Sarah Peyton: Using Relational Neuroscience to Enable Change
Channel: LIFT Economy
Date: 2021-06-08

While there is an ever-growing pool of ideas on how to use business as a force for good, and how to change systems, getting people to open their hearts and listen to one another can often be a sticking point in enabling systemic change. 

Sarah Peyton is a neuroscience educator, constellations facilitator, Certified Nonviolent Communication trainer, and author of the book, Your Resonant Self. She invites her audiences to understand how trauma affects their brains, and teaches them about their brain’s capacity for healing. 

In this episode, Sarah talks about how we can use neuroscience to understand people in the workforce. When we understand people’s inability to meet expectations, not only can we soften, but we can also create organizational structures and interventions that foster people’s healing. Although viewing employees as whole people is becoming increasingly common, it is still not the dominant business culture. We talk about what it means to go against the status quo and the implications this has. 

Our conversation also touches on sustainability, and expanding the definition of the concept, the importance of community, and what can happen when we allow emotions into the workplace. Opening the hearts and minds of others is not a simple task, but incredible change is possible with these shifts can happen.

Key Points From This Episode:

- What Sarah’s work entails and how she came to be interested in this line of inquiry. 

- How we can use relational neuroscience to better understand how individuals fit in the workforce. 

- Some questions to ask when thinking about bringing a whole person into an organization. 

- The importance of understanding how our patterns have impacted past experiences. 

- What we can do when people do not meet performance expectations. 

- When we understand the root cause of people’s ‘bad behavior’, we can help them better. 

- Some evidence-based practices that have been proven to help people in organizations. 

- The decision-making shifts that happen when organizational power structures are flattened. 

- Reflecting on the power of giving people autonomy and creativity in their roles. 

- Why Sarah believes that we have to rethink the definition of sustainability. 

- Unpacking the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. 

- How we can bring our right and left-brain hemisphere knowledge into the workplace. 

- The extraordinary shifts that happen when we allow space for emotion in organizations. 

- Some strategies for how we can make space for our colleagues’ feelings. 

- We live in a dominant culture and when we go against the status quo, we pay a price. 

- The value of creating communities where there are spaces for narratives counter to the dominant ones. 

- What Sarah means when she says we have all made contracts with ourselves. 

- How to connect with Sarah and some of the work she has in the pipeline.  

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