This episode comes from Nicola Richardson, who founded The People Mentor to help small employers, managers and leaders handle difficult conversations, strengthen accountability, and lead with calm, practical confidence.
In this episode I’m joined by Doug Stoddard, a neuroscience and habit-breaking expert and the creator of Legacy360 Leadership. Doug coaches leaders at every level, from CEOs of large organisations down to people managing a team of four or five. What makes his work different is where it comes from. He’s built multiple businesses, been through a devastating bankruptcy, and turned that experience into everything he now teaches. Doug’s core belief is that most leadership problems aren’t skill problems, they’re habit problems, and until you understand what’s driving behaviour at a subconscious level, you keep having the same conversations, conflicts and frustrations over and over again.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify below.
Key takeaways from The People Mentor
- Most leadership problems are habit problems, not skill problems. Until you see the pattern driving your behaviour, you keep repeating it.
- The brain is a prediction machine built to keep you safe. When something feels threatening, it fires a fast, emotional reaction Doug calls a mental tsunami.
- Change starts with three steps: notice when it’s happening, hear the actual words in your head, and name the story or identity underneath.
- Most reactivity comes from unmet expectations. Your brain builds them without asking you, and when reality doesn’t match, it treats it as a threat.
- The subconscious thinks in either/or. When you catch yourself in “my way or no way” language, that’s usually the habit talking, not clear judgement.
- What we’re not aware of becomes expensive. Awareness is where the cost stops, and where hope begins.
In This Episode, Doug and I Talk About
- Why a devastating bankruptcy taught Doug more about leadership than any of his success
- What’s actually happening in the brain when someone becomes reactive
- The “mental tsunami” and how a stored pattern hijacks behaviour in seconds
- The three steps to step aside from a reactive moment and make a better choice
- Why unmet expectations sit behind so much of our negative self-talk
- How self-worth gets quietly attached to our ideas, and why that makes disagreement feel personal
- What real hope looks like in leadership, and the CIAM framework behind it
A Useful Reframe
What we hear in our heads is not who we are. But because it’s in our heads, we believe it is, and we build our behaviour around it. The moment you see that, you don’t have to obey it.
Episode Transcript
Nicola: Hi, it’s The People Mentor, and today we’re in Bite-Size Brilliance: Managing People. My guest today is Doug Stoddard. Have I said that right, Doug?
Doug: Yes.
Nicola: Brilliant. Doug is a neuroscience and habit-breaking expert, and the creator of Legacy360 Leadership. He coaches and trains leaders, from CEOs of large organisations right down to people managing a team of four or five. What makes Doug different is where his work comes from. He’s built multiple businesses, been through a devastating bankruptcy, and used that experience as the foundation for everything he now teaches. Doug believes most leadership problems aren’t really skill problems, they’re habit problems, and until you understand what’s driving behaviour at a subconscious level, you keep having the same conversations, the same conflicts, the same frustrations over and over again. Doug, it’s great to have you. This plays in really well with some managers I’ve been working with recently, where I’ve seen it’s the habits, the subconscious, the neuroscience, all playing in. So thank you for being here.
Doug: Thank you very much for having me, Nicola. I love talking about this subject. It has changed my life.
Nicola: So let’s start right at the beginning. You’ve said going through bankruptcy was the learning experience that outperformed everything else in your career, and most people would do anything to avoid that kind of failure. What did it teach you about yourself as a leader that all the success before it hadn’t?
Doug: That’s a great question, because a lot of my earlier success, in my efforts to create it, I wasn’t paying attention to my thoughts. My self-worth and confidence were built around my success, and I’d had a lot of it. But when circumstances changed and that success was gone, I could suddenly hear the noise in my head, these patterns of thinking that were driving a lot of my life, and I just wasn’t aware of them. One of the greatest lessons I learned about leadership is that until we become aware of what’s really driving our behaviours, we get caught up doing the same things over and over again that aren’t serving us. So one of the biggest blessings from bankruptcy is that I could finally hear the noise. “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I create this again?” The impatience. The need to be right. All those things I couldn’t really hear before. I’d ignore them and just keep working in my business. Finally I became aware of what was really driving my life.
Nicola: That’s really important. For me, about five years ago I started a positive intelligence course, in an app. The first time round it went in a bit, but not significantly. Then three years ago I was in hospital, having been diagnosed with cancer and having had a haemorrhage, and I was really struggling to stop, to relax, to just let things be and know I’d be all right. I started listening to it again, and what came out was that my hypervigilant thoughts were telling me to worry, to keep scanning all the time. It wasn’t giving me time to heal. That was the biggest breakthrough for me. I was struggling to sleep in hospital, and just by listening to that and some sleep music, I started to recover. We’re so busy most of the time that we’re not recognising what’s really going on in our heads.
Doug: I’d agree. We’re in a world of high distraction, and we don’t take enough time to reflect. We just react, over and over again.
Nicola: It’s interesting. Yesterday I had my daughter on the phone in a very volatile state. Her daughter had swallowed a toy and she’d gone into panic, that same hypervigilant thinking, taking everything the wrong way. I think I need to do some work with her around slowing down, breathing, recognising those voices. It was a good reminder of how you never stop doing this work. It doesn’t stop.
Doug: No, it doesn’t. I agree.
Nicola: You talk a lot about patterns of thinking that get stored in the brain, then triggered, and drive behaviour. Many managers have never encountered neuroscience before, so can you walk through it in plain terms? What’s happening in someone’s brain when they become reactive?
Doug: Our brain is a prediction machine. It’s constantly trying to predict an environment it cannot see, and its whole focus, simply put, is to keep us safe. From the time we’re very young, and there’s science now that says even before we’re born, we learn how to react to things. As we react to something over and over with our emotions involved, the brain decides it’s important and stores that pattern, or habit of thinking, in a neural pathway. We have many of them, and each has a trigger. So when something happens, someone doesn’t agree with your idea about a project, or how to raise your kids, and that doesn’t feel safe to your brain, it goes to that pathway, pushes the button and delivers what I call a mental tsunami. It’s memorised, it’s very fast, and it carries a message, emotions and feelings, and a story or identity behind it. For me, I used to be the king of needing to be right. It caused a lot of relationship issues. Suddenly I’d be in reactive mode, hearing, “They’re not valuing what I’m saying,” so I’d push even harder. The story underneath is a belief, “People don’t understand me,” or “People don’t value me,” which really says, “I’m not enough.” That’s the identity. That whole tsunami is what drives behaviour. In eleven or twelve years of doing this, my experience is that culture, good or bad, in a family or a business, is all driven by behaviour.
Nicola: I completely agree. I’ve had a case exactly like that this week. I can see it’s behaviours, but it’s because they’re not understanding the voices driving them, and it’s all subconscious.
Doug: Yes. So what drives behaviour? These patterns of thinking stored in the neural pathways, triggered like a mental tsunami. That’s why you can wake up and say, “Today I’m going to be more patient,” or “I’m going to listen better, be more present.” Then you go through the day, have three or four of these tsunamis, and by the end you’re metaphorically hanging upside down in a coconut tree with a bag of crisps and a tub of ice cream, beating yourself up. “I can’t believe I was impatient again. What’s wrong with me?” It comes to a point I truly believe: what we’re not aware of becomes very expensive.
Nicola: Absolutely. So what’s the first thing you’d suggest to someone you were working with?
Doug: First, you have to become aware of when it’s happening. Second, you have to hear the messaging, the actual words and thoughts going through your head. Third, you have to understand the story or identity you’re buying into that’s driving the behaviour. Once you have those three, you use a framework that lets you step aside from the emotional tsunami so you can make a better choice. There are lots of great books on personal development, but science tells us true transformation doesn’t happen until you can force the subconscious to cut off the old neural pathways delivering these tsunamis and create new ones that deliver a totally different response. That’s the only time real transformation occurs.
Nicola: Picking up on the stories that lead to that is a really important point, and I don’t think many people address it. Until you understand that, you can’t change. You’re just reactive.
Doug: That’s how I was for nine years after my bankruptcy. It affected my relationships with two of my six kids for over nine years, hardly any relationship at all. It affected how I grew my businesses. I wasn’t aware of what was going on, only that I didn’t like the outcomes. Do you ever keep hitting the same walls, asking how you break through? You’ve got to be ready to do the work.
Nicola: I see people who know something’s not right but aren’t open to exploring it, and that makes me sad, because you can see the difference it would make. But when you’re not in the right head space, it’s never going to happen. Often you have to hit rock bottom, unless you’re a particularly self-aware person who likes to keep evolving. My mantra is continuous improvement, so it’s there in me, but I don’t stop and reflect enough. You’ve given some really good tips already. Thank you, Doug.
Doug: You’re welcome.
Nicola: You previously mentioned a team member responsible for over $600,000 of revenue, brilliant at the technical side, but the moment he felt his work wasn’t valued, he reacted in a way that damaged client relationships. You said the turning point was getting to the root cause of why he responded that way. What did that look like in practice?
Doug: He was responsible for about $600,000 of business, and a lot of it hinged on his work. Very good at what he did. One of the major triggers of these patterns is unmet expectations. For the most part we don’t create expectations consciously. We feed the brain ingredients, what we think about, what we envision, past experiences, what it notices around us, and it creates an expectation. If reality doesn’t match it almost 100%, the brain doesn’t feel safe and triggers a tsunami. The number one cause of negative self-worth dialogue is unmet expectations, and we live in a world of high expectations. This man’s identity was, “I do exceptional work, and it’s always proven effective.” So if anyone dared challenge it, his brain said, “That’s not safe,” and delivered a response that went after the person, quite disproportionate to what was needed. His emails were very critical, telling people they didn’t know what they were talking about, and these were people running very large companies. You can’t have that. So working with him, first we helped him become aware of it when he felt that “ugh.” Give it a name, so you can quickly identify it. Second, what’s the story in your head? “She doesn’t value my work.” Is that true, or does she just see it differently and have questions? Third, what’s your identity in this? “I’m very good at what I do,” but his worth was tied to his work, so if it wasn’t received the way he thought it should be, it felt like a threat to his worth.
Nicola: That makes total sense. And when we see people go very defensive, that’s the same thing coming into play?
Doug: Absolutely. The brain takes what you think about and envision and quickly creates expectations that feel unmovable, because the subconscious only thinks in either/or. It’s my way or no way. We do the project this way, or not at all. You agree with me, or you’re not my friend. If you hear that either/or language, it usually won’t serve you. The brain attaches your ideas and beliefs to your self-worth, which is why it becomes so personal. If someone threatens your idea, it feels like they’re threatening you as a person.
Nicola: Absolutely. That’s going to really help the managers and leaders listening. You’ve said one of your biggest frustrations is watching managers face the same issues repeatedly because they haven’t got to the root cause. I have the same frustration. If someone is nodding along right now, where would you suggest they actually start?
Doug: Where I started: you have to become aware. Reading books can help. When I was so frustrated after nine years of hitting the same walls, I hadn’t found anything that worked on a sustained basis. I was fortunate to take a proprietary assessment, based on high-level axiological mathematics developed at the University of Tennessee. Many assessments give great information, but they’re subjective. They ask questions, we answer, someone interprets them, and we get a label. Businesses use those labels to manage people, “you’re permanently a high achiever, permanently this or that,” and that’s not true. It changes.
Nicola: It does change. That reminds me of a time I’d been marked down because I was getting divorced, and I was seen as very flighty. Then we had a move, the manager went off sick, there was nobody to cover, so I took charge and sorted it. Suddenly the people in charge said, “Oh, we’ve seen you in a different light.”
Doug: Before that, you were always this one person. That’s how we are. This assessment is different, it’s the maths of subconscious valuing, and the people who built it were nominated for the Nobel Prize. A man I work with spent $3 million developing it, and it’s laser accurate. All you do is move statements around based on how you value them. If something’s worth $100 to you, you put it at the top; if it’s 50 cents, at the bottom. When it’s done, the brain runs something like 6.4 quadrillion algorithms, and it shows us these mental tsunamis and how frequently they occur, along with a lot of the language the subconscious uses. For a company with culture or leadership issues, we can take that information and quickly get to what’s really driving someone, how it’s impacting them, and what the cost is. There’s always a cost when we’re not aware of the patterns driving our behaviour.
Nicola: Absolutely. That’s really helpful. It’s fascinating that you found this out about yourself after nine years. Finally, you’ve described what you do, in one word, as giving your clients hope, and I love that, because you don’t hear that word much in leadership coaching. What does hope mean here? What are you giving people that they didn’t have before?
Doug: Clarity. Awareness. And a path forward. Recently I was going through this with a client and asked how it made him feel, and he said, “Hope.” Because what we hear in our heads is not who we are, for the most part. But because it’s in our heads, we think it’s us, our core identity, and it isn’t true. Once you realise that, you say, “I don’t have to buy into that. I’m not locked into needing to be right, or being impatient, for the rest of my life. There’s hope I can shift it.” That’s what I give people: hope and clarity. It falls under CIAM, which stands for Clear Identity Awareness Mindset, and that drives freedom.
Nicola: That’s brilliant. Thank you. I could talk to you for ages, so I’d love to have you back on the podcast. I really appreciate your time, Doug. It’s been so interesting.
Doug: Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
Nicola: Thank you. Bye for now.
Resources Mentioned
- Legacy360 Leadership: Doug Stoddard’s leadership coaching and training work.
- CIAM (Clear Identity Awareness Mindset): the framework Doug uses to move clients from reactivity to freedom.
- Positive Intelligence: the mental fitness app and course Nicola refers to.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between a leadership skill problem and a leadership habit problem? A skill problem is fixed with training. A habit problem sits below the surface, a stored pattern of thinking that fires automatically, so no amount of new knowledge changes it until you become aware of the pattern itself.
What is a “mental tsunami”? It’s Doug’s term for the fast, memorised reaction the brain delivers when something feels unsafe. It carries emotion, a message and a story about who you are, and it drives behaviour before you’ve consciously decided anything.
Why do disagreements at work feel so personal? Because the brain attaches your ideas to your self-worth. When someone challenges your idea, your subconscious can read it as a threat to you, not just to the plan, which is why people go defensive.
How do I start changing a reactive leadership habit? Begin with awareness. Notice when it’s happening, hear the exact words running through your head, and name the story or identity underneath. That gap is where you get to choose a different response.
A Final Thought
Most of the leadership problems that wear managers down aren’t about competence. They’re habits, running quietly underneath, so familiar we’ve stopped hearing them. Doug’s work is a good reminder that you can’t change what you can’t hear, and that awareness is where it all starts.
If the same frustrations keep showing up with your team and you want a calmer, more honest way through them, Making Difficult Conversations Easier gives you a practical framework to work with, rather than reacting your way through the same conversations again.
And if you’re a manager who wants this kind of practical support every month, that’s exactly what The Manager’s Academy is for. It’s where I help managers understand what’s really driving behavior, lead the person first, and build the confidence to handle the tricky conversations well, all for less than the cost of a coffee a week. Come and take a look at The Manager’s Academy and see if it’s the steadying hand you’ve been after.