Outside in - the rooms that created you vs those you create and choose

The greatest leaders are known to be able to read the room. 

I do wonder how they got that way.

The closest thing to actual evidence is a study of 268 senior executives on executive presence. Reading a room and adjusting to it showed up - but as one line under "communication," not the headline. Gravitas topped the poll. 67%.

So which is it. Built, or born? Trained in a hundred rooms that went badly, or just walked in already able to do it?

Neuroexposome tells us we are neither built nor born - not nature or nurture. Think of the neuroexposome as your brain's exposure record - everything it's ever been exposed to, outside your body and inside it, and what all of that has done to you. Every room. Every relationship. Every meal, every virus, every year of sleep or no sleep. All of it logged.

Three systems build that record, all running at once: outside in, top down, bottom up. Environment. Thought. Body. None of them work solo. They’re regulating your brains development, performance and health together, talking to each other and adapting the whole time.

Outside in is big, and complicated. Some of it you can’t change. Some of it you can. 

Twenty squirrel monkeys. Half were briefly, predictably separated from their mothers, on and off, for about ten weeks as infants. The other half weren't. Grown up, the separated monkeys had better cognitive control, more curiosity, lower cortisol under stress. Mild. Controllable. Recoverable. That's the difference between stress that builds a nervous system and stress that wears one down.

It’s the culture that raised you, your social world, your family structure, your education, your stress load, your environment, the life events that landed on you whether you asked for them or not. All bookended by acceptance and choice. Past and future.

This puts us in a wonderful position to ask things like:

Which of my habits are mine, and which are just conditioning? Do they fit the world I'm building for the people I love?

Which groups am I part of on purpose, and what are they doing to me?

What is my relationship to stress?

We take the outside in mostly through sight and hearing. Fast track into the prediction system. , so my body reaches for whatever kept me safe last time, whether or not it's actually useful now. I hear someone's voice go flat, and my breathing changes before I've decided anything.

After the Boston Marathon bombing, researchers tracked thousands of adults nationally. The ones who watched six or more hours of coverage a day that week came out with more acute stress than the ones who were actually there. Your body doesn't always know the difference between the room and the footage of the room.

Almost none of this is conscious. Call it autopilot.
But what happens if we are deliberate?

“If you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there” George Harrison

In 1984, Roger Ulrich tracked 46 patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in a Pennsylvania hospital. Half had a window looking out at trees. Half looked at a brick wall. The tree-view patients went home sooner, needed less pain medication, and got better notes from their nurses. Nobody in that hospital chose their room. The room still chose their recovery.

That same machinery runs on rooms that don't exist yet. The one you're picturing right now - the promotion, the relationship, the stage - your body is already rating it against every room it's ever learned from. Which means just imagining where you want to go can pull you toward it. Or quietly keep you out.

Get conscious of it, and you start choosing your rooms instead of just landing in them.

A founder client of mine had been through conventional treatment for long COVID for months and reached a plateau - recovery had stalled, and stayed stalled. When friends invited her on an OS trip, she nearly said no. She was afraid the trip would set her back, that she was too fragile at this plateau to risk it. She went anyway. And the trip didn't set her back. It showed her that home life itself, the stress sitting underneath her daily routine, had been doing more to keep her stuck than than she could even comprehend.

You can't think your way past a prediction. You have to give the body enough new evidence to write a different one.

If training your nervous system feels important to your future path we could start with a call.

Cheering for you.