Thoughtload, with Liane Davey

In this conversation, Dr. Liane Davey discusses the concept of 'thought load' and its impact on individuals, particularly in chaotic environments. She emphasizes the distinction between cognitive load and emotional burden, highlighting the multiplicative nature of chaos in modern life. The discussion covers coping strategies for executives, the importance of discerning what really matters, and the necessity of managing energy reserves to combat overwhelm. Liane also shares personal strategies for recharging and emotional recentering amidst the chaos.

Topics

• Thought load is the cognitive and emotional burden we carry.
• Chaos is multifaceted and cannot be reduced to a single source.
• Executives often cope by increasing their workload, which is ineffective.
• Effective coping involves discerning the most important tasks.
• Tuning out distractions is as crucial as tuning in to important signals.
• Emotional burdens can derail cognitive processes in the workplace.
• Managing energy reserves is essential for handling thought load.
• Personal strategies for recharging can include social interactions and creative activities.
• Creating time for reflection helps in processing emotions and thoughts.
• Finding flow in work can significantly enhance productivity and energy. 

Chapters
00:00 Understanding Thought Load and Chaos
02:38 Coping Mechanisms for Executives
05:55 The Importance of Focus and Discernment
08:09 Tuning In and Tuning Out
10:53 The Emotional Burden of Thought Load
14:45 Managing Energy Reserves
15:45 Personal Strategies for Recharging

Keywords

thought load, chaos, emotional burden, cognitive load, executive coping strategies, discernment, energy management, focus, tuning in, tuning out

Guest Contact Details:
For more information about Dr Liane Davey’s work and books, including the assessment she mentioned, see https://lianedavey.com/ 

Thanks to Jacopo Lazzaretti for the intro/outro music:  https://jacopolazzaretti.bandcamp.com/album/secret-love

For all contact details (including our Associates) and useful self-worth resources, see www.SelfWorthAcademy.com

Transcript

John Niland (00:00)

Welcome to Self-Worth in Times of Chaos. My guest today is Dr. Liane Davey. Liane is the author of Thought Load, and I particularly loved the distinction that she makes in in the beginning of that book, which is that it's not workload that's killing people, it's thought load. Liane, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Liane Davey (00:19)

Thanks, John. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, diving into the chaos.

John Niland (00:23)

Well let's dive into the chaos. I mean we usually do we usually begin with chaos. That that is the podcast, after all. which brand of chaos would you like to describe today?

Dr. Liane Davey (00:26)

Mm.

Well,

so the whole concept of thought load is that there's not one chaos that we can put our fingers on as the the culprit right now. So let me give you three chaoses. One chaos is that the cognitive demands on us are such that we're trying to attend to everything everywhere all at once. So that's chaos. that at the same time, the emotional burdens that we are dealing with are such that we're trying to pretend that business isn't

personal and and that's total chaos with everybody running around triggered in emotional contagion. And then I guess the third would be the chaos of trying to sprint a marathon, which we seem to be doing at the moment, which is you you can't sprint a marathon. So I would say all three of those things are factoring into this tornado of chaos that is thought load. So is that fair to to say that chaos is is so

multiplicative that we can't even answer with one just one chaos?

John Niland (01:37)

Well, w one of the recurring themes running through this series of conversations is that chaos seems to happen in multiple dimensions all at once. So there isn't there isn't a chaos, there is chaos plural. And of course and we haven't even mentioned all the uncertainty that's around, which of course is is enough to depress anyone.

Dr. Liane Davey (01:47)

All at once.

Yeah, exactly.

Just it like drops

the floor out from beneath all the rest of it. Yeah.

John Niland (02:05)

Indeed -oh Indeed. What's your personal experience of chaos?

Dr. Liane Davey (02:09)

Yeah. So I work as an advisor to CEOs and their teams. And so seeing what they're facing in terms of and and I work with them on business strategy and executive team effectiveness. So I'm in the in the eye of the storm in the chaos because there's the chaos of their markets being completely disrupted. There's the chaos of how they do work being disrupted by AI, but in ways that are not yet clear. so there's all of that.

And then there's the chaos of you know how executive team members are interacting with one another, some of this seeing as this as an abundance opportunity and and and spotting so many ways and and trying to drive forward quickly into the opportunity, conflicting with those who have a scarcity mentality and who are trying to retrench or protect. so I get to live because I I work exclusively with executive teams, live in that

you know, particular chaos that is, you know, trying to set business strategy in a world where the old rules don't seem to apply and then function as a human in in both setting and executing that strategy with people who are in very different emotional states. It is truly chaos.

John Niland (03:27)

Hmm. And how how are they coping? The executives.

Dr. Liane Davey (03:33)

yeah, so most of them in in ways that are not very effective. So many are coping by just working more. So, you know, more and more and more emails on a Saturday, on a Sunday. I have a policy that, you know, I try and get my inbox to zero every two or three weeks. And that means I have to do it on a Saturday or a Sunday because otherwise I'm clearing a message and getting two new ones in the process. So what I've noticed lately is I'm starting to reply to things or process things on

on a weekend and I'm getting a reply back five minutes later, which means that those clients are they're working too. So a lot of people are just trying to up how many hours they work. So that's the most common coping strategy. I think there are other coping strategies that are really not effective, which is we're just trying to distract ourselves or stimulate ourselves in the evenings. that's not very helpful. So the the ones that are

you know, putting in effective coping strategies are the ones who are really starting with focus. I think that's the biggest difference. Those who in in amongst all of the noise can pull out the signal, can understand we could pay attention to a thousand things, but these are the five that are going to make a difference for us. These are the signals we will see to know when to trigger a decision or an action.

that's the this is the one meeting I need to be in and these are the five that I don't. this is the one email I need to stop and think about and respond to effectively and these are the hundred I can delete. You know, all of those sorts of things. So so bad coping strategies are just do the same thing more hours a week. good coping strategies are separate the signal from the noise.

John Niland (05:19)

Let's dig into that a little bit because it's come up a few times now. Matt Day in this series has talked about the Meaningful Few, which is very much the same concept. it's come up in the word discernment that someone else used, and I cannot remember who it was. that ability to discern what are the five ultra important things that's going to make the difference, versus the other nine hundred and ninety-five that I can just

Dr. Liane Davey (05:27)

Yeah. I love that term. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

John Niland (05:48)

ignore the email or not attend the meeting as the case may be. how does one know?

Dr. Liane Davey (05:51)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. You don't, of course. and so experimentation, right? by by asking the hard questions, being willing to try something for a little while. So Michael Bungay Stainier has a great podcast called Change Signal. and I heard him talking about two-week experiments, you know, try paying attention to something for a couple of weeks, try tweaking something or changing it to see how it responds. So we don't, but there are a few general things.

So A, be more externally oriented than you are, right? We get so busy navel gazing and just trying to keep up with our email inboxes. So I promise you that's not what we need to be paying attention to. I I know where not to look. I've looked under the email rock. There's not much there. So more external. more more with your customers, with your in your ecosystem, with your competitors, you know, more.

John Niland (06:37)

Mm-hmm.

Mm. Yep.

Dr. Liane Davey (06:52)

you know, more external for sure. more long time horizon. So so much of our energy and attention just goes on to what's happening this week or this month or what am I going to report to the analyst this quarter? So you know, what to pay attention to is going to be much more about lifting your eyes to the horizon and starting to future cast to okay, what does that look like end of this year, next year? What does that look like at the release of the next round of AI models? What does that look, you know, whatever is.

So there's a few generic things, is that more externally oriented, more out there in your business ecosystem, more talking to the ultimate recipients of what you're trying to create and the people in that world and longer time horizon. And then within that, play, pay attention to some different things, have conversations with other smart people, and you know, track some stuff and see which ones make a difference. But I think.

You know, even that, that just deliberately choosing to pay attention to different things will put you ahead of ninety percent of the people in the work world right now who aren't choosing. They are passive recipients of information as opposed to active curators of information.

John Niland (08:08)

Yeah.

Indeed. And it does sound as if this is doubly significant in the age of overwhelm, because no matter what we're no matter what signals we're reading, the one thing we can be sure of is there's an awful lot of them. So so the it's the tuning out piece is is almost important as the tuning in, isn't it?

Dr. Liane Davey (08:24)

Yeah. Yeah. And

For two

reasons. The tuning out is important. Yes, for the cognitive demands, which is one part of the thought load equation, right? So if we're if we're our attention is diluted across too many things, then all we get is noise and no signal. So yes, completely agree with you. I would say the second reason is that the second component of thought load is the emotional burden of everything that we're taking in. And another reason to tune out is that humans were not.

Built to understand every tragedy in every country of the world. So whatever is happening, whether it's, you know, the various wars or humanitarian crises going on at the moment, the climate crisis, an earthquake in Venezuela, it, you know, whatever it is. And now we can find out about, you know, the murder of a child 5,000 kilometers away. So the other reason we have to be careful is that information is

Wildly triggering for us emotionally. And we weren't built to carry the burdens of the world. And unfortunately, that's a little bit of what's happening. So we need to protect our attention, not become ignorant, not tune everything out, but be deliberate about how so I'll give you one example. I'm a very visual person, and when I watch the news on television.

I the emotional residue of those images is with me for a very long time. If I read it in a newspaper, I can process it intellectually, but it doesn't have the same emotional residue. So I'm deliberate with my intention to not watch news on television, but instead to take in my news in in written format, just because I can manage the emotional burden that comes with it because of it. So I think you're really onto something about tuning out as important as as important as tuning in.

But it's not just for cognitive reasons and complexity and decision fatigue. It's it's as much to keep ourselves as animals out of the threat response as we possibly can.

John Niland (10:32)

Liane, I sit in many conversations apart from the twenty-eight episodes that's already happened on this podcast. And honestly, this is the first time, tingles, this is the first time that I've heard the emotional overload piece from Overwhelm described in that way.

Dr. Liane Davey (10:39)

Yeah.

Yeah, and and so I'm

I'm so gratified to be able to bring this message out because it's interesting. Even in the first few conversations I had about thought load, people would paraphrase back to me and they didn't want to use the word thought load again. So they'd start talking about cognitive load and I'd say, Okay, yeah, so cognitive load is an important piece of the puzzle. It's just one piece of the puzzle. And Michael Porter was famous for saying culture eats strategy for breakfast.

So I say emotions kick cognitions to the curb. Like if you are having an emotional experience of something, you are not having an intellectual experience of it. Right. So the fact that we want to keep work neat and tidy, that was one of the chaoses I said, right? We're trying to pretend that work isn't personal. so if if we fail to appreciate how profound the emotional burden of life today is, life in general.

But life in the workplace, we are undermanaging our thought load. And we're undermanaging a component of our thought load that will derail all the rest of it. And I it's interesting because you know, we we think about emotions in the workplace as you know, this person's crying or they're upset. And that is just one brand of emotional outburst in the workplace or emotional kind of contagion in the workplace.

There was a recent study in Britain that showed men have far more emotional episodes in the work day than women. But because they come as anger and frustration and dominance and things like that, we don't label them as emotional. But I promise you, if you're feeling impatient or jealous or any of those more power oriented emotions, those are hijacking you just as much as somebody feeling sad or imperfect. So we have to be talking more about this.

John Niland (12:41)

hijacking the team without doubt. So we have the cognitive overload, we have the emotional overload. Any others? Any other dimensions to this?

Dr. Liane Davey (12:44)

absolutely. Absolutely.

Other any other pieces of the puzzle? So thought load I've I've portrayed as an equation with those two things as the numerator. So the cognitive demands and the emotional burdens are the load. But of course you can think about a day where that load was fully manageable. You'd rested well, maybe you were working on something you were passionate about, whatever, and you're like, Bring it on. I got this. I can lift the school bus over my head.

And you've also had a day where the smallest thing sets you off. Just like, I can't. So that brings up the third piece of the puzzle, which is the denominator of the equation, which is your energy reserve. So whether that's your physical, your mental or emotional, spiritual energy, whichever one is salient for you in the moment, when that goes up, the denominator goes up, your thought load feels lighter.

But of course, when your energy reserves shrink, like any shrinking denominator, it drives the whole thing up. So when your energy reserves, when you start to wear through those, burn them out, the thought load feels that much heavier. So those are the three components of the thought load equation. And only when we manage the three, because my husband is a neuroscientist, we work together, and and he has shown me from a neuroscience perspective how each one of them amplifies and exacerbates the others.

So we cannot just manage our attention and ignore our emotions. We cannot just restore our energy and and not think about how to focus attention so we don't drain the batteries right away again. So those three pieces all factor in.

John Niland (14:35)

Very good. And when you work with executives on the energy denominator as you described it, what kind of thing what kind of things come up?

Dr. Liane Davey (14:42)

Yeah.

Yeah. So first, I the I I use the silly story in the book of of being a noble knight on a on a quest and trying to understand your quest. and so when it comes to energy, I'm like every knight needs to fill their chalice. Like it, you know, being on a quest takes a lot of energy. You have to fill your chalice. And there are there are three things to pay attention to. First, you know, can you fill it from a waterfall? Because that's a really great way to fill your cup is when there's a waterfall of energy. And that really is about working in flow.

And most people, the average person only goes 11 minutes working on something before they they shift to something different. That's how how soon they're distracted. And they return to that task only 25 minutes later, which means even the interruption was interrupted. So finding flow, carving out 90 minute chunks to work uninterrupted. So that's filling your cup from a waterfall.

So the second thing is understanding what are your well springs of energy. Sometimes

you know, energy isn't as plentiful as coming from a waterfall and you have to dig deep for it. So individuals have very different sources of energy. So some people are activated and energized by physical activity, some by social interaction. So there's a little assessment on my website so you can figure out what's your overwhelmed type and what's your well of energy. So that's half of the equation. But I I'm interested to hear John if you find this with your with your clients. The bigger problem is not that they don't know what energizes them.

The bigger problem is they're telling themselves a lie that it's so busy right now, I can't afford to do that thing that charges my batteries. I don't have time to go play my soccer match with my friends, or I don't have time to go to the gym, or I don't have time to stop for lunch. And it is a lie you're telling yourself. it's like saying, it is very, very important that I get from point A to point B. I don't have time to stop for gas.

Like when I say it that way, you immediately realize how dumb that story is. But that's what leaders are telling themselves. So a big part of restoring renewable energy is remembering, you know, you have to plug in the EV at night if you want it to go again tomorrow. So telling yourselves, it's so busy, I can't afford not to do these things that renew me. So that's the second piece. And then the third piece is, you know, if your cup has cracks in it.

Doesn't matter how much you're doing to fill it, it's not going to help. Where are there meetings in your calendar that are adding no value and draining you? Where is there conflict debt where you're carrying around grievance or resentment that's that's burning your energy? Where do you have toxic relationships you need to address? So, you know, you gotta make sure that your cup is full. If you can find waterfalls of energy and work in flow, that's the best way. If you need to dig deep to get it from that.

you know, well spring of energy for you, then tell yourself that it's so important. You you do need to plug in at night if you want the machine to go tomorrow. And then address, you know, where are the things that are really draining your batteries as well.

John Niland (17:55)

So what do you do to maintain your energy? You're very busy working on strategy, you work in writing, you are a keynote speaker, you have a very full career. Where do you recharge? How how do you practice that yourself?

Dr. Liane Davey (17:59)

Yeah. Yeah.

I have two. So one is that I'm a very social person. So, you know, making sure that I see my friends, that I go to my book club, that you know, those sorts of things very much. But I also am more more of an introvert than people would think. And I need to charge my batteries. so lots of fiction. I I

really emphasize reading fiction because we know that fiction increases empathy. So when you work with teams and when you work with teams in really difficult situations, you need your empathy to be high. So I really prioritize reading fiction. But the other thing is that, you know, what we're what we're doing to ourselves in this chaos-centered world is we are never allowing ourselves time without input. So we get up in the morning, we grab our phone from the bedside table and start reading emails.

We put on the radio while we make our coffee. We we are never without input. And so the the other thing that I do as a discipline is what I call the two-week cleanse, which is intentionally for two week chunks, finding five or six chunks of one hour where I go with zero input, giving my default mode network and my brain a chance to fire up, to make connections, to process emotions that are in there.

And my favorite right now for that is I have started a discipline. I've kept reading about how bad it is to have screens before bed. And while I do read in the evenings, I get to a certain hour and I can't read. I'm I'll fall asleep if I read. So I've started a new discipline that I this is gonna sound silly. I color. I have a coloring book. I bought myself a set of 80 beautiful pencil crayons. and I color. And and that time before bed does a few things. It allows me to process.

the emotions I've had in my day so that they're not causing me spooky weird dreams at night. it causes me to it or gives me an opportunity to make connections between client work or things I've written or a question I got at a speech. And and so I go to bed with that processed instead of going to bed with it all this big jumble in my head. So coloring has been my latest discipline. And I'm really, I really enjoy it.

John Niland (20:26)

Love it. Love it. thinking of Ashleigh Vilk who talked about singing in a cho singing in a choir was hers. For her it was like she could when she joined the choir, because she's living in Hong Kong, she doesn't always know the people that she's singing with. But for her it was a complete escape from everything else. And going back to your theme of the emotional load and how important it is to develop that.

Dr. Liane Davey (20:28)

Yeah.

What's yours? Yeah, what's yours?

Yeah.

John Niland (20:54)

that skill of looking for what Matt Day would call the meaningful few. that reset at night with the colouring book really starts to become significant now because of course we need the reset to be able to discern what it is that's important in the forest of stuff around us.

Dr. Liane Davey (21:14)

Yeah, so I I've been thinking about it lately. Have you ever been on Google Maps and it it plans out your route and then for some reason you're not seeing enough of the screen. So you you start to scroll and and move it off somewhere else and go down a side alley and whatever. But then Google Maps has this wonderful button. As soon as you do that, it l brings up a button that says recenter. You can just tap that button and it goes and it brings you back. So my coloring time and whatever your version of it is.

John Niland (21:34)

Recenter.

Dr. Liane Davey (21:42)

Is me just pushing that recenter button. Let me just go back emotionally recenter in terms of my attention, recenter what matters. And unfortunately, as humans, we don't have that neat little button we can just push and go and be right back. So we need to create those opportunities to recenter because we go off on the craziest paths all day. We were we were supposed to go from point A to point B, and for some reason we've scrolled way over here. So I just need to recenter.

John Niland (22:12)

I'm having to practice that now, Lianne, because there's so many interesting pathways in this conversation that I would be very happy to go down. But perhaps some of them will have to wait for another day. Thanks ever so much for joining me today. I really appreciate the insights.

Dr. Liane Davey (22:18)

Yes.

I enjoyed it so much, John. Thank you for helping bring some order to the chaos for us all.