The Neuroscience of Kindness with Janet Sperstad - Part 2

Planners on Purpose Podcast

In this episode, I explore the neuroscience of kindness with special guest, Janet Sperstad, CMP-Fellow and Faculty Emeritus for Madison College.
Janet Sperstad’s professional history reflects her lifelong vocation: driving excellence in meeting and event management execution and education. She has dedicated her career to defining the competencies and career pathways that articulate meeting planning as a design discipline requiring skills in the social sciences, executive leadership, and the cognitive sciences. Her contributions are global in scope and rooted in over 25 years as a meeting professional and executive leader in the corporate and non-profit sectors.
This is part two in a series where we unlock some more areas of neuroscience and how it can apply to our lives as event professionals. If you missed Part 1, where we discuss the neuroscience of stress and resilience, you can check it out here.
The fine print of this episode comes down to: kindness matters when we are planning events. As we lead our events, it's important to understand how kindness plays a big role in helping you solve problems, deal with stressful situations, and even become more creative on the spot.
In this episode, Janet shares how 90% of the conversations that we have are social in nature. She shares how our brain is a very social organ in which its natural set point is to commune with others. Additionally, kindness is a neurochemical and a culture. It can ignite the reward center in our brain and it is pro-social in nature craving community with other human beings. Thus, our brain cultivates commonalities, it wants to look for belonging and collaboration and is wired to look out for differences.
Furthermore, Janet teaches us that there is a language of kindness, and how every word we use to portray kindness can cascade across people. As event professionals when we get into a period of frustration or stress or just solving a problem, responding in kindness can help to minimize the stress and frustration that is being emitted in the moment.
Lastly, we unpack that great ideas come to us best when we are relaxed. So when we are solving problems onsite ensuring that we are responding in kind ways that will produce more ideas for creative problem-solving can be helpful.
Stay until the end to hear some personal fun tidbits about Janet and her sharing the time when she was shown kindness that shook her to her core.
If you enjoyed the first episode, you'll love this one too.
Links and Resources
Janet Sperstad Linkedin
The Neuroscience of Stress and Resilience - Part 1
Thank you so much for listening, stay on purpose!

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