S36 Ep21: Dr. Helena Boschi - Your Brain Unlocked: What Every Leader Needs to Know

Today, Steve sits down with Dr. Helena Boschi, globally acclaimed psychologist, to talk about the best security system of all: the human brain. The two discuss how stress impacts performance in high stakes environments like cybersecurity, why trust and psychological safety matter more than ever, and what leaders can do to help their team stay calm, focused, and creative even when the pressure is on. Finally, Dr. Boschi also explains what neuroscience reveals about how we can train our brains to become more cyber resilient.

Key Takeaways:

1. Leaders must be aware of the early warning signs of too much stress – memory loss, absentmindedness, sudden outbursts, etc.
2. Leaders must strike a balance between quick results and allow teams to think about problems in new ways, even if it takes a little longer.
3. The brain is not great at adapting to big changes, so introduce new things in chunks to make the transition easier.

Tune in to hear more about:

1. How the brain can help us become better leaders (11:26)
2. Digital fatigue (19:56)
3. How leaders help teams embrace change (25:50)

Standout Quotes:

1. “If you can see that if people start behaving in a much more emotional way than normal or they're struggling to make decisions or they're a bit absent-minded, time for leaders to say, let's just take a pause and let's think about what's going on. By the time these warning signs are spilled over into physical and behavioral ones, it's normally then almost too late.” - Dr. Helena Boschi
2. “In a world with endless distraction, we have got information coming at us from all directions, and we simply don't have the brain power to deal with it all. So the brain selects what it wants to focus on based on what's important to that person. So what's important for me may not be important for you. We have to select, the brain has to actively select – this is called selective attention. Selective attention also makes us blind to the things we are choosing not to focus on. And you might pick up something that I am blind to. So your selective attention might help me see what I can't see. So it's really important to surround yourself with people who disagree with you, who see the world differently, because their blindness will be different to our blindness.” - Dr. Helena Boschi
3. “Human beings are quite fallible and they're quite flawed because we have a brain that is not optimized for making the best decisions. It's optimized for making the best decisions for me, but often not for the collective. And when it comes to information security, again, it's not really optimized. If the brain is tired or hungry, it won't make great decisions. So I think coming back to basics for the brain is really important. Keeping the brain in its most healthy state is probably the best thing that cybersecurity professionals can do, and that means keeping the body very active.” - Dr. Helena Boschi

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From the Information Security Forum, the leading authority on cyber, information security, and risk management.