Hello everyone. My name is Thiago Cesar, I'm one of the mentors of the Learning How to Learn course led by Dr. Barbara. Today, I'd like to share with you a special interview with Dr. Kevin Majeres. Dr. Majeres is a medical doctor, that serve in the faculty of Harvard Medical School for domestic. He create a special mechanism to optimize working study called The Golden Hour, where he help people achieve excellence in fulfillment in their work through his website optimalwork.com and through his great podcasts, called also "The Golden Hour." I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I do. Was that the way I was helping people in my clinical practice which is focused on anxiety disorders. I was teaching people how to reframe threats as opportunities and how to settle their attention with mindfulness, and then how to lean in to the challenge. When they would do that, they would get really rapid progress in overcoming their fears but I discovered that that is the exact same steps that apply to attaining flow, where your highest level of focus in any kind of task. Before you start, you sit down and you see, the tasks you're about to do. How is it the greatest opportunity for growth or for a service? Or for some higher ideal to be realized. Something that would actually get you excited about it and induced, and every task has something in it that can do that. Then settle your mind so that you are silencing the source of distractions, your background attention and so you just do that until you feel like your mind is now calm and ready for the task. May take a minute or two it doesn't have to take long. Then you set out on the challenge the way you're going to stretch yourself in this next period of work with a definite stop time. Ideally, you have at least a few steps laid out in advance. That's going to be the path you go down and those steps laid out in advance help your attention to get just pulled along in that direction. What I found is this became a very reliable way of helping students to attain flow. The highest level of intelligence, the highest level of focus, it's called effortless attention. But you can do that as long as you have a positive frame, you're in the present moment and there is a right stretch, right kind of challenge free to go into. So that's why I called The Golden Hour. Golden Hour is just where you spend a few minutes before you start working, but it's so well worth it because it sets up this entire next experience at a time of work and people have been amazed at how better they learn and how much more joy they have in that work, so it's better in every way I think it's truly golden. Reframing, mindfulness, challenge, those are the three main steps. Now, it helps if people do have one task or one work that they're wanting to do at that time, so that makes it much easier for them to not be at multitasking in any way. But I call it uni-tasking, sequential uni-tasking, so you just hear one step at a time that your mind is working on and you put 100 percent of your attention into it, it's very effective. For that also, it's good to silence your phone and close out all unnecessary tabs or browsers or programs. Make sure you have everything you need, so you do something of setting up perimeter or a wall around what you're about to do. But the key thing is your internal readiness of your mind, the attitude. Literally, so I think it's simply that's the challenge of modern times and that challenge can bring out the best in us. But we have to learn to be savvy about it, we have to learn the right practices to be putting in place in our day. I think that it's possible to strategically limit email to some minimum. Now for some people that might need to be an ongoing thing that they're staying available. But even then, it doesn't have to be a distraction, so it can be something that develops into the rhythm of your work and it doesn't have to take you out of flow. It's a different thing if there's something that your actual work requires of you, then that's just part of the challenge of that hour and that challenge helps you go into flow. It's different than the distraction, which is something that is coming from within you where essentially your mind didn't know where to go next, it didn't know the right step for you to be doing in this task so take it as a wrong guess and it takes you to the wrong step. A lot of the struggles we have with attention is because we have two types of attention. One is in the present moment and that's what you use for doing work that's the task attention. We tend to actually be at our best. When we're there, the background attention, that's what we're more familiar with if we're lost in our own thoughts, we'll talked about the inward collapse of attention. Nice phrase that we got from Adrian Wells that describes well this idea that your attention can collapse within you and you're just cogitating, worrying, ruminating in your mind. Well, that default attention, if it doesn't know where to pull you, because it's actually what pulls you, it prepares the next step in your work. If it doesn't where to pull you, it just pulls you back into your mind or to some other thing like checking social media when it's not necessary. Or checking email when it's not necessary. But that default attention can be trained to know what are the right steps, and that's one of the functions of laying out steps in advance. Before you sit down to do anything, you at least in your mind know a few of the steps you want to be going through. You'll find that it's way easier to then just be gently pulled through that task because your default attention prepares the way. It helps you to be ready so that when you finish step you're on, you just get gently pulled to the next one, and then you give your whole task attention to that, when you finish it, you get gently pulled to the next one. But I think it's exciting when people learn how to train their own background attention, this default attention, and so that you're able to gain real mastery of tasks. Because mastery is simply when these two parts of your attention work effortlessly together on different types of tasks, you master one task and now you just know the steps to go through. But laying them out in advance is a wonderful quick way of getting there. [inaudible] the golden hour came from my experience with anxiety and helping people to embrace the challenge that they were facing at that moment. When a person has anxiety in the system their medulla is now very much on the alert for any other threats, which means that they're going to be a little more prone to notice negative things. Challenges then when you're in threat mode can loom large. It can seem like this is something that would be very daunting, and you can feel like you're really being challenged by these external things. But you can also when you get anxious you get some adrenalin, and that adrenalin has two different forms essentially. One is what it does when you're in threat mode, and the other is what it does when you flip yourself into opportunity mode, you get into a new mindset of, how can this challenge actually be something that will bring out the best in me? What would it look like for me to thrive in this challenge? What would be the skills or qualities that I would want to aim for to stretch in this challenge? Because that's actually what adrenaline is for. Adrenaline is to help you stretch, to achieve a stretch goal. When you have a stretch goal within the work itself, you get excited about it, the adrenaline flips right into enthusiasm. This becomes the way to help people to thrive in any kind of high adrenaline moment, it could be an important test or an important performance, or it could be a social setting, it could be anything. If beforehand, you try to envision what it would look like to be loving the adrenalin and saying, "Bring it on." The more, the better. Knowing that the adrenaline is there to help you achieve stretch goals. The very interesting thing about that is, then with, let's call it the reframe, you flip your view of a threat to see it now is an opportunity for learning and practice, some gaining of skills. Once you do that, you feel adrenalin now helping you to think. Adrenaline is the best mental enhancer that we have. It's far better than any other medication people could take. The adrenaline raises your IQ, it increases verbal fluency, it increases your ability to recall, and to encode new memories. It makes you more creative, in social situations, it makes you more engaging and funny. Adrenaline has all these wonderful properties provided you welcome it. If you can say bring it on, I have a stretch goal to use this for, the adrenaline will help you then and you feel the lift. Then also feels like you're not being challenged by things outside of you. You've internalized the challenge, and now that is in a position to really bring out the best in you. Research shows that having high adrenaline in performance situations does not indicate that it doesn't lead to any harming of your performance provided you view the adrenaline as a positive thing. It's just your view of adrenaline that matters. If you can learn to use it and welcome it, maybe you need to practice in smaller steps. We learn to do it in where it's easier to practice, you have a little bit of adrenaline and you learn to flip it. But even if not, you don't get to practice, you find yourself in high adrenaline situation. Just say bring it on. The aggressiveness may answer. It's only going to be good for me. Then it's almost like the anxiety people feel in their chest is like an engine in a car revving when the car is in neutral. Because the purpose of the gas pedal is really to give you gas to [inaudible] drive. As soon as you put the car in drive, then that gas pedal pushes you forward. Otherwise, it's just rubbing and doesn't really do anything useful. Now these are harmful, it doesn't do much useful either. Yes, I am a great optimist and I'll share that with Professor Oakley. I really admired the way Professor Oakley helps people, I see to have courage. Yeah, and how they had originally gained expertise in one field they can transfer to another. Or how they learn to confront challenge, and engage challenge in one area. Now they can apply to this new challenge. Obviously it's that willingness to embrace challenge, that's the key. To have an entrepreneurial mindset about this, you start little by little and you get better and better at something. Even just to see it in a sense, a game, that each of these things is a puzzle, a game, and you just have to learn how to play it. You have to learn how to win at it. I think that everything can be broken down into small steps. Our brain tells us, you can have those stories, you can know that they're there while you're learning new things. You want to get rid of them. It's just that my brain tells me I'm shy, but I'm going to do an experiment. I'm going to try to practice just greeting people warmly, and I will do that all day today, everyone I meet. Then you just keep building up skills a little by little. I think once you get a sense that these skills, they start going deeper and deeper into you. Then you find, not only are you more better at saying hi to people and introducing yourself. But you're also getting more deeply, cheerful or joyful. You are already more available for others when they're in need and you're more encouraging. What's great is that these things deepen in us to our highest ideals of love and service. Being able to be brought into any action. That happens when you essentially embrace challenge and then learn how to serve others to forget about yourself and give your best in your work. I think ultimately we thrive on challenges when we're really being generous and we're trying to do it for these high motives. Then we're less worried about our model, and we're less worried about whatever the thoughts we have about our performance. We're just more interested in growing and serving. Those are all very, key lessons. The other is that the goal is really that you personally grow as much as possible. It's not about achieving some GPA, or it's not about achieving even a degree or a promotion. It's actually about how are you really growing in the skills that you have, in the knowledge that you have, in your personal qualities that you're starting to embody. That's where the lasting benefit comes from any task. It's not just about getting the task done and then achieving some outcome, and then you're just this endless. You just achieve outcome after outcome. No, it's really about are you growing? When you're meeting a challenge, the goal is to do it in a new and better way. That way, you're constantly stretching yourself. You're always doing little experiments to see how can I get better at this? Better though, not just doing it more efficiently, which is getting things done faster, but actually growing more in it. The way I think of it as you don't set quantity challenges in work, set quality challenges. Or if you do with quantity challenges that they serve some higher goal, which is a quality. That to do this work with more creativity, with more perseverance, with more order, with more intensity. There's all these ways that you can be, you letting this task bring out the best in you. What happens then is you end up thriving in work that you feel, yeah, I'm becoming more creative, more curious, more engaged and attentive. Then I carry those qualities to the rest of my life, so that your work is just a training and developing it. As a side effect, you learn because you're constantly engaging challenges, you're avoiding things, so your anxiety gets better and better. Because what feeds anxiety is avoidance of challenge. But the continual challenging yourself flips it. When you're challenging yourself, the challenge is internal, and you don't feel overwhelmed by external challenges because we're now within you. You're less distracted, so there's all these benefits to everything in life. I think that really work is the hinge in which all of our personal growth turns. But then it's the people that we love most, the people that are closest to that we really want to benefit the most by this growth that we attain in each hour of work. That's that, in at least one hour a day, turn it into a golden hour. Shape it in advance. See what's the best way that I can grow here. Settle your mind in the present moment and then stretch yourself in until that hour's finished. With that way you have a concrete plan of growth that super flexible, it changes every day, but you're getting these habits down and reframing mindfulness, embracing challenge, which I think are the key psychological skills to thriving. It's challenging, that's not a bad sign. It just means that's where the growth occurs. The other thing I would say, one last thing is that complaining is a mindset, it goes completely opposite to this. You can use anytime you notice yourself complaining, to think, wait a second. The only thing we complain about are challenges. If I'm complaining, what's the challenge here that I need to really be embracing? You'll be surprised how easier life gets when you start flipping those daily small challenges around and seeing ways that it can bring out the best in you.
