The Resilience Factor Podcast
Cyber resilience is fast emerging as the driving force behind critical business continuity in our digital era. Faced with brownouts, blackouts, and the ‘when not if’ nature of cyberattacks, how do businesses harness this resilience for stronger cybersecurity and networking?
Listen in to The Resilience Factor as our hosts — renowned social engineer Jenny Radcliffe and Zscaler’s own Kate Baker — explore how organizations and employees can fail forward to adapt with confidence.
Through trend-based discussions with cybersecurity experts and pioneers, real-life case studies, and practical advice, The Resilience Factor offers audiences insights on the tools and strategies needed to build business and personal resilience.
The Resilience Factor Podcast
S1 E7 Mastering the art of personal resilience with Shirzad Chamine
Shirzad Chamine, CEO and founder of Positive Intelligence, joins the Resilience Factor podcast to explore the critical role of mental fitness in building personal and professional resilience. Drawing on his background as a Stanford lecturer and bestselling author, Shirzad shares how stress fuels self-sabotage and impairs performance, especially in high-pressure environments like cybersecurity. He introduces the concept of “saboteurs,” the ten internal voices that undermine our well-being, and explains how simple, science-backed techniques can rewire the brain for greater clarity, empathy, and focus. Shirzad also highlights why resilience isn’t just a personal trait but a trainable skill that organizations must prioritize to foster healthier, higher-performing teams.
Cyber resilience is fast emerging as the driving force behind survival and success in a world of unprecedented digital transformation. Through trend-based discussions with cybersecurity experts and pioneers, real-life case studies and practical advice, the resilience factor offers the tools and strategies needed to build business and personal resilience in all areas of cybersecurity and networking. Not only that, but you'll get to hear from a range of industry-leading professionals and experts at the very top of their game. Join us as we build a vital resource to drive organizational resilience within a fast-moving security landscape. I'm Jenny Radcliffe. Welcome to the Show landscape. I'm Jenny Radcliffe. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:This week we are joined by Shehzad Shamin, CEO and founder of Positive Intelligence. Shehzad is a Stanford lecturer and New York Times best selling author of Positive Intelligence. Shehzad has been the CEO of the largest coach training organization in the world and has spent the best part of the 21st century helping people to be the best versions of themselves. Currently, Shehzad is the CEO and founder of Positive Intelligence, a company with the inspiring mission of creating a world where mental fitness is as widespread as physical fitness. Shehzad joins us today to discuss all things personal resilience and the importance of being mentally fit in the modern day world. Welcome, listeners. We hope you enjoy the show, Hi Shehzad.
Speaker 2:Hello Jenny, how are you?
Speaker 1:I'm good. How are you today?
Speaker 2:Great delighted about being here with you.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I expect this positive response, knowing a little bit about you Great well, yeah, I expect this positive response, knowing a little bit about right, but can you just start by giving us a little overview of personal resilience and what it means to you?
Speaker 2:I define resilience simply as how quickly you can recover from your negative responses to life's challenges. When something is challenging and goes wrong in our life and setbacks occur, we are human. We react negatively, we feel stressed, we feel upset, we feel disappointed, we feel angry, frustrated all of those things. Those are negative responses. Resilience means you quickly recover from that negative response to a positive response to challenges, which might include feeling empathy, curiosity, creativity and being able to move into calm, clear-headed, laser-focused action. Clearly, if you're able to recover really quickly from negative to positive response to life challenges, you will perform better, you'll also feel better, and that speed of recovery is based on how resilient you are.
Speaker 1:Coming from you, this means a lot, because you have spent your career looking at how to overcome those negative parts of the brain and I've been looking into your career and into your work and your research before we came on here. So do you want to just tell me a little bit about why you're sort of so qualified to talk about that?
Speaker 2:Well, there is a personal level. There is a professional level. At the personal level, I grew up in poverty with scary parents and ended up being in clinical depression for the first 30 years of my life, and I was pretty much kicked out and demoted from my first CEO job because I was such a horrific leader under stress at the first company that I founded. So I have learned from having really hit bottom on, both personally and professionally, and needing to grow myself out of it. Professionally, I've been at this for more than 20 years and I'm a science-based thinker, so all of our work is based on rigorous scientific research that has asked the question at the root of it all what are the root causes of optimizing or sabotaging our well-being and performance? So the research that we have done is what's at the root of optimizing or sabotaging our well-being and performance, which basically reveals the key factors for being resilient or not being resilient.
Speaker 1:I love that you take that science-based approach. I wonder whether that's because you have experience and training and being in engineering, as well as all the psychology that you put into your work now, a problem-solving mindset, along with kind of the psychology that we need to understand people and understand how they self-sabotage these I'm going to say problems, these challenges, these facts about the way the human brain works. Do you think that that double-edged approach has been useful?
Speaker 2:I think it's critical. I am rigorous about being skeptical with all sorts of claims made that sound good on surface but don't materialize. And I looked at too many personal development, professional development efforts where initially it generates euphoria and generates life-changing insights and then three months later we're back to the same old behavior. So I asked myself what is it that has so many of our attempts at improving ourselves fail? And what I realized are two things. One, we are not really looking at root causes. We are treating the symptoms. Two, we are treating issues at an insight level, just generating insight. And the problem is our bad old behavior live in our brain in the form of neural pathways. They're muscles of the brain. You can't fight muscle with insight. You need to fight muscle with muscle, which means if you're serious about change, you've got to build new muscles in the brain. Therefore, move from insight to actual daily practices that build mental muscles, rewire your brain. So with those two things, I believe massive and sustained change is absolutely possible. That's the work we do every day pretty life-changing stuff.
Speaker 1:Stress in the industry and mental health, if you like is becoming such a. It's such a pertinent topic these days, particularly in the security industry, but I'm sure throughout industry. I wondered whether you'd seen a trend in your career, you know something changing more attention, attention to this, or I wonder whether it's more attention to the subject or whether people are more stressed, given the macro environment, given the challenges businesses face yeah, I believe we are experiencing an epidemic of stress.
Speaker 2:The head of wellness at a major institution I was talking to said that 49% of their people were in need of psychological intervention and he was astonished saying that, saying you know, 10 years ago it used to be less than 10%. So there are macro dynamics that are affecting this scenario. We don't necessarily need to get into them, but here's the problem are affecting this scenario. We don't necessarily need to get into them, but here's the problem. Stress is the part of our response which is survival-based and it just gets the brain into a spiraling into more and more of the negative part of the brain.
Speaker 2:My work is on how we sabotage ourselves and we have shown that there are 10 ways people sabotage themselves and we have shown that there are 10 ways people sabotage themselves and unfortunately, all of these 10 ways go on hyperdrive when we are stressed and as they go on hyperdrive, they generate more stress, so we get ourselves into a vortex of negativity. As we get stressed, things get worse and worse. And when it comes to cybersecurity, the challenge is that the stressed mind is not a very clear-headed mind, it is literally. The stressed mind is literally tunnel visioned, and when you're tunnel visioned, you're not seeing things clearly and you're not seeing things broadly enough to know what truly matters versus what are the things that are not as important. And so, for this profession in particular, I would imagine that being able to really manage stress and quickly recover from a stress response to positive response, which is again my definition of resilience, is paramount. It's critical.
Speaker 1:For good explanations. Shehzad's got a great TED Talk that you can see. You can find that very easily, and obviously there's the book as well Positive Intelligence. One of the things I wanted to ask you about this, and only to touch on it quickly is that I know that people will say but I'm great when I'm stressed, I work best under pressure. Stress is just a feature of modern professional life. I mean, what's your retort to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, huge mistake, and completely the opposite of what happened. I've worked with athletes at Stanford world-class athletes and one of the things we show them is that world-class athletes, when things get tougher and tougher and tougher, they actually learn how to not go into a stress response and instead go to what athletes call being in the zone. When you're in the zone, you're not feeling stressed, it's quite the zone. When you're in the zone, you're not feeling stressed, it's quite the opposite. You're feeling calm and clear-headed and laser-focused and you do much better than you would. If you are under hyper-stress, you actually choke. That's why great athletes sometimes choke in the most critical moments of the game. So stress is absolutely not going to be getting you to your peak performance. So things like stress gives you my performance edge, unfortunately, are one of the self-fulfilling prophecies we live on, which generate more and more self-sabotage because you sometimes seek it and you don't realize how hampered your brain is when it is under stress.
Speaker 1:You said that there's a difference between being in the zone and being stressed, and it sounds to me as if people are semantically mislabeling this. They're mislabeling. It's part of the language that we tell ourselves. So, because we think there were times that we were in this zone and we did really well, they say, oh well, that was because I was stressed, it was under stress, I performed. But what you're saying to me is it's not that they were under stress, they were, I performed. But what you're saying to me is.
Speaker 1:It's not that they were under stress. They were in the zone. Stress is actually something we define, uh, uniquely and personally, and it's not the same thing yeah, they feel completely different when I'm stressed.
Speaker 2:My palm is sweating, my heart rate is is fast. I don't want to have, uh, more and more of those feelings. When I'm in the zone, you literally feel the opposite. You feel calm, clear-, clear-headed and deeply at peace. It's almost the exact opposite of stress and you would want a lot more of it. When you leave the zone, at least just say oh my God, that was so incredible. How do I get back there? And we, of course, teach them how to get back there systematically. Often they don't know how they got there. And we teach them how you can systematically get back into that zone.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, can you talk to me a little?
Speaker 2:bit about the personal resilience reports and just touch a little bit on that. Yes, it's very discouraging to hear what a high percentage of leaders don't believe that resilience is a real focus and, from everything that we know, resilience, as I defined it, is paramount to optimizing both your well-being and your performance, for both yourself and your team. So not having resilience be a key focus is a significant detriment to leaders being able to achieve the best outcome.
Speaker 1:So do we think that we need stress as some sort of performance indicator, and I wonder how it would be difficult to define that qualitatively.
Speaker 2:Yeah, stress is the thing that fuels 10 ways of self-sabotage and what our research shows? That there are 10 key ways that when people are under stress, they sabotage themselves. We call these the saboteurs, agents of self-sabotage, and all of us have it. So the names of these saboteurs are things like the judge, the controller, the stickler, the victim, the avoider, the pleaser, and so on. So the problem is, when you go under stress, these ways of self-sabotage go on steroid. They are fueled by stress.
Speaker 2:So when you're under stress, if you have the controller, you become more controlling.
Speaker 2:If you have the avoider saboteur, you become more avoiding. If you have the stickler saboteur, you focus even more on the minutiae that don't matter and miss sight of the big picture and so on. So we look not just as stress, but we ask ourselves, we show people how do you sabotage yourself, what's your pattern of self-sabotage? So that when you see that pattern, come, we teach you these 10 second neuroscience-based techniques so that you can quiet that part of your brain that generates stress and generates these ways of self-sabotage and you begin to energize the positive side of your brain and your positive side of your brain responds with positivity, feels things like empathy, curiosity, creativity, calm, clear-headed, laser-focused. So you have you shift from the negative response to positive response by just being aware of how, what stress does to you in terms of self-sabotage and how to shift your brain activation you know, I was looking at some of your stuff and I saw you talking about this and I thought this is so interesting because I think at one point you say so.
Speaker 1:Now you can say, oh no, that's just the judge. That's just the judge that's in my brain telling me you always mess this up, you always get this wrong, you always leave things to the last minute. Ah well, and now I know you're there and I found that very interesting, because if you can label something, this is just my explanation. This is not the science, so excuse me if I don't get this quite right, but I always think if you can label something and then go oh, there you are again. It's kind of almost anthropomorphizing, but it is. It's almost like this little human in your brain and you can say to it right, you can shut up now.
Speaker 1:I know that you always say that to me, I can do better right.
Speaker 2:Yes, an example of it is, let's say, the judge. One of my great saboteurs is the judge, and so notice the difference between me saying I think I'm an idiot and I'm going to fail, or saying my judge is saying I'm an idiot and I'm going to fail. Notice the difference. I have discredited this voice as a voice of my saboteur, giving it a name. Put it outside of myself rather than saying, oh my God, the voice in my head is telling me the truth.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of lies that we tell ourselves in our head, spoken by the saboteurs, and we discredit these lies by showing you which character in your head is voicing these statements and discrediting it and putting outside yourself it has a profound impact very quickly in resilience, because these saboteurs are our agents, are what makes us not resilient. These are the characters that cause our negative response. So if you want to be resilient, one of the ways that you can go to the heart of it is notice how you go negative, and these 10 ways are the ways you go negative. There are 10 ways that you are not resilient in response to challenges, and you can shift that pretty quickly in in the sort of lexicon of the security industry, particularly cyber.
Speaker 1:It made me think of hackers. We've got these little hackers in our brain and sitting all this malware and telling you and you know, and you just got, you just have to recognize it and then it install the fix. You know, fix the bug I thought it was. It was very interesting.
Speaker 2:Yes, recognize the hacker as opposed to the friend. Like it's powerful to see who's friend and who's foe. Exactly right, let's catch these hackers.
Speaker 1:Little kind of confidence hackers that just sort of get to us all and, as you say, there's many of them. So let's talk about z scalers report, because their c scalers personal resilience report found that 51 of it professionals don't believe employers actually care about personal resilience, and so the question to you is how do we address that? How do organizations go about building a culture that values personal resilience? I mean?
Speaker 1:mean you know, if we look at your advice and look at the idea of these 10 saboteurs in the brain the judges, one the controller, as you mentioned we can sort of personally do it. But what about on an organizational level? You've had a lot of experience with the biggest companies and big CEOs. What can a company do?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I stand in front of corporate audiences and I look people in the eye and I say I want to tell you that every single day you actively sabotage your well-being, performance and relationships. Let me repeat that Every single day you're actively sabotaging your well-being, performance and relationship. How do I know that? Because everybody does that. And the question is not if you do it, but how you do it. And we can show you. There are 10 ways people do it and you can figure out how.
Speaker 2:And just imagine what would happen to your well-being, performance and relationships if you were able to catch your saboteurs, the ways you self-sabotage, and shift to the positive part of your brain. And that is absolutely doable, it's achievable and it it is so powerfully. Uh, done that within eight weeks of practice the harvard affiliate that neuroscientists have shown your brain gets so rewired that within eight weeks of this kind of practice, you can actually see increased gray matter in the region of your brain where all these ways of self-sabotage live, and increased gray matter in the positive side of the brain, decreased gray matter in the negative side of the brain where all the saboteurs live. So you're reviring your brain and that's why we call this work mental fitness. It is possible to shift, but you got to build muscles through daily practice and that is the essence of resilience, where you quickly recover from negative to positive response.
Speaker 1:That's so clever because that's what you're saying. It's like building a muscle. It really is something that you can practically address. Is there some practical exercises people can do? Are there any sort of takeaways a couple of quick takeaways people can take from this, or does it take longer?
Speaker 2:Well, I give you a couple. One people can do after the show, which is just figure out how you self-sabotage, and so you can go and do the five-minute online saboteur assessment and we can give you the link for that. Then the second thing is there's a very simple technique. It takes 10 seconds. We call it the PQ rep. Pq stands for positive intelligence quotient. The PQ rep is a 10-second exercise that quiets the saboteur region of your brain and energizes the positive part of your brain.
Speaker 2:Just take two fingertips. Gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers. So gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers. And as you do that, if your head had been under an fMRI machine, you would have noticed that you ever so slightly quieted the region of your brain where all these ways of self-sabotage and stress live and ever so slightly energized the positive part of your brain.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, with one of these, it's not going to change your life, but what if you did a lot of them? You would build significant muscles in your brain and I call this the fundamentally the muscle of self-command, where you're learning to command your mind rather than let your mind do its crazy things, which is generating all the stress and negativity. So you just started building the muscle of self-command. So you shift from self-sabotage to self-mastery, which is again the key central muscle for resilience. Are you in charge of your mind or is your mind doing its thing in a way that's not serving you?
Speaker 1:that's so useful. I'll be doing that a lot because I need all right but but one of the things that it it that makes me think about and made me think about when I was reading some of your um writing and reports, was a lot of this is about discipline, but discipline something, or it feels to me like it's about discipline and and something that's very quick and easy for people to do, like that little exercise, actually is that sort of a micro discipline, you know it's like you're saying, no, we're going to calm down now, so it's really useful she's had you.
Speaker 1:I just wondered whether you have any details in your own life when your own resilience was tested and I wondered I mean, you spoke about you know your background, a little bit about your childhood and everything else, but do you get people who push back against this? How are you resilient when I'm sure you get people who push back and say, well, you know, this is a business, is very kind of binary and busy and you know how are you resilient, telling people and convincing people that this is apart from.
Speaker 1:You know the brilliant science behind it.
Speaker 2:well, everything we do is science-based and also quite common sense. So, uh, what we talk to people about is hey, when you feel negative emotions for a second, feel stress, upset, disappointment, anger, shame, all those stuff. That's really helpful because it alerts you. Something needs your attention. But beyond that, why would you stay stressed, upset, anger, disappointed? All of that stuff and staying in negative emotions is clearly sabotaging you. So why are you doing it? Well, the reason you're doing it is because you're not commanding your mind. You don't have control over your mind. So what would it be like if he developed self-command over your mind, so that you don't necessarily waste your time in those negative emotions? And we show you how the brain gets rewired. We show you all the data, neuroscience research and also how the saboteurs were discovered. So there's no place where we ask you to have a leap of faith, place where we ask you to have a leap of faith.
Speaker 2:And then, in terms of actual practice, I have gone personally from a leader that was, you know, kicked out of being a leader. There's a palace coup where people went to the board saying we don't want to work for Shirzad anymore because he's such a horrific controlling micromanager under stress which is who I was to somebody now you know who's getting like a 90% plus engagement survey in our business. Because when we hit crises, when we hit challenges, we literally practice what I'm talking to you about. Anytime the meeting starts going negative, we say stop, we are beginning to go down the spiral of negative energy and that's contagious. Let's do a couple of minutes of these things I just showed you the PQ reps and let's shift.
Speaker 2:And so if you talk to anybody working for us we practice this Everybody says their life has changed as they start working for us because we practice everybody catching themselves go negative and very quickly shifting to positive and saying my goodness, life can be so much easier and we can be having a lot more fun and performing so much better. So it's a way of life and we have trained about 100,000 coaches around the world. This has become the biggest movement in the world because coaches working with all sorts of populations are saying these techniques work powerfully and pretty quickly. Within six to eight weeks, 80 to 90% of practitioners report significant improvements in stress management, conflict management, ability to handle challenges better. All of these metrics are improving very quickly because we focus on building muscles and we focus on root cause rather than treating the symptoms.
Speaker 1:Well, it's been so amazing. Speaking to Shazad, I have to ask all my guests one more question what would you consider to be your personal resilience superpower?
Speaker 2:I would say self-command, building self-command, and I build self-command 10 seconds at a time doing PQ reps and that starts it all. It starts the shift from the negative to the positive response.
Speaker 1:I think your superpower is bringing all of this to everyone's attention because it's useful as it is, it's given real positive change. Bringing all of this to everyone's attention because it's useful as it is, it's given real positive change. I want to say thank you very much to shazad charming for all of this insight and point everybody to um, the positive intelligence book, and to that ted talk which will explain it all. Shazad explains it all in in sort of quite a short format as well, if you want to know more. So let's reflect on that conversation with Shehzad Shamim Shehzad has identified 10 key ways people self-sabotage. He calls them saboteurs.
Speaker 2:All of us have it. So the names of these saboteurs are things like the judge, the controller, the stickler and so on. So the problem is, when you go under stress, these ways of self-sabotage go on steroids. They are fueled by stress.
Speaker 1:Shirzad believes we're experiencing an epidemic of stress and it's detrimental to the work we do.
Speaker 2:When it comes to cybersecurity, the challenge is that the stressed mind is not a very clear-headed mind. The stressed mind is literally tunnel visioned, and when you're tunnel visioned, you're not seeing things clearly and you're not seeing things broadly enough to know what truly matters.
Speaker 1:And if you're one of the people who say they work best under stress, Sherzad has some words for you to think on.
Speaker 2:Huge mistake World-class athletes. When things get tougher and tougher and tougher, they actually learn how to not go into a stress response and instead go to what athletes call being in the zone. When you're in the zone, you're not feeling stress. It's quite the opposite. If you are under hyper stress, you actually choke, See.
Speaker 1:Scaler's personal resilience report found that 51% of IT professionals don't believe employers care about personal resilience. He believes organisations sabotage their well-being, performance and relationships this way.
Speaker 2:Just imagine what would happen to your well-being, performance and relationships if you were able to capture the ways you self-sabotage and shift to the positive part of your brain. So you're reviring your brain, and that is the essence of resilience, where you quickly recover from a negative to positive response.
Speaker 1:The Resilience Factor podcast is brought to you by Zscaler, a leading cloud-based cyber security platform, revolutionizing the way businesses protect themselves from cyber threats. Revolutionising the way businesses protect themselves from cyber threats by transitioning from traditional appliance-based systems to a cloud-delivered model and the implementation of zero-trust principles, cscaler provides businesses with optimal protection from cyber threats.