Mastering Self-Leadership with Neuroscience REVIEW PART 1 Chapters 2-5 (Grant Bosnick)

Welcome back to Season 13 of the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast. In this episode, join Andrea Samadi as we delve into practical neuroscience applications for self-leadership in 2025. Discover how to balance various aspects of life through insights from Grant "Upbeat" Bosnick's book, 'Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership.'

We explore strategies from four key chapters, focusing on leveraging neuroscience to level up your goals, the inspiration behind motivation, the benefits of mindfulness, and the art of achieving flow states. Learn actionable steps for overcoming obstacles and using positive forces to drive personal growth.

Whether you're implementing new habits or seeking motivation, this episode serves as a guide to harnessing the full potential of your mind and achieving greater heights.

Welcome back to SEASON 13 of The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we connect the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning and emotional intelligence training for improved well-being, achievement, productivity and results—using what I saw as the missing link (since we weren’t taught this when we were growing up in school), the application of practical neuroscience. I’m Andrea Samadi, an author, and an educator with a passion for learning and launched this podcast 6 years ago with the goal of bringing ALL the leading experts together (in one place) to help us to APPLY this research in our daily lives.

Now, we are well into 2025, and if you are listening today, I want to congratulate you. Not everyone chooses to do the work that is needed for self-improvement. It’s something I’m dedicated to working on each year, and like you, those who tune in each week, implementing the ideas we write down in our notebooks, and even the ones we highlight in yellow, this is the hardest work in the room. I just want to recognize you for showing up here, and tuning in to grab some ideas, do this difficult work, and take the ideas that you learn from the research, and put them into action.

Like you, I am doing this as well. We interviewed Kristen Holmes, the VP of Performance Science from Whoop.com back in May 2021, on EP134[i] when I had first started using the wearable device to measure my sleep, strain and daily recovery. She told me something I already knew, and that was that my sleep needed work. She said it much sterner than this, but I heard it, loud and clear, especially since my brain scan from Amen Clinics, that we reviewed on EP 84[ii] came back and showed that I was sleep deprived. Changing behaviors, habits and daily routines, and changing the trajectory of our health is all possible, but actually sustaining the change—this is what I’m looking for. This is why I am doing these podcast episodes, and sharing what I’m learning along the way. It took me 4 years to finally improve my sleep, but to do this, I had to sacrifice something else important to me, and that was my early morning workouts. I’m sure if you are listening, you would understand and know exactly what I am saying here. While making improvements with one area of our life, we tend to do this at the expense of another area. I’m determined to prove that we can have it all, and hopefully, at the end of this review, we can all find a way towards improving the balance in the important areas of our lives.

REMEMBER: “Mastering others is strength; mastering oneself is true power” - Lao Tsu

Now wouldn’t it be great to have a tool (like a map) that tells us what is important to focus on each year, based on what we say is important to us in our work or personal lives?

Now sleep is not on the map we are covering today, as we will review the 19 chapters from Grant Bosnick’s book, but I would put sleep right at the top of the list, along with the Top Health Staples that we covered back on a bonus EP we did in 2022[iii] where we first covered the importance of daily exercise, good quality sleep, eating a healthy diet, understanding how to balance our gut-brain axis, how to listen to our hunger cues with intermittent fasting, and the importance of stress reduction (that I think we could cover more in depth this year).

((If you took the leadership self-assessment[iv] last year, go back and take it again, and see if any of the areas have changed for you.))

SELF-ASSESSMENT LINK HERE

And now we will begin PART 1 of our 4-PART review, to sum up last year, 2024, and our entire year studying one book, Grant Bosnick’s “Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership: A Bite Size Approach Using Psychology and Neuroscience” that we first dove into with our interview on EP #321[v] the end of January 2024. The goal was that each week, w