Episode 23: Reprogramming your brain to lead at your next level

Most of the programs running in your brain right now were installed between the ages of 0 and 7. In that window, your brain is in a state of almost hypnotic receptivity, what neuroscientists sometimes describe as a theta state. It absorbs everything from your parents, your environment, your culture, and it wires all of it in as truth. Not as one possible interpretation of the world. As absolute truth.

These programs don't live in your conscious memory. They live in your implicit memory, the part of your brain that operates automatically, below the surface. Which is why most of the time you don't even know they are running.

And it goes deeper than your own childhood. Research in epigenetics has shown that we can inherit emotional and stress responses from our ancestors. So sometimes you are not just carrying your own conditioning. You are carrying generations of it.

We live in a world that has historically given women very specific messages about what they are and are not allowed to be. Be helpful. Be modest. Don't be too loud, too ambitious, too much. They came through a thousand subtle signals: who got interrupted at the dinner table, who got praised for speaking up versus who got called difficult, the absence of women who looked like you in positions of power.

Your young brain absorbed all of it. Filed it away as: this is how the world works. And now those programs show up in the boardroom, often without you even realising it.

The woman who was told to be quiet as a girl becomes the executive who softens her boldest ideas before she even speaks them, starting sentences with “this might be a silly question, but…” The woman who was told she was too emotional suppresses the very intuition and emotional intelligence that are actually her greatest leadership strengths. The woman who never saw anyone like her at the top struggles to picture herself there, because her brain genuinely has no reference point for it.

I lived this myself. I loved talking as a child. Genuinely, I could talk forever. But I received so many messages to be quiet, to not take up space, that over time I became shy in big groups. It took years of conscious reprogramming to undo that. And I am still at it.

The programming isn't your fault. But deciding to undo it — that's yours. And that decision changes everything.

Research shows that somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of our daily decisions, behaviours and emotional reactions are driven by the subconscious, not by our conscious intentions (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Kahneman, 2011).

Ninety-five percent.

So when you consciously want to step into the next level, negotiate that salary, put yourself forward for the role, but somehow you keep pulling back, you are not being weak or inconsistent. The subconscious almost always wins. Because it is faster, it never sleeps, and it has been running these programs for decades.

This is the core of the work I do with women. One of my clients was searching for a new job. One of the first beliefs we found was: “The job I want is not available to me.” Until we worked on that belief, she was continuously sabotaging herself without even realising it. How invested would you be in searching, in preparing, in showing up fully to an interview, if somewhere deep inside you believed the job was not actually available to you? Not very. The brain does not waste energy on things it believes are impossible.

These beliefs act as protectors. They stop us from going all in so that we never have to face the disappointment of failing. The problem is they also stop us from ever really trying. Once we dismantled that belief, she started showing up differently. And she got the role.

Your brain receives around 11 million bits of information per second. Your conscious mind can process about 40 of them. The structure that decides what makes the cut is the Reticular Activating System, the RAS, and it filters your perception based on your beliefs. If you carry a deep program that says opportunities are not available to someone like you, your brain will literally not see the opportunities in front of you.

Think of it like the Instagram algorithm. Once Instagram figured out last year that I was getting married, it only showed me reels about weddings. Your RAS works exactly the same way. It does not change reality. It just decides what part of reality you get to see.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent years studying what separates people who consider themselves lucky from those who consider themselves unlucky. It was not chance. It was perception. He gave both groups a newspaper and asked one question: how many photographs are in it? On the second page, Wiseman had printed a message in large bold letters that took up half the page: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs.” The lucky group spotted it almost immediately. Most of the unlucky group missed it entirely. They were so locked into the task that their brain filtered out everything else, including the answer sitting right in front of them. Same newspaper. Same page. Completely different reality.

Lucky people notice more, they expect more, and so they find more. Their RAS is primed for opportunity. The unlucky group's RAS was primed for effort and struggle, and that is exactly what they experienced.

This is why mindset work is not fluff. Belief shapes what you perceive. Perception shapes what you act on. Action shapes your results. It all starts with the program running underneath.

Change what you believe is possible, and you literally change what you are able to see. That is not poetry. That is neuroscience.

The last mechanism is negativity bias. Your brain evolved in environments where threats were constant and often fatal, so it is wired to prioritise bad news over good. Losing something feels roughly twice as painful as gaining something of equal value feels good; Kahneman and Tversky called this loss aversion (1979).

The problem is that your brain cannot fully distinguish between a physical threat and the psychological discomfort of asking for a promotion, launching something new, or stepping into a bigger role. It floods you with reasons to stay safe, and those reasons feel completely rational, even when they are just your ancient threat-detection system protecting you from imaginary danger.

Understanding this doesn't make the fear disappear. But it means you stop treating the fear as evidence that you shouldn't move forward. The fear is just the program doing its job. Your job is to lead anyway.

Psychologist Gay Hendricks explains exactly why this happens. In The Big Leap, he describes the Upper Limit Problem: every one of us has an internal thermostat set to a certain level of success, happiness and possibility. When we start to exceed that level, when things are genuinely going well and the next level is within reach, something in us pulls the temperature back down. We sabotage. We hesitate. We manufacture a crisis. Because our nervous system has a ceiling for how much good we are allowed to experience.

So the next time you feel that pull to shrink just as things are getting good, recognise it. That is your Upper Limit doing its job. Notice it, name it, and choose to expand anyway.

You cannot change what you cannot see. The first step, and honestly the hardest, is developing the ability to observe your own automatic patterns without immediately defending them.

The challenge is that these programs feel like facts. Like absolute reality. I remember coaching an amazing woman a few years ago who was so certain her limiting beliefs were true that she genuinely couldn't accept they were beliefs at all. She believed she was stuck in her job because her company's salaries were the highest in the market. So every time she went to an interview, instead of negotiating upward, she was asked how much less she would be willing to accept to make the move. She had accepted that story so completely that it was quietly shaping every conversation she had about her own value.

We worked on that belief together. A few months later she went through an interview process where the salary offered was above market. What she had spent years treating as a fact turned out to be, once again, just a belief.

As I always say to my clients: it is really hard to read the label when you are inside the jar. But it is a skill you can train.

Here is an exercise I use. Look at the results in your life right now, in the areas where you feel most stuck. Work backwards. What beliefs would a person need to hold to produce exactly these results? You are not looking for someone to blame. You are looking for the program.

And another one that goes even deeper: ask yourself what you are afraid you will lose if you actually get what you want. Because sometimes the block is not fear of failure. It is fear of what success costs. One of my clients had a strong belief that growing in her career meant less time with her children. When we worked through it, she found her own way to be both ambitious and present. But first we had to name the fear.

Once you have identified a limiting belief, test it. Cognitive behavioural research has consistently shown that examining the evidence for and against a belief is one of the most effective ways to loosen its grip (Beck, 1967).

Ask yourself:

• Where did this belief actually come from?
• What is the concrete evidence that it is true?
• What evidence exists that directly contradicts it?
• Is this a universal truth, or a pattern from one context that I have overgeneralised to my whole life?

A personal example. Years ago, when I was single, I kept attracting men who were not available. I finally stopped and asked myself honestly what beliefs might be running underneath this pattern. And up came things like: interesting men cannot commit. I am not worthy of real love. So I started actively looking for evidence that contradicted those stories. Men around me who were interesting and committed. Love in my friendships, in my family, even in the cuddles from my sister's cat. After a few months of genuinely doing this work, I met my now-husband. Was that luck? I do not think so. Challenging the belief changed how I showed up. And different behaviour, over time, creates a completely different reality.

Challenging an old belief creates a gap. You need to fill it deliberately, with a new, more empowering story, or the old program will simply slide back in.

This is where affirmations come in. A belief is just a thought repeated so many times that you accept it as true. If you repeat a different thought enough times, with enough emotional investment, you eventually start believing it. You are literally constructing a new neural pathway.

For affirmations to actually work:

• Use present tense. “I am” lands completely differently in the brain than “I will be.”
• Make them emotionally resonant, not just intellectually plausible. Emotion is what activates deeper neural encoding.

If a statement feels too far from your current reality it might trigger resistance. You hear yourself saying it and it actually reinforces how untrue it feels. That is why it is important to go through Step 2 first; affirmations applied to an unchallenged belief often backfire.

A trick I share with the women I work with is to use a bridge. Instead of “I am confident to take up space”, which your brain immediately rejects, you say “I am learning to take up space.” Same direction, same destination, but a version your brain can actually receive today.

One exercise I love: record your affirmations and listen to them during your morning routine. Let your own voice become the voice that reprograms you.

The brain does not cleanly distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one, especially at the level of emotional and physiological response. This is why elite athletes use mental rehearsal.

If you have never seen anyone like you in the room you are trying to enter, the boardroom, the C-suite, the stage, you can create that experience in your mind. With enough vividness and repetition, your subconscious begins to hold it as familiar. Not threatening. Not foreign. Yours.

Visualisation is not wishful thinking. It is deliberate experience design.