How to maintain your momentum: Goal Getters with Sarah Baldeo

Even despite our best efforts, constant maximum effort is impossible– everyone loses their momentum once in a while. It’s how you regain your stride, pushing forward even without the requisite motivation, that makes all the difference.

So, what fuels some to be their most resilient and adaptable, while others are content with the status quo?

Futurist, neuroscientist, and AI/ML expert Sarah Baldeo specializes in helping people set purposeful goals and develop a forward-thinking mindset. She’s contributed her knowledge and expertise to organizations in both the corporate and learning environments, demonstrating a commitment to continuous improvement and professional development.

In this episode of Goal Getters, Steve Hardy, CMO at Prophix speaks with Sarah about the science and study of resiliency and some of the engineering of why we do some of the things that we do.

Below are some takeaways from this Goal Getters episode. Watch the full conversation over here.

From a scientific perspective, what fuels some people to progress and to be quite resilient and adaptable in the face of challenges, whereas others are perhaps not as resilient?

“Most people would like to believe that we can all learn to be resilient. As a neuroscientist, I always go back to understanding the engineering of the brain. Most people don’t realize that the majority of the growth that has happened in the human brain over the past two to three million years, has all been focused on your frontal cortex - that's kind of the front part of your brain. And the brain's only really grown by about 30% in those two to three million years.

The reason this is important is when it comes to resilience and building resilience, your brain really relies on the left prefrontal cortex which controls things like mood and emotional regulation.

The people that are the most resilient have learned to divert that instinctual response to a threat or a challenge or something that has happened in your life that doesn't go according to plan. Instead of relying on their instinctual emotional response—often called the fight or flight response—they divert their neural synapses, and they build these neural synapses over time to engage their left prefrontal cortex.

Progress is about experience. Getting as many experiences as you possibly can, as well as failing fast and learning from those experiences.

Any tips for how people can coach their brains?

“The human brain is very lazy. It is a lazy piece of equipment that is designed to be more efficient - to learn how to do something and just keep doing it.

Why? Because it can.

The more you do something and the more you repeat it, the faster you are.

But what happens is, over time, for many things—take the ‘auto-pilot’ drive home the same way each day as an example—you don't engage a lot of your frontal cortex and so decision-making becomes habitual.

So, when I talk to leaders and decision makers that are trying to incorporate resilience in their own lives and help their teams to build it, I say to them, “Break your patterns. Force yourself to do things that are uncomfortable.”

Listen to the full conversation, How to Maintain Your Momentum, and explore the rest of our Goal Getters series!

This blog post is part of our Goal Getters series. Goal Getters looks at what it takes to chase and reach your goals. You speak up, lean in, and take your seat at the table because being a goal getter means you believe in seeing what you can do. Explore our episode library here.