Shows / StefanieFaye
StefanieFaye
Episodes
- StefanieFaye
The Brain’s Malleability Mindset: Two questions that reveal whether someone believes change is possible.
There are entire territories of a person's life that are affected by their mindset. And that mindset will affect whether they'll ever even try what you're…
- StefanieFaye
3 ways the brain filters information: your ideas need to make it past these filters
  In a previous article, I wrote that every idea you offer is landing on a nervous system (with a history and in a particular state)... if that system…
- StefanieFaye
How to talk about neuroplasticity: Giving language to one of the brain’s greatest strengths.
“[...] every human has the built-in power to improve, to change for the better, to significantly restore and often to recover. Tomorrow, that person you see in…
- StefanieFaye
Fixed mindset has a neuroscience problem: Why neuroscience supports growth more than fixed ability
In many ways, growth mindset is more neurologically 'accurate' than fixed mindset. A growth mindset reflects the idea that we can build and evolve our…
- StefanieFaye
Human Systems Resilience Free Mini-Book
There is a quiet intelligence inside you … one that knows how to bend without breaking, to repair what has been ruptured, to return to connection to oneself…
- StefanieFaye
How I teach “soft skills” at MIT, Stanford, Google and the FBI
If you could walk into any room and say, "Here's what's happening in your brain and nervous system... and here's how my method works to create lasting…
- StefanieFaye
The Neuroscience of the Comeback: if we measure regulation by never getting triggered, we’re measuring the wrong thing
  There's a version of "being regulated" that sounds a lot like being untouchable.   Calm. Collected. Unshaken.   Always able to find the…
- StefanieFaye
There is no magic state (what our brainwaves tell us)
In a group training I ran recently, I started with a mindful moment. Some people in that room needed to slow down. Others needed the opposite. A little…
- StefanieFaye
The Neuroscience of What’s “Possible”
Our brain is a prediction machine.   It is constantly running models built from its history - and using them to predict and filter data about what's about…
- StefanieFaye
Your Nervous System Is Already Teaching:
I've been writing a lot about mindset lately.. about what a person believes regarding their own capacity to change, and how much that shapes whether anything…
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience of false growth mindset
For the past 18 years, I have been teaching the neuroscience of growth mindset to audiences all over the world. I've developed curriculum for non-profits…
- StefanieFaye
Why Mechanisms Beat Memorized Neuro-Words: Nervous systems don’t always follow acronyms
There's a difference between knowing the words and knowing the mechanism. Many of us have collected vocabulary about our internal states. ‘Dopamine menus’…
- StefanieFaye
The safest place your nervous system can return to
"Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own…
- StefanieFaye
Your brain was born with a growth mindset: What happened to it… and how to get it back.
You didn't learn to walk by getting it right. You fell. Over and over. And your brain treated every fall as data... fuel for the next attempt.   In many…
- StefanieFaye
The Future of Leadership is Embodied Systems Thinking
The Future of Leadership Is Embodied Systems Thinking The leaders who will guide us through complexity, polarization, and problems that seem to repeat…
- StefanieFaye
The Neuroscience of the Inner Critic: The way you talk to yourself has a history.
Notice what happens the next time you get something wrong. Is there a voice that helps you stay open and keep trying? Or one that makes you want to shut…
- StefanieFaye
Why mistakes sometimes build the brain, and sometimes don’t: how “failure” affects the brain
Within about 100 milliseconds of making a mistake, brains show a burst of electrical activity. Before a person consciously registers "I got that wrong," their…
- StefanieFaye
The hidden nervous system signal of “You’re too much right now.”: what “calm down” actually asks of the brain
Many of us have heard, or said, the words “calm down”. We use it as a way to try to help someone who is dysregulated. But lets take a look at what "calm down"…
- StefanieFaye
A biological explanation of HOPE… and the one ingredient hope alone can’t give you
Humanity is at a threshold. We have more information about how to ‘live life to the fullest’ than any generation before us...   and yet more people than…
- StefanieFaye
Every nervous system leaves a trace: what is yours contributing to the field
"Breakthroughs come when people learn how to take the time to stop and examine their assumptions." Peter M. Senge   Why Your Nervous System Matters More…
- StefanieFaye
The brain activity that comes before an answer: Your neural circuitry needs something before it needs a solution…
There's a moment, right before we reach for the answer, when something else is available to us. The next time a new idea unsettles you, or you notice yourself…
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience of why “believe in yourself” stops working: Prediction, plasticity, and what happens when people finally understand why
There was a time when simply saying, "Believe in yourself," was enough. Today, we live in a world with unprecedented access to information. Within seconds, we…
- StefanieFaye
One micro-signal can rewrite a future: Small signals shape what the brain predicts
There are moments in every person's life that quietly divide time into two parts. Before they believed something... and after they believed something new…
- StefanieFaye
Brains fascinated me long before I studied them. But what actually pulled me into neuroscience was watching a single shift in someone's thinking change the…
- StefanieFaye
What the brain is doing when someone says “I can’t”
When someone says "I can't," the brain is usually offering a prediction. A forecast, drawn from past experience, that feels like truth from the inside.  …
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience underneath growth mindset: a quieter, deeper form of independence and power
This week, many places in the US and in the world are celebrating the idea of independence. There's a quieter, inner freedom worth naming, too. The freedom to…
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience of systems thinking: Why memorizing brain words isn’t the same as understanding the nervous system.
We often reach for words from someone else's theory. Dorsal. Ventral. Amygdala. Sympathetic. Growth mindset. We attach them to brain structures and expect them…
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience behind “soft skills”: The operating system underneath change
Meditation. Breathwork. Somatics. Mindfulness. Emotional regulation. These things are changing people's lives every day. But when they're explained vaguely…
- StefanieFaye
The Neuroscience of Letting Go: What happens in the brain when you stop trying to control what’s next?
The Brain Signature of Surrender   There's a moment I come back to again and again, that comes from faciliating transformational journeys for people…
- StefanieFaye
When the world shakes, regulate and return: a nervous system invitation toward coherence
When the world shakes, return The world keeps asking us to react. Every hour brings something new to absorb, answer, brace against. The nervous system reads it…
- StefanieFaye
Neuroscience as the language that makes “possible” real
“Your brain – every brain – is a work in progress. It is ‘plastic.’ From the day we’re born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving…
- StefanieFaye
Humans call this stubbornness. the brain calls it something else
When something doesn't work .. a message ignored, a person who won't engage, an idea that goes nowhere .. most of us read it as failure. The brain reads it…
- StefanieFaye
why ‘being chased by a tiger’ is not a good enough metaphor: our anxious, social nervous system
You've probably heard the tiger metaphor.   The one where our nervous system reacts as if a tiger is chasing us—even when no tiger is anywhere close…
- StefanieFaye
Vibrational Availability: Resilience as a different kind of listening
What if resilience is less about a "right strategy" and more about a different kind of listening? A listening that tunes into the stream of intelligence your…
- StefanieFaye
The order of operations between you and AI
AI is uncommonly good at words. It can offer you ten ways to describe a state. It can mirror back what you 'kind of' said.. and then sharpen it. When we use it…
- StefanieFaye
“Fine is not a feeling”: how naming feelings with nuance changes the brain
"How are you?" "I'm fine." Such a common phrase we here... it’s also a reflection of an untapped potential we have to regulating ourselves more intentionally…
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience underneath “name it to tame it”
There's a moment between feeling and naming that can change our choices for what we do with our feelings. In a previous article (“AI can’t smell the rain”), I…
- StefanieFaye
Nervous systems are relational.
Nervous systems are relational. We regulate in the presence of other regulated systems. We co-regulate before we self-regulate.   Long before we have…
- StefanieFaye
Beyond fight, flight, freeze, fawn, dorsal, ventral: When words pull us away from our own nervous system
Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. Dorsal.   The words help at first. They give shape to experiences that once felt impossible to describe.   But sometimes…
- StefanieFaye
AI can’t smell the rain – what this means for human nervous systems
Right now, as you read this, an entire ocean of information is moving through you that no machine can access. The tingle and tickle of sweat tracing down your…
- StefanieFaye
Why the brain rejects helpful advice: The habenula and why people resist change
Every offer for change carries a hidden implication: The way you’re doing things right now isn’t working.   Even when we phrase it gently. Even when we…
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience of noticing our feelings: How awareness changes biology
  Awareness changes biology. What we can name, we can begin to transform..*   When we help ourselves or other people make sense of what they’re…
- StefanieFaye
No surprise, no learning: how we earn the brain’s attention
If the way you say something falls in line with how someone has already heard you (or someone else say) many times before… you might sense your words ‘going…
- StefanieFaye
Bravery has a biology: how the brain learns to move toward
Most of what we call courage rests on a quieter skill underneath it. Most of what feels like real personal power does too. That skill is discernment. The…
- StefanieFaye
Two kinds of uncomfortable: what the brain can’t tell apart
The brain is an energy-conserving system. When something requires effort and doesn't come with a guaranteed return, it gets tagged as be cautious. That tag…
- StefanieFaye
new podcast! Your nervous system isn’t just yours
There is a signal underneath words. Beneath the identities we try to project. Your nervous system is transmitting constantly: micro-movements, frequencies and…
- StefanieFaye
the ‘neuro-words’ that bring people back into their bodies
Yesterday I wrote about how parts and theory vocabulary can pull a person up and out of their body.   Today I want to go into the flip side. What it…
- StefanieFaye
How popular ‘neuro words’ lead us astray
There's a pattern I keep noticing.   People come into the coaching, learning, personal growth space for real reasons (as learners and leaders).  …
- StefanieFaye
Intelligence older than opinion
Do your words match what you really want to say, and what you want others to hear? There is a layer under belief. Under culture.   Where every nervous…
- StefanieFaye
Your Nervous System Isn’t Just Yours.. What Are You Contributing to the Field?
Human nervous systems are constantly teaching each other what to expect from the world. Safety or vigilance. Openness or defensiveness. Curiosity or…
- StefanieFaye
Nervous system science: 3 things I don’t do to reach people who resist ‘self-help’
“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” — William James, Principles of Psychology (1890) For…
- StefanieFaye
A question from a 4th grader I keep thinking about: The eye-brain link that shifts your nervous system in seconds.
This week I presented to several groups of 4th graders (part of career week presentations I was honored to share with my family) and I got to spend the morning…
- StefanieFaye
The neuroscience of why change is so hard: metabolic math for the brain
The brain is an energy-conserving system.   Something to understand and reflect on - for ourselves and those we interact with, is that..   Before…
- StefanieFaye
Vibrational Beings: your nervous system as a bio-collective contribution
We are vibrational beings. At every moment, we are transmitting frequencies and vibrations that reflect our internal state, whether we realize it or not…
- StefanieFaye
Mixed, Messy Feelings: Your brain isn’t confused. It’s computing.
"Feelings can annoy or delight us, but that is not what they are for […]. Feelings are for life regulation, providers of information concerning basic…
- StefanieFaye
How one nervous system shifts an entire room
A lot of self-help and nervous system advice is designed for conditions that don’t exist in real life. A quiet room. Time you don’t actually have. Space to…
- StefanieFaye
You are the rare place: the science of the frequency you carry into this world
There are not many people, right now, walking through their day thinking about how to help another human being feel a new sense of well-being and strength…
- StefanieFaye
A biological address for the “soft skills” you already teach
Most of the humans on this planet have not built nervous system regulation to its full potential.   We're not born with that architecture. Humans develop…
- StefanieFaye
the brain wiring no one is born with
Self-regulation is not something we are born with. Many of us learned the opposite. Our world and the people around us told us (even if not explicitly)... that…
- StefanieFaye
Start in the Shadow: The dark side of the nervous system – and why it’s often the most powerful place to begin
There is a threshold the nervous system uses to decide whether information is worth attending to. … for a lot of people, in a lot of rooms, positive framing…