When I'm about to walk on the stage and deliver a keynote, that's good stress. It's helping me grow. And I'm trying always to think about that as I'm excited rather than I'm nervous. So stress is neither good nor bad, but it is what it is. And when we experience stress in an actual, like an acute moment, let's just take that as an example, you walk into a spiderweb, or a car pulls out in front of you or, you suddenly realize that the audio is not working on your podcast, and you're like, you're supposed to go on in two minutes, whatever it is, in that moment our survival brain sort of takes the wheel. They take over. And we have this blood flow that's sort of shunted and redirected down to the primitive parts of our brain that are responsible for the stress response. A lot of different parts going on in there, but we'll just say primitive brain. And our primitive brain and our emotions in that moment are dominant. They take over. That's your sympathetic nervous system, like, activating. And then we get through that, and we are in default mode. So we're not thinking critically, we're not making rational thought, or decisions in that moment. Or, I should say, it's very challenging to do so. Obviously, you can train for that. Particularly, you look at police officers, firefighter, military, ER, uh, surgeons and nurses they're really well trained to manage that, but most of us are not. And so, when the moment passes, we move into what's called our parasympathetic nervous system and we come back to homeostasis and then that blood flow redirects back up and then we become, what, reflective, we analyze, and then we have that surge of emotions and thoughts and reflections. We make sense of what just happened, whatever it is. We tend to be the victims in our own story. So if someone's cut us off, it's 99 percent
[00:14:52] Nicole: their fault.
[00:14:52] Lauren Hodges: a moment of stress, their fault. Maybe, yeah, exactly. Maybe an hour later we go, ooh, you know, I was kind of like not wanting to let that guy in and so he cut, and then we become a little bit more of our best version of ourself. Maybe you had a tough conversation with someone and in the moment you were kind of a jerk and then later on you're more reflective. So that is the stress response in a nutshell. Just to underline this: Not all stress is bad; stress can produce growth; but there is sort of a tipping point for everyone. It's called allostatic load in individual moments and then kind of in aggregate in our life. And that load is very dependent on all the other things that we have going on. So the same situation that would never stress you out might be different if you have other things going on in your life. You know, the same traffic jam that you might hit three days a week could be different if you're late for an important meeting. And then your threshold is different and so your perception of that stress is different. Therefore you have a negative response to it. I say that to say that there's not like a fixed threshold for everybody where you're either stressed or not stressed or we perceive stress to be negative or positive. There's a lot of leeway in how we train, too, to look at stressors and manage stressors and sort of close that gap between that reaction that we have and that desired response that we want to have. And that's all through the book, how do we close that gap and take control of the stress. So it's not something we want to reduce. Stress reduction is an absolute myth. There's no such thing. And we wouldn't want that either
[00:16:26] Nicole: That's so interesting.
[00:16:26] Lauren Hodges: Because we wouldn't grow. Yeah, who would we be if we didn't have challenge and discomfort, you know? It's like building a muscle in the gym, you can't expect it not to hurt a little bit. But on the other side of it, you're stronger, and you're more resilient, and so is your body. So it's the same analogy that you could use for stress itself. We're not getting rid of it, we're not killing it, we're just managing it. We're taking better control of it.
[00:16:48] Nicole: And so, many people listening to this podcast, they've heard me talk about this book and if you haven't read it yet, you got to read it. It's called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Okay. Everybody write that down. And he's got a quote in there, right, Lauren, that says, between thought and reaction, there's just this moment where we can decide what we're going to do. And let me tell you, nobody's been -- well, maybe there's somebody listening that's been through what Viktor Frankl went through, I don't know, but I'm telling you, that is one of the greatest books ever. So this kind of idea of, really having mastery over your stressors and getting that resilience in place, it's just so essential, like to survival and Viktor Frankl, he was surviving the concentration camp. So anyway, so really good stuff.
[00:17:32] Okay. So you say this in your book, you say over the years, our stress personality develops through many variables: previously heightened emotional experiences, family, parents, caregivers, community, school, culture, traumatic experience, education, and our backstory, genetics and our current and past work environments. Now you kind of just said that, but I wanted to push on that a little bit because people are like, well, how do I know? So after you say that, we need to do a little self assessment. You go into the different types, right? Of stressors. So can we kind of go through some of those and maybe take a look at them? Okay.
[00:18:09] Lauren Hodges: Sure! I wish we had all the time in the world, but you know, just going through, maybe let's just take a couple of the more popular ones. And just to reiterate before we're talking about them, these are not problems to be solved, deficiencies of ours, things we need to conquer. This is not the bad versions of ourself. And then there's the good versions of ourself. These are just how we show up. And I, say that all throughout the book, but I also try to say it on all of these podcasts and articles that I'm writing because it's really important to me for people to understand it's a yes, and. Like, these are parts of ourselves that really get in the way of who we want to be at our best. And they are the best versions of us and the best parts of ourselves, because they inform who we are at our core. They are clues into our values and what's important to us and really There's a lot of skill that comes from them. I'll give you an example first of the two most popular are the worrier and the runner.
[00:19:04] The runner is me. So I'll start there just because I want to underline the previous point. Runners are avoiders of stress. So in a fight or flight situation, they're the flight, where the fighter, for example, per stress personality would be running toward a threat to squash it and dominate it,
[00:19:21] Nicole: Wrestle it to the ground.
[00:19:22] Lauren Hodges: make sense of it. The runner's gone. Yeah, the runner's going the other way, so you'll never see me take the bull by the horns when I'm in a stressful situation, it's just not something I think I'll ever be able to conquer. But again, I don't know if I even want to because the runner, although there's a lot of ways that this could get in my way of being who I am at my best; for example, runners can be avoiders. They can procrastinate. They can push off. They can have really a lot of challenge with difficult conversations and confrontation, and they don't want to hurt people's feelings sometimes, and similar to the pleaser stress personality. Runners, though, the little hidden superpower in there is they tend to have a really good knack of creating space for reflection and process. So when something is making them feel overwhelmed or really anxious, they're really good at a little bit of boundary -- now sometimes they just avoid, avoid, avoid until it's too much, but they're still nonetheless wired to create space. Where a fighter can be very reactive and say something they don't mean, a runner is gonna go the other way and very process-oriented and reflective. Now their wheels are spinning, but nonetheless they create space. So that's an example of, there's a stress personality, there's a lot that could go wrong when you're avoiding, avoiding, avoiding, and there's some superpower in there.
[00:20:44] The worrier on the other hand... so you've got the fighter that runs toward, they can hit the ceiling, they can say things they don't mean, they can blame, they can be reactive, we all know that. You raise kids, you know in a minute there's a fighter in all of us, right? Like, you lose your cool sometimes. The fighter, that's their persistent default. The runner avoids. So here's the worrier. The worrier is not running toward a threat. They're not running away from a threat. They're running really fast in no
[00:21:11] Nicole: In here, their hamster is going, right? Their hamster is running.
[00:21:16] Lauren Hodges: Just a Just a hamster on a wheel. I mean, they can't get off of it. And so they are tackling the threat in the way they know best which tends to be, they're very deep thinkers, they're a lot of times really detail oriented, they're processors, they can process ad nauseum. So, paralysis by analysis. They get stuck in an, and I go into the brain science of each of these, but they get stuck in an area called the default mode network or the mind wandering space, which is sort of like the antithesis or opposite of "being on," you know, focused and attentive where we're operating right now. We're listening to each other. We're thinking critically, making decisions. The default mode network is this area of the brain where we go and we're like, not thinking of anything at all, or our mind is drifting. We're sitting at a traffic light or in the shower. It's a great place to be, actually; we solve problems there. We're creative and innovative, but sometimes we can unintentionally get stuck there and it's really hard to be in the present. And that would be the worriers' experience of stress, negative stress. The good part of a worrier, my husband's a worrier, is they're super detail oriented, and tend to be really good communicators. Not all worriers withdraw within, some like to process.
[00:22:27] So now let's think of this from a business perspective. You've got a fighter on the team who's really good at taking charge, very values driven. They know their right from wrong and they are action focused. You've got a runner who was the kind of like a voider needs some time. So in a moment of crisis, you don't really want to be pressing, pressing, pressing on that person, but you want to nudge them along to remain productive. And then you've got your worrier who's very risk averse, very
[00:22:53] Nicole: Poking a hole in new ideas in the conference room
[00:22:55] Lauren Hodges: Yeah, right. And the, I would say like, I don't want to stereotype, but like the engineers, the finance people, the lawyers, they tend to be worriers because they've been trained this way. In a good way, a wonderful way. And then sometimes it can take control, and they have trouble coming out of it. And so, every personality has that, like, this is how we experience it, this is how it could get in our way, and then this is how it's really a, it's really a wonderful sort of super skill that you have that we don't want to get rid of. So those are kind of three main ones. We have I know I'm gonna forget one, but we have a pleaser, we have a negative self talker, we have a thriver, we have a freezer. That's another big one the, and
[00:23:41] Nicole: Nailed it, got them all.
[00:23:42] Lauren Hodges: Whoop, okay. At this point, I hope I do. And I could go through some more
[00:23:46] Nicole: Oh, yeah, I would love to.
[00:23:47] Announcer: Are you ready to build your vibrant culture? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference, or organization to help them with their strategies, systems, and smarts to increase clarity, accountability, energy, and results, your organization will get lit from within email her at nicole@vibrantculture.Com and be sure to check out Nicole's TEDx talk at vibrant culture. com.
[00:24:13] Nicole: Yeah. Let me just tell them to you again in case you're like sitting there taking notes because you're super nerdy. The fighter. The runner, the worrier, the freezer, the pleaser, the negative self talker. Somebody out there went, oh, that's me. Distracted and the thriver. So we did fighter, runner, worrier.
[00:24:32] What about freezer? Let's do freezer.
[00:24:35] Lauren Hodges: So the freezer, there's two types of freezers. There's the productive and the unproductive freezer. The unproductive freezer, that's the one that when things get difficult, I would say they like teeter on the edge of burnout sometimes when things get, or could be in there right now, things get hard and challenging, they sort of just shut down all the way. You know, they crash on the couch and they're surfing Netflix instead of tackling this to do list that they have or this demand that's bringing them stress.
[00:25:05] Sometimes the freezer's like the secondary stress personality for people. For, for myself, for example, the last, uh, like, month of last year, like, November, December, I was crashing on the couch. So my runner sort of like evolved into, I think stress was just becoming cumulative. There was a lot going on. I was exhausted. I was traveling a lot. So I did find myself in that like freezer mindset quite a bit. I went from avoiding to just
[00:25:33] Nicole: Shutdown. Yeah.
[00:25:34] Lauren Hodges: completely checking out. So that's the unproductive one. The productive freezer actually runs-- I was talking to someone yesterday about this, one of the stress personalities that runs the highest risk of burnout in the whole group. And that's the one who can very easily compartmentalize and push off all negative emotion and thoughts and move forward. So they're, under stress, highly productive people. You want them on your team. They are the first responder. They are the trauma surgeon who can make quick decisions in a really, really high stress, high pressure environment. They're the type A CEO type, we all know them, like nothing seems to get to them and they just, they can charge forward no matter what.
[00:26:18] The problem is, when you stuff emotion, when it's negative emotion, you can't stuff negative emotion without stuffing all emotion, positive included. And so a lot of the times, I don't know if you've experienced this with your clients; with mine, who identify with that stress personality, they can sort of reflect that it's really hard for them to come off or away from that, come back from it, and they feel like nothing at all. They numb out, they're indifferent, they come across as apathetic or like they don't care especially in a moment of crisis. It can be a little like I'm not going to feel, I'm just going to think and go, but they have a lot of trouble processing after the fact and that's where I say they can very quickly move into a space of burnout or depression or anxiety because they're just sort of like pushing and pushing and pushing off feeling emotion and moving through negative thoughts, which we all know, we have to do in order to move forward. So that's the freezer personality. They can fall into one of those two cat, I almost made them two different ones, but I thought, no, it's like the same kind of experience. You're just pushing off, but one of them is a little bit different than others in terms of their behavior. So I put them as one.
[00:27:30] Nicole: I betcha a lot of people are relating to that one for sure. Yeah. I have a mentor, her name's Ann Sturette, and she works with a lot of people who are pastors in churches. And a lot of the pastors are freezers because they deal with the funerals and the cancer and the deaths and the things. They also have the weddings and the good stuff too, but they have to be so calm under pressure. And in these you know, very life changing moments of people's families and things, and she talks about how they push things down and she says if you don't go through it and process that stuff, the issues will be in your tissues is how she says it, you know. And then it can cause the depression and the things that you're talking about. So I think that's to me. Okay. So we did fighter, runner, worrier, freezer, pleaser. Let's talk about pleaser for a hot second.
[00:28:20] Yeah, I'm glad you chose that one next because I was going to say, the same conversation I was having yesterday about the freezers, we were talking about freezers and pleasers and actually pastors came up as a group, similar to social workers, hospice care workers, teachers, the bleeding hearts of our world, the ones that we just can't live without. They're just the best people because they're just so service minded and others centered and they tend to be the more high risk of burnout. So pleasers and freezers, if you're looking at the research and the statistics, tend to be the more higher risk groups for the very reason that they're just really good people and they tend to put themselves last. Or, to your point, they tend to operate in really tough environments, and so they tend to just push off, push off, push off because they're really focused on that person or people that they're dealing with in the moment. They want to stay cool, calm, and collected.
[00:29:13] Pleasers are very similar to that, in that they have a lot of trouble saying no, and they have a lot of trouble with boundaries, and they are aiming to please. Not to overgeneralize, but like those types of professions and careers, people tend to be pleasers, and then I have noticed that people early in their careers tend to err on the side of pleaser because they are eager to climb the corporate ladder. Or prove themselves, prove their worth, if not for the other people around them, but for themselves. So imposter syndrome tends to drive those behaviors too, similar to negative self talkers have a lot of that. There's a big difference there, which I can explain a minute if you want.
[00:29:55] But the pleaser, yeah, just for what it's worth, they really struggle with boundaries. And that's a big part of that chapter, there's a good boundaries exercise in there, how to recognize that we don't have to give up the best parts of ourselves and give up that servant heart and others-centered world in order to really navigate this stress personality. In fact, it's better if we don't. It's better if we self-protect and have those strong boundaries so that we can be who we need to be in the moments that matter for those people that we're serving.
[00:30:27] The negative self talker, the difference there, everybody has negative self talk, Everyone in the world, you know, you're lying if you're saying that you don't have those thoughts creep in here and there,
[00:30:37] Yeah.
[00:30:37] Lauren Hodges: Let's be real. Um, I guess unless you're like a clinical narcissist or something
[00:30:41] Nicole: Yeah, I'm awesome all the time, yeah.
[00:30:47] Lauren Hodges: So, the difference is the negative self talker-- They don't just have negative self talk. They go for the throat, like their own throat when they're experiencing stress. They default to absolutes about their core worth and value. So the best way I explain it when I'm like in front of a group is if I'm a worrier, and I'm in front of a big group of people, and I bomb a keynote, I mean really bomb it, what am I probably gonna do? I'm gonna go back to my hotel, and I'm just gonna, this is just gonna spin in my head for the next week, two weeks, whatever. I'm gonna have trouble letting it go. My thoughts are gonna be focused on how I behaved in that moment, how I showed up, what I was doing, what I was saying. If that same person was a negative self talker and they bombed that keynote, they're going to leave there going, I am not cut out for this. I shouldn't be doing it. I'm not enough. I should quit. And in other words, I'm a failure, you know, going for that absolute, I'm not worthy.
[00:31:50] Nicole: Right?
[00:31:51] Lauren Hodges: Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. And that's where they go first and most often whenever there is stress. So, a fighter and a negative self talker get in an argument and the fighter's going to go, this is all your fault. And the negative self talker is going to go, I know it probably is all my fault. So that's, that would be the difference in those stress personalities. I think we all have a little side dish of negative self talk but the negative self talkers, they know who they are. I would also say, ironically, They are extremely self aware people, and they are very good at lifting others up. So, I was looking at so much research around this particular stress personality, and looking for those superpowers, and that was one that stuck out to me that actually made me laugh. Like, of course, they can just zero in on someone else who needs to be lifted up, and they can do it. It's just they struggle a little bit more with how to do that for themselves. Again, in a moment of stress. This is not who we are all the time. This is who we are under a moment of stress. Really important to clarify that. So, that's the
[00:32:56] Nicole: All right. We only have two left. Let's let's pop them in here. One is the distracted and then the last one would be the thriver.
[00:33:04] Lauren Hodges: Yeah. So, the distracted's a fun one. I added that one in late because I realized that I was missing a big group of the population who doesn't experience stress very emotionally, per se. They experience it really cognitively, mentally. And so when they are feeling stressed, high negative stress, they're like the little dog in the animated movie Up, who sees the squirrel
[00:33:29] Nicole: Squirrel!
[00:33:29] Lauren Hodges: They just, you know, they just squirrel. They can't, they can't focus. And that's their experience. It's not a surge of any sort of emotion. It's not attacking their core worth. It's just, they really have trouble either staying attentive, on task, they're foggy headed, so they have cognitive fog, they're easily distracted, they're disorganized, they make more mistakes, a very cognitive experience. So everyone has cognitive impairment under stress, no doubt. This is just an exacerbated experience of that. They don't feel particularly down and out, or angry, they just have that cognitive impairment like tenfold more than other people. And if you have ADHD or know someone who has ADHD, I'm gonna guess this is probably your stress personality because stress would exacerbate that type of experience sometimes. Sometimes people with ADHD or ADD, depending on the type and degree of stress, they actually get hyper focused and hyper productive. So I want to be careful not to overgeneralize there, but they can at least identify with and resonate with that stress personality pretty accurately, which is kind of cool.
[00:34:42] Nicole: There's a gentleman out there. His name is Dan Sullivan. Everybody jot down his name. He's written, he writes a book a quarter. I want you to think about that. Every quarter he writes a book. Yeah. And he's he is called the strategic coach, but he has ADHD and he defaults to the super focus. And he is fully convinced that folks that are in the same space that he's in, that they can totally flip it, you know, like you said, like the freezer can be really awesome or super unhealthy. I think it can go both ways there too, so he's doing amazing things and I think it gives people a lot of hope too, that have ADHD or ADD, yeah that they can, they can manage,
[00:35:23] Lauren Hodges: Yeah. It's interesting research. Yeah. It really, I love the research on ADHD. I did a lot of research on neurodiversity for Accenture. I've consulted with them for a few years and that, not to go off topic, but neurodiverse learners is fascinating when they tweak that relevancy dial a little bit and they start to tell themselves or really believe that they're more interested in something, all of a sudden the
[00:35:47] Nicole: yeah.
[00:35:48] Lauren Hodges: is hyper focused or it's hard to get them to get away from that thing. And I just always thought that was, and all the superpowers that come with being neurodiverse, these just incredible skills that like churning out a book a quarter, unbelievable people. And I'm always curious for my neurodiverse listeners and clients, I'm always curious about that, because I think a lot of them do experience distractedness when the stress is negative. If they can tweak it to become opportunity... so, you know, a lot of our stress, I don't want to say all of it, but a lot of it could be reframed in the moment as opportunity. And so I'm curious with that population group, when they do that, how does that change your experience of stress and your stress personality? Does it flip the switch on the distracted, for example, if that's who they identify with? It's just not an area of research I've taken enough of a dive into, but I'm super curious and always kind of like poking in keynotes at participants. A third of that audience is neurodiverse by, if we're thinking of statistics, that I so want to call them out and just say, what do you think? Tell me. I want to learn more from you.
[00:36:57] Nicole: Okay, well, the last one we have is the Thriver. So let's talk about the Thriver.
[00:37:03] Lauren Hodges: Yeah. So the thriver is like the end game. It's that person we all aspire to be. We are in a lot of moments in our life. We take a stressful situation and we reframe it; it's opportunity for growth or we've just somehow gotten back in the driver's seat. They're the ones who are more agile and resilient. They're not just weathering a storm, they're thriving through it. And they come from, in my experience and in my research, three different areas. Number one, they were just very lucky to be born into a very thriving environment. You know, they were raised by thriver parents, and they just, they just have a really good grasp. It's not that they haven't gone through challenge. It's that they were just, it was modeled well for them this, these resilient behaviors. That's number one. Number two, they've trained for it. They've worked really hard, and I have a lot of clients who can sort of, testify to the power of really investing in this area of your life for, four or five, six months. I have seen some unbelievable transformations from the leaders that I work with, who I would confidently call them thrivers. They're not absent of stress. Again, there is no such thing. They didn't conquer anything. They have a stress personality out there. One of the other seven is them. They have just really learned how to move through it. Recognize it, say hello to it, love it. Acknowledge it, intervene, and move on quickly. The third type of thriver is the one who has been through something really challenging. Horrific, yeah. And it has changed their inherent beliefs about what is worth their stress response in the first place. They're not even reactive to things that the rest of us would be. And, those are the ones that you can feel their energy and their soul in the room, and they just, things just seem to fall off their back, like it was no big deal. And it's not that they're, again, absent of stress, they get worked up, but their reframe ability is so almost instantaneous, and those are the ones that I love to talk to, because they are the ones that we can- sadly, bittersweet- learn the most from. How do we capture that perspective on life in general and train our brains to really not even react to certain things that the rest of us would just lose our cool over. So that would be a thriver in a nutshell. They're born into it, they train it, or they've experienced something tough or it's a combination therein. And all of us can move in the direction of a thriver and be that person more of the time. That's the whole point in that particular chapter. Actually, I take that back, in the chapter after that, there are what I call Thriver accelerators..
[00:39:50] Nicole: Yeah. Page 312, everybody.
[00:39:52] Lauren Hodges: Yeah, I didn't know if we were going to cover that, but Thrivers do tend to have a lot of those practices in place. Prioritizing sleep and exercise, nutrition, constantly learning, training their brain. Those types of things are also in the book too. So if we're looking at like, big picture, I can influence all stress personalities, those Thriver accelerators are in there too, and Thrivers tend to embody a lot of that as well.
[00:40:15] Nicole: Yeah. Yesterday I had a training room full of young leaders and we were talking about how you can choose how you move through the day, but you got to sit still and go, okay, this is what I'm going to do today. You know, you got to get your brain engaged, and one of the more was kind of like, well, sometimes you have a bad day and I'm like, Oh, of course, of course you're going to have a bad day. I said, but you know, I know people that like you ask him, how are you doing? They're like, if I was any better, I'd be twins. Like people that, like that's their response, that's what they believe. That's how they've chosen to show up. They could have something bad going on, but they're like, I'm good. I'm working through it
[00:40:51] Lauren Hodges: Mm hmm.
[00:40:52] Nicole: So it's really interesting to see how certain people just have it wired. No, there's going to be joy in the midst of trauma or whatever, I'm going to find the silver lining, all that good stuff. Yep. So good. So good.
[00:41:04] Lauren Hodges: Yeah. And I love to just remind people that even Thrivers have their days. You know, There's no finish line to this work. Even our most resilient people that we know that always are like that every time we see them, they have a threshold like everyone else. And there's going to be times when we're all a version of ourselves we're not proud of or we're burned out or whatever it is. I say that just to remind your listeners to give themselves some grace in this process. There's no like certificate at the end of this that's like congratulations, you're a thriver. You're never going to experience negative stress again...
[00:41:32] Nicole: Right. Right.
[00:41:34] Lauren Hodges: You know It just doesn't really work that way. We're just like trying to move the dial in the direction of feeling more in control. Really this all boils down to how in control we feel of our stress personality. It's not about conquering and I know that
[00:41:49] Nicole: again. Say it again.
[00:41:50] Lauren Hodges: but it's important to me. Yeah. It's important to me because I think there's a lot of grace that has to come with this work. It's like eating healthy. Like you're going to have those days that it's just tougher to do that than others. You just have more of a threshold or less of a threshold. And so I want to, I want to always remind everybody to give themselves grace in this whole process. It's good. It's worthy work, but it's hard work.
[00:42:12] Nicole: All right, everybody, have you just had the best time listening to Lauren Hodges and talking about her book, Less Stress, More Calm, Discover Your Unique Stress Personality and Make It Your Superpower. Okay, so go buy the book. You can get it on the Amazon. You can get it all the places. Lauren, what's your website?
[00:42:32] Lauren Hodges: My website is performance-on-purpose.com. And we're a human performance training and coaching company like you said earlier. We focus on a lot of different areas of high performance behaviors for leaders. One of our courses is called agility. And this particular book is embedded into that program. So it's part of our curriculum. This was like just a passion project for me. This is a side of our work that I really like a whole lot, I would say the most. On the website there is a stress personality quiz. So feel free to go in, it's free. You get your report right away. The only firewall there is just you have to enter your email address to get the results. You can always unsubscribe from the newsletter. I just send out a monthly kind of tips like this, conversations and some brain science and stuff. So feel free to take that. And I'm also, there is a LinkedIn learning course on stress personality, so I'm on LinkedIn as well. You can find me there.
[00:43:25] Nicole: Fantastic, everybody,. We've had Lauren Hodges on the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. Do us a favor, go down right now as you're finishing and hit the like button and leave a little love note for Lauren. Tell her how much you appreciate her coming on the podcast and downloading all of her superior genius so that we can all handle our stress. We can have less stress and more calm. Again, Lauren, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm very grateful.
[00:43:52] Lauren Hodges: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me on.
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