Webinar Database

Context: The school is a private, faith-based school in South Africa who teaches students from Grade 0 to Grade 12. After covid, teachers were trying to come to grips with the burnout they had experienced during the constant emerging changes of Covid. During Covid teachers had to move from face-to-face classroom teaching to online teaching in a matter of 3 weeks as lockdown in South Africa commenced. After the lock down was lifted teachers were faced with teaching face-to-face as well as online simultaneously to accommodate students from vulnerable families who could not return to school when lock down regulations were alleviated, had to co-regulate students who had to maintain social distancing and were unable to see each other’s and teachers’ facial expressions properly due to the wearing of masks, and had to process the risks to their own health and safety.

During various waves teachers had to contend with temporary lockdown’s that disrupted exams and teaching due to covid regulations. Their nervous systems had to contend with a state of continuous instability and an impossibility of creating routine within the teaching environment.

At the point of the intervention, covid restrictions have been lifted completely and extra-curricular activities were resuming. Teachers found returning to “normal” extremely stressful as change fatigue and chronic stress have taken its toll. The Executive of the School was looking for an intervention to assist teachers through the transition to “normal”.

Intervention: The case study that will be presented used a condensed Appreciative Inquiry format adapted based on applied neuroscience principles. The applied neuroscience models and theories integrated for the adaptation of the intervention were:

Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2021)

The consistency-theoretical model (Grawe, 2007)

Functional large scale neural networks (Menon, 2011; Arden, 2019)

Neuro-narrative therapy (Zimmerman, 2018).

Organisations around the world are discovering neuroscience as the research base for future-orientated success. Through neuroimaging technology, we now have a deeper understanding of how the brain functions, shedding light on behaviour, motivation, learning and memory, providing insight into evidence based leadership practices. This webinar summarises the foundation of applied social neuroscience and that is, what transpires in a personal interaction between leader and team member (or trainer/teacher and trainee/student) that impacts on motivation levels to engage at our best performance. Explore how to strengthen your influence as a leader to improve learning uptake and bring about behaviour change through a neuroscience lens. Discover why emotion can’t be separated from decision making, what happens in the brain during unwelcome change, what cognitive bias means for leadership impact, how the brain thinks in expectation and what this means for leading teams. Reflect on your own leadership style and approach, based on the 12 Leadership Attributes that build trust, rapport and growth and the 10 motivational triggers.

Join Dr Judi Newman as she shares her research and practice and explores answers to these burning questions with practical strategies and tools to implement immediately and much more.

• How does a leader prime conversational chemistry?

• Why is distrust the default of the lower regions of the brain?

• What are the three questions we ask ourselves when we interact with someone that effects our behaviour?

• What leadership behaviours trigger defensiveness and resistance?

• What is the most powerful leadership strategy for building other leaders around you?

• Why are leadership behaviours brain based but not always brain wise?

• How does the brain learn best?

• Why do you forget what you came into a room for?

• When you buy a new car, why do you then see them everywhere?

Audience: Corporate CEOs, Professionals, School leaders and teachers, trainers, coaches, and anyone interested in applied social neuroscience.

The connection between acute hyperventilation and anxiety is well-known. This workshop is designed to introduce participants to the often-present but overlooked, chronic, ‘hidden’ form of hyperventilation, which creates on a day-to-day basis, a fundamental disturbance in physiology and biochemistry. This ‘baseline-overbreathing’ drives sympathetic-dominant state, interferes with cognitive function, depletes energy, and primes a person for acute stress-response. It may underlie loss of resilience, relapse, or failure to respond to therapeutic intervention.

By restoring physiologically normal breathing, ‘breathing retraining’ down-regulates primitive systems in the medulla – breathing and heart rate, balances blood chemistry, optimises oxygenation, and promotes the parasympathetic state. This is a vital key to effectively working on higher-order systems – emotions and cognition.

This theoretical, interactive and experiential workshop provides an understanding of relevant neuroscience and physiology, and tools to identify and address dysfunctional breathing habits.

Clinical and research findings on the incidence and nature of abnormal respiratory parameters in patients with anxiety disorders are reviewed and discussed. Case studies are used to illustrate application, results and benefits of breathing retraining in anxiety disorders. You will practice basic skills to apply in a clinical situation to defuse the stress response and to improve and stabilise breathing for immediate and long-term benefits.

Format and Learning Outcomes

Relevant neuroscience and physiology of breathing - 20 mins

The link between dysfunctional breathing and biochemical and neurophysiological imbalance, sympathetic dominant state, tissue hypoxia, and common mental and physical symptoms of anxiety disorders- 15 mins

Understanding the breathing retraining process - 10 mins

Identification and evaluation of dysfunctional breathing patterns (interactive, practical) –15 mins

Strategies to defuse the stress response and relieve breathlessness, panic attacks and insomnia (interactive, practical) - 15 mins

Integration of better breathing into psychotherapy, meditation, yoga and everyday life (interactive, practical)- 15 mins

The knowledge and practical skills you learn today may advance and enhance your practice. There is new information, but also old, very powerful and often overlooked information that is highly relevant to you. The presentation will dispel damaging myths and misinformation about breathing.

ALERT: It does not contain any traditional deep breathing exercises!