Hi, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And for those people who hear this guest introduce themselves, there'll be no doubts where in the world he's from. So, good morning to you, Bill Carson.
Bill:Hello, Russell, all the way from Sydney.
Russell:Sydney, Australia. You're almost exactly on the other side of the planet to me. Isn't that amazing?
Bill:I think so, yes. However, you're looking at it, obviously split.
Russell:Through drill, stop drilling downwards from where we are. Yeah, we'd probably come out just around the corner from you. Is it a Paniata river or whatever it's called? Well, it's a delight to talk to you today, and it's wise at this point to say to listeners, obviously, that there's going to be slightly more of a lag on this show. So, it may well be that we have to be a little bit less to and fro than usual, but let's give it a go. So, first of all, Bill, I'm delighted to meet you and delighted to welcome you to the podcast. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, what it is that you do?
Bill:Good. Thank you very much, Russell. So, I'm kind of in this icky guy place for me, which is everything's landing where I belong in the areas of specialising in mental health. Mental health in workplaces and resilience is very much part of that. Way back in uni days, I was sort of seriously thinking of doing psychology and teaching, but for a whole raft of reasons, I didn't. I ended up doing a science degree, majored in metallurgy, and worked in manufacturing roles. But I really struggled a lot during uni. I had a lot of what am I doing here? What's the purpose of my life?
Bill:All this kind of existential kind of stuff that we do, and we often manage that stuff with sex, drugs and rock and roll, because what had happened for me was my father had died in a car accident when I was five. And the massive trauma from that experience. My mother was 26, she had four kids. I was the eldest. And you can well imagine that she lost her husband, who was 29. The massive trauma that she went through, she was so traumatised that she didn't help me through mine. And then mine kind of just stayed with me for a really long time. And now I'm fully healed from that because I've done a lot of work on it. But that kind of informs at some level why I do what I do.
Russell:Yeah. And for people who heard the term IgA for the first time, it's a Japanese thing. It is something about sense of purpose or knowing your purpose or understanding your purpose. It's about purpose, isn't it?
Bill:Yeah. It's this wonderful principle that it's the combination of something that you love, something that you're good at, something that the world wants. And the fourth is that you'll get paid for it.
Russell:Yeah.
Bill:I'm passionate about this whole work. I'm good at it. I've got a lot of pedigree, which we can talk about. The world wants it, and it really makes a difference.
Russell:Yes. And you're raising a fascinating point here about the impact of childhood trauma on our adult lives. And I think one of the challenges that people face is that they often have trauma, but they can't remember the original incident, or they've had an original incident, and they've not had the tools and methods to be able to change their perception of that or to be able to manage the effects, or they almost risk being defined by those things, don't they? So actually, it becomes their life purpose to work this thing out rather than to live an actual life. And you can be defined by an incident in your childhood, which can be, there's no diminishing what the incident was, but how one learns to deal with that is actually pretty important, isn't it?
Russell:And I wonder whether, I don't know what your mental health system is like down there, but I don't know whether we get onto things early enough. We certainly don't hear. So, we have a lot of childhood trauma presenting and often quite late adult stages. So, I wonder how you began the process of negating the harm from the childhood incident.
Bill:Yeah, that's a really good question, Russell. It came about because in the sort of 20 14, 20 15 20 16 period or 2014 2015, really, I had some experiences where work situations went south, didn't work out for a complex range of reasons. And I have an internalising stress reaction style. I'll attack myself, I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy versus all the other people who have externalizing, blameless styles. And so, there are things happened. I kind of got blamed. Looking back. It wasn't my fault. They were just as stupid as I was. And anyway, I really internalised a lot, but I fortunately had some divine intervention. And I came across John Gray's book in this country town of New South Wales called UK. And it was John Gray's book called staying focused in a hyper.
Bill:And you know, as you know, John Gray originally wrote Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. And he's done a huge amount of work around brain chemistry and a whole raft of things. And so, I started reading this book. It really introduced me to that whole area of supplements and brain chemistry and whatever. And then I came across Daniel Ayman's work, change your brain, change your life, and inflammatory conditions in the brain. One of the things that Daniel talks about is ANT automatic negative thoughts. And since then, I've seen a lot of research that talks about inflammatory conditions in the amygdala hippocampus kind of area. And that just generates a lot of negativity. And then I did a lot of research around supplements and kind of whole range of area, William Walsh's work, Patrick Holford's work, et cetera.
Bill:And then I just started testing. These guys were talking about it. And you could get these supplements to improve serotonin levels and dopamine levels just from the original sort of molecules in the amino acids. Like serotonin comes from altyrozine. You can just buy it over the counter from a health food shop. It's no big deal. And then started experimenting. And then there's a particularly really good product that turns out by Swiss, the chemical, the supplements kind of manufacturer called mood. It's got really good combination of tyrosine and phenylalanine and b six b twelve bilova and all that kind of stuff. And I really started to notice that was very helpful. And I also started to really connect in with my feelings and really started to notice just the kind of underlying trauma around that. And I had some really good therapy.
Bill:And so it was really a combination of brain chemistry and good therapy and a lot of other sorts of kind of stuff that I was learning around resilience and all those kinds of areas that just got me into a really good place. And now I kind of understand a lot of that challenge and trauma that people experience and recognise the incredible value of a whole raft of different approaches to help get through it.
Russell:No, that's really interesting. So, let's have a think about this. So, I always thought it was l tryptophan that increased serotonin, but that might just be a different scientific approach, because altairazone is more for energy and speed, isn't it? But do your research. We all do different things here. But what I'm fascinated by here is your starting approach. And I think what you said is extremely sensible and wise. I'm sorry to have to agree with you on all these things, but it is fascinating if you go to the doctor and say, I've got shortness of breath, I've got pain in my arm, I've got tingling in my shoulder or something. They look at the organ, the heart, and say, there's a problem with your heart. And we go to the doctor, and we say, I've got racing thoughts, I can't sleep.
Russell:I have physiological reactions to things. No one says, let's look at the health of your brain. Everyone talks about, and that's what you're talking about with supplements. We're talking about how we actually look after the actual organ that produces cognitive process, how it produces all the things that we do. And I think you're right here. I think we undervalue the care for the actual organ. We're so focused on the thoughts, and you have to do that. You have to do cognitive repair and CBT or whatever it might be, therapy, blah, blah. But I think if you don't focus on the shell and what's inside the cell at an organic level, you can't expect the machinery or the system itself to actually work. So, I think it's quite an interesting approach, starting with the nutrients. I think you're absolutely right.
Russell:I think as well, neurobiology has really been massively affected by our ability to understand food and the correlation with energy and such like, and how that works. And that's because food science has improved. Yes. I think this is a really interesting approach because lots of people come in here and they talk about having a positive attitude and jumping up and down and thinking things and having pictures on the wall and all that sort of stuff. And that, for me, is down the road.
Bill:Yes.
Russell:Like if you have a heart attack, the first thing you don't do is go and run a marathon. What you do is you look after your heart.
Bill:Exactly.
Russell:You come back, you build capacity, don't you? Build well, that's what resilience is. It's about learning and building. And I think sometimes one of the key things we see in terms of cognitive repair and cognitive function of working memory is learning to learn. And I think it's something we talk a lot about in the corpus sector. I know you're there as well, and I think we've lost the art of learning. And it's interesting that you picked up a book and you learned from that book. You probably reflected, took action, built a plan, all that sort of stuff. So, I just wonder whether sometimes we sort of start in the wrong place. So, I was just intrigued by the way you started.
Bill:So that's yeah, that's a really good point. And I think broadening out the perspective around starting points as well. Russell it’s the classic biopsychosocial model, which fundamentally underpins classic sort of western psychology approach is fundamental, but it's missing also an incredibly important piece as well. So, the bio is looking after ourselves physically, which obviously will impact on brain health and brain function. Psycho is obviously the mind, and then therefore good therapy, and then social would-be relationships, et cetera. But man's search for meaning, Viktor Frankl's work around logo therapy and sense of purpose, this is incredibly important. And that's one of the things that I was struggling with when I was young. What's my sense of purpose? And then these days I have a huge sense of purpose.
Russell:So you can have all those ingredients, but if you don't have a sense of purpose, Simon Sinek's start with why these things kind of all link in to cover the full domain of sort of showing up and being the best that we can be.
Russell:And it's fascinating, isn't it, because we've sort of developed a highly individualised, non-community led model of existence as human beings. So, we increasingly have the sense of I rather than we. We increasingly sit at our own little individual domiciles, not talking to each other, not within a family, especially in big cities. The idea of loneliness is a massive contagion these days, which, of course, is one of the facets that leads to suicide ideation. And I wonder whether we over focus on the eye and over focus on this individuality, and we'll lose that sense of purpose which comes from. I mean, the Americans call it serving others, whatever the jargon might be, the sense of belonging, higher purpose, an integrative purpose to which we belong, rather than the purpose is just me and my little old journey sort of thing.
Russell:So just wondered about your views on that.
Bill:Yeah. And that's why for me, and it's taken a bit of time to kind of figure out this sense of purpose for me, which is that my purpose is that I make contribution of love to humanity every day, one person at a time. And that's my purpose. That's what I do. So initially it was kind of making a contribution of love, and then I kind of picked up on brilliant human being will come to me that if we exist for humanity. So, one of the things that I do is and have done for the last seven years is I do lifeline, my volunteer telephone crisis supporter.
Russell:Okay.
Bill:And it's incredible. The gift that flows into my life because I'm giving my gifts to support others who really struggling when they are having very difficult thoughts and situations like that. So, I'm making the time available. I'm giving 4 hours a fortnight. I've given over 600 and 700 hours. It's the equivalent of like a quarter of a million dollars in terms of my own hourly rate. And then I've been blessed massively from that.
Bill:And I think to your point, Russell, the myopicness, sometimes we get caught up because there's such a huge driver by the advertising industry and their kind of whole business model that people got to really be careful about just not letting that business model overtake their lives and all the facets that they create around that and seek their own sense of identity, their own sense of relationships, their own connectedness is a really strong view that I have.
Russell:Yeah, no, that's fascinating. So, I'd like to ask a question. Before I do, I'm going to preface this, if I may, by saying it's refreshing how you've not mentioned the word values today, because I am so fed up with values. But let's talk about if someone was sitting there thinking this purpose thing. That sounds jazzy. How do I begin to work out my purpose?
Bill:It's a really good question, so I'll answer it with a little bit of context. So, there's this model of happiness called that I've seen, and I use, and I share, which is called the three P's of happiness. So, the lowest form of happiness is pleasure. And there's an author, I haven't read the book, but I know of it, which is essentially the massive delusion that so many people are under and that is that they get pleasure from having things, having the house, the car, the holiday, the whatever. We will never ever be happy when our externalisation is outside ourselves by having something. So that's a pleasure thing. The next level of happiness is passion. So, a sense of you're doing this work, you're passionate about it, you want to give it to it. I'm passionate about my work.
Bill:And then the highest level of happiness is purpose. So, a classic example is classic Aussie. Mate, what are you doing? I'm just doing a job, laying some bricks and next level. So just doing a job. So, people who just do a job, just collecting the money, they'll never fundamentally be happy because all they're doing is just doing the work to collect some money, to have some pleasure. The next guy who's at the passion level, what are you doing, mate? Look, have a look at this wall. It's really straight. I'm very good at walls. I just love my work. And then the highest level. What are you doing, mate? I'm building a cathedral. And there's this high sense of identity. And then if you kind of just extrapolate that back into, like, an example. So just someone who works in a supermarket.
Bill:So why do you do what you do? I'm just doing the work to collect some money. I hate the bloody thing. People annoy the crap out of me, et cetera. Then what are you doing? Yes, I work in this supermarket. I'm committed to becoming better at it. I eventually want to become a manager one day. I want to really grow in the retail industry and sort of be the best I can. And then what are you doing? Well, each day I make a decision to smile at as many people as I can. And so, I'm putting the fruit out, I'm loading the shelves, and I'm just being nice because I make a difference in someone's life every day, and that's my purpose. No big deal, but relevant sort of context.
Bill:Context and scale.
Russell:Yeah, exactly. Interesting.
Bill:So we would start with the three P's and would we start by thinking, well, for me, because I'm very much about how you find the happiness, how you find happiness and where you are, rather than waiting happiness to strike you like a shaft of sort of enlightenment from the skies. So, in a sense, what you're saying is how you link what you do to your purpose, how you uncover your purpose through what you're doing. Yes, I suppose it could be either way, can't it?
Russell:Yeah. There kind of needs to be a fundamental component of a contribution to others. It's just the essence of who we are as social beings. We'll always ultimately have a fundamental sense of worth to a degree, when we care about others, and you can balance that out. But that's what I've learned, is a fundamental component. The media and society tend to not want to orientate us towards that. For some, the fundamental kind of premise of their model of the world is fundamentally creating constant trauma, because that's the way they keep. Because they figured out back in the 1960s that if you keep the masses in trauma at about the level of 75%, then they consume to offset their trauma. And this is kind of one of the reasons why we think humans have this negativity bias.
Russell:It's really because it's constantly aggravated by the media, their business model, which is to sell stuff. But if you kind of wake up to that and learn to recognize that, put it in its place, and honour relationships. And if you look at Barbara Fredrickson's work and Lasada and John Gottman, the incredible importance of positivity in relationships, saying positive things to each, you know, thank you for filling the dishwasher, and thank you for ordering the food, and thank you so, constantly balancing out a minimum of three positives to every negative. And so, if you got that going on in a relationship and at work and in life, then we're in a much better place somewhere than the negativity that comes with.
Russell:And that's interesting, because just going back to purpose for a second, and this might be a bit of an engineered ratchet turn, but I'm quite thinking a little bit about actually, when we work, what we're doing is we're effectively aligning our sense of personal purpose with what an organization has for its purpose. I work with a lot of different industries, but let's say I'm working with someone who's very creative. If you have a very creative organization, strong sense of purpose, and you have a sense of purpose for creating something, those two things align. And I think that what drives that is psychological safety, safe conversations with managers, because actually you need that time to learn and explore, don't you? So, I know you've done a lot of work in this area.
Russell:I just wonder if you could say something around the broad subject of psychological safety and safe conversations. And of course, I know you've written a book in this area, so it'd be interesting to hear something about that.
Bill:Yeah, good. Thank you. Thank you very much, Russell. Yeah. The Safe Conversations for Work and Life book that I've written kind of comes out of a workshop called Safe Conversations skills for managers. And I've trained a lot of managers in mental health first aid. And what often happens is managers don't know how to have the conversation where someone might be struggling. And welcome to being a human. We all have stuff that happens and that impacts on our performance. And so, managers with manager brain always think that they need to try to solve the problem, so they find it very difficult to drop all that and to be able to connect in and have a person-centred conversation. And that's what I teach.
Bill:First of all, I teach, what would you be noticing what might be happening if someone is kind of struggling and then gently entering into the conversation in such a way that you're helping the team member colleague create their own self-awareness and then identifying the resources that would be most suitable for them. So, you turn off manager brain because manager brain wants to be telling them what to do. That's really unhelpful. Consistently, managers are finding that it's a really good strategy because it is a very good upskilling for psychosocial safety and psychological safety in the workplace.
Russell:So that makes sense. So, a safe conversation can still be a robust conversation. It's a situation where you can have a professional conversation, a professional debate where someone's not at risk. So, you get the best from guessing.
Bill:Yes, exactly. So, if, let's say for I, you and I had a kind of good trusting relationship and let's say you work for me. And then I was kind of noticing that Russell was kind of like not his normal self for some reason. Let's say, for example, you've got some things going one of the kids is unwell, one of your parents is kind of unwell, and you're sort of worried about them. So, I connect in, and I have a, how's Russell going know? And then it might be in the second instance I might refer to the fact, you know, if you're an Aussie, I'll be kind of saying, hey, mate, your kind of not seeming to be your normal, know, how are you going, whatever's happening, have you got things, support to look after yourself and so forth.
Bill:Now in that moment, you will make a decision. Is it safe for you to open up and just kind of share what might be going on for you? And if there's a degree of safety, in other words, if I am safe to talk to, because I'm not going to judge you, tell you to kind of buck up, mate, you'll get over it and something like that, you'll just be safe. And I create this, in a sense, this platform of safety between us where you can just share, I'm not going to tell you what to do, et cetera, then there's an enormous amount of, in a sense, healing and help and support that happens for you and for other people when we have that kind of skill.
Russell:Yeah. And we know that when that's happening, adrenaline levels are lower, cortisol is lower, dopamine is higher, serotonin is higher. Because actually we are neurobiologically not operating from that position where our body is stressed and ready to take action. It's a manifestly scientific approach, as it were. And I think people think these things are soft and fluffy because people should get a grip and get over themselves. But actually, learning to treat adults like adults is actually a safe conversation. Learning to give people agency for their own thoughts and conclusions is a safe conversation. So not talking down to people, not those sorts of things. And I often think people think being psychological. Safe is psychological. Safe means you can't say anything to anybody. And I think it's the reverse.
Russell:It's building a culture where you can have robust professional conversations, but in a way that is healthy and energised so you don't end at being distressed or angry or tired or what you need to do is either just go out on an even keel or potentially better, because that's the nature of having robust professional conversations at work. It's about usually how to improve performance. So, Bill, how do I get my paws on this book of yours?
Bill:Yes, it’s available on Amazon at the moment. Safe Conversations for Work and Life. My website is inspirelearning au and so you can go there and get the resources that way. The book is available in paperback version and also in ebook version as well. Russell, very good.
Russell:I was going to say the other thing I see on your site, which I was just distracted by as well. I was just having a look at how to measure your emotional fitness and there's an interesting model of resilience on there. So that's a conversation for another day. But do you want people to come and have a bash at that, fill that in for themselves?
Bill:The emotional fitness probably. With the work that I've been doing, one of the things that I find really intriguing is you know how we're generating more awareness these days around mental health. Whoever has a thought without feelings, we never do. All over the world we're going to get more sophisticated. We got to get comfortable with feelings and with emotions and learn to emotionally regulate ourselves most effectively a lot. So many of the issues on the planet just exist because people don't know how to emotionally regulate themselves appropriately with the stresses and challenges that occur. And I'd love to talk with you in more detail around that. And this is how it ties into your work around resilience and those sorts of things as well. So, when we have good levels of emotional fitness, then that's really helpful for us.
Bill:So yeah, people can go on the site and do the emotional fitness measurement and then happy to have conversations with me and explore it in more detail.
Russell:Brilliant. Well, look, it's been a joy to talk to you today and I've just noticed that the time has run past her a lot of times. So, forgive me for being too interested in what you had to say. So, we've been talking to Bill Carson. The site is inspirelearning au and the book, of course, which is available on Amazon all over the place. Safe Conversations for Work and Life. Bill, it's been a joy to talk to you today.
Bill:And you, too, Russell. Thank you very much.
Russell:Thanks for joining us. You take care.