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The cognitive edge podcast is designed to help you gain an advantage in all things thinking, learning and understanding. This podcast is brought to you by Strat Futures Pty Limited, the developer of the cognitive readiness and resilience. It is an evidence-backed digital platform for leaders to enhance cognitive performance. We deliver actionable cognitive fitness enhancements based on user needs, including focus techniques, productivity tools, critical thinking and decision frameworks and biological optimisation. Supported by practical training, data-driven insights, and a peer community, we empower users to build resilience, make better decisions, and thrive cognitively in a digital world.
Miah Hammond-Errey (00:02)
Welcome to the Cognitive Edge. I'm your host, Dr. Miah Hammond-Errey I'm the CEO of Strat Futures and an adjunct associate professor at Deakin University. In this podcast, we focus on anything that helps you think, learn, and understand to help you improve and gain a cognitive edge. Follow and join us on this journey.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (00:27)
My guest today is Doctor Jo Lukins Jo, thanks for joining me on the cognitive edge.
Dr Jo Lukins (00:31)
Thank you for having me, I'm really excited to be here.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (00:34)
Dr Jo Lukins is a performance psychologist with over 30 years experience.
Starting in elite sports, she has worked with countless sports teams and elite athletes. Currently, she's the mental skills coach for the Dolphins and Queensland Women's State of Origin, as well as women's NBL referees. In addition for the past decade, she's helped defence and corporate leaders perform under pressure. She's authored 10 books, including The Elite and Belief: Building Unshakable Confidence. She's been awarded as an outstanding alumni at James Cook University.
I'm coming to you today from the lands of the Gadigal people. I pay my respects to el-ders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, C and community. I had the great pleasure of spending a few days with Jo recently in the context of human performance optimisation. And one of the things I really enjoy is her ability to translate complex concepts into actionable and simple practices and help individuals build great habits. I want to share some of her expertise with you all.
So Jo, to kick us off, in your view, what are the foundational building blocks of good cog-nitive health and performance?
Dr Jo Lukins (01:38)
Well, I think having listened to the podcast already, some of your earlier guests have al-ready tapped into what I would see as some of the fundamentals, but it's definitely worth mentioning some of those things again. So when I see, and obviously in the areas that I work in, which is in elite sport and in defense settings, corporate settings and so forth, even though they're very different domains, there's very common foundations I think that lead us towards success.
And so it starts with all the low hanging fruit that we know about. It is about, you know, how well fueled are you? How well rested are you? So, and whilst that feels like, you know, repeating what we already know, as you saw when we spent some time together, my question to an audience is, well, we know that, but what are we doing?
You know, so that's usually when people, if they're in the audience, they look at their feet and don't want to maintain eye contact with me. And I know I put myself in those catego-ries from time to time as well. So I think those foundations, they start with our fuel and with our rest. But then if we broaden it more into the areas where people might expect some of my expertise to sit, is it is around the habits piece. And the reason that I like to focus on habits is because
Our habits are more reliable than things such as our motivation. So motivation is incred-ibly important, but of course it waxes and it wanes through the day often impacted by our fuel and our rest. So I think our habit formation is an incredibly important part of it. Then I also think if I talk about it more broadly, I'm sure we'll get into it in more detail. It is that mindset piece. It is the way we choose to view the world. It is our habits of thinking and the perspectives that we have.
We know that thinking in particular ways and through a particular lens can either get us, it'll take us in one of two directions, won't it? It'll either take us closer to our goals or fur-ther from our goals. So we know that that mindset piece is incredibly important. And I think if I was going to add in one extra element there, I think it would sit around grati-tude. So there's been an incredible amount of research in the psychological domain over the last 15 to 20 years around
gratitude as a piece. we know that gratitude is an absolute winner for us in terms of our general health and wellbeing. But what we're also seeing in the areas that I work in is we also see the links between gratitude and high performance. So that might be something that we might touch on today as well.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (04:04)
before we go to to kind of understanding that cognitive performance in a bit more detail, I just want to ask what the s what do you think the most surprising thing is about how top performers actually think and behave versus how people think they will.
Dr Jo Lukins (04:18)
Yes, well I think the most surprising thing is often, often they don't think too differently. You know, so I was working with a group of athletes in a particular sport only yesterday and some of their challenges, some of the things that bring about worry, there things that bring about concern and so forth would be highly relatable to anybody. So I think sometimes there's an expectation that the thinking is completely different all of the time.
And I think what elite performers are able to do is to dial into the thinking patterns and styles that will facilitate their performance. But there certainly might be plenty of times when they might dial that back or not be able to sustain that over time. So I think peo-ple's expectations is that, you know, if you look at an elite athlete, I'll go down that line first. If you look at an elite athlete, it's the idea that they are elite in their thinking all of the time.
And I guess what my career has shared with me is the vulnerabilities of humans. And there's no doubt that in practicing the habits of high performance, you see consistency, you would expect to see that, but it's understanding the fallibility of humans. And that's what I think makes the area that I work in so fascinating.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (05:33)
It that's actually a great segue because I c I want to talk a little bit about measuring and understanding cognitive performance what we've found on the platform is that often once users join and they start experiencing the platform, they they are quite surprised at the relationship between, you know, physical health, sleep, emotional regulation, and cognitive performance.
It's not surprising because human bodies are interconnected, but somehow we put thinking on a different kind of platform to how we think about the rest of the body. And I like your approach because it acknowledges that interconnectedness. If someone wants to genuinely improve their overall cognitive function and performance,
Dr Jo Lukins (05:57)
Yeah
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (06:12)
Where do they need to start and what does that journey look like?
Dr Jo Lukins (06:16)
Another great question. I love what you said there about the interconnectedness of, if we use the framework that Defence very publicly use about mind, body and teams.
So there is definitely that connection between all of those. I think the foundational piece, particularly from the mind perspective, Is a concept that's had different branding over the years.
But I'll go with the one that's most currently familiar for people is that notion of mindful-ness. Mindfulness, awareness, ability to look in the cognitive mirror and to have an un-derstanding about where am I at right now? And it might be if I'm about to go on a stage. Mindfulness equips me with the ability to check in with my body and say, how is it? Is my heart racing?
If it is, that's a piece of data that I can do something about to calm it down, to enable me to perform better. What is happening for me in terms of, I feel physically prepared? Do I need to have another drink of water? How do I look after myself from that perspective? But then what that mindfulness also allows me to do is to tap in mentally with what is my current self-talk and how am I feeling in terms of my preparation? And have I done my usual habits for success?
that might lead into a presentation. So I really do think, I think, if you can't see it, you can't do anything about it, is fundamentally what I would say. So I don't think we can make any steps in terms of enhancing our performance unless we've been able to look in the mirror, sometimes literally, but also figuratively, and to say, where am I at?
What am I thinking right now and is there anything that I need to shift or change that's going to get me closer to the performance that I'm seeking in this particular endeavour, whatever that might be.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (08:07)
what do you think is most important for each of us to focus on, or if you're so inclined, measure and track when it comes to improving cognitive performance?
Dr Jo Lukins (08:18)
Yes, well I think that depends on your current strengths and your current areas for growth. So if I can share I guess a mantra of mine that I lean heavily on in the work that I do and this will be familiar to some, I think I've extended it little bit but it's the notion that success leaves clues and disappointments offer lessons. So in any activity that we've done, if those who are listening to us today
or watching us today, think back to your last performance, whatever it might be. And it might be your last day at work. know, what did you do yesterday when you were at work? It doesn't necessarily have to be a performance on a stage or on the field or on the battle-field. But if you think about your last performance and you think of it through the lens of what went well and where are there areas for growth, I think that's the starting point for us
I want to do a broad generalisation. don't think people spend enough time reflecting on what we've done well. You know, we kind of go, yep, that went well, awesome, tick, move on. And we've just walked past, you know, so many gold nuggets there of because for all the high performers that I work with, they usually want to repeat high performance. So if you want to repeat high performance, why wouldn't you take the elements of your per-formance that went well so that you can rinse and repeat and have that happen again?
And then I very carefully phrase it as, and our disappointments offer lessons because it's important to understand that, we are improving or we're learning is essentially how we move through life if we give ourselves permission to look at it in that particular way. So I think if we start, to come back to your question, I think that if we are trying to understand where is my starting point for cognitive growth or cognitive improvement.
It comes from our ability to give ourselves a, I'm going to use the word deliberately, a kind audit over our performances and say, what do I genuinely think I'm doing well here? And to recognise that and to really dig into, well, why is that happening? And it might be be-cause I slept well the night before. It might be because I was well-fuelled. It might be be-cause I spent four hours preparing for whatever it was that I was going to do, preparing for a meeting or something like that.
So where has the success come from? And then where is my room for growth? And once we know that about ourselves and particularly in relation to our cognitive patterns, then we can go, okay, so with that in mind, this is the area of me that I'm looking to improve.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (10:45)
That's really helpful. So often we measure our cognitive performance or decision-making capacity on the outcome, which may or may not be a result of the specific you know, effort or process or even the mindset that we're in. Sometimes you just get lucky and sometimes you make great decisions that don't actually result in great outcomes just because of the circumstances. So that level of reflection back, I think, can really help move us beyond assessing.
those things based on solely the outcome, which I think it we have a tendency to do. Be-cause we want to repeat positive performance.
Dr Jo Lukins (11:19)
But well, what
we do and I agree, think tying that into outcome versus process is a really helpful way to think about it. And if it's okay, I'll just reflect on a quick story from recently. So as you mentioned in the introduction, I work with the women's state of origin and for those who don't follow rugby league. So I work with the Queensland team and we lost the se-ries. you know, in terms of outcome,
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (11:30)
Yep, thanks.
Dr Jo Lukins (11:45)
if you're measuring that, you do as a Queenslander through the lens of success or fail-ure, then you would define that as a failure. and look, I would absolutely want to be sit-ting on this podcast saying, and we won, but we didn't. So what do do with that? So if you look at that through the lenses, you know, the successes and what are the clues that are there and where's the growth for improvement? You you look at things like,
Like losing a series three nil is a tough thing to go through. And that's over an extended period of time of it was give or take the campaign went from February to May. So it's a long time for a group of people to be together coming in and out of camps. Now what happens when you're losing, when you have losses is your team dynamics. If we come back to the team element of it is the foundations you've led there will greatly determine
the performances moving forward. So, you know, what I saw was a group of women and the staff that supported them. And we hung tight through all of that. Now that happened because of the culture and what we've done in terms of the values and a whole range of other pieces. So whilst we didn't get the outcome we wanted in terms of points on the board and beating New South Wales and so forth, you know, where were the wins for us? Because that becomes really important then for the squad moving forward.
You know, we were a relatively young team. had seven debutants. You know, there's a whole range of other things that, lead into that. But there, there are so many, if I use in-verted commas, wins that came from that campaign that don't necessarily look what, like what you measure on the scoreboard.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (13:19)
Yeah, great great insight. you've written about embracing the suck. What's the cognitive skill behind staying functional in discomfort?
Dr Jo Lukins (13:29)
Yes, so it really is about our relationship with that concept of discomfort, isn't it? so, in areas that you've worked in and in many, I mean, this resonates, think, for everyone is there are times when we do stuff and it's not the most pleasant of things or it's, and sometimes it may not even feel like there's a purpose to the thing that we're actually do-ing. I've often had
That said to me in both sporting and defence settings, where people have recounted ex-periences they've had and said, I was asked to do this and I don't even know why, which I guess speaks to the importance of the why question for people as well. So, but essen-tially when we look at that embrace the suck notion, it's the idea that you can't always change your circumstances. So if you are an athlete and coach says, do this, then.
you do this, you know, if or even in sport, the weather conditions, you know, might be dreadful. Again, do whatever you like, but if you can turn down the rain, well done, you know, so it's it's what do do there in defence settings, you know, if you are if you are tasked to do something again, it doesn't serve you well to turn around and say, actually, no, I'd rather not, you know, in corporate settings, and so forth. So it's not so much
where we find ourselves or certainly once something has happened. It's not so much what happens to us, but it's how we respond to it. That's the pace. And I often talk to people about your sense of control is one of the key things for many people that keeps you functioning well. And this is just, guess, an observation through my 30 odd years of working is that the two things that I find people really generally don't like is when life feels out of control and unpredictable.
So what the ability to embrace the suck does is it puts us in a position where we say, look, I may not like where I'm at right now, but I am going to, I'm going to influence the narrative for myself. I'm going to decide how I view this particular opportunity. A flippant example that comes to mind is literally this morning as my husband went to leave the house.
He reached into the fridge to grab his lunch, knocked a jar of olives and they came out. The jar just went everywhere and there was olives and olive juice and everything all over the kitchen floor. We were cleaning it up. I mean, it's a good example, isn't it? Like you would wish that hadn't happened. It happened. And then I turned to him and said, well, at least the jar didn't break. And he said, yes, of course you've. And I said, well, at least it didn't. It could have been worse, you know? So it's that perspective. do you, how do you, we can't always control the circumstances.
but we do have influence over the thinking that we have. And that's incredibly important because of the relationship between how we think and then the resulting feelings that come from it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (16:15)
Okay, I wanna ask three things from that. The re The relationship between how we feel about things and our actions. Can you just talk us through that a bit?
Dr Jo Lukins (16:17)
Sorry Miah, that was very long answer to your question.
Yes. So in a nutshell, I would say that it's our feelings that drive our behaviors. Now, some people don't like it when I say that because they don't want to think that their feelings drive their behaviors. But for those who are familiar with the cognitive behavioral ap-proach to humans, is the notion that our behaviors are influenced by the way we think and the things we do. So let's use an
An example that is familiar for many. So the alarm clock goes off this morning and you plan to do some exercise and we're recording this in the winter months. So the alarm goes off and then our self talk, our commentary starts and you know, we may go down the path of fantastic. I get to get up and do some exercise this morning on this bleak cold day or we might go down a path of it's too cold. It's too early. I don't feel like it. So those two competing.
versions of self-talk generate different types of feelings. And so those feelings that, woohoo, can't believe I get to exercise this morning. I am probably slightly over glossing that, but anyway, let's pretend it's that. There's an energy that comes with that, which means you are more likely then to travel out of bed and get yourself changed and off you go to do your exercise. If I'm telling myself,
It's so dark. It's so warm under the blankets. I really don't feel like it. I'm sure I could do it this afternoon. You know, and I feel tired and sluggish. Then again, it's those feelings. So I've always found that even though that we can at times behave our way to success, that it's, it's those feelings that they generate the emotion. It's the emotional tone that drives the behavior. If you get, I'm going to stick with exercise examples, cause they're always so pertinent to people. But if you get home at the end of a long day,
and you're sitting on the couch and you decide to go to the gym or you decide not to go to the gym, whichever way that goes. And then you are telling someone else about your decision. You'll say, I didn't feel like going. You won't say, I didn't think like going. You know, it's, it's our feelings that really have a very strong influence. So with that in mind, then what we want to be able to do is to find some strategies to manage our thinking.
to help generate the feelings that are gonna get us closer to the behaviors that are then gonna lead on to the performances that we have.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (18:43)
I wanna come to that in a sec. I said there were three things. can embracing the suck be trained? How do you flex it like a muscle? Yeah.
Dr Jo Lukins (18:50)
Yes, yes,
yes, you can. Yes, you can. So what a great question. So what I would challenge people to think about to start with is, have you noticed how habitual your thinking is? So what do we mean by that is it means that when we find ourselves in particular kinds of scenar-ios, we have a tendency, you know, one of the things that our brain does is it is
It's trying to make life easier for us. That's one thing our brain is always trying to do. So that's why we flip back into habits. So we're not having to constantly deal with new sce-narios. So that might be why your morning routine is so familiar. So what we know is that the way we think, if you would think about doing a challenging physical training session, whatever that might be, there's a very good chance that as you start to
increase your heart rate or increase the weights that you're lifting or you increasing the discomfort in whichever way that comes there is a commentary that goes with that and over time we develop that into a habit so the jargon word we would use in psychology for that there's a few but the one I'll go with for today is that then becomes what we call our attributional style the way we attribute the world the way we explain the way things hap-pen I am lifting this weight well because I am strong
for example, is a narrative we might tell ourselves. I am struggling to find my breath be-cause I'm not fit, might be another narrative we might tell ourselves, or we might say, well, I didn't get enough fuel and rest yesterday and I'm fatigued. They're very different explanations of the world. And so with the mindfulness that we were talking about earli-er, if we notice our patterns of thinking when we are in discomfort,
and when we're under cognitive load and when we're under physical load, then we can develop strategies to help tweak the thinking. You know, we don't even have to com-pletely overhaul it, but if we can be creative in how we do that, we can change the way we then emotionally experience it, and then that then potentially allows us to move forward.
more often than not, and even with the high level elite performers that I work with, par-ticularly in the physical domain, so if I think particularly of athletes, is they will often tell me that at the point when they feel like they've hit the wall or hip fatigue or whatever de-scription they might use, and you then give them a moment of rest, they then say, no, I could have kept going. It's just that my, it's that notion of does the mind give up before the body does? It's always going to be a fine line, because what we never want to do is put
people where we push them to the point of injury. that's, you know, sometimes that's not an exact science as to what that looks like. But my experience is absolutely, I've spent most of my career with athletes looking at how do you change your narrative in a way that's helpful, that's going to get you closer to the outcomes and allow you to push through the discomfort so that you can truly get closer to giving the performance that you're capable of.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (21:55)
Okay, so I am gonna come in in the next question and ask you how do you change that narrative? but first I just wanted to finish off on the three things. When when you talk about that reframing,
Dr Jo Lukins (22:03)
Mm.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (22:06)
Where is that line between reframing things in a healthy way and not glossing over it?
Dr Jo Lukins (22:13)
Yes, yes, because I guess to the question, can you be too optimistic? Absolutely, you can. And the analogy I often give and again, just to simplify it, but this will make sense to anyone who has ever spent time as a child reading in the Hundred Acre Wood is if we re-member two of those characters from Winnie the Pooh, and we've got Tigger and we've got Eeyore. So if we wanted to typecast
explanatory style ⁓ in a simplified way. We talk about the tiggers and the eos of the world and not that they are discrete descriptors but almost to think of it like it's a continuum. And certainly when you look at explanatory style, you look at optimism, when you look at pessimism, those are typically measured along a continuum. So it's not like you are an optimist, you are a pessimist, but you sit somewhere along a continuum of that. What we see from the research is that
particularly in any sort of performance environment, there's a wide body of research that is supportive that a more optimistic explanatory style is predictive of success. Generally, if you are in areas of academic study, if you are in sport, if you are in work, if you are thinking about your health, if you are thinking about your relationships, if you work in sales, you know, any of those kinds of domains where we are setting ourselves out.
in a pro-social way trying to achieve, then some of those key elements of optimism and what sits at the base of optimism is hope. Now, for anyone who hears me say that and says, ⁓ yes, Jo, but hope is not a strategy. I agree. It's not your sole strategy. If you're go-ing to walk into the exam and just go, and someone says, Jo, how did you prepare for the maths exam? I'm just going to hope it went well. It goes well. ⁓ Then I'm in trouble. But what we know is that
that hope is certainly, it's the foundation because let's think about what the opposite of hope is. That means that something is hopeless, you know, and so we know that that is then predictive of things like depression and a whole range of other factors. So we know that hope sits there and explanatory style is particularly from an optimistic point of view is that when something goes well, you know, we ask ourselves, you know, we personal-ise it, we say, you know, did this go well because of me or was I just lucky in the universe?
You know, we ask ourselves how permanent it is. know, did I go well in the maths test because I'm smart? Or I just happened to fluked that test. Or we ask ourselves how per-vasive it is. You know, is it that I'm just good at trigonometry questions on a maths test, or do I tend to do well in most mathematical senses? So those three P's of, you know, is it personalized to me? Is it permanent? And is it pervasive? Which I know is a
a lot. It's a big mouthful there. But essentially that's what optimism is a reflection of is the tendency that when things go well, we tend to think those things. And in reverse, if we tend to be pessimistic, you know, and even if I do well on the maths test, I go well, they gave me a they gave me an easy test. I'm probably just good at trigonometry, not much else. And, you know, it's it was just a one off, you know, like that's a more pessimis-tic way to look at it.
So we know that there's some nuances there with optimism versus pessimism and how that relates to performance. And that can be measured. ⁓ And there's a number of good instruments out there that do that. And to your point though, can you overplay your cards with optimism? Absolutely you can. You can overplay optimism if there is a high level of risk in a situation. So, you know, if I'm flying a plane between Brisbane and Syd-ney and I don't know, an engine freezes up.
and I say, she'll be right, I'm sure we'll get there. That is a foolish decision.
So there is a tipping point there where I think you can be overly optimistic, but what we definitely know from the research in all the areas I mentioned before is being overly pes-simistic is absolutely not helpful for us in terms of our wellbeing, in terms of our perfor-mance.
and just in terms of what it's like to be with us as a human.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (26:19)
Reframing things needs to come with acknowledgement that people have that emotion-al state and that it it's it they need to have the experience to move through that at their own pace. And if they are trying to reframe, then for them, that's acknowledging that that i that emotional state actually exists. And I think there's a really there is an important dis-cussion because some people do feel like
they want to move in that direction, but they they also want it to feel genuine and so they're taking, I guess, different steps. Yeah.
Dr Jo Lukins (26:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I really like that because I think that
it's, we do want to in its simplest way, we want to feel the feels. So if you're having an emotional response to something and you don't stop and acknowledge it and you don't give yourself permission to feel the annoyance or the frustration or whatever, all you ac-tually do is just tuck that back somewhere into the deep recesses. it's, it, to be dealt with later or to creep up on you and then to present itself at the most inopportune of time.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (27:09)
To be dealt with later.
Dr Jo Lukins (27:17)
or you know so and particularly if it's something that's maybe continuing you know in a workplace or whatever it might be so it's absolutely valid to have the emotions that we have it's just that what we want to be able to do is give ourselves some space to experi-ence them where we can give ourselves some time to process them but then also to rec-ognize the environment that we're in I've just been working with one particular women's sporting team a different one to
to the ones we've mentioned, they're a large squad and each week, I think it's close to 17 players don't get picked. You know, that is disappointing and they all wanna get picked. Like it's a big squad. And so we were actually having that conversation recently and I said, it's absolutely valid to be disappointed when the coach tells you you're not playing. And then you have to inhale and exhale, because in half an hour you're gonna be at train-ing and you don't wanna bring that version of yourself in because...
isn't going to pick you next week either, you know, if you come in all sad. you know, it's that regulating and again, all that comes from our ability to look in the virtual emotional mirror and to see how am I feeling right now? How am I experiencing that? And what can I do about it to help myself through this time?
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (28:29)
so y you touched on it a couple of times there, but how do we t tweak those strategies that we have to help us embrace those difficult moments?
Dr Jo Lukins (28:38)
Yes,
so there's a range of ways that you can do it and I guess it depends on your theoretical position that you come from. for example, I mentioned earlier a cognitive behavioral ap-proach. So the cognitive behavioral approach has as one of its key premises that you take an unhelpful thought, which might be, go back to my maths test, I'm not very smart because I've just not done well on this maths test. And we'd broadly see that as being quite a...
an unhelpful thought for us if I've still got lots of maths tests in front of me. If this is last one I've ever done, then be gone maths. Maybe I don't need to think about it anymore. if I'm a psychology student and I've still got couple of subjects to come with maths in them, the cognitive behavioural approach would tell us that you take a thought that's broadly unhelpful and then you take that thought to court.
you you analyze it from different ways. So you might ask yourself, what's the evidence that's true? You know, well, maybe I'm a third year student and maybe I've passed tests before. So maybe the reason I didn't do well wasn't because I'm hopeless at maths. Maybe it's because, you know, and there could be something else. So then you could look at the alternatives. Why else might this have come about? You could look at the im-plications, you know, even if this thing is true, you know, so it's, it's giving some level of analysis to it.
⁓ One of my favourite strategies for if I'm having a little bit of a moment, like if I'm driving through town and I get caught up at the traffic lights because there's a train coming through and now I'm going to be late and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I can feel myself spi-ralling into an unhelpful mood, a pessimistic outlook. And I know what version of me will get out of the car when I finally get to my destination. One of my favourite questions is, how long is this going to be?
a burden to me? How long is this going to be an inconvenience? You know, and one of my favorites is well, so for example, we're recording this on a Tuesday, and it doesn't mat-ter what day people are listening to us on it. But you know, think about all the things that bothered you exactly seven days ago. You know, I can't even remember last Tuesday, I'd really, I'd really have to look at my diary to see what I was doing last Tuesday. So let alone the things that bothered me. So how much do I want to hold on to those annoyances?
And you know, you can take it further forward. You know, will this be an issue for me in a day, a week, a month? You know, what were all the things that bothered me in early July last year? I have not a clue. You know, so how much energy do I want to invest in sitting with that unhelpful thought? So you can take that sort of cognitive behavioral strategy. Other theoretical approaches would encourage us and also has a good evidence base is ACT, which is acceptance and commitment therapy.
So it has a similar approach to the cognitive behavioral approach in that it says, recog-nize your thinking, but it just says, you know what, thoughts come along all the time. If we sat in a room and I had some clever little machine that could spit out every thought that went through my head, like a little ticker tech machine, leave me in the room for the hour with nothing else to do. And you'd come back in and you'd have to wade through all the paper. Cause my thoughts would be random and I would have many of them. But as humans, what we do is we,
And some people will argue it's because humans tend to have a functional negativity bi-as is we tend to look for what's going to go wrong. You know, that's what's us alive for all of this time we've been on the planet. And so, you know, we seek out the negative and then we kind of hold onto it and put it close to our heart, you know. And so sometimes if we can just see that the thought was just a thought, you know, that, you know, I didn't give a good presentation or...
I didn't perform very well in that training session or whatever it is. That's just a thought that I had and thoughts come and go. So there's a range of ways that you can look at it. I guess the most encouraging thing I would say to people is that it is possible to shift your explanatory style if that's something that is of interest to you. If you go, look, I probably am more pessimistic than is helpful for me at times.
that there is ways to shift that. And then there are also little strategies that you can do that kind of shift the way you manage adversity when you face it that can be helpful for you. there's lots of resources out there on how to do that. And I know that's a particular focus that you have in the work that you do, but there are, we could talk for days on what all the kinds of strategies are, but there are plenty there, but it's about the way.
most broadly the way you choose to think and recognising that our thinking is a habit and a pattern and we've got ourselves to hear with repeated practice so it makes sense then that repeated practice of thinking in different ways is the way that we then shift our thinking.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (33:19)
Yes, and ⁓ to plug your own book, The Elite. ⁓ has lots and lots of strategies ⁓ in there, so people can definitely check that out.
Dr Jo Lukins (33:22)
Hahaha.
thank you for the plug.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (33:28)
I wanna go in a few different directions.
Just really quickly, reframing like many of the mindset tools you've mentioned is really simple. It's not easy, but it is really simple. How come these seemingly small and simple techniques are so successful?
Dr Jo Lukins (33:45)
because what they do is they momentarily shift our perspective and change the emo-tional tone. I think that in its simplest form is what happens. I think that the moment that you can look at something in a slightly different way and it takes you to a different place emotionally, what we get from that is emotional momentum, if you like. And, you know.
When we're about our emotions, when we're talking about our mood, I always say that mood is contagious. And so it makes sense then that it doesn't take much. I guess the best example I could give or the example that's just come to my mind is let's just imagine that you want to go to the gym. Well, you've told yourself you're going to the gym because it's Tuesday and you go to the gym on a Tuesday, but you actually don't feel like going. But by some Christmas miracle, you've managed to dress yourself in your gym clothes. You've got your shoes on.
You've driven to the gym and you're there and you still don't feel like going. And then I have little rules for myself like, well, you've got this far, just go in and listen to one song and then decide what you want to do. But you walk into the gym and then wouldn't you know it, your favourite song is playing in the gym and it's pumping out and all the rest of it and boom, your whole mood shifted, your whole mood shifted and then you go in and you do the gym session. it, the...
The good thing for us as humans is it doesn't take very much to shift the momentum, you know, if we're open to it. And as long as whatever the thing is, is it's consistent with our goals. So if physical activity is consistent with your goal, then it may just take a song in the gym to change everything. And then all of a sudden you're open to doing the ses-sion or whatever it might be.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (35:24)
So we've kind of covered like the reverse there of negativity bias. So catching like the positive momentum that you get. I had a question here about negativity bias in terms of like the practical ways that people can catch that coming, but I want you to answer it from both directions. Like, what's a practical way we can catch any kind of negativity bi-as, but then also gratitude or positivity bias? How can we feel that in the body and
Dr Jo Lukins (35:29)
Yes.
Yes.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (35:50)
remember like remember then, like feel it and go, okay, this is coming. 'cause I think that a lot of that is physiological, you know, you sense a heart rate shift or you sense a feel a physiological change rather than a thinking change.
Dr Jo Lukins (35:59)
Yes.
Yes.
Yes,
I would agree. And actually that's such a great point, Miah, because often when I say to people, you know, and they describe a scenario where they've spiraled down or spiraled up, whichever way they've gone. And if I say to them, so what did you think? They'll go, I don't know. I just felt it. And so, so to that point, if it is habitual for us, then no wonder we don't catch it. What we get left with is the remnants of the thinking, is, which comes through from the emotions.
So what does it mean for catching the less helpful pessimistic, more negative thinking? We need to do it early. Because what happens is if we think about for any of us, if we're going through a tough time and there's a lot of that sort of less helpful self-talk and less helpful reality of a situation, know, if repeatedly half a dozen things have gone wrong and it's still only 11 o'clock, you know, in the morning, you know, so those things build upon each other.
And our best chance of intervening is to catch it early with that sort of broader negativity, if you like. I think it's also about having some self-awareness about what is your patterns of less helpful self-talk. Like what are the things that you typically say to yourself? There might be some phrases that you use. And if you hear yourself saying that, again, it's al-ways going to come back to the mindfulness piece, which is why I raised that when you asked that very first question.
So that becomes incredibly important. So the earlier you can intervene on that, the bet-ter. If I can shift to how do you catch the positivity and you actually partly answered that for me in the way you framed the question, because you lent straight into it, it's the grati-tude piece because we know that in moments when we choose to be grateful,
⁓ We notice those moments of gratitude of what's happening for us in our lives. We know the flow on effects, particularly in terms of wellbeing, but also, as I mentioned ear-lier, high performance are really evident. So if anyone wants to follow any of the work of a New York researcher, her name is Sonja Lyubomirsky
mean, Sonja's research is fascinating and she has genuinely looked at gratitude from every possible angle. But it's that notion of, and you don't need, the beauty of it is you don't need spend long doing it. know, people could pause the recording for 30 seconds and think about three things that you're grateful for. And they don't even have to be big things. Maybe.
Maybe the cue to your coffee shop this morning wasn't particularly long. Your barista nailed it and you got a good park out the front, know? Yay me, that sounds like a good start to a day. And it's that noticing, the little tiny things because we know that a little by little, a little becomes a lot. The other thing that I find quite interesting in the gratitude research is in addition to noticing the things for which we're grateful, the other thing that kind of, if you really wanna
10 exit is savour it. So don't just think about the thing that you're grateful for, but actually just sit in that moment. Like how nice was that coffee this morning? And it was, it was so like, it was like the planets lined up for me this morning and I parked in front and I, know, all of those things. And so we are seeing that additional beneficial wisdom that's coming from what happens not only when we notice something that's gone well, but also, but also the savour it and just to
pick up on one of the points that I know Sonja talked about in her research is, and I'm a big fan of, be grateful at any moment of the day that serves you. Don't leave it all till the end of the day, but there's some good research about doing that at the end of the day. And what I've seen with a lot of the athletes that keep gratitude journals and those sorts of things, they will bookend that at the end of their day and
And their anecdotal feedback to me is, Jo, it's almost like a sleep tonic. The last thing I do is I have a notebook next to my bed. I jot down a couple of things about the day, three things that I'm grateful for. I put the pen down, I put my head on the pillow and I'm out cold. You know, and you think about the difference of doing that versus lying there and doom scrolling through your phone. You know, they're very different approaches to your night of sleep. And you know, had no surprises that you get very different.
comes from that.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (40:19)
I I know this question could be opening a can of worms, but
Dr Jo Lukins (40:22)
I'll keep my answer brief.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (40:25)
How do we get into the place where our emotional states drive the behavior we want more of the time?
Dr Jo Lukins (40:33)
Yeah, so I guess it starts with understanding what we want that behaviour to be in the first place. So we kind of want, we do want to have a little bit of an outcome focus there. you know, for all that we say about the importance of process, let's not forget the out-comes because there might be some really distinct ways to, to determine what that is. The outcome might be that you finish a course that you're studying. It might be that you write a piece of writing. It might be that you achieve a physical, you you finish that mara-thon or whatever the thing might be.
So it's understanding what that is. It's kind of reverse engineering it, think, and going, well, given what I'm wanting to achieve, what's it going to take for me to get there? And then it's going to be about if we're wanting to shift the emotional tone that's going to get us closer to the behaviors we're wanting to see, then we really need to know what our narrative is around that as well. For some people, that is done really in a helpful way by goal setting.
So goal setting is something that many people do, many high performance performers do. And when it's done well, definitely can result in the outcome. The one thing I do like to mention is that I've also worked very successfully with athletes and with teams who don't set goals, you know, which almost seems people go, what do you mean? What is this madness? You know, and again, this is about the fact that it's about finding what works for you. But an athlete that I worked with who was in a team sport.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (41:49)
But
Dr Jo Lukins (41:59)
The reason that this came about in this particular direction was when we were planning for, because I often begin with the end in mind. So I'd said, let's imagine it's the end of the season, you know, which is going to be in, I think in that case, it was 11 months time. We're sitting down having a coffee and you're telling me how the year went. What do you want to be able to tell me that you achieved? What do you want me you know? So that's, that's a reasonable way to frame a question to get towards that. And the athlete just looked at me and just went, I don't actually know.
because there's lots of things, but I don't actually know what is realistically within my capabilities for this next year. I don't know whether I need to set my goals this high or this high. And I'm worried that if I get closer to this one, there's missed opportunity here. So that's where it started. He and I had spent quite a bit of time helping him to articulate what his personal values were.
And so he was very clear on his values and he was adamant that what he wanted to do was to live a life that was consistent with his values, which I am a big fan of. And so with that in mind, and I said, look, I think we need to keep monitoring, obviously what you are doing, what you are achieving. How do you feel about, do a little bit of an experiment for the next month. We'll just do it for the next four weeks. Is it each day when you go out to training for your sport?
you set some intentions around your values and you train and let's see how that goes. And so we did that. again, my apologies, I can't give the specifics for this particular per-son, but if we're talking about setting, say lower expectations and goals and higher, he ended up.
finishing the year so much closer to the higher goals than the lower goals. And his reflec-tion was, I don't know if I would have aimed for this stuff, Jo, if we'd set it as goals. look, I've spent my career 30 years, 30 plus years doing way more goal setting than basing it just simply on the values that someone has. But what I would say is that can sometimes be a different way to view performance.
And I'm always a really big fan of people leaning into values and behaving consistently with their values because we feel better about ourselves as humans when we do it. But there's every chance that those values are going to get you closer to the performances that you're seeking as well.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (44:26)
When an athlete or soldier needs to make a clear decision in a really high stakes, time pressured moment, what's happening cognitively for them? And is that different to someone that might freeze or panic?
Dr Jo Lukins (44:39)
Yes, I would say so. all I can say is from the experience I have from the conversations I've had, because again, to be really clear, I have never been personally in that situation. just going from what, what has been said to me is that so consistently
What has been described to me is the most helpful thing that people do is they fall back to their habits. So it's that habits of training and habits. And when I talk about habits, it's the behaviors, but it's also the cognitions. Training the way that you think in those sce-narios. And that's why those simulations and practice situations are so incredibly im-portant for that. And you're right, it is very different to that sort of freezing moment that
people have, which generally typically won't get someone to the outcome that they're seeking. my experience is, I remember talking to an athlete not so long ago and we were talking about goals and we said, you don't really look like your goals, you look like your habits. The goal is something that you might want to try and achieve, but who you are right now is far more reflective of the habits that you have. So I guess the best I can do in answering that question is
I guess, pointing out the importance of reflecting on our habits of thinking, understand-ing the way we think under pressure, and then, you know, where appropriate, seeking areas and ways that we can improve in those particular areas.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (46:12)
Awesome. I wanna ask you about breath work.
Breathing is a physiological sign of stress, like it changes when we're stressed, but it al-so has an impact on our down regulation. So what are some of the breathing strategies that people can use when they are in really, really challenging, difficult, whether they're high-stakes environments or not, that can help them in that exact moment?
Dr Jo Lukins (46:35)
Yes. So there's a range of things that people can do. again, this is going to be about hav-ing a number of breast strategies potentially, although some people will tell me they just use one in particular, but I think it depends on the scenario and how, know, is this a, need to respond to this in this absolute instant or do I have the luxury of walking over to the staff?
kitchen and making a cup of tea before I come back and respond to this email. So they're going to be very different things, but it could be the player on the field, the soldier on the battlefield, whatever the thing might be. having a breathing strategy, as you said, is im-portant. It has obviously the significant physiological effects that it has for people. The other thing I find, and when I talk to athletes about this, is knowing that you have breath work as a strategy.
is down regulating in and of itself. know, so you will see if you watch many particularly sporting teams at the moment, you might see it doesn't seem to matter which team you're watching, but they you know, they'll stand in a circle, they'll breathe together and so forth. I work with a team that they it's a group of female athletes. And so because they're all coming from their lives outside because they're not full time athletes, they have
jobs and things that they do outside, have caretaking responsibilities, caregiving re-sponsibilities as well. So one of the rules is when they come into the room before any session starts, before the team meeting, one of them will lead them through some breath work. And so that might be just some simple inhale, exhales, letting the day go, bringing yourself, you know, your awareness into the room and so forth. We certainly see that many in defence will lean into strategies such as box breathing.
I've heard some people say that they don't like box breathing, know, in defence settings as well. there are a number of strategies there that people can try. One strategy that I see particularly in sport is a strategy which is called the centering breath. And the notion is how do you calm yourself in a moment when you're about to perform? So the rugby league example would be before you kick the conversion or the basketball example might be before you take the free throw shot.
How do I calm myself sufficiently in this moment so that I can perform? And it's essen-tially a couple of physical cues that you might say to yourself. So if I reverse engineer it for those who are watching the video. So this is very cranky, stressed out Jo. Okay, so you can see my shoulders are up. So it's a very conscious relaxing of the shoulders. It's a slight smile on the face because that takes a lot of the tension out of the face. So it's be-ing aware of sort of my physical positioning. And then I take a diaphragmatic breath. So you'll actually see the diaphragm.
move out as I take the breath. And then on the exhale, you have a cue word that you have already lined up for yourself, that you say as you are exhaling that signifies to you that you are calm, you are in control, you are ready for this moment. And it might be a word like calm, it be like breath, or I've got one athlete who has the word smooth, and they use the word smooth because then that signifies to them and they're not a kicker, they're
that they are on a wing position, but they just go if they need to take a breath. And the thing of it is it's the consistency of breathing exercises. So for example, this player will take a couple of centering breaths when we have scored a try because that's a high adrenaline moment and you want to kind of calm your farm a little bit so that you're ready for the next part of the performance. But it will also do it after his tries just being scored against us. So it doesn't matter whether it was the high or the low.
but it's recognizing that when there has been a shift in my breathing or shift in my physi-cality, I can use a breath to kind of anchor myself to where I need to be. there's a range of strategies that people can explore. And like you said, it's interesting, isn't it? What gets us into breath work, what gets us into some of those practices like yoga or Pilates or some of those that are typically seen as sort of those movement practices. And then sometimes we...
we drop out of those and then we come back in and so forth. it's again, it's working at what habitually works well for us. And it can be a time of life phase as well in terms of what we choose to do and where we can allocate our time.
But if I can give one other little handy hint. So I do my breath work at red traffic lights. So every time, every time, so it's become my habit. So for those who do read the elite, there's a little chapter in there about habits stacking and creating the when then strategy. So when I am at a red traffic light, then I take three breaths, irrespective of whether or not I think I need it.
because when you drive around you get enough red traffic lights, you may as well, you're sitting there anyway, so you may as well do something. But of course, if you think about what that is, is even on a day when Jo's heart rate isn't elevated or my arousal levels aren't high, if I'm consistently bringing that down every single time, then it brings a better ver-sion of me out when I get to my location of where I'm going. it's just, and other people could do other things. It could be, you might be able to do it when you're on the phone or it could be, you
When you're going to make a cup of tea, you could do some breathing or whatever the thing might be, it's bringing in some regular breath practice is certainly very helpful for us.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (51:52)
So I may have preempted it, but what's one pre-performance routine, mental or physical, that you would want everyone, not just elite performers, to steal?
Dr Jo Lukins (52:02)
let's go with something different. I would say, because yeah, you couldn't do the rest stuff, you can do any of the things that we've already talked about. But I think approach-ing whatever it is you are about to do and checking in with yourself, seeing where you're at, and then giving yourself what I would call a kind narrative around.
what you are thinking about yourself. I broadly look at when we're talking to ourselves, if we again wanna simplify it, sometimes we're nice to ourselves, which is awesome, be nice to ourselves. But sometimes when we're nice to ourselves, we gloss over the things we need to see. Sometimes we're mean to ourselves, that doesn't generally help us ei-ther. But a kind reflection on ourselves is seeing where we're at, what we're capable of. And I'm such a big fan of curiosity that I think...
those are things that we could take into any performance that set us up ready to perform, but at least ready to manage however the event actually goes.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (53:00)
I started this conversation by saying one of the things I really like about you and your work is how you make it so approachable and easy for people to actually translate them-selves into their own lives. If you had to pick a belief or mental habit that quietly sabo-tages more people's cognitive performance than they realise, what would it be and what would you suggest they do about it?
Dr Jo Lukins (53:21)
So the one I hear about most often is the notion of imposter syndrome. So that is prob-ably the most common thing I cross that notion that
I've found myself in this room or in this space or about to do this performance and I'm about to get found out. I should not be here. You actually don't.
you don't have imposter syndrome. it's one of the few guarantees I can offer to people in a room. If they're hearing me speak as I say, you will walk out of here without imposter syndrome. And that's because if you pick up the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual, mental disorders, and I've done this before, I've taken one into the room and I said, go to the back index and look it up for me.
look up imposter syndrome for me and they get to the eye and they can't find it because it's not there. Cause it's actually not recognized as a condition. So the notion that people have this, I'm not good enough and it's a syndrome, it doesn't exist. And why is that im-portant? I'm not just Jo getting caught up on detail is because when we define ourselves with a syndrome, then that's something that we carry. know, I have imposter syndrome and what I challenge people to do is to shift it.
Because then invariably I'll get people go, well, you might tell me it doesn't exist love, but you should see what's going on in my head. And I go, okay, look, I get that. But what I think is going on in your head, it's not imposter syndrome. You do not have a syndrome. You are having a moment of imposter thinking. And imposter thinking is absolutely true. You know, the moment that I go, you know, well, imposter thinking is actually really help-ful. Cause that stops us from doing stuff that we really like. I should not do heart surgery.
You know, so if I'm suddenly finding myself in a hospital, gowned up with a knife in my hand and I go, I don't think I can do this helpful because I get me out of there. know, be-cause I can't because I actually can't. You know, so what does imposter thinking offer us? Moments of doubt and doubt is
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (55:06)
Because you can't Yeah.
Dr Jo Lukins (55:15)
really helpful because doubt stops us from doing stupid stuff that we shouldn't do. Where doubt doesn't help us, where moments of imposter thinking doesn't help us is 30 seconds before our presentation starts and we're standing in the room.
Do I deserve to be here? That's where we wanna have a strategy And at the moment that that happens for us 30 seconds before we're about to start, that's when we actually do need to bring in our interventions that we've developed for ourselves. That is where you need to notice it, take the breath, change the thinking in whatever way you can or,
whatever your strategy might be, look at your notes and realize what the first thing is you're gonna say and shift it and then you move away from it. doubt isn't normal. I think most of the genuine imposters don't even know that they have it. But for most of us that have imposter thinking, that is simply doubt that is offering us a question. And then we just wanna think then about what is our response to that question.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (56:13)
Before I wrap up, what are you currently curious about or researching that you haven't fully worked out yet?
Dr Jo Lukins (56:19)
so I do have a book that I'm in the process of writing and I'm still trying to work out my exact angle on that particular book. But I think that is, I think it's going to sit somewhere in the space of what keeps people persistent through activities that are important to them. That is, I really need to work on my marketing before I, that is not how I will de-scribe it once it's actually written. But that's, I'm thinking of doing some writing in that particular area.
So that's been a curiosity for me in the last couple of months.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (56:53)
is do you have a reading, watching or listening recommendation?
Dr Jo Lukins (56:56)
I'm reading two books at the moment and one I'm very happy to tell you about. second one I may get judged on but I'm very happy to tell you about that as well. So I'm enjoying reading and I put it near me so I wouldn't get the title wrong, Kate Reed's book which is called Destination Moon, a memoir of fast cars, French pastries and finding purpose. And Kate Reed is the person who is responsible for Lune Croissants.
if you're familiar with the Lune Croissant story. So I'm reading her book and really, really, and I guess it's interesting that I'm looking at writing something in the area of that sort of relentlessness, you know, how is it that we are hell bent on a topic? And she's certainly a picture of that. So maybe that's how I found my way into that. And then a recommenda-tion I was recently given in a defence setting is a book by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. And I'm reading one of his books at the moment, which is a much heavier read.
⁓ It's filling in some gaps for me about some human experiences that I don't know a lot about. So sometimes I find some of those reads heavy, but it's certainly helping with my curiosity. So yeah, I like to read different things at different times.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (58:03)
Awesome. So to close, Jo, from everything we've covered today, what are the three things in the cognitive space that everyone can do to improve their performance?
Dr Jo Lukins (58:13)
Yes, great question. work on your mindfulness skills, I think is the first thing that is a constant work in progress. And I think anything that you can do to to bring about your self awareness, because if we can see it, we can do something about it. I think that's in-credibly important. I think looking at life through the lens of curiosity is one of my my ab-solute go tos. So I think that that's incredibly important.
for us in terms of it allows us to ask questions and to be vulnerable and to learn more and to be wiser. And I always think that's a great thing. And then it comes back to our habits. So it's not always the shiniest of topics and people go, really, haven't you got something else for me? But there's no doubt, like we said earlier, you don't always look like your goals, you look like your habits. So the choices that we make and finding strate-gies and skills to continue to enhance our habits, I think is something that
really does. It's low-hanging fruit. It sets us up well for success.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (59:13)
Awesome. Jo thank you so much for joining me on the cognitive edge.
Dr Jo Lukins (59:15)
Thank you for having me.
Miah Hammond-Errey (59:19)
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