How to Train Your Brain for the AI Era

What if the key to thriving in the age of AI isn’t smarter technology — but a smarter relationship with your own brain?

In this episode of Leading People, Gerry Murray talks with Dr Jon Finn, founder of Tougher Minds and author of Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution.

Jon has spent more than two decades studying how the brain drives performance and wellbeing — and how we can train it to stay focused, energised, and adaptable in an AI-saturated world.

Together, Gerry and Jon explore:

• Why brain science, not algorithms, will define the next generation of leaders
• How Brain State Intelligence helps you shift from distraction to focus and flow
• The habits that protect attention, motivation, and mental energy
• Why your inner technology — your brain — is still your ultimate competitive edge

It’s a practical and hopeful conversation about leading yourself, staying human, and using AI without losing focus or purpose.

Curious?

🎧 Listen and discover how to train your brain for the AI era.

Connect with Jon on LinkedIn

Visit Tougher Minds Website

Follow

Leading People on LinkedIn

Leading People on FaceBook

Connect with Gerry

Website

LinkedIn

Wide Circle

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Why The Brain
• 2:05 Jerry’s Neuroscience Journey
• 3:29 Meet Dr John Finn And His Thesis
• 5:27 From Sport To Business: Lessons Learned
• 8:20 Neural Networks And The AI Wake‑Up
• 11:12 Behaviour Change: Beyond Knowing
• 13:35 Brain States And AI’s Two Roles
• 17:02 Avoiding Overload With Better Prompts
• 20:59 Building Brain State Intelligent Cultures
• 23:45 Recharge: Sleep, Nutrition, Exercise
• 26:45 Chips In Brains And Real Limits
• 30:07 Three Daily Habits For Leaders
• 34:24 Trust, Safety, And Feeling AI‑Proof
• 39:20 From Heavy Rucksack To Snowmobile
• 42:54 Focus, Activation, And Deep Work
• 47:30 Case Studies And Real Results
• 52:07 Scaling With Belts And Playbooks
• 55:03 Final Takeaways And Next Steps
• 1:00:23 Offers, Links, And What’s Next

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to Leading People with me, Jerry Murray. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers, and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights, and tools that drive personal and organizational success. And in between, I bring you one simple thing: short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought-provoking ideas, leading people is your guide to better leadership. When I studied psychology in the 1990s, we didn't really talk much about the brain. Neuroscience was still in its infancy. A few years later, as I moved into personal development and coaching, I started to notice that some of the tools I was using seemed to work astonishingly well. But I didn't really know why. There was a piece missing. What was actually happening in the brain? Was there science behind it? So in 2016, I decided to fill that gap. I signed up for a 10-day classroom course in applied neuroscience. Back in the good old days when we still sat together in a room, scribbling notes and debating ideas. We not only studied how the brain works, but also had to design our own brain-based interventions. That experience changed everything for me. I became a practitioner of brain and behavior change, and ever since I've woven those insights into every training and coaching session I run. It's transformed the impact of my work and the results for my participants. So whenever I meet someone who's pushing our understanding of the brain even further, I'm keen to get them on the Leading People podcast. My guest today, Dr. John Finn, has spent over two decades researching how the brain drives performance and well-being, and how we can train it to thrive in a world increasingly shaped by AI. He's the founder of Tougher Minds, author of Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution, and a returning guest on leading people. Together we explore how to stay focused, energized, and adaptable in the age of AI, and why mastering our own inner technology might be the most important leadership skill of all. Dr. John Finn, welcome back to leading people.

SPEAKER_00: 2:47

Delighted to be back.

SPEAKER_02: 2:49

Thanks, John. When we last spoke, and it was actually back in early 2023, about your book, The Habit Mechanic, we explored how habits shape performance and well-being. And now you're back with a new book and a new focus around, I think it's called Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution. And this kind of asks what how we can stay human, adaptable, and effective in a world where AI is rapidly changing how we work and think. But to start, John, let's remind my listeners about your background and then let's segue into what led you to write this new book and what problems were you seeing in leaders and organizations that made you think we need to train our brains for this next era.

SPEAKER_00: 3:33

Yeah, sure. So I've worked in the fields of resilience, performance psychology, leadership, organizational change for over 25 years now. And I've got three degrees in those areas, including a PhD. My professional work started in elite sport, where I worked in professional football, rugby, cricket, golf. And then seeing a problem, a challenge around very talented young athletes not always fulfilling their potential at senior level. I completed my PhD on the junior to senior or academy to first team career transition. And what I felt was the main effect variable in that, which was emotional regulation. That work then got picked up in education, which took me into education. Um so I went to work for some private schools to set up their performance psychology curriculum. And then that program got a lot of coverage, and we would teach parents what we were teaching the kids, or teach parents how to support their kids, and the parents ended up saying, Can you come and work in our business? Because what you're doing here feels much more advanced than what we're doing. And that was then me moving into the business world, and then we had real success in the city of London and America, but we knew that when we left the building, um, some of that impact we were having started to dissipate. So that's why we wrote The Habit Mechanic, which was the Habit Mechanics a playbook, it's not sort of a typical New York Times bestseller where it's one idea repeated ten times. It's it's an end-to-end playbook of how to become a habit mechanic and also then how to become a chief habit mechanic, our leadership program. And then it was about two summers ago I was in the London Science Museum, and um my partner was looking at something, I'm not sure what she was looking at, but um I ended up looking at the books, and I saw a book on the shelf called The Genius Makers by a New York uh Times journalist called Caird Metz. And it's essentially the story of the people behind neural network AI. Um and Jeffrey Hinton, the the London-born academic, is the protagonist of the story. And what really interested me was the understanding that this neural network AI is based on is designed to work like brains work. And in fact, the technology is not particularly new, it's been around since the end of World War II. We've just never been able to get it to work before, and that's what Hinton was able to do. But anyway, so although this is quite interesting because I know a lot about how brains work, and then I just followed AI and started to use it, started to see is the hype real. Then we started to encourage our clients to use it, and essentially the thing that I found most powerful about AI, or find most powerful, is its ability to personalize learning, but also its ability to do some of the work for you that only you used to be able to do, or that another human would have had to do. So I see it as like an extension of the brain, and it's the first time in human history we've got a technology which is more like a species that can actually think and do cognitive things that up until this point in history only humans have been able to do. And when we traditionally think about helping people to change their behaviour, we know that traditional approaches are broken because they get stuck in the knowing. They think that if we can get people to know what they need to do, they'll be able to do it. But we know that what big compelling sets of data from neuroscience and behavioral science have shown is that most of what people think and do most of the time is automatic or semi-automatic. Don't think of a white elephant. You don't have to, it's already in your brain. We're so it's so automatic. So we know that at least 98% of what we're thinking and doing at any given time is subconscious, and often it's just a hundred percent. So we know we knew that we had to help people to rewire their habits, hence the habit mechanic. And our formula for doing that was two-part formula. One is help people to understand how their brain actually works in a science-based but practical way, and then two, help people to understand how to use behavioral science so they can actually rewire and reprogram the destructive habits they've got and build more super habits, and that's what made you a habit mechanic. But from I think now AI is a powerful third part of that equation because we can use AI to outsource things, jobs, tasks that we would have normally had to use our brain to do. The biggest barrier for behavior change is willpower. Willpower doesn't explain everything about behavior change, but it's the conduit to change needs effort, and that's where people typically fall down, is they just don't have the mental mental capacity to persist with doing the things that they want to do, whether that's going to bed earlier or eating more healthily or not procrastinating or um being a better leader, etc. So I think that AI is so profound that we actually created a new scientific field called human AI performance psychology. And this is what we're passionate about driving forwards, and we think that the key to thriving in the AI era is to develop what we call brain state intelligence, so to really understand how our brains work, so that we can actually understand how AI works at a high level, and we can get the most out of our own brain by co-working with AI and forming human AI teams. That's a summary, Jerry.

SPEAKER_02: 10:05

That's pretty there's a lot in there now that we're gonna unpack over the next uh half an hour or so. Um let's start with a kind of conundrum that you set out here, which is that the uh kind of in the book, and this is this idea that the real challenge isn't the artificial intelligence, it's the human intelligence. And and what do you what do you mean by that, or what risks you see if we don't deliberately upgrade how we use our brains alongside the AI? On Leading People, the goal is to bring you cutting-edge thought leadership from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in leadership today. Each guest shares their insights, wisdom, and practical advice so we can all get better at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share a link with friends, family, and colleagues. And stay informed by joining our Leading People LinkedIn community of HR leaders and talent professionals.

SPEAKER_00: 11:12

Yeah, so AI, neural network AI, is just designed to work like our brains. So if we don't understand how our brains work and the kind of things our brain is capable of doing, we're not going to be able to properly understand AI and the things that it can help us with. But essentially, we're moving to a world where it's it's becoming much cheaper to use AI to do certain cognitive tasks than it is to employ humans. And we saw this in the Industrial Revolution, where industrial machines made it cheaper to execute physical labour, some forms of physical labour, than to pay humans. So where humans are only going to be valuable to their own lives and to their businesses if they can do things that the AI can't do. So for me, humans have to get we have to get good at two things. One is really learning how to use the AI well. It's a bit like driving a snowmobile. Once you learn how to drive it, you're gonna go up the mountain faster than you ever thought possible. But two, it's being able to turn up every day and do the mentally complex, the strategic, the high high-impact problem solving that AI is not um able to do.

SPEAKER_02: 12:47

Okay, so um I'm actually making some notes because there's a lot of rich stuff coming out. Um so there might be people listening to this who might be trying to balance out this idea of AI being a brain enhancer versus AI being a brain replacer. You know what I mean? So, and I'm hearing a bit like you're really tending towards the enhancement aspect where it's going to help people use their brain more effectively. Is that if that what I'm hearing?

SPEAKER_00: 13:18

Yeah, so let's let's break down brain function in a bit more detail, and that will help to frame um that understanding. So we think of the brain as being a bit like a battery, a rechargeable battery. It literally is our brain runs on chemicals and electricity. And we in every 24-hour period, our brain only has so much charge, only so much energy, and it operates in three core states. It operates in the recharge state, which can be sleep, but also non-sleep recharge. So in every 24-hour period, you need to do some recharge. We have a medium charge brain state where we are doing fairly habitual, busy type of work, low cognitive effort, uh, very addictive to our the limbic regions of our brain. Um, and then the third brain state is the high charge brain state. This is where we are doing our most mentally complex thinking, high impact uh thinking, strategic thinking. And this is where AI can help. So there are broadly two different types of AI. One is LLMs or generative AI, and this is uh the sort of commercial names for those are things like Chat GTP and Claude, and there are other more industry-specific ones. We can use LLMs and generative AI to co-work with us on our high-charge, high impact thinking tasks. So, for example, instead of it taking maybe four hours to write a report for a new client, maybe you can do that in one hour if you co-work well with an LLM. And then the other core form of AI is agentic AI. Agentic AI is excellent at automating the our medium charge tasks. So it's very good at doing the kind of tasks that we do, typically doing our medium charge work. So that instead of us getting bogged down with this endless busyness, we can start to outsource some of that to the agentic AI. So we free up time from um doing less busy work, we accelerate our ability to do high charge, high impact work, get more of it done, feel better about ourselves, and that then frees up more time for high quality recharge. So it's not about one replacing the other, it's about using working together as a team and humans leveraging AI to, as you say, augment themselves, but also automate some of the things they would have used to have to do um manually.

SPEAKER_02: 16:23

So so just as an example, I I take my youngest daughter to the train station every morning, and when I get in the car and open up my navigation app Waze, it asks me, Do I want to go to the chain station? So it's already figured out without me having to put in where I want to go. It kind of said, Well, this is what you've been doing. I think this is where you want to go. Is this where you want to go? Is that is that an example of one of these sort of very more medium charge, almost slightly semi-unconscious things that you would have to do, but your AI is just doing it for you, and we have loads of experiences of that in our day-to-day.

SPEAKER_00: 16:57

You've you've got it. So that is this language of agenci and agents is new, but you've got Waze is uh a navigational agent. Um, if you think about banking now, we all have banks in our pocket in an app. We don't go to that physical, or there's not as many physical branches anymore. So some industries, some sectors are way ahead on the agentic piece, but the breakthrough with neural network AI and the vast amounts of mil of trillions that have well, the trillions that have been invested into the development is is putting that technology into everybody's hands. So you don't have to be um a bank to be able to get that tech. You can access it often for free now. And the scalability means that businesses of all shapes and sizes can use it to do things more efficiently and effectively. So, yeah, there are lots of um technology hasn't just this technology hasn't just emerged in the last you know 12, 24 months or whatever, 72 months. It's been coming for a while, but it's really accelerated in the last couple of years because you've got these massive companies um that have emerged and the massive investments that have gone into them.

SPEAKER_02: 18:21

Yeah. And one of the things that occurs to me, I got a couple of things coming out of what you're saying there, is um the the this, you know, when you look at the those three core states, of course the recharge is is when it's really downtime, but the other two states of medium and high charge, um, I've been a pretty as I would say I'm an I I'd like to claim I'm a bit of an early adopter with things like ChatGPT, not just using it, but asking it to automate things for me. Once it's done a few things for me, I'll say like what would the prompt sequence look for that if we had to do it over and over again and you know play around with that. There are times actually, um, and I find it I I have to say I find it to to have it as a sort of companion, a sparring partner, a sort of helping me clarify things, I find it very, very useful. Uh I still don't like to have it do things completely for me, like uh cognitive things like writing for me and that, but it's kind of useful sometimes to help me get my ideas sorted and that. However, the one point I wanted to make, and then I wanted to segue a little bit into one or two other questions, but most of us are dealing with more and more data, more and more decisions, more and more distractions than ever. And I sometimes experience that. I find if you interact with something like the ChatGP, let's just use that because people are familiar with that. A lot of people are feeling after a while, it's like, holy, holy moly, holy shit, right? It's it's there's a lot coming at me now. How how am I going to deal with this? And one of the things I've worked on is making sure that I get the contextual prompting, the so that it doesn't just throw loads of stuff at me, which just actually doesn't help me in the end because it it overloads overloads my capacity to process. So so what can you know leaders will probably be be asking their people to do this, but what can we all do to deal with uh and prevent cognitive overload and stay adaptable in this AI accelerated environment? You're listening to leading people with me, Jerry Murray. My guest this week is Dr. John Finn, founder of Tougher Minds and author of Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution. Coming up, John explains how brain state intelligence can help leaders and teams shift from overload and distraction into focus and flow. And why learning to manage your mental energy may be the ultimate advantage in the AI era. Stay with us.

SPEAKER_00: 20:59

We need to get brain states intelligent, and this is the key to understanding our brain and our three brain states, and working on optimizing how we use those three brain states. Because if you're really well rested, you're gonna be able to get into your high charge states more easily, and you're gonna be able to deal with higher volumes of data, for example, because your brain is going to be more um flexible and powerful. So what many people are doing is they're trying to use they're trying to do high charge type activities on Chat GTP when they're in a medium charge brain state, and that's why they're feeling overwhelmed. So we've got to match the right brain state with the right task, and that's why thinking about AI in those core categories of LLMs, high charge, co-work with it on that, medium charge, agentic, outsource that kind of work so it frees you up. Um and I think that for me, I just think of chat GTP as being like a consultant. Um, and people people forget this stuff designed to work like us is based on how we work. So people say it makes mistakes, so do humans, it hallucinates, so do humans. He's biased, so are humans. So, you know, when you're working with this thing, it's only like working with another human. Um, it knows a lot more about you than lots of things, but a lot less than you about other things. But the power of it, it's cheap, it's evergreen, it's 24-7 available. Most people have worked with consultants, they make mistakes, they're not perfect, they're often very expensive, they're not available when you need them. So this is this is how um why ai is so powerful. It's uh it's not magic, it's it's it's it's it's very cost effective. But again, we can't get the most out of the tech if we don't know how to get the most out of ourselves, and that's why high that's why brainstorm's intelligence is key, and that's why I train your brain for that evolution, and that's why we're working with businesses to help to create what we call brainstead intelligent cultures, which is we see as the lean sigma six for the AI era.

SPEAKER_02: 23:32

Right. Um now I will remind the listeners that one of the things you emphasized a lot in your habit mechanic book was the importance of your nutrition or diet, your exercising and your sleep as basically ways of keeping your body and mind in a healthy state, isn't that right? Yes. So it what you're saying here is adding when you're gonna deal with this kind of AI stuff, is it now has it's it's another element that that has to complement or you have to use those three things of nutrition, exercise, and sleep, but in a more AI um contextual uh way.

SPEAKER_00: 24:11

Yeah, so they're gonna be core pillars of the recharge piece. So core good quality sleep is gonna be the central pillar of high quality recharge, then what we put into our body, nutrition, that has to feed, nourish, nourish, help our brain to replenish itself, get rid of all the toxins. We've got to use exercise in the way it's intended, so we're designed to move around and solve problems, good social connectivity as well. That's all going to feed into good healthy brains, so you've got that great foundation. Most people, so in chapter eight of Train Your Brain for Their Evolution, we have um what we call the human II readiness brain state assessment, so it allows you to um measure your brain states and you get a score, and it gives you a sense of where your balance is across your medium charge, your high charge, and your recharge. But if you want to get good high charge, yeah, you absolutely need to nail your sleep, your diet, your exercise, your social connectivity. So you've got really robust core brain function because you're well rested. Most people are and they're overwhelmed. In the UK, right now, we've got 5,000 people a day, a day being signed up on the sick, um, mainly with anxiety and depression. That's poor, that's all driven by poor core brain function because people are overwhelmed. And unfortunately, um for many people, AI is having that effect. If it's not, it's another thing to overload them. So there's that tension between companies expect it, expect the AI investments they're making to improve efficiency and productivity. But many people say it's slowing me down, it's overloading me. But it's not a tech problem, it's a brain function problem.

SPEAKER_02: 26:11

Yeah. So you you talked earlier uh a few minutes back about putting the tech the AI tech in everybody's hands. The thought came into my head, what about the future? Are we going to have AI tech in everybody's brains?

SPEAKER_00: 26:27

There are biz there are companies working on that, but putting a chip inside someone's brain can do different things, right? So um already there is that kind of technology to start dealing with um certain prefrontal cortex diseases, Parkinson's, etc. Um I think we're a long way from cognitive control, we're much closer to physical control, because understanding which parts of our central nervous system drive which movements is much easier to map. Whereas cognitions spread across you know hundred billion neurons and trillions of moving parts is much more difficult to understand. So yeah, I think um we're very close and if not already there with with some types of AI. Um but I think I think um I think that AI technology is much more human than we're understanding because most of what humans do most of the time is not conscious, it's automatic, it's driven by it's driven for efficiency. But also I think that AI is a long way off from being able to think and solve complex problems like uh a real expert, because it really, it really I I don't see any time soon where it can get the context of a situation, um, you know, 360 degree, what is going on right now, not just in front of the screen, but in the world, what data am I seeing, am I experiencing, um, and what have I seen in the past? AI doesn't feel like it's anywhere close to that because ultimately it's learning from data on the internet, right? Which often can be out of date and just gets out of date faster than ever before because the world moves so quickly. Um so I don't see it as a threat to human intelligence, I see it as a way to outsource lots of the things that we don't actually like doing anyway, and help us to do the things that we do like doing faster, more effectively, um, which is gonna make us feel better about ourselves at the end of the day instead of feeling like I've been busy all day, I haven't achieved anything, I'm rubbish, I'm useless. And then you can't switch off and you don't sleep properly, and you get into a vicious cycle. So again, that's why going back to the brain states idea for me is is so is so central.

SPEAKER_02: 29:19

Yeah, I read it, I was reading an article in The Atlantic magazine a few days ago. Um, it was one of these ones where a leading academic in psychology or neurobiology, I think it was, was kind of putting out his challenge to another academic. And the whole uh thesis of what he was talking about was that many scientists have been predicting that we'll be able to understand things like the DNA of intelligence, you know. And this guy's argument was that we're still a long, long way off understanding intelligence, whether there are genes, etc. So from a from the biological point of view, the there may still still be a lot of science that hasn't been or stuff that hasn't been discovered yet that that whether you could develop the AI capabilities around that. Because I was thinking you were talking about taking data on the internet. And then the thought came into my mind was what would happen if AI was taking data from your brain and working with that and building its own neural models based on that. It maybe it could get there one day, but at the moment it seems there's constraints around just what uh biobiology and people who study neuroscience understand about the brain anyway. Would that be true?

SPEAKER_00: 30:34

Yeah, you know go to well go to London and go do a neuroscience course for three or four days and you'll soon understand as we'd understand a lot of it you know what's going on in there. And um but the AI will help us get there faster in terms of understanding how our brains actually work and what are the core mechanics. You know just even being able to distinguish brain matter is very difficult because it all looks the same even though it's not um but I think that yeah reading cognitions for me feels very challenging um there is some one of the Star Wars spin-off shows where they show this uh this like mind reprogramming machine which I find fascinating they're trying to eradicate all the neurons connected to the thoughts about the empire they're trying to rehabilitate the imperial um guys who've just kind of surrendered after the rebels won but you know if you start zapping neurons in people's brains that feels quite dangerous to me because neurons are all interconnected and you might take one out that's got some resonance of something bad but equally it's got a lot of good stuff in it.

SPEAKER_02: 31:51

So although it it does it does sort of um make you wonder there's a maybe a few prominent leaders in the world today would love to experiment with that because they they'd say well it's a magic magic formula you know you can inject bleach into people so why not just zap their neurons and stuff like that. I mean that's the danger that somebody begins to oversimplify what can be done um and and thinks that it's just a magic wand and this is all going to just happen the way they want it, right?

SPEAKER_00: 32:22

Yeah I think the I think I'm right in saying that the some of the COVID vaccines really benefited from earlier versions of neural network AI in terms of you know churning through the the data and looking for patterns etc and we're seeing great leaps in medical science so it's good at working through large sets of data and finding patterns it's not going to be it can't really make sense of what's going on in someone's brain we can't read those brainwaves right it's it's not it's not possible to do right now it's not like a heartbeat it's a complex set of of biological processes but I think ultimately people need to feel AI proof and um then by feeling AI proof you're not going to be scared of AI. You're gonna learn that actually this is a tool you can use for the better.

SPEAKER_02: 33:27

Maybe we should now sort of get into a little bit more of the practical stuff because now we've reassured everybody out there that it would it's unlikely to take over our brains completely and that we can really work with it as a complement to our own intelligence. Let me ask you a question if you were to design like three AI era habits building on your your other book on the habit mechanic but if you were to design three AI era habits that every leader should master what what might they be and why those ones?

SPEAKER_00: 33:59

Depends what you how you define a habit but I think the core habits that we want to build are what we call intelligent self-watching and intelligent planning habits. So these are things that we do daily that help us to step back and think about our behavior, what we're thinking and doing in a way that's connected to our bigger goals but in a way that helps us to improve what we're doing every day so we can achieve our bigger goals faster. So one habit would be and I talk about this in chapter one of the habit mechanic which is the daily tea plan so you ask yourself the question how well did I do my best to be at my best and achieve my goals yesterday you'd ask yourself that question at the start of the day you give yourself a score out of 10 10 means you were perfect one means you failed you're probably somewhere on that continuum then you'd say okay what's one tiny thing and this is called the tiny empowering action plan what's one tiny action one tiny empowering action I can do today to give myself the best chance of getting a better score today might be going for a walk at lunchtime um eating a piece of fruit with breakfast creating a plan for the day whatever it is and then step three is you write down why so that's a good cornerstone habit. Number two, I would really encourage people to and we call this the willpower story to plan out their day in relation to the tasks that they need to do but also the brain states they need for those to complete those tasks in and then which parts of the day are most suited to that type of brain state so many people have a bit of a slump early afternoon. It's kind of human to do that so we might want to plan to do our medium charge more of our medium charge work in that zone many people like to do their clever work first thing but they get sidetracked by emails etc so planning ahead to actually get that done and spend that one or two hours doing that. So we call it the willpower story and then you would also put into that plan sleep diet exercise what time you're going to go to bed etc and then the third thing I'd encourage people to get in the habit of doing is writing an end of day written reflection starting with a three to one so three helpful things about the day three positive or helpful things or as many as you can and then one thing you can do even better tomorrow so that's going to help you to process the day acknowledge what you did well but also give you a better chance of doing better tomorrow like um be in bed 30 minutes earlier tonight than I was last night you know whatever it was something like that.

SPEAKER_02: 37:12

Okay. So I think those are those are three very practical things that uh anybody listening to this now can start to explore immediately actually I was listening to another podcast of was it yesterday, the day before with Josh Josh Burson who's quite well known in the uh HR world and also is doing a lot of stuff today around tech and AI and he was commenting on the economic factors and how organizations are kind of struggling at the moment to figure all this AI stuff out. In some cases they're they're not hiring people so it's creating all sorts of concern people are are worried that their jobs are at risk and you know all those things we hear about and read about in the news and and I think the kind of way he was conveying this is that we're we're at this sort of pivotal moment where organizations and their leaders etc are trying to figure things out in some cases they some sectors like tech sector overhired after COVID and and then they're scaling back but then they're deciding not to put people in because they're not sure whether they need to put people back into certain jobs so it's creating a lot of uncertainty in the labor market. And what what I wanted to ask you about was that the whole kind of trust and psychological safety aspect of the AI world and you know many AI type decisions may feel opaque or even dehumanizing in some contexts.

SPEAKER_00: 38:41

So how can leaders build more trust and psychological safety when a technology like AI sits between people their tasks and decisions I think you've got to make people feel AI proof and we actually created a um a certification called the AI proof professional for that reason because if you think about AI and what our brain is programmed to do AI is inherently threatening it's um so we know that the core driver of of our behavior is survival um and there's obviously um physical violence threats we're trying to avoid but also there's social status that we're trying to preserve and you know the parts of our brain that remind us about our social status are literally hardwired hardwired into the parts of our brain that um tell us we're thirsty and we're hungry. So I'm gonna lose my job is this thing smarter than me am I relevant anymore we heard a story from um a Swiss bank that we know they gave 50 of their tech people a two month trial on um an AI app, an AI tool they didn't say what it was they just said it's a rocket you can't argue with it it's it's a brilliant tool after two months 25 of the 50 hadn't even turned it on of the 20 20 of the 25 that had turned it on didn't do much more than turn it on but five people used it like it was going out of fashion and they produced 16% more output than everybody else and what we were saying is is that the hidden factor there is the cognitive drain on those people that didn't even turn it on because they're thinking what if I don't turn it on even if it's not conscious right so I think first of all we've got to many businesses have rushed into this they've rushed into rolling out the AI or they've they've bought it and that as you're talking about psychological safety which is key because if we don't feel safe our brains don't work or the part of our brain we need to work does it's not working gets wiped out by the limbic regions. So we need to people to feel safe and again that's why I keep saying it but brain state intelligence for me is the key that that's what the conclusion that I came to is that if we don't understand ourselves we can't understand AI and therefore we're not gonna ever trust it and therefore we we're gonna get left behind because it's going to become such a big part of what we're doing. So our goal in creating human II performance psychology um which is a a new scientific discipline we've created is to use that to help people to better understand themselves and how they're and how AI works and how they interact together and help people move towards creating their own human II team to start with. So for me Jerry you working with chat GTP that's like a human AI team and then scaling that up because we're making the transition from teams of humans to smaller teams of humans working with AI and the essential skills for the humans in the human AI teams are that one they are experts at getting the most out of the AI but two they can consistently do things think in a way solve problems that the AI can't and that's difficult for most humans to do right now because they're overwhelmed. So we've got this perfect storm of just at the point where we actually need our brains to be working really well humans are more overwhelmed than ever before and I liken it to so so our metaphor for teams is they're climbing up a mountain top of the mountain is is the goals and there are five core things high performing teams do um which I unpack in the habit mechanic but where we know the conditions on the mountain are getting stormier and stormier and that for many people the AI is acting like a heavy rucksack that's actually slowing them down. That's what people are reporting whereas if we get the brainstet intelligence right we can use the AI like a snowmobile that speeds us up the mountain. So the metaphor for human AI teams is everyone's got their snowmobile and they're working together to get up the mountain. But this will happen by magic I think we're going to start to see um teams of human AI performance psychology coaches in businesses actually helping people to understand their own brain and how to get this brain state intelligence culture working so that they can people can get their brain working really well understand how to use the AI and supercharge engagement health happiness performance and I think it can create the world that everyone hopes for um and and built into AI are variable reward systems the LLMs so they're addictive right and because that's why our brain is addicted to variable rewards gambling uh BF skinners work this cut again comes back to brain state intelligence and recognizing what are the things that I need to get done to progress my goals in my life but also the team's goals and the organization's goals and of those things which are high charge tasks which are medium charge tasks so it's creating a more sophisticated language around how we operate every day what we can do what we need to do in relation to using our brain states and whether AI can actually help us.

SPEAKER_02: 45:00

Again trying to do a high charge task with AI in a medium charge brain state you might be seeing lots of copy going up the screen but you're probably not progressing in solving the complex problem you're trying to solve or create the kind of thing you're trying to create yeah I mean I personally my own experience is that knowing when I can do focused work and and knowing how to set aside the time for it and also knowing that interruptions actually um create this reset in the brain which is also not efficient. So being able to not just say I'm going to focus on something just making sure that I can focus on something for an hour or two if I need to. Of course we probably can't go much more than the two hours of really focused attention without even breaks and that but uh I I I I would agree with you on that completely you know yeah and then what sits behind the brain states is what we call activation levels which is a concept I introduce in the habit mechanic and activation is really about neurotransmitters and if we can really understand activation everything we do every day has an optimal activation level from going to sleep to doing our high charge work so it's about matching the the right activation level with the right task.

SPEAKER_00: 46:30

So often why not because we're overwhelmed um so that's absolutely key um so yeah you know back to that overarching point understanding our brain how it works how to get the most out of it is more important than ever because we now have a competitor that can do things that up until now only humans have been able to do we've seen it before in the Industrial Revolution you know watch an old film watch an old documentary look at the number of human beings it used to take to do many of the manual jobs now that are done with just a small team of humans and big powerful machines um it wasn't that long ago if you just watch some of the Michael Palin documentaries uh you know when he's around the world you see these enormous um numbers of people I suppose in these almost uh pre-industrial um societies so we've seen this before but on the physical side now it's the cognitive side um and and I I actually like um AI I think AI can do for human health happiness and performance what sports science did for the physical development of elite athletes that's where I began my professional journey and we can see the sort of the physical performance levels whether it's strength speed how high you can jump how long you can endurance they're all off the chart compared to where they were 20 years ago the DNA hasn't changed but the conditioning has and it's more science it's it's based on science. For me, I think AI and the ability to outsource brain power and the need to learn more about our own brains can take our cognitive health happiness and performance to a new level which is going to ultimately make people feel healthier happier and at their best more often and I think that's what people ultimately want.

SPEAKER_02: 48:35

So given that it's if it's early days in AI like if you were to ask somebody for certain types of jobs that AI are doing today for like seven or eight years experiencing it, you probably haven't got many people who could put put yet put that on a CV or resume. Even though it is still early days in AI what sort of examples could you share from the work you've been doing so I guess you're taking your this um extension of your first work on the the the habit mechanic and you've been exploring how it works in a more AI contextual world and what sort of examples are you you could you share about working with maybe teams of people or in the last year or so where you've been testing this out and noticing the difference that it's making yeah so one really good example is um Eva Eva Hart who's an American attorney and she started doing one-to-one coaching with our head of coach and Andrew Foster just as we were really starting to integrate some of these AI insights into our approach it was about this time last year and Eva Eva's starting point was on the laptop till 1130 12 every night trying to get up at five in the morning can't think straight just in this doom loop now she finishes work by five o'clock every day at home cooking with the kids and the and the family she got in January she got a$70,000 uh pair eyes and offered equity in the business um and now she's actually she's an attorney in New York now she's sitting in the California bar so she was by getting her brain state sorted out getting brain state intelligent and then starting to layer the AI tools in it just accelerated her performance um so that's the starting point for a team is that you've got to get each individual working on themselves in that way becoming habit mechanics becoming brain state intelligent um and then we've seen similar you know similar examples where people are just able to go much faster one one really interesting example from me is that I wrote the Habit Mechanic um I think it was published in 2022 it took me a long time to write you bringing everything together um in that final sort of 18 months or two years no neural network AI available it's all done with brain power with my own brain power but you know you also have editors and you get people to read things for you you're right um then fast forward to train your brain for their evolution loads of different AI tools available um and it's just like working with an editor but it's cheaper it's evergreen it's available 24-7 but we actually worked out for the audiobook we were able to create the audiobook for train your brain for the air evolution 17 days faster and 90% cheaper than for the habit mechanic because um we use some AI technologies to help us to do that.

SPEAKER_00: 52:11

And then what you're also seeing if you look at sectors like sales and marketing which are possibly slightly further ahead than some other sectors in deploying certainly agentic AI data shows that some of those businesses are going to market with new products this year at 2% of the cost they were last year. So they're saving 98% 2% of the cost 2% saving 98% of the costs and that's data from a company called Winning by Design who are a leading sales training company and their clients are people like Uber Adobe they're uh SaaS specialists they work with about 25% of the world's biggest SaaS companies you know so generating copy sending out emails um another client I have is in Texas he says that by the end of this year no um car um dealership in the US will have a human receptionist it will all be AI so you'll be speaking to an AI and you can't even tell so a lot of this stuff is moving much faster than we even thought it would back in January um because you know people always look at the problems but there are so many positive use case examples as well where it really is accelerating things. Yeah so that's a scattering of examples we've got now we're starting to work to scale this out across organizations from helping the C-suite to become the champions training teams of human high performance psychology coaches and we've actually created like a martial art belt system white belt to black belt um for people to become bread state intelligence like Lean Sigma 6 basically and we have a digital training program to do that. So this is still very early doors um but the early data we're seeing is really really positive and I think what's also quite empowering is it doesn't matter where your brain state we call it profile is right now you can change it quite rapidly you know and we sort of work in 30 day cycles and in train your brain for their evolution there's a four-step process so that goes around a 30 day um period of time you you can make big improvements just by getting a better understanding and building a few new habits um so if you're struggling don't worry because you you can just change a few little things and you can get back on track really quickly and the AI is really helpful.

SPEAKER_02: 55:02

Right. So coming to the end John and you've shared lots of great ideas tips and even practices if there's one way of synthesizing that into a couple of sentences so that whatever our listeners can take away from this conversation what what would that be?

SPEAKER_00: 55:23

Yeah the key to thriving in the hue in the AI era is getting brain state intelligent that means understanding your three brain states high charge medium charge recharge and recognizing where each of those are in terms of I'm nailing it or I'm failing at it and just slowly but surely improving each of those states they're all interconnected and then just slowly but surely just start to drip and try and test some different AIs you're probably already using more than you you think you are and in the in train your brain for their evolution there's a four-step system called the AI success cycle really simple just gives you a a daily weekly monthly framework to put all this into practice and then once you understand how to do it yourself you can then also help others to do the exact the exact same thing that you did.

SPEAKER_02: 56:22

And I I think that the key is it's learning to coach yourself learning to become your own brain state coach um not just knowing it but doing it and putting it into practice your brain is the most important asset that you have and it's becoming more and more important um so we've we've got to we've got to get our heads around it because unfortunately we didn't learn this at school it wasn't a lesson um we won't go into schools because I think that's a fascinating space right now we need another episode it's another episode but but yeah so for me it's about brain state intelligence and um I just want to spread that message and if you think that's a compelling message spread it as well because I think this is the most important intelligence is that we understand our brains and our brain states and that is the key to being healthy happy and at our best and that's that's why I wish for everybody and I know just like you Jerry we see when we work with people and we get them to actually practice doing the right things it transforms our life so again it doesn't matter that's the important word practice and deliberate practice because the science also shows not just knowing things knowing how and like if you're trying to learn to shoot basketball you're gonna miss a lot of baskets in the early stage but the more you practice the more you learn from what you're you know what's not working the better you're gonna get right and I I think the other thing we do a lot of here is we encourage leaders to be role models for their people. It's rather than constantly trying to tell people stuff and tell them what to do, show them how a leader can perform at their best and and this is a great opportunity for anybody out there listening who's in the leadership position to incorporate this brain intelligence so that they're able to not only talk about it but they know how to to to make it work for them so they can model it for their their people, right?

SPEAKER_00: 58:25

Yeah exactly so we want we need to be modeling this for our people um it's not about becoming an expert in ai it's about becoming an expert on yourself and you're with yourself every day. We hope the the human behaviour is is is you know far clearer now why we do and think the things that we do than it was 25 years ago. So we have no excuse um I will say that I wrote I've written two books about this that had the habit mechanic and training brain for their revolution so if you're not what sure I'd start just start with those books um but yeah I I think it's exciting Jarry I really think the tech is exciting um and I get the pessimism and people worrying but it's here you know the video's worth four trillion dollars and it might only be worth three trillion next year we don't know but you know that um it's not going away and what uh what I've seen with our own clients and in my own life and my family you know showing them how to do it it just accelerates people's ability to achieve their goals faster whether it's building a better sleep habit or getting your next promotion or managing stress better or becoming a better leader. It's just an accelerator.

SPEAKER_02: 59:49

So yeah it's exciting okay so um become an expert on yourself um or maybe we can uh slightly adapt and Irish playwright Oscar Wilde saying, be yourself, be an expert on yourself because everybody else has taken. Um, maybe that works. And um I like that. And John, how can people reach out and get in contact with you? And do you have anything, if they do reach out to you on the usual platforms, do you have anything special that you might be able to offer them after listening to this podcast?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:23

Yes, after Jerry is a hard negotiator, so he's negotiated a special deal for um for listeners. So if you contact me on LinkedIn, it's Dr. John Finn, um, and just tell me you've heard you've heard me on on um the wide circle Jerry's podcast. Leading people, yeah, leading people. Leading people, um then I will tell you about our certified Havant Mechanic coach programme and the very special deal we're gonna give people. Also, you can get the Havant Mechanic, or you can you can get the Haven Mechanic, Train Your Brain for the Air Revolution on Amazon. But if you go to tougherminds.co.uk, you can get the train your brain for the air revolution for one dollar plus a planner as well, so you can put it into practice.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:11

Okay, and I'll put the links in the show notes. So, as always, John, thanks for sharing your insights, tips, and wisdom with us all here today. Coming up on leading people. Can artificial intelligence really help us resolve conflict at work, in teams, and even across nations?

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:35

That was one of the main inspirations behind the book. The AI is this tremendously powerful tool, and it can be used for good and it can be used for bad. And unfortunately, I think our current trajectory is going down some not so good routes. And so that's why I wanted to write the book to spread the word that there is a better way of using it in order for us to use it that way. So the the premise, the core premise, is that AI is this tremendously powerful tool. It can model human best practice and then make that best practice more widely available.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:15

My next guest is Simon Horton, negotiation expert and author of The End of Conflict: How AI Will End War and Help Us Get On Better. In our conversation, Simon explains how AI could actually become a force for better collaboration, not by replacing humans, but by helping us understand each other more deeply. It's a fascinating and hopeful look at how technology might just help us become better people. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another one simple thing episode waiting for you. A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast. Until next time.